104 | NIGHT-BLOOMING WILDRUSH

Mist swirled around my ankles. My brain felt heavy and slow as I looked down, tracing the way it coiled, snake-like, up my legs. There was something ominous about it. Something I didn’t like.

I tried to kick it away. It didn’t move; it just kept coiling, around and around, up and up, until it reached my thighs.

Huffing out a sigh, I pushed myself onwards. Forcing my legs to march, darting through the undergrowth in the dense patch of woodland we’d set up camp in – if it weren’t too rudimentary to be called a camp, with nothing more than a couple of cloaks scattered across the ground to keep the damp and the frosty winter’s chill from settling into our bones – I curved away from the tree line and the clearing, where I’d be too exposed, and ducked under strands of ivy as I began my hunt.

Dawn light painted the horizon in sweeping brush strokes. I squinted at it through the thick foliage; it took on an unreal quality the longer I tried to watch the colours shift with the sunrise. Shaking