“What the fuck just happened?” Jake exclaimed loudly.
They turned their heads in his direction, speechless and clearly having forgotten he was even there.
Olivia raised her fingers to her mouth, grazing her kiss swollen lips, her eyes wide. “I… I can’t–”
Not sure how to finish that sentence she did the only thing she could, she turned and bolted into the library.
Slamming the door behind her, she fell back against it. Her heart pounding, and her breathing ragged as the last vestiges of adrenaline pumped through her veins. Feeling her legs give out on her, she slid down until she sat on the floor. She’d never lost control like that before, not of her magic and not of herself. Closing her eyes she let her head fall back against the wood with a dull thud and forced herself to take a slow breath in an attempt to calm her racing pulse.
What the hell was that?
She had no explanation for what just happened or why. They only thing she knew with any degree of certainty is that what she had felt for Theo in that moment was more frightening than the thought of a murderer loose in her woods.
15
It was cold. That was the first thing Olivia noticed. The ground squelched wet and gooey beneath her bare feet, but she paid it no mind. The freezing air seeped into her skin, raising tiny little bumps along the exposed flesh of her arms and legs. The icy wind tugged viciously at her thin nightgown and danced down her spine, yet she continued on beneath the canopy of jagged tree branches and starlight.
She couldn’t say how long she’d walked. It didn’t seem important. She seemed to be a long way from her house. Something about that should have concerned her, and her brow momentarily creased into a frown, but the thought disappeared like a skittish animal as quickly as it had come. Was she looking for something? She couldn’t quite remember, and the thought disappeared before it could cause her any distress.
Wandering further into the woods, she thought she saw something up ahead—a person in a dark cloak, a hood drawn up over their face. She wondered if that should concern her, but the idea slipped away as thin and insubstantial as a wisp of smoke.
A mist closed in around her, grasping at her ankles like ghostly hands. She stared down absently at the transparent fingers winding around her legs. It seemed wrong somehow, but she couldn’t quite place why. She couldn’t concentrate; every time she had a conscious thought, it tattered and fell apart before she had the chance to grab onto it.
She continued to wind her way deeper into the woods. The part of her mind that still retained some form of consciousness gradually began to realize she was no longer following any kind of path.
She was now much deeper into the heart of the wood, ambling through gnarled ancient tree trunks. Glancing down she noted vaguely that the thin mist had now thickened into a greasy fog that had a strange hue to it, a sickly phosphorescent glow. The unnatural fog seemed to surround her, undulating in whichever direction she chose to move.
It should have scared her, but her emotions seemed to have switched off. She tried to focus, and her thoughts became slightly clearer, although with that clarity came a curious sense of numbness. She caught a glimpse of a tattered yellow ribbon flapping ponderously in the ghostly breeze. Crime scene tape, she mused as it slowly disappeared behind the thick curtain of fog.
For a second, she glimpsed a cloaked figure, and then it flickered out of sight under a fresh swathe of fog. Was she following the figure? Or was the figure following her? She couldn’t quite tell. It seemed something about the figure should alarm her, but she couldn’t say why.
She adjusted her direction.
Her mind slowly began to stir and thoughts came a little easier. She paused and tilted her head. Had she heard something, a whisper on the air calling her name? It came again, louder and more insistent.
Adjusting her direction once again, she followed the whispering voice. Was she following the voice? Had that been what she’d been doing all along? She listened harder. It was a sibilant hiss that lulled, cajoled. It was a siren’s call, and she was unable to resist. She quickened her pace, heedless of the sharp twigs underfoot that scratched and tore at the soft, exposed flesh. Suddenly, her foot caught in a shallow hole in the ground, and she stumbled. Throwing her hands out to save herself, she dropped to her knees, grazing her palms.
She raised her head slowly. The tree line had opened up, and she was in a circular clearing. The clouds above her had burned away, and the sky was blazing with stars. The waxing moon glowed pure white, filtering down through to the clearing. The fog had settled along the ground, bobbing and churning like the surface of a stream, broken only by one dark, twisted, solitary tree.
No longer a living, breathing tree like the others in the woods, it was little more than a hollow. It writhed and speared up painfully from the ground, as if it were trying to escape something deeper and darker below.
A flicker of dread began to coil in her gut. She knew this place. Something inside her was telling her she wasn’t supposed to be there.
She climbed painfully to her feet, the newly forming bruises on her knees throbbing as she wiped her blood-smeared palms against her nightgown. She wavered and tried to take a step back, but something had hold of her. It pulled at her. The whisper came again, and she unconsciously stepped forward. Her torn hands stretched out as she moved closer to the corpse-like hollowed tree. The whisper grew louder in her mind, building with each step. The whole clearing spoke to her now, building to a vast crescendo. Her hand touched the crumbling, diseased-looking bark and then...
Silence.
The whispering, the wind, the thousand tiny little voices and sounds of the wood were suddenly gone. The silence was deafening.
For one terrifying moment, she could have sworn she’d seen a face in the bark of the tree, its mouth hung open in a silent, timeless scream.
Suddenly she was hit with a punch of power so strong it forced the air from her lungs and took her feet out from under her. She was thrown backward and hit the ground hard, jarring every bone in her body.
Then reality flooded back.
Whatever sleepy, dream-like trance had been woven around her was gone. Everything crashed in on her, sharply and painfully. Her heart hammered in her chest as she tried to drag in a lungful of air. Her feet and hands stung from the dozens of cuts and grazes she’d sustained from making her way through the woods. She was freezing, and her arms and legs felt slow and sluggish from the biting cold.
She rolled over, drawing in a shaky breath. Hauling herself to her feet, she glanced back at the foreboding tree. She knew where she was now. Boothe’s Hollow. The one place in the whole of the woods that had always been forbidden to her and her friends. The place she’d seen only once as a child. How the hell had she gotten so far from her house, and how long had she been outside?
