Chapter Eleven

The next time I’m at the studio, I know what to do. Quiet room. Door shut. I set the alarm for only a couple of hours from now, not having much time before I need to be back in the city. After a few minutes testing colors, I hold the brush over the paper, the tip so close to touching. I pause for a moment. Why am I scared? It’s like dreaming—nothing worse than that. I lower the brush.

Wolfwood is waiting.

I barely control my slide down the long trunk, the bark burning my thighs and arms, but my excitement to go find the little thatched hut almost masks the pain. There’s something important about that place, I know it. I feel it. Nearing the bottom, I jump, my legs buckling when I hit the ground. The sisters turn. They’re huddled together in a sheltered spot a short ways off, keeping close, unified. A family.

“I saw something,” I call to them.

“What?” Lila asks, as all three hurry over to me.

“A shelter—like a little hut. Something someone built.”

The sisters’ eyes widen at the news.

The Others don’t do anything but fight the monsters; none of them would have built it. And the only other person in Wolfwood is him.

There’s a quiet moment as they let this sink in. I take my blade back from Lila.

“So . . .” Scarlet finally says, “he could be living right nearby. He could be watching us as we speak.” She twists her head as she says it, scanning the area around us.

Scarlet has never seen the Wolf—none of them has. I’m the only one. I first glimpsed him when he was climbing a tree that had attacked us. He made it all the way to the top, no movement at all from the monster. If anything, it was using its leaves to help him climb. He got to the top and then he flung himself off, flipping in the air, whooping on the way down. When I told the sisters—when I described him—they immediately decided: he must be the Wolf. KILL THE WOLF—the instruction written in the dirt when I first found them.

Since then, we’ve been looking for him while also searching for a way out. Kill the Wolf or escape, whichever comes first—that’s what Scarlet says. But whenever I’ve glimpsed him, he’s disappeared by the time we’ve reached the spot. Scarlet says he’s messing with us. That this is his domain, his monsters. He’s letting them toy with us. Torture us.

“I want to see him!” Lila says. “Let’s go there, to the shelter.”

“Keep your voice down,” Scarlet hisses.

“It’s pretty far from here,” I say.

“Where?” Azul asks.

I orient myself, then point. “Back that way. Past the big wetland. Near the water holes and the white poison-spitters. We should go now, before the landscape shifts too much.”

“We’ve already been in that area,” Scarlet says. “We’d have seen something like that.”

Does she think I’d make this up? “Well, I saw it. So we must have missed it.”

Out of nowhere, a branch lunges at us, grabs Lila’s arm so hard she shrieks, but all at the same time my reflexes kick in and I stab the branch clear through and the monster pulls back, growling and coiling into itself. The whole thing happens in less than a second. Lila rubs the scrape on her biceps. We move farther away, Lila sticking close to me.

Not only do I have the best reflexes, but I’m the only one with a blade—a machete of razor-sharp hard wood. I’ve had it from the start. The girls use rocks or whatever else they can find as weapons.

“I’m not sure about this,” Scarlet says. “Every time we go looking for him it’s like a wild-goose chase.”

“We’re supposed to kill the Wolf,” Lila says. “We can’t not look for him.”

“I don’t care about killing him!” Scarlet says. “I just want to find the way home. The longer we’re here, the more danger we’re in.”

“What danger?” Lila says. “We can’t die, right? As long as we’re here, we live forever.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Scarlet says. She’s pacing around, smacking the ground with a long, thin stick. “We’ve had this discussion before. Maybe we’re like the Others. They’re hard to kill, but they can die. If one of us was decapitated, and the head was thrown away, I don’t think we’d be fine. Or if we were burned as badly as those Others were, down to charred stumps, we wouldn’t be fine. And what about Zoe?” She stops and gestures at me. “One bad attack and she’d probably die. She doesn’t heal like us. We have to weigh the risks of everything we do. And I don’t know if this one is worth it.”

“I have a thought,” Azul says, in her quiet, calm tone. Since she doesn’t talk much, we all pay attention when she does. “What if the structure Zoe saw is a . . . a portal. Maybe it’s the way out of here. Like in a book. Like the wardrobe entrance to Narnia.”

Lila inhales a small gasp. “The way home?”

Scarlet looks at me. I shrug. “Could be,” I say, even though, somehow, I don’t think that’s it. She rubs her jaw, frowning.

“Okay. Fine,” she says. “We’ll go there.”

Scarlet leads the way, based on my direction. After some easy bushwhacking, we have to lizard-crawl under a woven tangle of vines, through mud that smells like it’s made from decomposed bodies. We make it through safely, emerging from under the web of vines into a riot of color—fleshy flowers the pink of our gums. Petals as long as our bodies, edged with jagged teeth. Muscular stems as thick as our legs. There’s a slow, subtle movement among them. A pulse. Following Scarlet, we forge a careful path between them, all of us with our weapons at the ready.

“This pink color reminds me of the house we lived in on the river,” Lila says to her sisters, holding her sharp rock in the air.

As she says it, a strange realization comes over me. I can’t remember anything from before the moment I discovered the sisters here in Wolfwood. I struggle to latch on to something—a face, a house, a voice—but it’s all a big blank. Has it always been this way? Or is it somehow linked to that earlier moment of blankness, when I didn’t know who I was?

“Quiet!” Scarlet stops suddenly. We all freeze. “Listen.”

I hear the bass of the jungle’s breath, like ocean waves. And then . . . a yowl. A chorus of yowls. The sound of pain. They can’t talk, the Others, but they can scream.

The chorus grows. Something terrible is happening to them.

Lila blocks her ears.

“We have to get to these ones,” Scarlet says. “Before it’s too late.”

I’m anxious to find the shelter, but we need the Others to help us fight the monsters. That’s why we always try to save them, if we can. They fight for us, we fight for them. They’re getting into battles all the time. The jungle is littered with body parts.

“Can you tell which way the sound is coming from?” Scarlet asks me.

The wailing is everywhere now, drenching the air. I close my eyes to hear better.

The minute my vision goes dark, a black-and-white image flashes before my eyes: our bodies, tossed in the air. Another: Lila’s neck, broken.

Startled, I blink away the imagery.

“What’s wrong?” Azul asks, lightly touching my wrist.

I shake my head. “Nothing. Sorry.” No idea what that was. Memories, I guess. A past attack. Although . . . it felt more like a premonition.

“So, can you tell where the screams are from?” Scarlet sounds impatient.

I focus on listening, this time with my eyes open.

“That way.” I point toward a dense area of glossy leaves.

We hurry toward the carnage.