Brynn’s pleasure vanished abruptly as a wall went up around her. “It’s catchy. Gets stuck in your head,” she said, her gaze fixed determinedly on her bag as she dug through it.
“I’ve noticed,” said Yejun darkly. “It’s a trap. But you’re a fan of the band, I see.”
“Yeah, I am,” Brynn said defensively. “They’re just people. What happens with the song isn’t their fault. They were—” She snapped her mouth shut, shook her head, and zipped her bag shut.
I demanded, “Did you find what you’re looking for? Can you two bicker while you walk? I don’t want the trail to vanish again.” And I took a few steps backwards, toward Nod and the edge of the clearing, trying to lure them along.
Suddenly all cheerful again, Brynn stood up, slung the bag over her shoulder, and brandished what she’d found. “Yup. Got my little camera. Next time some weirdness carries us off, I’m totally getting pictures.”
“Right.” I set out at a brisk walk, my dogs (my only friends) ranging around me. My head still wasn’t quite straight from the storm that had rushed over us, but movement always fixed that.
The brambles surrounding the clearing turned out to be raspberries twined ’round with morning glories. Berries were just visible in the wrong moonlight. Brynn stopped to investigate and I said, “Please don’t eat strange berries you find in a magical forest we shouldn’t even be in.”
“I know,” she said mildly, taking a picture of the bramble. The flash was too bright, just as out of place as the moon, and Brynn said, “Oops. I always forget to turn that off.”
“It’s night,” observed Yejun. “You don’t have a tripod. What else are you going to do?”
“I do have a tripod, though I guess I can’t set it up now,” countered Brynn, “Also, it’s not really night. It’s just dark.”
“It’s definitely not nighttime,” I agreed. “This is just... an illusion. That moon is totally wrong.” I glared up at it. “The full moon isn’t for days yet. And the clouds go behind it. I really hope this trail leads us to someplace more normal.” But I knew that was a vain hope; the trail led deeper into the wilds of the Backworld, where things would only get stranger.
Yejun squinted up at the moon and Brynn looked at her camera. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to where they were walking, although they did at least walk. Exasperated, the dogs and I guided them past the brambles. On the other side of the thicket, the forest opened up a bit. The ground was covered in an unusually thick carpet of the same crisp leaves that clung to the pale trees. Only the occasional slender white mushroom poked above the detritus. We could have walked in any direction easily, and every direction looked the same. Sometimes the trees were closer together, and sometimes they were farther apart. Sometimes there was a broad trunk with a hollow in the roots. Nod was wary, but Grim wanted to go play in the leaves and scent out the animal trails he was sure would be there. Rabbits! Foxes! Deer! Mice! He was very excited about the mice.
I wasn’t as sure. The hollow we passed was empty, unlived in, and if anything mundane lived in the forest, surely it wouldn’t pass up a den like that?
Unless it was too big to fit.
That was a nasty idea. But it made me look around a little more. Eventually I noticed long furrows on some of the trees, as if something very large had been sharpening its claws, or marking territory.
I wasn’t really concerned for myself—it takes my father or something out of a nightmare to make me worry about my own skin. But my charges, my tagalongs—what would they do if a giant creature started chasing us through the wood?
Even if it seemed empty, the forest wasn’t really quiet. The air thrummed with the sound of occasional birds flapping, but I never saw one in the dim light. The trees creaked and rustled even when there wasn’t a wind. It wasn’t a dead forest, even if it wasn’t normal. And once, in the distance, just at the edge of hearing, there was a roar. It didn’t seem like the others heard it, which was for the best.
Grim started ranging further and further from the main pack, which irritated Nod more and more. Finally, when Grim was off sniffing at a cluster of slender saplings growing in the ruins of an ancient trunk, Nod dashed after him, growling. About fifteen yards away, he skidded to a halt and looked around with an almost comical look of horror. I reached out to figure out what was wrong, then stopped dead.
“Nobody leave the trail,” I commanded. “It stops existing about where Nod is.”
Yejun turned to look back at me. “Isn’t that how trails work?”
“No,” I snapped. “It’s a scent. They fade away. This one turns off like there’s a switch. If we go exploring all over this wood, the only way we’ll find it again is if we get really lucky. Hell, it might stop existing if we all leave it. I don’t trust that Fiddler guy one bit.” I whistled for Grim and Nod to come back again and ran to catch up with Heart, who was still faithfully following the trail with her nose low to the ground. Grim flashed past, turned back to give me a guilty look, then fell in alongside Heart.
Brynn fell into step beside me. “What if the whole trail is fake?”
“I can’t think about that,” I said shortly. “It’s the only trail we have.”
She grinned. “True that. This forest is pretty amazing, isn’t it? But you don’t like it. Where were we supposed to end up?”
“I thought we’d cross over and be in the corridors, honestly.” I gave her a sideways look. “Big empty spaces. And we’d go from there to... well... somewhere like this forest, actually. Except more regionally appropriate.”
Radiating puzzlement, Brynn asked, “Why big empty spaces? Corridors? Like... hallways?”
I shrugged. “My father says that the Backworld is like maintenance tunnels for Creation. Or it was, before the faeries colonized it. Normally when I cross over, I cross into that, unless something’s been built exactly where I’m crossing.”
“Your father...” said Brynn thoughtfully, which was not the conversational hook I wanted her to pursue.
Quickly, I said, “I have to concentrate on the tracking. Maybe you can find out from Yejun if he knows what we’re supposed to do once we find this horn.” And I did concentrate, trying hard to shut out everything but the track. It wasn’t an appealing scent, but it was nuanced and very clear, and it took focus to follow it back to its origin instead of forward to where we shouldn’t be. If I had to do it alone, I’d be totally oblivious to everything else around us.
A few moments later, the ground vibrated with the distant sound of many hoofbeats and Brynn froze, listening as the sound rose, then faded away again. “What was that?”
“Just a trick of the forest,” I told her. “There’s been a lot of weird noises. Distant animals and stuff. It’s a forest.”
“It sounded like horses,” she insisted.
I shrugged. “Maybe. Hooves, anyhow. That could mean a lot of things in a place like this.”
Brynn shivered and looked around. “A horse stepped on me once. I’m not a fan of horses.”
Yejun lowered his head as if to look at her over the rim of the sunglasses he wasn’t wearing. “You’re a junior high girl. You love horses.”
“I loved horses when I was eleven,” Brynn corrected. “Then I went to horse camp and Chili the pinto mare tried to trample me to death. Horses are big. I do not like them.”
“Do you like them in a house? With a mouse?” quoted Yejun.
“Shut up,” Brynn said, but without any rancor. “And I’m in ninth grade, thank you very much.”
I turned around, walking backward for a moment. “Come on. If a herd of wild horses appears, the dogs will chase them off.”
“Right,” said Brynn, hurrying after me. But Yejun took her place beside me before she could catch up. He didn’t bother me with distracting questions, though, and for a while we just hiked through the forest. The ground, once level, began to rise and fall in hills so gentle they were really more like waves. The trees grew more densely together, too. They were older he
re, although the ground was still carpeted with the debris of an endless autumn. It was uneven, slippery footing and it kept annoying me that the trail we were following had left no sign on the ground.
Until, eventually, it did. I could only make out a few signs of it, because it was dark and I never actually studied sight-tracking much, but I could tell somebody else had traveled over the composting forest floor before us. Maybe more than one somebody, but all I could smell was the trail that the Fiddler had magically summoned up. Which was also pretty annoying. If I ever saw the Fiddler again, I was going to have some choice suggestions for him about how to share a trail.
But at least we’d left the region of the clawed-up trees. That had to be good.
Brynn started humming behind us. Then she said, “What’s that humming?” and I realized it wasn’t her. Somebody else, somebody with a light girl’s voice, was singing in the forest. It was hardly a song at all, really, especially compared to the sublime music of the Fiddler. It was just some sing-song gibberish. Still, I stopped to listen to it for a moment. Music worried me. It had demonstrated risks that couldn’t be bitten through. And it was hard to run from because it got inside your head.
“La la lala la, lala lala lala la,” went the girl’s voice, sweet and floating.
“Somebody needs to update their repertoire a bit from the sixteenth century,” said Yejun.
“I don’t know, it’s kind of catchy,” said Brynn, her gaze faraway. “Are we going to meet whoever it is?”
I listened to it from my dogs’ perspectives for a moment. “It keeps moving around. I hope not. It’s bound to just be another distraction. I bet the home of the Wild Hunt has defenses and this is one of them.”
I kept walking, and the singing followed us. I wondered if it was even attached to a person. Maybe it was a disembodied voice. Maybe it was a ghost. But it seemed really unlikely that there’d be a ghost on the way to the home of the ultimate ghost slayers.
After a while, the song stopped, but the sense of presence that had come with it remained. I wished whatever it was would come out of the darkness and face us directly. I wished we’d reach the end of the forest soon, too. My stomach was grumbling hungrily.
When the singing started again, I called irritably, “Come on, cut it out.” Everything went silent, even the rustling of the trees. There was nothing except the sound of our footsteps. Slowly, the ambient noise crept back in again. And the third time the song started up, it was different: faster, with more variations between “la” and “la la” and even “da.” And it was moving away. Good.
My stomach grumbled again, and I suddenly wondered if Brynn had packed any snacks in her giant camera bag. “Any food in that thing, Brynn?” I asked.
There was no answer.
My heart in my throat, my limbs filling with leaden fear, I turned around. Yejun, a little behind me, cursed softly in what sounded like Korean. And Brynn—well, Brynn was gone. She was just... gone.
“Did she wander off?” asked Yejun.
“I tried hard enough to convince her to wander off before and it didn’t work,” I responded. “Something took her. And we didn’t even notice.”
It was the trail. The overwhelmingly strong magical trail. We were hardly able to smell anything else. As soon as I realized that, Heart jerked herself away from the trail and started running back the way we came, almost stumbling over her paws in her urgency to find out what had happened. I followed behind more slowly, staring at the ground fixedly, my jaw clenched tight.
I hadn’t smelled anything, I hadn’t heard anything. The trail explained the scent, but what explained the silence? Brynn’s footsteps had dropped away and I hadn’t noticed. I probably hadn’t wanted to notice. She was in the way, after all. Hadn’t I said that, believed it? If she wandered off and something happened, that wasn’t my fault, was it?
Heart found Brynn’s bag, dropped on the ground on its side. She pawed at it anxiously, then looked up at me as I approached. I made her sit down, then studied the ground around the bag. After a moment of peering at the moonlit ground until my eyes hurt, I fumbled around in Brynn’s bag until I found—aha—a flashlight. That made it a lot easier to figure out where she’d left the trail.
“Go find her scent,” I commanded Heart and Nod, gesturing in the direction Brynn had gone. Grim started to go too, but I called him back. Yejun stood behind me, watching with veiled eyes. “Yejun, you and Grim stay here. We can’t all leave the trail or it might vanish. Can you take care of yourself? I have to go get her back.”
Yejun nodded, but his hand closed on my arm like I’d once held his. “I don’t need Grim to stay with me.”
I pulled away. “I do.” Then I was running after Heart and Nod.
They hadn’t stopped when I pulled Grim back, and once they made it off the broad swath of magically generated trail, they’d found the scent of Brynn’s kidnapper easily. They shared it with me: the half-human, half-not scent I associated with monster spawn. Not one of my father’s wolves, but still the servant of some other monster. She was moving fast, almost as fast as my dogs; I wasn’t going to catch up unless they caught her and slowed her down.
Well, she was only almost as fast. And Brynn wasn’t bleeding yet. Maybe we could save her.
Then a cloud went in front of the wrong moon and the dim night became nearly black. I had Brynn’s flashlight but I still had to slow down. My dogs didn’t bother, until Heart ran straight into a tree. Her yelp echoed back, bouncing off other trees and lasting longer than any echo really should. Nod stayed beside her until she snapped at him. Then he picked up the trail again, moving slow enough to avoid running into any trees the kidnapper might have climbed.
Heart waited for me, whimpering. I crouched down beside her and inspected the gash on her nose. Then I pulled a bit of my shadow out and rubbed it into the injury, holding her by the scruff of her neck as she tried to squirm away. Once the injury had sealed up and the scar had faded away, I stood back up again.
While I had been concentrating on Heart, the cloud that covered the moon had descended to earth. Cautiously, I started walking after Nod. The flashlight was nearly useless in the thick fog, which made me angry and afraid. My father could summon and banish fog, but I hadn’t inherited that gift. Every year he used it on his Halloween forest walk, when he identified victims for the coming year. The trees were different, but I had too many ugly memories swimming to the surface all the same. Walking through a mist-filled forest with a flashlight, nervous, giggling people behind me.
But there was nobody behind me this time.
Was there?
I stopped and listened, then whirled around. But there was nothing. Heart cocked her head at me, ears lifted quizzically. Then she trotted ahead, focusing on Brynn. She wasn’t worried about memories in the mist. There were plenty of things to worry about right now.
A whisper of sound echoed through the forest, just as Heart’s yelp had. It sounded like a voice, but I couldn’t make any details out.
Nod could, though. I closed my eyes, concentrated, and listened through his ears.
-ten-
The trees had changed again. The trunks were thick and rough, and the leaves on the ground were yellowed rather than crimson. Gnarled roots rose from the packed soil and a dry streambed meandered into a clearing. Nod wriggled his way behind a particularly large root and listened as two women spoke.
“—what you asked for,” said the first voice. It was the singer, and she sounded eager and puppyish.
“Hmm,” said the second woman. Her voice was older: rich and mellow. “So you have, sweetling. Let me see her. Ah, yes. Let me just—” and there was a percussive cracking sound. Not the sound of cracking bone. Nod knew the sound of cracking bone.
“Thank you,” said the rich voice. “But be honest with Auntie Tala. You stole this prize, didn’t you?”
“So? What if I did?” said the singer defiantly.
“Those you stole it from no doubt wish it back. They trample
through the forest. They hunt you down,” the rich voice said sweetly. “You can hardly be a hunter if you yourself are hunted.”
“Hey! You said if I—” and now the singer was petulant.
Auntie Tala had no patience for petulance. “Amber, my sweetling, I said if you brought me the demoness’s weapon, I would help you to join the Hunt. Go now and become the hunter rather than the hunted and I will help you further.”
“I hunt all the time,” the singer called Amber said sulkily.
“You scavenge from the shadows. A hunter chases down her prey. She is not chased.”
“That’s such a waste of energy,” complained Amber.
“I really have no interest in convincing you, child. You may either hunt, or you may be hunted.” Tala paused significantly. “I will take this prize to the others now. Once you have made your decision, you are welcome to come boast of it.”
Nod buried his nose under the rotting tree trunk to suppress a whine. Tala was picking up Brynn and leaving with her! He backed away from the tree and tried to circle around the clearing. He wanted very much to bite the thief, but rescue was more important than punishment.
The thief, the singer, the one called Amber, she disagreed with his priorities. Even though Nod moved like a shadow through the mist, she saw him and darted up a tree, then dropped down in front of him. She glared and Nod growled. She smelled like blood and celestial musk and talcum powder, and her shadow was the thin shadow of those who had given up their souls in exchange for a lease on immortality.
I pulled out of Nod’s head and started stumbling through the forest again. I didn’t understand any of what I’d overheard, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t want Nod fighting a monster spawn alone.
She was fast. Even distant from Nod’s mind, I could tell she was fast. She had reflexes like a cat, and she wouldn’t let Nod go around her. I tried to hold him back from attacking her—he was mine, he shared my power, and so he could be very strong. But it was better not to fight alone, especially the spawn-daughter of an unknown monster.
Wolf Interval (Senyaza Series Book 3) Page 9