Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 113
113
They kept following the trail until they reached a dead tree, fallen across the path. There was a splash of blood on the rotting bark, dried into a dark stain.
Ander stepped on top of the dead hunk of wood, but just as he was about to drop down on the other side, his eye caught something that froze him solid. Or rather, it was what his eye didn't catch.
There was nothing on the other side of this tree. It was just a smooth expanse of snow. Pure white. There were no tracks, no spots of blood. Nothing at all. It wasn't that Banno's trail had faded or gone cold. It had vanished.
Ander held out his hand and the hunting party ground to an unceremonious halt, with lots of bumping and apologising.
"What is it now?" Sorrin growled.
Ander carefully stepped over the tree and inspected the other side. The blood was simply gone. It wasn't buried beneath the snow, it just wasn't there. Even the scent was gone. No more bitter whiffs of rotting flesh or puss-weeping wounds. It was as if Banno had simply disappeared without a trace.
Or maybe he was still here, waiting to pounce.
Ander moved in a slow circle, looking up at the trees, expecting every shadow to birth whatever monster his brother had turned into.
"Did you lose it!?" Sorrin slammed his fist against a tree hard enough to make the branches shudder.
"He didn't lose it." Nilia drew her blade. It glimmered in the dark like a sickle-moon. "This is where the trail ends."
The Foxes quickly huddled together in a large circle, bows and arrows at the ready. They threw nervous glances in every direction, eyeing every tree and shrub and snowy boulder as if it might come alive at any second and rend them to pieces.
The seconds dragged by, and still nothing happened. No rustling in the bushes, no fleeting shadows, no Banno jumping out at them spewing smoke and flame.
There was something very wrong here.
Ander looked around, trying to make sense of it. This was the perfect spot for an ambush, nice and cramped, so why...?
"That coward is messing with us," Sorrin said, his eyes darting from shadow to shadow. "He's trying to throw us off, buy himself some time to get to that house."
As logical as that sounded, Ander simply could not envision Banno doing something like this, setting up a trap, without being there to spring it himself. He has always been a preternaturally driven individual, a Wolf of single-minded drives and aspirations. He liked to get his claws dirty. For him to go to all the trouble of making his trail vanish and then not stick around to take advantage of the situation...
It felt like he was missing something.
"I agree with Sorrin," Nilia said, pressing her back up against Ander's. "Banno knew we'd be coming for him. This is his way to get ahead, to buy himself the time he needs to reach his destination."
His destination...?
Something snagged at Ander's mind. It felt like he was overlooking some vital detail. "This doesn't make sense," he said, staring at that very last splash on blood on the fallen tree. It had dribbled halfway towards the snow before hardening to a crust.
"When did Banno ever make any sense?" Nilia retorted. "He is a creature of hunger and instinct. If there's something he wants, he goes after it. If he believes his prey to be in a house to the south, that's where he'll go. That's where we should go, trail be damned. You know the way, don't you?"
Yes, he did know the way. As did every Fox here. It was yet another thing that felt wrong, somehow. It twisted his gut, made him feel anxious, made him want to move.
Ander got down on one knee and inspected the pure white snow once more, heedless of the grunts and grumbles and insistencies that they were losing time, that they had to keep going. He stuck his hand in the snow, biting cold, and swept it away, expecting to find a discoloured patch of frozen blood deeper down, like a disease festering just below the surface of the skin, but there was nothing. He lifted his hand and sniffed at the clumps of snow stuck to his fingers, but the answer remained the same... nothing.
"Ander, we can't stay out here much longer." Even Nilia was beginning to lose patience. "If Banno makes it to that farmhouse and finds it empty, there's no telling where he might wander off to. He might head straight for the lights of the village, and what then?"
She was right, of course, but Ander couldn't tear his eye away from this pristine patch of snow. It was wrong. It was completely wrong. It was wrong in every way imaginable. This spot was supposed to be saturated with blood, but it wasn't.
How? Just how could Banno pull off something like this? There are ways to hide your footprints, to be sure. Even ways to mask your scent. But to make your entire trail vanish without a trace? And without a river nearby? Apart from growing a set of wings and taking to the air, Ander didn't know of any ways that could possibly happen.
But there was another question burning in his mind, a question with far deeper implications than how, and that question was why.
Why would Banno go to the trouble of hiding his trail when it didn't benefit him in any way? What could he possibly gain from this? It wasn't a trap, otherwise he would have shown himself by now, and it couldn't be for as simple a reason as throwing them off his scent, because they already knew where he was going.
But does Banno know that we know? Ander thought. Yes, of course he does. He has to. Mateo and the others just barely managed to escape with their lives. Even Banno, in his half dead state, must have known that the very first thing they'd do was -
And that's when it hit him, the realisation that he had been a complete and utter fool. It crashed into him just like the snow that had buried so many of his people, knocking the breath right out of him and locking his muscles in a grip of ice.
"Ander, what's wrong?" Nilia asked. "What do you see?"
Ander straightened up, feeling the tendons creaking inside his legs like old strips of whipcord. He looked to the north, back the way they came. The trail of blood was still there, but just barely, slowly fading away as the snowflakes piled up higher and higher. When they first started following that trail, the blood flow had been heavy, about one spot every two strides. But then they found that bloody tree with the crimson handprints, and suddenly...
"We have to go back..." Ander whispered, trying desperately to keep his panic in check. "We have to go back right now!"
"What?" Sorrin looked furious. "Listen here, pup. I am not about to turn tail just because of some -"
Ander vaulted over the rotting log and sprinted through the snow, past Sorrin's outstretched hand and through a drove of bewildered-looking Foxes. His torch whispered in the wind, flashing back and forth over frightened faces, each of them wanting to know what was happening, what was wrong, but there wasn't enough time.
There wasn't enough time!
"Ander, wait!" Nilia's voice came chasing after him, joined by the heavy sounds of her footfalls crunching through the snow.
Ander couldn't afford to wait, not even for a second. The trees kept rushing by on either side of him; black, reaching claws and swaying boughs, reminding him of the last hunt he had shared with his brothers. This must be close to what the stag had seen and felt before its life was cut short, before it felt the sting of an arrow in its flank and sharp claws tearing across its back. The fire in its chest and the ache in its muscles and the blinding panic racing through its mind, narrowing the whole world down to a single pinprick of hope, and that hope was to run, to run and run, to never stop, to just keep going, faster and faster, otherwise everything would be lost.
"Ander! By the Cora, stop!"
The way Banno had sunk his teeth into the neck of that stag and all those that came before it was something that had been burned into Ander's memory time and time again. The way he would first put his mouth around its throat, not biting, just getting a grip with his teeth, then licking, sometimes sucking, feeling its pulse beating between his jaws. Only once he couldn't restrain himself any longer would he actually begin to bite down, slowly increasing the pressure until his fangs burst through the creature's skin and penetrated the softness of its meat. How his eyes would roll back in their sockets, how his eyelids would flutter in ecstasy as the blood leaked over his tongue. And that was always the worst part, wasn't it? Even worse than the pitiful wailing of his prey or its feeble attempts to break away, even worse than the blood flowing across his lips, even worse than the guttural sounds bubbling up from deep inside his throat, worse than all of those things was the way his eyes would go unfocussed, how they'd roll back, how his eyelids would flutter just a little bit and then close completely. It was a look of pure, undiluted, perverted pleasure, and he was getting it not from the thrill of the hunt, but from the death itself. He was tasting it, eating it, taking it into himself, forcing it to become a part of him forever.
He could have done that to Mateo, to Rufio, to Jonah, to the twins, to the others as well. They were all weak and defenceless, barely even standing. He could have done the exact same thing to them as what he did to that stag. He could have torn them open and bathed in their innards in a matter of minutes. He could have indulged his perversions without limit. He could have chewed on their jetting throats, tasting their deaths one by one as steam billowed around his chomping jaws and blood soaked into his mangy fur, dyeing it the darkest crimson.
But he didn't. He could have, but he didn't.
"Ander! Damn it, wait!"
He is a creature of hunger and instinct. If there's something he wants, he goes after it.
But he didn't. He didn't go after his prey. They were right in front of him, and yet -
"Ander!" Nilia grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked him around. "What's gotten into you!? You can't just -" And that's when she saw the look on his face, his blind panic, his terror, his dread. "Ander? What's wrong? Speak to me!"
"They didn't get away, Nilia!" Ander spouted, talking so quickly that the words passed over his numb lips in a frenzy. "Don't you see? Mateo and the others, they didn't escape at all!"
A frown spread across Nilia's brow. Sorrin and the Foxes were finally catching up, panting and heaving as they struggled through the snow, but she didn't even glance back. "What are you talking about, Ander? Of course they escaped. They -" Her eyes went wide as she realised the truth, and she slowly shook her head in complete and utter denial. "No... No, that's impossible... he can't have..." She looked down at the scant spots of blood that were still visible through the building snow, a trail that started out heavy, then became even heavier.
Twice as heavy.
Ander nodded, plumes of mist billowing from between his lips. "Mateo and the others didn't escape," he said. "Banno let them go."
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