The Unraveling, Volume One of The Luminated Threads: A Steampunk Fantasy Romance Read Online Free PDF

an excuse.
    “We don’t—” Daeryn sucked a breath to steady his tone, to make his point sound reasonable. “We don’t run down every animal that crosses onto Wellspring.”
    “That’s right.” Zar jabbed a finger at her, nearly hitting the fur between her eyes.
    Jac flinched back, changed to human form nearly identical to her cousin Maraquin’s, and fell to a sit. “Fine. I get it.”
    “Do you?” Zar barreled on. “All a guard needs to do is run a beast off the farm property, same as every other beast who threatens the crops. Nothing more. If Owen were here, he’d have your hide for this foolish lark.”
    “No, he wouldn’t,” Jac said. “This beast is different. It must be foreign, from Outside the Basin.”
    “You don’t know that,” Zar spat out. “By the Path, no one of us can properly identify the variety of life—animacambire, planta or just plain creatures—lurking in the back bowels of Blighted Basin.”
    Jac jumped to her feet and snapped, “Would you let me finish?”
    Daeryn stepped between them. “Let her talk. This team isn’t pack. With Owen gone, we’re equal members and have to hear each other out.”
    Between his mustache and beard, Zar’s lips twisted like he’d scented carrion.
    But Jac dipped her chin to him in a rare show of appreciation. “You didn’t see what I saw, so you can’t fault me for running down the one I finally found. It’s bad. Tonight those pests didn’t just bite up some vegetables. They’ve gnawed the stalks at the base and destroyed an entire row of acorn squash.” Jac waved her arm this way and that, her excitement from the chase still evident. “The teeth on those things must be as sharp as axes.”
    The four of them remained silent. This was bad. A few of these beasts, over a few nights of cutting through plant stalks, and Wellspring Collective wouldn’t have a viable crop left. Or sales…or cash…or workers.
    “This proves it can’t be sentient,” Jac said. “Nor an animacambire. Only a ’cambire gone bad pulls that kind of crap, ruining a crop so the plants die and the vegetables can’t ripen.”
    Daeryn swallowed. “Can’t be a bad ’cambire, or even a small pack of ’em,” he said. “Not when every farm north and east of here reports them. The entire north half of the Farmlands shire.” This was what ruined farms, like Owen had said the hare invasion of ‘39 did when the whole valley almost starved. Drove farmers and their hands to town jobs, and Outside. Many of them didn’t return. After nearly three years, Daeryn wasn’t just a hand, but a vested collective member. This farm was also his, just as it belonged in part to Jac, Maraquin, Zar…all of the longtimers.
    If Wellspring went under, he wouldn’t just be seeking a new position, but a new home.
    Jac sank down onto a log. “You lot should be thanking me. I ran that thing right off the property, tail between its legs, then chased it farther than the beast ever took it into its head to run on those short legs.”
    “’Cept it doesn’t have a tail,” muttered Zar. Now calmer, the man in his late twenties had returned to his usual sparse remarks.
    “But you didn’t catch it.” Daeryn wasn’t asking. He knew. Otherwise, she’d have the body. And they needed that body to figure out what it was. To stop it…them.
    Jac glared at Zar before glancing around. “Got a better look though. It has a rabbit’s bulkier body with the agility of a stoat. I’d guess a cross, but it’s furrier than either, making it hard to pick out the features. And it escaped down a burrow.”
    “Great,” Maraquin said. “So they’ve made dens—”
    “No.” Jac shook her head. “A rabbit burrow, one with the faintest scent of something I’ve never smelled.” She jerked her thumb northward. “Come on.”
    They all shifted, and Jac led them a couple of hundred feet around a rock outcrop and down a dry ravine. To Daeryn’s polecat nose, the burrow in the bank was exactly as