The Wilderwood still seemed wrung out, exhausted and pushed to its limits. But when Red twitched her fingers, the branches quivered.
Eammon bared his teeth. He cut the air with his hand—go back— but Red shook her head. Another step closer, power coalescing—
And she stepped on a twig.
The crack could’ve been a spine, for how loud it sounded. Red
froze, hand outstretched toward Eammon. For the first time since she’d known him, the Wolf looked terrified.
The creature raised his nose to the wind. Sniffing. “And oh, here it is.” The shadow-bloated head swiveled to face Red. “Fresh blood.”
The word was a lunge, and the seconds stretched too long, her heartbeats coming in measured ticks. Beat and the creature launched in her direction, beat and its dark-rotting hand raised, beat and the once-human nails elongated to claws.
Beat and Eammon sprang in front of her. The claws raked him instead, slicing through fabric and flesh.
Magic rioted in her middle, the sight of Eammon’s blood finally giving space to memories of all the ways it could go wrong. It shivered in her grip, the ease their marriage had bought slipping away as Eammon crumpled before her. Magic wasn’t the only way to heal the breach, though, and the glint of the knife as it fell from his hand to the ground was a sharp, clear reminder even as her magic slipped toward chaos.
Damn his rules. Red grabbed the dagger and slit her palm.
Her hand slammed to the dirt, blood seeping into the forest floor. Her intention was a scream in her throat, reverberating through every part of her, too focused to be ignored. “Stop!”
The shadow-pit obeyed.
It wasn’t slow, not this time. The edges of the rotted ground shifted backward, surging toward the roots of the sentinel, disappearing beneath them. The tree righted itself with a boom, shock waves skittering over the forest floor. Distantly, Red was aware of those people at the fringes falling backward, unable to keep their balance on unsteady ground.
A moment of silence, of stillness. The creature watched her with wide eyes, still swimming in shadow. Eammon looked from the bloody dagger to Red’s hands subsumed in dirt, horror on his face.
And something in Red . . . shifted. The tide of her magic turned, no longer rushing out but rushing in.
Rushing in, and bringing the Wilderwood with it.
Something slithered against her hand in the dirt. A tendril of root, working its way into the cut in her skin. The forest laying claim. It had a taste of her, and wanted more.
If you give the Wilderwood blood, it won’t stop there.
Pain brought a snarl to her mouth, but the sound that ripped through the clearing didn’t come from her. It came from Eammon.
He lurched from the ground, his scarred and leaking hands closing around her shoulders, wrenching her out of the dirt. The slithering feeling of roots against the cut sharpened, then let go as her hands came free of the ground.
Eammon crouched, slamming his hand to the forest floor, still churned with Red’s blood. No new cuts in his skin. Instead, changes, like that day in the library when he healed her cheek: Bark closed around his forearms like vambraces, the veins in his neck and beneath his eyes going green. Emerald ringed his amber irises, until no white was left.
“Leave her,” Eammon growled at the now-healed sentinel, at the surrounding Wilderwood. His voice was layered, resonant, like it echoed through leaves. “This one isn’t yours.”
The Wilderwood shivered. It gave a sound almost like a sigh.
Eammon’s breath came in pants as he collapsed on his knees next to Red. His chest bloomed crimson and green in three stripes, more blood coming as he ripped a strip of fabric from the bottom of his shirt and tied it messily around her hand.
Then he sat still, eyes searching hers as green slowly leached away, wide and terrified and so tired.
A groan split the moment in two. Eammon flinched.
The creature on the sentinel’s roots twitched. Parts of it shrank— the claws that had rent Eammon’s middle contracted back into the shape of a human hand, the milky eyes that had been wide as saucers grew smaller, grew blue. His monstrous height halved, his legs righted themselves, broken bones snapping back together and ripping a scream from his throat. Shadow hissed out of the cut on his arm.
The half-man, half-monster creature collapsed on the roots, twitching, crying. She’d healed the breach, but not him, not completely.
Red turned away.
“We can take it from here.” The man who’d caught her when she and Fife first careened into the clearing stepped from the cover of trees. His hair was snowy blond, braided elaborately over his shoulder and into his long beard, paler than his white skin. Silver rings glinted in its length, a style Red had seen only in history books. The others stepped from the shadows, all dressed in the same greens and grays.