Page 107 of When the Woods Go Silent

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

TORRENCE

The thud and splintering shriek of trees being torn apart, their sudden scream of pain renting the air around the forest.

That’s what finally surfaces me from my crazed bloodlust.

Ruby.

A bare memory flashes in my raging mind - her sprawled there on the deck, motionless and huge-eyed as I shredded Arlo’s chest and ripped open his stomach. She was here. She saw me do it. She saw me kill someone she thinks is my best friend. She probably saw all the bodies. All the blood. She’s going to be terrified, no matter what explanation I give her.

This whole day has been a fucking disaster, and everything I’ve worked so hard for is gone, just like that.

The restaurant. The gobbelins. Arlo.

How can I come back from this? She’ll never want to see me again.

Then the rage of battle clears a little more, and I remember what Arlo tried to do to her. He tried to kill her. He had his hands around her perfect throat, choking the life from her, and I acted on pure instinct. Against everything I was born into, my gut reaction was to save her, a human, over another gobbelin.

But she ran. She ran from me anyway.

Ruby.

My disoriented brain stutters back to her, and I wheel to where the trees are still wailing. Vaulting over the railing, I land hard on the ground below the deck, running as soon as my feet hit dirt.

I see Ruby’s car, enmeshed in a stand of trees just past the house, where the road bends sharply. It’s nothing more than a hunk of metal now, stabbed through with broken limbs and shredded bark.

Ruby.

Ruby... no.

Can a human survive a crash like this? Their bodies are so fragile. Too fragile. I’ve never cared before.

“Please,” I whisper, although the Goddess doesn’t answer prayers from creatures like me. “Please, let her be alive.”

The trees are a cage around her car, a mass of broken ribs trying to protect the heart I desperately hope is still beating. I have to free her. My hands form claws of ice as I rip at the branches and trunks, breaking the trees’ hold on the mangled car. Is she alive? Is she crushed?

The trees fight back, fighting against me. Protecting her?

They’ve never come alive here before, never wielded their own magic in Clearwater like they can in Haret.

Torn branches stab at my skin from all angles, splinters forcing under my fingernails and sap oozing around my wrists. Slender twigs and garlands of leaves braid together like rope, as the woods wakes up and tightens itself around the car, until I can barely see the glint of metal at all.

My efforts slow with the trees’ screams of pain and rage, as I understand they really are protecting Ruby. Protecting her frommenow.

This realization drains my rage, and I step back instantly, dropping my claws to my sides and struggling to find words in the fae language I barely learned as a child.

Leaning into one of the trees, palms spread in surrender, I whisper a broken plea, again and again. I hope they’re the right words.

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