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.
That grinning, bug-eyed face, golden and gleaming and terrible, all the teeth showing. The face that had haunted the corners of her nightmares, that had called to her, sung to her, reached out to her. The gleam of gold beneath rotting foliage. Eyes that didn’t see, but saw everything, the mouth hanging open, hungry and waiting.
Blaise pushed her forward with unassailable force and she couldn’t stop herself. Why couldn’t she stop herself?
‘You’re the last of them, the women of the de Wildes. Your blood is of the de Wildes and of Kilfayne,’ he said. ‘You can set him free. You can set us all free.’
But she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to touch it. She knew it was wrong. Something inside her told her that, something she had to listen to. But she couldn’t stop herself. She knelt down and reached into the earth beneath the house, pulling it out. It was heavy and cumbersome and she wasn’t strong enough. But she couldn’t seem to stop. The cold arched roof of stones closing over her and the stench of mulch. The darkness pressing in on her, suffocating her.
‘Alex?’ her father cried out. His footsteps were thunder on the steps down from the study. ‘Alexandra, get away from it.’ Alex dropped the idol back into the ground and twisted around, a wild surge of hope filling her. Dad was here. He was here and he would save her. And everything would be all right again. This nightmare would be over. Because he always saved her from her nightmares.
Blaise Chambers whirled around, striking her father’s solar plexus like a spear, pushing through him and into him, taking him in that moment of his greatest weakness, when all his defences were down, and making him his own.
She saw it happen, saw her father’s eyes go wide with shock and horror, saw his mouth fall open in a silent scream.
‘Run, Alex,’ he gasped. His last ever words to her. ‘You have to run! NOW!’
And he fell, hands still, limp on the rich and hungry earth.
It wasn’t the darkness of the forest around her. It was the undercroft, the house itself, its deepest most terrible heart, and she had led her father here, right into a trap.
Because the man getting up again, straightening his spine, lifting his head, smiling that terrible smile…that was not her father, not anymore.
Alex ran. It was all she could do. She threw herself into the gap between the undercroft and the cellar, while the ghosts of Wildewood Hall tore at her, their nails like brambles on her skin, as they tried to catch her and drag her back to the thing that now possessed her father.
She made it outside, into the darkness of the woods, and the forest seemed to convulse around her. She was part of it, something it wanted to protect. She knew that now. It was part of her. Her blood, not just that of the de Wildes. She was of Kilfayne as well, that was what Gran had told her. Gran was one of the wise women and so were countless others of her line. Grandfather had a whole chart and everything. Different families, different times, but always there to tie them to the wild wood and make it strong again, to protect them all from the creature trapped beneath the house.
And the wild wood knew her. It loved her. How could it not love her? She belonged here. She was its child as well. From the moment she came here, the woods had reached out.
But the figure lurching after her like some kind of savage beast…the thing that wore her father’s face…that ran so much faster than she did…
It caught hold of a handful of her hair, dragging her to a halt, squirming and crying for help from the air and the water, from the earth and the sky, from all the trees and all the living things around her. Screaming.
And he had laughed. Blaise Chambers had laughed. The ancient god Crom had laughed. Her father had laughed…
‘Mine,’ it had said with a chorus of long dead voices.
No, the forest had replied and its roar was deafening.Mine!
Alex had reached for it, let it fill her. She’d tasted leaves and mulch and growing things, felt them in her veins and entwined around her bones. She made it her own, even then, unknowingly, only a child trying to grab hold of anything that might help her. Because she had to. Or she was lost. Everything was lost.
The wild wood fell on her father and tore him to pieces.
It left her sobbing over a corpse.
Right here, in the ring of stones, in its centre, in the heart of the wild wood.
Alex lifted her wretched face to look at her brother’s spirit, but found he was gone. Another man sat there, his sad eyes fixed on her, his so familiar face wearing the other older smile, one filled with love and devotion.
‘It’s okay, Alex,’said her father, his voice no more than a whisper.‘That was the past. You couldn’t have saved my life, but you did save my soul. By bringing me here.’
The leaves spilled out of his mouth and nostrils, framed his eyes and tangled in his hair. He smiled his own smile again.
