Before we ascended, I touched Dorian’s arm. “This tunnel—your mother built it?”
He paused with a foot on the first step. His face lowered. “Yes.”
I hesitated, then asked what had been gnawing at me since we’d come down here. “Why?”
He flinched as though he’d been pinched. His lips pressed together. “Because once, someone came through the front door who shouldn’t have. And she never wanted to be caught unprepared again.”
The words hit colder than the damp earth around us. I stared,waited for him to say more, but he started up the steps without another word. At the top, he grunted and pushed something aside. Light flooded in. Light. Air. And with them, danger.
We were back amongst the fae. Back amongst the Wild Hunt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The sky was stillgray with early morning light when we emerged from the tunnel into the Sylvanwild forest. Sunlight speared through the canopy in thin threads, turning the mist to spun gold where it touched the forest floor.
We had come so far from the cottage, I couldn’t even see it amidst the trees. Dorian’s mother really had been paranoid.
Or pragmatic.
She truly understood the cost of being unprepared.
Who had come through the front door that night? And where was his mother now?
Had her tunnel saved her, or not?
Dorian’s voice was low beside me, his breath light on my ear. “This is the deep forest.”
A shiver rippled through me. I forced myself not to turn, not to slip into the past. I couldn’t be in the past. I could only be in this moment.
Here was unlike anywhere I had seen in their lands. Vines tangled the trees with yellow and red blooms so large I could have pressed my face into them where they touched the ground. The airwas thick and humid and heady with earth and sweet blossoms and the tang of fungi growing over the large rocks and fallen trees.
These felt like the truest, wildest depths of Sylvanwild, where the mythical creatures I’d learned about as a girl might actually roam.
It would have been beautiful if we weren’t being hunted.
“Go,” Dorian said. “Go now.”
I climbed from the tunnel’s entrance and light-stepped to the nearest tree some ten paces away. I pressed myself against its enormous trunk as Dorian had instructed, invisible and silent. Its bark was firm, lush, the base so wide around I could have built a home inside it.
I waited while he pushed the mossy stone that had been atop the tunnel’s entrance back over, and all evidence of the passage was gone. He crossed to a tree at a diagonal from me, surveyed, and signaled. I headed for the next tree ten paces on while he remained watchful.
We moved through the forest in this way, at diagonals. We never moved at the same time, always waiting until the other had stopped before we jogged on to the next tree. Dorian was always in the lead, and I always waited for his signal. In this way we headed toward the falls. Not as quickly as we might have side by side, but like rabbits—paused, breathing, watchful.
The deep forest wasn’t like the rest of Sylvanwild. Here everything grew larger, the bushes pressed tighter, the vines slipped lower. But I didn’t feel themenaceof the citadel, the grove, the wraiths.
Here felt purer, somehow. Untouched.
An hour in, Dorian stopped with a hand up. He stood statue-still, listening. I didn’t know what he was listening for, until?—
A bird’s call. It echoed from deep in the forest, a vaguely familiar sound that pinged at my brain. I had heard that call before; it was unlike the other birds in the forest. The warble was faster.
Then I remembered.
That first night outside Sylvanwild, in the darkness, Dorian had saved me. He’d saved me a second after I’d heard that bird’s call.
Instinct clenched my muscles. Down.Down.
I threw myself to the ground against the tree I’d been standing beside. A whistle pierced the air, and the trunk above me cracked. Bark rained over me. Above me, a slender red-feathered arrow stuck out of the tree where my head had just been.
