PROLOGUE
ALEX
It started with a laugh. It was deep and dark, a low chuckle that knew far too much and promised everything.
It always started this way, the laughter rippling its way up through her body. Distinctly not her own. It twisted deep inside her stomach, tightening muscles and sending waves of pleasure through her. Things she didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand.
She was running through the trees, the boughs overhead moving as if in a storm, like a wild sea made of leaves and malice. But she had to keep running because the hunter was coming. And if he caught her…if he caught her…
‘Alex!’ her father’s voice cried out, echoing after her, ringing around her head and driving her onwards. ‘Run,Alex! You have to run! NOW!’
But she was lost, and desperate and the trees were closing in. And beyond the trees only the manor was waiting, a thousand empty windows for eyes, and an open maw, waiting for her.
There was no way out. She was lost between the wild and the Hall.
She turned back to the trees and saw Theo. Her brother, her twin, had his arms thrown out wide, head tilted up to the sky,caught in the trees as if crucified. Theo still and limp, held by the wild wood, the one that had taken their dad, that would take them all. The forest that crowded close around the Hall, hemming it in, the boundary trapping that malevolence inside. The place to which none of them should ever have returned. The thing that lived in those woods. They had called it the wild when they were children visiting this place. And they feared it.
Theo shuddered, just once, and turned his empty, glassy eyes on her. And it wasn’t Theo. Not anymore. It couldn’t be. She tried to shout his name but nothing came out of her mouth but leaves and vines.
She choked on them, going down on her knees, clawing at her throat while the wild burrowed through her body, filling her and making her its own. She crawled from the woods, through brambles and undergrowth, to find herself kneeling on the steps up to the door of the Hall itself, caught underneath the shadowy recesses of the Georgian portico.
It’s a dream, she tried to tell herself. Just a dream.
The shadow fell over her, blocking out any remaining light.
‘Alexandra,’the voice said. He held out a hand, pale and beautiful, long-fingered, inviting, terrifying. She couldn’t see him clearly. Beyond the elegant hand, he was a dark shadow with burning eyes. His voice was a murmur, but it was the same voice that laughed in her dreams, that reached out to touch her in the darkness, that wound itself around her and promised her everything, that would never keep those promises. Or even worse, might keep each and every one. His voice. The voice that had drawn her through the house’s labyrinth of passages and hallways, out into the night. The voice that teased and tormented and would surely destroy her.
‘You don’t need to fight,’he said, the darkness welling up around her as if it was made of tar.‘You don’t need to run, my beloved. Not anymore. It’s time to come home.’
She reached out, barely conscious of the involuntary movement, and slipped her hand into that ancient and remorseless grip. She felt his smile like a caress. The darkness closed around her with the finality of a bear trap.
Alex awoke with a scream, bolt upright in her bed. Her room was too bright, stained with green, like the wild wood, like her dream… She gasped for air, the choking sensation of vegetation cramming itself in her mouth from the depths of her throat lingering far too long. She was sheened in sweat, her heart thundering. It wasn’t the first time she’d started awake, haunted by dreams about Wildewood. Since she left, she’d continued to run from the place in her sleep. But this dream was different.
Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
Alex couldn’t have gone back to sleep if she tried. Theo wasn’t answering the phone when she called, or responding to her messages. So she waited. There was nothing else she could do.
As the city woke up around her and the sky finally brightened, sunlight seeping through her apartment windows, she sat in the kitchen drinking coffee after coffee, trying to convince herself it really was just a dream.
Until the cops arrived, just after nine. Two of them in uniform, solemn-faced and serious, and she knew. She just knew.
‘Dr Alexandra O’Neill?’ Carefully respectful. His colleague hung back, face ready with empty sympathy.
‘Yes.’ It was all she could do to force out that single, breathless word.
The first man paused, trying to work out what to say, how to phrase this and no doubt inwardly cursing his luck that he had to be the one to tell her. ‘Ma’am, I’m afraid there’s been an accident.’
Theo. It had to be about Theo. There was no one else.
She retreated a step. ‘What – what happened?’
He introduced himself but she was barely paying attention. Because she knew where this was going.
Alex swallowed hard, the mulch of the wild wood still there, mingled with the rising vomit in the back of her throat.
Because she’d already known. From the moment she woke up. From the moment she had torn her way out of that dream.
Twins knew, they always said.
