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She searched the bogs that lined the road. Peat bogs as far as she could tell. Her head tilted down, she snuck a long assessing glance at the brute stretched out behind her. Everything about him indicated he was a city dweller. Soot-stained clothes. His accent. His smell. She shifted her gaze to the driver of the wagon. She couldn’t see the front of him, but his ill-fitting clothes were the same.
What did a city dweller know about bogs?
With any luck, nothing.
Her mouth closed tight and she inhaled a long breath to fill her lungs, then coiled.
She waited for the brute in the back to look behind them and she jumped, leaping over the side of the wagon.
Straight down the embankment toward the bog.
It was a risk. But this was land she knew. Land she could identify. Land they could not. And they wouldn’t be so stupid as to follow her into a bog.
She spied her first chunk of solid ground to leap onto. One leap. Two. Her foot slipped, the toe of her boot splashing into water. Arms swinging, she caught herself. Three. Four leaps.
Ignoring the shouts behind her, she hopped and jumped from one clump of solid ground to another, avoiding the mushy wet mosses in between that would for sure sink her to her death.
Bogs were like that. Hungry for humans.
But she didn’t intend to be eaten.
Her eyes scanning the grasses, searching for solid lumps, her concentration stayed fully on the ground before her. She was forty steps into the bog before she realized the brutes were following her, their bitter swearing getting louder and louder.
She glanced over her shoulder. The thin driver was faster, more nimble as he slipped and scampered across the squishy spots of the bog.
He didn’t even see it as his fellow brute dropped behind him. One loose foothold, and the blackguard slipped, sinking into the muck of the bog.
His arms flailing, he struggled to stop the sinking, grasping at grasses, screaming.
Sloane wanted to shout out for him to still. To calm.
But it was too late. Panic and his massive form were exactly what the bog wanted. What the bog feasted upon.
The brute’s head slipped below the moss and his hand went motionless, still clutching a fistful of grass.
Swallowed.
She shouldn’t have stopped. Shouldn’t have looked back. For in the next breath the driver was almost upon her.
“Stop right there, ye fuckin’ bitch.” He stretched out with his long limbs, his fingers snagging her left wrist.
Sloane yanked her arm and leapt onto the next mound closest to her—or what she hoped was a mound. His fingers slipped off her arm in midair, and the sudden absence of resistance sent her flying too far. She slid off the mucky grasses, her right knee and arm sinking into the bog.
The solid ground not nearly solid enough.
Behind her, a splash, and then silent thrashing. The driver had fallen face first into the bog, crashing through the top layer of moss. What little there was of his backside stuck high in the air went still, then slowly started to slip below the moss.
Swallowed.
Sloane couldn’t spare even a thought for the brute, as her right arm and right leg were quickly being sucked into the thick muck of the bog.
She froze in place, attempting to fight the panic threatening to take over her muscles. Her eyes squeezed closed and she tried to conjure everything Jacob had every told her about bogs.
Do not struggle. Do not fight against a bog. You have to fool it. Move slowly. So slowly you are tricking the bog into thinking you are still. It is the only way to dupe it. The only way to escape it.
Her left leg was still partially on a solid clump of ground next to her left hand, her thigh shaking with the ferocity of gripping to the last thing keeping her from drowning.
“Sloane.” A thunderous yell flew across the bog.
