Everything in Andrew’s head started screaming.
He swung the ax but the creature ducked. It slammed its head into Andrew’s chest and he flew backward, landing hard with a wheeze.
The hatchet clattered down between Andrew and the monster.
Thomas scrabbled toward it, but the monster screamed and flung itself over him, pinning him bodily to the ground. Thomas landed a good punch at its face and the monster hissed, rearing back.
Then its tongue shot out.
“Thomas!” Andrew’s fingers closed on the hatchet, but his sweaty hand slipped. He was too slow, too shaky. He slammed the hatchet into the monster’s back, but it bounced off as if its skin was impenetrable.
Andrew staggered backward just as he realized the monster’s tongue had never been forked. It was an arrow tip.
It plunged into Thomas’s stomach.
Thomas screamed. He writhed beneath the monster, kicking so madly it had to fight to keep his limbs down.
No,no no no—Andrew was failing. He wasfailing him.
He flung himself on the monster’s back, but it flicked him off like he weighed no more than a butterfly. It hunkered over Thomas and rocked, slow and languorous, as it sucked on its tongue like a straw. Lisping smacks of pleasure came from its mouth.
Thomas stopped screaming, but his whimper alone could have murdered Andrew. He suddenly sounded so small, so full of pain. His mud-slick fingers grabbed at the tongue, but it was too slippery to hold.
Andrew dropped the hatchet.
A wildness grew in his head, thorns and fury and poisonous berries. If this was a story, he would have written himself strong enough to kill the monster.
So he’d make it a story.
He snatched Thomas’s Sharpie from the dirt.
Then he ran.
Thomas’s cry broke behind him, a thousand shattered pieces taken by the wind. His thrashing body churned the leaves, but he couldn’t get away. He was prey, impaled.
And Andrew had left him.
He didn’t look back even as Thomas sobbed for him.
Andrew vaulted the mossy log and flung himself at a smooth-skinned birch. He braced one hand on the trunk, forcing his other hand to steady as he rested the Sharpie to the bark. Think,think. He was static electricity; he was full of Thomas’s screams.
Then he began to write.
The dark hid each word as it bled out over the birch, but Andrew kept writing. The pen tripped over grooves and whorls, but the story tore out of him.
Deep in the hollow woods, a witch liked to catch boys and soak her tongue in their blood.
Thomas’s whimpers turned to another sobbing scream that left holes in the night. Andrew wrote faster, his heart pounding.
But when she dipped her tongue inside a boy with hair of stoked flames, she burned to ash from the inside out and everything left of her blew away.
Andrew shoved away from the birch, chest heaving as if he’dbeen the one running, fighting, screaming. He spun, his mind full of hatchets and blood, and this clawing terror for Thomas Thomas Thomas—
He saw the moment the monster’s body spasmed and curved backward as if its spine were made of rubber. Then, with a shrill scream, it exploded into ash.
Gray flakes swirled over Thomas’s body before the wind took them.
Andrew ran back, slipping and tearing the knees of his jeans on sharp rocks before collapsing at Thomas’s side. His hands were all over Thomas, feeling across his stomach, his chest, pressing a palm to his beating heart before cupping his face.
