Two girls. Two secrets.
Only one can survive.
Years before Nelle Wychthorn plans her escape, Tabitha Catt may unearth something in a Horned God's lair that is the key to freedom.
Desperate to save her beloved aunt from a dark curse, Tabitha is out t...
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A rush of air shivered through my hair as I jumped a rotting tree. Moss and gold lichen grew over its carcass and red-capped toadstools sprouted through blades of grass nearby. Though it had stopped raining half an hour ago, droplets still fell from the canopy above, splashing upon my head and shoulders and running down my forehead in icy rivulets. In the distance came the sounds of creaking trees and croaking frogs and forest animals scuttling through wet leaves.
An hour ago, while my mind reeled from what I was staring at and what it meant, I'd wiped the sticky web from my hand against the furled bark of a tree trunk. The tacky threads tugged and stretched like elastic, eventually releasing their grip on my fingers. A deep sense of foreboding had dragged through my limbs, tainted with fear. Tabitha Catt had webs caught in her hair and on her raincoat. Not spider webs. Krekenn webs.
The forest wasn't their natural habitat either. They preferred dark lairs, like the caverns beneath Ascendria, where prey was easy to find on the rabbit-warren alleyways of the broken underbelly of the city and dragged down to their nests and slowly consumed. So how the fuck did a swarm of krekenns find themselves in the Hemmlok Forsest?
I'd spent the last hour, shivering and wet and miserable, shoving through the forest. My senses picked through the different smells of flora and fauna, trying to detect Tabitha's unique scent, but the rain had poured down harder and washed her trace away, her footprints too. I'd been able to track her path through the forest from the odd broken branch and pink threads from her scarf caught on the thorny tips of stems. Tabitha had traveled even deeper into the forest than where I'd originally found her sitting on a broken tree trunk reading her book.
Briskly rubbing my freezing arms, my teeth chattering, I waded through the bushy tussock. The twisted trees were draped in a blanket of creeping vines, which stretched across the canopy and hid the sky above, but at a spot near a cluster of broadleaved saplings, the wild grasses had been flattened by footsteps.
Squatting down, I pulled back the foliage and found a metal cage hidden behind layers of leaves and thin branches. The reek of dead animals wafted from inside its metal belly. Peering through the crisscross of steel, my gaze landed on a small pile of slitted squirrels and gutted rabbits—the kind of bait that would tempt a fox.
A fucking fox.
I'd already found a snare set up for a rabbit, and two other metal cages. One with fresh slices of apples for opossums, and the other had an egg to entice a hedgehog. It seemed whoever had set the traps, and I was pretty fucking sure it was Tabitha, was after any forest critter small enough to be carried.
A rustling came from the undergrowth and an otherworldly creature, a tiny Brunnie with big bat ears and spindly limbs, peered from beneath the shadows of a sprawling fern, its round eyes glowing a deep russet-orange while it chewed on plump larvae, watching what I was up to.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I ran a hand down my face, swearing low.
Courting Tabitha Catt just got a whole lot fucking harder.
