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

black. Milky eyes, a howling mouth. Behind it, fog shifted around a white tree with dark rot climbing its trunk.

The creature gave a low laugh, tripping up a discordant scale, and raised its clawed fingers before slashing down.

Another shadowed rush of leaves and branches. Her eyes saw only the tower again. Red’s mouth opened and closed on a choked sound as she clutched her stomach, sure she’d feel viscera spilling warm and slippery.

But it wasn’t her facing a monster. It was Eammon. Eammon, the vision of him even stronger than it’d been before.

The thread bond made her magic easier to wield— at least in theory, when she wasn’t utterly frozen by bloody memories. Apparently, it gave them other abilities, too. Tied them so tightly together that she could see through his eyes.

See that something was terribly, horribly wrong.

“Are you all right?” Fife arched a brow.

“I . . .” She didn’t know how to articulate what she’d seen. Past or present? Future? The parameters of this new bond between them were entirely alien. “I saw Eammon. Eammon getting hurt, hurt by something . . . something dark . . .”

Fife’s eyes went wide and worried. “You saw him?”

“It’s happened before.” She didn’t know quite how to explain it, so she didn’t try. Red stood quickly, her chair toppling behind her. “I have to go.”

“Absolutely not.” Fife’s head shook so vehemently, his hair stuck up. “Eammon said—”

“I can’t just leave him.” Shadowed forest-shapes still edged in at the corners of her eyes, sharp twigs and climbing vines. In her chest, power swirled, growing up and out, making the already-overgrown ivy on the table quiver. “It was real, Fife, just like last time. I have to do something.”

His brow furrowed with an emotion she couldn’t quite identify. Finally, Fife sighed, standing. “Fine.” He turned to jog down the stairs. “But when Eammon wants to know whose idea it was, don’t expect me to save your ass.”

The Wilderwood was eerily still as Red and Fife made their way between the trees, its attention drawn elsewhere. Fog stretched sinuous fingers into the lavender sky, threading between mostly bare branches.

“Northwest, since they came from the Edge,” Fife murmured, following a compass in his head. “And probably close by.” His teeth flashed. “Kings-shitting stupid Valdrek.”

Red barely heard him. She pushed through the undergrowth, weaving around thorns and catches of leaves, her focus singular— Find Eammon.

As far as what she could do once she found him . . . that, she wasn’t quite sure of yet.

Sentinel trees scattered along their path, tall and pale. Black rot climbed them all, sometimes only at the roots, sometimes past Red’s knees. She could smell it when they came close— empty and cold, ozonic. The ground around them was solid, for now, but she couldn’t keep from wondering how long that would hold. When they’d come loose from whatever magic moored them in place and show up at the Keep, a silent sign for Eammon to either spill more blood or risk tipping his internal scale further into forest.

A sound ripped through the quiet. A roar.

Fife met her eyes. Simultaneously, they broke into a run.

Branches whipped past, Red barely avoiding their sharp ends, still remembering Eammon’s rule, the only one he seemed intent on her keeping—don’t bleed where the trees can taste it. Labored breath a harsh bellows in her throat, the thrash of Fife’s feet through the underbrush making a metronome. Don’t bleed don’t bleed don’t bleed.

Voices up ahead, curses made ethereal by layers of fog. Possibilities flickered through her mind and lent her speed— Eammon wounded, Eammon gored, Eammon dying in puddles of leaf-flecked blood.

But when she reached him, Eammon was whole. Whole and snarling.

He stood with his back to them, arms outstretched, precisely cut slashes in both palms leaking green-chased scarlet down his wrists. Before him, a sentinel listed to the side, covered in black rot, on the verge of collapse. Roots slashed through rotten dirt, the slow-spreading ring of darkness like a seeping wound. Bloody handprints marked the ground, and there the edge of infection receded, barely. Already, the small amount of forest floor Eammon had managed to clear was rotting again.

Instinctively, Red took a step back, colliding with a warm figure. At first, she thought it was Fife. But the arm attached to the hand clapping over her mouth was clad to the wrist in gray leather vambraces.

“Quiet,” an unfamiliar voice hissed in her ear.

Red didn’t need the directive. The creature stalking back and forth across the rotting sentinel’s roots, as if guarding it, stole any speech from her throat.

“Wolf-snarls, small snarls, snarled in the trees.” The thing might’ve been a man, once, and that made it worse. The way he moved was wrong, low and lurching, on legs with knees bent backward. His shirt hung open at the arm, a long, dark slash marking his swollen bicep. Shadow crawled from the wound, inched over his skin, rotting it as surely as it rotted the ground. “Saw the shadows,” he singsonged, pacing back and forth. “Saw the shadows and the things in the shadows, and the things in the shadows have teeth.”

Eammon’s bloody fingers twitched, trying to call forth branch and thorn. The whites of his eyes shaded greener, veins in his neck turning verdant, but other than a bare twitch of the underbrush, the Wilderwood didn’t answer.

Blood and magic, both running thin.

A fractioned moment where the look on his face was close to helpless. Then, with a snarl, Eammon sliced into his palm again.

“Why aren’t you helping him?” Red tried to lunge forward, her whisper slashing through the air, but whoever held her had an iron grip. “Help him!”

“What do you want us to do, girl?” the voice behind her hissed. “Our blood won’t do shit for the Wilderwood, and we don’t need someone else getting shadow-infected.”

Her eyes darted, searching for Fife. He stood slightly behind her, among others clad in green and gray, blending into the colors of the dying forest. These must