Coldfall Wood Read online

  He saw the Horned God properly for the first time.

  The man stood in the middle of a shallow brook, the water swirling around his cloak of leaves and lichen. The layers of foliage gave the figure undeniable substance, but it was the eighteen points of antlers curving wickedly away from his temples that transformed him into the stuff of nightmares. In his left hand he held an elaborately carved staff, the bulbous head hollowed out to resemble his antlers. In the shadows it was impossible to see where his arm ended and the staff began. There was no flesh, only leaves. In his right hand he held a tangle of Penny’s hair. The girl was on her knees in the water. The pair were surrounded by a mat of pondweed that choked the surface of the water.

  The Horned God forced her head down beneath the surface, holding her there as she struggled against drowning. The bubbles came fast, rising to the surface in a desperate froth, more and more of them, and then less and less.

  Then none as she stopped fighting him.

  It was all done in silence.

  He couldn’t move.

  “Why?” he tried to say, but the wind stole away the word.

  He could only stare at Penny Grainger’s body, facedown in the stream, her ponytail undone and her hair spread out on the surface around her like a dark halo.

  The antlered man bowed his head, lowering the antlers as though in deference to his friend’s sacrifice. The trees whispered primitive prayers; the rustling leaves calling out to the old gods of the earth and sky, their will be done.

  Charlie couldn’t move.

  It was as though the ancient roots had clawed up out of the ground to tangle around his ankles and hold him firmly in place. The antlers curved upward viciously. He could imagine the elemental being locking horns with all comers, dominating them like the true monarch of the woods he was.

  He looked up.

  Charlie saw the most beautiful face he had ever seen, ethereal and yet masculine, haunted and yet filled with strength, the wind swept the locks of hair away from his brow as it blew others across his cheeks and into his mouth. The Horned God’s powerful chest rose and fell, rose and fell, in time with the stream lapping around his waist. He planted his staff in the soft alluvial bed, then lowered himself into the water, his right hand still tangled in the dead girl’s hair. He turned her over in the water so that those empty eyes could gaze up at him.

  Charlie wanted to scream.

  He managed a step. Just the one. Lurching from one foot to the other.

  He was too far away to make out Penny’s face for the shadows. That was some small mercy, at least.

  He could smell something, the fragrance rising in the air around him. Roses. And beneath it, rot. Roses and rot.

  He managed another step.

  The Horned God hauled the dead girl up to her feet. Pondweed clung to her empty smile, giving her the appearance of green teeth. She looked so frail, broken, in the stranger’s grasp. His grip was the only thing that stopped her head from lolling sideways on her neck.

  And then he kissed her, breathing life back into her brittle bones.

  Penny Grainger opened her eyes.

  Her smile opened wider.

  Her eyes were dead, but that couldn’t silence her. When she spoke it was with the voice of the stream. “I will rise,” she promised, answering that very first demand the waking god had placed in her mind. It was the same for all of them, but Penny was special. Penny was no longer herself. She was born again. Reborn. She was his creature.

  Charlie couldn’t look at her.

  It was her eyes. Looking into them stole something from him.

  In the legends of the old country, Jenny Greenteeth was the scourge that came crawling out of the brackish waters just far enough to reach out and drag you down. She was the hag with a pondweed smile. She haunted the old waterways of the great woods where the stream ran into the rivers and the rivers ran into the sea. There wasn’t anywhere she couldn’t swim with her pondweed smile. This was who—what—she had become.

  Free of his grasp, Penny lowered herself beneath the scum floating on the surface and swam away, the ripples the only sign of her passage.

  11

  Danny Ash did as he was told.

  That would be his epitaph, those six words carved in the granite headstone: He did as he was told.

  Musa Dajani’s body weighed heavily in his arms. How much did the kid’s life weigh? He had no idea, but with every passing street as they struggled through the Rothery he felt heavier and heavier until every ounce of Musa Dajani’s life—way beyond the weight of bone and meat—burned away the last of Danny’s resolve.

  He shouldn’t be doing this.

  There was blood on his hands, literally and metaphorically.

  The kid reeked of urine and shit where he’d soiled himself during Tommy’s beating. Danny could feel it on his arms where he cradled the boy close to his chest. He didn’t want to think about it. It was tough not to. Each step he just kept focusing on the simple stuff, the act of putting one foot in front of another and not letting his body sag and drop Musa. For a while at least that was enough. It distracted him from what mindlessly following Tommy Summers into the woods meant.

  He shouldn’t just go along with this. It had stopped being about Ollie Underwood a long time ago. Now it was about something inside Tommy that was broken. There was right and there was wrong. It really was as black and white as that. Then there was this, which existed on an entirely different electromagnetic spectrum.

  Danny looked around, knowing they’d walked beneath a hundred street cameras since leaving the park. London was the most-surveilled city in the world. There were cameras everywhere. Think about it long enough and you realize there isn’t much in the way of places that aren’t overlooked. The rats in the sewers—one for every person living in the world above—were the only ones with any privacy in the city. The police would be able to track them every step of the way, right up to the first line of trees. After that, though, they would vanish into one of the few blind spots in the city. The ancient woodland had remained unchanged for centuries. But they’d have to come out at some point, and the second they did they’d step right back out in front of the cameras—without Musa Dajani’s body. As evidence went it was pretty damning, right up there with the kid who got kidnapped from the shopping center and beaten to death on the railway tracks years ago. The courts didn’t need to see the killing to know exactly what had happened.

  Even so, he followed Tommy into the woods.

  Every time he’d told himself he wasn’t a bad guy, every time he’d told himself he was going to be the hero of at least one life story, was undone with that first step. He wasn’t a good guy. He wasn’t the hero. He was Tommy’s creature.

  He didn’t look down at the boy in his arms.

  He couldn’t, because that made a lie of everything.

  Even as he felt him stirring, trying to come back from unconsciousness, he kept his gaze focused on Tommy’s back.

  “Where are we going?” he called for what felt like the hundredth time.

  Tommy didn’t turn around. He made no move to answer. He walked on with the confidence of a man answering to a higher purpose.

  He knew where he was going.

  Deadfall crunched under Danny’s feet. A month ago there had still been snow on the ground. Maybe there was something to that whole global warming thing.

  The woods were cold and dark.

  He caught a fleeting glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye, a blur of movement, a shadow-shape, but as he turned to try and see better what it was, it was gone, disappeared deeper into the undergrowth all around them. He didn’t feel alone, even though it was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. The forest lost its depth in favor of darkness.

  “Come on, Tommy, let’s just dump the kid and go.”

  “No,” he said, or maybe it was the forest itself that spoke to him, the harsh rejection some natural phenomenon that wanted Musa Dajani dead?

  It wa
s getting out of hand.

  They were just supposed to give the kid a beating, screw with his legs to send a message to his people. His kind. That was the plan.

  He concentrated on the sound of his footsteps. There was a rhythm to them, albeit an erratic one.

  As the trees parted around them to let moonlight into some kind of grove, Tommy turned to face him. Danny could just make out a circle of gray stones. He knew where he was. The fairy ring. The wood felt so much bigger today than it ever had in all of the years he’d played here growing up. Sometimes it felt like everything in the world was different, and becoming more so every day, but some parts were immune to change. The fairy ring was one of them. Thirteen stones, each the size of his head, were arranged in a rough circle. The grass in the middle of the ring was higher, and greener, and the blades thick enough to make whistles, unlike the trodden-down scrub on the outside, which looked more like mud than lawn. That added a strange magic to the place, like the center of the ring was somehow removed from this reality and really was a portal to the fairy realms like they used to pretend as kids. And thinking about that made him think about the girls they’d grown up with back at Herla House. They’d loved this place. He remembered one night Zoe Fenn had even managed to convince that bastard Bracken to let her sleep here one midsummer, making a pillow of wildflowers, in the hopes that she would dream up the face of her true love. She never did tell him who she’d dreamed of, only that it wasn’t him. It was never him.

  “They need to be taught a lesson,” Tommy said, spreading his arms wide. His voice spiked, the anger no longer beneath the surface. “They can’t get away doing what they did to Ollie. We need to send a message.”

  “That’s what we were doing,” Danny said, tired beyond words. Ever since they’d entered Coldfall Wood he’d felt his resolve dwindle, and his strength along with it. The boy in his arms was a dead weight.

  “Bring him into the circle.”

  One step.

  Two steps.

  Again, he caught that fleeting blur of motion, as though someone was running around the perimeter of the trees, ghosting in and out of sight as they did. He turned his head, trying to catch a glimpse of them, whoever they were, but all he saw were rustling leaves. The effect was dizzying. He turned and turned about, watching the rippling effect of the leaves as whoever it was out there raced around the glade, completing the circle once, twice, three times.

  He heard a voice in the susurrus. Deep, rich, eternal. He couldn’t understand a word it said, but there was no denying the power of it or how deep-rooted it was in the land. He felt, as much as heard it, the timbre vibrating within his bones.

  As Danny Ash’s foot broke the circle of the stones, stepping into the fairy ring, he finally saw the antlered man. The stranger towered over them, easily seven feet tall, eight with the curve of his horns. In the moonlight, his skin was the same shade as the leaves that cloaked his powerful frame.

  Tommy knelt in the dirt, a look of pure adoration on his face. “Here. Bring him here.”

  Danny laid the boy down in front of his friend.

  Hwaet! Áríseaþ!

  Hark! Rise up!

  “I will rise,” Tommy promised the Horned God.

  Danny knew what he meant now. The words made perfect sense to him. It was as though he’d always known them. He felt the compulsion to echo his friend’s words, but didn’t know if he had it in him to follow Tommy where he was going.

  “This is our land,” Tommy said, like a prayer. “This is our home. This is England.” He looked down at the broken boy Danny had delivered to him. “And your kind aren’t welcome here.” There was a deadness in his voice, as though the words were coming through the veil from the great beyond. “There must be sacrifice. This is war. Your blood will open the dimgate.”

  He closed his eyes as Tommy brought the rock down in the middle of Musa Dajani’s face over and over again until there was nothing of the boy left.

  When Danny opened them again the sounds of the attack were over, replaced by Tommy’s panting breath.

  He watched his friend daub the dead boy’s blood in streaks down his cheeks like war paint.

  “Come here,” Tommy said, holding out a hand.

  Danny crawled toward him on his hands and knees.

  I’m not the hero, he thought as Tommy pressed his palm against his left cheek, letting the blood smear beneath his fingers, then did the same to his right. I’m the monster.

  “The gift is offered,” Tommy said, sounding nothing like himself. “Blood is given. Blood is received.”

  The pair of them knelt over the dead boy, Tommy’s strange words weaving a spell around them.

  The Horned God watched impassively.

  Danny didn’t dare move for fear of breaking it.

  The moment he moved, the real world would come rushing into the fairy ring, and the reality of the murder they’d just committed would be overwhelming.

  Tommy raised his head to look at the Horned God.

  “The dimgate is open,” Tommy said.

  Guard the way with your life, Gatekeeper.

  12

  Jamshid Kirmani stopped running.

  He was lost in more ways than one.

  His world had crumbled around him. No, that wasn’t right, crumbling gave the impression of some gradual erosion, a slow disintegration, of it coming apart piece by piece over time. It wasn’t like that at all. It was brutal. Violent. Everything torn out from beneath him in a single knife slash. All he could see now was blood, Aye’s life ended with a single brutal cut that opened the veins of her throat.

  He’d killed her. The one person he’d truly loved. He’d killed her.

  Jam leaned forward, hands on his knees, and vomited.

  He gagged on strings of puke, the stink making him retch all over again.

  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  He had hated Ollie Underwood enough to kill him. He’d meant to do that. He’d left the house that evening with the sole purpose of ending his life. But Aisha? He’d never meant to hurt her. He couldn’t explain what had happened. He’d heard that voice, then seen that hummingbird tattoo and lost it.

  When had he become this person?

  He looked down at the dried blood on his jeans.

  There was no honor in what he had done.

  The headache pounded in his temples, like a bomb had been planted beneath the skin and was set to explode.

  He looked at his surroundings, not recognizing any of the landmarks.

  The night changed things, even buildings he passed every day, transforming the landscape into something both haunting and alien. Fear and adrenaline amplified those sensations. Together they had Jam turning in circles desperate to see anything even remotely familiar, and turning again when he couldn’t.

  He heard it again, that voice, urging him on.

  Come to me, it beckoned.

  But where? His hands went up to his head, fingers digging into the temples. The blood pounded through his skull. He wanted to scream. He didn’t know where he needed to be.

  The voice existed in the rhythm of the blood. Come to me. Come to me. He wanted to howl at it, “Get out of my head!” but it wasn’t going anywhere. Was this what it was like to lose your mind? To lose all sense of self? He couldn’t think about anything. There was no room. There was only the voice demanding: Come to me.

  He was moving again before he realized that was what he was doing, running from street corner to street corner in search of the owner of the voice, desperate to obey the command rooted in his brain before the pressure inside his head finally blew the plates of bone apart.

  Come to me.

  Up ahead, he saw the gates of the cemetery, the mausoleums and endless rows of gravestones marking out the lives spent on London, and beyond them the rise of Cane Hill and the oaks of Coldfall Wood.

  Come to me, the trees seemed to call to him.

  He answered the call the only way he could, by putting one foot in
front of the other, helpless to do anything other than obey the imperative.

  The closer he came to the forest the worse the pain inside his skull became, until it was blinding.

  “What do you want from me?” he begged, trying to understand.

  The path to the woods was lined with the bloated bodies of black slugs and the shells of snails, their sticky tracks silver in the moonlight. He had never seen as many slugs in one place in his life. He placed his feet carefully at first, trying not to stand on any of them, but the closer he came to the trees the deeper the pall their shadows cast across his path, hiding them. He felt the first couple rupture beneath his feet and tried not to think about it as he walked on.

  A stile divided the footpath in two, the branches of two silver birches intertwining to form an archway around the metal-filigreed gateway. The words Coldfall Wood were barely visible through the foliage, which tangled around the letters. He must have walked beneath that archway a hundred times, but it was the first time he’d noticed the red berries inside the O. The lights lining the pathway went out at nine thirty, leaving the wood pitch black for nine months of the year.

  Jam followed the path as it wove its way up a series of switchbacks climbing the hill.

  A bat flitted across his line of sight; its peculiar swooping flight drawing his attention away from the distant carousel wheel of the London Eye. As he followed the bat he caught sight of another indistinct shape in the shadows. At first he mistook it for a man, but it was something else entirely. It wore the darkness, blending in perfectly with the foliage around it, its cloak of leaves rustling in the breeze. It was only as it moved, ghosting away through the trees that Jam saw the darker outline of antlers protruding from its skull. It wore them like a crown, lowering its head like a stag in challenge to Jam’s presence in its wood. He didn’t move. Couldn’t.

  The Horned God prowled the forest around him, moving from tree to tree to tree, watching him all the while.

  Come to me.

  “I’m here,” Jam told it, no idea why he was talking to the shadows.

  Come to me.