Darkwood by M. E. Breen Read Free Book Online Page A

it, but there was no denying that it was not lit and had not been for some time.
    The light must be coming from overhead, or behind her, or … Annie scrambled around the confines of the pit, objects coming into view as she got nearer to them, sinking back into darkness as she moved away.
    The dirt walls formed a rough circle that narrowed toward the top, with the underside of the wooden door forming the roof. The floor was about as wide across as she was tall. To one side was a bucket, to the other a filthy blanket full of holes and a heap of moldy vegetable rinds. Neither the door, nor the walls, nor the blanket, nor the bucket emitted any light. Desperately, Annie kicked the vegetable rinds, but they were just vegetable rinds.
    She studied her hands again, holding her right wrist with her left hand to keep it from shaking. If she kept her hand close to her face, she could see every detail: the sworl of prints on each fingertip, the branching lines on the palm that Grandmother Hoop claimed she could read to foretell a person’s future. When she moved her hand away, its outlines grewsofter, the surrounding light deeper and deeper brown, as though she were submerging her hand in murky water. Each time she repeated the experiment she thought she could see her hand a little longer before it disappeared. Something like fascination crept into Annie’s chest alongside the fear, but she squashed it.
    I hit my head. This won’t last. It’s … it’s
… She struggled for the words Page would use, words from her books that made things sound exotic but comfortingly remote, easy to shut up and put away, like the books themselves.
It’s a conundrum. It’s an oddity. It’s an aberration
.
    If a cow wanders into the yard, be quick to shut the gate
.
    Not Page, but Aunt Prim, reading aloud from
The Book of Household Virtues
. For the first time in Annie’s life the saying meant something.
    A second inspection of the pit convinced her that the only way out was through the opening at the top. Standing, her head just grazed the wooden door. She pressed her palms flat against it and shoved as hard as she could. It didn’t budge. So this was why the scarred man had wasted those precious seconds watching her struggle with the door, to be sure it was too heavy for her. She yelped in a sudden rush of anger and panic and pushed again with all her strength. Then she felt it, a slight vibration against her palms, the
strick, strick
of nails against wood.
    Annie shrank back. The kinderstalk. Even here, they could smell her.
    More scratching, then silence, and then a different sound, almost too faint to hear.
    A meow.
    â€œIzzy! Prue!”
    The cats meowed again.
    Annie sagged against the wall, then let herself slide down it until she was half sitting, half lying on the floor. All that long night, whenever she called out, they answered.

    The ax, or whatever the weapon had been, had split his head into two globes. A dense ridge of scar tissue ran between them, bumpy and faintly blue like thick ice. At first she had tried not to look—he couldn’t help it, after all—but after a while she realized he
liked
the scar, the suggestion of violence it carried. When he spoke he dipped his head toward her, as if to ask, what do you suppose happened to the man holding the ax?
    She’d had plenty of time to study him since he hauled her from the pit at daybreak and marched her back to the barn. He pushed her into a wagon and bound her ankles together, then looped a stout rope several times around her waist and tied the ends to one of a dozen metal rings fastened to the inside of the wagon bed. He fit the rain cover over the top and sides of the wagon.
    Her hands he left free. Breakfast consisted of a wedge of bread, a blackened fish head, and a couple of knobby potatoes with bits of earth still clinging to them. Annie ate it all. And she drank from the bucket of water he’d given her, drank