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

settled back into the places she’d made for it. It didn’t speak again. But she had a strange sense of something decided.

And whatever it was, it meant the forest would leave Eammon be. For now.

Slowly, Eammon and the Wilderwood untangled, as much as they were able. Root tendrils seeped out of his arms, back into the ground, leaving bloody gashes in their wake. He shuddered, coughing up dirt against her knees. Two circles of bark braceleted his wrists, showed no sign of fading— another permanent change the forest left, like that extra inch of height, like the green threads in the whites of his eyes.

But he was her Eammon again.

Red slumped next to him, her forehead falling against his. A moment, and Eammon shifted away, though the movement felt heavy, unwilling. “How’d you find me?”

“Vision.” Her hands shook without his skin to steady them. “How did this happen?”

He stood, knees watery. “I healed them all.”

It took her a moment to catch his meaning. When she did, her eyes widened, going from his face to the bloodless, green-tinged slashes on his palms, his arms, his chest.

Every gap where a sentinel should be, gone. And when he’d run out of blood, he’d called forest. Called the Wilderwood’s magic until it nearly crowded him out.

“Why?” she asked hoarsely. “Why would you do that?”

He didn’t look at her. “So when you return to Valleyda, you have no reason to come back.”

Red’s cloak weighed on her shoulders like stones. “No,” she said, because it was the only thing her mouth could shape. “No, that doesn’t make sense. I have to come back, you need—”

“I don’t need you.” It would’ve been cold, had his voice not shaken. “I took care of the Wilderwood on my own for a century. I can do it again, I can take it without falling. I can be stronger.”

Stronger than Ciaran. Stronger than the man who’d started this long string of death and roots and rot, whom the forest had drained when he was left alone.

“I gave it what it needed. Cut deep enough, deeper than I thought I could. I can be enough alone.” Eammon’s hands curled, the slashes in them bloodless, dripping only sap and edged with green. “This proves I was only being weak.”

“And what happens when it needs that again? Eammon, it almost had you. It almost took you, made you . . .” She didn’t know what it had almost made him, not really. Something that wasn’t human, but he hadn’t ever been one, had he?

A monster, maybe.

“It took them,” he said. “Every Second Daughter. It only left me because it knew it needed someone living.” He held up his hand, flexed his blood-and-sap-covered fingers. “I can live. No matter what it makes me.”

“Stop it. You can’t just—”

“There’s nothing for you here, Red!” Eammon loomed like the trees around them, shadowed and severe. “Your sister is stealing the sentinels so you can escape, right? So do it. Escape.” His hand cut through the air as he turned away. “Be free of me with a clear conscience.”

“Free of you? Is that what you think I want?” She swallowed, then tugged at the edge of her cloak, pulling it around so the twilight caught the golden embroidery. “Is that what you want?”

A muscle in his back tremored under the dirt and sap-like blood. Eammon looked at the cloak, something deep and unfathomable in his eyes, then turned his face away. “It doesn’t matter what I want.”

“What are you doing?” It sounded broken, it sounded like a plea, but she had no more steel left for it.

There’s nothing for you here.

Eammon still faced the trees, as if the sight of them shored his resolve. “I am trying,” he said, almost a prayer, “to do what’s best for you.”

“Horseshit.” Frustrated tears blurred her vision; Red savagely wiped them away. “Horseshit. You don’t get to decide what’s best for me, Eammon.”

He flinched.

“Why?” It came out shivery, the ghost of a question she’d been asking for weeks. “Why do you insist on being alone when I am right here?”

His answer came quiet. “Alone is safer for both of us.”

“You can’t just—”

“I killed them.”

It was snarled through bared, wolf-like teeth; he’d turned like a predator. On instinct, she took a step back.

“The Wilderwood drained the others because I didn’t hold it back.” Fierceness was in every line of his frame, but he couldn’t hide his eyes— they were lost, they were hollow, they were glad she’d backed away. “I let myself be weak, I didn’t bear it alone, and it killed them. Shadows damn me if I let it happen to you.”

Red’s head shook, a slow, sorrowful back and forth.

His hand cut toward the mass of gleaming white at the base of that tall sentinel with the scarred bark. The thing she’d seen in her vision, when she peered through his eyes, the thing she’d been too panicked to examine closely. Now her gaze followed his hand, and the shapes were impossible not to recognize.

Bones. Bones tangled in roots, in vines. Three rib cages, three skulls, a chaos of others she didn’t know the names for.

What was left of the Second Daughters.

Eammon’s voice was hoarse and rasping. “Don’t you want to escape now, Red?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

A ir was a slippery thing, too thin to hold in her lungs. Red’s hands opened and closed on her cloak. He’d told her what happened to the others, to Kaldenore and Sayetha and Merra, but seeing it struck her cold, an icy chill of fear that ran from her temples and slowly down her spine.

Eammon turned away, shoulders a hunched ridge. “Go.” He rubbed a weary hand over his face, smearing blood. “Please, go.”

“No.” Red grabbed Eammon’s hand, laced her fingers tightly with his, pressing their palms together and daring him to pull away. “Tell me what happened to them. Exactly what happened, no more half answers.” Her nails bit into his skin, and she thought of myths and how they made terrible