Page 27 of Echo North

All around, the trees bowed low, knotting their branches together, cutting off my path.

And suddenly there was nowhere left to run.

A sapling sprang out of the ground and reached its twiggy fingers toward me, pinning my ankles and wrists, cinching tight around my chest. It stabbed toward my throat but I wrenched my head to the side, screaming.

More branches wrapped round me, until I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. They dragged me down and down, into smothering blackness, and I was swallowed by the wood into the dark of the earth.

Spots swam before my eyes. My life slipped away.

My father would never find me. Never know what had happened.

And then, heat, pressing in. A sudden thrust upward, the binding branches falling free.

I collapsed on the ground, gasping, so much grit in my eyes I couldn’t see.

Fire raged round me.

Smoke crawled high.

And the wolf was there, white against the flame, a torch gripped in his teeth.

The wood shrank back from him, screaming.

I reached out for the wolf; my fingers grasped his fur, locked around his neck.

He dropped the torch.

And then we were hurtling through the wood for the second time in as many days, me clinging to his back, shutting my eyes against the horror, against the dark.

He had found me. Somehow, the wolf had found me.

He carried me through the meadow and into the hill, past the gatekeeper and into the house. Up to the bedroom behind the red door.

I collapsed onto the bed, dirt and leaves falling black on the sheets, blood smearing red. I sobbed into the pillows, sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t stop. But it wasn’t because of the pain raging in every part of me.

The wolf climbed up beside me, rested his head next to mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

But he blew a breath of warm air into my ear and said, “Dear one, do not be sorry.”

“ECHO. ECHO.”

I swam back to consciousness. Pain seared from every point in my skin; my vision was blurred and too bright. Some part of me realized that the wolf had never said my name before. I liked the sound of it in his gruff voice.

“You’re bleeding, Echo. We need to see to your wounds. You have to come with me.”

Somehow I pulled myself up, half falling out of the bed and leaning heavily against him. My blood seeped into his fur. Blackness threatened to overwhelm me.

“Stay with me. Just a little further.”

Down the hall, through a carved stone doorway, into a cavernous, echoing chamber. I had the dim impression of pillars and arches, silver light flooding through a wide window, a chaos of wheeling stars beyond. There was a sensation of peace and stillness, solemnity and great age. And underneath it all a feeling of tremendous power.

My head spun. I collapsed onto the floor, succumbing to the pain.

A breath of wind passed over me. I peered up to see the wolf bowing before a man who seemed to have wings growing out of his shoulders.

And then the man was kneeling over me. His wings wrapped around me, his fingers brushed whisper soft over my wounds. The cool sensation of magic buzzed under my skin. The pain faded.