My hand shot to my ear and pulled the silver piece of jewelry free. It was only a few inches long, but the blade was sharp enough to slice through the vine.
I swung, stabbing toward the vine around my ankle. The instant it met the metal, the vine recoiled and jumped back into the bushes, taking me along with it.
A scream was knocked back into my lungs as it jerked me off the bench, and my back slammed into the ground. Then I was being pulled across the garden at a speed that had my head spinning.
I exploded through the hedge, and then another, thorns slicing my skin and branches jabbing at every part of me.
The vine dragged me through the mud, my head whirling as I was viciously jerked down turns and through several more hedges. The disembodied heads laughed as they watched me zing past.
“Ha! Looks like the blood oak caught her!” one head snickered, its voice gone as soon as it had come.
Blood oak? Belial’s words from when he’d pulled me from the quicksand came rushing back. He’d mentioned something about carnivorous trees. Was that what the head was referring to?
Of all the ways to die in this stupid maze, being eaten by a fucking plant wasn’t going to be the way I went down.
With the dagger earring clutched in my fist, I tried to haul myself up to reach the vine dragging me, my muscles screaming. It was no use. At the speed I was moving, I couldn’t pull my back off the ground.
Mark had once tried to get me to join a Pilates class. I’d laughed in his face when he suggested exercise, especially in public. At a strip mall of all places. Not exactly my scene.
Now, I regretted turning him down. If only I’d known weekly core exercise would have saved me from a flesh-eating tree on my unexpected vacation to fucking Limbo.
I smelled it before I saw it, and I had to resist the urge to vomit. I was no stranger to death, but the corpses I was used to were dusty and had long since decomposed. This smell was pungent, the kind that seeped into every pore, leaving a film on your skin and hair.
The scent of decay in the air was so intense, so thick, my eyes watered and my stomach churned.
I was pulled through another thicket and emerged on the other side to find myself in a walled-off garden. That’s when I saw it.
The blood oak was a colossal tree with the thickest trunk I’d ever seen. It had twisting, gnarled branches that looked like something straight out ofSleepy Hollow.There were no leaves, no traces of greenery. Just dead branches and snake-like vines, identical to the one that had dragged me here.
The bark was stained with dark sap. No…blood.It streaked down the trunk, and bled into the ground around it, turning the dirt an ominous crimson color.
The vine around my ankle was still retreating, coiling around the tree, reeling me in. I stared up at the branches, noting pale chunks of something caught amongst them, which blended with the overcast sky at first.
When I got closer, I was able to register what they really were: body parts. They were being chewed by the thick knots in the branches. Each bulbous knot and burl on the tree hadteeth, sharp and yellow, munching on the rotting pieces of flesh, dripping more blood down its bark and staining everything red.
I was so horrified, so scared that I would be just another corpse strewn amongst the blood oak’s branches, that I couldn’t scream. For a painfully long moment, I could only watch as the tree continued to drag me toward it, and the blood-soaked space between it and me disappeared.
Then, something kicked on in my brain.
A surge of adrenaline and determination summoned every ounce of strength I had left to pull myself up and grab onto the vine around my ankle. Gripping it with one hand to anchor myself, I started sawing through it with the dagger earring.
The tree howled in pain, dozens of disembodied souls blending together to create the most disturbing sound. I worked frantically as the vine lifted me up in the air, desperate to free myself from the blood oak’s clutches so I could hit the ground running.
Sweat streaked down my body. My breath turned to tiny little huffs as I focused on the vine, honing in on the fraying fibers so I could try to ignore the tree’s movement in my periphery.
I shouldn’t have looked.
The blood oak’s trunk had a slit running down its center that opened into a gaping maw lined with countless rows of needle-sharp teeth. Inside its mouth were pieces of chewed up limbs all tangled together.
“Oh,fuck.” I fought the urge to retch as a fresh waft of decaying flesh slapped me in the face.
“Keep it down would ya? We’re trying to rot in peace,” one of the heads stuck in the hedge nearby griped.
“Just hurry up and let it eat you,” another head snickered. “It’s not so bad. Not once you’re dead anyway. Before you’re dead, it’s pretty bad, actually.”
All the other heads nodded, as much as the brambles holding them up would allow, and murmured in agreement.
Pure, unsaturated panic had me sawing through the vine as fast as humanly possible as it hoisted me higher into the air. I sliced through the last of the vine’s fibers with a snap, the blade cutting into my ankle from the pressure.
