The creature's head snapped toward us.
It had heard him? Heard me? Scented the blood on my clothes? It didn't matter. One second it was across the clearing, the next it was moving.
I turned and ran.
The forest blurred instantly into roots, trunks, shadows, and impact. My boots slammed into the trail so hard I felt the shock up through my still-healing ribs. Branches whipped my face and shoulders. I heard the thing behind me not as footsteps but as violence, trees shaking, brush tearing, the ground thudding under each stride.
"Left!" Finn barked.
I veered left around a huge trunk just as something smashed through the space where I'd been. Bark exploded against my shoulder. I nearly went down, caught myself on a branch, and kept running.
"Do not waste spirit power yet," Finn said. "Save it."
"I'm a little busy!"
"Yes. That is why I am reminding you."
A root caught my foot and pitched me forward. I hit one knee hard enough to see white, rolled by pure instinct, and came up under a low branch just as the creature lunged past behind me, overshooting by a body length and plowing through a knot of young trees with a crack like splitting bone.
Too fast.
Way too fast.
I ran again before it could turn.
The chase stopped feeling like movement and started feeling like panic with direction. Every second became a choice between two trees, a leap over deadfall, a duck beneath branches, a desperate effort not to let my feet tangle in roots and kill me faster than the monster would.
"Use the slope," Finn said.
I saw it half a heartbeat later, a sharp drop in the ground to my right, not a cliff but a steep wash where water had eaten through the soil years ago. I slid down it rather than jumped, dirt and stones skidding under my boots, almost falling the whole way. Pain tore through my side. I hit the bottom half-running, half-stumbling.
The creature came after me.
Not down the slope. Through it.
It crashed through brush and loose earth in a spray of dirt, barely slowed.
"Now," Finn said. "Touch the well."
I reached inward on instinct and found the cold hollow. This time I didn't yank at it. I touched it—small, controlled, the way he'd drilled at me. A faint current ran through my legs.
The next stride carried me farther.
Not much farther. Just enough.
Enough that when the creature's claws tore through the space behind me, they caught only the back of my shirt and not the flesh beneath.
Then the next jump came too early. My foot hit uneven ground. My ankle twisted. I went down hard against a fallen log, pain flashing bright along my leg and side.
The creature hit the log half a second later.
Wood exploded.
I threw myself sideways into a patch of brambles and nearly screamed as thorns raked my face and hands, but the thing's bulk crashed through the log instead of onto my spine. It wheeled, snarling now, a deep ugly sound that shook in my chest.
I got up limping.
"Move!"
I did.
Everything after that felt narrower. Harder. The forest closed in, which should have helped me and didn't. The creature was too big for some gaps, but not big enough to be stopped by that. It just broke what stood in its way. Whole saplings snapped under its weight. Bushes flattened. Once I looked back and saw it launch over a fallen trunk I'd just scrambled across, jaws open, eyes locked on me with chilling focus.
It wasn't raging.
It was hunting.
That terrified me more than anything.
I ducked under a low branch, slashed through hanging vines with the sword, and nearly impaled myself on a broken stump jutting out of the ground. My breaths came ragged and hot. Every inhale scraped. Every exhale felt smaller than the one before it.
I touched the well again for another burst of strength.
Too much this time.
The current surged too hard through my legs and I almost overstepped, slamming shoulder-first into a tree when I tried to correct.
"Careful," Finn snapped. "You are supporting motion, not throwing yourself through space."
"Then say that sooner!"
Behind me, the creature hit something solid enough that the impact boomed through the trees.
Then came that deep growl again, closer than ever.
I burst into a narrower stretch of ground between two stone outcrops almost hidden by ferns and vine. The forest dipped abruptly there, the earth giving way to rock. And in the shadow between those stones, black enough at first to look like nothing at all, yawned an opening.
A cave.
It was not much larger than a doorway at a glance, though the darkness beyond it made the scale hard to judge.
My only chance, I thought instantly.
Not because it looked safe. It didn't. It looked wrong in the way all dark holes in wild places look wrong. But the creature behind me was bigger than the entrance. Too broad through the shoulders to fit quickly if it tried to force itself in.
It might buy me seconds.
That was all I had.
"There!" I shouted, already moving toward it.
Finn did not argue.
The creature broke through the trees behind me just as I reached the stones. Up close it looked even larger, scarred hide dark with old blood, jaws flecked with foam. It lunged.
I dove.
Stone scraped across my forearms and chest as I hit the cave floor and slid two body lengths into cold darkness. The sword clanged against rock. Behind me, claws hit stone with a screech that sent pain through my teeth.
I twisted onto my back in time to see the creature slam to a stop at the entrance, one forelimb inside, shoulders bunching as if it meant to force its way through anyway.
Then it hesitated.
Its head lowered.
It sniffed once into the dark.
And backed up.
I stayed where I was for a second, unable to understand what I was seeing.
The thing stood outside the entrance, muscles tense, eyes fixed on the cave mouth, but it did not come in. It paced one angry half-circle instead, claws tearing grooves into the stone, then stopped again.
"It doesn't want to enter," I whispered.
"No," Finn said.
The answer came too quickly.
I pushed myself upright, one hand braced on the cave floor, and stared past the entrance where the creature stood framed by the dim forest light. It gave one low, rumbling snarl—not at me, I thought, but at the cave itself.
A chill moved through me that had nothing to do with sweat cooling on my skin.
"Why not?"
Finn was silent.
Not empty silence. Focused silence.
Then I felt the shift in him.
The cold presence beside my soul sharpened, turned inward and outward at once, as if some part of him had suddenly locked onto something deeper in the cave beyond what my own senses could reach.
"What is it?" I asked.
His voice, when it came, had changed.
Not afraid. Not exactly. But intensely alert. And beneath that, something like interest, sharp and unmistakable.
"There is something ancient here."
My fingers tightened around the sword hilt.
"That is not comforting."
"It was not meant to be."
Outside, the creature gave one final huff through its nose, backed another step from the entrance, and then turned away into the trees. I listened to it go, heavy impacts fading through the forest until the undergrowth swallowed the sound.
Relief should have come then.
It didn't.
Because the moment its presence left, the cave itself seemed to settle around me.
The air inside was cold enough to bite at the sweat on my neck. The stone under my hand felt damp. Somewhere deeper in the darkness I could hear water dripping, slow and spaced too evenly apart. The smell was older than the forest outside, rock, wet earth, and something else beneath it. Faint. Almost warm.
I got to my feet slowly, wincing at the ache in my ankle and side, and turned toward the deeper black within.
The entrance behind me framed a pale wedge of forest light, but it only reached a few paces before the cave swallowed it completely. Beyond that was darkness layered over darkness.
Finn remained very still beside my soul.
"You're interested," I said.
"Yes."
"That usually means I should be worried."
"Yes."
I let out a thin breath that might have been a laugh if I'd had more strength in me.
The cave opened wider a few steps in, the darkness pulling outward beyond the narrow throat of the entrance. The floor sloped gently down. Not enough to be obvious at first glance. Enough that deeper air drifted toward me in a cool, steady breath.
And under all of it, I felt it.
Not the foreboding from the forest.
Something heavier.
Older.
A presence buried deeper in the stone ahead.
I looked once over my shoulder at the forest outside. The opening now seemed absurdly small compared to what I had just escaped. My pulse was still hammering from the chase. Sweat cooled on my back. My whole body screamed for rest.
But rest was not what waited in front of me.
I knew that.
I knew it with the same certainty I'd felt at the tree line when the foreboding first touched me.
Still, the only way now was forward.
I tightened my grip on the sword, swallowed against the dryness in my throat, and took one careful step deeper into the cave.
The darkness swallowed the sound of it.
And as I moved farther in, with the forest at my back and something ancient waiting ahead, one thought settled coldly into my bones:
I had escaped the monster outside.
But I had not found safety.