Page 56 of The Alien's Vicious Starflash Manor

Kila grew quiet, but her wings buzzed anxiously every few moments.

By this time, I had made my way around the house and was once again headed across the back field toward the woods. I had barely made it thirty feet when a voice calling my name drew my attention. “Lara! Wait for me.”

Shit. Fintan. Of course. My shoulders drooped. There was no way I was going to get out of here without talking to him first. He jogged toward me, catching up easily.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” The bull-featured alien carried an axe in one hand and a package of some sort in the other.

“Trying to.”

“It’s dangerous out there,” he warned me.

“Yeah, but now I know where the cemetery is.”

Fintan, having heard me recite the story of my adventure with the undead, snorted. “The Eternal Dreamers aren’t the only dangers out there.”

“But there are dangers here, too. And I can’t keep living like this.”

“Here,” Fintan said, pressing the axe into my hand. “If anyone tries to stop you, tell them I sent you out for kindling for the fireplaces. No Icecaix will know what that entails.”

“Thank you.” My voice caught in my throat a little. I blinked, gratitude rising up in my chest as my eyes welled with tears.

“This, too,” he added, putting the package in my other hand and explaining, “It’s some smoked meat, a little bread. I don’t want you to starve out there.”

I nodded and used the hand that wasn’t holding the axe to give him a one-armed hug around the waist. “Thank you. You’re a good friend.”

He looked a little sad—possibly at that characterization of us as friends? But he didn’t comment on it, merely nodding instead. “Go.” As I turned to walk away, he added, “Be sure to take care of Kila, too.”

The raya poked her head out from behind the hair framing my face and waved cheerfully. “Goodbye, Fintan,” she called out before shivering and ducking back inside the hood as we headed toward the tree line.

Once we reached the woods, I stopped long enough to turn my doubled cloak inside out, putting the green layer on the outside in the hopes of blending into the woods.

I knew the cemetery of the undead was to my left as I faced the forest. So this time I went right, ducking far enough into the tree line so that I was unlikely to be seen, but staying close enough to be able to leave the woods quickly if danger presented itself.

At least, that was the plan. We did move through the forest that way for hours. And we got farther away from Frost Manor that time than I ever had before. I don’t know what we would have found if we’d been able to keep going that night.

But this time, instead of zombie vampires, we found monsters of an entirely different kind.

Kila alternately curled up against my neck to sleep and tried to peek out from inside the hood, peering out from between strands of my hair to see where we were going.

“It all looks the same,” she complained for what seemed like the millionth time.

My fingers and toes first began to ache with the cold, then burn, and finally, they went numb. I trudged through the trees, their snow- and ice-laden evergreen boughs never changing—until the moment I glanced up and realized that the trees were now closer together, growing in more densely packed groves.

At some point, Starfrost Manor had disappeared, its lands gradually turning from open-air fields to lightly wooded land to thick forest.

Kila had fallen asleep, crawling under my sweater and pulling it up around her like a blanket, draping herself across myshoulder with her head in the crook of my neck, her right arm and leg hanging down behind me, the others in front of me.

I didn’t blame her—I was cold, miserable, and tired, too. I began watching for a place to rest, finally finding a tree growing beside a log that had fallen over a dip in the ground, creating a covered hollow protected on three sides, just big enough for me to curl up in.

Not that I had seen or heard anything in these woods that might indicate danger. But it was eerily quiet. Once again, I didn’t hear any birds, no chittering of squirrels or rustling of rabbits. Just cold, unrelenting silence.

I pulled a branch off the log, using it to sweep out the hollow space beneath, worried that something might have made a den in there. The last thing I wanted was to go up against a bunch of angry foxes or something else irritated that I had co-opted their sleeping spot. But there was no indication that anything had ever been inside it other than fallen pine needles.

Once I was certain it was safe—or as safe as anything in this cursed land was—I crawled into the tiny area, leaned back with a sigh of relief to be off my feet, and pulled my knees up to my chest.

I don’t know how long I slept. But several hours later, I jerked out of a light doze, uncertain what had awoken me. It was pitch black outside of my hiding space—not a single ray of moonlight broke through the canopy of trees. I considered checking if I could see more on the other side of my crawlspace, but the thought of stepping out into that blackness sent a chill racing down my back.

That’s when I heard it. It started as a whisper, a susurration of words scraping across each other, hissing out meanings that I couldn’t understand. But as the sounds grew louder, the whispers separated into distinct strands, resolving into lines of meaning. Within seconds, they were circling me, the voicescoming from every direction, calling me by name, letting me know I was neither anonymous nor alone out here.

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