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I look at this kid with his sociopathic stare, and my hands go cold, my pulse thundering in my ears. I’m confronted by my oldest enemy: Fear.

Then I remember my injured sister and my dead friend lying on the ground among the roaches and bones, and I lunge at the snake with a heart full of vengeance.

I’ve got him beaten on physical strength and bulk alone, but he moves quickly and athletically, effortlessly dodging most of the punches I throw. He must’ve taken my last “mano a mano” challenge to heart, because I’m seriously paying for it now. He clearly has extensive military combat under his belt, and soon I’m dripping with sweat and breathing hard.

The magic in this place is making me weaker, my punches clumsy. How stupid was I not to think about how this forest affected me the last time?

Pearce catches me in the side, and I stumble off the path into a tree, coming face-to-face with a decaying, grinning skull that snaps its jaws. When I turn from it in horror, Pearce is already coming at me again with a jaunty, almost playful step, and I finally start to realize that the odds are not in my favor here.

He seems vastly stronger now than he was before. He may be an arrogant jerk with delusions of grandeur, but when he says he doesn’t need The One’s help anymore, I believe him.

Which means I’m a bit overmatched.

I get lucky and nail him with a crushing hook to the jaw that should’ve downed him, but somehow he stays upright.

Pearce takes advantage with a jab in my stomach, quick and vicious. I bend at the waist with a shocked groan, and by the time I suck in a wheezing breath of sour air, he’s spun me into a deadly choke hold.

All I can think is You are a star athlete, Whit. How did this even happen?

I’m going to die here today.

And then he’s going to kill my little sister before she even gets to see our parents again.

I kick and flail, shoving my elbows into him, my face puffing up with the strain, but I can’t seem to break free from his grasp.

“Now, now, hold still, Whitford. This’ll only hurt for a second.” He laughs cruelly. “Okay, that’s not really true.”

I’m almost unconscious, and at first I think he’s going to melt my face, but that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.

He’s suddenly grabbing my legs, compressing them all the way up to my stomach — no, into my stomach. My organs are being crushed. Imagine being disemboweled with your own body parts, the agony vibrating from both sides, and you might be close to where I’m at right now.

Looks like Pearce has been practicing a new death trick.

What information can I give him to make him stop? my mind screams. But of course I don’t have any, and he wouldn’t anyway.

And it just gets worse.

I can’t say what’s happening, but in every single cell of my body I feel the most excruciating pain, as if he’s forcing my limbs and torso inside my own skull, creating a human foolball of me. I can see his hands, but that’s all. I am beyond thought. I can only watch in horror as Pearce points a finger into the distant wilderness of the Shadowland.

“Go long!” he shouts to Wisty, whom I can’t see, though I can hear her pitiful begging, her useless sobs. “No? No matter. I’m sure one of the bone trees will catch him.”

And then my compressed body is falling from his hands, only to connect with his steel-toed boot in a vicious dropkick that sends me sailing through the air. It’s all I can do not to howl. Instead I focus my strength on absorbing the blow, on reversing the spell, on … anything but the inevitable.

The world turns itself inside out and back again as I spin through the air, barreling closer and closer to one of those mammoth trunks at astonishing speed, a car facing a head-on collision. Oh no.

No, no, no …

My skull smashes into a bone tree with the force of a freight train, but I don’t shatter. I don’t die.

I bounce.

As I whip through the air, my body is forced back out of the skull ball with seemingly no broken bones or permanent damage.

I’m alive, but I’ve never been more freaking ticked off in my life.

I hurl myself forward, rage distorting my features