The creature was circling her like a wolf.
“What are you?” Kestrel snapped. “What do you want?”
But the creature was already gone. It had disappeared into the forest with the silence of a moth.
Kestrel slowly slid her spoon into her pocket, still staring after it. Her hand touched an empty space, and she stopped breathing. Something was missing. She checked again, touching all her pockets, then digging her hands into them. But she could feel its absence like a missing limb.
Her notebook was gone. It had been there just moments before. Kestrel looked around desperately, scanning the ground all around her, but there was no sign of it.
“Where did it go, Pip?” she said, feeling her throat constrict.
The answer was bearing down on her like a landslide. She tried not to think about it, but the answer was so big, so horrible, it was almost impossible to ignore.
The thing with yellow eyes had stolen it.
“Grurbbb,” squeaked Pippit, and she couldn’t suppress her thoughts any longer.
Kestrel’s legs turned to jelly. She felt a huge, hollow emptiness, that horrible absence of feeling that comes before a life-changing storm. For a short second Kestrel wondered if this was a grabber she knew, one that had escaped her clutches during a hunt. But this one had no body. It was as insubstantial as air.
And it had taken her notebook.
Everything that had happened to her, every horror she had ever faced, in one heartbeat became as insignificant and tiny as a black beetle with a broken wing.
The feeling began as a slow trickle, then it turned into a flood, and within moments it was crushing her, stopping her breathing and forcing her to the ground as her heart tripped and sputtered. She lost all the feeling in her arms and legs. Her bones were bending and splitting. Her fingers were breaking one by one. Her whole body was falling apart.
Her grabber was building its body.
Kestrel was going to die.
She tried to put her hands around her fear, to squash it and destroy it, but for the first time it was too big for her and it swallowed her whole.
8
POWER IN TEETH
Kestrel didn’t know whether seconds or minutes had passed, but slowly, piece by piece, she came back to herself. She was sitting on the ground, her knees drawn up to her eyes and her hands around her legs, staring into the dark space between her feet and the dirt. Pippit was urgently bumping his head against her face, trying to make her move.
She was furious with herself for sitting there like a stupid lump, a big, obvious target for anything that wanted to eat her. She saw the flash of a tail, growled, and lobbed a rock at the animal in the trees. It gave a satisfying yelp and ran away, squeaking like an old door.
Kestrel hauled herself to her feet. Her heartbeat had slowed, but her arms were numb and heavy, as though all the blood had been sucked out of them.
“Weak,” Kestrel whispered, anger sloshing between her ribs. Granmos would be ashamed to see her sitting on the ground in the middle of the forest, shivering like a baby. “Get a grip!”
She pressed her fingers over her eyes and tried to decide what to do next. Her head was a jumble of words and pictures, each of them with a wavering yellow eye planted in the middle.
Go back to the village, moron, her head said.
“Okay,” Kestrel said obediently, wondering if she was mad. She touched the place where her grandma’s notebook usually was and felt another pang of shock when it wasn’t there.
She walked shakily through the trees. Pippit dug his claws into her shoulder and crouched low. With every step she took, the question what will my grabber look like? thumped in her head, and each time she swept it away before she could think of the answer.
She asked herself what her gran would do. And she knew: Granmos would ask questions. She would gather evidence, look at her options, and decide what to do next. She wouldn’t make the same mistake as the villagers, who shut themselves away when things went missing, who locked their doors and never said a word. She would pull on her big, tattered coat made of rags, light her pipe, and make a plan.
And at least Kestrel had an advantage: Her eyes were sharp enough that she’d caught the grabber lurking. Most of the villagers didn’t see their grabbers at all, until the end, so it was easier for them to pretend that nothing was happening.
But you did the same thing, didn’t you? said a nasty little voice in the back of her head. When her slingshot had disappeared she’d brushed it aside, but what if her grabber had it? It could have been following her for days. Even the Briny Witch had noticed that something was following her.
She shivered. Maybe she was the same as everyone else. Nobody, not a single person, had escaped from their grabber once it had chosen its final form. What if Kestrel couldn’t fight hers? What if it was so terrifying that she couldn’t even move?
She was scared, she was really scared, and she had no idea what to do. She had a choice: Kill her grabber when it had a body and came for her, or escape the forest before it could catch her.
Kestrel knew what Granmos would say. She was a hunter. Her job was to fight. Maybe this time she’d kill a grabber before it fed. But when she started to wonder what form the grabber would take, she crushed the thought immediately.
She didn’t want to find out.
“I’ll discover a way out of the forest,” she said with false confidence. Her voice helped drive the darkness away. “I’ll find my grandma’s grabber, and my mum will call off the dog, and I’ll be able to leave. Easy.”
But even if she got what she wanted, she’d be doing something terrible. Escaping meant abandoning everyone to their own grabbers. She’d have to find her dad and persuade him to come with her. And she had to find a way out of the never-ending forest, which suddenly felt as impossible as telling a moth to carry a suitcase.
Kestrel stopped. She realized she’d been walking for too long; she should have hit the village by now. She closed her eyes and sniffed the air, but she couldn’t detect the usual smokiness of the wolf fire.
“I’ve gone the wrong way,” she said bitterly, fighting the urge to kick something. What was wrong with her? She couldn’t let herself get distracted by the grabber. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the nearest tree, and seconds later it began to snow.
“Pffft,” Pippit said. “Pffft.”
A thin layer of snow was already covering his fur. He shook himself, but within moments it settled back on him.
“Pffft,” he said again, then looked at her so pathetically that she had to hide a snort of laughter.
“You’re meant to be a fearsome hunter,” she reminded him, picking him up and bringing him to eye level. He ran up her sleeve, dragging wet snow with him. Kestrel yelped and tried to shake him out, but he popped out by her neck and planted himself there with an air of satisfaction.
“Not moving,” he said.
She shielded her eyes from the snow. At least she felt better when Pippit was with her. “Let’s try this way.”
She started walking again, but she couldn’t get her bearings. The more she tried to concentrate, the more she thought about her grabber instead. As the snow swirled around her face Kestrel began to shiver uncontrollably. Her brain was playing tricks on her. She saw the wide, bright eyes of the grabber in every chink of light that came from the stars. She saw its shadowy, unformed body behind every tree she passed. It was going to grow and twist and change—so what part of its body was her notebook going to be? What would it be? Would it look like—?