Tribe: The Red Hand (Tribe Series Book 1) by Kaelyn Ross Read Free Book Online Page A

looking down at the roadway, she talked herself into to touching it, hesitantly at first, like a cat testing water with its paw, then pressing her palm flat against the surface. It had felt like glass, maybe polished stone, but slightly gritty. It had also been cool, despite the heat of the day. When she later told One-Ear Tom about her find, he warned her to stay away. And so she had … until last winter.
    Telling herself that she was only hunting antelope, she returned to the plateau, its smooth crown swept by icy winds and covered in a few inches of snow—except where the roads lay. They were bare, and when she put her hand on one that time, it had been warm and dry. Suspecting some enchantment at work, she had fled.
    Now Kestrel and Aiden followed a similar road into the old city. She tried not to think about the coolness of it beneath her feet, despite the beating sun.
    They made their way deeper into what had once been home to innumerable people, those who had last walked in the flesh before the Red Fever had, according to One-Ear Tom’s more grisly stories, devoured their insides and left them spewing blood in their final moments. What drying bones there might have once been to mark their passing, had long since been dragged away by scavenging animals, or reduced to dust by countless long years.
    “I don’t like it here,” Kestrel said, helpless to avoid speaking aloud her fears. Her eyes traced the evidence of the last wildfire that had swept through the area, probably back before her parents had begun their courtship. Besides old dead tree stumps hidden amongst the new growth, she saw where fingers of flame had shattered windows, and left behind sooty slashes up the sides of almost every nearby building. Rusted corpses of bizarre machines slumped along the roadsides, the wonders they had performed forgotten, and now serving no greater purpose than to provide shelter for rodents. It was hard to believe this city had ever been filled with light and life.
    “There’s nothing to fear,” Aiden said, running his hand over the rusted hulk of a machine that, if the stories were true, might have once soared through the air, or raced at great speed over the land. Kestrel was never sure if those tales were reliable, because some even claimed that people had once traveled between the stars.
    “I can feel them watching,” Kestrel said softly, recalling a recurring nightmare she used to have. In it, shapeless things ripped loose from the muddy ground after a rainstorm—much like the one the night before—and hounded her though a phantom forest cloaked in shadow and mist. No matter how far or fast she ran, those rotting things always caught her. What she remembered clearest about the dream was the way the malignant creatures would ogle her with dead white eyes as they snaked their dead fingers around her throat. Before she woke, their gaping mouths, puffing the reek of things lying putrid in the sun, would fall on her and begin to feed. The memory of their sightless stares and loathsome touch felt much the same as she did now: trapped and afraid.
    Aiden favored her with a puzzled look. “Who can you feel?”
    “The dead . They are everywhere … watching … waiting.”
    Aiden paused. “You mean the Ancestors? ”
    “Who else?”
    “They will not trouble us.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because,” Aiden said, “no matter what anyone says, they were just people—like me and you.” He spoke as if he had some secret knowledge.
    “Maybe they were people,” Kestrel allowed, “but now they’re dead.”
    “Dead or alive, they will not trouble us.”
    Kestrel was not so sure. “You know what One-Ear Tom says?”
    “Remind me,” Aiden answered in a bored tone.
    “‘The dead want only one thing from the living, and that’s to make them dead, too.’”
    “If the Ancestors wanted to harm us, then why do we waste our time asking favors of them?”
    Kestrel frowned at the raw slash on her palm, from which her