Shadow's Curse by Egan Alexa

Author:Egan, Alexa [Egan, Alexa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2013-09-23T21:00:00+00:00

12

The path wound. Turned and turned again. Right or left? She couldn’t remember. The thick trees obscured her view ahead and behind, and the landmarks she’d noted to guide her back had faded as if they’d never been.

The right path descended into a thick wood. The left rose to a high ridge before disappearing. Neither seemed familiar. She shouldn’t have come so far. The landscape was foreign, the twining paths looping and circling back. She had wanted to lead the Stockton child’s spirit deep into death, where it could not find its way back out. Now she was lost as well.

She chose the right-hand fork, hurrying down the slope and beneath the trees. Here within the deeper reaches, the paths were either strewn with rocks and exposed roots or sucking, quivering bogs one must traverse with care. The trees reached their black and skeletal branches to grab and harry, and there was always the threat of dangerous beings who would be drawn to her warmth and her light. She’d never encountered one, but Mother had described them all in gory detail, making certain Callista understood the danger—shambling, mindless grel and rotting, worm-riddled dead-flesh, the ghostly, shrouded soul eaters with their reaching bony hands, and phantasms whose eerie wails sounded like the screams of a million condemned souls; the world’s nightmares made real.

The path narrowed, the footing treacherous. Beneath the trees, even the dim gray light faded to darkness. A prickle teased its cold way up her spine as if something watched from the undergrowth. She peered through the gloom, here and there catching a glimmer of light, a whisper in her ear. Spirits flickered like will-o’-the-wisps to lure her from the trail. Tempting her to new paths and untried roads as she struggled to find her way back to life.

She ignored the pull of their call, keeping to the rocky path, praying it led her somewhere recognizable before the cold or the creatures found her. Rounding a bend, she staggered to a halt, gazing out over a greasy gray bog, the water slick and still. Had she come this way? She couldn’t remember. But there was no turning around. The spirits closed in behind her and every now and then, she heard a fearsome growl or an inhuman shriek from the wood behind. Her presence had been discovered. The creatures of Annwn closed in.

She stepped carefully into the thick, oozing mud, sinking up to her ankles, her gown slapping against her legs as she moved slowly out toward the far shore where the trees gripped firmer earth. With the ash-handled Blade in her hand, she felt her way a step at a time despite the panic eating its way up through her gullet.

A ripple slid across the surface to her right; a shape rising and falling into the mud. She increased her pace as much as she dared, but the bog clung, sticky and cold; her stomach cramped against the icy pain, and there was no feeling in her calves.

Twenty paces away from the shoreline.

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