by Brea Viragh
I grabbed an old jacket draped over a lawn chair and wrapped it around my waist, pushing away from the sagging porch toward the lean-to at the corner of the property. “From what you say, the way the town has forgotten about him, I owe it to him to try,” I insisted.
Didn’t I?
“You’re going to fight your way up the mountain at night?”
“I will once you tell me the way.”
She knew she didn’t have an option. My mind was made up. Patricia told me the general direction to the castle, at the end of a trail I’d started down many times, one leading directly up into the mountains farther than the eye could see. I knew most of the way by heart, I assured myself. If I’d been there before, then I should have no problem returning, though I battled the dusk and the coming of night.
We had managed to keep our old gelding Rudy after the move from our estate, even when feeding a horse pushed the boundaries of our pocketbook. I hadn’t been able to part with him, a last gift from my father before he succumbed to illness.
That too I remembered.
“Reila, slow down.” Behind me, Patricia labored to keep up.
But I was on a mission. Rudy stuck his head out of the old shed at the sound of our voices, chewing on a pile of hay. With a swift pat on his nose, I slipped through the half door to gather his bridle and prepare him for the ride. I didn’t need to bother with a saddle. Not when he responded beautifully to my unspoken commands.
Patricia trailed me, watching as I slipped the bridle over Rudy’s head, the leather reins lying across his butter-yellow hide.
“Nothing I can say is going to change your mind, is it?” she put in quietly. “You’re dead set on going. Tonight.”
“You won’t change my mind, no.” Then, hating myself for the harshness of that word, I turned to my mother with a sigh. “This is going to eat me alive until I see for myself. Do you not understand the severity of what I’ve done?”
I didn’t understand what I’d done. And maybe that was the worst part. Maybe that’s why the need to go tonight rested heavily on me. Heavily enough I’d brave the dark to travel to a castle I’d never seen.
One I didn’t remember seeing, I mentally corrected. I must have been there at some point.
Patricia drew the edges of her sweater tighter around her midsection in an attempt to keep calm. “It was a long time ago. Long enough to be someone else’s problem. Think about this. Do you really believe if Merek is still there he’ll take kindly to seeing you? He could hurt you, kill you even.”
“Yes, it’s been years, which means I’ve wasted enough time.” Gritting my teeth, I led the horse out of the shed and hoisted myself up, settling on Rudy’s back until I found my seat.
Patricia walked forward enough to rest her hand on the horse’s flank. Stared up at me. Pleading with me to reconsider.
“You don’t know where you’re going and you’ll lose the light soon. This is a poor idea, Reila, and one I cannot find any justification in. Do not go. Please.”
“I’ll find my way,” I said with a confidence I wasn’t sure I felt. “Trust me, Momma.” A hand went to my heart. “I have to do this. Okay?”
She stared up at me for a moment longer before bowing her head, chin dropping to her chest. “I understand how that feels. I’ll tell your brother you had to leave for an emergency. But come back to us. Soon.”
“I will. Give him a kiss goodnight for me.”
She would understand, I knew, because after Dad died, she’d done everything in her power to try and keep my brother and me away from the horrors of his disease, as well as the loss of our income and fortune. She’d tried to pretend like things were normal, things were fine, pushing through to keep the two of us in a protective cocoon instead of giving in to her grief.
The way she should have been able to, had it not been for—
Me.
I remembered bits and pieces of her struggle, our struggle, yet so much of my history remained a mystery to me. Perhaps tonight I’d finally find out why.
“I’ll come back to you both, okay? I won’t be gone too long. But I have to at least try. I won’t be able to rest until I take the first step,” I said, reining in Rudy to keep him steady.
“Then be safe and return swiftly.”
I dropped low, tightening my grip around Rudy’s barrel-like body, to place a kiss on the top of Patricia’s head. “Be good. No smoking while I’m gone. I’ll know.”
I left her with the gentle warning as I dug in my heels. A cluck of my tongue had Rudy taking off out of the backyard and along the quiet confines of the meadow to our rear.
Dark trunks of maple and oak rose into the blue and violet hush of sky. Rudy knew his way along these trails, had taken them thousands of times with me when I needed space. When I found it was quite impossible to lose myself in the pages of a book no matter how hard I tried.
A deep forest surrounded the town of Bellmare on three sides, a tempestuous sea on the fourth. It kept us isolated. It kept us safe, or so I’d believed. I admit I’d never given a thought to who ruled our little country. Government didn’t have any effect on my life. On my day to day activity.
Now that I thought about it, how strange it felt to have no knowledge of those in power, content to live in ignorance. In my defense, I’d been dead set on researching how to find my lost memories to take an interest in much else.
I finally felt I’d taken a step in a productive direction tonight. At least I knew these woods. Since moving into the cottage, I’d taken to walking or riding the forest paths and now they were as familiar to me as the back of my hand.
Fields led into the darkness of the trees and the land slowly ascended. The horse’s hooves clopped along the rocky ground and I focused on the sound, paying attention to the surroundings. The rest of the town dropped off until the slanted roofs and stone buildings grew small. Hardly anyone was out at this time of evening.
Sunset came and went, leaving me in navy and violet shadows, and I urged Rudy to keep up the pace as we moved ever higher. The trails leading up the mountainside were small and overgrown from disuse but I had the distinct impression I’d come this way before. I didn’t remember, didn’t know how long it would take to reach the castle.
I simply knew we would.
“Good boy,” I said to the horse in gentle tones. “Keep going, now. You’re doing wonderfully. It’s only a little further and then you can rest.”
Keeping my chin defiantly tilted up, we left the town behind and made our way forward. As much as I hated the idea of leaving home, I hated more the idea of someone in pain because of me.
I wasn’t the same girl who had cursed the prince. No, she wasn’t a girl, but a witch. A witch now dressed in loose pants and her father’s old shirt which was much too large for her. A witch who had turned a man into a monster by the mere force of her thoughts.
It frightened me.
Somehow, I could not get the image of the witch I used to be and the image of myself in the mirror this morning to merge. To me, they seemed to be two different people.
The horse whickered and his muscles tensed beneath my legs. Pulling him to a halt, I glanced around the navy twilight.
“What’s the matter, Rudy?” I asked out loud, slipping from his back and giving him a reassuring pat on the neck. “It’s okay. You’re okay, boy.”
It didn’t take long for both of us to figure it out. Rudy shook his head and backed down the trail as the first of the creatures slunk from between two tree trunks. More followed.
The nearest beast turned to me with serpentine eyes. I lunged for the horse, for the jacket I’d brought and the knife held within the left zippered front pocket. Five shadows slipped through the oak trees, dark and silent, like someone had plucked the night sky down and given it form.
“Hello, little girl.”
The hissed voice shot straight to my marrow.
This was a creature I had never seen before. One that had slipped through nightmares into the phy
sical realm to rend and tear, to slaughter mortals like me. One I should have been prepared to kill if I’d been smarter, faster.
Huge slitted eyes greedily took me in. The creature paused across the clearing, and I trained my knife on it defensively.
It smiled to reveal a row of sharp white teeth, a long pink tongue darting out. “What surprise has the night sent us? A gift, sisters,” the creature said in sibilant hisses, amber gaze shifting toward the top of my head. “A meal.”
“Not much there to make a decent meal. We can split the pony between us,” another one put in with a flex of its claws.
A sense of the surreal surrounded the small clearing. “What are you?” I called out.
I tugged Rudy’s reins to back him away—toward the slightly sloping hill and the cottage we’d left far below, keeping my knife trained on the pack.
“We are nothing to concern yourself with, child.” This from the closest one. “An ant does not need an introduction to the foot about to crush it.”
My breath came in thin gasps, as though my lungs were not powerful enough to draw into my body what I needed. There was no one around, no one to come if I screamed, if I cried for help.
Every sense remained on high alert as I steered the horse in the opposite direction. I shouldn’t have dismounted, I thought belatedly. Too late for that now. I was sure they’d be upon me before I could get back on Rudy and ride away.
I didn’t have the physical strength to take on these creatures. Already my arm trembled just from gripping the knife in readiness. Only heartbeats left to make up my mind what to do. To see if I could spin a plan faster than they could pounce. The lead beast stared at me as though enjoying my fear.
A scream ripped through me as the lead beast suddenly surged forward, the long column of its furred neck stretching out, jaws open wide and fangs exposed.
And I kept screaming as those fangs bit deep into my ankle.
Chapter 6
They wanted to kill me. And they could do it with ease.
Branches and twigs snapped around me as Rudy whirled, his frightened neighs urging me into action despite the pain. I struggled to hold on to the reins with one hand, slashing blindly with the knife in the other. Breaking free of those fangs at last, I lashed out with my uninjured leg. The heel of my boot collided with the creature’s face and the resulting snarl was unlike anything I’d heard before in the natural world.
The creature fell back a bit, as if in pain or perhaps sheer surprise that I’d fought back. That gave me precious seconds to heave myself onto the horse’s back. “Go, Rudy! Go!”
I clucked my tongue and used my legs and feet to get the horse to move, meanwhile landing another kick to the creature’s face when it lunged forward again. My aim was true and it fell back with a roar. No room for a killing shot. They were circling too close, Rudy unable to run without a clear direction. He bolted away from a peripheral attack and nearly slammed us both into the trunk of a tree.
With my horse panicking and the danger edging ever closer, I didn’t have time to think. Situating myself more securely on the horse’s back, I urged Rudy over the fallen tree limb blocking us to the left and we raced along the path we’d used earlier. Wind and branches whipped at us with every passing second.
We were too deep in the woods, too far from help against the grunts and howls trailing us for me to pause or to give even a second of doubt any merit. It took all my focus to keep my horse steadily moving forward but not so panicked and helter-skelter that he risked losing his footing. That would have meant certain death for us both.
Had the beasts been lying in wait? Waiting for someone—anyone—to cross their path and ensure their next meal was an easy one? Were they a dark and dangerous part of the forest no one had warned me about?
Both were just as likely explanations and neither would matter in the end if we didn’t make it out. And the odds for that were dwindling fast because I could hear the creatures sprinting behind us, sibilant hissing interspersed with growls sounding louder and louder the more they gained on us.
My only hope of getting us out of there alive was to outrun them, which seemed less and less likely, or somehow learn to harness and use the magic my mother told me I possessed. I didn’t let myself think about the distance we’d already traversed, or how far we would need to bolt once we cleared the forest. Or what would happen if the beasts actually caught us.
Blood streamed from the puncture wounds on my ankle, a trail for them to follow.
“Rudy, go! Hurry!”
A thrash of my hands on the reins had the faithful old steed moving at top speed, careening around trees and brush at an unsafe pace as the crashing behind us became louder. I veered the horse to the right, holding on tight when he leaped over downed limbs and trunks in our path. Running at this speed might have dissuaded a normal predator but did nothing to keep these monsters at bay.
I tried to call the power I’d felt swirling inside of me. The heat and the life that had once been so powerful it cursed a man into a different form. I barely felt anything except the warm sting of tears sliding down my face. I didn’t even have time to wince at the emptiness inside of me. Not as two furred bodies flanked the horse to close us in.
Cut us off.
Something inside of me ached as I pushed toward that empty hole, focusing solely on the magic I knew I had and letting the horse have his head. I fought for the magic I’d seen only in small doses until now.
I can do it.
This was a little different from causing a feather to levitate. I walked a thin line between life and death with this one.
But the creature to the left rushed at the horse, fast enough I could only shift to the side at the last minute to avoid the slash of teeth and claw. The upset balance had me swinging over Rudy’s side unable to catch myself and landing on the soft dirt. I stumbled, coming down hard on my shoulder and swinging up into a standing position, head dizzy and the rest of me aching.
“Get away!”
I swung the knife in a wide arc to keep the rest of the monsters at a distance, the horse continuing on. Without me. I didn’t blame him, not when I would have done the same if given the opportunity.
But it left me alone with my attackers.
I nearly lost my grip on the knife when the beast to the right pounced. The blade was a near miss but the hilt connected with its face and blood poured from a slash, accompanied by a screech.
Luck. Sheer, dumb luck.
I used the confusion to hurdle over the body without pause and chase after Rudy. Knowing the rest of them followed me. The wound on my ankle made the going slow, and I’d made it only a few feet before one of the beasts passed me then stopped in front of me.
“Do you think you can escape with your life?” it hissed. “Answer honestly, tender morsel. Do you think you know these woods well enough to get away? Surrender quietly. All that rushing about gives a vile flavor to your flesh.” And then he—she?—it licked its lips in a terrifyingly grotesque manner.
I tried to slice the knife at its head, my grip turning my knuckles white though I missed every time.
“Poor little human thinks she still has a chance,” the first beast spat to its comrades. Their sharp-toothed smiles grew larger.
Teeth gritted, I replied with, “I think you can all go back to the hell you crawled from.”
I tried to sound more confident than I felt despite the inky-black fear working its way through my body. They laughed, stepping closer inch by inch.
“Silly little human. You will make a tasty morsel, for certain.”
“I don’t even taste good!” I yelled to them in dubious defiance.
I kicked out with my booted foot toward the closest. He dodged it like I’d tried to swat a gnat. To be hunted like this, like an antelope surrounded by hungry hyenas, like a rabbit in a circle of ravenous coyotes, was nothing I’d experienced before. It did not sharpen my instincts. It did not urge me to fight or flight. If anything, I froze.
&nb
sp; If there was ever a time for magic, this was it. I needed help. Needed a flash of light, a boom of thunder, a plume of fire—anything to scare these beasts away.
Come on, magic, work!
The snapping heat of power flashed once through my fingertips. A taste. Or a warning. I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t enough to do anything but remind me that I had failed.
I had no real power. In fact—
A loud roar suddenly cut through the clearing an instant before the closest beast pounced toward me, a clawed paw swiping the wrist that held the knife. It clattered against a nearby tree trunk and the sound hung in the now nearly silent woods.
The blood drained from my face and I had mere seconds before the beast pushed me to the ground. The impact jarred every bone in my body to the point where my vision blurred.
“There are things in these woods, girl, that would shake you to your core, and we are but one of them.” It breathed against my cheek, the huff of an exhalation carrying the stench of rotting meat. “We won’t leave a trace of you for your family to mourn. All who walk through these woods now are ours.”
Not like this, please. My mother will die. My brother won’t survive on his own without me.
White-hot terror raged through me. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, reaching for power I could no longer count on.
The beast had me pinned, dripping jaws looming closer. I dodged the contact and brought my knee up to crack against the soft underside of its belly. The first kick did nothing. The second gave me an inch of wiggle room, and I took advantage of it.
Claws caught my shirt and yanked as I tried to run, rending the cloth into shreds as the rest of them came for me then. My skin tore beneath those frenzied claws.
The magic wouldn’t come. I realized it at last. The magic I’d wasted foolish time trying to call when I could not. The burnout must have done serious damage to whatever part of me used to control the power.
Those claws flashed in front of my eyes, long and lethal. Perfect for the brutality they had planned for me. The beast opened its mouth, fangs flashing, as a second mighty roar cut through the clearing. Loud enough to shake the trees and cause leaves to tremble and fall.
