like someone had cut it off in a hurry and never paid attention to it since. And then he said: “I forgive you for going through my stuff.”
Ren bristled.
“Well, I don’t forgive you for hitting me.”
She had never noticed his eyelashes were quite so dark as he grinned. “Me neither.”
Ren wondered, for the first time, if they were starting again. Right, this time.
On they went, flames burning silently on every side. In the midafternoon, Lukasz’s horse—Król—threw a shoe. Their group stopped while Lukasz hammered a new one into place.
Ren moved on to scout out the path ahead with Ry? and Czarn. The smoke had thickened, now weighing down the branches like dusky red snow. Gauzy drifts floated down to the ground and sparked.
The haze was so dense that Ren could barely see in front of her. Czarn was panting.
Shapes materialized from the smoke. Four wine-colored bundles huddled on the ground while birds circled above them. They swooped down, pecking, taking flight again.
Storks.
“Czarn,” she whispered. “Do you see that?”
“Hard to miss,” interjected Ry?. “You should change, Ren.”
“Don’t order me around in my forest,” snapped Ren, but her heart wasn’t in it.
“I don’t know if this is still your forest,” whispered her brother.
The little group advanced on the shapes and the birds. Czarn barked, flinging strings of saliva across the forest. The sound was deafening in the silence. The storks barely stirred. Ry? growled.
The closest stork, a shock of white in the red, turned to them. There wasn’t any fear in its beady black eyes.
Czarn fell back and growled. The shapes on the ground had taken on terrifyingly familiar forms. From the trees, Ducha screeched.
Almost lazily, the storks spread their wings. They sailed up to disappear into the smoke overhead. The flames had begun to expand, moving out of the periphery of Ren’s vision. They cast the bodies in flickering, red-orange light.
Ren reeled. The flames were taller than she was, her vision rippling with heat. The warmth was crushing. Ren felt her hair growing heavy and wet, pressing along her neck. Then she looked down and screamed.
Five bodies lay on the ground. And Ren knew them: Jakub, Koszmar, Felka, Lukasz. . . .
Tree roots entwined them. One black root snaked out of Jakub’s empty eye socket, ran down his cheek, burrowed into the skin. Tiny, spidery roots twisted out of his open mouth, like black veins, running down his chin and encasing his throat.
In spidery fingers, they forced open Koszmar’s mouth and surged down his lifeless throat. Another one, as thick around as the Dragon’s tail, curled lazily around his legs. Next to him, five cuts scored Lukasz’s body. Something wriggled beneath his skin, bubbling, slithering. Ren almost screamed as black, twisted fingers started to force their way out of the open wounds.
No. She sank to her knees. No, not—
BANG.
A shot echoed across the forest.
Ren staggered and spun around. It was . . . Lukasz? Alive and well, he stood five feet behind her, still silhouetted in red smoke. He lowered his rifle.
“What’s going on—?” she choked.
The others materialized behind Lukasz. Also alive. She twisted around, looked back at the bodies. The roots pulsed like blood vessels.
“Stay back, Ren,” said Jakub, somewhere behind her. “It’s an illusion.”
Ren suddenly registered that Lukasz had shot his own corpse. A bullet hole yawned in its chest, and through the hole, a red-rimmed eye blinked. Fingers emerged once more, wriggling free of the body’s chest.
Lukasz—the real Lukasz—fired two more shots in quick succession. The corpse danced on the ground. Deep within it, something began to howl.
Koszmar used the hilt of his saber to knock away Lukasz’s rifle.
“Don’t waste bullets,” he ordered. “We don’t know what’s out there.”
Ren wasn’t listening.
“It’s some kind of warning,” murmured Jakub. Despite the situation, there was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. “Notice that the only corpses here are human. None of the animals are represented. . . .”
Ren was moving toward the last body. She couldn’t stay away. It was impossible. It pulled her in. One stork remained, ignoring her and picking at its back. Even facedown, Ren recognized the body. The flames closed in as she knelt down. There was no room for fear. Only cold, bone-chilling realization.
Her hand, blue in all the red, reached out and closed on the shoulder. She turned the body over.
Ren met her own dead eyes.
There were no roots. Nothing black pushing out of her eyes, creeping out of her throat. The dead version of her looked just like her. Only its color was