Chapter Eight — Things That Hunt in the Dark

She should not have gone into the forest.

She knew that before she even crossed the tree line. Grimwall's forest sat on the east edge of town where the cobblestones ran out and the streetlamps stopped and the path narrowed into something that barely deserved the name. People in Grimwall did not go into that forest after dark. They did not go in before dark either if they could help it.

Tyra went in at dusk.

She had a reason. Old Sera who bought flowers from her every week had sent a message that morning saying she had found rare herbs in the forest that Marta charged three times too much for. Enough to cut Tyra's costs for a month.

She had left before she could talk herself out of it.

That was an hour ago.

Now she was not sure she could find her way back.

The trees had thickened faster than she expected. The path had split twice and she had chosen wrong both times and the light was almost gone and the forest had gone quiet in the way that meant something had noticed her before she had noticed it.

She stopped walking.

Listened.

No crickets. No wind. Not even the distant sound of Grimwall's evening bells that she should still be able to hear from here.

Just silence pressing against her ears.

"Okay," she said quietly. "You turn around. You follow your footprints back to the path. You go home and you never do this again."

She turned around.

The footprints were gone.

She stared at the ground. She had been walking on soft earth. She had seen her own prints clearly on the way in. Gone now. Like the ground had swallowed them.

Her mouth went dry.

She took one step forward anyway.

Something moved in the trees to her left.

Not an animal sound. Not leaves or branches. Something that moved like shadow moved, without weight, sliding between the trunks with a speed her eyes could not track.

She turned toward it.

Nothing there.

Movement to her right.

She spun.

Nothing.

Then directly ahead something stepped out from between two trees and she saw it and every thought in her head went blank.

It was the shape of a person. Roughly. The way a shadow cast at the wrong angle was roughly the shape of whatever made it. Dark and shifting at its edges, never fully solid. Where its face should have been there was nothing. Just more dark. Just that shifting, breathing blackness that seemed to pull the light out of the air around it.

It tilted its head.

Looked at her.

She ran.

No direction. No path. No plan. She just ran and her boots hit the ground hard and the branches whipped at her arms and she could hear it behind her. Not footsteps. Not breathing. Just a sound like the air being pulled backward.

She looked back once.

There were three of them now.

She faced forward and ran harder.

A root caught her boot and she went down hard, hands hitting the earth, her knee slamming into something solid beneath the soil. Pain shot up her leg. She pushed herself up and kept moving. Limping now. Slower.

The sound behind her got closer.

She ducked behind a wide tree trunk and pressed her back against it, one hand over her mouth, breathing through her nose, trying to think.

She had nothing. No weapon. No way to fight something that was not solid. She could not outrun three of them with a bad knee. She could not hide because they had already found her once in open forest.

She pressed harder against the bark and thought about Troy's voice from that morning.

The kind you do not want finding you.

Had he known this was coming. Had Kael being in Grimwall meant something was already moving toward her. Had she walked into this forest at exactly the wrong time.

A sound directly in front of her.

She opened her eyes.

One of the shadow creatures stood three feet away.

Up close it was worse. Its edges moved constantly, reaching outward like fingers, like it was always trying to become more than it was. The cold coming off it was not weather cold. It was the cold of something that had never been warm. That had never known what warmth was.

It reached toward her.

She pressed flat against the tree.

"Stay back," she said.

It kept reaching.

"I said stay back."

Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated that. She was alone in a dark forest with three creatures made of shadow and her knee was bleeding through her trousers and there was nobody coming.

The cold fingers of it touched her coat sleeve.

She screamed.

Not from fear. From something deeper. Something that came up from her chest without asking permission, hot and enormous, tearing out of her throat and shaking the branches above her head. For one single second the shadow creature pulled back.

Then the other two closed in from either side.

She looked between all three of them and understood with a cold flat certainty that she had run out of options.

"Help," she whispered.

Not to Troy. Not to anyone.

Just out into the dark forest because it was the only thing she had left.

The creatures moved forward together.

And the forest went completely silent.