A lean shape leaped off the porch and ran past them into the woods. William caught a glimpse of dark hair and small brown boots. Lark. Why would a child be sneaking out into the woods in the middle of the night? Was she meeting “the monster” there?
Cough got up and trotted after her.
Good idea. William peeled himself from the wall and sprinted across the clearing. As he passed the tree with the sentry, he looked up and saw the kid asleep between the branches, the rifle leaning on his lap.
Finally something was going his way.
EIGHTEEN
WILLIAM glided through the grove. The cypresses gave way to the Edge pines. Huge pine trunks surrounded him, black and soaring, like a sea of masts that belonged to ships sunken deep under the carpet of blue leaf moss.
Dense thickets crowded the pines, punctuated by the patches of rust ferns. Stunted swamp willows with startling pale bark protruded through the brush like white wax candles. This wasn’t his Wood. This was an old treacherous place, a garish decay and new life mixed into one, and William felt uneasy.
The dog by his side didn’t much care for the wood either. The sleepy-eyed, good-natured idiot had raised his ears, and his brown eyes scanned the woods with open suspicion.
A breeze touched them. They both sniffed in unison and turned left, following Lark’s trail.
Where was that kid going? William leapt over a fallen branch. He hoped with all of him that Lark wasn’t meeting some “nice” monster in the woods and telling him all of the secrets of her family.
A large white oak loomed in the woods, a lone giant tinseled with maiden hair moss. The air currents slapped William with a dozen odors of carrion, some old, some new. What the hell?
With all this carrion, he could smell nothing else.
Cough barreled on ahead. Dogs. Stupid creatures.
William jogged closer.
A dozen small furry bodies hung from the oak’s branches. Two squirrels, a rabbit, an odd thing that looked like a cross between a raccoon and an ermine—something the Edge had cooked up, no doubt—fish . . .
A skinny shape scrambled through the branches above him. Lark’s small face poked through the leaves.
“You shouldn’t be here. This is the tree where the small monster lives,” she said. “This is the small monster’s food, and that’s the small monster’s house.”
He looked up to where she pointed. A haphazard shelter sat in the branches of the oak, just some old boards clumsily nailed and tied to make a little platform with an overhang. A small yellow something sat on the edge of the platform. William squinted. A stuffed teddy bear next to Peva’s crossbow.
Cerise was right. Lark thought she was a monster. A small one. Who the hell was the big monster?
The teddy bear looked at him with small black eyes. Looking at it made him feel uneasy, as if he was sick or in serious danger and he wasn’t sure when the next blow would be coming. He wanted to take Lark and her teddy bear away from the tree, just carry her off to the house, where there was warmth and light. His instincts told him she’d bolt if he tried.
Human children didn’t do this and she wasn’t a changeling. If she was one, he would’ve recognized her by now and Cerise wouldn’t be surprised by his eyes.
William tapped the tree. “Can I come up?”
Lark bit her lips thinking. “I can trust you?”
He let the moonlight catch his eyes, setting them aglow. “Yes. I’m a monster, too.”
Lark’s eyes went wide. She stared at him in silent shock for a long breath and nodded. “Okay.”
William took a couple of steps back and launched himself up the trunk, scrambling up like a lizard. It took him less than two seconds to crouch on the branch across from Lark.
“Wow,” she said. “Where did you learn to climb that fast?”
“It’s something I do,” he said.
Cough whined below.
Lark scuttled down the branches, pulled out a small knife and cut the rope holding a water rat. The rat’s body fell with a wet plop. Cough sniffed it and sat on his haunches, panting, long sticky drool stretching from his mouth.
“He never eats them.” Lark frowned.
That’s because they’re rotten. “Do you come here a lot?”
She nodded. “If we don’t find my mom, I might move here. I like it. Nobody bothers me here. Except for the big monster, but I usually run away when I hear him.”
“The big monster?”
She nodded. “It moans and snarls when the moon is up.”
The Hand’s agents were freaks, but he doubted they would howl at the moon. “Is it something that’s always lived here?”
“I don’t know. I only started this tree four weeks ago.”
“What does it look like?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It gives me the creeps, and I usually run straight to the house.” Her face shut down.
“Do people bother you at the house?”
Lark looked away.
“Monsters belong in the woods,” she said. “They don’t belong at the house. Were kids mean to you when you were a small monster?”
William considered the question, trying to sort through the mess that was his childhood to find something a human girl would consider mean. “I grew up in a house with a bunch of kids who were monsters like me. We fought. A lot.” And when they really went at it, only one changeling got up in the end.
Lark scooted closer to him. “The adults didn’t stop you? We aren’t allowed to fight.”
“They did. They were strict. We got whipped a lot, and if you really screwed up, they would put you on a chain in a room by yourself. Nobody would talk to you for days.”
Lark blinked. “How did you get food?”
“They would slide it through a slot in the door.”
“And bathroom?”
“There was a hole in the floor.”
She pursed her lips. “No showers?”
“No.”
“That’s nasty. How long did you stay in there?”
He leaned back, lowering one leg down. “The longest was three weeks. I think. Time is odd when you’re in that room.”
“Why did they put you in there?”
“I broke into the archives. I wanted to find out who my parents were.”
“Did you?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So you didn’t ever have a dad? Or a mom?”