The Darkling Tide Read Online Free Page A

troubled.
    Abagail was taken aback. She wanted to say something snide to her sister, she wanted to rebuke the fear and the accusation she saw in her eyes, but Leona was right. It seemed Abagail was just as much a threat to them as the darklings just off the trail. Furthermore, she couldn’t control the darkling wyrd within her when it really wanted to come out.
    She looked to Rorick and the hammer that hung at his side. She remembered the pact they made. If the shadow plague took her over, Rorick had agreed to be the one to kill her, to be the one who ended her life so that her father or her sister didn’t have to. He had almost done that already, and she knew he was good for his word.
    Darklings killed his family, she thought. He refuses to let darklings destroy mine.
    “I don’t know,” Abagail answered truthfully. “There may come a time when you have to tie me up, or something. I really can’t tell. The most important thing is that we reach this school or whatever of harbingers. They will know what to do. If you have to knock me out and drag me there, then that’s what we will have to do.”
    Leona smiled at that, and Abagail laughed at the image of them hauling her body through the forest. She was simply too well muscled to make that an easy task.
    “I’ve already got the burden of the wood,” Rorick said. “Tugging her along is all your department, Leo.”
    “No sweat, I need to build some muscle anyway.”
    The wolves howled menacingly. Leona’s smile faded, her face turning pale. She took a step closer to Abagail and glanced behind her at the warding of the trail.
    Abagail hoped she was wrong that there really wasn’t a rift in the warding along the trail, but that was the only thing that could explain the darkling they’d fought the night before.
    All Father, keep us safe, Abagail said, casting her eyes up to the heavens. The fog was too thick for her to even see much of the scarlet canopy above them.
    Rorick shouldered the pack of wood and Abagail gave one more tug on her work glove before they fell into line behind Daphne.
    A few times the pixie would fly too far ahead and get lost in the fog. The trees around them changed from the scarlet grove they had been walking through, back to the normal green needles and barren branches covered in snow of the Fey Forest they’d entered. The road was carpeted with orange and brown leaves once more, but the going was rougher now. They were going up a hill dotted with stones and boulders. At times the ground was so uneven that they had to use hands and knees to climb.
    Rorick was having a hard time of it, the pack of wood slumping forward at the most inopportune times, creating havoc for his climbing. When they reached the top of the hill the fog had thinned considerably, and they were able to glimpse a cold blue sky above them. Sun dazzled over the tops of snow covered trees some ways in the distance, a vantage point they could see from the top of the hill.
    The wolves, noticing they were not going to startle the humans, had quieted down.
    “I hope we don’t have to go all that way,” Rorick said, panting. He bent at the waist, placing his hands on his knees and gave in to the respite.
    “The forest seems to go on for miles,” Abagail agreed. “I’m sure the trail doesn’t extend all the way in that direction. It must veer off. There’s no way we would make it all the way through that in two days.”
    “Unless we had some kind of elf wyrd,” Leona commented.
    It reminded Abagail of how Celeste had vanished so suddenly. What if what the elf had meant was that they would get there in two days with the way elves travel, not with the way humans did? That was absurd.
    “Wait, do you hear that?” Leona asked.
    Rorick started shaking his head before he’d even listened, but then he stopped. His eyebrows furrowed together, and a look of concentration fell over his face.
    Abagail turned her head to hear better. The fog was still thick enough to muffle