Lily Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 3 of 17

Marrow walked on Lily's left. Ollie walked ahead. The cold glass in Lily's palm ticked against her, steady as a second pulse. For a while the woods behaved. Then Ollie stopped and put a hand up. Somewhere behind them, a branch cracked in a slow, deliberate way, like a foot testing weight. "Something's on our line," Marrow said. She did not turn around. "Don't run. Running tells it where you are." Lily looked back anyway. The path behind them was empty, but the empty had a shape. The ferns bent away from a space that should have been air. She felt it notice her, the way a dog notices meat. Her hand went loose around the flask. The trees began to slide again. Ollie's sweater blurred at the edges. Marrow grabbed Lily's wrist through the cold and squeezed her fingers back around the glass. "It wants you because you're not tied down," Marrow said. "It eats loose ones. If it gets its mouth on you, you come apart. You don't get to the clearing. You don't get anywhere." She pulled a second flask from her satchel. This one was bigger, cut with gold bands, and the liquid inside moved on its own, gold-green and slow. "My uncle told me not to use this. He said it was for a living body. But you're carrying a living thing inside a dead one. Your want. That might be enough." Behind them, the shape stepped closer. A smell came with it, wet bark and old iron. Ollie backed toward Lily until his shoulder was almost against hers. He did not speak. His eyes stayed on the empty space. Marrow uncorked the second flask and tipped it against the first one in Lily's hand. The gold-green light poured across the cold glass and sank in. Lily felt it hit her like a swallow of hot tea she could not taste. Her feet found the dirt. Her outline pulled tight. For one breath, she was almost a girl again. "Now walk," Marrow said. "Fast. Not away. Toward the clearing. It can't cross where you're going. Not yet." They moved. The thing behind them made a sound like a throat clearing under water and did not follow past the next bend. Lily kept her eyes on Ollie's back and her hand tight on the glass. The heat inside her thinned as she walked. By the time the trees opened a little and the ground began to slope, the second flask was empty in Marrow's belt and the first was only cold again. At the top of the slope Marrow stopped. "North fork's here. I go now." She looked at Lily's hand. "You've got one squeeze left. Maybe. Don't spend it before the clearing." She turned and was gone between two pines. Lily stood with Ollie on the lip of the slope and saw, for the first time, smoke rising thin from somewhere below.