“ What the hell are you doing?” Graves asked him. “Does making a mess help somehow?!”
“ You like to take stuff from places that we travel through, right?” Cross pulled open a bag that turned out to be filled with dry rations and tossed it aside. “Like souvenirs? Kray used to do it, too.”
“ Yeah, sometimes,” Graves said. “So?”
“ Look at these trees,” Cross said. “They’re different than the trees that were here last night.”
“ Again… SO?!”
“ This is a different forest.”
“ How is that possible?” Graves asked as he tried to wake Stone. “What, so we were pulled through time and space and dropped in some random forest? I mean…where in the hell are we?”
Cross finally found what he’d been searching for amidst Graves’ things, and cursed to himself.
Damn it, Sam, you may have killed us without even realizing it.
Cross held the wormwood branch up so that Graves could see it. It was a twisted and gnarled piece of wood, shaped almost like a claw. It smelled of sulfur.
“ It’s not some random forest,” he said. “It’s the Wormwood. And we didn’t go to it — it came to us.”
Graves laughed the kind of laugh one might have when they found out they had cancer, or that their father had just died.
“ Are you saying that the forest followed us?!”
Cross snapped the branch in two and tossed it into the smoking remains of the campfire.
“ Part of it did. I’ve heard of stuff like this happening, but I’d never actually seen it. Most cursed locales possess some intelligence, and sometimes they can be…vengeful.”
“ The forest is pissed at us because we got away,” Graves laughed.
“ It’s pissed because we took some of it with us. It used the branch to follow us.”
“ Awesome.” A loud crash sounded, closer than before. “Let’s move!”
Stone was glassy-eyed and a bit disoriented from having slept so long, but Graves quickly explained the situation and the squad leader rose right to his feet, one arm wrapped about his bandaged ribcage.
“ I can’t leave you two alone for one God damned minute, can I?” he growled.
Cristena proved more difficult to rouse. After three applications of smelling salts Cross finally got her to wake up. Her eyes were bloodshot and her speech was dreamy and slow. She might as well have been drunk.
“ I need you to get up, Cristena,” Cross urged. “Right. Now.”
Another crash sounded, closer than the last. Cross saw a shadow in the distance, a mass of something that crawled through the forest maze like a school of oily black eels. Trees fell before the advance of the ebon nightmare that approached.
“ Just take what we need!” Stone barked. He pulled his armor jacket on even as he winced in pain.
“ Damn!” Graves cried. “The horses are gone! The friggin’ camel, too!”
A bestial roar issued out of the forest, a dismal sonic wave like screaming animals and cruel fire.
“ Run!” Graves shouted. They took up weapons and scrambled away. Cross pulled Cristena behind him by the hand. When she stumbled and fell, still too groggy to move on her own, Cross took hold of her waist and hoisted her up onto his shoulder, and then he ran, surprised by his sudden strength.
They ran through the grey mist and leapt over fallen tree limbs and broken branches, over bubbling bogs and patches of bloody moss. They dodged skeletal trees that stood like sentries in the mist, their ranks without end. The air turned blacker as their pursuer drew near.
They’d been at the edge of the trees, but now the forest went on forever. They were marooned in a dead woods.
Trees exploded at their backs and showered them with painful splinters. The force of the blast sent Cross and Cristena onto the ground, where they landed on a dead tree root that struck Cross in the sternum. Cristena landed limply across his back, pinning him to the ground and knocking the air out of him. Cross felt like he’d been impaled.
He heard screams and shouts that echoed and circled around his head in a spiraling whirlpool of noise. He sank into it, a lost ship, down into darkness so deep he couldn’t hear the beast as it moved over him. Cross was only dimly aware of the smoking shadow’s feet behind him, of the unformed black mass of a snout that probed his back, of the cold white eyes that were the creature’s only discernible feature. Its whole was an impenetrable mass, a midnight solid. He felt breath on him, like a hot wind in a butcher’s yard.
He is in the glade. The sky is filled with churning black clouds that spiral away from the mountain. A terrible chill crawls over his body. Ice-hard wind blows through the pale clearing and pushes back the trees.
She is there, at the center of the stream. She stands near another. They are nearly identical, and both of them are soaked through to the bone. Her counterpart is an androgynous male, and he so closely resembles the raven-haired beauty that they might be brother and sister.
Across the clearing, on the other side of a shallow pool filled with stones and bone white fish, he sees Cristena. She looks dazed, unsure of what she sees, and she is weak. The wind blows stronger. Black lightning rips open the sky, and a hard slap of violent thunder rattles the ground.
Their spirits meet in the water, and embrace. They kiss passionately.
Warmth flows through his body. A channel of energy like heated milk works its way up from his toes to his fingers, from groin to neck, a heat that nearly paralyzes him even as it heals. More important, he realizes, is that it heals her, his spirit, his soul. He feels fire burn behind his eyes, and the blood grows warm in his heart.
The spirits heal each other. Their erotic embrace somehow revitalizes their ethereal bodies. He feels himself lifted off the ground.
Movement catches his eye. He sees Snow, just beyond the tree line. Her eyes are black and terrified. He tries to call out but he has no voice. He moves to help her, but something in the shadows grabs her from behind and yanks her away with such force that it nearly folds her in two. She is sucked into the darkness of the trees.
He sees Cristena, and she sees him. They hear the shadow in the trees, ready to pounce.
Cross opened his eyes. Pain flared across his chest, and Cristena’s weight, light though she was, nearly suffocated him. His body pressed painfully against stones and twigs on the forest floor. The air was hot, and it stank of charnel matter. Something loomed over them.
A sharp blast tore the air apart. Cross saw Graves with the grenade launcher just a few yards away. The 40mm shot drove into the shadow above him, and the creature bellowed an utterly inhuman noise, a hurricane melded with a chorus of dying animals. Cross rolled over, pulling Cristena along with him.
Their pursuer now stood in plain sight. It was an oily morass, a gargantuan caricature of black liquid matter tied together in the vague semblance of a canine beast. Greasy green and black smoke billowed from its swollen jaws, which opened to reveal an impossibly deeper darkness within.
Cross leapt to his feet and pushed Cristena away. Graves fired a few rounds from the M16, then launched another grenade. This time the shot vanished into the beast’s folds of shadow flesh with nothing but a soft thud, and it did no visible damage at all. The hound reared up, and Cross just managed to jump back as its smoky claws ravaged the earth where he’d stood. The ground shook, and he was nearly knocked to his knees.
Something held him aloft. The cold white whispers ran smooth against his skin, and they wrapped around him like a lover’s warm breath.
She was back. His spirit had returned.
Whatever healed his spirit must also have healed Cristena. She used her magic to tear chunks of stone out of the ground and launch them at the hound in a tightly contained spiral of rocks bound together by forest vines, a barbed wire topiary. The strands lashed at the beast, but the hound discorporated itself, split the folds of time around its unnatural flesh and pushed its body between moments, collapsed into spatial cracks and escaped the attack unharmed.
Its attention turned to Cristena. A thousand bodiless voices screamed in unison from within the monster’s dismal core.
“ Run!” Stone shouted as he uselessly fired a Beretta at the creature.
It was clear that Cristena was still weak, and only by the grace of her spirit was she even able to stand. Cross felt his spirit swirl around him, connected to his core, fused to the skin of his soul with a diamond-hard bond. Her power surged around him.
The creature bayed at Cristena. In that moment, that frozen second, Cross surrendered himself to the power of his spirit.
