ACCORDING TO THE compass, Ashander had raced northwest. Sam shouldered her backpack and ran northeast. Even if she couldn’t find the Golden Acorn, at least she’d be leading Ashander away from Caitlin and her aunts.
The forest loomed before her, more shadow than tree. She reached its border and plunged inside. Night had fallen hard and heavy, and it was almost pitch-black in the grip of the trees. Her backpack whacked her in the spine repeatedly because she hadn’t taken the time to tighten the straps. She kept her flashlight moving left and right and back again so she wouldn’t run headlong into a tree trunk or blind herself on an errant branch.
“We’re here!” a squirrel voice said.
Sam swung the flashlight and found Maple and Cedar running beside her. Maple wore a raincoat of shiny, bright-blue fabric with the oversized hood pulled up to shield her ears. Cedar wore yellow galoshes on all four of his paws.
“Where’s Birch?” Sam asked, ducking under the sticky branch of a pine.
Maple did not answer immediately, panting as she ran. “Birch volunteered to distract Ashander so you could escape. Perhaps you heard her howl.”
“Oh, no,” Sam said. She grew panicked picturing Birch with her tiny sword, trying to fend off a fox. “Is she okay?”
Is she okay? Mom, is she okay?
“We don’t know,” Cedar said.
“We will hope that she is,” Maple replied firmly. “Birch is strong.”
The forest blurred, and for a moment Sam couldn’t tell if she was stumbling between tree trunks in the middle of a storm or navigating an endless hospital hallway that flickered in and out in time with its fluorescent lights. Caitlin will wake up, Sam. She will. She’s strong.
“He wouldn’t hurt her, would he?” Sam asked in a small voice.
Maple ran silently. “Not on purpose, but … maybe by accident.”
It was an accident.
“Why would she do that for me?” The rain was everywhere, even in her eyes. Sam wiped them with her soaking sleeve. “I never asked her to do that!”
“Do you mean Birch or Caitlin?” Maple asked.
“I meant…”
But suddenly Sam didn’t know how to answer. When she pictured Birch, the squirrel had a cast on her foreleg. When she pictured Caitlin, her sister was wearing a knight’s helmet and brandishing a sword made of sticks.
Maple slid to a stop. Cedar nearly collided into her.
“Quiet. Ashander is in the forest,” Maple said.
Sam peered into the dark behind them and tried to silence her rasping breaths. “How close?”
“It’s hard to tell,” Maple said. “The wind is being coy with his scent.”
“The trees are letting him pass,” Cedar said, hugging his arms to his chest. He wasn’t wearing his galoshes anymore—just his normal yellow tunic and pants, already soaked from the rain.
“We still don’t know where to find the Golden Acorn,” Sam said. She shined the flashlight on the compass. They were still headed northeast, but who knew if that was even right. Ashander was going to catch her before she found it.
Sam switched the flashlight off to save the battery. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, a strange thing happened: the directions and hands of the compass lit up as if Sam had plugged them into a light switch. A glow-in-the-dark compass! Why hadn’t Lucas mentioned that when he gave it to her?
Maybe because Sam was too busy throwing it at him.
She studied the compass and noticed something odd. The regular compass hand and ordinal directions weren’t visible in the darkness, but a new, glowing symbol had appeared, along with a glowing arrow. They must have been hidden under the glare of the flashlight.
Wait, Sam thought. Somewhere up above the trees and the clouds, there was a full moon. It was the moon that had turned Lucas’s compass to magic. Sam peered closer, hoping to see what her heart most desired.
The symbol was an acorn.
Her compass could direct her to the Golden Acorn!
“Look, look!” Sam knelt and held out the compass so Maple and Cedar could see. “That symbol represents the Golden Acorn. All we have to do is turn until the arrow points to it, and then we know we’re going in the right direction!”
“How marvelous,” Maple said, clapping her paws. “You are such a clever girl, Samantha.”
Sam’s chest swelled with something other than panic for a change.
Cedar turned and sniffed the air. “I can smell him.” He looked at Sam, his eyes wide and afraid. “Ashander is hunting.”
“We should move quickly,” Maple said. She touched Cedar’s shoulder, and he shivered. Maple took off her raincoat and wrapped it around the younger squirrel. The blue fabric turned yellow the moment she buttoned it.
“If things get ugly, I will do what I can to protect you,” Maple said. She looked up at Sam. “And you, too, Samantha. I will do everything in my power.”
Sam stared into Maple’s determined eyes and couldn’t coax a single word from her own throat. She nodded gratefully.
“Now lead us to the Golden Acorn, Sam,” Maple said. “We haven’t much time!”
Sam turned until the glowing compass arrow lined up with the acorn symbol. “This way.”
The forest had never been silent, but now it was a raging cacophony. Branches snapped, leaves rustled, rain drummed against every surface. Animals darted through the underbrush and leaped from tree to tree overhead. Sam’s clothes were twice as heavy now that they were soaked with water, and despite the summer month, it grew colder every minute. Soon her breath came in ragged puffs.
Sam stopped to check the compass. Had she been gone five minutes, or ten minutes, or three hours? Aunt Vicky’s house felt as far away as Oz or Narnia or middle-earth.
“I’m done,” Cedar said, huffing at Sam’s side. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Shush now,” Maple said, patting him on the back. She seemed only mildly winded by their run and had somehow acquired another blue raincoat. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it,” Cedar said angrily. “We had everything figured out before she got here. We knew his moods. We knew what to say and what not to say. We knew when to lower our eyes or to laugh or to fetch him his dinner. He liked my juggling—it made him smile once! He only got angry sometimes, and only when we deserved it. Everything would have kept on being okay if she hadn’t come to the forest.” He glared at Sam. “You ruined everything!”
“Shh, shh,” Maple said.
Sam couldn’t help feeling hurt. Didn’t Cedar see how manipulative Ashander was? How the fox slid between happy and angry and tricky and sweet so fast that there was no way to keep up? How Ashander said one thing but did another?
“It’s not my fault that he’s like that,” Sam said. “It’s not my fault that you have to worry so much about what he’s thinking.”
“The forest was better before you got here,” Cedar said.
“That’s enough,” Maple said sternly. “We have no time for this bickering.”
“If you don’t want to stay, then don’t,” Sam told Cedar. “I’m not making you do something you don’t want to do.”
Cedar crossed his arms. “If I have a choice, then I’m definitely leaving. And I think you should turn around, too. It doesn’t help anyone to go against Ashander’s wishes. You should give yourself up and beg for forgiveness. He’ll punish all of us if you don’t!”
“If you’re going to leave, then go,” Maple said crossly.
“Fine, I will. And if you’re smart, you’ll go too, Maple.” Cedar gave Sam one last defiant glare, then darted into the night.
The compass shook in Sam’s hand. She tried to focus on its face instead of on the disappearing tail of a squirrel she’d thought was her friend.
“You may as well go, too,” Sam said to the compass, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at Maple.
“Of course I’m staying,” Maple said. “I promised to protect you, and I will.”
“Thank you, Maple.” Sam wiped her nose with her very wet sleeve. “I wish Ashander stayed charming.”
Maple’s determined face grew sad. She touched Sam’s leg with her paw. “Nobody is only one thing.”
“Then I wish he weren’t charming at all. If he hadn’t been so nice at the beginning, if I didn’t like him, then it wouldn’t matter so much that, that…”
“That he’s hunting us,” Maple said.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s run, child,” the squirrel said, and they did.
The farther they went into the forest, the darker it got. Sam tripped over a tree root and landed face-first in the mud. Her body ached. Maple cleaned the muck from Sam’s eyes and got her back on her feet. They kept running, but this time with the flashlight. It was impossible to know how far they had to go. The compass told them the direction, but not the distance. The Golden Acorn might still be miles away.
Strange voices echoed through the forest. Sam couldn’t tell what they were saying, not through the noise of the rain. It was like a thousand drummers were banging on the leaves and the tree trunks and the ground, determined to be as loud as possible.
A twig snapped, and Sam swung the flashlight.
Nothing.
She swept it in the other direction, and a dark shape darted away from the beam.
“He’s close,” Maple said. “Faster!”
Sam sped up, but her boots slid in the mud. She fell to her hands and knees. The flashlight dropped from her grip and rolled away, the beam bouncing wildly.
Maple tugged at Sam’s hand. “Get up! Get the flashlight! We have to go!”
Sam tried to stand, but her shoes kept slipping and her hands were so numb that they refused to do what she asked. Plus, she was sure that her left shin was bleeding from the fall.
A howl cut through the darkness, silencing both the rain and the voices.
Sam scrambled forward, but all she managed to do was twist and land on her rear in what felt like a stream. The water was freezing! At least she got her almost useless fingers to wrap around the flashlight.
And there, in the spotlight of her beam, was Ashander.
His purple coat had ripped along its seams. Mud matted the fur of his arms and legs. But he leaned against a tree trunk and studied his claws, as if he’d been casually waiting for her the whole time.