Not one to waste good fortune, I grabbed my dagger and jumped up. A moment later, I was running with everything I had. Ripping through bushes and ducking under branches, I didn’t stick to any kind of path. I didn’t care if I could be tracked or heard. I doubted anyone would chase a scrappy little shifter who couldn’t shift, not with the monstrous melee going on behind me.
I burst out across the Forbidden Wood’s boundary and raced around the village the long way to my house. It would be faster if I didn’t have to worry about jumping fences.
I stomped up my steps and barged through the door. Before I could catch my breath, I turned and slammed the door shut behind me. I yanked the heavy timber at the side in place across the door, securing us in.
Hannon pushed up from the couch, his eyes anxious. Seeing me with my back against the door, panting, he hurried to the little window overlooking the porch, grabbing the interior wood shutters to block it off.
“No,” I panted, my chest still heaving. I unslung the pack with everlass and straightened it out. I didn’t want my nearly deadly trip to have been in vain. “Leave it.”
He paused with the shutters halfway closed. Without a word, he slowly pushed them back before peering out into the night.
“You saw it,” he said softly.
Straightening up, I gulped air and shook my head. “No. I mean…” I licked my lips, utterly parched.
Without a word, he moved toward the kitchen. After years of nursing our parents, he didn’t need to be told what a person needed.
“Kinda. I saw a huge shape. A body. And a tail. And the foot. The foot. It had to have been the beast.”
“How close was it?”
He shouldn’t be asking that. He never asked how close my close calls were. That kept me from having to lie.
This time, though, I didn’t feel like covering up what had happened.
I told him everything, from the shaking birch, to the weird, territorial owl, to the strong incubus that never materialized, to the strange escape.
“I don’t think it was coming after me,” I finally said, having moved to the couch and finished two cups of water. “I mean…at first it obviously was. It stalked me. So did that other creature—”
“How?” Hannon asked, sitting in the wooden chair opposite me. He’d made it.
“All the noise around me, I guess, I don’t know. The birch and then the owl. Or maybe the draught to deaden smell didn’t work? It’s not like I have ever properly tested it in the Forbidden Wood. I’ve only ever tested it in the forests to the south and east, on real animals in natural habitats, not on demon creatures in an evil ecosystem. The magic in the Forbidden Wood is twisted.”
“Well.” Hannon rubbed his face. “I’m going to bed. Father is sleeping peacefully right now. The elixir earlier really helped. Maybe he’ll be lucid tomorrow.”
I nodded and stayed put for a moment. I’d need to dote on the everlass leaves tonight if they were going to work for me. I had to nestle them into their drying tray and sprinkle them with water to keep them fresh until they could be dried in tomorrow’s dying sun. Very high-maintenance, those leaves. But if you treated them well, they kept your loved ones alive.
For a moment, though, I just wanted to sit and unwind. There were still so many questions to ponder, like what the fuck was up with that birch tree? And where had that owl come from and what was its problem? Most importantly, though, what had happened with the incubus? I highly doubted the mockingbird of terror could turn a person on. It had its thing, and sexy-time was not it. Neither did I think the beast moonlighted as a sex god. I would’ve heard about that. So what was affecting me like a filthy good time, and was it still out there? Because incubi had no problem wandering into the village and taking what they wanted. Sure, they might usually be easy to ignore, but this one was something else.
Late the next morning, I held out my mug for a specially made tea in our homely kitchen. Coffee was a thing of the past, new supplies lost to us when the curse went into effect. Coffee beans were grown in a few kingdoms, not to mention the human realm beyond the magical veil, but we weren’t one of them. When my parents had been plagued with headaches after the supply ran out, I devised a mixture to calm the ache and still give a little kick to start the morning. It had done the trick, and now I looked forward to it.
Hannon pulled the pot off the hook hanging over the fire and tilted it. A tiny bit of life-saving draught filled my mug.
“Try again,” I said with a yawn, keeping my mug in the air.