Teddy sighed, but inside was a controlled panic that was coming more and more uncontrolled as the days wore on.

He also considered, once again, for perhaps the two-thousandth time, sharing with them.

Teddy knew for (relative) certain The Rising priests that had fled, if they had escaped the Beast, were not looking for Teddy and his women.

They were finding safety wherever they could find it.

But unless he shared the far more frightening information of why they needed to make a great deal more haste, he could not tell them they had nothing to fear from the men who took them.

This he found tremendously upsetting for, like in the now, the echoes of the terror of what they’d experienced, what they’d witnessed, and what might have befallen them if they had not escaped interfered with their common sense.

He wished them to know they did not have to live every second, petrified that they would be dragged back to that place.

But he did not wish to replace that fear with one altogether more paralyzing.

“We will carry on as we are,” he muttered.

“Teddy,” Moira called, and as he was beginning to resume their journey, he stopped and looked back to her to see his friend grinning at him with reassurance. “We’ll get there. Prom—”

She stopped mid-word, frozen, and she was not the only one.

Teddy heard it and he had frozen too.

For half a second.

Then he hissed, “Stay low, stay quiet, and follow me.”

He got low himself, while scanning the trees, looking for fallen logs, hollow ones, wide trunks, anything that would hide them.

He did this as the distant, but approaching, sound of horses’ hooves got ever closer.

The steeds were not on the road, which was some ways away.

They were coming through the forest.

Toward them.

“Kate, Terra, duck behind that log,” he clipped, pointing to a fallen log that was thick, so it rose high from the ground.

Kate and Terra bustled that way and disappeared behind it.

With cautious haste, he continued guiding the rest through the trees and searching for hiding places.

But he could hear the horses getting closer.

Damn it!

Could he have been wrong about The Rising priests searching for them?

“Hattie, Constance,” he whispered urgently. “Over there. Big tree. Hide behind it.”

“Minnie, Irma…behind that log. Lie on the ground. Side by side. Everyone, pull leaves over you,” Moira instructed, indicating a fallen log that was not tall, but would provide the two women cover if they did as told.

And the horses continued to get closer.

He turned to Moira.

“Go to Kate and Terra. Hide with them. If it is us they’re searching for, I’ll draw them away,” he ordered Moira.

“I’m staying with you.”

Gods!

Why was the woman so bloody stubborn?

It suddenly felt like the thundering hooves were shaking the trees.

Damn it, how many of them were there?