The Year of the Witching(43)

It was a horrible truth, but one Immanuelle was forced to push to the back of her mind. She needed to focus on the curses and the witches and getting back to Bethel and . . . Ezra.

Ezra.

She raised her head to look for him, knees buckling beneath her as she pushed to her feet. But he wasn’t by the bank where she’d last seen him. And the rope around her waist was slack.

Immanuelle staggered forward, calling for him, but he didn’t answer.

Then, as she scrambled up the bank, she spotted him lying in the reeds. She ran to him, stumbling up the shore, and fell to his side. Ezra lay limp, with his eyes wide open, his pupils swollen so large they nearly devoured his irises. His nose and mouth were smeared with blood, but she couldn’t tell if it was the pond’s or his. The gash on his bad hand was bleeding freely, the bandages ripped and the stitches split open by the friction of the rope, which he still had hold of in a vise grip. And his limbs . . . they were pinned to the forest floor, bound by a tangle of thorns and tree roots.

A few feet from where he lay was his rifle, lying useless in the reeds, the metal barrel twisted into a knot, as if it was nothing more than a bit of wire.

Immanuelle struggled to pry the growths away—bloodying her hands as she tore at the brambles—but the forest’s grip on Ezra held fast, and try as she might she couldn’t free him. Desperate, she raised Abram’s knife and began to hack at the tangle of thorns and tree roots, painstakingly cutting his arms free.

Ezra reached for her, his hand hovering in the air between them. He stared up at her with a kind of dazed awe, but his eyes were vacant and completely unfocused, as if he was seeing something more than just her. But the longer he stared at her, the more his expression changed—awe turning to confusion, confusion to dread, and dread to outright horror.

Something shifted in the woods.

The air went cold. The pond began to gurgle, small waves lapping against its gory shores. Overhead, a bank of dark clouds churned, and storm winds hissed through the treetops. A few crows winged to the sky, fleeing east, and the wind began to roar, blasting through the trees so hard it bent them double.

Immanuelle kept hacking at the vines with Abram’s knife, working as fast as she could. She bloodied her own hands ripping at the brambles around his ankles. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to free you. Just hold on a little longer; you’re almost . . . Ezra?”

He stared back at her like she was a stranger . . . no, worse than a stranger, an enemy. He stopped struggling against the vines and branches that bound him to the forest’s floor and started to fight against her, lashing out and yelling, demanding that she stay away.

But Immanuelle refused to relent. She kept hacking at the branches, working to free him from the Darkwood’s hold, even as he thrashed and struggled as though her touch was burning him. And when Immanuelle cut the last of the roots that pinned his legs to the ground, Ezra lashed out, locking a hand around her throat so quickly she didn’t have the chance to scream.

His fingers—slick with gore and blood—bit deep into the hollows on either side of her throat, sealing it shut. Immanuelle tried to pry his fingers away, clawing at his hands, his arms, his shirt. But to no avail. Ezra’s grip was unrelenting, and his hold on her only tightened. Her hearing went first, and her sight began to go after it, the black edging in from her periphery. She realized then that she was about to die, there in the woods, at the hands of a boy she would’ve called her friend.

In a last act of desperation, Immanuelle raised Abram’s knife, forced it to Ezra’s chest, and the tip of the blade bit into the hollow between his collarbones. For a moment they sat there, frozen in place—Ezra with a hand around Immanuelle’s throat and Immanuelle with a blade to his.

Just as she began to lose consciousness, Ezra’s eyes came into focus. There was a flash of recognition, then horror after it.

He let go.

Immanuelle kicked away from him, gasping for air, and raised the blade between them, ready to use it should he reach for her again.

But before Ezra had the chance to do anything more than mumble her name, his limbs twisted in a series of convulsions. He thrashed, his head snapping on its axis, back arched so severely Immanuelle feared his spine would snap in two. But somehow, despite the throes of those horrible seizures, Ezra was . . . speaking, spitting prayers and catechisms, psalms and proverbs, and strange Scriptures that Immanuelle had never heard before. It was then, and only then, that she realized what she was witnessing—a vision, Ezra’s first.

Storm winds swept through the forest. Pines bowed low and the treetops churned. Immanuelle weighed her options as she fumbled into her dress. Her first thought was a selfish one: avoid the risk of a second attack and leave Ezra there in the woodland. Let him find his own way out. But as she stood to leave, her own guilt got the better of her. She turned back to Ezra, who lay motionless in the dirt, the worst of his vision now over.

Either they left the forest together, or not at all.

So she sat Ezra up, ducked under his arm, and stood, with no small amount of struggle, gritting her teeth as she pushed both of them to their feet and staggered toward the trees. Immanuelle tried to cry for help above the roaring winds, praying that some hunter or field hand would heed them, but her calls for help were lost to the tumult of the storm. Still, she pressed on, fighting for every step, lungs burning with the effort.

The Darkwood’s edge seemed to retreat three steps farther for every two she took, so Immanuelle moved faster, even as the shadows rose around her like water. In the distance, she could just make out the bright line of the wood’s edge, where sunlight spilled through the trees. But as strange and twisted as it was—despite her terror and her desperation, despite Ezra’s dire state—there was still some wretched part of her that desperately wanted to stay.