Page 7 of Into the Heartless Wood
Father. Awela. Tears blur my vision.
I glimpse the siren through the trees, a flash of green and silver. The screams grow louder, swelling toward me like an ocean tide. But they do not block out her song. They don’t even muffle it.
She comes nearer, to a car five down the line. She has the vague form of a woman but she’s very, very tall, and unnaturally thin. Her skin is silver-white bark, and she’s clothed in green and gold leaves round as coins. Branches burst from her hands and catch hold of the train carriage, ripping it open as easily as if it were an egg. She drags a passenger out by the throat, and with one vicious twist she snaps his neck and flings him to the ground.
A scream tears out of me. I try to fight against the music. I tell myself to get up, to run, but my body will not obey me.
So I just lie here. I lie here and watch her slaughter them all.
Bodies. So many bodies. She scatters them over the grass, flings them onto the wreck of the train. They’re broken and bloody, some with twisted limbs, some with their final screams frozen in their vacant eyes. Vines spring out of the ground, and pull them into the earth.
She is two cars down from me. One. With every person she kills, she kneels beside them for a moment, and something hanging at her throat pulses with a silver light. She never stops singing.
I feel her music in every part of me, throbbing in my veins, heavy in my bones. It will be the last thing I ever hear.
An eerie red light slants through the trees, and some distant part of me realizes that beyond the wood, the sun is setting.
I won’t live to see the stars. Won’t have the chance to tell my father and Awela goodbye.
I weep.
There are no passengers in the train car ahead of me, or if there were, they were killed in the crash. A mercy for them. I think of the old man and his newspaper, dead on impact. He will not have to die as I will—in the grip of a nightmare, at the hands of a monster.
She comes toward me, her movement wavering and strange, like a tree bowing in the wind. She will put her claws in me. She will break me in half, and fling me to the ground for the earth to swallow, like it swallowed all the rest.
But she stops three paces away from me, and closes her mouth. Her song is cut off. She stares at me. The tree sirenstares at me.
She is even more monstrous up close. Her hair is silver, tangled with yellow leaves. She wears a crown of violets. There is blood on her hands.
I shake, dimly aware that my will is flooding back to me. My body buzzes with needle-like pain, blood rushing back into limbs that have been asleep. My mind is a riot of terror. I still can’t move, fixed by her gaze as I was fixed by her song. There is a pendant at her throat, hung on a twist of vine. It glows a faint silver, reflecting in her eyes.
She opens her mouth and I shrink back. I have lost my chance. I should have fled the instant she stopped singing.
“Run,” she snarls.
Chapter Five
MONSTER
THE ORB AT MY THROAT IS HEAVY WITH SOULS. THEY WEIGH ON ME.
There is a boy in the dark.
He stares, but does not cower.
There is a strangeness about him.
A difference in his soul.
A familiar spark.
I do not want to kill him, to feel his blood warm and wet on my hands.
I do not want his soul.
I do not need it.
The orb is heavy.