Night Quest. Susan Krinard

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СКАЧАТЬ his voice.

      The young Opir pushed against her, the urge to flee warring with his body’s need for blood. Artemis held him down.

      “What is your name?” she asked him.

      “P-Pericles,” he croaked.

      “Pericles,” she said, “this human is called Garret Fox. He saved my life from other humans who would have killed me.”

      “Where is my son?” Garret demanded.

      “Garret,” Artemis said sharply. She cupped the dying Freeblood’s head in her hands. “Pericles, where did you see the child?”

      Pericles closed his eyes again. “Make the human go.”

      Ruthless in his suspicion, Garret moved to stand behind her and gazed down at the boy with his hand on his knife. “Where is he?” he repeated.

      Shifting her body, Artemis placed herself between human and Opir. Garret felt like a looming thundercloud at her back.

      “Don’t come any closer,” she warned.

      “Answer me,” Garret said, stepping around her.

      Artemis stood and turned, her face only inches from his. “It would be very foolish if you and I were to fight now, when we may learn something of use to us,” she said.

      They stared at each other until the Freeblood gurgled in a way that sounded very much like death. Darkness swirled up in Artemis’s mind.

      The boy’s time had run out.

      Pushing all thoughts of dying aside, Artemis knelt beside him again. “It’s all right,” she said gently, cradling his head in her arms. “Garret, if you provide him with a little blood, he may be able to speak.”

      She expected refusal. Instead, he crouched beside her and gazed at the boy, his jaw working. He began to draw his knife from its sheath. Artemis caught his arm.

      Garret jerked away and cut his wrist. “Tell me where I can find my son,” he said to Pericles.

      “Take it,” Artemis urged. “His blood cannot cure you, but if you help us, at least one of your people will remember you with honor.”

      Licking his dry lips, the boy stared at the dripping blood in fascination. “North,” he said. “Beyond...Oceanus’s territory, across the...Columbia River.” He choked. “Wa-Washington.”

      “Why?” Garret asked. “Why are they taking my son so far away?”

      “I...” Pericles closed his eyes, beginning to lose consciousness. With a quick glance at Artemis, Garret offered his wrist to Pericles. The young Freeblood’s mouth clamped on his flesh. Garret winced but held steady, and Artemis found herself battling both her own unexpected hunger and Garret’s heightened emotions.

      After a minute the boy’s head fell back onto Artemis’s arms, and he went still. The echo of his pain faded from Artemis’s mind. Then there was only an emptiness where he had been for such a short while.

      Somewhere in the darkness, an owl hooted. Perhaps, Artemis thought, the same owl as before. She laid the boy’s head on the ground and closed his eyes with a sweep of her palm.

      “Thank you,” she said to Garret. She took his arm and sealed the wound. Garret hardly seemed to notice.

      “He was with the ones who took my son,” he said, his voice hoarse with anger.

      “And they left him here to die,” she said.

      “They are rogues, and so was he.”

      “Yet you showed him mercy.”

      “To find out what we needed to know. It’s unlikely he’d have done the same for me.”

      Garret had not felt the boy’s very real fear of him, Artemis thought. She wished she had not. She lifted the boy in her arms and carried him to a place under the trees. She laid him out there, his hands folded across his chest, and stood over him for a few moments. Garret waited silently behind her.

      “I know you don’t believe it,” she said, “but this boy was also a victim. I do not think he has been Opir for more than a few years.”

      “That makes it worse,” Garret said. “He doesn’t have the excuse of having had decades or even centuries to forget what it was like to be human. He chose to join a pack of rogues and kidnap a human child.”

      “Did it occur to you that he might have needed to join a pack in order to survive?”

      “Like you did?”

      His sarcasm bit hard. “It is because I am older that I could do what he could not,” she said.

      “You can’t make excuses for every rogue who commits crimes against humanity.”

      “Many of your kind would say that I have committed such crimes merely by existing.”

      Garret gripped her arm and turned her to face him. “Those humans would be wrong,” he said.

      “How many would have saved my life?” she asked, trembling at his touch.

      “I would not be the only one.”

      “And I believe that only the worst of my kind would harm a human child.” She pulled her arm from his light hold and strode back to the ruins.

      “Artemis,” he called after her.

      She stopped without turning. “I do not wish to quarrel,” she said.

      “Neither do I,” he said. His moon-cast shadow fell over her, and she felt his breath stir her hair. “We obviously don’t understand each other very well yet.”

      “Perhaps it would be better if we did not.”

      “Our survival might depend on it.”

      She swung around to face him. “What is it that you do not understand?”

      “I heard you tell Pericles that you believe it isn’t in your people’s true nature to kill each other over humans, or take human lives just because you can.”

      “Why is that a surprise to you?” she asked.

      “Are you really concerned about saving humans, or only about Freebloods killing each other?”

      Without answering, she broke into a fast walk back to camp, where she began to gather up her things. Garret did the same, though he moved more slowly. Artemis thought she sensed regret in his mind. He checked again to make certain the fire was out, and that the rabbit carcasses and entrails were well buried, not that an Opir hunter couldn’t have smelled them if he’d been searching.

      But there was still no sign of intruders, so Garret withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his pack, and carefully smoothed it across the cracked and overgrown floor of the building, right where a shaft of moonlight illuminated the ground. Artemis recognized a СКАЧАТЬ