Page 207 of The Demon Tide

He glares at me, his face tightening with a look of brutal resolve. “Todie.”

We journey deeper into the woods, and I catch glimpses of constellations shimmering overhead as I struggle to brace myself to meet my end.

Northwest,I grief-strickenly consider.We’re moving northwest.

A new Dryad has moved into view, talking in low tones with the flower-haired soldier with the branch light, who I’ve named Flora for her graceful ways and surprisingly gentle expression.

The new Dryad doesn’t seem gentle at all. She’s streamlined and muscular, her hue a pale mint, fanning iridescent mushrooms for hair. Green-glowing zigzags mark the sides of the soldier’s face like verdant lightning. She wears pale birch bark armor, two branch-staff weapons strapped to her back, and like the others, she has the imprint of a tree on the palm of her right hand. Her bearing is all compact energy, her expression predatory, a silvery panther slinking beside her. When she glances at me, there is no mercy in her eyes, and I name her Lightning.

Who will be the one to kill me? I dully wonder, bracing myself against the inevitability of my fate.Lightning? Or maybe Pine, which is the name I’ve given to the rangy man with pine-bough hair who seems to be in charge. Or maybe it will be the large, silent, branch-antlered Dryad before me with the bear companion, carrying the front of the net. I’ve named this soldier Sithoy for the huge trees of the West’s Sithoy Forest. And then there’s the brooding Dryad who carries my net’s other end.

This Dryad is like a chill at my back.

I’ve managed a single glimpse of him, but that one look is branded into my mind. He’s a slender, wiry young man with a chiseled, triangular face, his lime-green visage shadowed by the hood of his cloak of dark leaves.

But his eyes.

They’re anchored with dark circles and narrowed with easy malice. And the shadows under his eyes don’t make him look wan and sickly.

No.

They make him look like he swallowed the night whole, and he practically radiates the potential for violence. Wooden blades are strapped all over his black-clad body, and I’ve named him Darkness. Perhaps he’ll be the one to kill me, I consider. Or maybe it will be the acorn-decorated, furious young woman with the staff who can’t seem to stop striking me. I’ve named her Vicious.

I’m sure Flora won’t be the one to kill me. Not her. She glances at me, her gaze riddled with conflict. And then, sorrow ripples over her expression. It undoes me, breaking my tightly held grief apart as I murmur the names of the loved ones I’ll never see again—

Rafe. Trystan. Lukas. Yvan. Tierney. Diana. Aislinn. Or’myr...

My captors slow to a stop.

Two huge Black Oak trees stand before us, the branches of their crowns entwined.

Pine stalks forward. He grabs one of the branches sheathed at his waist, murmurs a windswept line of their language, and swipes the branch between the two trees in a circular motion. Wind begins to swirl, leaves and dead brush caught up in the gust’s circular flow, faster and faster, until there’s a blurred but perfectly formed oval between the trees.

The scene in the center of the oval wavers, then mists over, and I’m swamped by a caustic sense of Vogel’s surprise.A portal, I realize. A sense of staggering finality drops down through my soul. Because I know that wherever it leads is where I’ll meet my end.

Pine glares at me over his shoulder, then motions everyone forward as the Forest’s ire pulses like an executioner’s drumbeat.Black Witch. Black Witch. Black Witch.

I steel myself as I’m carried through the swirling wind and the portal closes around me.

CHAPTER TWO

III

Elloren Vogel

Northern Forest

The Dryad soldiers carry me through the portal into a predawn forest, the surrounding leaves shifting from steely black to a paler gray in my Shadow vision. Despite their altered color, the enormous trees have the distinctive crenelated bark I’d recognize anywhere.

Ironwood.

They loom over me, their hulking forms struck by furious recognition—Black Witch!

Loathing bears down with suffocating weight as their elemental force rushes in around my corrupted affinity lines.

Vogel’s venom unfolds. My lines tense of their own accord and I shudder, my Shadowfire aura blasting out at the Forest so violently, its catapulted force has me gasping. The energy of the mammoth trees gives a collective recoil, a frisson of horror rippling through them that’s so potent the air seems to waver from it.

The Fae steal an alarmed glance at the Forest canopy before their gazes swing to me, clearly reading the Forest’s punch of emotion. Flora locks eyes with Pine, her lips trembling as she says something impassioned to him in their leafy tongue. Pine knifes a murderous glare at me, his green face twisting with a look of outrage. “III is going to destroy you, demon witch,” he seethes, “before you can make one move toward our Forest.”

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