Page 249 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

to win my war against waking. Only seconds passed before
the forest had completely embraced me, taking me into
its confidence and revealing to me all of its secret paths. I
quietly thanked the woodland as I rushed through its ancient
darkness—a silken gloom that had been hidden and nurtured
since time immemorial, passed between shady meadow and
benighted thicket, to be preserved against the day forever.
Yet despite the forest’s best efforts, I could detect from
somewhere within those undisclosed lanes a Wolf keeping
pace with me, deciphering the confusion I left in my wake,
avoiding my every trap and predicting my every feign. The
Prince of Smoke was a formidable hunter, indeed.
A hollow in the woods yawned wide as the Prince,
preempting the path I would take, rose from the mists
directly in front of me. He showed me his hands, clad in
black leather gloves, and began moving them with an awful
celerity. He thrust them out in front of the darkness that held
his face from sight, beneath a hood seemingly stitched from
the gossamer of shadows. Instantly, a swarm of fat flies
swept out from between his dancing fingers and splashed
across my face, the entire cloud trying desperately to bury
itself in my eyes. An enemy silence bloomed all around me,
turning my vigilant senses aside and inviting a blade deep
into the flesh of my back.
I followed the pain to the exact point at which my skin
ended and the Prince’s knife began, hoping to seize it. But
my hands only clasped the tail of a mist that twisted in the
moonlight. My renewed silence closed the wound as the
blade vanished, and I called the shadows to reveal the void
where hid my opponent.
My fist followed where the shadows led, and the magical
murderer spat his broken teeth onto the twisting coils of
ancient tree roots. The conjoined triplet backpedaled into
his strange and magical smoke as I sunk into my obedient
darkness. Not even the searching songs of crickets and frogs
could find the silence through which we stalked, nor could
252 | Mark Anzalone