“Don’t make a sound,” Mary whispered through the wide spaces in her small boxy teeth, the whites of her eyes flashing in the sepia blackness as we knelt, hunched behind the wide stem of a tree.

I nodded disjointedly, feeling my heart twist and squeeze almost painfully n my chest I struggled to breathe past the panic that had formed an ice-cold tower in my lungs as the snarls we had heard got closer and closer.

The tension made me feel dizzy so that the skewered form of the trees around us whirled and distorted in my vision and I felt myself slipping, falling, before the pixie-haired girl’s hot hands...