The Soul Eaters (The Thin Hex Line Book 1) by Gwyndolyn Russell (e reader txt) 📕

barrier of his smoke." Jackal started to talk quicker, trying to get out all of his jumbled up thoughts. "There was a fight. Something big. A few of them. A lot of blood all over the clearing. There's a trail of his footprints I lost in the dark."

"All right. Breathe." Reaper sighed. "I know you're worried about him, but that can't be our priority right now. I know for a fact he's gonna be alright. If he's hurt, he'll come back. We need to focus on our own people right now, Liam."

"We can't just forget about her and pretend she doesn't need us!" He threw his arm to the side.

"Are you forgetting that Fenris was literally created to fight the eos?"

"That doesn't matter! I'm going out there to find her. I can use the cartographer to follow the trail."

Reaper's lips pursed. He rubbed his palm over his mouth. A habit of his when he thought hard about Spectre. If she was the one out there, he'd be going after her too. No doubt about that. He'd go through any length to make sure she was all right. How could he stop Jackal from doing it for Fenris?

"All right." He sighed. "Take Yaaranam and Nostra with you."

"You're...letting me go?"

"I'd rather you stay, but you're right. Just because you can do it alone, doesn't mean you should. Fenris needs our support. We can't sit idly by and wait."

FORTY-TWO

"Fucking shit!" Yaaranam cursed, attempting to get into the back seat of the truck.

The vehicle was a heavy duty, all terrain six wheeled pick-up truck with an extended bed to carry extra cargo. Four wheels in the back, two in the front. It sat up high requiring a two-step side skirt at each door. It even had various bars on the outside. Painted a matte white with gray accents, the windows were tinted just enough to make it hard to see inside, but not difficult to see outside at night.

Big as a bulldozer, Yaaranam still had trouble fitting inside. She was nearly ten feet tall and the interior of the truck was designed with humans in mind. Even I wasn't as comfortable as others would be; needing the driver's seat pushed back pretty far.

"Why don't you get in the gunner’s seat?" I suggested, taking the time to check that all the lights worked, and the truck was running fine. I even made sure the manual toggle for its height, and which wheels were used to drive worked.

"There's a gunner's seat?! This thing doesn't have a gun!"

"All of our trucks are ready for weapons to be mounted. We only keep a handful ready to go. The rest are used for transport."

"And you think the one without the gun is the best choice?" She shut the back door and climbed onto the roof.

"I was planning on going alone." I grumbled.

"Like that was ever going to happen."

Nostradamus sat in the passenger seat quietly, listening to the two of them go back and forth.

"Are you ready yet? I figured raven women didn't take as long as human women to get ready to go." I revved the engine.

"Shut your trap." She dropped down onto the seat of the hatch. She stuck half way out of the roof, rested against the door. "Let's go. I want to shoot something."

"Is it wise to be going far from the camp at night?" Nostradamus asked.

I rolled the truck forward headed towards the field back the way Reaper and his team had come from.

"Probably not. I imagine this thing can outrun anything we come across. Plus with her up there and a gun, we should be all right." I flipped the switch to turn on the extra lights on the hood and roof of the truck. We could see straight ahead for several meters, the extreme amount of lumens lighting the terrain up as if the sun was shining bright in the sky.

"They already moved the bodies?" Yaaranam asked.

"Friendlies, yeah. I don't think they touched the eos." I answered.

"Well, they aren't there either."

We looked out where we last saw the corpses of the eos. The blood was still there. The debris just as it had been. The human bodies were long gone. Apparently the eos bodies were, too.

"I didn't even see them drag them in." I said, scratching the back of my head.

"Perhaps Dr. Reynolds wanted to examine them." Nostradamus proposed.

"Sounds about right." Something didn't sit right about it.

I shook the feeling away and hit the gas. I hooked the cartographer to the trucks systems so the map would display on the screen in the dash. Unfortunately, we couldn't see the location of other cartographers out there. All we had to go off of was what appeared on the map. It was only a basic topography of the surface and ours seemed to be updating once every hour. They should update quicker than that.

"Fenris does not seem to be on a certain path." Nostradamus pointed at the screen.

What showed up zigzagged around, and at times looped around with little changes. It seemed he was primarily heading north.

"It last updated ten minutes ago." I said. "Could you find the newest change?"

"Of course! Let me plug in…" Nostradamus jumped up at the idea. A series of dots flashed on his face.

After a moment an exclamation point appeared.

"I've connected with the system! It will take me a moment to find the newest changes."

I headed north, keeping an eye out for any sign of Fenris. The eos seemed to be few in number. Either because Fenris already killed most of them off, which I doubted, or scared them into hiding. They could just have a small population here though. Fuck, how was I supposed to know anything about this? They didn't exactly teach much about biology or science in the military. Couldn't even call it teaching. It was more like instructions for oddly specific situations. I knew my equipment, and my ship, that was it.

The rest of this stuff dumbfounded me. Made me realize that there was