Shadow Forest- The Complete Series

by Eliza Grace

  “Put me down,” I grunt. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re far from fine,” Jon bites out. I wonder if he can tell that I’m reluctant to be held by him. I’m reluctant to feel what I’m feeling for him. I don’t need the complication.

  “Just put me down,” I repeat gruffly.

  He does, slowly and deliberately, delaying the release of me.

  “She said put her down.” Hoyt’s voice carries through the kitchen, low but somehow filling every corner of the room. He’s stood in the doorway between the hall and kitchen; the wheelchair is in front of him.

  “I am putting her down.” Angry, sullen Jon returns. He’s mourning my mother, and I’m hurting him with my rejection.

  When I’m seated at the kitchen table, my eyes dart around searching for Jen. “Where’s Jen?” I want to stand, but of course I can’t. I’m in clean clothes, a pale blue sundress. Someone changed me. Did Hoyt? I hope it was Jen. I hope she’s okay. I hope I saved her. I remember it now. Pressing shocks of life into her body and hoping they would stick.

  “She’s sleeping,” Hoyt says gently. “She’s alive. Don’t worry. You saved her, Tilda.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. “Is she the one that. Um…”I gesture down my body to the fresh clothes.

  “Oh,” Hoyt’s face reddens. “I’m really sorry. Your dress was in such bad shape and then you had this massive nosebleed after saving Jen and I…” he pauses, running his hand through his hair and looking sheepish, “I didn’t want to put you in your bed in dirty clothes.”

  Now I could feel my own cheeks grow hot.

  And Hoyt panics. “But I didn’t look. I tried not to, I mean. And I left on your… you know.” Hoyt motions across his chest and began to lower his hand, but then he stops, looking stricken. I put him out of his misery.

  “Thank you,” I try to make my expression grateful and understanding. Though, secretly, I’m more than a little horrified that Hoyt has changed me. He says he didn’t look, but he must have… to pull the dresses gently over the collection bag.

  “Tilda?” A soft feminine voice finds us. I turn my attention from Hoyt, ignoring Jon who’s stuck himself in a corner of the room to stare out the window with his arms crossed. My eyes find Jen, her hair wild from sleeping, wearing her favorite oversized sweat pants and art festival tee. Again, I want to get up. I want to run.

  And I can’t.

  She moves to me, tears in her eyes. “Oh, sweetheart.” She falls to her knees, her hands coming up to cup my face and brush my hair. I begin to cry then.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d lost you too.” I lean forward, wrapping my arms around her neck. My tears fall thick and heavy and I realize I’m soaking the collar of her shirt. She doesn’t care. I don’t care. She smells like paint and her powdery deodorant and home.

  We just hold each other and we cry until our salty tears are well and truly spent.

  “Sirens are back,” Jon says casually. “I’m immune, but you all might want to move into a room away from windows.

  “Is that what happened to me? The same thing that happened to Hoyt?” I move a little away from Jen, but can’t bring myself to take my arms away from her.

  “Yes. We got a few wolves and vamps, but it looks like most of the supernaturals have gone. Except for…” his voice trails off. “The shadow beasts.”

  “The others,” I say, sure in my gut that what he calls the shadow beasts are what my mother and I hid from in the forest. The darkest things, to be feared more greatly than any blood sucker or moon shifter.

  “That’s what your mom called them.” He nods, his voice tightening around the words ‘your mom’. He’s in so much pain. I can almost forgive him the attitude. Almost. She was my mom, even if he has spent meaningful time with her in the forest. “The sirens are leaving.” He changes the subject. “They all are.”

  “Where do you think they’re going?” Hoyt moves to the window.

  “They’ll go where there’s prey. Where there’s food.” Jon doesn’t sound like he cares. Maybe because he’s not human.

  “Oh no,” I breath out. “They’re going into town.”

  Jen rocks back on her heels, keeping her hands on my knees. “What do we do?”

  “What can we do?” I breathe out back at her.

  Pixie Powder

  At that moment, a light flickers against the ceiling. It dies immediately, but is so bright that the entire room holds an after-flash, not unlike staring into a lightbulb for a moment too long. Your eyes are captured in the blinding brightness for a few moments before you’re released.

  “What was that?” Jen is standing, staring upwards.

  But I know what it is.

  Or who it is rather.

  “Arianna? Is that you?”

  All was dark and silent against the ceiling for ten minutes as we all waited expectantly for something to happen again. “What was that?” Jen breaks the silence.

  “Fairies,” Jon says casually, and I’m getting tired of him being such a know-it-all, though he is the person with the most knowledge of the things that were in the forest, and that have now escaped into our very human world.

  “I met her,” Hoyt says, not taking his eyes off the ceiling. “I was in this place… this Neverwhere place. I almost didn’t make it.”

  “Met who?” Confused, I look at Hoyt.

  “Arianna. She was… really confusing. Repeats a lot of stuff. I wasn’t really nice to her. She frustrated me. But she still helped me, even though I thought she seemed weak.”

  “I can’t imagine you being ‘not nice’ to anyone or anything, Hoyt.” I smile at him, feeling warmth in my chest. I stop smiling when I catch a glimpse of Jon’s scowl.

  “You were in the Neverwhere?” Jon’s voice is disbelieving. “That’s not a place you can just waltz out of.”

  “She helped me,” Hoyt repeated. “She told me how to find the creature that created the Neverwhere and trapped the witchfinder. I was sent back, sent to find Tilda.” He reaches up and touches his cheek, his eyes tightening. I don’t know what he’s remembering, but I wish I could wipe the momentary fear from his face more quickly.

  “Elisabeth Clarke released you? I find that hard to believe, even if you were connected in some way to her descendant.” Jon sounds irritated, but then again when is he not irritated.

  “Maybe she wanted me to stay,” Hoyt muses, “she said it had been a long time since she’d seen a human face. But she hates the witchfinder more than she wanted companionship. She sent me back.”

  I still cannot believe the Neverwhere did not consume him. That meddlesome, annoying giant of a man. The witchfinder’s voice in my head is louder than it has been; I have to shake my head to clear it.

  “He survived it no thanks to you,” I mutter angrily.

  “Honey, what did you say?” Jen is now sitting cross-legged on the floor near me; she reaches a hand out and touches my thigh now.

  “Nothing.” I blush. I’m not ready for anyone to know about the visitor in my head. I don’t know why… No, I do. It feels like I’ve been poisoned. Like there’s a blemish inside my body that I can’t ignore, and have no idea how to fix. The man who hurt those I love still exists in ‘fragments of being’ currently punctuating my conscious mind.

  Fragments of being. It’s funny to think of it that way. It’s how I’ve felt since the fire, since losing Mom and Dad and my little brother. I have felt like walking fragments of a being that used to be. Particles that hover around each other in a painful dance, coming close to one another, close to properly reuniting again, but the distance simply will not close. I’ve not been a full person, not for so very long. I’ve always felt I needed my legs back to become who I once was.

  Yet now I realize that my legs do not matter.

  Only my heart matters.

  And my heart is around me in this room; the brooding vampire boy is even part of its beating.

  A bunch of sentimental trash.


  “You’ve never really loved anyone. You would think that,” I say it without thinking and Jen shifts so that she’s kneeling in front of me again.

  “Tilda, I’m worried about you, sweetheart.” Jen tucked stray hair behind my right ear. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

  I shake my head, hoping to dislodge an answer that makes sense, and I try to look less embarrassed than I feel. “I’m just tired, I think. And everything’s so confusing.”

  The sun has set completely outside, it has been down for some time. The moon is full, an omen in the sky that speaks of the wolves at our door. It is bright enough to send beams of cool blue light into the kitchen.

  That is how we know something is happening outside the protected walls.

  Because the night goes dark as pitch, as if thousands of gallons of hot tar have been poured over the roof to stream down the walls and windows.

  “Not everything went towards town,” Jon breathes out. “The shadows.”

  Like living smoke, tendrils press against the glass. I can just make out the curves of the strange beasts. The house creaks around us as the tentacles of darkness begin to tighten. And I can feel the pops and protests of the magic I have set to protect us.

  The others… the shadow beasts…are destroying the spell.

  The irony does not escape me—I ruined Elisabeth’s spell and loosed these terrors, and now they will ruin my own spell so that they can enter this new prison. For it is a prison, it keeps us in as well as keeps them out.

  Deeply, the house groans. The wall framing the back door begins to crack. The crack begins to widen, little by little, as if the bones of this home are screaming.

  Jon and Hoyt back towards the center of the kitchen, both starting when they realize they’re about to run into one another. They scowl and create more distance between them. Boys can be so stupid. The dark tendrils undulate and threaten. Jen takes my hand and squeeze so hard I wince.

  “Stop!” I yell, slamming my free hand down on the table. A thin trace of power tickles my palm, but nothing happens. “Stop!” I yell again, but I am weak it seems, from saving my Aunt.

  The house is crying still, nails pop in little rows along the ceiling and new cracks appear with each passing second as the shadow beasts squeeze. The spell has weakened to the point that I’ve no idea how it’s still holding together.

  When I know all hope is lost, that is when the room comes alive again with brilliant bursts of white light and pink. It is Arianna; I can see her smiling at me from behind translucent wings beating so fast they are only a blur above. “Do not worry. Do not worry. Help, help, help we will.”

  A dozen lights begin to fly up and down the walls. I imagine they are darting to and fro, providing little kisses of their fairy magic. The yawning of the house slows and then quiets. The cracks do not disappear, knitting together as if they never existed, but they do begin to fill with sparkles. The whole room is damaged and the fairies are artists practicing Kintsugi, the art of repairing pottery with gold to show that broken does not mean unbeautiful.

  The glowing magic sets in place and I can feel the spell has been brought back to life. Outside the house, the shadows still move and threaten. But the fairies have pushed back, giving the beasts pause. “Arianna, thank you,” I gasp out softly, realizing how very scared I’d been.

  “Arianna is friend,” the beautiful fairy flutters down to lay a soft kiss upon my cheek. Her smile, so tiny, is genuine and warm. Then she leaves me and goes to Hoyt. “You made it out of the Neverwhere,” she sing-songs. “That pleases me. Pleases me. Pleases me.” She flies around Hoyt’s head then, leaving a trail of magic.

  The room is still bright with color, the white and pink of fairy flight. Every few seconds, a brief shower of gold sparkles downward.

  “Do you feel better?” Hoyt asks, and he seems so concerned that it makes my heart beat fast for him. He is so kind, so caring.

  “Yes, yes. We all do. To be free of the spell. I can flit here,” she disappeared in a blink, “and there.” She appears next to Jen’s shoulder.

  Aunt Jen finally releases my hand, and the blood rushing back into my fingers tingles and burns. “I… I need to paint,” she says simply, her gaze a little bloodshot. As soon as she’d stood up, Arianna had flitted away towards Jon.

  “You need to paint?” I ask stupidly.

  Jen stares at the fairies; she doesn’t look at me. Her hand goes to her head. “I just need to paint,” she repeats, turning away from me and disappearing into her studio. Moments later, crashing sounds fill the house. I can hear Jen cursing and searching for snow white paint. Not antique white. Not ivory. It had to be snow white.

  “Hoyt,” I say his name and point at the abandoned wheelchair, too far from me to reach. He nods and fetches it for me, locking the wheels and not offering to baby me. I’ve got to get used to this again; it’s good that he doesn’t help. I shift in the kitchen chair. I hate the wheelchair has armrests. It needs to have armrests, but they get in my way. I sigh and make my way to the floor, pulling my legs forward and criss-cross-apple-saucing them. Taking a deep breath, I lean forward and test the chair to make sure it doesn’t shift under my pressure. It doesn’t.

  And then it’s a matter of upper body strength, which for the record isn’t my strong suit and never has been. I pull myself upwards, keeping my legs as crossed as possible. I’ve dragged myself almost into the chair, and not for the first time, I wish that I was a smaller girl. Shorter, thinner, lighter weight. It is a beast to get up in the chair from the floor. I’m breathing heavily by the time I’m seated again.

  “I should have helped,” Hoyt remarks, a thread of pain in his voice.

  “No, you shouldn’t have. All of this,” I gesture out the window and then at Jen’s studio, “happened because I couldn’t accept what happened to me. I couldn’t accept that I was this person now, busted and feeble and needing a wheelchair for maybe the rest of my life.”

  Hoyt wipes the sweat from my forehead gently. That makes me cringe. I don’t want to be tired and sweaty and gross. “You’re not feeble, Tilda. You’re one of the strongest damn people I know.”

  “Sure she is. She’s a veritable goliath,” Jon breaks his silence, all snark and ill-temper. “I keep telling you people to stop lying and acting like everything is fine. Monsters aren’t real. They’re probably not attacking the town right now. Jen is totally sane. She’s probably not in the other room drowning in premonition powers. And Tilda, well. Tilda is a muscle-bound super hero who just happens to sit in a wheelchair. You know, like superman and his glasses. Great cover there, Tilda.”

  I won’t cry, I tell myself. He is still mourning my mother. He doesn’t like Hoyt, because of how much I like Hoyt. I need to be fair here, to not be mad at him. That’s what I thought. What I say is an entirely different thing. “Stop being such a jerk, Jon.”

  I turn in the wheelchair, not caring that his expression is shocked. Let him have a taste of his bag fat jerky medicine.

  As I move, the fairies who have finally calmed and perched on cabinets and counters, also move. They follow me towards the chaos happening in Jen’s studio.

  I worry what I will see when I cross the short distance.

  When I cross the threshold, I see a manic Jen. She is slinging colors across an already-finished painting. One that was supposed to be sold when it was finished. I think she’d said it even had a buyer lined up. But now it is a monochromatic riot of black, snow white, and gray. There are harsh black lines and swoops of near-silver. I follow the curves. I find four lines that make a box. I find two angled lines that make a roof.

  The swoops are the tentacles of smoke.

  They are choking the house around us.

  Jen is drawing what has happened.

  But then she picks up a filled-to-the brim cup and pours it down the painting. The colors run and bleed and mesh together until the entire canvas is raining, black tears fall to the hardwood floors, which Jen has not covered with a drop
cloth. I’ve seen her paint and get in the zone. I’ve seen her space out for hours working on a canvas. But she’s always mindful of her space. Paint might flick everywhere—on her, on the sofa, on the walls—but she always puts down the floor covering, as if the house will forgive her the mess if she only shows a little effort.

  Jen picks up the largest brush in her stash. She rushes it across the canvas, blurring everything together until, in effect, she has a blank canvas again. She paints, once more, with whites and blacks. There are more harsh lines sideways and upways and over-ways. Many houses. What looks like the shop sign outside the café, or the shape of it, at least. Smoke pours from roofs. She steps back, turns in circles searching for something, and then picks up cardinal red.

  The sight of that color runs my blood cold for some reason. After exclusively painting in grayscale, why now does she want such a vivid hue.

  I soon find out as she wields two brushes. She outlines something on what I can only believe is the main thoroughfare in town. Extensions in and out. A circular shape near the upper edge of the long design she’s making.

  I see it then.

  Arms. Legs. A head.

  And then the red flashes forward, creating a pool of crimson around the body’s silhouette.

  “Oh my god,” I whisper, mesmerized. “She’s painting town, Hoyt.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here and do something.” His voice is gruff with emotion.

  “I vote for sitting pretty here and letting everyone die.” Jon’s voice is a sharp, cutting counterpoint to what I’m feeling.

  “You know what, I’m sick of this.” Hoyt whirls around, hands fisted. He pushes towards Jon who is still stood in the kitchen behind us. “Everything’s bad enough without you constantly spewing your vitriol.”

  “Oh, big words, country boy,” Jon spits back.

  My eyes do not want to leave Jen, she seems to be winding down, but the children behind me require attention. I roll backwards, bumping into Hoyt. He moves, still bowing up at Jon, who is, conversely, playing it James Dean casual.