AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A wisp of a girl stood behind him—the one this man had raped minutes ago. She held out a sword as big as her, hands shaking violently as she wept.
Struggling for breath, I used my remaining energy to gulp in shallow, sharp gasps through my thick, bruised throat. When I pushed the chain off my neck, I could feel the deep indentations it had embedded. I’d been lynched and only narrowly escaped—but not without a reminder of what had happened to me.
The girl in her bloody, rippling white shift looked like a pale ghost in the night, standing stock-still against the moonlight as our eyes locked.
I tried to say “Thank you,” but couldn’t get the words past the pulpy knot in my throat.
Then she morphed from a ghost into a banshee, and wailed a bloodcurdling cry.
She swung the sword at the dead man beside me.
Stunned, I rolled away before she could accidentally slice into me. She went to her knees and stabbed into Simon’s corpse repeatedly, crying and screaming at God the entire time. Blood sprayed all over her. The ripping sounds of flesh and crunching bones made me grimace as I watched with wide-eyed horror.
She pushed Simon from his side to his back, continuing to bring the blade down into her rapist’s face, through his mouth, eyes, nose, until he was an unrecognizable mass of gore, teeth fragments, and brain matter.
Finally, hands firmly took her by the shoulder. “Enid! He’s dead! He’s dead!”
The girl named Enid belted out another crooning wail and let the bloody sword drop from her hands and thud onto the crimson grass.
Maria flung her arms around Enid, hugging her from behind. “Shhh, it’s okay, it’s over,” she whispered, tucking the girl’s head into her bosom, petting her. Over Enid’s shoulder, Maria’s eyes locked with mine.
We were both shocked. Silent. I simply blinked blurry eyes then sat up, heaving for breath, trying to gather myself.
“It’s not much better over there,” Maria muttered to me.
I furrowed my brow and crawled past her to look up the hill. I saw a gang of women in thin, semi-translucent shifts—two of them stark naked in the moonlight. Freed from the carriage, clawing and hitting the other guard they’d brought down. They screamed as they tore the dead man apart, as if lost in some kind of ritualistic trance of murder and sacrifice.
Maybe it was a side effect of the amnestic.
One of the girls grabbed a fist-sized rock from the road and smashed it over the man’s head, again and again, until I was sure he resembled mushy old Simon here.
I stared in abject horror at what these girls were capable of once they were liberated from their captivity. They’d transformed into raving, bloodthirsty creatures yelling at the moon—the she-wolves of legend that Mama and Father always warned me about. Flesh and blood monsters.
And I didn’t blame them one bit.
Holy shit. My jaw dropped as I realized something. I have my Merry Women . . . except it’s not quite what I envisioned.
Chapter 46
Robin
The girls couldn’t be pacified. When I tried to corral them into the carriage so we could leave this place of death, they refused to step foot inside—their prison on wheels.
I understood that part.
What I didn’t understand was when they all just . . . took off running. After gathering torn and bloodied cloaks from the dead guards for the two naked girls, and other bits of tattered clothes to warm themselves against the night chill, they sprinted as a group down the road.
I swooped up one of the dead guards’ swords and hurried after them, with Maria close behind.
“Wait!” I cried out, struggling to keep up. I limped from my wound and grimaced, putting a hand to my side. My energy was depleted, yet I couldn’t just let these wild women keep running until they died in the cold.
“What do we do?!” Maria asked.
The entire world had gone upside down. We were tailing a gaggle of stark-raving lunatics who had lost their minds to bloodlust, freedom, and the moon.
Suddenly, myths and legends of people going mad in Sherwood Forest made much more sense to me. I was seeing it firsthand. And I had no answer for what to do.
So I followed as best I could. Maria helped me along as we careened down the road, barefoot. The gravel bit into my soles and distracted me from my bleeding side.
