It looked like all the bones were starting to move. I screamed again as Devyn came up behind me. I pointed at the thing that held me, half hoping that, like Marcus, I would look like I had foolishly been imagining things, but no, the hand still had its skeletal fingers around me. Devyn lifted the long stick he had picked up earlier and whacked at it before prying it loose with his own live hands. The sound of bone cracking and crunching made me shudder as Devyn made sure the hand wouldn’t be grabbing anyone again. Ever.
I shivered as he pulled me away from the glade of corpses.
“Don’t veer off the path,” he commanded before starting forwards again.
I was in shock, still recoiling from the experience. He looked back over his shoulder and, seeing that I was still unmoving, came back for me.
“Cass,” he said, grabbing my shoulders and giving me a little shake. “I need you to move. That, that was nothing. Do you hear me? What just happened, what you saw, was nothing. Once the sun sets, that entire glade is likely to stand up and start following us.”
I didn’t want to move deeper into the borderlands. But he painted quite a picture.
“Let’s not wait for them, then,” I responded to his motivational speech.
“Good girl.”
We pushed ahead once more, and this time, despite my screaming muscles, I powered on, matching the boys step for step. If we didn’t make it out of here, it wouldn’t be my fault.
As we crested the hills and started to descend on the other side, I had enough breath to ask how long Devyn expected it to be before we made it out of the area.
“We’re crossing the Chiltern Hills now, then we’ll go back down through the valleys. We’ve come a good way since dawn, but if we want to be out the other side before dark, we’re going to need to move faster than this.”
“Let’s go then,” I urged. “I have no interest in meeting anything else out here.”
“I’m with Cassandra,” Marcus concurred. It was as much as he had said since we stopped to eat an hour earlier.
Chapter Six
The pit of my stomach continued to dwell somewhere much further south than it belonged as we trudged north. The sun had become a dim grey glow in a gloomy afternoon sky, barely glimpsed between the treetops, making the forest seem more menacing than it had in the golden morning. Earlier, I had revelled in the clean air and endless fields and forests, the beauty of the leaves carpeting the forest floor, and the dappled light snagging through the leafy boughs overhead. Now I worried endlessly about what might lie beneath the fallen decaying leaves on which we stood, and whether an unexpected warrior from centuries past was going to reach up and try to grab me again. I could still feel the trace of where the skeletal hand had clutched me about the ankle. The inconsistent lighting created shadows that crossed our path heavily, and the bushes in the darkness of the forest could conceal some unknown border-dwelling Samhain-raised ghoul or nasty that I never conceived of before stepping outside the city walls.
I edged closer to Devyn and put my cold hand in his. Unfortunately, this seemed to have the effect of increasing the strength of our bond, and if my unease was at an all-time high then it was nothing compared to the reverberating dread coming off Devyn. I thought that the glade full of rustling skeletons had been the most terrifying sight I would ever witness, but Devyn’s emotions promised that there was an awful lot worse out there.
We walked as quickly as we could across the uneven ground, the fading light making our trail harder to pick out. I stumbled, tripping across a branch and was caught and righted by a distracted Devyn.
“We should have been out the other side by now,” he muttered, clasping my hand tighter.
“What?” Marcus asked, unable to hear as he was walking behind us.
A pigeon or some large bird burst out of the undergrowth, making us all jump. Devyn looked sideways at Marcus, unnerved by our recent scare. “We should have come out the other side of the forest by now, I’m sure of it.”
Marcus jumped at the sound of a twig snapping from somewhere behind us. Or in front of us – the sounds here were distorted. “Let’s walk and talk, shall we? What makes you think we should be out the other side? You’ve never been here before.”
“No, but I know the lie of the land, we should have been across the Chiltern Hills and out into open space by now. It’s getting dark. How long would you say it is since we left the river?” Devyn continued to set a pace that made my aching feet protest vehemently.
“I don’t know, nine or ten hours?” I guessed. Marcus, nodded his agreement
“We should easily have covered twenty or so miles,” Devyn insisted. “We should be out the other side and seeing the lights of Oxford by now.”
“We’re going to Oxford?” I asked. I had never thought to see the Britons’ centre of learning, a place which stubbornly remained at the edge of the borderlands, its reputation legendary. I had never been much of a scholar, but the city of learning was famed across Europe. Although Londinium, I knew, saw it as a nest of rebellion which spewed out young men and women who spouted their anti-imperial poison all over the Western World.
“That’s where we’re aiming for; we should be able to get help there, and supplies to travel north,” Devyn explained, not pausing
