Holly Black - The Darkest Part of the Forest

She startled, her whole body freezing up.

She lost her balance. The bike spun out from underneath her. It happened so fast that she didn’t have time to react, to correct herself. One moment she’d been speeding along and the next she was slamming into the road.

The horned boy watched her crash, his expression unreadable in the moonlight.

CHAPTER 9

She hit the pavement. Her hands, thrown out to protect her face, hit first, skidding along the road. Her breath was knocked out of her. She rolled sideways, skinning her elbows and scraping the back of her head. Everything felt raw and awful. For a moment she stayed there, dirt in her mouth, waiting for the pain to ebb.

She could hear the wheels of her bike spinning and something else—the horned boy coming toward her. His footfalls on the asphalt sounded as loud as snapped bones.

He knelt down, looming over her.

His skin was pale, seemingly bleached by the chill. He was still wearing the fine embroidered blue tunic he’d had on for generations, the fabric darkened by rain, ivory boots spattered by mud. His horns rose up over his temples and curved back behind his sharp ears, close to his head and ending in points just past his jawline, so that, to someone at a distance, they might appear like thick braids. Even his bone structure—the planes of his cheekbones, height of his brow—seemed subtly different from a human’s. He seemed overall more finely wrought, like a crystal wineglass revealed to someone used to coffee mugs. His eyes were a mossy green that made her think of deep pools and cool water, and he looked down at her with those otherworldly eyes as though puzzling something through.

He was every bit as monstrously beautiful as he’d ever been. You could drown in beauty like that.

“What did you do to her?” Hazel asked, trying to push herself up. Blood was seeping from both of her knees and along her arms, making her pajamas stick to her skin. She didn’t think she could run; her muscles were too stiff and too sore.

He reached for her, and she realized that she was going to have to run anyway. She got up, lurched three steps, and saw that the girl lying in the ditch was Amanda Watkins.

Her skin was white—not pale or even sickly, but white as a sheet of paper is white. The only pinkish parts were along the very tips of her fingers and around the inside of her eyes. Her lips were slightly apart, and the cup of her mouth was filled with dirt, a few vines curling out from the corners. She had a high heel on one foot, but her other foot was bare and mud-covered.

“Amanda?” Hazel called, staggering toward her. “Amanda!”

“I know you. I know your voice,” the boy said, sounding hoarse, as if he’d been shouting for a week. He grabbed her arm and, when she whirled on him, stared at her with glittering, hungry eyes. “You’re the very girl I sought.”

She felt as if she’d waited her whole life for him to wake up and say those words to her. But now that he had, she was absolutely terrified. She tried to pull away. His fingers held her in place, as chill as if they’d been plunged into ice water, seeming to reach through her skin. She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a strangled sound.

“Quiet,” he said, his voice harsh. “Be quiet . I know who you are, Hazel Evans, sister of Benjamin Evans, daughter of Greer O’Neill and Spencer Evans. I recognize your voice. I know all your foolish desires. I know you and I know what you’ve done and I need you.”

“You… you what?” She imagined her nine-year-old self whispering to him through the glass and blushed a hot, shameful red that went all the way down her throat. Could he really have heard all the things they’d said to him, all the ridiculous things that had been said around him, for all the time he was there?

“Walk.” He pulled her along the road. “We must go. We’re out in the open here.”

She struggled against his grip, but he pulled her along, squeezing her wrist tightly enough to bruise.

“What about Amanda? We can’t just leave her!” she shouted.

“She sleeps,” he said. “My fault, perhaps, but I cannot alter it, nor is it of much consequence now. Things will be worse for her and for everyone else if you don’t tell me where it is.”

“Where what is?”

“The sword.” He sounded exasperated. “The one you used to free me. Do not play at ignorance.”

Dread turned Hazel’s stomach. She thought of the nearly empty trunk underneath her bed. “A sword?”

“Return Heartsworn. Things will go better for you if you simply do as I ask. If you trifle with me, I will have to show you why that is unwise.”

“Ask?” Hazel snapped automatically. “You call what you just said ‘asking’?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She urged herself to think . It was disorienting to stumble along, aware that he might be taking her somewhere to kill her and at the same time, confusingly, embarrassed that he was going to kill her while she was wearing her pajamas and wellies. If she’d known she was going to die at his hand, she would have dressed up.

His lip curled into an almost smile, and he jerked her arm. “Asking in the nicest way I know.”

“Want my help?” she said. “Then tell me what you did to Amanda.” As she spoke, she fumbled in the pocket of her coat for her cell phone. He might be a magical creature, a real knight, but he’d still been asleep for a hundred years. She bet he didn’t know shit about modern technology.

“I? You are much mistaken if you think it was I who did that. There are worse things than me in these woods.”

“What kinds of things?” Hazel asked.

“You have perhaps heard of a creature who was once one of the Folk and is now something else. A creature of mud and branch, moss and vine. She hunts me. It was she who set upon your Amanda. No blade but Heartsworn could even scratch her, so you can see it would be in your own best interest to give me the sword .”

Oh, Hazel thought, a little bit dazedly. No big deal. Just the monster from the heart of the woods, the creature of legend. She tried to keep her fingers steady as she typed to Ben without looking at her phone, grateful for a lifetime of texting during class: HELP AMANDA HURT ON GROUSE RD!!! MONSTER!

“You’ve freed me.” He looked back at her—and for a moment she thought that underneath all his cold fury, there was something else. “And you are likely to pay for your kindness in most grievous coin. Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know for sure I was involved until tonight. You said you heard my voice—was there anyone else there? Anyone giving me orders?”

He shook his head. “Only you. But by the time I came awake—truly awake—the sky was bright and you were gone.”

“I don’t remember that. I don’t remember going anywhere last night,.”

He sighed. “Try to remember. Consider the fate of Amanda Watkins, who, by the way, I know you didn’t like. Still, the next victim might be someone you do care about.”

She startled at his saying that. He was a stranger, yet the way he spoke and the press of his fingers against her arm were oddly intimate. She’d imagined a scene so very like this so many times that to walk beside him in the dim woods had become half nightmare and half fantasy, all unreal. Hazel felt dizzy, as though she might faint. She kind of wanted to faint, so she didn’t have to deal with any of it. “Just because I don’t like her doesn’t mean I want her to die.”