There is terror and desire. A distant horror, a further distant pain. I must get through the door. I must, I must.
The door gives. I push through, hissing as a piece of jagged metal slices into my leg. The music pulls me, pulls me. I haul myself from the train, and tumble out into the wood.
Chapter Four
OWEN
DIRT GRINDS UNDER MY PALMS. THE CUT IN MY LEG DRIPS blood on the ground.
I gulp for air, my limbs strangely heavy. Screams echo in the wood ahead of me, a jarring counterpoint to the music that twists into my soul. The train has been torn off its tracks, the cars scattered on the ground like discarded toys. They stretch on into the wood, out of my sight line. Other passengers crawl from the cars ahead of me, some with broken arms or legs, many with wounds from the impact of the crash. All of them lie on the forest floor, limbs dragging across the tracks. All of them wait, as I do.
The music overwhelms me, pins me like a bug to the earth between the railroad cars. I can’t move my arms, my legs. Her song commands me to stay, to wait. My mind is screaming for me to run. My body doesn’t listen. I can’t move, can’t think. I can hardly breathe. She will come. She will devour me. And I will let her do it.
Horror is a yawning gulf inside of me.
I will never see Father or Awela again.
From the front sections of the train comes the same sound again and again, the pop and crack of something breaking. I realize that it’s bodies, that it’s bones.
Overhead, wind ripples through the trees. Branches groan and leaves whisper. Through it all her song swells and swells. It will swallow the world. It will swallow me.
I don’t even have the will to clap my hands over my ears, to shut out the all-consuming sound of it.
I just lie here, and wait for her to come.
I shake, shake.
Father. Awela. Tears blur my vision.
I glimpse the siren through the trees, a flash of green and silver. The screams grow louder, swelling toward me like an ocean tide. But they do not block out her song. They don’t even muffle it.
She comes nearer, to a car five down the line. She has the vague form of a woman but she’s very, very tall, and unnaturally thin. Her skin is silver-white bark, and she’s clothed in green and gold leaves round as coins. Branches burst from her hands and catch hold of the train carriage, ripping it open as easily as if it were an egg. She drags a passenger out by the throat, and with one vicious twist she snaps his neck and flings him to the ground.
A scream tears out of me. I try to fight against the music. I tell myself to get up, to run, but my body will not obey me.
So I just lie here. I lie here and watch her slaughter them all.
Bodies. So many bodies. She scatters them over the grass, flings them onto the wreck of the train. They’re broken and bloody, some with twisted limbs, some with their final screams frozen in their vacant eyes. Vines spring out of the ground, and pull them into the earth.
She is two cars down from me. One. With every person she kills, she kneels beside them for a moment, and something hanging at her throat pulses with a silver light. She never stops singing.
I feel her music in every part of me, throbbing in my veins, heavy in my bones. It will be the last thing I ever hear.
An eerie red light slants through the trees, and some distant part of me realizes that beyond the wood, the sun is setting.
I won’t live to see the stars. Won’t have the chance to tell my father and Awela goodbye.
I weep.
There are no passengers in the train car ahead of me, or if there were, they were killed in the crash. A mercy for them. I think of the old man and his newspaper, dead on impact. He will not have to die as I will—in the grip of a nightmare, at the hands of a monster.
She comes toward me, her movement wavering and strange, like a tree bowing in the wind. She will put her claws in me. She will break me in half, and fling me to the ground for the earth to swallow, like it swallowed all the rest.
But she stops three paces away from me, and closes her mouth. Her song is cut off. She stares at me. The tree siren stares at me.
She is even more monstrous up close. Her hair is silver, tangled with yellow leaves. She wears a crown of violets. There is blood on her hands.
I shake, dimly aware that my will is flooding back to me. My body buzzes with needle-like pain, blood rushing back into limbs that have been asleep. My mind is a riot of terror. I still can’t move, fixed by her gaze as I was fixed by her song. There is a pendant at her throat, hung on a twist of vine. It glows a faint silver, reflecting in her eyes.
She opens her mouth and I shrink back. I have lost my chance. I should have fled the instant she stopped singing.
“Run,” she snarls.
Chapter Five
MONSTER
THE ORB AT MY THROAT IS HEAVY WITH SOULS. THEY WEIGH ON ME.
There is a boy in the dark.
He stares, but does not cower.
There is a strangeness about him.
A difference in his soul.
A familiar spark.
I do not want to kill him, to feel his blood warm and wet on my hands.
I do not want his soul.
I do not need it.
The orb is heavy.
She will not know.
He runs
into
the
night.
I let him go.
Chapter Six
OWEN
I TEAR INTO THE DARK, MY FEET SLAPPING AGAINST THE RAILROAD ties, my breathing ragged, frantic. Pain stabs under my ribs. I stumble on one of the cross ties, but I haul myself up and keep running. I can’t stop. The moment I do, I’m dead.
Oh God.
Bodies. So many bodies. The images crowd in my mind. I can’t run fast enough to shake them loose.
Oh God.
A sob tears out of me. The trees murmur and scrape above my head, an eerie wind seething past my hot face. I run and run and run, following the train tracks, the only possible route of escape. But how far did the train take me into the wood? How many hours was I asleep? Maybe I was nearly to Saeth. Maybe I should have run the other direction.
But Oh God, no. That was the way she had gone. The tree siren. The monster.
Slap slap slap go my feet against the railroad ties. My pulse is so quick I can’t count the beats. I gulp air like I’m drowning and maybe I am. Drowning in leaves and branches and the horror of her eyes.
Now I know the color of a demon’s eyes. Yellow.
Slap slap slap.
I run and run. I can’t feel my feet. My body seems separated from my mind, like I’m floating somewhere far above, watching my own futile dash to freedom.
She stopped singing. That is the only reason my will returned to me. I have no illusions that she really let me go. Why would she? She is a cat and I am a mouse, and any moment now she will catch me in her claws, bat me back and forth between them, leave my broken body on the forest floor like she left all the others.
Oh God. My body is screaming to stop running. My mind is screaming to keep going.
She was green and gold. Silver and violet. There was blood on her hands.
The trees watch me as I stagger on. I run until I collapse, and then I pull myself along the railroad tracks, tearing holes in my trousers and scraping my legs raw. I don’t make a conscious decision to stop, but I grow aware that I have, huddled between the rails, shaking and shaking.