Dropping my gaze, I focused on the bedraggled boy and girl at my feet. Fat, blood-engorged insects swarmed around them in the feeble moonlight. Garbed in grimy clothes, faces streaked with dirt, they reeked of fear and rot, blending perfectly with their surroundings.
“It’s going to be fine, Madoc. We have Fowler. He’ll take care of you.” She patted her brother’s shoulder and lifted her gaze to me again. “Right?” She was bobbing her head again, willing me to promise her lies. “Fowler?”
She was tenacious like an old hunting dog I once had. The hound would fetch the pheasant, but getting him to drop the bird from his teeth was another matter entirely. Eventually my father killed him, having no patience for such willfulness. He would have had no patience for Dagne or her brother. The fact that I did would have disgusted him.
I dragged my hands through my hair, fingers curling in strands that had grown long in the last year. I tugged hard as though ripping them from my scalp would give some relief. A gust of breath expelled from me. Against my better judgment, I’d let the siblings tag along with me and now I’d pay for it. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they possessed an ounce of stealth. My mouth twisted into a grimace. They were dead weight pulling me down with them.
I could have slipped away. I’d considered it. But I stuck it out, telling myself that it was just until the next village. I’d leave them there. Perhaps it was that I didn’t want to be like my father, that I was determined not to be, that kept me from abandoning them.
I glanced around, peering into the dark, gauging if any of the shadows were more than shadows. If the shapes sifting around me in the inky air moved with purpose. If we were already being hunted. I stared hard, straining my eyes in a world gone cold with relentless night.
“Fowler, do you—”
“Quiet,” I rasped, looking behind me into the yawning stretch of night, straining to hear beyond the sounds of buzzing insects and a far-off scream of a tree monkey.
I sniffed, detecting the smoke of peat fire somewhere nearby. I thought I had noticed it earlier and dismissed it. Where there’s fire, there were usually people, and people didn’t live in these woods.
It was several hours until midlight—that gloomy haze of hour when the barest amount of light filtered out from where the sun hid behind the moon. The only time during the day when the earth was free from dark dwellers. But even then there was tension, a fine edge of panic so sharp it could cut glass. A choking urgency to outrace time and hurry before the murky light vanished and they returned.
Dagne started weeping—a small, piteous sound like a mewling kitten fighting for its last breath. She wrapped her thin arms around her brother’s chest and struggled to haul him to his feet. He cried out and I flinched at the sound that seemed to echo around us. “Are you going to help me?”
I held up a hand for her to be quiet, cocking my head to the side and listening to a forest that had fallen suddenly too quiet.
“We should never have come this way,” Dagne complained. “I told you this forest is cursed.”
I had heard the tales as a boy, but didn’t care, assuming the Black Woods would be less populated. And where there were less people there were less of them. “I don’t recall inviting you to join me.”
“Just go before they come. Leave me,” Madoc whispered.
I let out a breath. It was tempting. He’d screamed when the trap snapped on his leg, and again when I pried the steel teeth from his ankle. A swarm of dwellers was probably en route to us. Even if we did escape, what were the odds that we would do so unscathed? It only took one bite for infection to set in. One drop of toxin would make you so sick that even if you didn’t die, you couldn’t function. Couldn’t run.
We all froze at the first cry. Now there was no doubt. They were coming.
Other dwellers chimed in. The eerie cries bounced off one another from every direction. It wasn’t the first time I heard them, but the sounds they made were no less terrifying. Monkeys went wild in the trees, jumping and rattling vines and branches, safe in their perches, but no less agitated.
A strangled sob spilled from Dagne. She clutched her brother closer. “I’m not leaving you!”
In a sudden surge of energy, Madoc shoved his sister at me and I caught her. The effort made him lose his balance and he fell back to the ground. “Take her! I can’t go on.”
Dagne was fragile in my arms, as easy to snap as dried kindling. She was only sixteen, but she felt smaller. She reminded me of Bethan with her slight stature and eyes big like a wounded animal’s. I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t be responsible for another life.
I wouldn’t be.
I glanced down again at Madoc’s crushed leg. He was right. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“Fowler.” He bit out my name. “Take her and go. I—I’ll delay them.”
Delay them. He meant they would be too busy slaughtering him to come after us. Dagne choked out a little cry, understanding his meaning, too. I nodded once and tightened my grip on her arm, tugging on her to follow me. She struggled, pleading, and I knew, despite my nod, this wasn’t going to work. Not with her. Not with me. Not together.