The monster snapped awake. It hissed as it clawed a path from the darkness. A prickling ache began in my fingertips.
“Please,” I rasped. “I am a woman of few means and fewer connections. I did not ask to be brought here. I did not scheme for it either.”
“That is not enough.” His voice was dark and terrible. There was no trace left of the charming, good-humored man who’d come with home-cooked stew. “I need to know that I will not come to regret saving you. That you will not bring ruin upon all I hold dear.”
Holddear… As if a faerie was capable of such things.
“Then cast me out into the storm. Let me go.” My voice trembled with anger and with fear and, above all, with shame. My veins thickened darkly beneath paper-thin skin. If he saw… If he saw, I was dead, or worse. “I did not ask you to save me. You should have left me. You should have let me die. What you saved, I have long given up. This life has no worth to me. I owe younothing.”
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
As vile as the rot and better off dead.
I noted, through tear-blurred vision, that Adrik looked at me no longer. His gaze clung to the window—where the evening sun drowned behind wooded hills and the shadows thickened between the trees. I almost expected him to drag me from thewarmth of the bed and banish me to the winter woods. I would have welcomed it. I clenched my chattering teeth to contain the monster. It began to slip through the cracks.
“Nothing but death awaits in the forest,” Adrik said softly. “Alas, I am not cruel enough to let you go.”
He swept wordlessly into the dusk. The door still trembled long after the hiss of his furious steps had faded. Deep within, the monster writhed, shredding its cage. A crack—
Hello, little bird.
I splintered.
FIVE
As vile as the rot and better off dead.
Ishrieked into the blanket as dark magic bled from me like tar, stealing for one anguished heartbeat breath and sight and sound. Power unfurled, seeping darkly into the patch of green beyond the window. The sage bush shuddered, magic creeping like a disease up its stem, blackening its silver-green leaves. The foxglove withered, the belladonna shriveled, and all that was green turned dry and spindly, veined with ink.
Night fell quickly. I’d scarcely blinked before the town and forest drowned in darkness. Not a lone star lit the skies.
From under the pillow, I took the flask of purplish smoke and inhaled it. A tingle crept into my blood. When I moved to the edge of the bed, I felt no pain. I tried in vain to stand, so I crawled on hands and knees to the door, clasping the glass shard I’d concealed in a corner of the blanket.
I needed not go far.
Just past the treeline, where the hounds would come upon my body before they ever made it into the town.
I found the door, luckily, unlocked. Panting with effort, I drew myself over a tiled path—past the withered garden, the rotting peach tree, a low fence. The snow pricked me like needles, cut me like knives, turned me achingly numb. The air was sharp as glass in my chest. I was past fear. All I had left was grim determination; to reach the forest before the hounds came, and to die on my own terms.
They came, as always, quickly.
With the wind at my back I’d crawled just past the briar, into a glade vivid with moss and strangely shifting firs. From the dark came a whisper of song so sweet I might have chased it, had my legs allowed it. One moment, I sat against a hollow trunk and squinted, heart ablaze with too-bright vigilance, into the glittering snow. The next, a pair of blistering yellow eyes blinked at me from the trees.
I did not scream as I readied the shard, nor as the hound lunged.
These things I had expected.
A shadow, quick as a hound and thrice as large, slipped from the dark and pounced. I shrieked as bones cracked and teeth clanked. In my fright, I dropped the glass shard. Something horribly warm splattered my cheek and trickled slowly from my jaw. It reeked of metal and rot.
A wince and a wet, gurgling growl; something tore and snapped. I looked, though I knew I should not. At my feet, in a tangle of mottled fur and twitching limbs, lay half of a hound. A little further, amid a dark stain in the snow, its ghastly head rolled back and forth as if it still possessed a sliver of life.
I choked my screech with the sleeve of my frost-stiff nightgown. With numb fingers, I searched for the glass shard. The snow had swallowed it.
A snarl.
I twisted to peer past the trunk. In the pale-lit snow moved a nimble beast. It danced among three—no, four—hounds, evading talons and fangs as easily as if it were the wind. I held my breath as I watched, in horror and in awe. I did not see it bite. I heard only the terrible rip of skin and sinew, and a thud as another severed head landed in the snow.
I retreated. I’d seen enough to know with a tide of dread that the beast—whatever it was—was a friend to me only as long as the hounds lived. Once it had torn them to shreds, it would turn to me.
