Page 21 of Hunted By Wolves and Shadow
“It’s the curse,” I said finally. I might as well be frank with her. She should know what we’re up against before I try to convinceher to help me. “Anyone who steps foot into Aglonbriar Forest—anyone who isn’t a witch, that is—”
“I’m not a witch and neither was my grandma, you cream-brained loon.” She snarled the insult to my intelligence with a curled lip.
I’d had enough. “Better a loon than a self-absorbed fool, looking through glass eyes, seeing only what suits you. No one is this naive,Emerald. Your sweet grandma’s curse has ruined more lives than a foison horde, yet you’d rather hurl insults than see truth. Open your eyes.”
“I—I…” she spluttered, too shocked to respond.
I forged on because she needed to hear this. “Anyone who enters loses themselves.” I tapped my head with one finger. “Nothing left. No past, no family, no names, no memories of our lives. We must have existed before the days we each awoke in this forest, but whatever—whoever—we were before is gone. I’ve watched it happen to people we couldn’t warn away in time. By the time we could talk to them, they didn’t remember walking into our woods, even though we saw it happen. This is all we know; the Mist and the beasts. So that’s what we name ourselves.”
“You lost your memory?”
Was that a hint of sympathy?Nah. “Yep. Every one of us.”
“I don’t understand. If the Mist is doing something to you, why don’t you leave?”
“And miss the chance to meet lovely little witches like you, bent on killing me? What fun would that be?”
She growled at me. It was frustratingly adorable.
“We can’t, growly kitten. Once the Mist claims someone, they’re trapped. And not the fun, sexy kind of trapped like you and me being stuck in this tiny cottage together with nothing but our body heat to keep us—Whoa, easy.” I sidestepped andretreated from a furious Emi storming forward. Feisty kitty. Knew I shouldn’t have let her keep that knife.
“Everything out of your mouth is lies, isn’t it?”
“Okay, no more jokes. But no, I’ve never lied to you. I might have withheld the truth at first, but I’m being honest. Well, except about needing body heat, because we do have a fire.”
She looked like she might throw the knife at my head. Again. Still, there was a flicker of doubt in those sharp green eyes that I could take advantage of. I needed her to listen long enough for me to turn this into a partnership, however forced.
“I mean that we physically can’t leave.” I leveled my gaze with hers. “Have you ever had your skin flayed off your body by molten metal blades while your muscles pull themselves from your bones and ice picks stab into your brain through your eye sockets? No? Lucky you.
“Taking more than a few steps out of Aglonbriar Forest results in a pain so all-consuming, only people who’d rather die even try it. The curse stole our pasts and our lives. It left us as nothing more than monsters and slaves to the Mist.”
The only times we got to be ourselves was in rare places where the Mist left a clearing. Playing to any scraps of sympathy Emi might feel, I told her a bit about the enclave and the group of us who called it home, trying to emphasize how we’d become a family, all of us just trying to live and fight off the inevitable end for as long as possible. The ever-present edge of madness called to us constantly, every heartbeat of every day, and we couldn’t resist the pull of those white tendrils dragging us back for long.
The knife dropped slowly to her side as she listened.
“Fine,” she said when I was done. “I’ll make omelettes. But only because I’m hungry.”
Chapter 10
Emi
Ihated him. That toad-bellied snake had shut himself in the bedroom again, and I was spending another night on the couch stewing in my own thoughts. For the third night in a row, the oaf had bested me and stolen a claim to the bed while I was occupied—this time, because I’d really needed to bathe.
Wolf had spent the rest of the day after our confrontation ducking outside whenever I was in the house, and returning whenever I emerged into the clearing. It felt like chasing my own shadow. While I’d been in the garden, he’d snuck inside to eat the omelet I’d burned for him on purpose, and then washed all the dishes like some weirdly courteous criminal. The moment I’d returned, he went slinking out the front door without a word. Slippery sneak.
Now he was hidden away again behind that infuriating closed door. I supposed it was for the best. I still hadn’t organized my thoughts about his explosive claims earlier, despite my mind churning all day.
The Mist had showed up when I was a babe, and since then, there had always been rumors of its origin and tales of peoplevanishing in the forest, never to be seen again. If Wolf could be believed, there was truth to those stories.
None of that forgave his cold-blooded murder of Grandma Ruby.
None of it changed the burning pit of grief and anger churning inside me.
But all day, my thoughts wandered to the other people he’d mentioned, curious to know if they would tell the same story. I’d been coming and going from Aglonbriar Forest since I could walk the path to Grandma’s house on my own, and I’d always returned unharmed. I wasn’t cursed.
Then again, Wolf said it was the Mist that claimed them, not the forest itself, and the path had always been clear for me before. This time, though, Mist had wrapped itself about my ankles, and still, I was fine.
And then there was the rest of it.
