I picked up the pace and promptly tripped over a root.

  It wasn’t a spectacular, tumbling, flailing kind of fall, just one of those jarring, ankle-wrenching stumbles that feels stupid even while it hurts like hell.

  I hissed through my teeth and crouched, clutching my foot. Zelda barked, nosing at my hand.

  “I’m okay,” I lied. “I just—ow—maybe not totally okay.”

  Emma doubled back fast. “What happened?”

  “I found a root,” I said grimly. “With my ankle. It didn’t go well.”

  Jack caught up a second later. “Shit. Can you walk?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then immediately amended, “Probably. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  I was sure it was just a twisted ankle. Well, not totally sure. It was throbbing with pain, the red-hot kind that would shoot up my leg with every step.

  “Up a tree. Quick.” Jack patted the tree trunk next to me. “This one, this tree.”

  “No, I’ll be—”

  “We don’t have time to argue. The tree’s already tried to kill you. Now it’ll save you.” He knelt next to me and wove his hands together into a basket, a signal for ‘step here and I’ll give you a boost.’

  “But Zelda—”

  “We’ll take good care of her. Or I’ll lift her up after you and you can hang on to her. But we need to move.”

  “Yeah, we do. Hurry.” Emma was looking off into the darkness, lips set, expression grim.

  I didn’t argue further, just stood, winced and tried not to scream in pain as I put weight on my bad leg so that I could step into Jack’s cradled hands with my good leg. I let him boost me, then reached for the nearest branch. I was incredibly grateful for those extra points of strength as I tried to pull myself up and over it. It had been a long time and at least twenty or thirty pounds since I’d climbed a tree.

  Once I was seated, with my legs straddling the branch, I leaned down and held out my arms. “Pass me Zelda. She’ll be safer with me.”

  Jack scooped her up without hesitating, saying, “Go, Emma. Go. I’ll catch up.”

  “I don’t want to leave you.” She’d been carrying her bow slung over her shoulder, but she’d let it slide down her arm now, and her hand was clenched tight around the grip as she stared off into the darkness.

  “I’ll catch up,” he repeated, as he held Zelda up to me. “Shadow step, illusions, remember? I’ll be fine. Run!”

  Zelda was being a very good girl, tolerating the extreme indignity of being hoisted into the air above Jack’s head with nothing more than the stiffness that expressed her dislike of the situation. But it still took me a few seconds to get a good grasp on her while maintaining my balance and not bumping my ankle more than could be helped.

  Emma didn’t run, but she moved, disappearing into the darkness within a few steps.

  Jack looked up at me. “Good? You got her?”

  I nodded, clutching Zelda to me. “Thanks, Jack.”

  He touched his finger to his forehead, a wry little salute. “I still owe you, you know.”

  “All debts cleared,” I said. “Stay safe. And run carefully.”

  “Shadow step,” he said, grinning. “Gotta love it.”

  He vanished.

  I leaned back against the trunk of the tree, heart pounding, ankle throbbing in rhythm.

  Zelda was warm against my chest. She wiggled, then tipped her head up and licked my chin. I gave a faint chuckle, thinking about that boost to my resilience stat that she was probably giving me.

  That had been an intense couple of minutes.

  I’d barely had time to realize how screwed I was. With the lizard catching up to us, if I’d been limping along while the others raced through the forest, I’d be the lizard food. Zelda wouldn’t leave me, so she’d be lizard food, too. Rebound from Warden’s Edge might have hit for some good damage, but with how out-leveled we were, I wouldn’t have wanted to count on it to save me.

  I wondered how out-leveled we still were.

  And then I sat bolt upright.

  Oh, fuck me.

  I squeezed Zelda so hard she made a squeaky chirrup of protest.

  I relaxed my grip instantly. “Sorry, sorry, love. Not so hard, I know,” I murmured to her, keeping my voice low in case the stalker was close enough to hear.

  I hadn’t been screwed. I’d been stupid.

  I opened my interface, scrolled to my status, and tapped to confirm my acceptance of my next level.

  Level 10.

  The rush was great, as always, made particularly nice by the way my ankle stopped throbbing. From intense pain to marathon-enabled, in one sweet second.

  Now, however, I was up a tree. Holding a dog. With a monster approaching.

  What should I do? Try to catch up to Jack and Emma or stay right where I was?

  I glanced up through the branches. The sky was starting to gray, morning creeping in after our long night. That would make it easier to see where I was going if we tried to jump down and run.

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  But I wasn’t sure jumping and running was the best approach. What if I landed badly and sprained my ankle again? If Zelda had been resisting being held, then moving would be the right choice, but she was putting up with being held in a tree with remarkable equanimity. She’d settled against my chest without complaint, which was unusual for her.

  She was my shadow during the day and at night she might deign to rest her head on my leg, but she didn’t do cuddles. Which was fine by me, I wasn’t exactly the cuddliest person myself. Right now, though, she was tucked close, warm and solid, almost like she understood we needed to be still.

  And we did need to be still—very, very still, because it was too late to run. I could hear the stalker’s wheezing breath, that weird high-pitched whine sending a chill down my spine. It was crunching its way through the woods with a steady stomp that vibrated through the tree beneath me.

  It was close, too close.

  And it was way too late to climb down.

  In our last encounter, I hadn’t really seen the thing, just the floating label above its head, with the question marks that translated to “way, way, way out of your league.” The lizard itself had fallen in my pit trap before coming into view.

  Not so now. Because as the morning light filtered through the canopy, I could finally see what we'd been running from.

  The lizard was huge.

  Huge.

  When Emma said Komodo dragon, I’d pictured, you know, a Komodo dragon. I’d watched enough Animal Planet back in the day to have a decent mental image: maybe a foot and a half tall, eight feet long, a couple hundred pounds. Big, sure. Ugly, definitely. But manageable.

  So when she used that name, my brain obligingly filled in the blanks and created an imaginary Acid-Spitting Stalker. I pictured a big, ugly lizard.

  I was so wrong.

  So, so, so wrong.

  Oh, it was big, and it was ugly, but it was no Komodo dragon.

  It was more of a mini-Godzilla and I could not fathom why Emma had compared it to anything else. Had she never seen a Godzilla movie? Had she somehow completely missed out on that cultural reference? Had she grown up in a cult?

  Because this thing was terrifying.

  And if it spotted me, sitting in this tree, completely unable to run, I was sure it could spit its acid and kill me with a single strike.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to watch my own death as it happened.

  My internal monologue went something like, “Please, please, please, please, please,” and honestly, I had no idea what I was pleading for. A quick death? That Zelda would stay with me after we died? That I wouldn’t have to hear her suffer? I don’t know.

  I do know that it didn’t even occur to me to wish the stalker wouldn’t see us, because discovery seemed inevitable. We weren’t hiding. We were sitting in a tree.

  All it had to do was look up. And not even very far up, just a little up.

  The stalker did not look up.

  I opened my eyes. I couldn’t help myself. Even though I didn’t want to see my own death, I couldn’t stand the suspense.

  The stalker moved like it owned the forest, with pure focused disdain. It was tracking its prey—us, we were its prey—and nothing was going to distract it.

  I stayed still, heart pounding so hard it felt like a countdown, half expecting it to pause, to lift its head, to sniff the air and swing that terrifying snout my way.

  But it didn’t.

  I guess fortunately for me that ‘us’ was not entirely accurate. It had to be tracking Jack, because Jack was the only one of us it had seen.

  I caught a glimpse of its back as it passed by—scaled, ridged, the color of moss and mud and nightmares. It looked solid. Heavy. Its tail dragged through the brush behind it, thick as my waist, carving a path like a plow.

  Zelda didn’t even twitch. Good girl. Best girl.

  It kept going, disappearing into the forest ahead of me.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, quiet as I could.

  Then I whispered, “Holy shit.”

  Because really, what else was there to say?

  I wanted to find Emma. I wanted to hug her and apologize. Profusely. The kind of apology you give when you show up drunk to someone’s birthday and pass out in the cake.

  (No, I didn't do that. It was my cake, my ex, and honestly, his apologies were insufficient.)

  But that level of apology.

  I’d seen how scared she was of the stalker, but I hadn’t appreciated why.

  Now I knew.

  Because probably I should get down from this tree now, and follow the stalker to my friends.

  (Were they friends? Was that the right word?)

  But I didn’t think my legs could hold me up. They felt like they were made of Jello. Or wobbly pasta. Something entirely insufficient to the job of walking around a forest where that creature was stalking. I don’t know how long I sat there, frozen and still. More than a couple minutes, definitely.

  And yet…

  I took a deep breath, the kind that pulls oxygen all the way down to your soul, and whispered to Zelda, “It was my idea. We have to go help.”

  How we were going to help against that was a complete mystery to me.

  But I’d spent the past twenty-four sleepless hours battling goblins with Jack and Emma, and I wasn’t flattering myself when I say they would have been dead without us.

  “Us” explicitly, because it wasn’t just me. I hadn’t seen Zelda turn into Giant-Zelda, but I knew her teeth and her quick kills against lower-level goblins had taken more than one battle from “debacle” to “eked-out win.”

  I might be the tank, but she was the secret weapon. Without us, I didn’t like their odds. Which meant we needed to get out of this tree and back into the fight.

  Let me be clear, if I haven’t been clear enough already: I was not a fighter. In my entire life, I’d never hit anyone. Until that squirrel, anyway.

  Oh, I wasn’t a victim. Bullies didn’t target me. Some people were born with an invisible “Kick Me” sign taped to their backs, but I wasn’t one of them.

  That said, I knew how to turn the other cheek. So for me to decide I had to fight…

  Well. It was probably proof that the System wasn’t just changing my body. It was taking over my brain, too.

  “We need to get down, sweet girl,” I whispered to Zelda.

  Did I need to whisper? Probably not. That stalker had to be well beyond us by now, given how long I’d spent frozen in indecision. But I whispered anyway, because that thing scared the shit out of me, and I wasn’t over it.

  She wiggled.

  Maybe, if my blood wasn’t still composed of 90% pure fear, I would have understood what that wiggle meant. But I didn't.

  It meant, “I am going to jump out of this tree and I will be fine, because my Level 14 bones are made of titanium.”

  But I didn’t speak wiggle, not at that moment.

  So when she jumped, I made a noise I will generously describe as a gasp and not a strangled shriek of panic.

  She landed with a soft thump, tail high, ears up, and trotted a few steps forward before glancing back at me like What? You coming?

  I sprawled across the branch, where I had half fallen, half collapsed when she left my arms, and just breathed for a second. I was fresh off my level up, clean from that lovely cleanse spell, and I should have been feeling great. But being afraid was exhausting.

  Really, I bet it was easier to run a marathon than to be as scared as I was.

  I peered down. The ground looked farther away than I remembered, but without a dog in my arms, I could clamber down in a completely uncoordinated, awkward, awful sort of way that included dangling from my branch and dropping a foot and a half as if it was dangerous.

  Ugh. I’d be embarrassed if anyone had seen me, but hey, good news, I was alone in the woods. I mean, I guess that was good news.

  I glanced at the countdown timer. Less than thirty hours left. I didn’t want to be here. I mean, I’d never wanted to be here, but now I really, really didn’t want to be here.