Page 7 of The Tree of Spirits
It was quiet. So very quiet.
The path was dirty and uneven. What must have once—very recently—been a sea of gurgling mud, had since dried and hardened, settling into a rigid but brittle crust. As I ran, the ground crunched and cracked under my shoes.
A low, eerie moan cut through the silent day—and through my thoughts. The Cursed Ones. They were so very close. I could hear their heavy footsteps, snapping and slurping, like a meat hammer hitting a wet piece of flesh.
And then I saw them. The tattered clothes and shredded shoes. The pale, ghostly skin, tattooed with black veins. The behemoth bodies, staggering down the trail, every movement choppy and ungraceful. They might have been really strong, but they were also really clumsy, like teenagers who’d suddenly grown too fast and didn’t know the boundaries of their own bodies anymore.
Then they just stopped, all at once. Their cold red eyes locked on to me. One of them snarled.
“You’re afraid of me, remember?” I said quietly.
One of them lifted its nose in the air and took a few short sniffs.
“I swear, I’m not tasty at all,” I said in a calm, level voice.
My heart, on the other hand, was thundering like a racehorse in my chest. I hoped they couldn’t hear it.
The other six Cursed Ones lifted their noses in the air and started to sniff too.
Beside me, Wolf whimpered.
“I’m totally not worth biting,” I told the Cursed Ones, not at all expecting my argument to persuade them.
But, somehow, it did. Or at least it seemed to. Because the next moment, all seven of them turned away from me and disappeared into the woods.
“Thank goodness,” I said with a sigh, sliding to a stop at the edge of the woods.
The wind let out a mighty howl.
I turned my gaze up to the sky. It was growing darker by the second.
“Let’s hurry,” I said to Wolf. “The storm is almost here.”
The wind howled again, louder, deeper. The forest started shaking. Something whistled in my ears, then a branch split off from its trunk. It whipped through the air like a javelin, just barely missing me.
The sky quaked.
The earth howled.
The wind sliced.
Another broken branch shot toward me.
And this one didn’t miss.
It whacked me hard in the stomach, like a baseball bat, throwing me off my feet. I smashed into a large tree, and the world went dark.
Sometime later, I woke up on the hard ground, my ears humming, my head throbbing. I must not have been out for long because everything was in the exact same place as before, right down to the gnarled branch that had whacked me like I was a piñata at a children’s birthday party.
I struggled to my feet, swaying to the side when a wave of dizziness smothered me. My hands slammed against the trunk of a nearby tree, but at least I remained standing.
The humming in my ears was replaced by something far more sinister. A beastly growl.
I scanned the surroundings for any signs of the Cursed Ones, but they were long gone. The source of the growling wasn’t a monster; it was a dog.
“Wolf!” I exclaimed as the husky bounded toward me.
She barked.
