Note to self: manually replace ...s with ….s and also, like, make it all better somehow. And go to sleep.
The next morning was overcast, and there was a surprising chill in the air. Waverly had half-expected to see frost on the grass, despite the summertime temperature she had experienced thus far. Why, even the chestnut trees looked tinged with autumn now, as if there colors had changed overnight. But surely that wasn't so; she must have been more tired yesterday than she'd realized, to not have noticed such a thing before. She was still quite fatigued this morning, honestly.
Despite the cold air and brisk wind, it was warm by the fire, warm enough to have Waverly nodding off in the middle of sharpening a spear. She was very fortunate to have found such a straight and sturdy branch growing within her reach. There was little use for the sharpened stick at the moment, but... Well, she had scarcely expected to feel so exposed in such a sweet and sheltered little grove, but last night she had awoken from a terrible dream, and any sort of weapon would have been quite a comfort.
All she had been able to do was to build her fire as high as she could in hopes of it frightening away the idea of shadowy creatures, lurking just beyond its light.
Between her fear of the fire going out and the lingering presence of the nightmare in her mind, Waverly's sleep had been scarcely worth mentioning after that. Her slumber was restless and broken by another, even worse nightmare. She had dreamt about a ghostly creature with empty black eyes staring at her from the end of a long corridor. When she ran and locked herself in her room, it slid underneath the door. She jumped in bed and pulled the blankets over her face to hide, but she was so cold, and she knew it meant that the creature was sliding up the covers...
She awoke with the echo of music in her ears. It didn't take her by surprise. Sometimes she would dream of her mother singing to her, and she would wake up half-expecting her to be there. What did surprise her, however, was that she could still hear the music after she sat up, stretched, and looked around. ...Humming? The sound was so faint, it almost wasn't there at all. Waverly shook her head, but it didn't go away. She rubbed her eyes—she must have still been half-asleep—but the noise continued even so. The shadow, too, did not disappear.
At the far side of the circle of light was a jagged black shape on the ground, dark and wrong like a cockroach crawling on a wall. She had only been imagining it, surely, but when she rubbed her eyes a second time, it still remained. It looked like a hand. A hand that was creeping closer and closer with every bounce of the fire's irregular light. She stared at the shape, not quite believing this wasn't a dream. But the humming grew more discernable and insistent, and the hand drew closer and closer until Waverly was absolutely stiff with fright. The fire suddenly gave very little warmth at all, whether from its dwindled state or the icy terror coursing through her body.
The hand slid right up to the base of her fire, and then, to her surprise, it began to ring the life out of it. Gray smoke billowed up and the flames waivered dangerously as the shadow hand actually strangled her fire. Equally surprising was the rage which welled up inside her, coal-hot against the fierce chill of fear. With a shout, she leapt around the fire and did the only thing she could do: Waverly stomped on the inky black hand as hard as she could, and—surprise again—the thing retreated. Like a dog with its tail down, it squirmed back to the wall of shadows, which was a great deal nearer to her now. If Waverly hadn't still been so angry, she might have lacked the courage to step beyond the ring of light and gather more kindling, or she would have dropped it with a scream when, as she stepped boldly out into the darkness, she felt a slithering sort of cold cover her entire body while images of black hands filled her mind.
In spite of all that, she merely snorted with rage and blindly grabbed for an armful of branches, not caring how they jabbed at her chest and hands. The cold was like an invisible bed sheet draped over her body, making it horribly difficult to move her legs and step back into the warm circle of light; and when she did, she was certain that she saw dim shadows on the ground—the shapes of hands clutching at her heels.
By that time, the cloudy sky was turning gray at one edge. She didn't sleep again, but she didn't hear the odd humming or see the frightening hand shadows again, either.
Now, in the full light of day and with a larger fire and a spear in her hands, Waverly wondered if it had not all been a dream after all. Whether it was only a nightmare or else...something worse...the recollection at least put an end to her half-hearted dozing. She sharpened her spear in earnest now. It distracted her from her rumbling stomach.
Birds sang, but not the insects. Squirrels played in the gold and russet boughs of the trees—she would have sworn that they were wholly green yesterday. Perhaps her memory was suffering from her night's ill rest.
She could remember other things, though. Things which she had been unable to fully remember before. A man's night-dark voice, and a pair of equally dark hands rising out of the ground and clutching her in their enormous, wicked fingers...and she remembered feeling an oddly tactile sense of cold then, too, like the very darkness itself was squeezing her soul... She shuddered. She wouldn't step out into the nighttime shadows again, if she could help it.
After finishing her spear, she spent the first part of the morning gathering more dead branches and tinder, and after she had built the fire up as high as she could once again, she set off with her spear in hand. The sharp rock she left behind by the fire, for fear of losing it. And anyway, she would bring any fish she caught back to camp and at least have the comfort of a good blaze while she disemboweled her dinner. If only she didn't have to kill them first; Bradford had always done that part himself, else Waverly should have simply trekked back to the house for food.
For perhaps half an hour, she followed the little brook through the trees. The forest grew thicker and darker not far from her little camp, but soon enough the trees thinned up again, something for which she was exceedingly grateful. She would not have liked to go back into the deep dark woods on an already dim day like this. Waverly soon saw—and heard, before that—why the trees were thinning out, however, and it made her a great deal less grateful.
The brook ended in a series of rocky steps and a waterfall right into the roaring ocean. She had never seen a seaside waterfall, but its beauty was greatly lessened by the impossibility of scaling such a drastic, rocky shoreline. Even if she could scale her way down to the water's edge, there was no guarantee of a way to climb up again. It was all much too steep. Off to her right were places where the land broke off sharply, and enormous tree roots dangled over a thin line of rocky sand, but, once again, she couldn't see herself managing to scramble back up the roots like a rope climber. It didn't seem worth the risk, even if there were fish in abundance.
With a sigh, Waverly turned back and began retracing her steps. The sound of the waves and the babbling brook were beautiful, but she couldn't enjoy them. There was a deep pit in her stomach, a combination of hunger and unhappiness, and it only grew deeper with this—yet another view of a shoreless and shipless ocean.
She had never felt so alone in all her life, even after Mother died.
Her walk went a great deal more uphill this time, and though she was grateful for the absence of thick forest, she found herself growing quite winded from such a steep trek. In spite of the chilly day, Waverly was hotter and wearier than ever by the time her brook began to widen. The bed—good Lord, what she wouldn't have given for a bed herself—deepened as well, so that the brook was sunken into the ground like a dirt path cut out by years and years of foot traffic. The banks were a little steeper here, and there was a margin of sand between the walls of dirt and the edge of the water. It was in one of these low places that she saw a bird.
It was brown with a white belly, and quite plump. When Waverly noticed it, her first thought was a stab of pain for the poor creature, one wing dragging in the soft wet sand as it fluttered helplessly. She thought too about catching it and letting it go—it was trapped down there, unable to fly back out with its broken wing. But what would it do, once she freed it? The poor thing was doomed. And that was what led to her second thought: food.
Waverly cringed. No, she would never do anything as barbaric as murdering a little wounded bird. ...But wouldn't it be more humane? A swift and merciful end at her hands, as opposed to some wild animal which would catch it and toy with it? ...No, no, no. She could never bring herself to do that. She shook her head, spared one more sad look at the pitiful bird as it vainly struggled to escape its sandy prison, and walked on.
The aching feeling remained, though, like a piece of ice lodged deep in her chest. She adored animals, and being unable to help a creature in distress was terrible. But it was more than having to leave the bird to its death, although that was bad enough. Along with the ache came a strange sense of panic which clung to her every breath. When Waverly stopped a moment to consider it, the root of that aching anxiety became clear: she and the bird were almost exactly alike in the futility of their situations. Undeniably trapped but unable to give up the endeavor to escape; doomed, in all probability, to a horrific death—either mauled by some predator, or a slow but steady starvation; and utterly, pitifully alone.
It brought her to a halt. Gloom settled on her with new understanding. What was the purpose in finding fish to eat? What was the reason for making a fire or a spear or anything? There were neither ships nor distant islands on which to pin her hopes of civilization. There were only monstrous hands in the night, monstrous pigs and monstrous spiders, and, somewhere, a man with an axe who would probably kill her and eat her up if he could. There seemed to be no-one else out here under the strange, oversized moon. She was all alone and starving, and, in all likelihood, completely devoid of any way to return home under her own power. She had no map, no means of transportation, no-one to help her….
She would never see Bradford or her father again.
Waverly sat down on the bank, shoes dangling in the muddy sand below. She was too far past hopeless to even cry. She sat and stared at her spear, listening to the faint scuffling sounds from the wounded bird.
At some point, her stomach growled fiercely. Apparently it, unlike its owner, had not given up the fight. She felt herself stand up, as if her belly had a connection to her feet which bypassed her head altogether. She plodded alongside the widening brook, away from the bird and its useless efforts.
Some time later, the brook widened into something like a river, as broad as a street but still rather shallow. It ran over dull colored stones, and she could see fish with similar coloring floating over them. Once again, as if compelled by a will that wasn't her own, she slipped off her shoes and walked forward—out into the middle of the water. The clouds had apparently retreated for the time being. It left the sun hot on her back, but the water was very cold, and the air chilled her legs where her damp dress clung. Birds sang in the branches that reached over the edges of the water; she stared at the reflections, an abstract painting of greens and blues. She stood and watched without a thought for what felt like a long, long time...and then there was a brush of something against her left ankle. A fish, and then another in front of her feet, and more off to her right. Slim, scaly harbingers of hope.
Waverly gripped her spear and decided to not give up for just a little longer.
Unfortunately, having the determination to persevere did not transform her into a master fisherman. No matter how quickly she stabbed at the shapes in the water, and no matter how many different ways she went at it, her spear never hit anything but rocks. She tried and tried and didn't improve, even after what had to be hours.
A turtle swam near. She stared down at it glumly as it passed within striking distance. Bradford had made turtle soup and roasted the legs on a spit once, and it had been only once—the experience was too traumatic for his younger sister, and, after that, they had eaten nothing but fish and plants for the rest of their summer excursions. So she watched the turtle swim away and wished that she could do the same. Perhaps she could swim across the ocean. Perhaps there was an island somewhere with a kindly old wizard, just as she had read in a storybook once, and he would give her food and tell her how she could return home...
Waverly jumped. Her head had nearly nodded off her neck. She was so tired, so hungry...and so unpleasantly cold, now that the sun was hidden behind the clouds once again. A chill wind blew and made her shiver. She looked around at the fish, which were becoming difficult to see in the gloomy afternoon light. With a weary sigh, she crooked her back this way and that, rubbed her goosepimply arms and her empty stomach, and splashed out of the river. A fat lot of good this had done her.
She passed the place where the bird had been. It was gone now, probably escaped or drowned, poor thing. Or at least she thought so...until she had walked a ways further and saw it. The pitiful creature sat motionless and damp on the sand, still staring up at the bank that might as well have been a ten foot wall. It didn't even run off when she came close to it, didn't even move. It just stared at the bank, still and soaked and sad.
Waverly's stomach groaned.
She stared at the bird for a long, long minute. She took a step down onto the river bed, and it didn't react. She stood over it. The bird didn't so much as glance at her.
Tears filled Waverly's eyes as she took her spear in both hands, and horror filled her belly. The clash of sickness and hunger made her insides churn. She gripped the spear tight enough to make her fingers hurt. She waited, hoping a burst of courage or cold-hearted resolve would come, but all she felt was piercing hunger and fear. After another long minute, that was all she needed.
It wasn't as messy as the turtle had been, but it was ten times as bad. At least Bradford had known what he was doing. At least he'd had a sharp knife. Waverly stabbed the bird, aiming for its head, and she missed. But she didn't miss the bird. Her hopes of giving it a quick and merciful death disappeared with the animal's agonized shrieking. She shrieked a little herself and couldn't help staggering back a step.
The biggest rock she could find scarcely weighed a pound and was difficult to hold with both hands, it was just that small. Waverly was still screaming as she took it over to the bleeding, screeching bird, and knelt in the sand.
Her stick had gone through its shoulder and pinned it to the ground; the stick wobbled as the bird flapped and convulsed. She didn't dare remove it for fear of having to chase the dying creature or having the water sweep it away. Her screams became sobs as she pounded the rock down over and over again, over and over and over. Much longer than she would have thought she'd have to, but she couldn't stop until a minute or more after the bird had stopped moving, for fear that it was still in pain. Then she went down on her hands and knees into the brook to let the water carry away the blood. Blood never made her sick, but she vomited from the sheer horror of the situation. She cried and shook and washed her face and screamed a little more. She felt cold inside and out when she was done.
At least she didn't feel hungry anymore. Surely no appetite on earth could withstand such a sickening experience, no matter how close at hand starvation was. Even so, Waverly was unwilling to abandon her hard-won, albeit gruesome morsel. Tonight, she would eat, even if she had to force it down her own throat.
She carried the bird back on the end of her stick. It was horrifying just to look at it, but she soldiered on, trying her best to envision the strength and dignity of the Lambs extending to a situation such as this. Thank God Bradford hadn't fought in the war, but she was certain he would have born the enemy's destruction with far greater aplomb than she was showing with one little bird. When she finally made it back to her fire, she took up the sharp rock in order to begin cleaning the carcass. After realizing that she could have given the bird an infinitely more humane death had she only brought the stone along with her, Waverly began to cry again. She cried harder still when it occurred to her that she didn't know how to clean and prepare a bird for eating.
Still crying, she sawed off the grisly remains of its head. She had just begun to pull the feathers out—she had never eaten a bird with feathers still on it, so that seemed like the next right step—when the rain came.
"No," Waverly whispered. Thunder answered her, and she answered it in turn with a frantic litany of, "No, no, no." She dropped the carcass and hurried to her pile of kindling. Perhaps building the fire high again would save it. A strong, cold wind whipped the flames ominously as she began to feed the blaze. Smoke stung her eyes and made her cough, but she didn't dare stop.
She could only recall once or twice when it had rained on her brother's fire, and in both instances, he'd had a large piece of bark to prop over the flames and plenty of dry kindling at hand. He had fanned the fire with something—another piece of bark? But she had no time to find any such thing, and she couldn't go search for dry kindling, either. All she had was the pile of sticks and branches and needles and small pieces of bark, so she shoved as much as she could on the smoking, shrinking flames...
Within minutes, the fire was out. She wasn't certain whether the rain had done it, or if she had accidentally smothered it herself, but it was gone now, a pile of sodden wood for its grave.
The rain fell on Waverly like hammers and tongs. She sat in front of the smoldering remains of her fire and beside the bloody remains of her supper, and then, at some point, she found herself squatting against the trunk of a nearby tree. The rain continued to pound around her in a dull, irregular monotone. She clutched her knees and shivered, soaked from head to toe. It seemed impossible with the weather and the chill in her bones, but she actually nodded off at some point. Or perhaps she was simply so numb, it seemed like nodding off. Torpor, wasn't that the word? An unmarked passage of time without true rest.
The agonized complaint of her stomach was the thing to rouse her. She hadn't known it was possible to be this hungry. She looked and saw that the downpour had stopped for the moment. The wind blew above the trees and shook fat, icy drops of water down on her shoulders and head. A thin mist rose up from the ground. There wasn't much light left, and, although she couldn't know how long she'd been dozing, Waverly supposed that evening must be coming on. Darkness and mist and a dreary wind high above her head—it should have made for quite the eerie setting, but she noted it without anything other than a dull ache of nothingness...until the moaning began.
A shock of genuine cold shot through her then, beginning in her stomach and shuddering all the way up to her hair, which truly seemed to stand on end. Suddenly she too was standing. She wasn't aware of taking up spear, but found it in her hands all the same. More moaning—low and guttural like the grind of machinery, and frighteningly close at hand.
Perhaps it was some ferocious creature which had smelled the blood from her abandoned supper; it would find her and gobble her up as well. Or perhaps, horror of all horrors, it was a ghost….
The rumbling, sole-of-her-feet deep moan came again, more insistent now.
Waverly left behind her paltry campsite and ran. She didn't even think to take that sharp, life-saving piece of stone. Nothing her spear went with her as she fled. The breath left her lips in white puffs of air as her throat began to catch fire. It felt as though her tongue had swollen to twice its size, but she didn't dare slow down. To her surprise, the widening brook gleamed alongside her. She had possessed the foresight to follow it, or perhaps that was simply good luck.
If she hadn't been running for her life, she might have enjoyed the ragged, moonlit clouds which raced above her head, or the silvery water racing beside her feet. She was grateful for the pale illumination, especially as the forest grew thicker and darker than ever, and strange sounds echoed over the sound of her own retreat. None of them sounded like moaning, at least.
She couldn't have said how long she ran—Lord, she would have legs like Athena after all this, if she survived. In spite of the hunger gnawing at her insides and the fatigue weighing on her head, Waverly felt she could have run even further, if it meant safety from ghostly things. Her legs were willing to cover the miles, even if her chest was near bursting when she finally stopped for a moment.
She stared at the shining river, wide as a proper street again, and then her heart almost stopped altogether. One of the noises she had heard became clear now: not wind, not echoes... Growling. And it came from a pitch-black beast standing directly across the river. It was a good thing Waverly hadn't eaten, or she might have been sick then and there. The creature was in the shape of a wolf, but only somewhat—it was much larger and taller and almost reminded her of a bull with its bulk. She didn't pause for a more thorough comparison. The minute her eyes locked with its luminous pair and took in the faint but visibly bared white teeth, she was off again, perpendicular to the river this time and unspeakably thankful for its width.
The feeling didn't last.
The forest thickened. The shadows deepened. The high-pitched noise of nightlife grew louder and, coupled with her heavy panting and the effort it took just to press forward, made it extremely difficult to hear anything clearly apart from her own breathing, the rustle of bushes, and the incredibly loud keening of insects above it all. It also guaranteed that she stood out like a sore thumb to anything on the hunt. She shoved her way through underbrush, compelled by the imagined vision of that odd-looking canine crossing the river and following after her; she hoped the water was deep, and she hoped that the dog was alone—just a random, terrifying stray.
It wasn't until she tripped over a spiny vine and landed on her face that she heard them. The pain and shock of her forehead colliding with the ground froze the air in her lungs for a moment, and within that short silence, she caught the echoes of a sound which turned her blood to ice. All the other nighttime sounds seemed to have ceased. In their place was a sort of...yammering. A scraping, bellowing, gut-wrenching clamor. She had heard something similar once, when her father and brother went on a foxhunt in Virginia. Waverly and her mother had waited with the ladies in a gazebo full of more civilized delights such as food and music, but over the sound of the phonograph, she had still heard the voice of the hounds.
This sound was definitely not hounds.
And so it had to be wolves—or something like wolves—although the cries sounded much deeper and stranger than the soprano wailing she had once heard in a zoo. They were cries which matched the terrifying, night-black form she had seen. Not quite a dog, but not quite a wolf. Not quite howling, but not quite barking. The sound was undeniably predatory, either way.
Waverly liked dogs. She had spent her last two birthdays begging her father for one to no avail. However, as she lay there on the ground, frozen in fright at the hellish baying, she would happily have gone the rest of her life without another happy, four-legged friend if it meant that she didn't have to meet the animals responsible for that sound.
She didn't know how many there were or how likely she was to outrun them, but she didn't care. She scrambled to her feet and began desperately clambering through the bushes. They pushed back at her and tore her clothes and her skin. They tripped her and made her lose her shoes. She scraped her chin on the ground after tripping again, but she didn't feel the pain this time. The wolves were getting closer.
The moon was her only ally. It broke through clouds and trees to show her paths where she didn't have to beat the brambles apart with her spear, which she quickly lost hold of anyway. Far ahead of her, she could see a great deal of light, like a pale, ghostly mist. She had the notion that if she could only leave the woods behind, she would be safe from the wolves. It was a foolish thought, of course, but when the others were pictures of a creature tearing her to pieces, it was the best thought she had.
There was a bear-ish roar somewhere behind her; she thought it held a note of triumph. Then the barking began in earnest, and although she could hear only one voice this time, rather than an entire chorus, it was much worse than the strangled yowling from before. It was an insistent and merciless noise, reminiscent of the shotguns her father and his friends used to hunt birds in the autumn. Waverly would have given anything for a gun at that moment.
The barking was louder than her heartbeat and gasping breaths and the crash of shrubbery beneath her urgent arms and legs—she was practically swimming through it now, but the mist of moonbeams was so near. So was the wolf, however. She scrambled faster. It snarled closer, and she expected to feel its teeth in her neck yanking her backwards each and every second.
When she fell into the moonlight, she could scarcely believe that she had made it there. It was equally difficult to believe that she had emerged in the exact same spot as the berries she had found days before, yet here she was. The moon painted the plains silver, and the bushes hedging the woods cast deep black shadows on the ground. A rather dislocated part of her brain thought it was very pretty and wondered whether there were any berries left to eat.
The wolf hadn't stopped barking.
Waverly's heart was making efforts to abandon her chest altogether, and her lungs felt as though they were blistering in some summer heat, but when she realized that the wolf was close at hand, she could have run a mile. But where to? The expanse of grassy ground before her that hadn't an inch of cover? The forest again in the hopes that she wouldn't be caught before finding a tree she could climb? The canine bawling and the sound of something heavy thrashing in the shrubs just behind her settled matters. There, not so far away, was a third option: the finger of forest jutting out into the plains where she had seen her gruesome woodsman. In less than a heartbeat, she decided that getting chopped into bits and cooked in a pot would be preferable to being torn limb from limb; at least the former might be a quick death, if the Axe Man was very hungry.
She ran parallel to the line of berry bushes, towards the finger of woods from which she had fled so urgently mere days ago. There was no guarantee, of course, that the Axe Man would even be there. It could be that he was busy stewing other unfortunate girls for his supper, or his home might be somewhere else entirely. Or, if it was nearby, he might hear the wolves and simply stay inside the house. Why, he might even come to the window to watch them tear her apart just for amusement. Perhaps she would reach the tree line, find herself utterly alone, and die within sight of a fir which could have been climbed, had she only been quicker.
Or perhaps she would be dead before she ever got there.
To her right, past the short line of scrubby berry bushes, just within the dark wall of the forest, there was a pattering of feet heavy enough to be heard over the cacophony she was making as she ran. Waverly shouldn't have looked—she knew it even before she did so. What she saw was an undeniably four-legged shape racing alongside her in the shadows, and then, just behind it, she saw another shape spring out of the forest, lithe and dark and dreadful. If she had hoped it was a trick of her mind and not a second wolf, that hope was killed by the howl which pierced the air directly behind her.
A wolf on her right, and another at her heels. They were ensuring she didn't escape back into the woods. Again, she felt the almost painful anticipation of frothing jaws closing over the nape of her neck. Waverly was running as fast as she possibly could—faster than she would have ever thought she could, in truth—but surely it was no match for those terrible creatures. Was it better or worse, then, when her hindmost pursuer, instead of leaping upon her as it so easily could have done, drew up directly beside her on the left? The wolves were indeed as fast as her, and it seemed they took pleasure in pinning her in. Toying with her. She was now running between her two pursuers, and if her pace slackened even an inch, she felt certain the left-hand wolf would cut in front and stop her, or the right-hand one would close in and spring upon her.
That certainty made it all the more hopeless and terrifying when she felt her unexpected reserve of energy rapidly coming to an end. Her feet beat the ground faster than ever, and her arms pumped hard as pistons, and she dragged the air into her chest like a bellows in a machine...but it was nothing more than one last hurrah. A dying burst of speed and endurance—her body's swan song, as it were. Soon she would fall flat on her face.
Another minute passed, or half a minute, or perhaps an hour. She would at least die inside the shadows of the trees, if the wolves would allow that much. They were so close now, both the wolves and the trees. The monster on her right was keeping pace, and the one on her left seemed to be pulling ahead; she had a very clear sight of one shining black eye, rolling wildly in its socket before locking dead with hers. Its red tongue lolled over teeth which were white as the moon and far sharper than a normal wolf's. Dragon's teeth, thick and long and dagger-like. They gleamed in anticipation of her blood.
Another hundred feet, perhaps a dozen yards or more, and she would die. She could feel it in her heart. Waverly considered her poor father, the way her death would devastate him—a final blow, no doubt. Her poor brother, how bereaved he would be without any family left to love. It was dreadful of her to leave them this way, but at least she would see her mother again.
Fifty feet—amazing how precise the mind became when at death's door. Waverly could feel her legs shaking now each time her bare feet struck the ground. She could taste blood on her tongue. She would soon taste more, if the wolf went for her neck first. But perhaps death would be easy, and having her throat torn out would immediately end her suffering. Or perhaps she would find a tree to climb at the last miraculous minute, although that didn't seem likely with the way her muscles were spasming; she could feel them about to give out beneath her. Or perhaps the Axe Man would emerge just in time to take her head off with one swing.
To her surprise, it was this third and most unlikely scenario which seemed to take the day, although it could merely have been Waverly hallucinating in her final moments. She thought a human shape ran forward out of the shadows, and she thought there was moonlight gleaming dully on a blade. But she couldn't be certain when her vision was failing. And anyway, what sane person would run towards the wolves instead of away?
Oh, but the Axe Man wouldn't be sane at all, of course. Perhaps he really was there, then, and she would be saved a painful death by having her head chopped off. It would be better than what the poor bird received.
That was the last thought Waverly had before darkness took away the world.