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“Lelu Custard or no, don’t care what the fuck it is. Run,” I bellowed, snatching her porcelain hand in mine and bodily dragging her as I pushed my unnaturally long legs to eat up the ground between us and the hideous thing stalking us. “Goose! Goose! Get back here you ashy asshole!”
My heart pounded, finally catching up to the nightmare we had been dumped into. Trees whizzed by us. Violet struggled, barely able to keep up with me on her small legs, as we flew through the woods with the rasping, coughing roar behind us. Branches slapped and whipped at my face, cutting deep into the flesh, but all I cared about was following the small flash of green in the dark woods ahead of me.
The shadows to my left expanded, and two blinking, pure white eyes stared out. A third joined its twins, narrowing speculatively at me. I kept running, kept pushing my body to its very limits to try and catch up with Emerald and Green Man, but the small, childlike doll at my side was slowing me down. All the while, the thing with three eyes to my left followed us. It didn’t close in, it didn’t outpace us. Like the moon following a car, it stayed the exact same distance away and ahead of us, just watching.
“Fuck! Goose, you giant lump of charcoal, I will kick you in your smokey balls if you don’t—” I didn’t have to finish my threat. The great, loping beast appeared, stepping out from behind a tree’s shadow, and snatched Violet by the collar of her dress, hefting her up onto his back. “Good boy. Love you. Kiss, kiss—now fucking run!”
The beast directly behind me, sensing the easiest of its quarry was getting away, began crashing through the leaf litter and underbrush, abandoning its slow stalking. The easy meal of the little doll would have given him gas, anyway. Violet was not the kind of woman to go down easy into the belly of a beast.
Goose and I ran side by side, with him keeping his massive body between me and the three-eyed cloud of horror, and me pushing myself after the flash of Emerald and Green Man. But Goose was pushing me steadily toward the right, off the path the two of them had forged ahead of us.
Fear laced its fingers around mine as I realized they were going to get lost. And the thing with three eyes was drifting quietly away toward where it would inevitably catch up with them. “RIGHT! RIGHT! RIGHT!” I screamed into the silent woods.
Every rule I had ever made up as a little girl about what to do in the woods—don’t whistle, don’t yell, don’t run around like prey—was being broken tonight. Who needed those rules anyway? They hadn’t been on my mind since I was a small girl. They weren’t about to help me much now. The woods I grew up around didn’t have whatever the fuck the two things chasing us were.
I heard the three make a course correction, and now my ears were trained for their stampeding as Goose wove us through the trees at breakneck speed. We caught up with them right as we neared a downed tree. Goose sailed over it with Violet’s delicate fingers buried into his midnight back, hanging on for dear life, pausing on the other side while I helped Emerald and Green Man over. The lion-headed man was catching up, I could see him just twenty feet away as I began to climb the massive downed tree’s trunk.
“Come on!” screamed Green Man fruitlessly, trying to grab my hands to pull me up and over the dark, moss-covered tree.
Claw-like fingernails dug into the backs of my knees, and I kicked and fought with every bit of energy I had left in me. I didn’t look back though. I didn’t care if it was the lion-headed man, the three-eyed mist, or some other creature. All I cared about was the fact that it was slowly pulling me down the log into the soft forest floor, and I was not about to go down without a fight. I cut my hands against a snapped bone of what was once a mighty branch and held on, straining my arms as the thing behind me pulled harder, dug its claws deeper into my flesh, my friends screaming while trying to help me.
“Run, dammit! Fucking run!” Even if I made it out of this, there was no way I was killing whatever had me. If they didn’t put distance between us when I finally got free, they were just as done for as I was. I could hear Goose growling and pushing at them, Green Man and Violet arguing with him like he would listen. The big beast barely listened to me some days.
The node of the branch snapped in my hand, and I came away with it, bellowing my fury. I didn’t look. My eyes were clamped shut against the potential horror of what I might see, the potential end of my life. My arms did all the seeing I needed, slashing out and slamming the sharp edge of the old wood into the beast as I kicked at it. It fell back with a thud against the hollow spring of the mat of dead leaves, rotten wood, and moldering vegetation that naturally gathered at the base of the dead fall.
I was not missing my chance. I didn’t even have to tell my body to shoot up and scale the tree, it was already doing it before I registered that I was free enough to do so. Moss came away in my fingers as I clawed my way up the bark, ignoring the angry, disturbed insects that lived under the wood. I made it to the apex of the tree before teeth sank into my flesh. The hot breath of the beast pursuing me corroded my calf and shook its head as if it would let me go, but not before tearing a chunk off me as the toll.
I screamed loud and hard around the word Fuck, and turned. It was the lion-headed man. Rotting flesh sloughing off around the bones of a massive feline skull as it thrashed, determined to excise its payment.
Behind it, a light glowed lilac and lavender, tumbling through the great spires in a crackling mass. Where it touched the wood of some trees, the bark turned black and decayed before my very eyes, crumbling into ancient dust. Some trees were spared, others were decimated, leaving a trail of fallen matchsticks in its wake.
Thought fled my head like a track runner taking the baton for the last lap, only to trip and re-engage a few moments later. It wasn’t higher thought though, it was purely primal instinct that pushed me to bend nearly in half, mouth agape and bury my teeth in the decomposing, soft, fleshy nose of the beast that gnawed voraciously on my leg. Pus exploded into my mouth and washed everything in the thick taste of grey-green, but I persisted through it, shaking my head until the nose came completely free of the revolting head. The beast fell back, roaring its agony, and I spit out my hard-won trophy and its putrid champagne.
The beast spotted the oncoming glowing lights as I leapt to the ground on the other side of the tree, splinters of pain radiating up my shins and rattling the violent throb in my wounds. The moment it saw whatever that thing was, panicked, shrill screams like a bobcat and a man intertwined radiated from behind me as it tried to scrabble up the side of the tree to follow me.
I ran. I didn’t know where my group had gone. I had no sight of them at all, but I knew that whatever that thing was behind me, slow moving as it was, I didn’t want to ask it for directions and hope it was feeling benevolent. I didn’t have to run far. Goose bounded out from behind a tree where he had been hiding the three humans and began running with me.
“What the fuck is that thing?!” I screamed as Goose yanked my dress’ shoulder and pulled me into a sharp left turn.
“Magic storm!” Violet called back down to me from astride Goose. “Wild magic. It eats up whatever’s in its path. Destroys anything and everything it touches. Doesn’t matter if it’s a tree, a Fae, a dragon, or any other creature. If it’s living, and it’s been magic-touched, it devours it.”
“Fuck that!”
Goose kept us at a grueling pace as we ran through the forest for what seemed like all night, stopping only when we hit a large stream that emptied out into an even larger river disappearing into the dark. Among the reeds and rushes, he hunkered down low on his belly, crawling between them until we all did. The magic storm had been left to roll its way through the forest, and any beasts that came for us now would be easily seen, not hidden by the dense bracken and trees.
Relatively safe, Violet, Emerald, and Green Man gathered in a huddle. Goose stretched himself wide to encircle us all in his dark shadows, and I watched the woods while Green Man fell into a fitful sleep. The other two maintained the silent, fear-soaked vigil with me while the bush snored.
At least for now, we were all safe. What the morning would bring was a problem for the morning. For now, the only problem I had was the grey hue to everything around us that had started the moment that bitch had collected her price, the aching wound bleeding out in my calf, and the utter desolation living within me that I chose to conveniently ignore in favor of focusing on anything other than that.
I could focus on that tomorrow. Or when I had a proper bed again, whenever that was. Now was no time to mourn the heartbreaking loss that felt like rose thorn canes had replaced every single one of the capillaries in my body.
I kept one eye trained on the forest while I tore the sleeve from my dress and soaked it in the river to clean the wound. The sleeve had been pierced by something in our mad dash through the forest and came away easily.
I sat cross-legged near the giant, near-transparent, smoky tail Goose kept insisting I tuck around me. Every time I moved it, he snorted a displeased growl and snapped it at me, so I gave in.
My calf bled freely, covering the soft, golden pearl skin in a hazy, milky film. As I dabbed at the bite mark, I shivered at the irregular shape. I had expected it to be the tooth impressions of a giant cat—even a rotting cat has big cat teeth, right? To my horror, that was no longer true in this fucked-up place. Dotted around the perimeter of the wound at seemingly random intervals were the distinct impressions of human teeth set into the same jawline of the clean punctures of the feline ones.
Goose shifted around me, wriggling out from under the others so that he could sniff at the wound. A displeased grunt was given before a pitch-black tongue rolled out and began hesitantly cleaning the wound.
