Chapter 5
FIVE
As vile as the rot and better off dead.
Ishrieked into the blanket as dark magic bled from me like tar, stealing for one anguished heartbeat breath and sight and sound.
Power unfurled, seeping darkly into the patch of green beyond the window.
The sage bush shuddered, magic creeping like a disease up its stem, blackening its silver-green leaves.
The foxglove withered, the belladonna shriveled, and all that was green turned dry and spindly, veined with ink.
Night fell quickly. I’d scarcely blinked before the town and forest drowned in darkness. Not a lone star lit the skies.
From under the pillow, I took the flask of purplish smoke and inhaled it. A tingle crept into my blood. When I moved to the edge of the bed, I felt no pain. I tried in vain to stand, so I crawled on hands and knees to the door, clasping the glass shard I’d concealed in a corner of the blanket.
I needed not go far.
Just past the treeline, where the hounds would come upon my body before they ever made it into the town.
I found the door, luckily, unlocked. Panting with effort, I drew myself over a tiled path—past the withered garden, the rotting peach tree, a low fence.
The snow pricked me like needles, cut me like knives, turned me achingly numb.
The air was sharp as glass in my chest. I was past fear.
All I had left was grim determination; to reach the forest before the hounds came, and to die on my own terms.
They came, as always, quickly.
With the wind at my back I’d crawled just past the briar, into a glade vivid with moss and strangely shifting firs.
From the dark came a whisper of song so sweet I might have chased it, had my legs allowed it.
One moment, I sat against a hollow trunk and squinted, heart ablaze with too-bright vigilance, into the glittering snow.
The next, a pair of blistering yellow eyes blinked at me from the trees.
I did not scream as I readied the shard, nor as the hound lunged.
These things I had expected.
A shadow, quick as a hound and thrice as large, slipped from the dark and pounced. I shrieked as bones cracked and teeth clanked. In my fright, I dropped the glass shard. Something horribly warm splattered my cheek and trickled slowly from my jaw. It reeked of metal and rot.
A wince and a wet, gurgling growl; something tore and snapped.
I looked, though I knew I should not. At my feet, in a tangle of mottled fur and twitching limbs, lay half of a hound.
A little further, amid a dark stain in the snow, its ghastly head rolled back and forth as if it still possessed a sliver of life.
I choked my screech with the sleeve of my frost-stiff nightgown. With numb fingers, I searched for the glass shard. The snow had swallowed it.
A snarl.
I twisted to peer past the trunk. In the pale-lit snow moved a nimble beast. It danced among three—no, four—hounds, evading talons and fangs as easily as if it were the wind.
I held my breath as I watched, in horror and in awe.
I did not see it bite. I heard only the terrible rip of skin and sinew, and a thud as another severed head landed in the snow.
I retreated. I’d seen enough to know with a tide of dread that the beast—whatever it was—was a friend to me only as long as the hounds lived. Once it had torn them to shreds, it would turn to me.
From afar, down the slope and past a maze of briar, beckoned the light and half-open door of the crooked house I’d fled. I became weak at the thought of warm hearth-tiles and blankets and began to drag myself toward it—but the wind hissed darkly in my ear and I wavered.
Let me see you, it whispered. Let me taste you.
I shuddered. It would be a kindness to die at the claws of the beast. These lands would be purged of my magic, the town safe from the carnage that followed me.
In death, I’d nourish this frozen soil. I’d serve a purpose, here in the forest. I placed my hands in the snow to rest my cheek in my palms. Rosehips dangled like rubies from the briar.
The wind brought them to a shiver and they trickled down, down, down, staining the snow red.
Amid the shifting trees lurked cruel, laughing faces.
Let me see you, they whispered. Let me taste you.
The forest hungered for life in this terrible cold. An echo of anguish slipped from its frozen veins, black with death, into mine. I slid my hands deeper into the snow, brushing against a tangle of roots. They twined around my wrists and kissed the last slivers of warmth from my fingers.
A yelp came from the thicket, ringing shrilly in my ears—
It ceased.
In its absence, the forest was still. Not a rustle in the trees, not a breeze in the frozen air.
I yanked my wrists free from the roots, skin flaring with the burn of their grasp.
The air stirred with a faint hiss of breath between sharp teeth.
Damp warmth brushed over my neck. It reeked of fresh blood.
The beast stood, still as something carved from stone, at my shoulder.
Its slender snout gleamed crimson. It was a fox, though it seemed in my terror to stand as tall as a red stag and as strong as a bear.
I’d have mistaken it for an enormous wolf, had its fur not gleamed a rich copper-red and had its eyes not flashed with cunning.
I awaited the slice of teeth, to be flung like a straw doll through the air.
The cold licked like flames over my skin, and my dread turned into impatience.
I gave a little huff. The fox responded in kind, as if something about my inaction irked it.
Perhaps it preferred to chase its prey. To play with it.
I had no strength left for such things, and if the beast waited much longer, the cold might finish me first.
Another huff. The fox was staring at me.
No, glaring. There was something decidedly vexed about its expression.
It seemed almost to have very little interest in devouring me.
I did not know whether to be glad or sorry about it.
It brushed me with its snout, firmly. I gasped in protest, losing my balance and tumbling face-first into the snow.
I wiped the ice from my cheeks, scowling.
The beast scowled right back, and this was so absurd that a shrill laugh broke from me.
“You are a strange creature,” I muttered through chattering teeth. It looked a little amused, as if to say that it thought the same of me; a rather impossible feat for a fox. “What now?” I asked.
I could barely speak, so violent were the shivers. Soon, the cold would render me rigid and I seemed well and truly on my way to madness, seeing as I was talking to a fox.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
The thought had, in the face of such horror and strangeness, lost its bite. The fox glanced past me at the house and nudged me another step that way. Tired and frozen as I was, I allowed it. The hounds were gone. There was no harm in returning to the warmth of the house—
A roar of wind whipped past. I stumbled into the briar, the snow muffling my cry. Thorns sank viciously into my skin.
Let me see you, hissed the snow. Let me taste you.
I blinked, mad with cold and with terror.
The snow blinked back. I shrank from it with a shriek.
A hand climbed from the ice, adorned with bracelets of barbed briar.
The fingers were black as ink and stiff with death, slithering around my ankle.
The fox snarled, snapping at the hand, shoving me aside.
A face lay there in the snow, blue-lipped and dusted with frost. A corpse, but not quite.
The eyes…
The eyes were white as bone, blinking at me.
You have brought me whom I desire. Now come closer. Now let me feast.
I sobbed as cracked nails dug into my skin, as the eyes blinked and blinked and blinked.
Rot slid like honey over my tongue. Then, the grasp was gone.
I lost balance, landing with a cry amid thorns.
The fox held, between its vicious teeth, a half-dead hand.
Terror roiled in its sharp gaze, making my stomach churn. If even the beast was thus shaken…
The corpse cackled.
With a yelp, the fox leaped aside, dropping the squirming hand at my feet.
Its fur tickled—
I noticed only when my arm slid from the beast’s back that I’d fainted. The fox had carried me back to the house. I did not remember crawling into bed, but I found myself cowering in the farthest corner, huddled in blankets that did nothing to thaw the ice in my bones.
I wept with quiet horror as I stared from the window.
The fox vanished between the birches and returned, a minute later, with a half-dead woman on its back. It carried her past the withered garden, out of sight.
Trapped in the claws of terror, I retched until I was faint. What lurked out there in the forest? What else might come for me in the night?
I sobbed with relief when a flash of copper-red stirred the lowest branch of the fir. The fox settled down in the snow. It spared me only a glance, as if to ensure I was still there, before its gaze wandered to the edge of the forest—where the limbs and heads of hounds lay scattered in the snow.
What if someone stumbled across the slaughter? What if they traced the tracks I’d left in the snow? What if Almira came again and found her garden veined with cursed—
A dark slumber swallowed me before I had finished the thought.