The Wood Queen (21 page)

Donna glanced over her shoulder and shivered as the shadow men did their creepy gliding thing toward them.
Didn’t these things ever give up?

She fixed him with what she hoped was a sincere expression. “I’m sorry, but we can’t just run. I won’t leave those things here—not if they’re a threat to people.” Maybe if she appealed to his heroic sensibilities, she could get him to help her fight them—and then return to close the gate to the Otherworld.

Fear cramped her stomach as she thought of facing Demian again, but she wouldn’t let that stop her.

Robert shook his head quickly. “Do you see other people around? The only ones in any danger are you and me.”

“I told you before, I don’t want you to protect me.”

“And I don’t want you getting in my way,” he shot back. He had the pouch in his hand again. “Stand still.” He scattered salt around her in a circle, bending over to reach the ground while trying to keep an eye on the shadows.

“Why are you doing that?”

He didn’t reply, but she was pretty sure the muttering under his breath wasn’t complimentary toward her. For one moment she’d actually thought it might be some kind of alchemical incantation, but then she heard the words “idiot” and “useless.”

Oo-kay
. Not a spell, then.

“Originally, I was going to trap them in a circle—we can’t destroy them. The best we can hope for is to hold them for a while.” Although his voice was matter-of-fact, she could detect a faint thread of worry running through it. He was working faster now, scattering salt wildly around both Donna and himself.

“Why aren’t they moving?” The creepy things were now just standing there, swaying. Like giant, man-shaped rattlesnakes.

“Waiting for us to run—they’re hunters. The movement gives them something to track.” He stood up, breathing heavily from all the bending and salt-scattering. “Okay, that should do it.”

“Do wha—?”

“Lux!” he shouted.

Brilliant light blasted into an uneven circle around them.

Donna stared at it in wonder—although it was bright, she could still look at it without having to squint.

“I thought you said you were going to put
them
in the circle,” she said, feeling trapped and nervous.

“Change of plan. We’ll be safe here until they get bored.”

“What if they don’t get bored?”

Robert glanced down at her. “You’re a regular little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”

Donna rolled her eyes, trying to hide how truly terrified she was. “But now we’re stuck here. That doesn’t seem like such a smart plan to me.”

“Where there are two shadows, there will be more, trust me. Did you think this was it?”

“No, of course not. But I don’t like being trapped here—I need to do something.”

He looked down at her, his dark eyes fierce. “So far, all you’ve managed to do is get yourself tossed around. This is safer.”

Although she appreciated the fact that he didn’t mention how it had been
her
who’d let them out in the first place, she still wished she could try closing the Otherworld door. Despite Robert’s dire warnings about how it had taken lots of alchemists and some serious mojo to do it before, surely she couldn’t leave the Ironwood without at least making an attempt.

She sighed. “They’re not going anywhere, Robert.”

But the shadow men did move away, and they did it surprisingly quickly. Even Robert seemed taken aback.

“Maybe he called them away,” he said, sounding genuinely confused.

She frowned. “Who?”

“The demon king; the one who seemed so bewitched by you.”

Donna shivered. “Don’t say that.”

He shrugged. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Wait a minute—” She wanted to say how it seemed too easy. Too fast and convenient.

But Robert had already touched the wall of light that encircled them, and it disappeared. He took three steps forward and was immediately engulfed by shadows. It looked like someone had poured a huge vat of oil over him, only the oil was moving.

Donna screamed as she lost sight of him in the crush of bodies.

“Run!” he shouted. His voice was muffled.

Oh God, how many of these things are there?
She glared at her tattoos glinting in the night, cursing herself for how useless she was. She counted five, six … no,
seven
of them. Seven demon shadows. Robert didn’t stand a chance.

She ran toward the writhing mass of darkness, trying to catch a glimpse of the young alchemist she was already tentatively thinking of as a friend.

“Get out of here!” Robert called, but she could hear pain in his voice.
“Run, Donna, and don’t look back.”

Her heart stuttered. He’d done it again—those had been her father’s words to her, that awful night in the Ironwood all those years ago. At least, those were the words her father spoke in her nightmares. It was a truly bizarre coincidence that Robert had twice echoed Patrick Underwood.

Was it an omen?
Donna wasn’t normally superstitious, but maybe Dad was trying to send her a message. Yet she couldn’t imagine he’d be telling her to run. She had never run from a fight in her life, and there was no way she was about to start now—not even when facing demonic shadows she hadn’t even known existed until today.

What can I do against them?

“Do
something
. Anything!” She hadn’t meant to scream it aloud, but it made her feel better for a moment—at least until seven inky heads lifted in unison and glanced in her direction with empty eyes.

What had Robert said about them before? They’re hunters.
Think, Underwood!
she told herself fiercely.
Use your damn brain.
The shadows followed movement—the quicker the better. Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to make herself a more attractive target than the fallen alchemist.

She was moving before she even had a chance to be afraid. Robert hadn’t hesitated when it came to helping her, and she owed it to him to do the same. If it wasn’t already too late.

Donna ran faster than she’d ever thought possible—cold air sang in her throat and her chest felt stretched too tight. She pumped her arms and legs, barely looking at
the scattered earth as it flew beneath her. As badly as she wanted to return to the clearing with the doorway to Hell, she knew that it was hopeless. Too much time had passed, and she didn’t really know what she could do to re-seal the gate anyway. Especially considering it was now probably fully open, letting demons and their shadows into this side of reality in even greater numbers.

Not to mention the fact that Demian, the king of the demons, would undoubtedly be there.

Cold wind whipped her hair about her face as the lightning-lashed sky lit her way through the trees. An idea was taking shape in Donna’s mind, but the shuddering ground and the hiss of the shadow men behind her made it almost impossible to think clearly. At the moment, all she could do was to try leading them away from Robert, but she couldn’t outrun them indefinitely. Far from it. She’d probably only managed it for this long because she’d kept darting around tree trunks and circling back the way she’d come. These particular creatures seemed to do better when moving in a straight line. Perhaps there were no zig-zags in Hell, she thought, clamping down on strained laughter that was bubbling up from a dark place.

Her throat burned and she knew she couldn’t keep going. She was also pretty certain she was circling back to the pathway where Robert had fallen. In a sudden wave of regret, she cursed herself for running in the first place; she should never have left her new friend behind, no matter how good her intentions had been.

Bursting from the undergrowth, Donna hit the trail at an exhausted run. Her pursuers were only seconds behind her; she could hear them whisper-gliding through the Ironwood.

She could make out a figure lying cold and still on the hard-packed earth. Dream-memories of her father threatened to drive her to her knees, but Donna kept moving.
This isn’t Dad
, she told herself firmly.
This is Robert Lee
. Her throat tightened as she reached him, wondering if it was possible to survive being overrun by demon shadows. Wondering if she had drawn them away in time.

“Please,” she whispered to nobody in particular.
Please, let him be okay
. Let her not have cost a good man his life.

Before she could even crouch beside Robert to check for a pulse, the shadows flowed out of the trees and onto the path. This wasn’t the first time Donna had looked death in the eye, but it wasn’t exactly something you were ever prepared for. Violent slashes of lightning rent the night sky, a dramatic portent she could have done without.

She stood in front of Robert’s body and waited for the first monster to reach her.

Donna felt like she’d been here before, only that wasn’t possible … was it? Then she remembered that she sort of
had
, in that weirdly realistic, almost lucid dream
just before she’d been woken up by Ivy’s hand across her mouth. It seemed so long ago.

The shadows had engulfed her so quickly it was like she was, once again, in her bedroom and Ivy had cast the Wood Queen’s charm to make the blackness
absolute
. The brutal darkness was so complete she might as well have been blind. Donna knew that if she took too deep a breath, she would inhale the demon shadows—somehow take them inside her soul and become one with the dark.

Her chest ached from the constant shallow breathing, and her skin hurt from the obsidian coldness. She couldn’t hear anything, and all she could feel was the earth at her back as she lay on the ground. She turned her head and saw Robert’s body on the other side of the pathway.

Robert!
That thought brought a spark of warmth, something to hold on to. A glowing thread in the starless tomb she’d somehow fallen into.

Then Donna remembered that a thread could be more than a metaphorical thread of hope … it could connect her to her power. That spark she felt was the piece of
prima materia
she’d been born possessing, that shard of the first matter so revered by alchemists as the mystical building block of all material things. It was what gave her the ability to open gateways in the very fabric of reality—what had marked her as different even before she’d been bound with magical iron.

Donna reached out with her consciousness and latched on to that inner brightness. On one level, she knew her body was still in the Ironwood, dying under the weight
of shadows. But on another … she knew she could travel through doorways that only she could open. She just had to remember how.

This time, with only the single glowing ember as her guide in the dark, she focused everything she could on the
thought
of pulling herself out, hand-over-imaginary-hand, along a line of pure white light. Everything inside screamed at her to give up. To just let go of the thread and surrender to the encroaching oblivion. To let the demons win.

But Donna was tougher than that, and she had a mission: saving her mother was more important than anything else. If she gave up now, all her efforts—all her
mistakes
—would have been for nothing. And that was absolutely unacceptable.

It was with that final thought, accompanied by a blast of radiant energy, that Donna Underwood activated the power inside her and literally burst free from the overpowering horde of demon shadows.

The explosion was nothing short of cataclysmic, and Donna was vaguely conscious of the trees that lined the path catching on fire. Her tattoos were writhing around her hands and wrists, and their bright glare dazzled her so badly she had to turn away. It was too much, even for her.

The shadow men had gone.

Gasping for breath, Donna crawled along the path until she reached Robert. His face was white and still, but his chest was moving and she almost cried with relief. He was alive. Somehow he was hanging in there. Bowing her
head and resting it, for a moment, on Robert’s shoulder, she struggled to understand what she had just done.

She’d been trapped by the demons in a dark and suffocating realm, and then she had escaped by using her increasingly scary and yet familiar abilities. Perhaps it really was as simple as opening the “door” of wherever the shadows had sent her and getting out. And yet … she knew that her physical body had been lying in the forest the entire time she’d been fighting to free herself. Had she freed her
soul
?

Donna shivered and decided that now wasn’t the time to think about it.

She touched her jeans pocket unconsciously, checking that her mother’s elflock was safe. Strangely, the action steadied her and helped her to focus. Just as she was trying to figure out what to do next—and how she was going to get Robert out of there—she heard a familiar voice calling from between a burnt copse of nearby trees.

“Donna! Are you out here?”

“Xan!”

Donna staggered to her feet and waved her arms, grateful for once for the shimmering tattoos that seemed like they’d never stop moving. She felt like a living distress beacon.

Xan appeared at the end of the path, his long black coat flying behind him like a cloak as they ran to each other. He was moving swiftly, and she remembered that his part-fey blood gave him agility and speed beyond the limits of ordinary humanity.

He swept her into his arms and held her tightly, crushing the air out of her as though he thought he’d lost her forever.

“I can’t believe I found you,” he muttered into her hair.

Donna made a sound of protest and managed to get him to release her.

He ducked his head, dark blond hair flopping into his eyes. “Shit. Sorry, I was just so happy to see you. I feel like I’ve been running around this place for hours.”

“How did you find me?” she replied, trying to regulate her breathing.

His viridian eyes met her. “How could I
miss
you, don’t you mean? True, at first I thought I was never going to reach you in this place—I even started thinking I must’ve somehow wandered onto one of the Old Paths, because it felt like I was walking around in damn circles and the Ironwood is
not
that big.” He shook his head. “Then there was a flash of light that reached beyond the tops of the fucking trees! That’s where I knew you’d be. Donna, how the hell did you do that?”

She shrugged, not ready to talk about any of it. She was truly glad to see him, but there was still so much to worry about. Still so much to
do
. And yet … she had one question of her own before they made their next move—one that couldn’t wait.

“Xan … I meant, how did you know that I was in the Ironwood?”

He had the grace to look vaguely shifty. “Ivy told me you were in trouble.”

Donna was so astonished she actually took a step back. “She
did
?”

“Yeah. When I saw her, she started babbling a whole load of what I honestly thought was nonsense. I finally got her to calm down so I could make sense of it. Figured I had to head out here and find you for myself.”

Wow
. Navin had been the one to alert the alchemists—and therefore Robert—about where she’d gone, and Ivy had told Xan. Donna was intensely grateful for such good friends.
Surprising
friends, in some cases, but no less welcome for that.

She gestured at the young man lying on the ground beside her. “Will you help me get him somewhere safe?”

“Of course … who
is
he?”

Donna swallowed another surge of emotion. “The Order of the Crow alchemist I told you about. Robert Lee. He’s a good guy; he saved me.”

“Sure. Let’s do this.” Xan hoisted Robert’s body over his shoulders, his knees almost buckling. “Does he have to be so damn tall?” And that coming from Xan, who was hardly what you’d describe as short.

If Donna weren’t so thoroughly shattered, she would have laughed.