Chapter Twelve - The Girl In The Tree

(Adelaide)

Adelaide exhaled so sharply she almost collapsed. She waited a full ten seconds before pushing off from the boulder, her legs shaking. Then she ran again—toward the deeper forest, where the trees choked out even the moonlight. Her foot caught on a bramble bush, thorns ripping into her calf. Warm blood trickled down her leg, but she didn’t slow. The line of fire the thorns left behind became another point to focus on—another reminder that she was still here, still bleeding, still moving.

She found another branch—sharper, smaller, cleaner—and grabbed it too. A makeshift dagger. Two points of wood. Two chances. It wasn’t enough, but it was something that belonged to her and not to his rules.

Her mind flashed with frantic possibilities:

I can lure him into a narrow ravine —

I can find a river to mask my scent—

If I set a trap with vines—

If I found a cave—

If I climbed—

She spotted a tree with low branches.

Yes.

Height was safety. Height was leverage. From higher ground, she wouldn’t just be running. She’d be choosing where to put her fear. Where to aim it.

She leapt, catching the lowest branch with both hands. Her scraped palms screamed in agony, but she hauled herself upward, gritting her teeth. Bark bit into her skin. Splinters embedded into her fingers.

She climbed higher, breath ragged, until she found a branch thick enough to hold her weight. She straddled it, pressing her back against the rough trunk, letting her legs dangle. Her thighs burned, her arms trembled, but from up here, the chaos on the forest floor became shapes and movement instead of suffocating closeness.

Her breathing slowed. Her heart steadied. Her mind sharpened. From this height, she could see more of the forest—dark shapes darting through the trees, more screams echoing far away.

He was hunting all of them. He was toying with them.

He was… waiting. Waiting for what?

A chill crawled down her spine. Waiting for her. It pressed between her shoulder blades like a finger, insistent and cold, pointing her out even when she tried to vanish into bark and shadow.

The tree shuddered beneath her. A low rumble echoed through the roots, vibrating through her bones. He was close again.

Adelaide clamped a hand over her mouth, forcing her breath silent.

A shape emerged below her—massive and dark, moving with a predator’s patience. The Devil’s beast circled the base of her tree. Once. Twice. His claws carved spiralling grooves into the bark with each pass. The tree groaned under the abuse, its protest a low, wounded creak that she felt echo against her spine.

Adelaide’s lungs burned from holding her breath. Sweat slid down her spine, cold and trembling.

Don’t look up. Don’t look up. Don’t look—

He did.

Those burning eyes lifted, finding her instantly in the dark.

She froze. For a heartbeat, it felt as if the entire forest shrank to the space between his gaze and her own—a narrow, taut corridor of awareness where nothing else existed.

A slow, shuddering growl leaked from his chest.

Adelaide’s stomach twisted.

He raised his claws, reared back, and slammed his full weight into the tree.

The trunk shuddered violently. Leaves rained down. The branch beneath her groaned. Bark cracked like old bones, showers of dust and splinters sifting down onto her hair and shoulders.

He hit it again, harder.

The bark split, and splinters flew. Her branch cracked beneath her.

He could knock the tree down. He was trying to shake her loose. Her fingers dug into the trunk until they bled.

He snarled, rearing for another blow. The Devil’s beast reared back, claws curling, muscles bunching beneath his massive shoulders. His eyes—those burning, molten pits—locked on her as the tree trembled violently beneath her.

He slammed into the trunk again. Harder. The branch beneath her feet shuddered. Cracked. Splinters exploded into the air around her.

He was definitely trying to knock her down. Trying to force her to fall. Trying to corner her like prey.

“Not this time,” she whispered, voice shaking with adrenaline and fury. Her words vanished into the night, but they steadied her grip, sharpening the moment into a single, fine point.

Her fingers curled around the long, sharpened branch she’d carried up the tree. It was crude, splintered, and jagged, but the sharpened tip was pointed enough to pierce flesh.

Even monstrous flesh.

Her heart hammered. Her breath shook. Her palms stung where bark had torn them open.

The beast took another step back, preparing to slam into the trunk again.

Now.

Adelaide let go of the tree. But she didn’t fall. She jumped.

She launched herself from the branch with a scream she didn’t recognise as her own—raw, fierce, feral—her entire body committed to the strike. The wind whipped past her ears. The world blurred. For a suspended instant, she felt weightless, hung between sky and earth, between prey and something else entirely.

She held the sharpened branch like a spear.

The beast lifted his head—not expecting her to leap toward him of all things—molten eyes blazing wide for one fractional beat.

And Adelaide drove the spear into him, right into the thick muscle of his back-left shoulder.

The impact jarred her bones. Pain lanced up her arms and into her shoulders, her joints screaming in protest as the force of the blow snapped through her like a lightning strike.

The beast roared—A sound so violent it rattled the trees—and his massive body lurched forward.

Hot, dark blood spurted around the wood, spilling across her hands, searing her skin with its unnatural heat. The force of the strike threw her off-balance, and she rolled off his side, hitting the ground hard and tumbling through leaves and dirt. The world flipped end over end—sky, branches, earth—until she slammed to a stop with every breath punched from her lungs.

She came to a stop on her back, wind knocked clean from her lungs. Her vision shook. Her ribs screamed. Her elbow throbbed where it hit a rock.

But she was alive.

And she stabbed the Devil.

She had stabbed the gods-damned Devil. The realisation cracked through her daze like a bell, sharp and ringing, cutting through the fog of pain with a single, savage clarity.

The beast staggered, massive muscles rippling, claws tearing trenches in the ground as he whipped around. His snarl tore through the clearing like a storm wind, lips curled back to reveal those monstrous teeth.

He reached back with one enormous claw, gripped the wooden spear, and wrenched it from his flesh.

Blood dripped down his fur. Thick. Dark. Almost glowing in the moonlight. Each drop steamed where it hit the frozen earth, tiny curls of shadow-smoke rising up and then vanishing as if swallowed by the night itself.

He looked at the wound, then at her. And something shifted in those burning eyes. Not rage—not entirely. Surprise, perhaps. And something like admiration twisted into fury. It was the look of a hunter who had just discovered that the rabbit had teeth—and had used them.

A low, rumbling growl rolled through his chest, vibrating the ground beneath her hands.

She scrambled up, every muscle screaming as she forced her legs to move. She clenched her scraped palms, feeling the sting, the blood, the grit.

He took a slow step toward her.

She backed away.

Another step, and her heel hit a root. She stumbled but caught herself.

His snarl deepened, but he didn’t lunge—not yet. He was savouring this. Drawing out the space between them like a bowstring, stretching the tension to the point of breaking.

“Come on then,” Adelaide hissed under her breath, voice trembling but sharp. “Come for me.”

His shoulders rolled, massive and shaking with contained fury. He crouched, lowered his head, horns slicing through the air, claws curling into the dirt.

She should have been terrified. She was. But beneath the terror, something brighter surged. Hotter. Sharper.

I hurt him.

He bleeds.

He can be wounded.

Power pulsed through her—thin, fragile, but real. It moved through her veins in time with her heartbeat, a strange, tingling awareness that for all his size and power, he was not untouchable. Not invincible. Not a god.

The beast roared again, the sound ripping across the forest like a living thing.

Adelaide ran. Not blindly this time, with purpose.

Branches whipped across her face. Roots clawed at her feet. Her breath tore from her throat in ragged bursts. But she ran with fire at her back and his roar in her ears, and the knowledge, burning bright in her chest, that she had struck him once.

And she would strike him again. If the forest was going to write a story about this night, it would not only remember the terror. It would remember the girl who leapt from the trees and made the Devil bleed.