Red didn’t know what to say. This story had haunted her whole life— he’d lived it, had to exist under the shadow of its happening and the ghost it left. She wanted to comfort him; every line of his body said he didn’t want to be comforted.
“The forest was in so bad a state, getting a new Wolf didn’t heal all the breaches.” He’d gone back to neutral tones now. Tucking emotion away, burying it. “So some of the shadow-creatures that had escaped when the Wilderwood briefly died still lingered.”
“Until Kaldenore came,” Red said, piecing it together. “And the Wilderwood drained her to heal itself as best it could.” Not good, not bad. But hungry. And desperate.
A broken sigh. “No ending here has ever been happy, Red.”
He shrugged off her hand. He turned toward the Wilderwood.
Red’s fingers closed on empty space as he strode between the trees.
Alone. Determined, always, to be alone, even when she was standing next to him.
After a moment, she followed, light pressure fizzing over her skin when she passed the border. They moved through the fog in silence.
Eammon’s hand shooting out of the gloom to seize her arm made her grunt in surprise. Red’s boots tripped over the leaves, and she saw what he’d pulled her from— a perfectly circular piece of shadow-rotten ground, nearly hidden in the dim. It looked like a circle of spilled paint over the canvas of the forest, with no listing tree to mark its center.
A missing sentinel. A hole.
Eammon’s lips pulled tight. The hand on her arm tremored.
Magic bloomed to Red’s fingers, ready for use. “What do we do?”
“I told you before.” Eammon shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do, Red.”
“There has to be something. Or are you just determined to leave me out of it?”
He froze, and that was answer enough.
Red drew her dagger. Eammon’s grip went from her elbow to her wrist, lightning-fast, pulling her close enough that her nose nearly notched into his sternum. She didn’t try to jerk away, but neither did she let go of the hilt, holding the blade sideways between their chests.
“No,” he nearly snarled. “Not yours.”
“It worked once—”
“And the Wilderwood almost had you.” His voice was harsh, amber eyes burning, green encroaching where the whites should be. “I won’t let it happen again.”
“So I’m just supposed to let you bleed out, then? Give yourself over to the Wilderwood completely when you don’t have enough blood left to satisfy it?”
A tremble in their locked-together hands. She couldn’t tell which one of them it came from. “If that’s what it takes.”
The sound was quiet. If they weren’t caught in fraught silence of their own, they wouldn’t have heard it— a thin screech, like tearing metal. Red’s teeth snapped together, a low, strange discomfort creeping up from her feet, through her bones.
Eammon’s face blanched. His hand curled around the hilt of his dagger, the other still on her wrist. His eyes went to the pitted, rotten ground as he stepped slightly away from her, moving like prey in a predator’s sight line.
The sound came again, louder. The surface of the pit undulated, something stirring beneath.
“Red.” Nearly a whisper, and Eammon’s eyes were wide. “Run.”
The pit ruptured before she had the chance.
It was darkness solidifying, shooting upward. Different from that first night— not some formless thing cobbling a counterfeit body from bone and shadow. This had a body, a wrong and terrible one, a tube of black scales and clinging rot. The tearing-metal noise came from an open mouth, wide as Eammon was tall, ringed with layers upon layers of carrion-caked teeth. The thing wove from side to side, towering in the air, circular jaws gnashing at the twilight sky.
The eruption tossed her backward, the edges of her vision dark and hazy. Red didn’t come fully back to herself until she felt Eammon beside her, ripping her dagger from her hand. Whether to use it himself or to keep her from it, she didn’t know.
“Go!” He jumped to his feet, whipping around in front of her with his teeth bared, facing the thing that had wrenched itself from the breach. Not a shadow-creature, nothing so insubstantial— one of the other monsters the Shadowlands held?
It seemed taller now, like it’d pulled more of itself free of the hole. Eammon held both daggers in one hand and swiped at the palm of the other, twin slices across a dirt-crusted lifeline. “Red, go!”