The noxious presence I sense from the forest isn’t the same energy I felt from the wolf. My instincts tell me they’re two separate entities. And yet the appearance of the wolf seems to coincide with the beginning of all this—Grandmother’s mental deterioration, the disappearance of Herron, all the inexplicable sights and sounds of the past weeks.
I shouldn’t be running from this thing, whatever it is. I shouldn’t be racing along the makeshift path blindly. I can’t let fear make me careless.
Panting, I slow my steps and look back the way I came. Either I ran much farther than I thought, or the tunnel throughWormsloe has extended itself. I can’t see the end of the path or the daylight beyond the edge of the forest. Only the trees exist, funneling away into the gloomy distance.
I shouldn’t have tried to enter the woods from this direction. I should have gone back home, to the path I know, and started from there.
“Barrow-Man.” I say it boldly, and then I speak the word the dying demon gave to me. “Alchelinore.”
Another hiss of wind races through the trees, but this time it builds, growing louder and more intense until it’s a voiceless scream. A visceral, icy dread grips my bones, and I realize, with a certainty that makes no sense, that the entity in the forest has been hunting forme. And I delivered myself straight into its clutches.
The rising wind snatches up a hurricane of dead leaves and hurls them toward me, like macabre banners heralding the arrival of their dread master. But in the midst of that roaring tempest, I hear scampering, thumping, galloping.
From the bushes burst a dozen or more demons, some of the larger creatures I’ve summoned. Anne said they were leaving the forest, but some of them must not have fled yet. They charge straight toward me, running at full speed.
At the front of the group is a doe the size of a cart horse. The skin and flesh on both sides of her body has receded, leaving her ribs exposed. Flowers bloom from between those bare rib bones, fueled by her organs and her inner heat.
She has looked that way ever since I summoned her two years ago, one spring afternoon in the back garden. I remember the pain and shock I felt when she appeared, the guilt because I couldn’t help her, the certainty that she wouldn’t survive. Yet here she is, alive.
She bounds up to me and throws her body against mine, knocking me off balance. With a dip of her head, she tumbles me across her shoulders. Two of the other demons, a marmot withan exposed spine and a chicken with a lizardlike head, leap onto the doe’s back as well, holding me in place as she doubles her speed.
I don’t struggle, because with my body against the doe’s, I sense our connection like a jolt of buzzing energy. In this moment, the demons and I are more intimately linked than ever. They’re fleeing, running from the same corrupt entity that is chasing me. They want me to escape, too. They’re trying to help me.
The hissing roar crescendos through the trees, whipping whole trunks back and forth. A great oak tears free of the earth and crashes across our path, but the doe leaps neatly over it. I’m nearly thrown off, but I cling to her back with the desperate recognition that she’s my only chance of escaping Wormsloe.
Roots arch up from the earth and rear high into the air, whipping and coiling like tentacles. Two of them snare one of the demons running beside the doe. The creature shrieks as the root-tentacles cinch tight. They jerk apart, ripping its body in two. Blood spews over the forest litter, and glossy entrails slide out of the creature’s lower half.
I scream and nearly vomit, both from the awful sight and from the jolting of my stomach against the doe’s back.
The walls of the path are heaving like giant lungs, the trunks undulating like grass in the wind. Two more of the demons are ripped away from our company, but the doe keeps running, even though her lungs rasp and her skin is humid from exertion.
Up ahead, between the hideously contorting trees and the thrashing serpentine roots, shines a crack of daylight, widening as we approach. With a final bunching of her muscles and a sound like a torn human scream, the doe bursts out of the woods into the meadows of Valenkirk.
She takes a few more staggering steps, then halts. I tumble off her back into the grass.
The other surviving demons don’t pause—they scatter across the fields, racing away to find a new haven. But the doe remains nearby, her slim legs trembling. Her insides glow like a lantern through the quivering flowers between her ribs. As I watch, the blooms turn limp, shedding a few of their petals, and the amber glow inside her torso falters, flickers, and vanishes.
The doe falls heavily on her side, her tongue flopping from her muzzle onto the grass. A horrible stillness follows—no breath lifting her flanks, no awareness in those glassy eyes.
She saved me, and she died.
My mind hitches, refusing to grasp the truth, revolted by reality. I want to reject it like a rotten apple, like rancid meat. It’s not something I want to swallow, because it will sicken me. It will hurt too much.
The doe survived for this long, and then she perished right in front of me because I was stupid enough to enter the forest and look for the Barrow-Man. Ishethe entity I felt? Is he the corruption? How is he linked to Beresford?
Unslinging my satchel and casting it aside, I crawl toward the doe. My teeth clench against the sobs that want to erupt from my chest. “Why?” I grit out. “Why would you do that? Why would you save me? What did I do that made you indebted to me, loyal to me? What did I do other than drag you from one place to another, from one reality into the next? What am I? What is this thing that I do? Why can’t I figure it out? Why can’t anyone fuckingexplainit to me?”
I realize that I’m screaming at her corpse through my sobs, and I stop, torn by guilt. The doe didn’t have a voice. She couldn’t have explained anything.
But the demon I summoned on the night before my wedding—that one seemed capable of higher thought, perhaps even speech. I wish I could have conversed with it before it died.
Wiping the tears from my cheeks, I lie down in the grass beside the dead doe with my face turned up to the sky and mycloak wrapped around my body. At first, I lie there because doing anything else feels like more than I can handle. I need to be quiet and still. I need to press my spine against the earth and think of nothing for as long as possible.
And in thinking of nothing, I fall asleep.
When I startle awake, the sky is dark, and I’m shivering in my cloak. The doe’s carcass lies nearby, wilted flowers draped against her pale ribs.
My bones ache, and I feel as if I’ve aged a decade, but my mind has managed to reconcile with reality, at least for now. I struggle to my feet, pick up the satchel that’s lying in the grass beside me, and head toward the mansion.
