Forsaken by the one person who was supposed to love her unconditionally, Red must brave the magic and monsters of the Wylds to find her true place in the world.
*****
Plague...
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The forest fire sucked the life out of Gretchen's gardens, feasting and fattening on the hearts of trees that had stood sentinel for centuries. It took to the Weavers' webbing with a crackling whoosh that echoed for miles around, going up as brightly and quickly as the dandelion puffs in more tranquil meadows, where the monsters were better practised in the art of masking their true nature. What creatures didn't have the sense or strength to flee suffocated in the bitter smoke, which thickened in their lungs and ravaged the last of their oxygen supply.
Still the Wraith wandered deeper into the hellish labyrinth, nose low to the ground in search of her trail. Flurries of soot and ash stained his fur black, until the only thing that distinguished him from the billowing smoke were two demonic eyes, smouldering like hot coals. His head swam from the radiant heat, his paws blistering as the earth baked beneath his very feet, but still he pressed on.
It was the bitter remains of the poison in her system that called to his senses, standing out above the boiling blood and burning wood of the forest and its denizens. The same poison that deterred the leeches in the Rotten Sea from sucking her dry; that discouraged scavengers from picking her bones clean when she lay stunned in the wake of a stampede. Red had made remarkable progress since she stopped taking that insidious tonic, but he doubted she'd ever fully recover from the long-term effects. Wolfsbane, oleander, hemlock and belladonna - all breaded in the ashwood sawdust he'd seen strewn about the floors of the Witch of the West's workshop. Everything they'd tried to kill her with had become an integral part of her.
Sebastian wondered, when he found the furrows in the dirt that attested to her desperate attempts to claw herself free, if Red had already killed the Weaver that claimed her life. The bloody bits of broken fingernail she'd left him hoping that she hadn't.
He wanted to tear the creature limb from limb himself.
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RED
Watching the Queen Weaver work was mesmerising. She'd relinquished the detachable skirts of her dress and defied gravity by climbing up the translucent steps of the web in her private workroom, until she hung upside down by a single thread of her own making. Since then, she'd called upon all eight of her limbs to weave the silver thread of my mate-bond into hauntingly beautiful patterns that would always elude human hands, cooing over the material like it was a child learning to walk. She had no need for a loom, nor even light to work by, but indulged my curiosity by setting aglow an oil lantern that she'd no doubt pilfered from the corpse of a previous victim. The oily light flickered as the lantern swung back and forth from its place in the web, gently rocked by the Queen's every movement.
