Kestrel let out her breath. She watched the grabber for any sign of movement, breathing hard, but this time it was well and truly dead.
A minute later its teeth began to fall out, pattering down like rain.
“Ugh,” she said, making a face. Then her shoulders slumped, and all the horrible pent-up fear left her, making her feel empty.
Pippit finished collecting trophies and returned with one of the grabber’s fingers hanging from his mouth. Kestrel patted her pockets to make sure everything was still there, the slingshot and the spoon and the notebook, and remembered that Finn’s lucky stone was still in the grabber’s throat.
The forest was growing cool and shadowy in the aftermath of the grabber’s death, and in a few minutes other creatures would start to arrive, drawn by the prospect of a free meal. Kestrel looked around nervously. She knew she should leave, but she didn’t want to lose the stone.
“Lessgo,” insisted Pippit.
Kestrel looked desperately at the deep, dark forest beyond the clearing, then at the grabber. They probably only had a few minutes before things started to descend on them. Cursing herself, Kestrel held her breath and reached into the grabber’s mouth.
It was warm and wet and slimy. She felt around, feeling nauseous, but she couldn’t reach far enough down its throat. She found a big stick on the forest floor, used it to prop the grabber’s jaws open, then took a deep breath and stuck her head in its mouth.
She pushed her shoulders in and reached as deep down as she could. After a few nauseating moments of scrabbling, her fingers closed around the stone, and she nearly shouted with relief. She started to wriggle out of the grabber’s mouth, but then, just for a fraction of a second, she saw something move.
Kestrel froze, her eyes fixed on the bottom of its throat. There was something down there, something moving deep inside the grabber. For a horrified second she wondered if the woodchopper was somehow still in its stomach, trying to fight his way out.
She peered deep into the grabber’s innards.
Four yellow eyes flickered open and peered right back.
Kestrel screamed and tore herself away from the grabber’s mouth just as the stick snapped and its jaws slammed shut. She stared at its face, her stomach squirming horribly. The eyes hadn’t been human, but she’d never met an animal with those eyes before, either.
“Back?” Pippit said as Kestrel grabbed the ax.
“Definitely,” she said, casting one last look at the creature.
Maybe the grabber had some new, four-eyed monster living in its stomach. It wasn’t unheard of for them to have whole ecosystems in their compost-heap bodies. She didn’t really believe it herself, but she didn’t want to stick around and find out for sure.
Pippit was happily squirming on the ground, playing with the grabber’s dismembered finger. Without a second glance Kestrel scooped him up and ran toward the trail, the ax leaving a deep and terrible scar in the earth behind her.
5
THE YELLOW EYES
Night was already curling its cold fingers around the village as Kestrel dragged the woodchopper’s ax out of the forest. Pippit was wound around her neck, snoring. She staggered past the woodchopper’s house, then sat down with a relieved thump.
She landed in a puddle and sighed.
The contents of the woodchopper’s house had been piled back inside, and his hat had been nailed to a nearby tree stump. It looked weirdly jolly, as though he had gone on a break and was going to walk around the corner to retrieve it at any moment. It was one of the rituals the villagers did after a grabber attack. Sometimes, when she was half asleep, Kestrel glimpsed the nailed-up hats and thought there were disembodied heads everywhere.
The door to his house opened, and Kestrel ducked.
Hannah slowly came out and stood in the doorway, staring at the grabber’s trail, not seeing Kestrel in the gloom. Her face was white. Hannah looked around, her expression wobbling, then when she was sure she was alone she let out a choked sob.
It took Kestrel a moment to remember that the woodchopper was her father.
The thought of anything happening to her own dad made Kestrel squirm with horror. For a second, she considered running over and giving Hannah a hug. Her legs even twitched. Then she had a vision of Hannah snarling and throwing her back into the puddle, and changed her mind.
Kestrel wished she could crawl back into the forest as Hannah continued to cry. A patch of red, spongy bloodmoss on the ground in front of her started squirming. Kestrel leaned away from it, silently willing Hannah to leave before it reached her and started eating her boots. Finally, after two horrible minutes, Hannah went back inside and slammed the door.
Kestrel sprang up just as the bloodmoss reached her toes.She edged around it and, with a final burst of effort, carried the ax toward her mother’s house.
But all she could think about now was her own dad. He hadn’t been back in weeks, and each absence was bigger and more worrying than the one before. He tracked and trapped wolves with a stubbornness that scared even her, and she was certain that one day a wolf would take him down. He knew everything about them, and he’d taught Kestrel all of it, from interpreting their howls to following their tracks. But it didn’t make Kestrel feel like he was any safer. If anything, it made her shiver even harder when she heard the yowl that meant hunger.
Walt, the stoker who kept the wolf fire burning, saw Kestrel approach and froze with his great mustache bristling. His eyes traveled down the length of the ax Kestrel was carrying, to its bent and dinted blade.
“Fletcher!” he hollered. Then he started heaving logs onto the fire again, his job apparently done.
Ike Fletcher sprang from his house like an eager rabbit, crumbs falling from the front of his shirt, and pursed his horrible thin lips at Kestrel.
“Good,” he said, as though Kestrel had performed a clever trick. “We’re indebted to your mother.”
Kestrel wanted to shout What about me? She turned away and stomped toward the house. Within minutes, word of her return would travel around the village, and cakes and biscuits and bowls of soup would start piling up outside her mother’s door. They were scared that if they didn’t thank the old woman for sending Kestrel out, she would do something terrible.
She had all their teeth, after all.
Kestrel shivered and plucked Pippit from her neck.
“Come find me later,” she said. “I’m going in, okay?”
Pippit grumbled and slinked away. Kestrel raised her fist and knocked on the splintered door, which swung open under her touch.
The black dog appeared from nowhere and gripped the ax handle between its teeth. Kestrel dropped it obediently, the blood rushing back into her hands, and stepped inside. Her mother was waiting with open arms.
“I knew you’d do it, sweetie,” she said with a perfect impression of warmth. “Come closer and tell me all about it.”
Kestrel had to force her legs to move. She crawled through the tunnel in the weave and sat on the edge of her mother’s swept-out skirt, which was as far away as she could get without being disobedient. Her mother reached out and wrapped her fingers around Kestrel’s shoulders, pulling her into a bony embrace.
“It was a spider,” Kestrel said into her shoulder, trying not to breathe in the sweet, cloying smell of her mother’s breath. She remembered the four-eyed creature in the grabber’s stomach and wondered if she should ask about it, but something told her that it wasn’t a good idea. She didn’t want to be accused of not finishing the job. She suppressed a shudder. “It had lots of fingers,” she added lamely.