Username: dandelioncupcake
Title: The Last Encounter
Word Count: 1,660 words
Katya flashed through the woods, faster than the speed of light. Her long black hair trailed behind her in an inky wave, capturing leaves and vines from the surrounding bushes and undergrowth in its midst. She tugged the hood of her headdress, the skull of wolf, down over her face to look menacing to her prey. The feathers and beads that adorned the animal’s skull tangled with her hair to create a streak of color that whooshed through the trees, stealthy and beautiful. Her wide green eyes peered through the bone, searching for the hunted; her nostrils flared as she tried to find her victim’s scent.
Katya reached a clearing, and she paused in the center of it to collect her thoughts. She took the piece of fabric that was clipped to her belt and pressed her nose against it, inhaling the fresh scent. It smelled like smoke and
human; the person she was after must have lived in a village just on the outskirts of this forest. She turned in a circle, eying all angles in which she could run, looking for hints of her victim. Then Katya spotted his trail—a thick path in the long green grass made by somebody trying to escape.
There you are.
She loaded her bow with one of the silver arrows the Head had given her when she’d received her Tracker position; they were beautiful and new, lethal little creatures that glittered in the sunlight. Katya took off sprinting into the thick trees, grinning at the fact that her prey’s scent grew stronger with each pad of her leather boots.
Thump thump thump, her powerful strides echoed, and she saw a faraway figure in the sunlight in front of her.
It was a boy, most likely her age, running like the wind. Katya was impressed by his speed, but she was faster—she had trained for years in agility and speed to become the best tracker that the Head had ever employed, and a village boy wouldn’t soon outrun her.
Katya was closing in, and at this point the boy had turned to see who was pursuing him, having been given a heads up by Katya’s loud footsteps. He stood there, dumbstruck, and Katya tackled him to the forest floor. He landed with a loud
whump, his white peasant shirt getting stained by dirt and patchy grass. Katya aimed her weapon at the back of his head and was about to strike him down when the boy turned his neck to face her.
Shocked, Katya slowly lowered her weapon and flipped up the wolf skull. “
Jens?” She gasped.
Jens flipped around and slid out from underneath her tackle. He looked so much older from when she had left the village, but he still had those same hazel eyes. In the sunlight, the gold flecks in his irises glimmered beautifully, just like they did those many years ago.
“Katya,” he breathed. “It’s been so long.”
Katya flipped down her mask so that he couldn’t see her tears. How was she going to kill him?
* * *
Against her will, Jens grabbed her in a bone-breaking hug. “It’s been so long,” he repeated in her ear, and Katya squirmed away. She stood up and leaned on a tree across from him, watching him sit in the undergrowth. He had gotten taller, and had a bit of beard stubble along his jawline, but he still seemed to be the little kid that used to live next to her.
“Take off the skull,” he ordered. “Let me get a look at you.”
Katya shook her head and looked down at her feet, still trying to hide fresh tears. She toyed with her weapon, trying to make a decision. How could he be so lighthearted about this? Jens knew what she was.
“You know what I have to do,” she stated flatly. She took off the pack that was slung over her shoulder and showed him the arrows inside. “The Head gave me these, and you know what they must be used for.”
“They trained you not to have a heart,” Jens sighed. He stood up and spread his arms, puffing out his chest with closed eyes. “Go ahead then. Shoot me.”
Katya couldn’t do it. She raised her weapon and aimed it at his heart, but could only think about the person that she hunted with in the woods, how he made her laugh, how Jens had kissed her underneath the stars at that summer festival long ago. All of these memories came back to her in a rush of emotion, and she slid onto the forest floor. Katya flipped up her mask, getting over her fear of letting him see her tears.
“You can’t do it,” he stated. It wasn’t a question; it was the truth, and Katya acknowledged it with the fat tears that rolled down her face. He slunk over to her and sat down on the ground so that their knees touched.
“Tell me about your life,” he said. “Are you a skilled killer?”
She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “I haven’t failed yet,” Katya said quietly. “This might be my first.”
“Maybe you could give them a different body. Or maybe we could run away,” he said brightly, rubbing her hand.
Katya shook her head. “You never were the brightest, Jens.”
They sat in silence for a good while after that, in which Katya took in the older version of Jens. He was dirty, but so was Katya, which tends to happen when you run frantically through a forest. His hair was dark, just like always, and had that little cowlick that stood up in the back; Katya had tried in vain so many times to smooth it down, but it was the most defiant cowlick she had ever encountered. Jens’s face had a square chin and pronounced jaw line, and his neck and shoulders were thick and muscled, like a horse’s. It was obvious that he had taken up Mr. Bäcker’s offer; Mr. Bäcker sold firewood for a living back in the village, which was a hot commodity. However, he was getting elderly, and needed a young hand in splitting wood; Jens fit the part.
Katya thought about her parents back in the village, and couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen them in ten years. Once her mother had tried to arrange a marriage for her and Jens, but Katya refused. This was when the Head had offered her training to become a tracker of criminals—which paid incredibly well—and Katya desired to travel. But now it made her heart ache to think that she could have had a simple life with Jens, to raise a handful of children and just tend house all day. It wouldn’t have gotten her in this situation, that’s for certain.
A question occurred to Katya just then, an important one that had previously been overlooked. “Jens,” she began. “What did you do?”
He sighed and leaned his head against an elm. “I stole. Good coin, right out of a man’s pocket; and then later I took a loaf of bread from the baker. We needed it, my mother and I, because Mr. Bäcker doesn’t pay terribly well, and my father died three years ago…there’s nobody left to support us.” He looked at my bow and arrows, which were relaxing in my lap. “I suppose it wasn’t worth it.”
Of course it wasn’t worth it. The Head didn’t tolerate stealing, and oftentimes people would be executed publicly instead of using Katya’s gifts. But this was a horrible, painful exception.
Jens laughed. “I thought of you yesterday, actually. I wondered where you were, what you were doing. But I guess that I know now.” Katya loved his laugh, rich and hearty, full of life and passion. Life that was about to be taken from him. “I thought of the summer festival. That was the night when my mother said that you were the most beautiful girl in the village…and when I realized what was right in front of me. But the next day, when I was trying to find you, everyone said that you had gone off to training.” Katya’s heart was threatening to burst into a million little pieces. He was bearing his soul to her, something he hadn’t done since the night of the festival. That was the best night of her life; she’d gotten a greater thrill then than when she hunted down humans.
“
Stop it,” she hissed. “Why do you have to make this so
hard?”
Katya was about to continue, but Jens took her face in his hands and kissed her, long and passionate. His breath was warm and filled every part of her body with joy and light, something that hadn’t been felt by either of them in a decade.
I’m an idiot, a complete idiot, for leaving him, Katya thought. But she wanted steady coin and the thrill of life over love. Love that would never come back again.
He picked up where they left off at the festival, wrapping his arms around Katya’s waist, wanting and taking her. His lips were strong and he knew, they both knew, that this was a kiss that would never happen again. It was a decade’s worth of kissing making up for a decade’s worth of loss.
Katya fumbled an arrow on her lap, and they knew what had to come next. Jens kept his embrace, but his lips were stronger, his mouth opened wider, and Katya tangled one of her hands in his shaggy hair. She lifted up his shirt, exposing his bare chest, and pressed the point of the silver arrow against his smooth skin. Jens was ready for it, ready for his fate, and stopped the kiss. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against Katya’s.
“Goodbye,” he whispered.
And with that, Katya shoved the point of the arrow into his heart.
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