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Page 8 of Into the Heartless Wood

She will not know.

He runs

into

the

night.

I let him go.

Chapter Six

OWEN

ITEAR INTO THE DARK,MY FEET SLAPPING AGAINST THE RAILROADties, my breathing ragged, frantic. Pain stabs under my ribs. I stumble on one of the cross ties, but I haul myself up and keep running. I can’t stop. The moment I do, I’m dead.

Oh God.

Bodies. So many bodies. The images crowd in my mind. I can’t run fast enough to shake them loose.

Oh God.

A sob tears out of me. The trees murmur and scrape above my head, an eerie wind seething past my hot face. I run and run and run, following the train tracks, the only possible route of escape. But how far did the train take me into the wood? How many hours was I asleep? Maybe I was nearly to Saeth. Maybe I should have run the other direction.

ButOh God, no.That was the wayshehad gone. The tree siren. The monster.

Slap slap slapgo my feet against the railroad ties. My pulse is so quick I can’t count the beats. I gulp air like I’m drowning and maybe I am. Drowning in leaves and branches and the horror of her eyes.

Now I know the color of a demon’s eyes. Yellow.

Slap slap slap.

I run and run. I can’t feel my feet. My body seems separated from my mind, like I’m floating somewhere far above, watching my own futile dash to freedom.

She stopped singing. That is the only reason my will returned to me. I have no illusions that she really let me go. Why would she? She is a cat and I am a mouse, and any moment now she will catch me in her claws, bat me back and forth between them, leave my broken body on the forest floor like she left all the others.

Oh God.My body is screaming to stop running. My mind is screaming to keep going.

She was green and gold. Silver and violet. There was blood on her hands.

The trees watch me as I stagger on. I run until I collapse, and then I pull myself along the railroad tracks, tearing holes in my trousers and scraping my legs raw. I don’t make a conscious decision to stop, but I grow aware that I have, huddled between the rails, shaking and shaking.

Oh God.I am going to die here. I’ll never see my father or Awela again. Never have the chance to talk to Mairwen Griffith.

Silver and yellow, violet and green. Blood on her hands.

My head throbs and my body aches. Silver and yellow, violet and green. Red and red and red.

Suddenly it’s not the train passengers I see—it’s my mother, her body bloody and broken, her eyes staring into nothing, a last ragged bit of her hair gleaming gold as the vines wrap over her and pull her under the earth. No one should have ended that way, least of all my mother. Not her, not her.

I weep for her, understanding for the first time that she’s wholly, entirelygone.My father understood it from the beginning. It broke him, body and soul.

Exhaustion crowds my mind. Creatures rustle somewhere in the underbrush. The wind rattles the leaves away overhead.

I want to sleep. I don’t want to see silver and yellow, violet and green. I don’t want to see red. I let unconsciousness steal over me, piece by piece. I let the horror of the Gwydden’s Wood lull me to sleep.

I wake to the blear of orange light and hands under my armpits, hauling me upward. I look into the gaunt face of my father, his mouth pressed into a grim line. “Are there any others?”