He slowed, still treading wide of the excited roots on the creature’s bloody trail. Should he go on? Take the chance that the beast might camouflage like a quetzal did? Maybe charge from the side after circling around to ambush its backtrail?

“I shot it,” Dek muttered under his breath. “It’s my responsibility.”

If he was making a point—both to himself and to the quetzals—he had to finish this.

“Doesn’t mean I ever have to do it again,” he told himself sourly.

Heart hammering, ears pitched for the slightest sound, he kept padding as lightly as he could across the roots, climbed to the left of the blood trail at the next thick tangle, and peered over.

No dying blade beast met his searching gaze, just the roots doing their manic thing.

“Damn it, why couldn’t it just be lying dead in the middle of that clearing while a thousand roots were climbing all over it ready for supper?”

The beast had taken two shots from no more than ten meters. Both of them right down the center. If the blade monster was anything like other Donovanian critters, those shots should have torn through lung, heart, and the net that made up the stomach.

“But not for the entire twenty-meter length of it.” So what kind of penetration had his bullets made? Maybe a couple of meters?

“Should have dialed it up more.”

Dek almost jumped out of his skin as something big flapped past his ear. Four-winged, the flying creature had to be two meters across. Covered with a sort of pelage, it flipped around on beating wings, stared at Dek with three eyes. The long, tooth-filled muzzle didn’t strike Dek as warm and fuzzy. He raised the rifle, finger hovering over the trigger, and tried to get his muscles to stop shivering and his franticly pumping blood from making the rifle jump with each beat.

The flyer let out a squawk, turned from green to bright yellow before twisting in midair and flapping away.

“Shit on a shoe,” Dek whispered, realized fear-sweat was beading on his face.

Where the hell was the blade monster?

He looked around at the twilight-dim forest. Seeing into the IR had real advantages. Hell, maybe it was worth the constant ache behind his eyes. Right now, all he wanted to do was get this over and get home to Talina. After that, he had nothing to prove to anyone.

Figured that was made even more probable by the fact that no quetzal was inserting itself into his thoughts or emotions. They really didn’t want anything to do with the blade monster.

“Guess that makes it unanimous.”

He slipped over the top root, made his way to the bottom, and picked a careful path around the clearing perimeter. Given the dark, cave-like arch of roots on the right, he chose the left side.