Chapter 46
ALEX
Alex tore down the hallway, heading for the front door and the nearest way out.
But as she reached the glass doorway, the rolling thunder in the air made her hesitate.
Just in time too. The glass partition shattered, shards exploding in every direction, crashing down onto the floor. Barefoot and helpless, she backed up.
No way out, not through there.
Blaise, still wearing Nick like a tailored three-piece suit, leaned on the doorframe leading into the drawing room, watching her nonchalantly.
‘You’re going to have to come back eventually,’ he said, in a lazy drawl.
‘There’s no way out of this. Not now. Not tonight.
Go out into that gale and it will kill you.
Go into the woods and they will kill you.
They know you for the traitor you are now.
Just like your father. Just like your brother.
Give in, Alexandra. Come here and do as you’re told, woman. ’
No. No, she was never going to do that. The very fact he thought he could just command her like that was infuriating and that edged out the terror just enough.
Alex glared at him and he twisted poor Nick’s beautiful face into something snide and superior, which just made her even more indignant.
She bolted the other way, heading for the kitchen and the back door. He’d follow. She knew he’d follow.
He had to.
Alex grabbed the corner of the door to the kitchen and slammed it behind her, throwing herself towards the boot room and locking that door after her as well.
The back door was still bolted, the panel Nick had put over the window barely keeping out the storm.
She dragged back the heavy iron bolt with sluggish fingers, fumbling as she did so.
‘Don’t be foolish, Alexandra,’ his voice – not his voice! Not his! – came from the kitchen, almost a sing-song of amusement. Blaise was coming and she couldn’t get the bloody door open. She was going to be trapped in here with nowhere to go.
Finally, as if in answer to her muttered prayers and curses, the bolt gave and the wind threw the door in, almost taking her off her feet as it did so.
She was driven backwards and she felt the kitchen door behind her buck as Blaise threw Nick’s body against it.
He’d be through in seconds, she knew that.
Or he’d find another way. Between them Nick and Chambers knew where all the keys were kept, every passageway and secret path in this place inside and out.
And he was strong enough to just break his way through the door if pressed.
Blaise wouldn’t care if Nick was hurt. Not now. He was just a tool, a blunt instrument.
Alex ran, letting the night and the storm envelop her in their own madness.
The wind screamed at her and the rain lashed against her face.
She was drenched in seconds but she couldn’t stop.
It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see where she was going.
Invisible hands guided her now, instincts and terror leading the way.
The wild wood might hate her family, but it was the only hope she had left to her.
She stumbled forward, barefoot and desperate, slipping in mud and sliding beneath the canopy of trees which lashed back and forth in the storm.
She had to shield her face and head as the world flung the debris of the forest at her, steel herself and press forward as the wind tried to drive her back.
‘Please,’ she yelled, and her voice was instantly snatched away. ‘Please, you have to help him. You have to help me help him. Please!’
She was back in that nightmare, running desperately through the woods which hated her and all her kind, pursued, hunted. Blaise Chambers was coming to get her and all she knew was that her father had screamed at her to run, so she had run. She had never stopped running.
And her father… her mind threw up that familiar wall of blackness, that thing she didn’t want to remember. Because why would she want to remember his death? Why? It had all been her fault. He’d tried to protect her and he’d paid for it. Like Nick.
Crom was going to kill Nick if he couldn’t have her. Through Blaise, he would tear Nick apart if they had to. And it was all her fault.
Alex sobbed and fell, her hands slamming down on nettles. The pain sent shockwaves through her, forcing her up again, making her stumble onwards in her heedless flight.
Behind her something was coming through the trees, something fast and deadly. The hunter. The wild thing. The beast…
This couldn’t be happening. Not again. Not with Nick this time.
Because she had always known what had pursued her so long ago, and in every nightmare since. She had always known the face. It was always a face she loved turned against her. Changed and transformed.
And it was always her fault.
She didn’t know how she found the clearing.
She couldn’t have been going in the right direction, because she had no idea what direction she was going in.
The wind buffeted her and turned her around and there were trees where they shouldn’t have been.
The screaming in the undergrowth sent her scrambling backwards and then she fell in between the standing stones.
And everything went suddenly still and silent. The wind stopped and raindrops hung in the air around her like diamonds.
‘Well,’ said a familiar voice. ‘You really butchered that, Lex. And you were so close.’
Theo sat on the ground, cross-legged, his hands folded in his lap like he was fucking meditating at a yoga class or something.
Moonlight fell around him, through him, illuminating him.
Vines twisted around his body, coiling about his arms and legs, leaves shifting beneath his skin.
Living, growing, unnatural natural shapes and things that made him appear here before her.
Alex pushed herself up from the earth and grass, tried to shove her soaked hair out of her face and left a trail of mud up her cheek like a smear of war paint.
‘Theo?’
Her voice was just a strangled sob.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or at least, what’s left of me. What I gave to the woods.’
‘The woods killed you.’
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t quite work like that. Not if you’re willing. It’s a sacrifice, Alex. A gift. Nick did it, a hundred years ago. I had to do the same. Take his place maybe. And by becoming part of it, I saved myself. It was the only way.’
‘You and Sally…’
‘Yes,’ and he smiled, a beatific smile. ‘She’s safe now, as long as the woods are safe. You called the woods, Alex, and now you have to give yourself up to them. Wildewood always demands a price from us. All of us.’
‘Are you… are you telling me to sacrifice myself? To Crom?’
He laughed. He actually laughed. And, oh God, it was a sound she had longed to hear again.
His laughter. It was like birdsong, like the sounds she’d heard in the woods when she got lost there.
That was why it had felt so familiar. It made her heart ache with loss and regret.
So many years of regret. Whatever he was now, he was still her brother.
‘No, never to him. To this.’ He spread his arms wide and flowers fell between his fingers. ‘Sally and I tried to stop Crom. We did everything and we failed. We even made Nick the guardian and gave him Maeve to protect because we thought—’
‘Wait, you gave him Maeve?’
Theo smiled. He always had such a secretive, knowing smile, like a naughty child who thought he had got away with something and had just been caught.
‘What did you do?’ she hissed, but Theo didn’t answer that.
‘And now Crom has him. You have to kill him. It’s only because the god of the hungry grass still wants you, the last of the de Wildes, that he’s still here. Otherwise, he’d just walk out of his prison.’
‘I am not killing anyone, you idiot. Especially not Nick.’
‘He’s of the forest, Alex. Part of this.
He died more than a hundred years ago, part of a group of men who wanted to burn the house and free Crom, whether they knew it or not.
But the woods weren’t having that. Sally called him out of the wild wood, a changeling created in the original Nick Walker’s image, from his essence and that of the wild, to protect Maeve until she came of age, in case I couldn’t. And I couldn’t, could I?’
There were oak leaves curling through his hair, and the curls were dotted with small, blue flowers, like a crown.
‘Why would you—?’ Alex stared at him, and understanding dawned on her. ‘God damn it, Theo, what did you do?’
‘What I had to,’ he told her, still smiling. ‘It doesn’t change what you must do, Lex. Let the wild have you both. It’s the only way. It’s too late to try anything else. Kill him, destroy Crom. Whatever it takes.’
‘You’re mad,’ she snarled at her brother.
Theo just reached out, fast as a robin darting after an insect, and pressed his fingertips to her forehead. ‘Remember,’ he told her.
And years of barriers fell away, all the methods by which her mind had tried to protect her. Everything that had said nightmare, or hallucination, or childhood terrors, all fell away like dead leaves in autumn.
Her memories, her real memories, thudded through her consciousness, as if she was being repeatedly slapped across the face. Sobbing, she tried to escape, but there was nowhere to go. Not from this.
She’d stood in the undercroft, just as Maeve had stood there. Daisy and Rose had flanked her, smiling, laughing.
‘It won’t hurt, Lexi. Don’t be scared. He’s going to make everything better again. He’s going to make us all be together at last. We’ll be a family.’
She’d looked down into the hole in the ground and tried to take a step back. But they wouldn’t let her. Not now. Phantom hands held her far too tightly.
And the face looked up out of the darkness.