Half Wild Read Online Free PDF Page B

uses, and I’m improving but he’s effortless.
    At the top of a minor peak he stops and watches me. His eye has healed, though there’s a scab through his left eyebrow and I think he’ll have a small scar—a reminder of how I attacked him when we were at the apartment in Geneva. I could have blinded him.
    He holds his hand out to me and I take it so he can pull me up the final step. There isn’t much room on the rock and we stand close together.
    The peaks in the far distance have snow on them. It’s cool here but I’m hot.
    “You’re panting,” Gabriel says.
    “We’re high. The air’s thinner.”
    “This bit I’m breathing isn’t so bad.”
    I nudge him with my shoulder.
    “Don’t start what you can’t finish,” he says, nudging me back.
    There is a steep, long drop with sharp rocks behind me and a small drop to a grassy bank behind Gabriel. I push him but not hard and I’m holding his jacket so he doesn’t fall.
    He breaks my hold with a sharp lift of his forearm and shoves me back hard with the flat of his hand. I grab his other sleeve, cursing him and pulling myself upright. He’s grinning like an idiot and there’s more pushing and shoving, each push a little harder than the last, until I break his hold on me and with two hands jab him on the shoulders and he’s falling backward, reaching for me, and he’s not smiling and he looks worried. I grab him but I’ve leaned too far and I can’t hold my balance and we fall together. I pull him to me and turn in the air so that I land on my back with him on top.
    “Ow!”
    I’m on the grassy bank but there are some flat, smooth rocks buried in it and they’re hard in my back.
    Gabriel rolls off me and laughs.
    I swear at him. “I think I’ve broken a rib.”
    “Moan, moan, moan. You English complain all the time.”
    “I’m not complaining, I’m stating a fact. Just cos I can heal doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt!”
    “I didn’t think you’d be so soft.”
    “Me? Soft?”
    “Yep.” He’s kneeling beside me now and pokes me in the chest with his finger. “Soft!”
    I’ve healed my rib and I grab his hand, twist and throw him to the ground so that I’m on top of him.
    I poke his chest. “I’m not soft.”
    “You are but don’t worry about it. It’s one of the things I like about you.”
    I swear at him as I get up. I hold my hand out to him and he takes it and I pull him up.
    We descend into the woods again, cross a stream, and ascend a steep, wooded mountainside, so steep that we have to use our hands to scramble up. Despite the slope the trees are tall, each with a hockey-stick curve at the base where it emerges from the ground. We arrive at a small area of scree below the wide, open mouth of a cave. The cave isn’t deep, only four or five meters and the same in width, but it’s dry and I could sleep in it, I think, without getting sick.
    The smell is that forest smell: decay and life.
    Gabriel says, “I thought, if anything happens . . . goes wrong, this is where we should meet.”
    “What are you expecting to go wrong?”
    “I’m not sure but Hunters are after you; Mercury is dangerous and unpredictable.” He hesitates, then adds: “You’re a little dangerous and unpredictable too.”
    He’s right, of course.
    He takes a tin out of his small rucksack, saying, “I’ll leave my things here.” He’s told me that the tin contains mementoes: love letters that his father sent to his mother, as well as the item Gabriel would have given to Mercury if she was to succeed in turning him from a fain back into a witch. I still don’t know what that is. I won’t ask. If he wants to tell me he will. He puts the tin in a corner of the cave and then fishes something else out of the rucksack.
    He holds the package out to me.
    “It’s for you . . . I thought you’d like it.”
    I’m not sure what to do.
    He says, “Take it. It’s a present.”
    I can tell from Gabriel’s voice, the way he hesitates, his hand not as