“Dad—”
“Kestrel, there are plenty of things I don’t know about your mother,” he said. “But I think she’s hiding things. It’s not just the dog you need to worry about.” Sweat was beading on his forehead, and his eyes kept flicking to the grabber below them. He touched the brim of his hat with his hand.
“Like what?” Kestrel said urgently.
“I don’t know what. I just . . .”
The tree creaked. He shuddered.
“Climb higher,” said Kestrel. “Follow me. We can get away through the trees.”
She glanced down at the grabber again and her heart stumbled. Its obvious hunger was making it fast and desperate. For the first time, a tiny part of her doubted she’d ever be able to kill a grabber before it struck. She was sure that this one would continue to hound her dad even if she were hacking it apart piece by piece.
“We can’t run forever,” her dad said gently, as though he’d read her mind.
The grabber drew back and licked its lips. It craned its neck toward them, a hundred tiny bones cracking and snapping under its stolen skin. It took a deep breath, as though it was breathing in the smell of their fear, and its nostrils flared.
“Remember the Marrow Orchard. Promise me you’ll get out,” her dad said. “I don’t know what’s outside this forest, but I’m choosing to believe it’s good.”
The grabber was swelling, its makeshift body creaking and snapping. It was ready. It stretched its jaws toward them, its mouth open, revealing its jumbled and rotting insides.
“I’ve had nightmares about this for years,” her dad said, his voice strangely calm. “You always know what your grabber’s going to be, deep down.”
The grabber hit the tree with all its weight, making it shake so hard Kestrel had to cling to the branch. The grabber jumped again, snapping its jaws a couple of inches below them, and Kestrel cried out.
All at once she knew what she would write in the notebook, if she still had it. The words scurried over her eyelids like frantic spiders.
The forest is alive, and the grabbers are its terrible appetite.
The grabber took a deep, rasping breath that rattled its gory ribs.
“Get away from here, Kestrel,” her dad said. “Run away and don’t look back.”
“No,” she said.
She gripped her sharpened spoon in one fist and leaned over the branch. She drew in a deep breath and aimed for where she thought the grabber’s heart would be. She was going to jump and land on it with all her weight. For the first time ever she would kill a grabber before it struck. Even if it killed her, too. She tensed her muscles, ready to leap.
And then it was like the world had folded in the middle. Her dad was bending over, offering himself to the grabber with his arms outstretched as though embracing it, and the grabber, in turn, was reaching for him. It was slow, too slow, and Kestrel could see every individual hair on the grabber’s back in terrible detail, could see the breath rising from its throat. Her mouth opened, and she yelled as the grabber took her father’s hands in its jaws and pulled him down.
He was gone in a second. Time became right again. Kestrel screamed as the grabber crunched something, then it was leaping away, taking her father with it; and he was silent, unmoving. His life had been snatched away with less effort than it takes to blow out a candle.
Kestrel’s body turned white-hot with a cry of pain. It came from the bottom of her stomach and forced its way out of her mouth, so hard she thought her jaw might break apart. Pippit bit her on the hand so she could feel his teeth on the fine bones running up to her knuckles, and that broke the spell. She pitched forward, flinging herself from the tree and landing hard in the dead leaves. She crawled after the grabber like an animal.
“Go!” Pippit hissed in her ear.
“Yes,” said Kestrel, and climbed up with her hand on the spoon, toward the grabber’s bloody trail. Pippit hissed in her ear.
“Wrong way! Go! Now!”
“No,” she said. “I’m not going back.”
“Village! Now!”
“You can go if you want,” she said. Her horror was slowly solidifying into a long spike of icy rage. “I’m going to kill a grabber.”
She raced after the grabber’s deep footprints. It had gone around the side of the hill, not wasting any time now, leaping over twisted roots and through jutting rocks. She quickly decapitated the creepers and branches that got in her way with one clean swipe of her spoon. The grabber was just ahead, and now that it had neatly dispatched and almost completely swallowed its meal, it moved with a sense of triumph.
It was scattering things behind it, its own fine white bones and claws and teeth, as though it was falling apart. Kestrel couldn’t see her dad anywhere. It seemed impossible that the grabber had swallowed him whole, but it was even more impossible that he had escaped its jaws. The grabber lowered its head, then slowed to a trot. It was bloated and triumphant. It didn’t seem to know that Kestrel was almost on top of it.
The grabber stopped. It was standing right on the edge of a cliff. The ground dropped away as though the hill had been chopped in half. Far below it was a pit of green needle-covered trees coated in a thin layer of snow. Small white flakes swirled around the grabber’s head. The snow had been falling all this time, and Kestrel hadn’t even noticed.
The grabber’s back was turned to her. It dropped something heavy on the ground and lowered its head to sniff it, its jaws damp. There was a metal trap around its leg, which it wore like nothing more than a bracelet. Kestrel gripped her spoon in her fist, shaking as she looked for a weak spot.
“Belly,” whispered Pippit.
The grabber twitched at the sound of Pippit’s voice. Kestrel threw herself toward the grabber, and before it had time to realize what was happening, she had driven her spoon through its ribs.
The grabber howled and thrashed. Kestrel pulled the spoon out of its body and gave it a blow to the side of the head just as it swung its jaws open to bite her, and then she shoved it toward the edge.
The grabber was heavy, but it hadn’t expected her to throw her whole weight into it. It scrabbled for a hold on the ground, but rocks were already sliding away under its feet. At the last moment Kestrel grabbed hold of one of the grabber’s ears, trying to stop it from falling, horrified that her father was in there somewhere. She was sick at the thought of him smashing to pieces with the grabber.
The grabber’s ear tore off as the monster slipped over the edge of the cliff. Its fur, which was attached to the ear, pulled away from the grabber as it plunged over the cliff. The fur dangled from Kestrel’s hand. It was Mardy’s missing wolf-skin rug.
The grabber’s howl was cut short as it crashed through the trees. It landed on the ground below with a sharp, final-sounding snap. Kestrel’s legs folded and she hit the ground, clutching the rug. It took her a while to realize that she was shuddering with tears, and that Pippit was licking her cheeks. She jumped at the sight of his face so close, his brown weasel-teeth and his eyes slightly crossed from focusing on her nose.
“Blood,” he said urgently. “Move. Go.”
She knew at once what he meant. The smell of blood was in the air, and now that the grabber was dead other creatures would come to see if there were any scraps left behind—first the wolves, then everything from the rust-colored dogs to the poisonous rabbits, even the fat white slugs, the ones that sucked up blood. They’d find her there, helpless and weak, and if one of them was brave enough to snap its teeth at her, they’d all have a go.