Whispering Pines by Heidi Lang & Kati Bartkowski

Author:Heidi Lang & Kati Bartkowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Other Place sits below our dimension, throbbing like a diseased heart. A wrong place, full of the Devourers, the Ravenous, the Unseeing, all feeding on our fears. And because fear is powerful, there is great potential for those who dare to cross its boundary.

But for every crossover, there is a price.

Blood opens and blood closes. A sacrifice given and taken.

“What’s ‘the Other Place’?” Rae asked, reading over his shoulder.

Caden pictured the world his brother had fallen into. “It’s a horrible alternate dimension, full of monsters and tentacles, and this awful light.” He waited for Rae’s reaction.

“Who named it?”

“I don’t know.”

“They couldn’t have come up with something more imaginative than the Other Place?” Rae shook her head.

“You’re not, like, freaked out right now?” Caden asked.

“Oh, I’m totally freaked out.” She sat down next to him, and he couldn’t help noticing the way her shoulder bumped his.

He tried ignoring it as he turned the page, then stopped, caught by a drawing of a woman with her mouth open in a silent scream, hands pressed to her cheeks, fingernails long and ragged as they raked bloody lines through the skin where her eyes should have been.

“Whoa, what’s that?” Rae asked.

“I don’t know, but it looks… sort of familiar.” He looked at the page next to it, where a story had been written in careful handwriting. “ ‘Birth of the Unseeing,’ ” he read.

“Sounds promising.”

“ ‘Long ago,’ ” Caden continued reading, “ ‘when giants roamed the earth and man knew how to harness the power of starlight, when ice stretched from coast to coast and the warmth of the sun was a distant dream, there lived a man with hair the pale gold of dawn’s first light, and eyes the winter blue of the sky. But though he was lovely to look upon, beneath his beauty lay a cold, calculating cruelty, as harsh as the landscape he dwelt upon.’ ”

“Why is a fairy tale in your mom’s spell book?” Rae asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, read the rest and see if it says.”

Caden skimmed the rest of the story. “The man was eventually cast out of his village, and then he roamed the frozen landscape until he fell in love with a beautiful woman who did not love him back. So he blinded her and abandoned her in the wilderness.”

“Sounds like a real charmer,” Rae said.

“Don’t worry, the girl’s aunt gets revenge,” Caden said.

“Good. Read me that part.”

Caden smiled. “ ‘Her aunt was not an ordinary woman but a powerful witch, although she had cast no spells in years. In her despair and rage, she tracked down the evil man and cursed him thusly: that he would live out an eternity in darkness, never to see out of his own eyes again.

“ ‘But the aunt had forgotten the first rule of witchcraft: any curse cast upon another will turn upon the caster threefold. The man lost his own eyes, but gained the ability to steal the eyes of others. And so, though he was doomed to wander for eternity in darkness, he never wandered alone.

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