“Did Theo disappear like dust in the wind?” Augustus asked.
“Yes!” Elsa said, thankful she finally had someone on her side, who might know how to find Theo and bring him back to her. She knew there was something to her hunch that Theo had gone back to the Forbidden Forest, or that someone made him come back. “Listen, I'm so glad I came across you guys, I just—” Before she could finish her sentence, both men morphed into two silver-coated wolves with red eyes, their mouths salivating, angry and ready for battle. Humburt, with the same tousled fur on his wolf head as his human head, grabbed the leather on Elsa's shoe in his mouth and dragged her through the forest. The small pebbles on the ground, the pine cones, the thorny tree limbs, and the ice cold air rushed over Elsa's body, sending searing pain through her front.
“Please,” Elsa screamed, “Please let me go. It hurts so bad.” But the wolves kept on, running faster and faster, kicking up a tornado's worth of debris. Several minutes passed, until Elsa could not take the pain anymore, the air slicing across the bridge of her nose and forehead, so that it seemed like she was not traveling through space any longer, but instead through time. She knew the wounds were already bleeding but she could not fight against the wolf's strength. Every time she tried lifting up her head, a small tree branch would knock her in the forehead. Soon enough, various colors rushed through her vision—streaks of yellow and blue, bursts of blue and orange, against the background of black. Then she fainted.
CHAPTER 27
Elsa's head hung from her shoulders, as she slept, her neck having lost its strength. She could vaguely hear people talking as they man-handled her body with some material that felt like sandpaper against her skin. She eventually realized the mild burning sensation was a thick rope coiled around her body, starting at the base of her shoulders around her waist, across her shins and around her feet. The rope itself attached to a pike in the ground, and Elsa could smell a curious stench of charcoal. She mustered all her strength to open her eyes but they were swollen shut.
“I got her tied for you, Doc,” she heard Augustus say. “She's all ready for some cookin'.”
“Good,” another man said, with a boxy, deep voice, which made him sound like a man made from a mountain, so big did he sound. Elsa tried to scream but she could not muster the energy. She knew two of the voices at the very least were Augustus and Humburt. But aside from those two, and the monstrous voice, she could sense two other men beside that.
One was a squeaky voice that laughed out loud to himself, apparently watching Elsa being tied to a post. “Boy lemme tell ya Kirby, she's in for a lot of heat. We'll get her sizzlin' real fast for ya. Won't we, Doc?” Elsa began to panic and lifted up her head, using every last drop of strength she had left in her. All five men immediately noticed.
She could barely make out any shape, except a blurry blob with a shark-like grin.
“Niklas Levitt, you get away from that pretty little girl,” the mountain man's voice said. She could hear him walk over to her and squeeze her shoulder softly to make sure she felt comfortable. “You are mistreating our guest, and that's rude. We don't want to be rude.” This was Doctor Hammond Kirbleitz, the leader of the pack. “You know what, let's untie her for a second. I want to make sure we have the right girl, ok?”
She saw the squeaky-voiced guy, shorter and younger than the rest of the men by far, walk behind her and suddenly the ropes released her hands. She fell down from the wooden post onto the charcoal at her feet. The porous material scraped the skin on her knees naked.
“Darling, can't you get up?” Dr. Kirbleitz asked. Elsa could barely shake her head. “Aww, you poor thing. I am really am sorry about the rough ride over here. But I guess it's a good thing the trees knocked you unconscious, because we don't want anyone knowing our location, now do we? Deep in the heart of our safe forest.” He picked her up by with both hands by her armpits, as if she were a scarecrow stuffed with hay. Elsa moaned in pain. “Listen, we can't have you crying like that. I want my boys understanding just exactly why we're going to burn you at the stake.” He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Between you and me, I don't think the little one here understands. This here is Niklas Levitt.” Kirbleitz stopped. “Actually, you know what? I haven't introduced any of my boys yet. Let's start with me,” he said, as he touched the tip of his index finger to his chest. “My name is Doctor Kirbleitz. I'm a specially trained spiritual soothsayer for these guys. I saved them when they came into the forest. If I wasn't for me, they'd all be dead, or worse, found their way back out into the normal world where they came from.”
Then he pointed to the twins last, Augustus and Humburt. “Those guys, you have already met, obviously.” Elsa noticed Humburt would not look Elsa in the eye, so ashamed by the look on her face. Elsa had a bad feeling about the whole situation, but she didn't have the energy to do anything about it. She couldn't outrun werewolves, or physically protect herself by fighting. She had to think of something quick before she burned alive.
“Now let me tell you why we gotta light you up,” Kirbleitz continued. “You see, in case you haven't noticed, the Forest you're surrounded by contains evil creatures and spirits. The longer you stay here, the further you fall into evil and spiteful ways. If I had not found Niklas, Hammond, Augustus, and Humburt, the forest would have eaten them alive and made their spirits part of its vileness. I taught them from a young age to pay respects to the Daeva God, who lives at the center of all this. See, if we pay respect to her, she'll keep us from falling further into evil and wrongdoing and corruption. There's no way we'll ever be able to undo the damage the Forest has done to us, but we can delay it.”
“Why don't you just leave,” Elsa muttered under her breath.
“That's a mighty good question, sister.” Dr. Kirbleitz laughed, rubbing his long, graying beard with one hand. “The Forest is who we are now. We have no place out in the real world. How would you people treat us werewolves? They would fight us to the death, and we can't have that. So here we are, stuck. We can't go forward, and we can't go backward. We just have to sit here for the rest of our lives, which uh—” Dr. Kirbleitz stopped for a second. “Well, let's just say we've been here for a while,” he laughed nervously.
Niklas sauntered over. He had big blue eyes and was so young compared to the other men. He shook Elsa's hand. “Hi Miss. Yeah, we've been here for a while, some more than others. Like our captain Doc here, he's been here for well over several centuries. We have tried to leave before, but the evil surrounding won't let us. The closer we get to the edge of the forest, the more it pulls us back and the more dangerous we become. So we just decided to stay here, that way we don't make things worse. There was only one person older than Doc, who tried to leave, but he—”
“Don't give away too much information about our history, Nik,” the Doc said.
“Of course not, sir. I was just trying to explain to the lady here where we were coming from. We are not evil people. We just have to do what we can from letting the Forest overtake us. Isn't that what you told me when you first found me in the river?”
“I did. But I doubt this lady wants to hear about all that, does she? What was your name, by the way? I introduced everyone without taking the time to get your name. How rude of me,” the Doc said.
“A—Elsa.”
“Hi, Elsa. It's very nice to meet you,” he said, smiling. The Doc was fit like the others, but his age was around mid-50s, and his musculature was ever so slightly worn down. She could tell he had entered the Forbidden Forest later in life, for whatever reason. “Well anyway I guess it's best we got started. Nik tie her up again. Humburt go get us some lighter fluid and matches.”
“Wait,” Elsa said. “Where did Prince Theo go?”
Doctor Kirbleitz stopped. “Prince Theo left us for the world outside of the Forest. He betrayed who he was, shaming all of us. He wants to be anything other than a werewolf. He wanted to change his nature, Miss Elsa. And if there is one thing I have learned in all my time in the Forbidden Forest, it's that you can't change your nature. You are who you are. It's just better to accept things, or you make them worse. Once you come into the Forbidden Forest, you can never leave. It won't let you. The evil becomes a part of you. So if Prince Theo wants to leave and pretend he is someone else, one day he will come back here. We just hope the Daeven god will haunt him and not us.”
“Who is the Daeven God?”
Niklas squatted down next to her. Up close Elsa could see how pristine his skin was, as if the Forbidden Forest had frozen him in time the moment he stepped into its borders. His face was so small next to her. He was just a kid, Elsa thought. “Listen,” he told her. “The Daeven God is a powerful force for evil. She hungers for sacrifice, and we have kept her satisfied at least since I been here. As she long as we don't anger her, she won't make things worse than they already are.”
Doctor Kirbleitz stepped forward, pulling Niklas back behind him. “Which brings us to you, sister. You see there's a Prophecy which says an innocent lady will enter our woods. If we sacrifice you, the Daeven God will let us leave the forest and resume our lives.”
“I'm not your girl,” Elsa said.
“You must be,” Kirbleitz laughed. “Because not a single person, living or dead, has step foot into our borders since I have been here. And my dear, I have been here for a very long time.”
“I promise you, I am not the person for your prophecy. Please let me go.”
“I am sorry dear Elsa, but we cannot do that. This is our only chance to redeem ourselves from the past. You gotta burn. Niklas tie her up.” The tiny kid pulled her from behind, surprising Elsa how strong he was.
“You're hurting me, please stop.” Before she could say anything both the Humburt twins and Niklas had her tied to a stake again, and within seconds, she was pleading for her life again. The boys piled wood around her feet and doused the entire area with flammable liquid from tin cans. For the second time in her recent memory, Elsa was on the verge of being burned alive. Niklas struck a match against the tree and made his way in her direction.
“Please stop, Niklas. I never did anything to you,” Elsa screamed, tears streaming from her face.
“It ain't about revenge, ma'am. We gotta get out of this Forest. This is the only way.” He placed the match on the wood, and Elsa looked around her at the men, who stood watching. The twins observed her with similar expressions, Humburt a little concerned about having to watch a woman burn alive, Augustus curious about the whole procedure, skepticism written on his face. Niklas tried to turn away as the fire slithered over the surface of the wood at Elsa's feet. She felt the heat almost immediately on the tips of her toes.
“Oh God, no!” Elsa screamed, realizing this was the moment she would die.
“Shhh, sister,” Doctor Kirbleitz said, attempting to comfort her with his smooth preacher's voice. “It'll all be over in a second.”
CHAPTER 28
She prayed to herself that the smoke would suffocate her first, fill her lungs like impatient air in a balloon, quickly enough to smother her insides before the heat got to her. She didn't want to go out like this, but she was too weak, too tired, too confused to survive, and the werewolves standing around her were too strong to resist.
“Just you hang on dear. You're gonna be fine. Breathe that smoke in,” Kirbleitz said. The flames licked at her ankles, already singing her socks. The smoke lingered around her eyes, sinister and curious about Elsa, its new meal. And the heat grew from the bottom of the soles of her feet, slowly and more intensely up her body.
“My goodness, sister. There's no need to scream like that. Where are your manners?” Kirbleitz said.
Everything she knew about herself—her strengths, talents, and curiosities—pointed to a near-certain doom at the stake in this moment. But climbing heroically from the depths of her nature came something foreign and unfamiliar to Elsa, some part of herself that would fight harder and longer to survive than she ever could. She closed her eyes before this new facet of her personality came bursting forth.
“Wait!” she said. “I know where Prince Theo is! He sent me to show all of you the way out of this mess!” Through the smoky haze she could hear commotion among the men, but she could only actually see the face of Augustus, that same skeptical expression which anticipated this turn of events.
“Quick,” Augustus said. “Get the water from the creek. I knew this prophecy was bullshit.” The other men didn't resist him, for various reasons, but mostly they did not wish to witness such a lovely girl burn to death, even if it did mean they would finally escape the living hell that was life in the Forbidden Forest.
The heat continued its progression up Elsa's waist, and she screamed in writhing horror at the pain. She could sense from the area around the smoke that the Jordan twins were throwing pails of water from the creek on the fire, in attempts to extinguish the heat, but the fire just continued to grow. Elsa looked up to the heavens, which was blocked by the vast canopy of the forest. She could faintly see the glimmer of stars between the light through the tree limbs. At this point the pain from the fire no longer registered on Elsa, because her entire body had gone numb from the shock and trauma. She could feel a single drop of rain suddenly splash on her forehead, then one into the corner of her eyes, and another on her cheek. Her heart jumped with the possibility of relief, and then in no time at all, whole sheets of rain covered the dirty bed of the forest.