The forest was dark and strange calls echoed through the treetops. I couldn’t see a damned thing, even with moonlight shining from above, because only a few spears of light managed to penetrate the heavy tree cover. Just enough to silver some of the big leaves hitting me in the face—right after they’d already done so. The leaves contained some kind of sap that burned like a bitch, even though I wasn’t really here, so that should have been impossible.

But tell that to my skin, I thought, trying to rub off a face full of sticky, itchy stuff.

“Auggghhhh!”

I jumped as a human cry echoed through the trees. It was close and loud and startled a bunch of what I really hoped were birds out of the canopy, sending them flapping and screeching into the night. I clapped a hand over my mouth, to keep my own cry behind my teeth, only to have something come crashing at me through the underbrush and knock it away.

I hit the forest floor, stunned, and not just because of the blow. But because I’d landed on a hard as steel tree root, which as luck would have it, had made a direct impact on my spine. The blow shuddered through me like a hit to my funny bone, only this was a whole-body experience, leaving me gasping and agonized—

And then pissed, when the same damned root tried to wrap around my arm.

I skipped anger and went straight to fury, because I’d been here before. Back when I was a wet behind the ears Pythia, I’d ended up in Faerie with a war mage who had died to protect me. Because every. Goddamned. Thing. In this horrible world wanted to kill me!

Only not this time, I thought, jerking the bastard root out of the soil and beating it with vampire strength. Tearing, ripping, and shredding the hard old bark and the sinewy tissue below it, I kept it up until the stupid thing was little more than a wad of pulp. And then ripped it off and threw it into the trees, hearing it tear through the dense underbrush and then keep on going, because a master vampire can throw a damned long way!

“You want some more?” I asked the rest of the roots scrawling over the dirt at my feet. “Do you?”

They did not want any more, retreating into the soil like the grasping hands they mimicked. I stomped on a few of the slower ones anyway, just because. And it felt so good that I did it again.

Goddamn, I hated Faerie!

I finally stopped, breathing hard, and then began trying to extricate myself from some brambles. They were not animated, but they’d caught me anyway. Because I was wearing a white lace torture device that caught on every damned—

There was a woman lying on the dirt, staring up at me with huge, frightened eyes.