We found a back way out, a glass door that led to a deck. Leon carefully lowered me over the side of before jumping down himself. Then into the trees that nestled close around the house, he dragged me breathless through the dark, my chest aching with panic and the cold air, until finally I had to beg him to stop.
“We have to move quickly,” he insisted, pacing as I doubled over, kneeling on the ground, unsure if I was about to vomit or pass out or both. “You need to get out of Abelaum, Raelynn. Somewhere he won’t look, somewhere they can’t find you.” Still pacing, fists clenching and unclenching, teeth clipping together furiously, he muttered, “He thinks he can take you from me. I’ll rip off his hands before I ever let him —”
“Leon…” I swayed to my feet, panic still clenched so tightly around my heart that it hurt. “Don’t leave me again…please…please don’t…I…I can’t…”
“I’m not fucking leaving.” He grabbed me, half gentle, half vicious — as if he could force what he was saying to be believed, the tighter he gripped my arms. The whites of his eyes were darkening, the gold in them like fire in the night sky, and even the veins on his forearms were running black now. “Nothing is going to take you from me. Nothing.”
“But-but my soul, you said…you said —”
He pressed his hand over my mouth. “Shh, shh, stop. Stop.” His hand was shaking. His claws were pressing into my cheek, little pinpricks of pain. “Don’t you fucking doubt that I’ll have your soul. I’m not letting you get away. I’m not letting anything” — he grasped me so hard, so tight, that I could hardly breathe, his heat rushing over me in waves — “anything take you from me. I’ll rip Heaven and Hell and this goddamn Earth apart before I let them steal you from me.”
He’d claimed I was his before but always with the caveat that my soul was a requirement. Now? It was as if the very idea that I might be taken was repulsive, insulting. Maybe that should have scared me too, but the ache in my chest calmed, even with my heart still pounding. For a few seconds, the only sound between us was our breathing: hard, heavy.
No oxygen in the world was enough when this fear, this longing, this inevitable desire wanted to steal every breath from my lungs.
Slowly, Leon uncovered my mouth, but he still gripped my cheeks between his fingers. He held his head high, his jaw locked. “Not a goddamn thing is taking you from me, baby girl. No man, and no God. I’ll kill them all.”
Snap.
I nearly got whiplash from how quickly he wrenched me back, his body between me and whatever had just taken a step in the darkness. For the first time, I noticed how silent the woods were. How oppressively empty they seemed. No crickets, no rustling of the little creatures moving through the underbrush. Even the wind was still.
But there was a smell. Like a damp cellar. Like mold.
A figure — tall, lean, pale as bone, stood about a hundred yards away among the trees. I might have thought it was the trunk of a broken aspen at first glance. But another second meant seeing the white antlers on its head, tendrils of seaweed clinging to their prongs — the long, knobby limbs — the hooves on its too-long bent-backward legs.
The eyes.
Large milky white eyes, staring.
“Leon.” My voice shook. My hands were knotted into fists against his shirt. Slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves, he pulled the mask from his face and dropped it to the ground.
When the mask dropped, the creature jolted; it moved — rapidly like still frames of a photo, jerking, unnatural — every motion accompanied by a click as if its bones were popping.
In the blink of an eye, it was fifty yards closer.
“What the fuck is it?” I whispered, panic tightening my throat.
“A Gollum,” he said. His hand was frozen, outstretched where he’d dropped the mask, as if he didn’t dare move it again. “A creature of rotten earth. They serve the God. Its will is their will, they’re an extension of Its influence. Listen to me. Carefully.” His head twitched in my direction and the Gollum twitched, too. Then it was utterly still, save for a slight twitching in its long, boney fingers. “When I move, pull out the knife. Keep it ready.”
My hands felt too cold, too numb, to do anything with that goddamn knife. “Can you kill it?”
He tweaked his eyebrow up, glancing back at me, a smirk on his mouth. “For you, baby girl, I can kill anything.”
The Gollum lurched forward, and Leon met it before it could cross even half the distance that remained between us. In the dark, the only way I could track their movements was by the sudden flashes of the Gollum’s pale white form. The sound was like thunder, like columns of wood smacking together. The Gollum was shrieking, terrible screams that echoed through the woods, but it wasn’t going down. It just kept fighting, matching Leon’s strength and speed.
I tugged the knife from under my sweater, holding it in front of me as I backed away, until I was pressed against trunk of a pine. My heart pounded in my ears, adrenaline demanding I run while the little sense I still had in my brain anchored me to the spot. I’d seen these things before. I knew there was more than one. If this one was here…
Then where were the others?
There was a massive crack, and Leon hurled a long tree limb like a baseball bat, striking the Gollum so hard that its body crumpled like a spider. But it was only for a moment. The creature jolted up again, clicking as it did, and its twitchy head fixated in my direction.
It opened its mouth, a horrid groaning gurgle spewing out of it as it jolted rapidly toward me.
Leon seized its arm and ripped it back. The Gollum slashed at him before leaping onto his back, wrapping its long limbs around him and squeezing. Leon ripped at it with his claws, his teeth, thrashing himself backward to slam the monster against any surface he could find. He ripped into its arm and blood sprayed across my sweater, or at least, I thought it was blood at first. As it dripped down my shirt, and I touched it in horror, I realized it felt like thick mud.
The monster wasn’t letting go. It was gripping tighter despite the gashes Leon was opening in its limbs. Leon gripped the hands around his neck, snarling ferociously, and snap — the long fingers crunched in his hands and the monster shrieked again, finally falling off of him.
But the moment it let go of him, it came for me.
I couldn’t get away with the tree at my back. By the time my brain processed that the twitchy creature was on top of me, its broken fingers were wrapping around my skull, and the moment it squeezed, everything went dark.
Dark…but there was hard, damp earth beneath my hands.
Dark, but there was a smell of dust in the air, of wet earth.
Dark, but somewhere ahead of me, water was dripping.
I pushed myself up slowly from the ground, reaching out blindly. I felt a dirt wall to my left…and to my right. Nothing in front of me. Nothing behind.
What the hell had happened? Where was I? This wasn’t the forest.
My heart drummed against my ribs, my lungs felt tight. Where was Leon?
Where was the monster?
Raelynn.
I scrambled to my feet, pressing myself against the wall, trying not to hyperventilate, trying not to be too loud. It was the voice from my dreams. The voice I’d heard calling to me in my nightmares.
The God’s voice.
My knife was gone. No matter how many times I blinked, no matter which way I looked, there was nothing but darkness. Panic was sinking its claws in deep. The water, dripping somewhere nearby, was trickling faster now. It wasn’t just a drip. It was a stream.
I took a step, and my foot splashed into water.
My vision jolted, like static cutting through my eyes, and for a split-second I saw the monster again, clinging to me, white eyes staring down into mine as Leon’s hands wrapped it into a chokehold from behind —
Back into the dark. There was water at my ankles now. The trickling stream sounded like a rushing river.
A flood…the tunnel was flooding.
Raelynn. Come to me. Let me help you.
I stumbled forward. I knew the voice was dangerous, but I couldn’t stand here and wait to drown. The water was rising rapidly. It would be up to my knees in a moment. I had to follow the voice. I had to find it. Maybe, somehow, it could help me…
The night sky burst into my vision, and I gasped for air as if I’d been drowning. I was lying on my back, my head was burning, I was so dazed that I couldn’t move. I could only stare through the ragged limbs of the pines, their needles piercing the starry night sky as the clouds swept over the moon.
There were footsteps behind me…closer…closer…
Leon stood over me. Something was smeared on his face; blood or mud, I couldn’t be sure. Slowly he crouched down, scooped me up into his arms, and cradled me against his chest.
His shirt was wet, stained. As he began to walk, it was with a stiffness that hadn’t been there before.
I tried to talk, tried to ask what the hell had happened and if we were safe. But my tongue felt like it was made of cotton, and I realized that my hand was still clenched in a vice-like grip around the knife.
“Just sleep, baby girl,” he muttered, even as my exhaustion swooped in as the adrenaline subsided, and I found myself barely able to keep my aching eyes open. “I told you I’d kill it. You’re okay. You’ll be okay.”
