Here is the last installment of The Laurel of Asheville’s sneak preview of Robert Beatty’s newly released Willa of the Wood, the first book in a series about an orphaned forest girl with special powers who lives and hunts in the Great Smoky Mountains in 1900. At the suspenseful end of last month’s installment, Willa had been caught in the home of one of the day-folk, as she and her clan call them.
Beatty lives in Asheville and is the author of the award-winning and bestselling Serafina series. To learn more about this book and others he has written, visit robertbeatty.com.
Willa of the Wood — Chapter 4
Willa lay crumpled on the floor at the bottom of the Stairs, her right leg bent badly beneath her left, her arm twisted under the weight of her body. Her head lay flat against the boards, blood dripping down into her eyes as she gazed out into the dead furniture and murdered walls of the shadowed lair. She could see through, and she could hear the wheeze of the air moving in and out of her lungs, but she couldn’t get her arms and legs to move. The through her eyes, and she could hear the wheeze of the air moving in and out of her lungs, but she couldn’t get her arms and legs to move. The only thing she could feel was the pain of the blast radiating through her shaking body. She lay helpless, stunned, and bleeding on the floor.
She felt the man’s footsteps coming down the stairs behind her. His dog tore out in front of him, a blazing burst of growling teeth. The beast clamped onto her calf with its fangs, sending sharp bolts of new pain shooting through her limbs, jolting her alive. She spun around, screaming, and struck out with a quick jerking motion. The dog pulled back, trying to drag her with its teeth, but she wrested herself free. The snarling beast lunged in for a second bite, but Willa darted away.
The dog chased her, gnashing its teeth behind her as she scurried across the eating room floor. She dove through the dog door, scrambled across the porch, and ran, fleeing out into the night, desperate to reach the safety of the forest.
The man threw open the door and charged out, aiming his killing-stick into the darkness. Another shot exploded the world, shattering the night with a flash of light and a deafening roar, as Willa scrambled away.
“Get him, boy! Get him!” he shouted as the dog flew off the porch after her.
“I’m going to kill you this time!” the man screamed.
She knew that she’d been moving so fast through the darkness in the house that he hadn’t truly seen her, but he was angry, far angrier than a man who didn’t care about his belongings.
Get to the trees, get to the trees, she thought frantically as she stumbled across the grass toward the forest. But she felt dizzy and disoriented, stumbling along, filled with nothing but pain and panic. Her head throbbed. When that fi rst blast hit her, it had slammed her against the wall and then tumbled her down the stairs. Now the blood was oozing from her head down into her eyes, blurring her vision.
Running nearly blind, she ducked into the first cover she came to. She scrambled into a small, closed-in place, gasping for breath, and hoping the dog would pass her by.
All she wanted to do was close her eyes against the pain and curl up into a little ball, but she knew if she withered here she’d die. She wiped the blood from her eyes and tried to look around her. Had she crawled into a hollow log? Maybe she’d been lucky enough to find a fox den.
But then she smelled something. And it wasn’t fox.
It was goat.
Her heart sank. She’d only made it as far as the homesteader’s barn. As she scuttled out of the pen, the startled goats ran bleating out into the yard and the chickens flew up in a squawking explosion of feathers. Get to the forest!, her mind kept telling her, but she knew it was too late. She could hear the man and his dog charging toward the building. She scurried deeper into the shadows of the barn and hunkered down to hide.
A debilitating fear gripped her chest. “If they ever catch you alone in their world, they will kill you, Willa,” the padaran had told her. “They cut down trees and burn with fire. They killed your sister and your parents!”
The barn door creaked slowly open.
The flickering light of the lantern entered first and then the gleaming double barrels of the killing-stick. The man came in slowly and cautiously. The day-folk were oddly blind at night. He held up his lantern, straining to see in the dim light, his weapon pointed in front of him.
Willa lay crumpled, curled up on the floor in the corner, wounded and bleeding, panting with an exhaustion so all-consuming that she couldn’t move—like a fawn that had been shot through her heart and lay on the ground breathing her last breaths. Willa had the power of the forest animals within her, but none of her powers worked in this unnatural place.
She could tell by the man’s careful movement that he couldn’t quite make out what type of man or beast he’d shot in the darkness and cornered in his barn. It wasn’t until he raised his lantern and peered at her at close range that he got his first good look at her.
She could just imagine what she must look like to him lying in the dirt like a trapped animal in the corner of his barn, shaking with fear, her greenish arms and legs pulled up to her chest, her chest moving up and down with fast, ragged breaths, and the blood dripping down her face between her emerald eyes.
When the man finally saw her, and she lifted her eyes and looked at him, his expression changed from grim determination to utter astonishment. The viciousness that had consumed him moments before disappeared as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
She knew that he had shot at a quick-moving dark figure running through his lair. In the yard, she had been but a blur. But now, here, close up and in the light of his lantern, she saw him realize that the thing he’d trapped in his barn wasn’t a man or a beast.
“Wha . . . ” he began to ask in confusion. “What are you?”
She could hear in the tremor of his voice the realization that he had shot some kind of strange little forest creature, not just a creature, but a girl. She didn’t know what he was expecting, what type of enemy he thought had invaded his lair in the dead of night, but it was not this, it was not her.
Willa looked down the double barrels of the killing-stick pointed at her. This man could shoot her again right here and now and end it all. All he had to do was pull the trigger. Or he could strangle her with his bare hands or strike her in the head with a shovel. Without the powers of the forest, she could not defend herself from him. She was helpless. But as she looked into his face she saw something that she did not think was possible in a day-folk man: kindness.
“I . . . I don’t understand,” he said in bewilderment. “Where did you come from? Who are you?”
I’m Willa, she thought, but she did not answer his question out loud. The padaran had brought the English sounds into their clan long before she was born, and she knew the sounds well enough to understand him. But whether she was using the old language or the new, Willa spoke to trees, not the men who killed them. How could day ever comprehend night? How could darkness ever know light? How could she say her name to a man such as this?
“Just stay still, child,” he said, watching her with steady eyes as he knelt beside her. He set the killing-stick and the lantern down onto the dirt floor of the barn. All the anger and fear that had consumed him moments before seemed to have disappeared from him now. He pulled a white cloth from his pocket and moved it toward her, as though he was going to try to staunch the bleeding of her wound.
So wickedly fast these humans seemed to change their spirit.
She stayed perfectly still as he reached slowly toward her. She didn’t move in any way as his hand came closer and closer.
But the moment he touched her, she sprang to her feet. Startled, he pulled back in surprise. She darted past him. The dog snapped at her, but missed.
With her last burst of dying energy, she dashed through the doorway of the barn and out into the darkness. She ran across the grass. The moment she reached the edge of the forest, she blended into the night and disappeared.
The last thing she had heard him say as he grabbed his lantern and his killing-stick was, “Come on, boy. We’re going after her.”
