Chapter 5 #2
I dragged the crate beneath the window and climbed up.
The grate was old, iron gone rough with rust, held shut by a padlock that looked like it had been there longer than I’d been alive.
I grabbed it and pulled. It didn’t move.
I braced my feet against the wall and hauled with both hands, twisting, wrenching, but the lock held and the grate held and nothing gave.
Rain drummed against the ground above the window.
At least they couldn’t burn me in this. But Klaus had other ways to kill a woman, and drowning didn’t need dry wood.
Nobody outside would hear the scrape of the crate, or my breathing, or whatever sounds I made trying to wrench myself free. The rain would eat all of it.
I closed my eyes and tried to find that heat again, tried to reach for it the way you’d reach for something in the dark without knowing its shape or where it lived. Nothing came. Just cold iron under my fingers and rain hammering the ground above my head.
Above me came shouting, footsteps, the clatter of weapons despite the rain. They were coming.
I stopped trying to find the power and just pulled.
Yanked at the padlock with everything I had, twisted it, hauled until my palms tore against the metal and the blood made my grip slippery and I didn’t care, kept pulling anyway, rage and terror flooding up through my chest in a wave I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried.
The padlock groaned. The old iron whined like a living thing in pain.
The lock snapped.
The grate swung outward with a shriek of rusted hinges and cold wet air flooded down into the cellar, carrying the smell of mud and pine and night.
No stars — just black sky and the dark shape of the meetinghouse wall and rain falling straight and hard through the gap above me, spattering against my upturned face.
Freedom.
I unfastened my red cloak, bundled it tight, and threw it up through the window. Then I stripped off my dress, the wool was too bulky. Underneath I wore only my shift, thin linen that would offer nothing against the cold and the rain, but it was all I had.
Grabbing the edge of the window frame, I pulled myself up.
My arms shook from the first second. I was not a light woman.
Years of life had softened me, rounded my belly, thickened my hips and thighs, and hauling my own weight straight up through a gap in stone with torn hands was harder than anything I had ever done.
I got my elbows over the edge and pushed, kicked against the cellar wall below me, feet scraping uselessly at the stone, rain already soaking my hair and running into my eyes.
My chest caught on the frame. I twisted sideways and felt my ribs compress until I thought they’d crack, then pushed harder anyway.
My chest made it through. Then my hips caught. I was stuck — wedged in the window frame like a cork in a bottle, my legs dangling in the cellar below. The shouting was closer now. Close enough to hear individual voices, someone saying witch, someone saying burn her anyway, rain or not.
The cellar door burst open below me. “She’s at the window!” Someone screamed.
I sucked my belly in and twisted and clawed at the ground above me, fingers digging into mud and dead grass.
The stone bit into the soft flesh of my hips and tore through the linen shift and then through skin and I felt every inch of it, but I kept pulling.
A hand closed around my ankle and I kicked back with everything I had and felt my heel connect with bone that crunched. The man below me howled.
I pulled harder. My hips screamed. A muscle tore deep in my side, a joint popped, and white fire raced from my hip to my ribs.
I wrenched myself through. Tumbled forward onto the frozen mud, rolled, shoved myself up onto my hands and knees with rain hammering my back and blood running down my legs and the ground spinning beneath me.
I stayed there for one breath and then I was on my feet.
I grabbed my cloak and wrapped it around my shoulders, and even soaking wet the wool felt like armor. Like every woman in my blood who had ever worn red was standing behind me, lending me what strength they had because mine was almost gone.
Behind me, men cursed. I knew they’d come around. They’d come fast.
I ran into the rain and didn’t look back.
I ran until the village was behind me, until the shouts thinned and there was nothing but open ground and rain and my own ragged breathing. Then I saw it.
The tree line.
It rose out of the dark like a wall, black trunks packed tight, branches tangled overhead like fingers laced together to keep the sky out. No light past the first row of trees. The darkness was so thick it looked solid, like something you could press your hand against and feel it press back.
Everything the village had ever told me about those woods sat down on my chest at once.
Children who wandered in and didn’t come home.
Men who knew every root and trail and still got turned around, still ended up face down in the creek.
Women who never went in at all because the women knew better, because the women listened when their mothers said stay out, stay close, stay away.
Only the men hunted there and even they went in groups, even they came back pale and quiet sometimes, even they left someone behind once in a while.
William had gone in with six armed men and never returned.
I looked at the forest. I looked behind me at the shapes of men coming after me, at Klaus somewhere in that darkness with his ruined hand and his fury.
I chose the forest.
The trees swallowed me whole. Branches clawed at my cloak, roots grabbed at my feet, and I tripped and fell and hauled myself upright and kept running. Behind me, the dogs howled and men shouted, their voices swallowed almost immediately by the dark and the rain.
I ran until my lungs burned, until my legs shook, until I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. The sounds of pursuit faded — the barking became uncertain, men’s voices grew fainter. They were giving up. Letting the forest have me.
I kept moving.
My foot caught on a rock and I went down hard.
Mud filled my mouth. I tried to rise and my arms wouldn’t hold me.
My body was done — spent, nothing left. I lay in the dirt and gasped for breath while the cold worked its way through me.
My shift was soaked through, the red cloak the only thing between me and the night.
Then I heard it. A low growl that vibrated through the ground beneath me.
I lifted my head.
It stepped out of the dark.
A wolf. But much bigger than a normal wolf.
It stood at least four feet at the shoulder, built like something from a nightmare.
Its fur was black, pure black, darker than the shadows around it, and its eyes burned gold in the darkness, fixed on me with an intelligence that should not have been in an animal’s face.
My whole body locked. Was this what had killed William? Was this the thing that had torn him apart and left pieces scattered across the clearing?
The wolf circled me, close enough that I could smell wet fur and pine and something else underneath, a musk that made every hair on my body stand up.
Then, distant but getting closer — dogs. Klaus hadn’t given up.
The wolf’s ears swiveled toward the sound and its lips pulled back from teeth longer than my fingers. It threw back its head and howled, a sound that started low and rose to notes that had no right to exist, filling the forest until the trees themselves seemed to shake with it.
The dogs started screaming. The sound of animals in pure terror.
“Go back!” A man’s voice broke through the chaos. “We have to go back!”
The hunting party fled. I heard them crashing through the underbrush, the sound swallowed fast by rain and distance.
The wolf lowered its head and turned those golden eyes back to me. Took one step closer. Then another. Close enough now that I could see the scars on its muzzle, the intelligent patience in its gaze.
It opened its mouth so close I could count the teeth. Could smell the rot and the blood on its breath. Could see the gums, dark and wet, and the way each tooth hooked backward like it was made to hold what it caught.
A sound came out of me, high and thin. The sound of an animal about to die.
Everything went black.