Page 29 of Little Witch

A fifth thing came from behind her, and I saw it a half second too late to close the distance myself.

"Amber!" I threw everything I had into the shadow between us, a wave of dark crashing into the thing hard enough to knock it sideways before it fully reached her, but it wasn't a clean kill, just a delay, and it recovered fast, snarling low, already turning back toward her with murder in whatever passed for its eyes.

Rowan reached her first. One brutal gust of wind slammed the creature into the nearest trunk hard enough that it simply stopped existing, dissolving into nothing more than a cold smear against the bark.

"We need to move," Rowan said, breathing hard, eyes scanning the dark for more of them. "There's too many. We can't hold a line here."

"Go," I said, already turning back toward the two still circling at the edge of the clearing. "I'll cover you. Get her out of the open."

"Orias—"

"I've got this. Go."

Amber's eyes met mine for half a second, fear and fury tangled together in her expression, like she hated the idea of leaving me behind nearly as much as she hated standing still. Then Rowan's hand closed around her arm, and they were moving, sprinting deeper into the trees, away from the worst of it.

I turned back to what was left. Two more, circling, patient in the way that meant they'd learned something from watching the first four die. I let the shadow pour off me thicker than before, drawing on more than I usually let myself use outside of true emergencies, and met them both at once.

It wasn't clean. One got close enough to rake claws across my ribs before I got a proper grip on it, and I felt the cold burn settle in deep, worse than anything I'd taken from the wraith at Amber's window weeks ago. But I finished it anyway, dark folding it into nothing, and turned on the last one with blood already soaking through my shirt.

It didn't wait around to find out if I had anything left. It bolted, dissolving into the treeline before I could close the distance, and I stood there a second, chest heaving, listening for any sign of the other two.

"Orias!" Amber's voice, distant, sharp with fear, edged with something that made my whole chest go tight.

I didn't wait to catch my breath properly. I pressed a hand hard against my side, felt the wet warmth already soaking through my sleeve, and ran toward the sound of her voice, ignoring how much every step cost me to take.

Chapter Sixteen

I hauled Amber deeper into the trees with one hand locked around her arm, the two of us crashing through undergrowth that seemed determined to slow us down at every step. Roots caught at my boots. Branches whipped back into my face, one catching me hard enough across the cheek that I felt the sting of it a full second after it happened. Behind us the sounds of Orias's fight faded into the general roar of blood in my ears, and every instinct in my body screamed at me to turn around and go back for him.

I didn't. He'd told me to run. Getting Amber clear of the worst of it mattered more than my own gut telling me otherwise, and I trusted my brother to hold his own — I'd watched him do it a hundred times before, watched him take on worse odds than this and walk away from it, and doubting that now wouldn't do either of us any good.

"How much further?" Amber gasped, stumbling over a root I hadn't managed to steer her around in time.

"I don't know." I caught her before she went down completely, hauling her back upright without slowing our pace. "The whispers are still pulling. We follow them until they stop."

The forest thickened the deeper we went, trunks pressing closer together, the canopy overhead knotting into something that blocked out what little evening light had been filtering through before. My chest burned. My legs burned worse. The ground kept shifting underfoot, wet leaves and loose soil making every stride a gamble, and somewhere off to our left I heard something crash through the undergrowth that I chose not to look toward, because looking would have meant slowing down, and slowing down wasn't an option right now.

The pull ahead of us sharpened with every stride. Less like sound now. More like gravity, something enormous and old dragging us toward a specific point in the dark, patient in a way that scared me more than the shadow-things chasing us had.

"Rowan." Amber's voice cracked on my name, breathless, scared in a way she hadn't let herself sound since we'd crossed the treeline. "Is he going to be okay? Orias?"

"He's fought worse than that." I said it with more certainty than I actually felt, mostly because she needed to hear it and partly because I needed to believe it myself. "He'll catch up."

"You don't know that."

"No," I admitted. "I don't. But I know my brother, and I know he'd rather die out here than let one of those things get anywhere near you. So he's not going to let that happen. He's going to catch up."

She didn't ask again, though I felt her hand tighten in mine, some silent, private fear she was choosing to carry rather than voice a second time. We kept moving, both of us breathing hard, both of us listening past our own footsteps for any sign of him behind us and hearing nothing but our own panic reflected back at us in the dark.

We broke into a small clearing a few minutes later, and every hair on my arms stood on end the second we crossed into it.

The tree.

It stood exactly like it had in the dream I'd never fully admitted to having, massive and ancient, bark twisted into shapes that looked almost deliberate if you stared at them too long — knots and grooves that could have been faces, could have been letters in some language none of us had ever learned, could have just been bark doing what old bark did. The whispers didn't come from the wind here. They came from the tree itself, low and constant, a hum that settled into my chest like something reclaiming territory it had always considered its own.

"That's it," Amber breathed, staring up at it, her grip on my hand going tight enough to ache. "That's the tree. From my dreams."

"Mine too."