The venom folds memory and nightmare together until I can’t tell which is which.I’m smaller and nimbler, hiding behind the woodpile near the cabin, splinters pressing into my palms.
At the edge of the forest, my mother stands too close to a man surrounded by a bright halo of white light. I can’t see his face, only the outline of his broad shoulders. His hand brushes hers before he links their fingers and pulls her under the canopy of autumn leaves.
She stumbles behind him and throws a glance over her shoulder at the cabin. Her lips move, but the man doesn’t hesitate. He guides her deeper into the forest with a hand on the small of her back, not threatening, exactly, but insistent. And intimate.
The image fractures.
The light refracts off their retreating silhouettes in a kaleidoscope of colors as they move farther away from me, and the leaves above begin to sway in the breeze. The red undersideof the canopy of the rowan tree above me is beautiful but wrong, burning instead of glowing.
The man’s light flickers, as if suddenly stretched too thin. I still can’t see his features clearly, but I could draw the line of his jaw by heart, and his name hangs on my tongue like a riddle I almost remember.
A pair of wide wings spread out on each side of him, and just before he and my mother disappear from view, he glances back at me.
For a moment, I see E.
Then the face hollows out, and the light around him caves inward. He vanishes in a flash, as though a black hole suddenly sucked him out of existence.
A bone-chilling shout rips through the air, and I spin around to find I’m no longer in the forest or near the cabin, but in a castle courtyard. There are at least fifty women around me—all female, all with red hair, a katana strapped on their back, and a jeweled scarf tied over their brows.
Nick strains on his knees in the middle of the crowd, iron chains biting into his wrists.
“Kneel for your new queen, beast,” one of them commands.
Red banners snap overhead as I try to run to him, but the ground softens, then gives way—liquefying beneath my feet. It clings to my boots and drags me down, thick as coagulated blood. Red-cloaked figures force Nick upright and tighten a collar around his throat while my body sinks into the earth like quicksand.
Nick’s eyes find mine in the crowd. He doesn’t look angry or desperate, just…hollow. As if he’s done and truly defeated.
The courtyard peels back like bark.
Behind it spans Lorntre Hollow, or at least what I imagine it to be.
It’s an impossibly vast and barren meadow, with a bunch of rickety trees around a bigger, taller tree at its center. A dark mouth breathes in slow, hungry drafts inside the Lorntre tree—a black void in an otherwise scarlet forest. The air moves in and out, in and out, like lungs buried under the earth. Roots twist and knot like muscle at its base, sticky burgundy sap glistening along the trunk.
“Come home, Maxine,” it whispers to me.
The invitation roots inside me, but before I can answer, the haloed man with wide white wings flies to the edge of the Hollow. For a moment, he looks like E, then his features smear, stretching into something faceless, something vast, something that was never meant to wear a human shape.
He extends a hand as if inviting me to fly with him and away from the hungry mouth of the Hollow. The sun pierces through the clouds in a golden, holy light.
The ground moves.
Worms push through the soil, pink and swollen and writhing at my feet. Insects spill from the roots in glossy waves, their legs clicking and wings shivering along the black bark. Golden snakes brush my ankles, their eyes fixed on me like they know my name.Autumn leaves tear loose overhead, spinning in a sudden, violent wind that wasn’t there before, circling faster and faster until the world becomes a blur of rust and light.
My mother’s voice echoes inside the tornado of fallen leaves, soft and strained. “You two were never meant to meet.”
The light flickers, and the leaves above my head curl back to reveal their tar-black undersides, the glossy surfaces drinking the sunlight in.
For one impossible instant, light and dark overlap, devouring each other. Nick is dragged backward by a longshadow, his chains shrieking against the stones until he’s sucked into the roots and vanishes beneath the soil.
The Hollow opens wider, its vast jaw stretched to its limit, and I understand, without knowing how, that everything is connected. Blood doesn’t just race in one direction. It circles around all living things.
There’s no shadow without light. No light without darkness.
I wake with a violent gasp, the taste of blood thick on my tongue.
The world slams back into focus.
Golden light bleeds through the trees, and I blink a few times to make sure I’m not still dreaming. Nick’s breathing is steady behind me, and E’s hand is laced with mine, yet my pulse won’t slow.
