The march to the hideout started badly and got worse.
For the first hour it was only roots and rocks, and branches that seemed to take Hunter’s face personally.
His dress shoes slid on every third step.
He’d chosen not to take them off last night because it had felt like one decision too many.
Now the leather soles were making that decision for him, one step at a time.
In the second hour something with too many eyes watched them from a tree.
None of the bandits looked up, so Hunter didn’t either, and he decided that was the smartest thing he’d done since he woke up.
In the third hour his left sole came loose and began to flap.
“Master.” Lex looked back, and his whisper was urgent.
“You have to be quieter, please.
Spirit beasts hunt by sound.”
Hunter opened his mouth to defend his shoe, saw Lex’s face, and shut it again.
The man wasn’t being fussy.
He was genuinely afraid.
So it was a murder forest after all.
He’d called it that as a joke.
They reached the river in the fourth hour.
It looked harmless and was not.
The water came up to Hunter’s chest and closed on him like a fist of ice.
He fought across, gasping, and dragged himself up the far bank with his teeth chattering.
He had been camping once in his life.
There had been bathrooms, and a Starbucks ten minutes away, and he’d still called it hell.
The right shoe gave up in the fifth hour.
He kicked them both off and went on in his socks.
Then in what was left of his socks.
The forest floor found every soft place on his feet.
When he glanced back, the ponytailed kid had picked up one of the ruined shoes and was turning it over with great seriousness.
He tucked it into his belt.
Hunter didn’t have the energy to ask.
In the sixth hour, something howled.
It came from somewhere to the west, long and rising, and all three bandits went white at once.
“Move,” Lex breathed.
“Don’t run.
Don’t make noise.
Just move.”
The howl came again, closer, and two more voices answered it.
Lex led them off the trail and into a thicket of thorns that tore at Hunter’s shirt and arms.
They crouched there with the branches knitted over them.
The kid pressed a hand over his own mouth and looked at Hunter until Hunter did the same.
Something big moved through the trees to their left.
He couldn’t see it clearly through the thorns, only pieces.
Too many legs, set wrong.
A long, wolf-shaped body plated in beetle armor.
Antlers, pale in the moonlight.
Its breathing sounded like wind in a cave.
Eyes caught the light, far too many of them, in rows.
It stopped ten feet away.
Hunter stopped breathing.
His hand found a rock in the dirt and closed around it.
Absurd.
The thing was the size of a bear and had the look of something bears were afraid of.
The air around its head rippled like heat off asphalt, except it was cold.
For no reason at all, he thought of his apartment at two in the morning: the streetlight through the blinds, the hum of the fridge, someone laughing in the pizzeria downstairs.
It used to annoy him.
He would have given anything to be annoyed by it now.
The beast’s head swung toward the thicket.
It breathed in, long and slow.
Then it turned and went back into the trees, unhurried, snapping branches as it went.
Nobody moved for a full minute.
Hunter counted his heartbeats to keep from making a sound, and lost count twice.
“Gone,” Lex whispered at last.
Hunter set the rock down carefully.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Blood ran from a dozen thin scratches.
His feet had gone past pain into a kind of wet numbness.
None of it mattered.
He was alive.
He looked at the three of them as they crept out of the thorns.
They had watched him kill their leader a few hours ago, and they’d groveled in the dirt, and they called him Master and flinched when he moved.
But not one of them had looked at him the way they had just looked at those trees.
Whatever lived out here, they were a lot more afraid of it than they were of him.