The Gretel Series: Books 1-3 (Gretel Series Boxed set) Page 2

  Yes, it was the quality of caution that had served her well and preserved her existence since The Enlightenment. But as always, caution was always overruled by necessity. It was time once again to hunt.

  She stepped down gingerly onto the crude stone landing that served as a porch and settled for a moment without moving. She listened as a distant breeze pushed through the green of the forest, moving deliberately past each leaf and limb, before finally catching her in its wake. Yes, this would be a fine day. She lowered the cloak’s hood, deciding she would begin the journey exposed to the wonders of the woods, figuring the sun would not be a factor for several miles, and the chances of encountering another person were remote.

  She took another step on the porch and immediately recognized the adrenaline that had surged during her earlier moment of clarity was now waning. She could already feel the weakness of her joints and muscles returning. The sting of old age, a feeling she had forgotten, or perhaps never known, billowed down her spine and limbs, and the pain choked in a breath as she tried to exhale. Alarmed, she moved quickly toward the edge of the porch, convincing herself that by reaching the boardwalk at the bottom of the steps and beginning her journey on the overgrown pathway that led into the forest, she could somehow outpace the inevitable.

  She reached the ledge of the stairs, barely, her legs giving out on the last stride, and narrowly avoided tumbling to the bottom. Only the stone wall that bordered the descent saved her from catastrophe. She held the barrier in a comic clutch, as if trying to keep a battleship from leaving port, and looked out at the seemingly endless timberland before her. She laughed aloud at the idea of venturing ten yards from home, let alone the ten miles or so it would require to reach the nearest source population. It was impossible. And rest was not the answer. Rest meant time and time meant decay. What the woman needed was help, and help—even more than companionship—had always been the greatest price of her isolation. The lack of companionship, or even the sound of another’s voice, could certainly be brutal realities, but there were ways to deal with those. She had come to consider the trees and animals and insects important companions in her life and addressed them with respect and appreciation. And she had long since shed any embarrassment of speaking aloud or taking on different character roles. This, in fact—along with her baking—had become one of the few joys in her life, invoking the characteristics of women from her past that she had always envied or admired, playing the roles of huntress or princess or whore. Early on she had discovered that for even the most primal of human relationships there were always alternatives, as any thirteen-year-old boy could attest to.

  But there was no substitute for the strength of men to remove an old iron stove, or fell a dying tree before it collapsed and demolish a house. Or for hands to help gather and hunt when the crops have failed and starvation is no further than a bad snowstorm away. She had paid for help in the past—and even kept slaves when the social climate allowed it—and though these servants had certainly alleviated many of the normal personal and practical burdens, the threat of loss had been too strong, and they never stayed on for long. Most of them she killed while they slept. Many were buried on this very property. Sadly, none of their innards were used for blending.

  And now isolation would cost her immortality. The motif of so many legends and religions would evaporate with her last breath, as it may have done, for all she knew, with hundreds of other possessive hermits in the past.

  She lowered herself down to a sitting position on the first step of the porch and rested her elbows on her knees. She coughed several times as if she had just finished a brisk winter walk and her lungs were struggling to adjust. She hung her head between her knees and watched as the wooden planks beneath her began to blur. She was about to go black again, perhaps permanently this time. Instinctively, she slid her buttocks to the next step down and continued this movement on to each lower tread until she reached the bottom. If she were going to die, she decided, it wouldn’t be from a broken neck. There was one last impulse to get to her feet, but the message was never conveyed from her brain to her legs. Defeated, the old woman rolled onto her back and spread her arms wide, encouraging the world’s embrace. She took in the bright blueness of the sky and wished that she could feel the wonder of rain one last time.

  The blue canvas above her turned shadowy, not from the arrival of clouds, she assumed, but from her brain’s lack of oxygen. She smelled the warm air rising from the ground, and tried to appreciate the last of life’s sensory experiences. Surely this was death. She had escaped it for so long, but now here it was in front of her. The brew of life on which she had relied since the early times of the Northlands had finally failed her. Or she had failed it. It was true she trusted a source would come—her dreams had told her of its delivery—but it hadn’t come, and she’d waited too long to move on. She’d trusted in her dreams and they had betrayed her, but it was her life, her responsibility. She had become careless and complacent. The supply was larger than ever these days, and she needed only to pull from it.

  If only there was more time. A week. A day.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, as that relentless resistance to death which had dictated the bulk of her life now turned to acceptance. Without contention, she awaited sleep.

  And then she heard the voice.

  ANIKA MORGAN WAS COLD, and the mud that had gently cushioned the soles of her feet when she set out now enveloped her ankles and threatened to swallow her shins. Every step felt like someone was pressing down on the tops of her knees. She thought of quicksand. Was that a possibility? That this was quicksand? She knew—or at least had heard the stories as a child—about quicksand existing in the jungles of Africa and places like that, but not in the Northlands. Truthfully though, she couldn’t be sure where it was found. Or if it was real at all. Was she really going to die such an improbable death as drowning in quicksand?

  Anika cleared her head and focused. If she wanted to avoid death today, she figured it wasn’t quicksand she had to worry about. Besides, quicksand was absurd, the forests of this territory were infamous for their swamps and mud; she had waded through much worse in her life. She had to stay on task.

  “Just go,” she scolded herself.

  She wanted to scream the words, but her overworked lungs wouldn’t allow it. Anika slowed her breathing and down-shifted her effort to an easy walk. The depth of the mud was making her progress comically slow, and trying to run through it was doing nothing but edging her closer to exhaustion. Adrenaline had its limits, and hers was almost reached. She would have to rest soon. In a few hours, the early morning chill would be giving way to the warmth of a typical spring day, and Anika could see the sun beginning its morning stretch upward. The sky was almost staggering in its clarity and blueness, and she was thankful at least to be dry; though had it been raining, she reasoned, she would never have attempted the forest to begin with, and probably would have been rescued by now.

  But she had chosen the forest, and at the time had done so quite casually.

  But why?

  Why would she have made such an unconventional decision? Such a bad decision? She was normally much more conservative in her approach to problems, and the woods in this country, even on a clear spring day, were risky to explore for the most well-conditioned of men, let alone a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two. So why hadn’t she just walked the road? Or waited for help at the place where the car drifted off the shoulder? It was true she wasn’t thinking clearly after the accident—everything had happened so quickly—but she hadn’t suffered any trauma to her head. In fact, she was miraculously uninjured.

  So the question remained: why?

  It didn’t matter now, she thought, the decision was made; all that mattered now was finding shelter and a telephone. Besides, with her car nestled at the bottom of what must have been a fifteen-foot embankment, with little hope of being seen from the road, it seemed somewhat reaso
nable that finding a place to call for help on her own was a safer play than standing alone on the side of a quiet road in the southern Northlands. Not that this part of the territory was particularly dangerous, but one could never be sure.

  Anika spotted a log about forty yards in the distance and decided it would be a suitable place to rest. She wanted to keep going, but she knew forty yards was about all she had left in her. If she pushed beyond that, she might not come across another place to stop, and would end up having to rest in the mud she was desperately trying to escape.

  And she was getting scared. And fear, she knew, would only make her judgment worse.

  She needed to stop and think, try to orient herself with what little she knew of the land here, and get out of these woods and back to her family. She could only imagine the fears they would conjure if they didn’t hear from her soon. She should have been home by now, and it wouldn’t be long before they started to worry. Soon they would call to check on her and learn that she had left ahead of schedule and should have been home even earlier. And that would be bad. She loved Heinrich, but for all his pretensions of strength and masculinity, he was emotionally weak. And combined with his injuries, he would be in no condition to comfort and reassure the children.

  She reached the large log and climbed atop to a sitting position, throwing one muddy leg to the far side to straddle it. She sat this way for a moment, legs dangling while she caught her breath, and finally lay down on her back, bringing her legs together and linking her hands behind her head for support. Under the circumstances, it felt strange to be assuming such a relaxed position, and she imagined that someone looking in might conclude that she was on some spiritual journey—albeit one that was oddly messy—and had come to the forest to contemplate the meaning of life or something.

  If only.

  It was still early and she’d only been up a few hours, but the grueling hike had tired Anika and she had to be mindful to stay awake. She had to keep her eyes wide and her mind active. She thought of her children and how they must miss her. She realized now it was the longest she had ever been away from them, only a little over a week, but it was eons compared to what they were used to, and, with Heinrich in his condition, it came at a time when she was needed at home most. They were both wonderful, mature children, exceptional for their ages, but they had no business carrying the responsibilities she had left them with this past week. Why hadn’t she just waited by the road?

  Anika sat straight on the log and took the last remaining bite of a stale candy bar. It had been in her car for days—weeks maybe—and she was thrilled now to have grabbed it before setting out. At least she’d made one good decision today.

  She swallowed the chocolate and then laid back down to fully replenish her lungs and examine her options. She supposed she could try to retrace her steps and get back to the original point where she had entered the forest, and then wait on the shoulder of the road until someone passed by. The roads were certainly desolate on the stretch where she’d swerved off—in fact, she couldn’t remember passing a car once in her short trip from Father’s house—but surely someone would eventually motor by and help. Even if it took several hours. At this point, the fear of some lascivious stranger with devious motives paled to the fear she had of still being in these woods come nightfall.

  But the truth was it was too late for the road, at least at the part where her car now lay abandoned and invisible. Whatever it was that had compelled her into the wilderness had now taken her beyond the point where she had the will to make it back. It would be a disheartening trek of over an hour through the now detestable mud, and at this point she wasn’t sure she would even be able to find it. The turns she had made along the way to avoid the deeper swampy areas and larger thickets had disoriented Anika, and though she was fairly confident that she could head back in the general direction she had come, with fatigue and fear now a factor, there was no certainty she would reach the road at all.

  Her other option—only option really—was to continue on. She realized she may only immerse herself deeper, but eventually she would reach a boundary. This was the Northlands, not the Amazon, after all. She had to keep going and cling to the fact that possibility rested in every new clearing.

  She stood up on the log and slowly surveyed the forest in each direction, hoping by some wonder of the universe her eyes would focus past the camouflage and spot something other than trees. It wasn’t a particularly dense woodland, so even with the lush spring leaves there was quite a bit of visibility. But she saw nothing. She jumped down off the log and searched the forest again, this time at ground level, figuring she may have more luck at a different angle. Nothing. She climbed the log again and this time stood tall, straightening her back, and cupped her mouth with her hands. She breathed deeply and screamed as loudly as possible.

  “Help me! Can anybody hear me!”

  The words seemed to float through the trees, echoing off the branches and carrying downwind. With the additional height of the log, her voice felt forceful, and the decision to yell now seemed less an act of desperation and more of an actual rescue strategy. She paused and listened, not expecting a response, and, of course, getting none. She screamed again, this time feeling a strained burn in her throat. She couldn’t remember ever having yelled this loud as an adult. Still nothing, and the subsequent silence was stark, only reinforcing her desertion. She couldn’t know that the sound waves of this particular bellow deflected at just the proper angle, avoiding perfectly the large oak trunks and dense clumps of leaves that should have absorbed them forever, traveling instead just far enough from their source to reach the auditory canal of an old woman who lay dying on a weathered terrace less than four miles away.

  Anika moved down to a sitting position on the log, broke off a dying branch, and began clearing as much mud as possible from her shoes and pant cuffs. It was a futile exercise she knew—they’d be covered again in a matter of paces—but she needed whatever boost she could get. At least she hadn’t worn a dress today, she thought. It could always be worse.

  She placed her feet back down on the damp dirt floor and was startled by a rustle beneath the log. She stifled a gasp and watched as two chipmunks ran past her and headed up a nearby tree. Anika unconsciously cataloged the vermin as a potential food source; though if it came to that, how she would trap such small, fleeting creatures she had no idea. She watched the tiny animals disappear into the camouflage of the tree’s top branches and then continued her upward gaze to the clear blue sky. It was indeed a marvelous day, she thought, and then she started walking.

  THE OLD WOMAN OPENED her eyes and searched her surroundings with the vibrancy of an infant seeing the world for the first time. The voice was faint—perhaps the faintest sound she had ever heard—but that she had heard it there was no doubt. It may be the voice of Death, she thought, but if it was, he was incarnate. That sound had come in through her ears, not her imagination. She replayed the words in her mind. Over and over. The voice was feminine—beautiful and distressed. Strong. Alive. Not the voice of Death. The voice of Life. Delivering again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Anika!”

  Gretel Morgan flinched violently at the sound of her father’s voice, somehow managing not to drop the ceramic plate she had been drying over the sink. He was awake, and, as was usually the case lately, unhappy.

  “It’s me, Father, I’ll be right there,” she called, turning her head slightly toward the back bedroom, trying her best not to sound aggravated. She certainly sympathized with his condition but had grown tired of the demands it came with.

  Gretel sighed and placed the dish on the sideboard. She had hoped to finish the cleaning before he woke since her tasks seemed to multiply when he was conscious. Cooking his meals alone was a day’s work; add in laundering his clothes (including ironing) and general fetching, and the assignment was barbaric. Thankfully, Mother would be home today, at least to bear some of the constant attention, if not the heavy lifting.


  Gretel walked the ten or so paces to her father’s room and paused at the door, softly clearing her throat and assuming the statuesque, confident posture her mother always seemed to have when she entered a room. At fourteen, her shoulders and hips had begun to forge, and early indications suggested she would have her mother’s shapely body. She had no delusions of striding in and conquering her father’s petulance in the same effortless way her mother did, of course, but hopefully she could disarm him if only for a moment.

  She formed what she believed was a serious, business-like look on her face and entered the room. She could see that her father was sitting up slightly in his bed, but avoided his eyes and walked briskly to the end table, feigning irritation at the crumbs and empty glasses that littered its surface.

  “Where is your mother?” her father grumbled, his deep, accented speech at once both intimidating and divine. “She was to be home by now.”

  “She’s probably not coming home,” Gretel replied casually, letting the words drift just to the edge of uneasiness. “I wouldn’t blame her. If I was her I would have changed my name and run away to a village in the south.” She kept her eyes down, serious, staying excessively focused on her father’s mess.

  Her father frowned and stared coldly at his daughter. “Perhaps I’ll send you to a village in the south.”

  Gretel stopped sponging the table in mid-motion, and stared up at her father with a look of both disbelief and anticipation. “Would you? Please! Promise me, Papa!” She held his gaze for as long as possible before losing control of the charade and erupting into a snorted laugh.

  Her father shook his head slowly and grinned. Gretel could see the flicker of joy in his eyes, proud of how quick his daughter had become with her banter. Yet another gift inherited from her mother.