Ilona Andrews - On the Edge

Rose looked at the dirt tracks. Now that had been something else. As far as she could remember, the truck hood came to a little above her waist. She rocked experimentally on her toes and jumped as high as she could. Not even close. If she took a running start, she could maybe get one leg up on the hood. But he had leaped onto the moving truck, landed on his feet, and kept going like it was nothing.

A tiny high-pitched noise from above made her raise her head. To the left a tall tree spread its branches over the path, leaning to the road. About nine feet off the ground, just before the tree trunk forked in two, a skinny shape hugged the bark. Kenny Jo Ogletree.

Kenny stood pretty far down on her favorite people list, only a step above his mother, Leanne, who had been best friends with Sarah Walton during high school and whose chief achievement was scrawling WHORES BITCH on Rose’s locker with a permanent marker. Grammar wasn’t among Leanne’s strengths, but bullying she had raised to an art form.

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree—at nine, Kenny was a bully and a loudmouth. About a month ago he and Georgie ran into a misunderstanding over a softball game and had to have words. If it wasn’t for Jack, Kenny would’ve beaten Georgie bloody, but all the kids were afraid of Jack. Jack fought like every fight was his last, and he didn’t always stop when he won.

Kenny clutched at the tree, standing absolutely still. His hands had gone white-knuckled with desperation. Grime stained his shirt and threadbare khaki shorts, and a long scratch along his thigh slowly dripped blood onto his calf. Kenny stared at her. His eyes were glassy, the whites starkly pale. Whatever problems she had with Leanne paled when faced with a nine-year-old boy terrified out of his wits.

“Are you okay, Kenny?”

He just stared.

The bushes on her left rustled. It was a purposeful, predatory sort of rustling. Rose backed away slowly.

A shiver ran through the thin stems. The branches bent, dark triangular leaves parted, and a creature stepped onto the road. Four feet tall, it stood upright, its body a mess of rotting, putrescent tissue clumped together in a grotesque patchwork. Rose saw the scales of a forest snake on the left leg, reddish fox fur on the shoulder, matted gray squirrel fuzz on the chest, brown stripes of a pig on the lower stomach . . . Part of its gut was missing, and a rotting mass of intestines glared through the hole just under a narrow flash of ribs.

Its face was horrible. Two pale baleful eyes stared at her from deep sockets. They brimmed with intense, focused hatred. Under them a wide mouth gaped, armed with sharp triangular teeth, sprouting from the jaws in several rows.

A ragged, whispery wheezing came from the creature, heavy and wet. A wold. A thing of hate and magic, a living curse that drew power from its creator’s rage. Someone had cursed some land or a house nearby, and the Wood gave the curse a form and a purpose: to kill everything it came across.

In the tree, Kenny whimpered like a kitten.

The wold opened its mouth wider and stepped forward, menace radiating from it like a foul corona. It wanted to murder her, to take a piece of her flesh and make it its own.

Rose raised her right hand.

The wold hissed. Its twisted limbs opened wide, releasing yellow claws.

A light sheen of magic coated Rose’s fingers. The magic vibrated in her, straining to break free.

The wold ran at her, its black maw gaping, teeth and claws ready to rend.

Rose flashed. Magic shot from her hand in a glowing whip of white and struck the creature in the chest. The wold’s momentum carried it another step, but the icy white flame of the flash burned it, burrowing into its chest, seeking its malice-coated core. Dismembering it wouldn’t be enough. She had to kill the curse itself.

Chunks of flesh rained from the wold. Rose advanced, keeping the whip of light fixed on the creature. Her arm throbbed with tension.

The wold fell apart, revealing a small mote of darkness churning with violent red and purple flashes. Rose squeezed her fist. The white whip clutched at the darkness. She strained, squeezing tighter, her nails biting into her palm. With a sound like a cracked walnut, the mote collapsed in on itself in a shower of white sparks and vanished.

Rose let out a deep breath, stepped over the carrion littering the path, and walked up to the tree. “Come on,” she said, holding out her hands.

Kenny stood frozen. For a moment she thought she’d have to go get his mother, but suddenly he let go and slid down the trunk, scraping himself against bark and all but falling into her arms. She had to drop him on his feet—he was too heavy.

“It’s gone,” she said and hugged him. “Dead and done. Understand?”

He nodded.

“It won’t come back. If you ever see another one like that, you run to my house as fast as you can. I’ll kill it. Go home now.”

He peeled down the road at a dead run, veering left, toward the Ogletree house.

Rose looked back at the carrion strewn in the dirt. Only a handful of families could claim a magic user strong enough to create a wold, and all of those capable were older people and supposedly knew better. A wold couldn’t be stopped. It was the kind of weapon that killed everything it came across. She hadn’t seen one for years. The last time one popped up, it took a full-blown posse to hunt it down with gasoline and torches.

Something had to have gone seriously wrong for one of the locals to curse a wold into life. Something dire was happening. Cold dread settled in the base of her neck. For a moment she considered following Kenny Jo to find out if Leanne knew anything about it, but decided against it. Shortly after high school, Sarah had married well and moved to a nice house in the Broken. Rumor said, Leanne wasn’t welcome at Sarah’s new dream home, and it made her only madder at life than she already was. She and Rose hadn’t spoken to each other since high school. She seriously doubted Leanne would suddenly open up to her.

Rose started up the road at a brisk pace. The faster she got home, the sooner she’d make sure that the boys were safe.

Few things happened in East Laporte without Grandma Éléonore’s knowledge. She would just have to ask her about it.

“MÉMÈRE?”

Éléonore glanced at Georgie’s face. She never could get him to explain how he knew to call her that. She had never spoken a word of French to either of them. But Georgie started saying it when he was two, with a light Provençal overlay. She had a feeling he didn’t know himself why he did it, but every time he said the word, it brought her back to dry, warm hills, where she sat in the sunshine next to her own grandmère , nibbling on fougasse that left a faint orange taste on her tongue and watching the men down in the village play la longue with the grace of ballet dancers.

She smiled at him. “What is it?”

“Can we go outside?”

Two pairs of eyes blinked at her from angelic faces: Georgie’s blue and Jack’s amber. Hooligans, both of them. “Is it dark?”

“We won’t go past the ward stones.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, and you think I was born yesterday, no?”

“Pleeease.” Georgie’s eyes would’ve done any puppy proud. Behind him Jack nodded earnestly.

“All right.” She gave in before her heart melted. Rose would be none too pleased if she found out, but what Rose didn’t know, she couldn’t fuss about. “I don’t trust the two of you. I’m coming out on the porch.”

They were out the door before she got up off her chair.

Éléonore took her teacup to the porch. The old rocking chair creaked under her weight. The boys dashed into the yard.

Beyond the lines of the ward stones, the Wood shivered with life. The sky had darkened to deep soothing purple, and the leaves of the upper branches stood out, nearly black against it, rustling gently in the cool whisper of the night breeze. Here and there the white spires of nightneedle bloomed between the trees. Their stems, no more than green shoots during the day, released a cascade of delicate, bell-shaped blossoms with the first touch of darkness, sending a mimosa perfume into the night. Éléonore breathed it in and smiled.