“We’ve lost the light again.”
He tries to veer us to the right, but as we move, I’m suddenly hit with the oddest, most unpleasant sensation. It is exactly like…the feeling of being five minutes late for a doctor’s appointment, and then getting to the check-in desk and being told I’m in the wrong building.
I stop.
“What’s wrong?” he murmurs.
My eyes fall closed, instincts strongly compelling me leftward. “This way.”
But he slides us right again, three steps, and sweat trickles down my spine. The sensation that arrests me this time is extremely specific, and once again, bizarrely unrelated to the situation at hand: I feel the coolness inside a pumpkin as I hollow out its seeds and stringy fibers with a big spoon. The back of my hand bumps against the rim, cold orange pumpkin slime smearing across my skin.
The thought is overpoweringly vivid. My hand twitches, and I drop his. “Gross.”
“Wh—” Morgan begins to say, but the rest sails off in an “Aghhh!” as he loses his balance, his voice growing louder as his body falls lower, to the ground, slipping downhill.
We’ve been walking at the edge of a cliff and had no idea.
“Morgan!” I throw myself to my knees, catching his wrist just as the top of his head slithers from sight, weak moonlight spackling his forehead and his wide, terrified eyes. My mouth falls open with a crush of pain when gravity stops carrying him off and I’m left bearing the full force of his weight, heavy and dangling over a vast, craggy pit. “Hold on.”
He lets out a choked noise. “Please don’t drop me.”
“I won’t.” But even as I say it, I can feel him slipping, the weight of his body staggering. It pulls against my every muscle, tendons standing out of my neck, skin burning like fire. “Climb up my arm.”
He tries to lift himself, and my shoulder turns the wrong way in its socket. I let out a sharp cry of pain. Morgan immediately stops. “I’m sorry,” he says breathlessly, laced with tangible fear. “Are you okay?”
“Keep going.” I hook my foot around a tree, teeth gritted. “Come on. We can do this. You arenotleaving me alone with the forest ghosts.”
“So you admit there are forest ghosts. This is progress, Zelda.”
As if my brain is trying to resist the very idea, my muscles react and I tug on him, hard and swift, bringing Morgan close enough that he can find purchase and scrabble the rest of the way up. Together, we heave him back into safe territory, then lie in a panting, trembling heap.
“Well,” he manages after a while, still collapsed in the dirt and leaves. “That kind of sucked.”
“Pffft.”Air escapes me in a wheeze. His response to a near-death experience is, for some reason, the funniest thing I have ever heard in my life.Well, that kind of sucked.
Morgan starts laughing, too. “Oh, that hurts.”
“What does?”
“Everything.”
I can’t resist. “Told you we should’ve gone left.”
“That, you did,” he replies, instantly sobered. “I should have listened.”
When we finally get moving again, Morgan lets me navigate without complaint.
After a bit more stumbling around, we relocate that faraway bluish-white light. “Does it seem like we’re getting any closer?” Morgan wonders aloud.
“Maybe it’s a portal to the afterlife. We both fell into the gorge back there and died but we don’t remember, and our souls have actually been roaming this forest for years instead of an hour.”
I feel Morgan shiver. “You’re creeping me out.”
I grin as I clutch his upper arm, stretching on tiptoe so that I can speak close to his ear. “They say that Morgan’s and Zelda’s bodies were never found, absorbed by nature.”
“Oh god.”
“Wait.” I shush him, going still. “Did you hear that?”
