Ghost Hunter Read Free

himself away.

    It was a bitterly cold morning, and the snow-crust crackled under his boots. On the higher ground, the wind had exposed patches of flat bearberry scrub: the startling scarlet of spilled blood. On one patch, Torak found a dead gray moth. He touched it with his boot, and it crumbled to dust.

    As he went on, he found more dead moths littering the undergrowth. The frost had put an end to them.

    Or maybe, he thought uneasily, Eostra no longer needs them. Maybe they've already done their work.

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    THREE

    "Can't you hear them?" whispered the sick boy. "Hear who?" said Renn. "The demons...."

    Renn took a brand from the fire and showed him every corner of the Boar Clan shelter. "Aki, look. There are no demons here."

    "The moths drew them," he muttered, rocking back and forth. "They'll never leave me now."

    "But there's nothing--"

    Grabbing her arm, he breathed in her ear. "They're in my shadow!"

    Renn jerked back.

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    Aki stared about him with haunted eyes. "I hear them all the time. The clicking of their jaws. Their angry breath. In the morning when my shadow's long, I see them. At midday, when my shadow creeps closer, they're inside me. Under my skin, gnawing my souls. Ai! Get away!" He clawed at his shadow.

    Renn wondered what to do. She was exhausted. For days she'd done her best to keep the gray moths from the Boar Clan, while their own Mage was laid low with fever. And now this.

    Aki's fingers were bleeding as he clawed the mat. Renn tried to stop him, but he was too strong. She called for help. Aki's father ran in and clasped his son in his arms. A second man, haggard from fever, raised a spiral amulet and made the sign of the hand.

    "He says there are demons in his shadow," Renn told him.

    The Boar Mage nodded. "I've just seen two more with the same sickness. Renn. If it's here, it'll be with the Ravens, too. I'm well enough now. Go back to your clan."

    The Boars had camped on the River Tumblerock, less than a daywalk north of the Ravens, but the fog made Renn's progress slow. As she stumbled through it, she thought of gray moths and Eostra the Masked One. Every falling leaf made her jump. She regretted having declined the Boar Clan Leader's offer to accompany her.

    Her tired mind went in circles. How to stop the

    18

    gray moths? How to fight the shadow sickness? What if Saeunn was too old and weak to cope, and everything came down to her?

    And like a dark current beneath it all was the gnawing anxiety about Torak.

    For days she'd been reading the embers, and last night she'd placed a dream-stave under her sleeping-sack: a stick of rowan wound with a lock of his hair. Now she wished she hadn't. Everything pointed the same way. She prayed that she'd gotten it wrong.

    The fog was gone by midafternoon, and she paused for a salmon cake under a beech tree. She was opening her food pouch when the zigzag tattoos on her wrists began to prickle. Quietly, she closed the pouch and examined the tree.

    On the other side, someone had gouged a strange, spiky mark in the trunk. It was about a hand wide, and it had been hacked--not carved but hacked --into the smooth silver bark.

    Renn had never seen anything like it. It resembled a huge bird with outstretched wings. Or a mountain.

    And it was fresh. Tree-blood oozed from the wounds. Whoever had done this had acted from hatred and a desire to inflict pain.

    Drawing her knife, Renn scanned the Forest. The light was beginning to fail. Shadows were gathering under the trees.

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    She knew of only one creature who could treat another with such savagery. A tokoroth. A demon in the body of a child.

    She touched the scar on the back of her hand, where one had bitten her two summers before. She pictured filthy, matted hair. Vicious teeth and claws. She fancied she saw branches stir, heard a cackling laugh as the creature leaped from tree to tree.

    There's nothing here, she told herself.

    But she was running up the slope.

    Not far now. Just over the