The hand she extends toward you is the edge of a dark, dark wing amid the burning loose fabric of her sleeve. Her face has turned reptilian and alien and talons clamp onto your shoulder and you’re lost. Lost, never to be found. Lost and no saving you should you burrow among the grubs and the moles and the other creatures hidden beneath the forest floor.

Frantic, you push away, try to rise, trip, fall back against the opposite side of the hollow, tree roots holding you up. Knives slice into your shoulder, how blood trickles out and the talons come in for another strike. The dark wing stands there, red eyes hungry. It will flay you alive, take your soul. Use you up as demons do.

That’s when the salamander barrels out of the dark, so much larger than before, smashes thrashing into the dark wing, and they fall, struggling, silent, terrible monsters, back into the darkness.

The moment you can move again. Find the journal. Pick up your pack. Run.

<<Her stepfather used to creep around the cottage as if a lurker, a stealthy walker, a shadow, a wraith. He would leave framed photos of his family on the walls to mark his territory, but he himself often seemed invisible. Then wasn’t there anymore, taken by demons.

Once her mother explained that he was mostly a ghost because “He doesn’t want to do harm.” But she knew that wasn’t true. Maybe it just made everything easier for him. Did ghosts have shouting matches with her mother in the bedroom with the door closed? And when he was gone, all that remained were tidal pools in the girl’s head and the portraits to show that, once, he had hung something on the wall.

His absence opened up a hole in her life she hadn’t known was there. As if he’d been an eclipse and the first abandonment now shone forth in all its heat and glory. The father she’d never known, who had never been in her life and about whom her mother said only vague things, like, “He was a good man,” or “He did like his sports,” as if any of it couldn’t describe a thousand men. Had he really been so ordinary?

Worse, alone with her mother … her mother was still the same—the woman with the pinched cheeks and mussed-up blond hair who tried hard most of the time, but would just as easily fill her cereal bowl with orange juice as milk, and when she complained would find a way to blame her.