What Came Through the Trees

It wasn't a wolf.

Everly's first thought, stupid and useless in the middle of the terror, was that it moved wrong for a wolf. Too low. Too fast. Wolves ran with their heads level. This thing's head hung near the ground, swinging side to side like it was tracking scent instead of sight, and when it finally broke into the clearing, Marcus made the sound again, the one she never wanted to hear a grown man make twice.

It was massive. Fur the color of ash, matted in places with something dark that had dried a long time ago. Its eyes weren't wolf-yellow. They were white, all the way through, like something had burned the color out of them.

"That's not a shifter," Grayson said. His grip on her wrist tightened. "That's not anything."

"It's a Hollow," Marcus whispered, and took two steps back before he seemed to remember he still had a job to do. "They don't exist anymore. My grandfather said the last one died before the war ended."

"Then your grandfather was wrong." Grayson's voice had lost every trace of the calm command it carried a minute ago.

The creature's white eyes swept the clearing and stopped, unmistakably, on Everly.

Not on Grayson. Not on Marcus. On her.

It made a sound low in its chest, not quite a growl, closer to recognition, the way a dog makes a sound when someone familiar walks through the door. Everly's stomach dropped, because some small, ancient part of her recognized it back, and she didn't know why, and not knowing why was somehow worse than the teeth.

"Why is it looking at me like that," she said.

Nobody answered her. Nobody had an answer.

"Hollows track bloodlines," Marcus said finally, so quiet she almost missed it. "The old stories say they were made to hunt one thing. Royal blood. Silver blood." His eyes went to her wrist, still slick and dark. "They said the last queen had one trained to guard her. Not to kill her. To guard her."

Grayson's head turned sharply. "Guard her from what?"

"From exactly what your family's been doing for three hundred years."

The creature took a step forward, and the ground actually seemed to flinch under its weight, and Everly felt Grayson's hand shift on the blade like he was recalculating everything he thought he understood about the last five minutes of his life.

"If it's here to guard her," he said slowly, "then it just watched me hold a knife to her throat."

Nobody moved.

The Hollow's white eyes shifted from Everly to Grayson, and its lips pulled back from teeth built for something much larger than a wolf's jaw, and the low sound in its chest sharpened into something with an edge on it.

"I don't think it liked that," Marcus said.

"Everly." Grayson said her name for the first time, and something about hearing it in his voice made her chest hurt in a way she didn't have space to examine right now. "When I say run, you run. Not toward your pack. Away from all of it."

"I don't even know you."

"I know. Run anyway."

The Hollow lunged.

It happened too fast for her to understand as anything but noise and motion, Grayson shoving her sideways hard enough that she hit the ground and rolled, Marcus screaming something that might have been her name or might have been a warning, the creature's weight crashing into the space where she'd been standing half a second before.

She scrambled up in time to see Grayson plant his blade into the Hollow's shoulder to the hilt, and the creature didn't even slow down. It threw him twenty feet like he weighed nothing, and he hit a tree hard enough that the sound made her flinch, and he didn't get up right away.

Marcus grabbed her arm, pulling her back toward the pack lands, back toward the men who'd been ordered to kill her twenty minutes ago, and some small furious part of her almost laughed at the absurdity of being saved by the same people who'd tried to end her.

"We have to go," Marcus said. "Now."

"He's still down there."

"He's Colt pack. Not our problem."

"He just saved my life."

Marcus didn't answer that. He didn't have to. His face said everything about what would happen to both of them if they went back for a boy from a family sworn to hunt her.

Behind them, the Hollow rose from where Grayson's blade had barely slowed it, unhurried, and its white eyes found Everly again through the trees like distance meant nothing to whatever it was tracking.

It started walking toward her.

Not running. Walking, patient, certain, the way something moves when it already knows exactly how this ends.

"Marcus." Everly's voice had gone very small. "It's not stopping."

"I know."

"What guards a queen from her own people?"

Marcus finally looked at her, and for the first time in nineteen years, there was something in his face that wasn't pity and wasn't fear. It was closer to grief.

"Something that doesn't care who gets in its way," he said. "Including you."

Behind them, Grayson finally moved, one hand pressed to his ribs, dragging himself upright against the tree, and he opened his mouth to shout something at her across the clearing.

The Hollow reached him first.