The Wicked Woods

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The Wicked Woods Page 5

by Kailin Gow


  Briony pushed the creature away, and it fell limply to the ground. Then, somewhere between one breath and the next, it changed. The fur gave way to skin, the wolf’s form to that of a young woman about Briony’s age. Briony was sure that she had seen her before. Maybe somewhere at school? Was anybody in this place just a normal human?

  Briony didn’t have time to answer that, because more of the creatures leapt at her. She swung the silver cross left and right, slashing at the advancing creatures, but with so many of them, it was all she could do to keep them from ripping her to shreds. One would feign from one side, and another would lunge in at Briony as soon as she reacted.

  Briony felt something grabbing hold of her, and she realized that one of the werewolves had become human again. He gripped her arms with strong hands, pinning them to Briony’s sides as she struggled to stab backwards at him. Briony knew that she was in trouble. With a blade in her hands, she could keep him busy trying to prevent her from cutting him, but that was it. It was only a matter of time before one of the other wolves took advantage of it to bite her.

  One of them looked like it had the same idea. It was the big, brown furred one from before, which stalked forward, growling as it came. Briony struggled, but her arms were still held firmly. All she could do was hope that it would be quick.

  A commotion came from back in the trees, and a young man strode from them, waving a burning branch like it was a sword. It might as well have been, because the werewolves fell back before it, yelping and snarling as their fur singed. The one approaching Briony turned towards him, and found itself knocked away.

  This close, Briony could see that the young man was perhaps a little older than she was, with short blond hair and features that almost spilled over from simply handsome into beautiful. He was wearing a dark leather jacket and jeans, along with thick boots that let him kick out at the wolves without getting his leg bitten off.

  Briony took her cue from him, stamping backwards hard enough that the grip of the werewolf behind her loosened. She stabbed backwards, and felt him stumble away from her. At the same time, the newcomer threw his burning branch at the wolves and dove for the car.

  “What are you waiting for?” he demanded. “Get in!”

  Briony wrenched open the door on her side, hopping in and closing it after herself. Wolves scrabbled at the windows, snarling and yelping.

  “Drive, or we’re both dead.”

  Briony didn’t need any more encouragement than that. With a silent hope that the engine would still start after the crash, she turned the key, and almost jumped for joy when the engine started first time. She threw the car into reverse, not caring if she hit any of the wolves. For a moment, it seemed like the battered old Ford might not move, that it might be stuck in the soft ground. Then, like a cork coming free of a bottle, it plunged back onto the road.

  Briony spun the wheel sharply, forcing the thing to turn back the way she had come. Switching gear again, she shot off forward as quickly as it would let her, hoping that it would be enough. How fast could wolves run, anyway? As it turned out, she didn’t get to find out. Briony glanced back in the rear-view mirror, and the werewolves were not giving chase. Instead, they sat by the road, just watching as they drove away. Somehow, that seemed more ominous than if they had been sprinting level with her rear bumper.

  “So,” Briony said, “it’s lucky you were passing…”

  “Fallon. And you’re Briony.”

  “How did you know that?”

  The boy smiled in a way that was simultaneously both deliciously exciting and utterly infuriating, his blue eyes winking. “Would you believe me if I said, ‘with my special powers’?”

  “What special powers?” Briony found herself reaching for her silver cross again.

  Fallon laughed. “Sorry, this probably isn’t the best moment for that kind of joke, is it? I just heard that there was someone new in town. Now, I haven’t seen you before, and you look a lot like the description, so you must be Briony.”

  Briony sighed. It was nice to have a mundane explanation for once. “Sure. It’s just… this has been a weird couple of days.”

  “A werewolf attack is enough to make anyone jumpy. Now, I figure that it’s probably best if I show you the way into town, and you can make your way home easily from there. Is that all right?”

  Briony nodded, and let Fallon give her directions that ended up with her in the middle of Wicked, not far from George’s diner. As they drove, Briony started to notice that her passenger didn’t look very well. At least, he was looking paler and shakier by the minute.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him. “None of them bit you, did they?”

  “No, I… I’m fine. You know your way back from here, right?” When Briony nodded, Fallon opened the passenger side door and started to get out. “Good, then I will get going.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Briony asked.

  “Completely, but thanks for caring.” He slipped out of the car, starting to walk away. It occurred to Briony that there was one thing she hadn’t said.

  “Thanks for saving… oh.” By the time she’d gotten halfway through the sentence, Fallon was already gone.

  Chapter 7

  Aunt Sophie wasn’t too upset about her car, in the end. After all, when you spent your life fighting the forces of darkness, keeping a paint job perfectly intact was never going to be that likely. She was also sympathetic about what had happened in the parking lot, putting an arm around Briony.

  “Killing the first one is hard. It gets easier.”

  Briony wasn’t sure if she liked that thought, though to be fair, she liked the thought of being drained by a vampire or torn to shreds by werewolves even less. Yes, she would definitely have to press Aunt Sophie for some lessons in protecting herself from them soon.

  She had hardly dared raise the fact that both the vampire and one of the werewolves had been classmates of hers. Briony had been half-afraid that Aunt Sophie would pull her out of the school. Well, that or charge down there with a big vat of holy water. Neither seemed likely to win her friends.

  She merely told Briony to be careful, and sent her on her way. Briony got to school the next day, and if she found herself a little more cautious around some of the others there, that was only to be expected. In any case, the others were still a little standoffish with her. Claire and Tracey were friendly enough, but generally only when Pepper wasn’t watching them closely. The others in her little clique were less willing to risk the wrath of their unofficial queen, and didn’t say much to Briony, even if they weren’t actively unfriendly.

  One side effect of this was that Briony found herself making friends in other places. Partnered up with a short, dark-haired girl with glasses called Maisy for a science lab, Briony quickly found herself liking her, and getting on so well that Maisy invited her to sit with her and her boyfriend Steve when it came to lunch. Steve was good looking in a scruffy kind of way, with a shirt that looked like it had never heard of the concept of being ironed, and sandy-haired that seemed to have a mind of its own. He greeted Maisy with the news that he had finally come up with something that might let him beat her at chess.

  “And this is Briony,” Maisy said.

  “Hi.” Steve gave her a thoughtful look. “Hey, weren’t you sitting with the popular girls at the football game?”

  “I think I only get to hang out with them part-time,” Briony replied, and Maisy nodded solemnly.

  “They can be really stuck up, sometimes. I don’t suppose you like sci-fi, do you?”

  She and Steve started to chat about a television show Briony had never heard of. It had too many vampires in it for her taste, given what things were like around Wicked, but she did her best to keep up anyway. The other two kept going without any of the awkward comments that would have shown up around Pepper, and the only slight pause came when they asked her about some math problem that had shown up in a test last week that Briony hadn’t been there for. Briony smiled. It s
eemed that in the absence of the popular crowd, she had been made an honorary geek.

  It wasn’t nearly as bad as she might have thought, and Briony actually felt a little guilty that at her old school, she probably wouldn’t have spent much time talking to girls like Maisy. Now that she was here, Briony resolved never to be that stuck up again. After all, if hanging out with people outside the popular crowd was the kind of thing Pepper Freeman would never do in a million years, it couldn’t be all that bad.

  And then, it got a whole lot better.

  Briony didn’t see Fallon come into the cafeteria, because she was sitting with her back to the door. In fact, she only noticed him when Maisy looked up and said.

  “Hey, who’s the cute guy?”

  “That would be me, wouldn’t it?” Steve countered.

  “In your dreams, maybe.”

  It was good-natured enough, and by that point, Briony wasn’t really listening anyway, because she had turned to look. Fallon looked, if anything, even better by daylight than he had last night. Of course, today he didn’t have a pack of wolves milling around him, though some of the cheerleaders were doing a pretty good impression of it. Even Pepper got up from her perch at the center of the room and made a beeline for him.

  “We were just wondering if you would like to come and sit with us,” she said. “It can be hard, making friends when you’re new.”

  “Yes,” Fallon agreed, “it can. Thanks for the offer, but I already have a spot.” Pepper’s eyes widened as he turned and walked over to where Briony sat. Though not as much as Briony’s did. “Do you mind if I sit here, Briony?”

  “No… sure… I mean…”

  “She means sit down,” Maisy translated. She smirked in the manner of someone who was filing away for future reference exactly how red Briony had started to go. “I’m Maisy, and this is my boyfriend Steve.”

  She extended a hand and Fallon took it. “Hello, Maisy. Hello Steve.”

  Briony was grateful for the pause in which to get her thoughts together. Fallon went to school here? Well, of course he did. Where else was there another high school nearby? It was just… well, the other night, he’d seemed a little older than her, not to mention a lot more confident. Briony had a hard time imagining someone like him going to school anywhere. She risked a glance back at Pepper. The cheerleader was looking at Briony in a way that made her glad that looks couldn’t kill. Around her, most of the more popular crowd were looking puzzled. Why wouldn’t the gorgeous new boy want to sit with them? Only Claire smiled, giving Briony a very discrete thumbs up.

  Finally, Briony returned her attention to Fallon. “I didn’t realize that you went to school here.”

  “Until today, I didn’t. I’m even newer here than you are. Maybe we could take turns showing each other around?”

  “You’d only get each other lost,” Maisy said.

  Fallon shrugged. “Getting lost in a school isn’t such a big deal. That forest of yours, on the other hand…”

  Briony winced at the casual hint towards what had happened the previous night. “Strange,” she said to cover it, “I thought you looked too old to be in high school.”

  “I’m eighteen,” Fallon said, apparently willing to ignore her discomfort. “It just that, if I ever want to get into college, I’m going to have to make up a few classes. Maybe you’ll see me in some of them.”

  Briony caught the hopeful note in it. “Um… maybe.”

  They chatted some more, and it earned Fallon some points that he talked to Maisy and Steve just as much as to her. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would ignore the unpopular kids, then. He even seemed to get a few more of the other two’s sci-fi references than Briony did, making a couple of comments about shows that seemed to be sufficiently obscure to impress them.

  Eventually though, Maisy made an excuse to leave. Something about having to get to the next class a little early because she wanted to talk to the teacher. At least, Briony assumed it was an excuse. If it wasn’t, then the part where she elbowed Steve in the ribs and repeated it loudly and slowly so that he would get the message and go with her was a bit excessive.

  “It seems that your friends want to give us some space,” Fallon observed. “I think Maisy wants to play match maker.”

  “Well don’t get any ideas,” Briony said, though she found herself hoping that he’d had at least a few.

  “Really?” Fallon raised an eyebrow. “Well, I suppose it would be a bit much to ask for the most beautiful girl in the school to throw herself at me. Tell me, not that I’m complaining, but why aren’t you hanging out with all the rest of the pretty crowd?”

  He nodded towards where Pepper and the others still sat. She wasn’t actively glaring at Briony any more, but she did glance across from time to time. The looks now were more puzzled than anything. Briony could guess what she was thinking. If she had always been able to get attention from any boy she wanted, why was this one ignoring her?

  “It’s not really my scene. Some of them are all right. It’s just…”

  “Yes, I saw the way the silly rich one looked at you.”

  “Then you probably saw the way she looked at you too. Tell me, Fallon, why aren’t you over there with them? I’m sure Pepper would just love to be friends with you.”

  “She’s not really my type.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Briony said. “Girls like her are everyone’s type.”

  “In her world, maybe. It’s just as well I don’t fit in there, then.”

  That comment raised a warning bell in Briony’s head. Around here, not fitting in could mean a lot of things, and what kind of young man could fight off werewolves?

  “What were you doing out in the woods last night, Fallon?”

  “That’s a bit out of nowhere, isn’t it?”

  “So were you coming to save me,” Briony shot back. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but it is a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Not really,” Fallon said. He brushed back a strand of hair. “The woods around here are supposed to be really good for nature walks, so I thought I might try it. I just ended up getting a bit closer to nature than I really wanted with those wolves. What were they, anyway?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Briony couldn’t believe that. Fallon hadn’t panicked, the other night, at the sight of werewolves. He hadn’t asked questions afterwards. Surely, he wouldn’t have been so calm if he hadn’t known. So he was lying to her. But why? Briony doubted that he could be some kind of werewolf himself, not after fighting them. But he had seemed sick in the car, and the silver in her cross had been in his proximity.

  Fallon sighed, and it was a beautiful sigh, the kind of thing a romantic poet might have managed on realizing that the world contained darker things than flowers and gentle pleasure.

  “Briony, look at me.”

  Briony did it without thinking. It wasn’t exactly a hardship. Fallon was amazingly, almost excessively, good-looking with his full lips, wide cheekbones… Briony could have studied the details of his face for hours. His lips, his cheekbones, his eyes…

  There was something strange about those eyes. They were too pale, so that the irises became almost an extension of the orb. Briony struggled to remember where she had seen eyes like that before. It was something to do with the people who had come to the house, wasn’t it? As she stared into Fallon’s eyes, struggling to remember, Briony found herself looking deeper into them, and deeper, and…

  “Briony,” Fallon said, his tone soft.

  “Yes?”

  “I think it will be better if you forget that you need to know what I am. Better for both of us. Can you do that, Briony?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I think what you need right now is a friend, so I want you to trust me, Briony. Wake up now.”

  Briony shook her head, trying to clear it. “What were you saying?”

  “Oh,” Fallon said, “nothing important.”

  Briony doubted that anything he said could be th
at unimportant, but she decided to leave it. After all, she trusted him.

  “Shouldn’t we be getting to class?”

  Chapter 8

  This was the kind of class you didn’t get at school, taking place in the backyard of Aunt Sophie’s inn, with just Briony, her great aunt, and George from the diner in attendance. George had brought a big bag with him, and he opened it to reveal contents that gleamed silver in the evening sun.

  “After what happened the other night,” George said, “Sophie has decided that maybe it’s time for you to learn to protect yourself.”

  “Preferably without clanking while she moves, George. Did you have to bring everything?”

  The diner owner shrugged. “There are a lot of weapons for Briony to learn about.”

  That, it seemed, was true. George spread them out on the back porch like an exhibit from a museum. Monster killing through the ages, possibly. There were stakes and silver-bladed knives, silver wire garrotes and sharpened crosses. There were even swords, short stabbing things that Aunt Sophie said were based on an ancient Celtic design. Their edges gleamed with the familiar silver shine. A couple of elegant, deadly looking crossbows rounded out the collection.

  “Crossbows?” Briony said. “Wouldn’t guns be better?”

  “Shotguns with silver shot can work,” George said, “but mostly only on werewolves. A wooden quarrel, on the other hand, is essentially a flying stake.”

  That made a kind of sense, so Briony went along with it while George and Aunt Sophie discussed the weapons’ merits in a matter of fact way.

  “Knives and stakes are easy to conceal,” Aunt Sophie said, “but hard to explain if you’re found with them. I don’t fancy my niece going to jail.”

  George nodded. “You certainly won’t be able to carry them around somewhere like your school for instance. There, your cross will have to be enough, though frankly I doubt anyone will attack you on the grounds anyway.”

 

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