Experiment in Terror 05.5 Old Blood Read Free Page B

blame him for letting me go, or if it was a case of him not being able to catch up. He was older but I was the same height as him and my legs were born to run. Within a few minutes of tireless scampering through the birch trees and overgrown roots and berry patches, I was alone.
    Alone and cursing myself with the only bad words I knew.
    I waited with my hands on my knees, my socks splattered with mud, breathing heavily. I had lost the path at some point, so it didn’t help that I was lost along with being completely alone.
    Another howl and another human cry.
    Of course I wasn’t completely alone.
    “ You’re an idiot, Pippa,” I said aloud, hoping maybe Stäva would hear me. Hoping the wolves wouldn’t. Just what was I thinking? I was tall but I was still nine and my survival skills consisted of picking berries and throwing stones. I was hardly a candidate for a rescue mission. And Stäva had never heard the child crying. Perhaps it was all in my head.
    But now. There it was again.
    “ Someone help me!” the child cried and now I was certain it was a girl younger than me.
    My fingers and toes ached with the cold that was steadily encroaching. Autumn in Sweden wasn’t very kind. It would be blissfully warm one day and then a frozen wasteland the next. Being in the dark woods overnight could possibly kill me. Yet the fact remained that I had chosen to come out here and with that lay my fate. Knowing was better than not knowing, even if I wound up dead.
    I know such thoughts don’t make a lot of sense when you take into account how young I was. But there was a part of me that didn’t fear things the way I should have. Though I was still afraid, the concept of death was one that never had much weight with me. It had nothing to do with my father and his religious ways, instead it was a matter of having experienced death before. I knew I died in some way when I found the girl in the lake. I don’t know how I came back to life but I know that even though she was dead she still protected me. I felt safe knowing I could walk away from such a thing.
    It was foolish of me to think that. I was young and, as I said to myself, an idiot. But that’s the way it was. I’m sure you might think it noble that I would risk death to save a stranger, but I don’t know if that’s how I saw it. It was more a matter of something I had to do, than something I should do.
    So even though every part of my body was cold and screaming for me to yell for Stäva, to at least try and find my way back before the real darkness set in, I didn’t. I walked toward the noises like some child martyr, creeping silently as I could through the rough and dying foliage.
    The darkness was dropping quickly and the forest began to take more ominous shapes. As the white bark of the birch gave way into rock and pine, my eyes played tricks on me. I saw shadows, shapes and faces everywhere I looked. It took all my nerve to keep it together and walk on.
    Finally I came to a small clearing where the dying twilight penetrated enough for me to see.
    I’ll never forget it and I would pray every night that I could.
    In the clearing, trampling down the long, wild grass were three dogs. I say dogs because they didn’t look as sleek and lupine as wolves. They were bulkier, sloppier, and lacked any grace I would associate with them. Even while killing, wolves can look elegant. This was plain revolting.
    The dogs were pulling at a young girl, maybe a few years younger than I. She had long brown hair that swung around her head as it lay limply to the side. One crocodile-toothed dog had one of her tiny feet in its mouth. Another had a hand and another the arm, teeth chomped down at the tender inside of the elbow.
    They were tearing the girl apart and it took me a second to realize one of her legs was missing, ripped off somewhere underneath her bloodied skirt.
    I froze, unable to move, to speak, to breathe. I don’t even know how I existed in that moment except to say