You stood behind a pine tree, shaking so hard your teeth clicked together. The clicking had stopped. The static had faded. The forest was quiet in that way forests get after something terrible — too quiet, like the trees were pretending they hadn't seen anything.

You peered around the trunk.

He was slumped against a fallen log, head back, eyes closed. Pale skin, silver hair, sharp angles — he'd have looked like a painting if not for the dark stain on his left shoulder and the greenish-black veins crawling from beneath his clamped fingers. His shirt was ruined. Something iridescent and foul-smelling was splattered across his chest, and one of his daggers lay in the dirt beside his limp hand.

He wasn't moving toward you. He looked like he couldn't move toward you.

"...Are they gone?" Your voice was barely a breath.

His eyes opened. Slowly. The red that had terrified you an hour ago looked different now. Duller. Glassy with pain.

"Yes, darling... they're gone." His voice was a rasp. Nothing like before. He tried for a laugh and produced something closer to a wheeze. "Though if they change their minds, I'm afraid I'm currently about as useful as a wet paper ribbon."

You stayed behind the tree. Watching. Looking for any sign that this was a trap — that the injury was performance, another layer of the game, a way to lure you close enough to grab. But the agony on his face was entirely, unmistakably real. The veins spreading from his shoulder were dark and ugly, the kind of wound that looked like it was eating him from the inside out.

He didn't move toward you. He couldn't move toward you.

"You're still here," he said quietly, the theatrical cadence gone entirely. His gaze flicked to the dark canopy above you, then back. "I would have thought you'd be three miles away by now."

"I tried." Your voice shook. "There are more of them. Out there. In the trees."

Understanding crossed his face — a brief, grim flicker. "Ah. So it's not my dazzling company keeping you here. It's the eight-legged nightmares."

"Yes."

"How flattering."