A trick.
Misdirection.
Tossing something away from yourself — it’s what you would have done!
I snap my head in the other direction and see a branch as thick as a baseball bat swinging toward me. I try to duck, drop to the side, but I’m too slow.
The branch collides with the left side of my head and sends me reeling to the side. I fall hard, face-first onto the forest floor. A rock that’s jutting up between the roots smacks into my right side, and I hear a muffled crack.
A burst of pain shoots through me.
My rib.
My head throbs, feels like it’s filled with its own heavy, thunderous heartbeat. The world becomes a splinter of dots, stars splintering apart in my vision. I try to push myself to my feet, but the world is turning in a wide, dizzy circle and I can’t seem to make my limbs obey me. My side screams at me, and I don’t make it past my hands and knees.
Focus. Focus!
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the man approaching me.
I don’t make it to my feet. He kicks me hard in my injured side and the ground rushes up at me again. I barely hold back a gasp of pain when I land. If the rib wasn’t fractured before, it’s almost certainly broken now.
Everything around me seems to be edging outside of time, but in my blurred vision I see him raise the branch, step closer. I roll away from him and feel the whoosh of air beside me as he brings the branch thwacking down right where my head had been only a moment earlier. A spray of mud splatters across my face.
My injured side squeezes out a jet of pain that courses through my chest every time I take a breath.
Get up, you have to get up to fight this guy.
Forcing myself to stand, I feel another swoop of dizziness, but I hide it from him. Face him.
He discards the branch, flips out a knife.
So he has a weapon.
But so do I.
Carefully, I wrap one end of the belt around each hand. It’s one of the simplest ways to defend yourself when someone comes at you with a knife. If you know what you’re doing, you can trap the wrist of your opponent’s knife hand, control the arm, and take him down.
And I know what I’m doing.
As long as you can stay on your feet.
The pain coursing up my side and pounding through my head makes it hard to focus.
He’s stationary, less than ten feet away, studying me, no doubt planning how best to attack me.
He holds the blade straight out to slice at me like he did last night when he went after Charlene.
No ice-pick grip this time. He’s learned his lesson.
As I breathe, breathe, breathe, try to relax, somehow, even though I’m distracted by the pain, my senses seem to become sharper, more focused. I catch the sound of a stream nearby that I hadn’t noticed. I smell the pine needles and the moist decay of the soil, feel the droplets of sweat trailing down my forehead and the warm blood oozing from the side of my head where he hit me with the branch.
He watches me.
Don’t black out. Do not black out.
But I’m unsteady and feel like I might.
I blink, rub the back of my fist across my eyes, and my vision clears enough for me to see the streak of blood splayed across his sleeve. I can only guess what he did to Abina before setting her on fire.
A shot of anger tightens my focus again.
“Her name was Abina,” I tell him.
“What?”
“The woman you killed in there. Before you started the fire.”
“Ah.” He taps the edge of his lip with his tongue. “Stuck her in the belly like a squirmy little pig. She would have squealed and squealed. Died quick, though. When I did her throat.” He demonstrates how he killed her, miming the action with the knife. “Burned kinda nice in that outfit too. Almost like she was dressed for the occasion.”
Rage, white and hot and like nothing I’ve ever experienced, overwhelms me and I like it. Feel fueled by it. I snap the belt taut between my hands and realize I’m no longer thinking in terms of stopping this man. That’s not exactly the right word.
Everything becomes clear: only one of us is going to walk out of this forest alive.
“How’s your leg? How about we do the other one too?”
His grin flattens. He flips the knife into his other hand. “Wound for wound.”
Stall, Jevin. Stall long enough and help will arrive.
But no, I don’t want to stall.
I want to take care of this right now.
Besides, I know help isn’t on its way. We’re hidden in the fog more than a quarter mile off the trail and down a ravine. Even if I called for help, the dense forest and the drizzling rain would devour the sound. No one knows where we are, no one is looking for us. Besides, there aren’t any cops around, so even if someone from the center did come, that would only mean one more unarmed person for this guy to attack.
Glenn eyed the man who’d bested him last night in the chamber.
A line from a movie came to mind: “You are the pus in a boil I am about to pop.” Glenn thought that, thought it, but did not say it.
But yes, popping a boil was a good way to describe what he was about to do to this man.
I move toward him.
He’s passing the knife back and forth from hand to hand, trying to intimidate me. Not wise — it leaves you unprotected for a fraction of a second each time you do it.
“I like it better this way.” His voice is all acid and filled with disdain. “I can make it last longer than the fire would have.”
“So can I.”
He feints left, lunges right, sweeping the knife toward me. I stop the attack with an inside block and let my momentum carry me through and land a left leg round kick to his side, then I twist away, sweeping my leg backward to take him down, but he’s quick and plants himself, blocks with his left shin.
Kick his leg. His thigh. It’s injured.
I go for it as he maneuvers toward me, but he evades the kick. He jabs right, then slashes the blade toward my stomach, catching my shirt, grazing my skin. He quickly goes for me again, but I block his hand, get in close, and smash his jaw with the back of my fist. It’s a solid punch and it hurts my hand, but I know it must have hurt his face even worse.
He has the knife in his right hand, and I go for that wrist with the belt, try to wrap it so I can disarm him, but he savagely slashes the blade against the belt, severing it. I drop the two ends as he punches me hard in my injured side, and I can’t help but crumple backward in pain.
My head is pounding fiercely and my balance is still off. I’m queasy, dizzy. It feels like everything around me is slipping off the rim of reality into a widening gray blur.
I straighten up. Face him. Give him no indication of how weak I feel. “Why set the fire? To kill Tanbyrn or destroy his files?”
Spittle hangs from his lip and he sneers, blood covering his teeth from where I punched him. He doesn’t speak, but there’s a stony hardness in his eyes, a look that seems to say, “I’m willing to do anything it takes to see this through. Are you willing to do as much to stop me?”
That’s the look in his eyes.
And I know it’s the look in mine.
The fog swirls aside as he rushes at me. His blade flashes toward my cheek and I deflect his arm, land another punch to his jaw. He spins, but I step to the side, heel-kick his injured leg, then his knee, buckling it, and as I do I strike the back of his neck as hard as I can with the straightened edge of my right hand.
He goes down quick, with a heavy, wet thud. I expect him to be on his feet in a second, and I wait, ready, my heart jackhammering in my chest.