Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

8: Rapunzel

The cows, which had been dozing off in the safety of numbers, sprang to nervous attention, knocking hips and shoulders in a sudden scramble to get up and away from the noxious thing that inhabited my stepfather. Gracie's eye fell briefly back in the direction of the disturbance as  her calf gamboled back into the wooded depths. For just a moment, maybe I'd imagined it, I thought I glimpsed my reflection in her soft brown eyes. 

And then Akta's grip tightened.

The briefest of thoughts crossed my mind in bursts of crimson. What? How? How could this be real? How could he be here? How could he...?

My fingers dug into the sleeve of Ajax's coat, scraped desperately at the unyielding grip of the possessed man. Him, or the thing that had taken control of him, was all I knew in that moment. All I knew was the dizzying kick of my uplifted feet and the snake-like way the skin of Ajax's wrist peeled beneath my clawing nails.

"What have you done, you bitch?" he spat. With an easy heft he slammed my back against the trunk of the tree. I couldn't respond to him, couldn't do more than grunt and kick and claw. "What have you done?"

There was a voice in the distance, an echo on the wind, a sharp but stern cry that broke through my fading senses.

My name.

My mother.

Ajax turned his head. His grip, however, was unyielding. "You can't help her," he hissed, then turned those dead eyes onto mine. "I've got your scent now. You can't run."

Heavy boughs of pine swung against my shoulder. The brilliant gleam of evergreen snow slipped into the black beyond. I shut my eyes, opened them again to darkness. And there was nothing in that darkness, nothing but the burning squeeze of fire around my throat, and then, that too had faded. A spotlight flickered with frenetic intensity, a warning light over the bruised curves of a sleeping woman. I could see myself, prone on the cold stone of the tower, fingertips twitching with blue frost, feet kicking, wheezing in the throws of distant death.

I ran towards her, myself, me, stretched through the pulsating darkness, stretched for those flexing, hoary fingertips.

The warning flickered brighter, quicker, back as night to blinding.

Light. Dark. Light. Dark.

A few more beats and I'd have her, a few more steps and I'd be free.

Light.

The pathway through the astral plane let another squeeze through its transient gaps. I didn't see it until the last step, the flash of spired antlers. A sharp, sudden sensation, firm as a dull punch, nailed the base of my spine. Momentum cease. I looked down, caught the boney as it retreated from my side. The great stag, his face a twisted wreck of inhumanity, mouth split in a fanged smile, thrust his head forward with a vicious snort.

I fell purposefully, felt the hard cut of hooves against my shoulder. The deer, his footsteps echoing like thunder across a black mirror, trampled several yards ahead before realizing he'd missed. But it was too late then. I'd picked myself up, one hand clutching my stomach, and bolted for the girl.

Blood bubbled up through her mouth. Her throat was raw and blistered. An unseen wound bled through the King's cloak, bled and crystallized the second it touched the stone floor.

The stag screamed, an ear-piercing shriek.

I remembered smiling. The next time I fell, I landed, hard, into the girl's pain. I awoke with a choked gasp of awareness, surged upright with a heartbeat that leaped so high into my throat I couldn't breathe again. I bent double, the hot squirt of blood trickling down my quivering stomach. In the wake of Akta's furious screams, the cavernous silence of the tower was a welcome oblivion, the pain of my body a necessary evil.

You survive. You get through it. You've had worse.

I told myself these things over and over, but some lies you tell to yourself are harder to swallow than others. When this all started, I'd barely known who I wanted to be, let alone who I was. Now I didn't even know what I was.

That was a lie, too. I knew what I was: a half demon.

And even though I was terrified for myself and others, some deep down part of me remembered the first cut Chiro had made on my arm. And it enjoyed the pain, just as it'd enjoyed tonight's jolt of kissing an electric wire.

I flexed the frosted breadth of my hands.

Half-demon.

Turned on-in some ways, quite literally-by pain.

The moon had risen, or perhaps had never set. I wasn't sure. Light of a pale ivy strain filtered through the window, illuminated the bloody trail I made dragging myself to the sill. The King's cloak crackled with ice as I pushed it against the gaping wound. I couldn't lift myself to look outside, just sat huddled beneath the shadowed overhang, wondering what would happen if I just climbed over that edge and jumped.

Under the lightening sky, wincing, I was able to shake off the frozen cloak and climb into the window ledge, perch there with one hand on my knee, thinking, wondering at the long plunge into the forest.

What would happen? If this was my second life, where was next?

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel," croaked a gravelly voice from down below.

I scoured the treeline, leaned as far out as I dared. The branches of a large oak shivered. There was something down there, climbing them, something pale and glazed with iridescence. Apelike limbs of raw sinew pulled the horned creature's head through the canopy. Tiny, glittering green eyes flashed up at me.

"Won't you let down your hair?"

I watched it a few minutes more, balancing its weight with deft precision on the thin branches, then dropped back inside the tower. I fished around for the jagged, bloodstained hunk of pottery I'd pulled from my body the other night, and set to sharpening it on the stone.