Ugly, otherworldly, feeds on the living, and affected only by magic?Kat knew of only one such creature, and he had thought it a myth. The monster pawing fire from its snout was a demon.
Aleks suddenly let out a choking cry. Kat twisted. Gods, what if the demon had stepped on him? What if it had tried to eat him?
But Kat wasn’t the only one who suddenly realized there was a helpless infant there. The demon hissed and scuttled forward on all fours, darting for Aleks. Katyr dove for the baby, but the demon was fast. Kat scooped Aleks up just before the demon fell upon him, but there was no time to check him over. A black scorpion tail shot at them out of nowhere, attached to the demon’s back.
Kat rolled aside, doing his best to protect Aleks, who was screaming. He hit the ground with his shoulder and grimaced as he slid, the dry ground tearing at his clothes and skin. When he came up, it was with a ball of lightning in his hand. He loosed it at the demon, who leapt to one side, narrowly dodging. Kat shot another spell at him, and another, but the demon was nimble enough to avoid them all.
It jumped to the center of the crossroads, skin shimmering in the moonlight. Kat unleashed a fireball, but the demon disappeared suddenly, as if it’d never been there.
Kat held the screaming baby tight against him and turned, scanning the landscape for any signs of movement. Demons did not abandon their prey so easily. It was coming back, and he had to be ready for it.
Something suddenly tackled him from behind. He fell forward and Aleks rolled from his grip into the soft grass. The demon clamored over Kat, darting after the baby.
Pure, icy panic took hold of Kat. He let out a primal scream and lunged forward, calling magic to his fists. Instead of pushing the power out of his body, he used it to turn his fists to stone. He crashed into the demon just short of Aleks, punching it in the snout. It roared and tried to kick as Kat fell on its back, but Kat had wrestled Isaac plenty of times. This demon was much smaller than Isaac.
With a grunt, Kat rolled the demon over onto its back and punched its face with his stone fists. It stared up at him, dazed, and tried to flinch away from the second punch, but there was nowhere to go. Back blood spewed from the demon’s face.
“You—” Punch. “—will not—” Another punch. “—have him!”
Strike after strike rang out until the demon stopped moving and it felt like Katyr was punching wet meat. He pulled his hands back and shook away the spell, staring at the putrid black blood. Slowly, Katyr staggered to his feet and, just for good measure, he set the corpse on fire.
“Aleks!” Kat’s unsteady feet carried him to where the bundle lay in the grass.
He fell to his knees, almost afraid to look. After such a violent confrontation, how could he possibly be unharmed? He was a baby, and babies were so fragile! Even wrapped in all those blankets, he’d surely been injured. It had to be serious. He wasn’t even crying.
You must, Kat told himself.Gods above, how will I tell Isaac if…
He wouldn’t think of it.
Kat took a steadying breath and reached for the blankets. Slowly, he pulled the blankets back.
Big baby blue eyes blinked up at him. Aleks sprouted a toothless smile.
“How?” Still panicked, Kat picked him up and stripped the blankets away, carefully checking the baby over. Despite being tossed all over and bouncing through the grass, there wasn’t a scratch or bruise on him. It had to be some sort of miracle. Even Kat had gotten hurt, and he was a full-grown adult.
Katyr frowned. He could’ve sworn he’d felt a faint hum of power just now, as if Aleks had a spell woven over him. But that was impossible. Kat would have noticed if someone had spelled him.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kat said, wincing and rising with the baby in his arms. “You’re alive and unharmed, and the demon is dead.”
He cast a wary look at the smoking demon corpse in the other direction. It wasn’t easy for demons to enter the world, and one hadn’t been sighted in thousands of years. They were the stuff of legends, or so he’d believed. If they could enter the world, it would take an incredible disturbance of magic and an unsettling sort of curse to make it happen.
But that was something he could worry about later, once they were safe and sound behind Greymark’s walls.
“Come, Aleks,” Katyr said, walking away from the demon’s smoldering carcass. “Where there is one demon, there may be others. We can’t stay.”
He went back to the horse, which had only been spooked by the whole thing, and quickly made a sling with another blanket to hold Aleks in place. They mounted up and rode off as fast as Kat dared to go in the dark.
Forty-Five
Rowansquintedupatthe weak sun behind its gray shroud. Though it was midday, the sky was drab, the air chilled when they came upon the Wytchwood. A sea of eternal mist clung to leaves the color of bile. Ancient, moss-covered trunks hunched over like bent spines. Frosty fractals transformed the once-green moss silver in the pale light. Long, thin branches twisted and reached for the sky in the shape of arthritic fingers. Spotted, dying leaves twitched in the wind.
Nothing living stirred within. Even the most desperate creatures knew not to enter that accursed forest.
As a child, Rowan’s nanny had told him tales of this place. She said there was once a wise woman who lived in a quaint little cottage at the center of the wood. She used her knowledge of plants and herbs to heal and help. When the missionaries from across the sea heard of her, they dubbed her a witch. They dragged her out and threw a noose over the boughs of a wych elm. With her dying breath, the wise woman cursed the land so that all who entered would die.
When they hung her, they left her body up as a warning to the locals. When one missionary returned to take her corpse down, he found it gone. Nothing but an empty noose remained. He turned to flee, but never made it back to his flock.
Every so often, reports would trickle into Greymark Castle from travelers brave enough to stop near the Wytchwood. They reported strange sights of a woman in white, her long silver hair floating around her head. They said she’d watch from the edge of the wood, and that sometimes, she would lift a bony finger to point at them and let out a deafening scream. Most of them were so disturbed by what they’d seen, they moved on in the middle of the night.