The Call - Michael Grant [9]
He tripped fairly often. And there was really very little chance that he would come across an animal to strike with his hatchet. No chance, really. But the baby was teething and therefore crying quite a bit, and Grimluk hated that incessant crying so much that even the forest at night seemed preferable.
As he was feeling his way carefully through the almost pitch black, he saw light ahead. Not sunlight or anything so bright, just a place where it seemed starlight might reach the forest’s floor.
He headed toward that silvery light, thinking, Hey, maybe I’ll find an opossum after all. And then I will rub it in Gelidberry’s face.
Not the opossum. The fact that he’d found something to eat. That’s what he would rub in her face. Because Gelidberry had accused him of only pretending to hunt so that he could get away from the crying, crying, crying.
Grimluk expected to find a clearing. But the trees did not thin out. Instead, he noticed that he was heading downhill. The farther downhill he went, the more light there was. Soon he could see the willow branches that lashed his face and make out some of the larger rocks that bruised his toes.
“What’s this about?” Grimluk wondered aloud, reassured by the sound of his own voice.
He heard a sound ahead. He froze. He listened hard and tried to peer through the gloom.
He crept, silent as he could make himself. He crouched and crept and squeezed the handle of the ax for comfort.
He moved closer and closer, as if he could no longer stop himself. As if the light was drawing him forward.
Then…
Snap!
The sound came from behind him! Grimluk spun around and stared hard into the utter darkness. It was too late to go back now—something was there.
Grimluk now had an unknown terror behind and a light that seemed ever more eerie ahead. He lay flat and breathed very quietly.
There was definitely something moving behind him and coming closer. Something too large to be a tasty opossum.
Grimluk wished with all his heart that he could be back at the little campsite with the screeching nameless baby and Gelidberry and the cows. What would happen to them if he never returned?
Grimluk crawled on his belly, away from the approaching sound, toward the light, farther and farther down the slope.
And there! Ahead in the clearing…a girl!
She was beautiful. Beauty such as Grimluk had never seen or even imagined. Beauty that could not be real.
She was perhaps his age, although there was an agelessness to her pale, perfect skin. She had wild red hair, long curls that seemed to move of their own accord, twisting and writhing.
Her eyes were green and glowed with an inner light that pierced him to his very soul.
She had a sullen mouth, full red lips, and more teeth than Grimluk and Gelidberry combined. In fact, she seemed, miraculously, to have all of her teeth. And those teeth were white. White without even a touch of yellow.
She wore a dark red dress that lay tight against her body.
Grimluk realized with a shock that the light he had seen was coming from her. Her very skin glowed. Her eyes were green coals. Her hair glistened as it moved.
“Who comes hither?” the girl asked, and Grimluk knew, knew deep down inside, that he would answer, that he would stand up, brush himself off, and answer, “It’s me, Grimluk.”
But he also knew this would be a bad thing. No creature could possibly be this beautiful, this bright, this clean, this toothy, unless she was a witch. Or some other unnatural creature.
As he was in the act of standing up, a voice spoke from the darkness behind him.
“Your servants, Princess.”
The voice was definitely foreign. It wasn’t simply that the voice spoke the common tongue with an accent; it was that it seemed to form sounds within that speech that were unlike anything that could come from a human mouth.
A dry, rasping, irritating, whispery voice in response to the cold, confident voice of the stunning object identified as “Princess.”
“Ah,” the girl said. “At last. You have kept me waiting.