For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten (freda ebook reader .txt) 📕

her skin. She screamed, pain and fear ripping through the silent forest.

“Redarys!”

Eammon stumbled up from the ground, legs unsteady, like whatever he’d been doing at the edge of the shadow-pit had left him a husk. Panic shone in his eyes, the whites of them once again tinted green, the veins in his fingers blazing emerald as he fumbled for the dagger at his belt. “Hold on, I—”

The Wilderwood drowned him out, shrilling triumphantly in a voice of cracking branches. The vines shackling Red opened new blooms, wide and pale in the unnatural twilight; the leaves beneath her blushed from faded autumn to summer-bright as her veins ran green and her mouth filled with the taste of earth. The splinter of magic in her middle grew up and out, stretching greedily toward the hungry white trees.

She thought of Gaya, root-riddled, consumed. Kaldenore, Sayetha, Merra, three more this forest had drained. It’d take what it needed and damn what was left, unless she found a way to stop it, to contain it, to cut it off—

With an inner strength born of distilled panic, Red took hold of the magic rushing out of her and snapped.

The forest exploded outward with a bone-rattling boom. Roots and branches and thorns skittered as Red shoved her magic down. It was painful, this denying, making herself a cage for a wild thing, but still she pushed it away, hiding it deep. Bound, banished, slashed off like her will was a knife.

The dirt-taste faded from her tongue; the veins in her wrist ran from verdant green to blue. The Wilderwood screamed, one more keening sound, then was silent.

She expected desolation when her eyes opened, but there was none, no torn limbs or felled trees. The Wilderwood stood still as a stunned animal. Red pushed up on shaky legs, dirt falling from her torn skirt, from her borrowed coat.

Eammon’s eyes were wide, the dagger held loose and forgotten in his hand. “What was that?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know, not when I just saw you try to use it.” The way his veins greened was near a mirror to hers. “Power. Power from this fucking forest. You were there when I got it. You were there when . . . when it took hold of me, that night. I saw you.”

The panic in Eammon’s eyes bloomed slowly into horror. “No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I . . . I tried to stop it, I thought I stopped it from—”

A deep rumble cut him off, coming from the white roots cutting through rotten ground. It struck them both into silence, eyes locking to the tree.

“Shit.” Eammon flipped the dagger around in his fist, shoving her behind him with the other hand. “Shit.”

He didn’t go to the edge of the breach again, didn’t try to call up whatever arcane forest magic he’d used before. Instead he sliced into his palm, a moment of such nonchalant and unexpected violence that Red flinched.

But he wasn’t fast enough.

The edges of the shadow-pit receded with unnatural quickness, like water draining from the bottom of a pierced bowl. Rot drained into the tree roots, turning them pitch-dark, climbing up the white trunk and covering it almost completely in churning corruption.

Eammon lunged toward the tree, bleeding fist outstretched. But before he could reach it, the last bit of darkness drained from the dirt into the roots, and the ground around them erupted. Sharp twigs and leaves shot into the air, all tinged with shadowy black, throwing Eammon backward and away from the trunk as rot surged up almost to the branches.

Red crouched, arms thrown protectively over her head. The tree, now fully rotted, slowly began to sink into the ground.

Around them, the rest of the Wilderwood watched, still and silent and somehow mournful.

With the same terrible, unnatural quickness, the shadow-touched forest detritus cobbled itself together, knitting a body out of ruin. Old bones tugged free of the forest floor, some animal, some human, some too strange-shaped to be either, all corrupted with threads of shadow that seeped up from the roots of the sinking tree.

This was it, Red knew, in the quiet part of her mind that seemed to float above her fear. Here was the shadowed monster from the fairy tale, facing off against a man changed by a forest. It was real, all of it was real.

When the chaotic roiling of bones and darkness and growing things stopped, a woman stood in its place.

Her hair was long and dark, her eyes an acidic emerald. She smiled, and mushrooms sprouted between her teeth. “You think this time will be any different?” The voice sounded nothing like a human. It was deep and somehow creeping, oscillating in the air, the lowest string plucked on an untuned harp. “This story has played out over and over again. It’s such fun watching from below, but it always comes to the same conclusion. You aren’t strong enough, Wolf-pup. Just like your father.”

Eammon bent half double, his seeping hand pressed against his battered ribs, the other brandishing the still-bloody dagger toward the creature. His breath rattled in and out of his lungs, his teeth glinting in the unchanging twilight.

The forest-and-shadow woman moved the blade aside with an almost-gentle finger, careful not to touch his blood. Lichen grew from her nailbeds. “It gets harder and harder to hold on to yourself, doesn’t it? The magic crowds you out, so you open a vein instead. But you can’t bleed enough to hold it off forever. Can’t bleed enough to keep the Shadowlands closed, can’t bleed enough to keep everything trapped.” The thing turned its eyes toward Red, soil dripping like tears down moss-scabbed cheeks. “This ends in roots and bones. For all of you. It always ends in roots and bones.”

Suddenly the specter of the girl changed. In an instant, she was prostrate on the ground, the terrible pieces that made her hidden away. Instead she looked like a corpse, the regular corpse of a young woman.

Red recognized her, though it took