“Your destiny is not to do what is right. Your destiny is to destroy us all.” Susannah gave me one last horrified look before her skull started to fade into the dirt.
The rosebush shifted to cover the grave where it had buried the Covenant alive, leaving me blinking at it in shock. My bottom lip trembled as I stood, looking back toward the doors to the school.
I took a step, determined to ask Gray what she’d meant.
I stopped.
She hadn’t fought. She was the Covenant, and plants or not, she could have easily escaped. She hadn’t wanted to, not if…
Run.
I looked away from the school, turning my body toward the woods surrounding Hollow’s Grove.
Casting one last glance over my shoulder and heaving a deep breath to calm my panic, I ran.
34
WILLOW
Fuck. I hated running.
I wheezed as I bent forward, placing my hands on my knees and trying to get a deep breath in. I couldn’t function on so little oxygen.
Couldn’t think.
What could Gray have hoped to achieve by lying to me about the bones? By keeping them from me? If Susannah was telling me to run, there had to be more to it than just the simple reality of him wanting to prevent me from finding them. That fear in her voice had sunk inside my skin, slithering beneath the surface like an insidious menace.
But instead of doubting what she’d said, I was left with the growing, dawning realization that something was wrong. That I’d missed something that had been staring me in the face.
A howl cut through the woods, raising the hair on my arms. Susannah had been willing to let me flee, to let me attempt to escape the fate waiting for me in Crystal Hollow.
Because she’d known the odds of me surviving were minimal. Creatures far worse than witches call these woods home.
I swallowed, heaving a sigh and spreading my feet shoulder width apart. Letting my magic loose was always like releasing a breath, like releasing a tiny sigh of that power into the world and molding it to my will.
I grasped my knife from the sheath, slashing it across each of my palms quickly before returning the blade slowly. My blood dripped onto the forest floor, the sound of it echoing in the silence around me. There were no noises as the beasts hidden here stalked me, keeping quiet as I listened for them.
I inhaled, filling my lungs with air and the feeling of the woods around me. I exhaled, blowing a long, steady breath into the trees. They answered, the forest itself seeming to shift as trees swayed to the side, showing me a path through to the border where it met the outskirts of Salem.
The beasts were to my right, their footsteps thudding against the ground and vibrating against my soul where I’d connected to the trees. I took off at a run even as my calves burned, taking the path the forest had revealed and refusing to look over my shoulder to see if they would catch me.
The ground helped, rising and falling to give me momentum beneath my feet as I kept breathing. Each sigh let loose a little more of that power that I kept trapped within my skin, until the air around me seemed charged with it.
Never had I surrounded myself so thoroughly, had I released so much of it into the earth and the air. A creek bed came up before me, and there wasn’t enough time to stop—to slow myself before I would stumble into it. A tree in front of me shifted, swinging a branch toward me just in time for me to grab it.
Bark dug into my skin, drawing blood that paid the debt between us as the branch swung forward and flung me over the creek.
I flailed in mid-air, my legs continuing to run even though there was no ground beneath my feet for a few moments suspended in time. I gasped as I struck the ground, rolling myself forward and popping up onto aching legs the next moment. The howls of the beasts stalking me came even closer, and I realized it wouldn’t be enough.
Even with the forest aiding me, I would never outrun them. Not with the way they were gaining on me, and hiding wasn’t an option when they could scent the trail of blood I’d left behind. When they could feel the magic in the air and know that something that didn’t belong was here.
I kept running, pushing for the boundary. My only hope was to reach the end of the woods by some miracle.
The creature that prowled out in front of me was straight from my worst imaginings. Long, gangly limbs covered in gray, mottled skin. It walked on all fours, the head of a wolf resting atop its shoulders even though the hind legs were far more similar to a human’s than an animal.
I skidded to a stop in the dirt, looking over my shoulder as the rest of the group emerged from the trees behind me. Their chests were muscled and covered in hair, the hair on their backs so long that it disguised the curvature of their spine. The creature’s fingers were long, the black nails at the end even longer than the teeth that sparkled in the dim light of the forest as the one in front of me opened his jowls and growled as he stood up to full height.