Chapter XXVIII
XXVIII
The Acheron Order is named for one of the five rivers in the ancient Greek underworld. Acheron, or ?χ?ρων in the original Greek, flowed from the mortal world into Hades, the world of the dead.
The forest swallowed Vic. The trees, thick and close in the deepening darkness, pushed in on all sides.
“Henry!” Vic called as she moved.
“Vic!”
He was right next to her.
Vic spun, trying to find the source of the sound. The woods were too thick, too dark.
“Where are you?” she shouted.
But there was no response.
Vic weaved through the forest as fast as she could, but it was slow going.
She’d never been in a forest like this. The trees, though thin, were densely packed.
Too tight, too wild, untouched by human hands.
Snow and ice and jagged rock blanketed the ground, and Vic slipped.
She couldn’t move in a straight line. She couldn’t see anything.
The forest became a maze of black and gray. Snow and shadow.
She prayed it wasn’t actually him. She prayed it was.
Vic twisted through a thick patch of trees. The road behind her had fallen out of view.
The winter air bit the inside of her lungs when she panted for breath. Her exhalations stretched in front of her like smoke.
Vic held her breath, listening for signs of movement, signs of Henry. She couldn’t hear anything but her own haggard breathing.
“VIC! HELP ME!”
Behind her this time.
She whirled around, squinting through the darkness. All she could see were the trees, gaunt in the muted moonlight peeking through narrow gaps where leaves once hung.
Vic held her breath as she scanned the stalks in front of her.
The forest went silent.
All the small sounds Vic never gave any thought to stopped. No birds, no bugs, not even the whistle of the wind sounded in the empty forest.
Some long-buried part of Vic screamed in recognition of that silence. She knew what that meant, prey to predator. Something other than Henry called out for her from the forest. Something much worse.
Vic ran.
She sprinted through the thin gaps between the trees. Vic slipped on a patch of ice and grabbed a tree to keep herself upright, and the skin on her hands tore against the sharp bark.
And Vic soon realized she didn’t know where she was going.
She couldn’t remember where the car was.
She tried to retrace her path, but fear clouded her thinking.
Had she come from that direction? No, the other.
She couldn’t tell the difference. God, she was such an idiot.
She hadn’t bothered to lay a trail. She’d been too panicked at the prospect of Henry being in danger.
For all Vic knew, she could be running farther into the forest.
But she could not stop.
Perpetual motion was the plight of the hunted. She had to keep going.
A dark shape appeared alongside her. Vic felt a rush of hope.
Xan had found her, somehow, as he had last time.
She wasn’t alone in the forest with an Orcan—Xan had come for her.
He would kill this thing, whatever it was, with the same ease he had the manananggal, and he would get her out of here. She knew he would. He would save her.
Vic stumbled, and her hands hit the icy ground. She hauled herself up and twisted toward Xan again. But it wasn’t him.
A dark figure stood stock-still between the trees. So still, in fact, that it almost blended in among the motionless pines.
It was tall. Taller even than Xan.
Vic had been right to guess a wolf. That was the closest comparison she could draw.
But it was much too large. The size of a bear.
It stood on its hind legs and watched Vic without moving.
At the end of long arms, claws hung at its sides.
But Vic paid little heed to its claws or its shape or even the ghastly size of it. Vic was too shocked by its face.
Or rather what should have been a face, because the beast had none.
Its skull was exposed. The bleached white bone stood out against the black fur coating the rest of it. As if someone had ripped the skin from its face, but only its face, and left it to sit in the sun for a hundred years.
It had no eyes.
A gaping mouth split like a seam, and the thing’s bare jaws moved. Open and shut, lipless. Vic stared in horror as her brother’s voice fell from the creature’s mouth.
“Please come here, Vic.”
Vic backed away from it. Even without eyes, it watched her move. She felt its gaze on her skin.
“Don’t run away from me, Vic,” Henry’s voice told her.
It wasn’t Henry. It wasn’t. It was an Orcan, one Vic had never studied, never heard of, and she had no idea how to fight it.
How had it gotten Henry’s voice?
The creature fell onto all fours and prowled toward her.
Vic broke into a run again, though it hurt to pull her eyes from the thing following her.
She sprinted forward, angling through the trees.
But it was faster than she was. Its claws ripped into her side, and Vic flew sideways into a tree.
Her back smacked into the trunk and all the air was punched from her lungs.
Pain split the right side of her body as she heaved herself back up.
Blood streaked the snow when she left it behind. The thing was gone.
Vic took off running again, slower now, too slow. Her lungs pulled in frigid breaths but they came sharper and sharper.
She couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. There were no trails, no evidence of the path she had carved into the forest. Vic moved forward blindly, hoping the road was in front of her, hoping she would get lucky, just this once, and be saved.
She longed for a weapon, a knife or a sword or a fucking machine gun. But she’d left them all at the castle with her brother and her friends and her shadow, and she had no means of defense against a creature she couldn’t name. All she could do was keep going.
Vic didn’t have any warning this time.
The beast collided with her from the side. She felt jagged teeth sink into the flesh of her right thigh, and she screamed. Its jaws clamped tight around her leg, the monster threw its head from side to side, and Vic’s body followed. Her scream came out like a sob.
The thing dropped her in an instant and drew back into the shadows beyond her vision.
Vic sobbed when she looked down at her leg. Blood poured from deep holes, and Vic knew it had torn something important.
Gritting her teeth, Vic tried to pull on the bind. She hated using Aren’s magic, hated relying on him, hated dragging herself even deeper into his clutches. But at the end of the place where she’d felt the magic before, there was nothing.
There was no response. She was alone. Even Aren had turned his back on her.
A horrible thought made its way through the tangle of panic and pain.
Aren could be responsible for this. Even now, he could linger in the forest nearby, waiting to place her final moments in one of his ruby-red stones, numbered and ordered, ready to be called upon when he needed to draw power from her pain.
Was this how he had killed her mother? Had the Orcan sent to kill Meredith taunted her, played with her like half-wanted food?
Vic struggled to her feet. She couldn’t run anymore. Her leg almost gave way when she put weight on it. She hobbled through the forest clutching the trees for support, biting back a cry each time she leaned on her right leg.
She was trapped.
She had been so stupid, coming into the forest. She knew it wasn’t Henry.
It couldn’t have been Henry. She had known that, hadn’t she?
But she’d come anyway, because—even after weeks at Avalon—she refused to accept her own limits.
Vic hadn’t understood how powerless she was.
She should have stayed in the car. She should never have gone to Avalon.
Vic screamed as loud as she could. Her voice was ragged in the empty air, cold and desperate and searching.
Vic screamed for salvation. She screamed for Henry, she screamed for Xan, she screamed for Max.
She even screamed for Meredith, like she would return from the dead, strong and resolute, to save her only daughter.
Vic screamed for someone, anyone, to help her.
The forest met her cries with silence.
No one would come this time. No one would save her. Vic had landed herself in this mess, through her ignorance and her foolish insistence that she could handle whatever the world threw at her, and she would suffer the consequences of her hubris.
Vic squinted through the trees for any chance of escape. Her vision blurred. Even in the dark, she knew the blackness creeping across her vision came from the inside. Vic sobbed harder as she screamed for help she knew wasn’t coming.
She started screaming with rage now, on the off chance that Aren Mann might hear her.
She screamed every obscenity she knew, in as loud a voice as she could muster, intent on leaving a reminder of his wickedness.
Every time he replayed this memory, he’d hear Vic’s condemnation. He would have no choice but to listen.
When she turned, Vic saw the beast again. It sat on its haunches a few yards away from her with unnatural stillness. Like a dog awaiting a command, Vic thought wildly.
“Please,” she said. She knew it didn’t care.
The creature tilted its head to the side in confusion.
Perhaps it didn’t know that word.
“Please,” Vic repeated in a softer voice.
Its skeletal mouth peeled open.
“Please,” it said back to her in her own voice. Its teeth clicked together as it spoke.
Vic whimpered.
The thing lunged forward at her. She tried to pry it off as it pinned her in the snow, but it was too strong. And she was too weak. Blackness clawed toward the center of her vision. She couldn’t hold on to consciousness much longer.
Vic let out a rasping scream when she felt its claws rip into her stomach. She was burning. She was on fire. Her back, almost numb with cold, pressed into the snow as an unbearable heat burned across her abdomen.
She gasped as the monster disappeared again.
Vic rolled over onto her front and fought to push herself back up. She felt a sickening emptiness and realized some of her intestines had fallen out.
She tried to cram them back in. They were hot and wet against her frozen hand.
They wouldn’t stay inside her. Vic clutched them to her belly as she pulled herself onto her knees. With her other hand, she pushed herself up until she stood on shaking legs.
Blood pooled in the snow around her. Her blood.
Vic limped into the forest.
She didn’t know where she was going.
Away, she thought.
Her vision darkened further as she stumbled. Only pinpricks left, there in the center, like a telescope’s sight.
She didn’t have the energy to scream.
The creature sat watching her out of the holes where its eyes should have been. Empty, emotionless sockets fixed on her.
Waiting for her to die.
Vic couldn’t move. She couldn’t see.
Her vision went black a second before her knees hit the frozen ground.
She couldn’t stop herself from falling face-first into it. She barely registered the impact.
Vic sank into the snow and felt herself flicker out like a candle.