Coldfall Wood by Steven Savile

Author:Steven Savile
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-08-21T07:00:00+00:00

33

Jenny Greenteeth remembered everything her body had been through in Herla House. All of it. His touch. The foul odor of his rancid breath as he leaned in close, drooling over this skin. All of it.

Bracken had no right. None whatsoever. This wasn’t the world they had left. It was different here. The children weren’t his possessions. He was not lord and master. He was meant to protect them. What he did was a violation. She closed her eyes, tapping into the fading memories. That girl had lived with so much pain from his hands. They all had. Even the boy she’d saved from the Hunt. Her heart quickened at the thought of betraying her own father.

She wanted to make it right. It felt important to her. This man, Bracken, should experience the same kind of pain.

Jenny Greenteeth smiled through a mouthful of jetsam, a cruel smile filled with the green teeth that gave the water witch her name.

Could he swim?

Sometimes the old ways were the best.

That pretty face of hers was nothing more than a mask over a dark soul.

She let the girl loose for a moment, allowing the memories bubble up to the surface. She knew these streets. Each turn was ingrained into her muscles. She only needed the flesh to remember for long enough to find the house, and then she would lure him out.

The house was so central to everything she didn’t have to dig deep.

Jenny’s nostrils flared as she inhaled.

Her eyes rolled up inside her head, showing the whites as her eyelids fluttered rapidly and her jaw fell open. Her entire body went completely rigid. Turgid water gargled deep in her throat, bubbling up and spilling out of her mouth until it seemed she might drown standing on dry land. When she opened them again her eyes were shot through with threads of blood where the smallest capillaries had ruptured. She knew where he would be.

She followed the stream out of the forest.

Taking those first faltering steps out of the sanctuary of the ancient wood left Jenny shaking, gripped by a physical withdrawal. Without Penny Grainger’s pain to lead her down toward the streets waiting at the bottom of the hill, she might never have been able to make it. Even then, those first few steps on the dead tarmac of the road were like crossing over from life to death, and on the other side she felt utterly bereft, cut off from the vibrancy of the forest and the soul of Mother.

But she followed her through the warren of streets with red-brick houses and blacktopped roads like scars on the land. They acted as a barrier between her and her world. She was cut off from the residual magic of the Earth Mother, unable to tap even the thinnest vein of that vital energy. She had never felt so alone in her life, not even that day when it had all ended for her here the first time around. Still, she focused on what

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