Girls of Storm and Shadow (Girls of Paper and Fire, #2)(2)
I trudge through the deep drifts beyond the temple, my boots breaking the snowpack with heavy crunches. The cold has numbed my entire body. I flex my stiff fingertips in my gloves. Melting shucks of ice keep sluicing over the tops of my borrowed leather boots no matter how tightly I lace them. But at least my hands and feet have some sort of protection from the weather. My face battles directly with the elements—and this is a war it is losing.
Wind stings my exposed cheeks as I peer through the dancing flakes, trying to see where the leopard demons have gone. We’ve been trekking through the mountains for almost an hour now. The steep forested hills are packed with snow, each leaf-stripped tree encased in ice. The afternoon is eerily silent: just rustling snow crystals and boot-crunch and my own heavy breathing.
“How you doing back there, Little Princess?”
I sigh. Not quite so silent.
“My name,” I shout back, “as I’ve told you a million times, Bo, is Lei.”
No sooner are the words out of my mouth than they are whipped away by the wind. Ice flakes dance around my nose, land cold, wet kisses on my raw cheeks.
“Princess?”
Bo’s voice sounds again, this time clearer. The siblings must be just a few yards ahead.
My breath billows around me as I hurry to catch up. Their tall forms materialize through the snow-blurred wind, as long-limbed and willowy as the trunks of the trees around them, and almost human in appearance. As I get closer, their demon details reveal themselves: snubbed leopard ears, athletic haunches, long tails flicking from side to side, sheathed in the same beige-black spotted fur that covers the rest of their bodies. Green eyes glint from dark-rimmed lids. Their round faces are so similar it’s hard to tell them apart at a glance.
One of the two sets of eyes is soft and kind. Nitta.
The other pair—her brother Bo’s—dances with amusement.
Nitta rushes to me with a relieved cry, brushing the wet straggles of hair back from my brow. “Thank Samsi! We were scared for a moment we’d lost you. Sorry, Lei, we’re moving too fast. We were trying to go slowly, but—”
“Any slower, and we’d be traveling back in time,” Bo quips. “You Papers,” he adds with an impatient cluck, scratching the underside of his chin as he regards me down the length of his flat, feline nose.
Nitta shoots him a frown. “Bo.”
“What? Anybody born without built-in weather protection is missing out, I say.”
“Maybe we should turn back.” Snowflakes dust Nitta’s spotted fur, and she brushes a hand over her brow absentmindedly, looking worried. “We haven’t found anything yet, and Lei looks frozen half to death. Merrin was right. This was a bad idea.”
Bo rests a hand on his bony hip. “You’re going to trust Feathers now? Come on, Sis, what does that bird-brain know?”
“You’ll defy Merrin’s orders just to annoy him,” Nitta retorts.
“Why else do you think I agreed to let Lei come along on our little hunting trip?” The leopard-boy grins. “No offense, little one,” he tells me, “but it wasn’t exactly for your expert tracking skills.”
“A lot of good your tracking skills are doing us,” I point out. “Found anything yet, hmm?”
While Bo cocks his head in amusement, I straighten, squaring my shoulders. I’m still barely half the height of the leopard siblings, but it makes me feel stronger all the same. “I asked you to let me come today because I’m sick of hiding away in that temple. It’s been more than two weeks now. If I have to spend another day listening to Hiro’s endless chanting and the rest of you sparring or talking war tactics while refusing to let me do anything, my brain will burst.” I reshuffle my scarf, bunch my gloved hands into fists. “Now, can we please go catch something good to eat? I’m sick of roasted taro for every meal.”
Nitta hesitates, but Bo tosses up his hands. “You know what? Princess is right. If I have to eat one more piece of taro I’m going to become a taro.” With a dramatic huff, he throws himself onto his back. Snowflakes rain down around him. “Look,” he croaks in mock-horror, blinking up at us from a distinctly Bo-shaped hole in the snow. “It’s already starting. I am one with the taro. And it feels… taro-ble.” He flounces back up, coat covered in ice, and beams his wide, snaggle-toothed smile. “Get it? Taro-ble?”
“Oh, Little Bro,” Nitta sighs. “Your jokes are just so taro-iffic.”
All three of us laugh at this, the sound breaking the eerie quiet of the snow-draped forest, until a loud crack to our left cuts us off. We whip around, my heart lurching into my throat, only to see a pack of snow that had been balanced on a banyan’s branches crash to the floor with a heavy flumpf.
Nitta and Bo straighten from the defensive stances they’d instinctively adopted.
Bo snorts, releasing hold of the knife at his belt. “Scared of snow, Big Sis? Afraid it’ll turn your pretty hair wet and scraggly?”
Nitta’s eyes slice his way. “Don’t think I didn’t see your reaction.” But there’s a touch of something cautious as she turns around, lifting her nose to test the air. Her ears twitch, listening. Then she starts forward. “Come on,” she says. “Something’s definitely out there. And, Lei, stay close this time.”
We continue into the swirling white. It’s all I can do to keep up with the siblings, their lithe Moon caste bodies slinking easily between columns of ice-wreathed trees. While Nitta and Bo carve the layers of snow cleanly with each neat lift of their lean leopard haunches, I slog clumsily through the thick drifts. The snowpack is as deep as my knees. Hidden tree roots tangle with my boots. Every drag of frigid air cuts my throat, but despite the chill, sweat beads inside my coat and under the fur scarf wrapped around my neck.