Curse of the Celts

by Clara O'Connor

  “What? What is it?” I cried as I ran up.

  Marcus looked up and then back down at the ground.

  “I don’t understand,” he started. “I was standing in… There was a pool at my feet.”

  We all looked at the spot he indicated. There was nothing there but grass and some fallen leaves.

  “I saw it. It was up to my ankles. I was standing in…” Marcus shook his head.

  “What did you see?” Devyn pressed.

  “It was a pool of blood.”

  “Bags on. We have to keep walking,” Devyn said, scanning the area, already moving.

  Spooked, Marcus lost no time, more than happy to put distance between himself and the disappearing pool. I was less convinced, but the urgency flowing from Devyn was enough to hurry me along. As we headed into the trees, it became strangely dark; the day was golden, a magnificent late autumn gift, and the sun was evident in the sky, but under the trees, the dappled light was less bright than it should be.

  My feet struggled to gain purchase as we trudged our way up the hill. I was bone tired: I was tired from the day before; I was already tired from tomorrow. My feet were raw, my legs ached, and my back was bowed in the effort of hauling myself up yet another hill.

  To avoid a vast expanse of mud that the boys jumped across, I veered away to pick my way around a tree. I stepped on a pile of leaves and heard a too solid crunch. I looked down to see the sickening sight of a skeleton beneath my feet, then the wind whirled and the carpet of leaves swirled up in the air, clearing the copse and unveiling a sea of skeletons, bones stained with age, all rib cages and legs, skulls and reaching fingers. I shuddered and tried to pick my way through them; the boys had kept moving forwards and were now a few feet ahead. I hurried to catch them, biting my lip, navigating carefully, trying to get back to the path. My foot caught and, horrified, I looked down, expecting to discover that I had somehow been trapped by bones. I had, but not in the way I expected. I couldn’t help myself and I screamed. Bony fingers attached to a skeletal arm were wrapped around my ankle; the dead hand was restraining me and I couldn’t break free.

  It looked like all the bones were starting to move. I screamed again as Devyn came up behind me. I pointed at the thing that held me, half hoping that, like Marcus, I would look like I had foolishly been imagining things, but no, the hand still had its skeletal fingers around me. Devyn lifted the long stick he had picked up earlier and whacked at it before prying it loose with his own live hands. The sound of bone cracking and crunching made me shudder as Devyn made sure the hand wouldn’t be grabbing anyone again. Ever.

  I shivered as he pulled me away from the glade of corpses.

  “Don’t veer off the path,” he commanded before starting forwards again.

  I was in shock, still recoiling from the experience. He looked back over his shoulder and, seeing that I was still unmoving, came back for me.

  “Cass,” he said, grabbing my shoulders and giving me a little shake. “I need you to move. That, that was nothing. Do you hear me? What just happened, what you saw, was nothing. Once the sun sets, that entire glade is likely to stand up and start following us.”

  I didn’t want to move deeper into the borderlands. But he painted quite a picture.

  “Let’s not wait for them, then,” I responded to his motivational speech.

  “Good girl.”

  We pushed ahead once more, and this time, despite my screaming muscles, I powered on, matching the boys step for step. If we didn’t make it out of here, it wouldn’t be my fault.

  As we crested the hills and started to descend on the other side, I had enough breath to ask how long Devyn expected it to be before we made it out of the area.

  “We’re crossing the Chiltern Hills now, then we’ll go back down through the valleys. We’ve come a good way since dawn, but if we want to be out the other side before dark, we’re going to need to move faster than this.”

  “Let’s go then,” I urged. “I have no interest in meeting anything else out here.”

  “I’m with Cassandra,” Marcus concurred. It was as much as he had said since we stopped to eat an hour earlier.

  Chapter Six

  The pit of my stomach continued to dwell somewhere much further south than it belonged as we trudged north. The sun had become a dim grey glow in a gloomy afternoon sky, barely glimpsed between the treetops, making the forest seem more menacing than it had in the golden morning. Earlier, I had revelled in the clean air and endless fields and forests, the beauty of the leaves carpeting the forest floor, and the dappled light snagging through the leafy boughs overhead. Now I worried endlessly about what might lie beneath the fallen decaying leaves on which we stood, and whether an unexpected warrior from centuries past was going to reach up and try to grab me again. I could still feel the trace of where the skeletal hand had clutched me about the ankle. The inconsistent lighting created shadows that crossed our path heavily, and the bushes in the darkness of the forest could conceal some unknown border-dwelling Samhain-raised ghoul or nasty that I never conceived of before stepping outside the city walls.

  I edged closer to Devyn and put my cold hand in his. Unfortunately, this seemed to have the effect of increasing the strength of our bond, and if my unease was at an all-time high then it was nothing compared to the reverberating dread coming off Devyn. I thought that the glade full of rustling skeletons had been the most terrifying sight I would ever witness, but Devyn’s emotions promised that there was an awful lot worse out there.

  We walked as quickly as we could across the uneven ground, the fading light making our trail harder to pick out. I stumbled, tripping across a branch and was caught and righted by a distracted Devyn.

  “We should have been out the other side by now,” he muttered, clasping my hand tighter.

  “What?” Marcus asked, unable to hear as he was walking behind us.

  A pigeon or some large bird burst out of the undergrowth, making us all jump. Devyn looked sideways at Marcus, unnerved by our recent scare. “We should have come out the other side of the forest by now, I’m sure of it.”

  Marcus jumped at the sound of a twig snapping from somewhere behind us. Or in front of us – the sounds here were distorted. “Let’s walk and talk, shall we? What makes you think we should be out the other side? You’ve never been here before.”

  “No, but I know the lie of the land, we should have been across the Chiltern Hills and out into open space by now. It’s getting dark. How long would you say it is since we left the river?” Devyn continued to set a pace that made my aching feet protest vehemently.

  “I don’t know, nine or ten hours?” I guessed. Marcus, nodded his agreement

  “We should easily have covered twenty or so miles,” Devyn insisted. “We should be out the other side and seeing the lights of Oxford by now.”

  “We’re going to Oxford?” I asked. I had never thought to see the Britons’ centre of learning, a place which stubbornly remained at the edge of the borderlands, its reputation legendary. I had never been much of a scholar, but the city of learning was famed across Europe. Although Londinium, I knew, saw it as a nest of rebellion which spewed out young men and women who spouted their anti-imperial poison all over the Western World.

  “That’s where we’re aiming for; we should be able to get help there, and supplies to travel north,” Devyn explained, not pausing as he continued to pull me along. “But we’re running out of time. The sun is setting and we are still inside the borderlands. We need to move, keep going in this direction, no matter what happens. Don’t believe the things you will see and, whatever you do, don’t engage with anyone or anything that approaches us. Do you understand?”

  Now he did stop, turning to glare at us intently until we signalled our compliance with his commands. We might have been sceptical earlier in the morning but with the encroaching darkness and our earlier experiences, we were no longer so dismissive of his warnings.

  I frowned as I caught the sounds of battle com
ing through the trees. The noises made by a large group of men attacking each other, faint clashes of swords and battle cries, roars of pain, screams. Had sentinels pursued us into the no-entry zone of the borderlands and been met by the Britons, alerted by their magical alarms? I looked at the boys to check that they could hear it too. Marcus looked similarly apprehensive.

  “I was sure the city would think we were dead,” he said to Devyn.

  “They do,” he assured us. If the noises weren’t sentinels in pursuit and Devyn didn’t indicate that it was Wilders looking for us, that only left things that went bump in the night. My heart started to sound awfully loud as we stood frozen in the darkness of the forest.

  Hoofbeats had us whirling around. Someone was coming up the path behind us. I started to run to find cover, but Devyn gripped my hand and stood unmoving. My nerves jangled as I pulled at him to come with me. What was he doing? They were nearly here. I turned to watch the horses approach, my heart now beating so loud and fast it threatened to explode out of my chest.

  The horse burst through the brush, its body covered in blood, its eyes wild as it galloped right towards us. I pulled Devyn with all my strength to step out of the way as the crazed horse surged past us. He stumbled at my unexpected burst of force.

  “What?”

  Was he losing his mind? Hadn’t he seen it? If I hadn’t pulled him out of the way, he would currently be lying broken in the path. Marcus and I exchanged glances. Had the man we were relying on to get us through this nightmare lost all sense of reality?

  “I told you not to engage with them,” he said, nodding at the retreating horse which was heading straight for a huge tree trunk. I cringed. It was going to hit… It sailed right into the tree, through, its body insubstantial. It wasn’t real. I drew a shaky breath.

  “Oh.”

  Devyn looked down at me, his dark eyes serious. “Yes, oh. The more we engage with them, the more attracted to us they’ll be. That horse probably rides that course every year. Nothing changes, but we just acknowledged its existence on this plane. That’s what they crave; they want to touch the living. We need to act like they’re not there.”

  I looked at Marcus to see if he was struggling to comprehend Devyn’s lesson in the paranormal as much as I was, but he was looking at something behind us. Under a tree lay a little boy, wrapped in a blanket. He was unwell, and the larger shape beside him was still. Too still.

  Marcus took a step to go to the boy before Devyn stood in his way. “No. Marcus, it’s not real. We need to keep going.”

  Marcus dragged his gaze from the sick boy to Devyn.

  “How can you be sure?” his voice was strangled.

  “I’m sure,” Devyn assured him. “It is Samhain. We will see a lot stranger before the night is through.”

  At this, he retook my hand and continued on into the increasingly dim twilight. I forced myself to look away from the boy who, noticing us, had reached a thin, pale hand out of his blankets to stretch it imploringly in our direction. Grimly, I steeled myself to ignore him. Marcus finally took a step to follow us, his mouth set as he, too, forced himself not to go to the boy.

  We pushed forward. Unable to help myself, I glanced back just as we were about to lose sight of the child. The thin bundle raised itself up, and in the blink of an eye, the boy had sped through the air to hover in front of us.

  “You could have saved me!” he shrieked, his eyes wide and accusing, his face all the paler for the dark crimson streak that ran from his mouth down his chin. And then he was gone.

  Devyn ground his teeth in frustration at my action, which had triggered the boy. My entire body was trembling. I looked to Marcus who stood in shadow, his whole body tense in response to an accusation he must have thrown at himself many times over the last months. How could he bear it?

  I glanced up through the trees. I could just make out stars in the sky; twilight was almost past, and the sun must have set. We were in real trouble now.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled to Devyn. “I promise, I won’t look. I’ll stop.”

  Devyn looked at me strangely. His eyes narrowed and he shook his head, as if dismissing my presence, before glancing around him.

  “Cass?” he called into the cool air. “Marcus, where did she go?”

  Marcus snapped out of the reverie that had held him since the bloodied child screamed at us. “What?”

  “Cass,” Devyn roared into the darkening woods. His entire body was tense, poised, as if he were about to break into a run. His eyes were searching wildly around us looking everywhere but at me.

  Marcus frowned at me, then at Devyn. “Devyn, she’s right there.”

  “She isn’t,” he gritted, his eyes flinching from where Marcus pointed to me.

  “She is.” Marcus looked at me, baffled. “She hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “No.” Devyn shook his head, still scanning all around him, his movements growing frantic as he continued to call for me.

  What was going on? I walked right up to him and he flinched, averting his gaze, stepping backwards and continuing to call for me.

  “I have to find her,” he muttered to himself, or to Marcus – it was hard to tell. “She’s my responsibility. I will find her. I promise.”

  His head half tilted in my direction. “I promise.”

  With that, he started to move, his movements uncharacteristically uncoordinated as he picked up the pace to a near jog. His progress was louder than it had been all day as he crashed through the darkness. Marcus and I hurried in his wake, doing all we could to keep him in sight. My body was already aching from the walking we had done since dawn; it had been a crazy few days. Between the Metes and then our escape last night, and what happened to Marcus’s father, I had never felt so weary. And now, Marcus and I were trying to keep pace with a man who had grown up in terrain like this, and I was exhausted.

  “Devyn,” I called as I pulled in a laboured breath. He had to slow down; I couldn’t keep this pace up. If I couldn’t keep up, he would abandon me. That was my last thought as I went flying. Marcus was too late to catch me as I tripped on some tangled tree roots that were hidden by the fallen leaves. I put my hands out in an attempt to save myself as I faceplanted onto the forest floor. I could hear Marcus calling for Devyn to stop as I tried to shake off the shock of the fall.

  “Don’t touch her.” Devyn’s voice was sharp as he turned to find Marcus trying to help me up off the ground. “Get your filthy city hands off her.”

  Stung, Marcus snapped his hands from where they were around my shoulders, turning to snarl in Devyn’s direction. “You have no right to tell me who I can and cannot touch, Wilder.”

  Devyn strode across the clearing, coming to a halt inches from Marcus who stood his ground. “I said, don’t touch her,” he snarled, still not looking in my direction. “I have to find Cass. Where did she go?”

  “Devyn, I’m right here. I didn’t go anywhere,” I whispered, baffled and deeply disturbed by the dark emotions swirling through him: self-loathing, despair and an overwhelmingly frantic pulse. He really couldn’t see me, which stood in total contradiction to his reaction to Marcus helping me off the ground. I stood and laid my hand on his arm. I was already terrified in my own right; I didn’t need his emotions amplifying mine. As it was, my entire body was giddy with fear.

  I attempted to push some reassurance of my presence through the bond, only to be resoundingly rebuffed as he blocked against me.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he chanted, his eyes glittering in the dark. “I found her. Like I promised. I found her. I don’t know how I lost her again.”

  “Devyn, snap out of it.” Marcus pulled me back from the Briton who looked and sounded increasingly unstable. But this only roused him from his stupor.

  “I said not to touch her,” he shouted at Marcus, the tendons standing out in his neck, his eyes flashing.

  He finally looked directly at me, his dark eyes almost wholly black. “I know I’m not worthy, I know it. I won�
��t touch her again, but please give her back to me. I’ll keep her safe, no matter what it takes,” he implored me. “Please, my lady.”

  My lady? He never called me my lady. A mocking princess or a scolding Cass, but never my lady. He thought I was someone else. Devyn was seeing someone else; that’s why he was trying not to look at me. He hadn’t wanted Marcus to interact with me either, but it hadn’t been like with the boy earlier. He had been enraged when Marcus had touched me; whoever it was he was seeing, she meant something to him. My lady… my mother?

  “Ask him who it is he thinks I am?” I directed Marcus. Marcus frowned before his face cleared in understanding.

  Devyn was muttering to himself, still searching frantically for signs of me, I presumed. He looked up as Marcus softly called his name.

  “Who is it you’re talking to?” Marcus asked quietly in the dark.

  “You don’t see her?” Devyn seemed confused. “But you were touching her. You can’t touch her. She is… well, I suppose you are more worthy to touch her than I, even in death. I can never make up what was lost. He chose me over her. He shouldn’t have done that. She was worth a hundred, a thousand, of me.”

  “Who?” Marcus pressed.

  Devyn didn’t answer. His focus was elsewhere, his eyes darting away, seeking me.

  “Let’s concentrate on getting out of here,” I urged Marcus. “Maybe once we’re out of this damn forest, he’ll snap out of it.”

  “What did she say?” Devyn looked at Marcus suspiciously.

  “She wants us to continue to Oxford. Cass is waiting for us there,” Marcus supplied ingeniously.

  Devyn’s eyes lit up at learning of my location. “Let’s go then.” He moved off into the night. Marcus nodded at me but didn’t reach out to take my hand as that seemed likely to set Devyn off again. We made sure we stayed close together as we trailed in his wake though; the last thing we needed was the handfast impacting me now, clouding my judgement at the worst possible time.

  Was he seeing my mother? I saw again the woman in my vision cut down by the sentinels. Devyn told me his father had been her protector; he knew who I really was. If I had family, a place to be out here, I just had to get through this. I had to survive the night.