All that came later, when her father’s screams rang nightly in her ears and her own wounds itched fiercely enough to make sleep a fantasy. At the time, she’d merely played the beam of her flashlight over the marks on the bank, cutting one small line of light through the darkness, and looked to him for suggestions.

  “Check the trees,” he said, voice pitched barely above a whisper. “Melnorn nests are papery and look a lot like paper wasps. I’ve never seen a Laicaln hive, but they supposedly stick to hollow trees, and they block the entrances with wax.” Alice nodded once, and they separated, moving in opposite directions around the edges of the pond.

  There were no visible nests in the branches surrounding Miller’s Pond. All the trees appeared to be healthy, with no obvious signs of decay and no traces of beeswax. Alice approached a tall oak and tilted her flashlight up toward the branches, looking for shapes that didn’t belong there. The light shone greenly through the leaves, illuminating nothing.

  Shaking her head, she lowered her eyes and prepared to move on. Then she froze, the hairs on the back of her neck rising as she realized something was wrong. The woods were silent. The woods were never silent—not unless something was getting ready to attack. She straightened slowly, suddenly tense, and turned in a slow circle, casting the beam of her flashlight around her in a steady arc.

  Two-thirds of the way around the circle, the beam hit something that threw back the light like a cut jewel. All she could think in that moment was that insects had multi-faceted eyes. Careful not to drop the flashlight, Alice drew one of her mother’s revolvers with her free hand, beginning to back away as she aimed one-handed toward the glitter in the distance. It wasn’t moving. She took that as a good sign; she was too large for a Melnorn to view as prey if she wasn’t actively threatening the nest, and Laicaln bees were slow-moving at night. She’d be fine if she kept quiet.

  The buzzing started less than half a second before something that felt like an enormous super-heated needle slammed into the back of her left arm, embedding itself all the way down against the bone. Too surprised to think, she shrieked, dropping the revolver as she reached to grope at the source of the pain. The rifle she had slung over her shoulder swung around on its strap, slamming into her hip hard enough to leave a bruise she wouldn’t discover until the next day.

  Her questing hand hit the side of a hard, chitinous body. She forced her fingers to close and grabbed it as firmly as she could, yanking it away and flinging it hard off to one side. Not Laicaln, she thought, as the stinger came free of her arm with an audible sucking sound. Her flesh felt like it was on fire.

  She groped until she caught the butt of her rifle. Swinging it up, she fired twice at the buzzing coming from the direction where she’d flung the creature. She didn’t take time to aim. She didn’t need to; her shots were followed by a thin, echoing shriek before the silence returned, heavier now than ever.

  And then her father was there in front of her, his own rifle raised and held against his chest. “How’s your arm?” he demanded.

  “Bleeding,” she said, as she bent and retrieved her revolver from the ground. “We need to get a tourniquet on it. Daddy, was that—”

  “No tourniquet,” he said. “That was an Apraxis. You need to bleed the venom out.”

  So it was bad enough that death from blood loss was preferable to risking the poison staying in her arm? Alice nodded once, pressing her right hand over the wound, and tried not to think about it. “At least we know what we’re dealing with now. Let’s go home.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  “Is someone there?”

  The voice came from the woods behind them. It was high, tremulous, and frightened—the voice of a little girl lost in the woods. Alice’s head snapped up.

  “That’s Jenny,” she said.

  “Or that was Jenny.” Jonathan’s voice held a grim note of warning. “Remember what we’re dealing with here.”

  Apraxis hives started out small and fairly easy to destroy, but they didn’t stay that way for long. The entire hive absorbed the intelligence and memories of each victim, learning at a steadily increasing rate, even as they incubated additional drones in the bodies of the dead. A single Apraxis hive could easily wipe out a good-sized town if it wasn’t caught early enough.

  It had been over six days since Jenny Sampson disappeared. Much as she wanted to hold out hope, Alice knew better. “They’re learning,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Please, oh please, is someone there?” The voice sharpened, taking on a more anxious pitch. “Miss Healy, is that you? Please, I’m so scared. There are these big bee-things, and they keep buzzing all around me. Please, is someone there? Won’t you help me?”

  “Don’t listen,” Jonathan said.

  Alice nodded, lips pressed into a thin line. “I won’t.”

  “We’re going to need backup on this one. Backup, and some sort of flamethrowers.” Jonathan turned to offer Alice his hand.

  “I know where you live, Miss Healy,” said Jenny Sampson’s stolen voice. It sounded more conversational now, calmer, and Alice could finally hear the buzzing underneath it. “I’ve been there before. You let me sit on the porch. You gave me lemonade. Can I come over to play?”

  Jonathan froze, stiffening. Alice glanced toward the dark wood, looking for the source of the voice. There was nothing there. “Don’t listen, Daddy. You can’t let them goad you.”

  “They know where we live,” he replied. “Apraxis wasps don’t have to be invited in.”

  “Daddy—”

  “You’re already hurt. Stay here and cover me. I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  “I’m not being stupid, and I’ll be careful. The hive can’t be very large if they’re still resorting to sneak attacks and lures. This is the time to stop them unless you want a visit in your bedroom tonight.”

  “Daddy . . .”

  “Wait here. I’m just going to get a location on the hive and see how many of them we’re actually dealing with.”

  Alice grabbed for his hand as he turned and walked away from her. She missed by only a few inches, but it wouldn’t have done any good if she’d caught him. He had fifty pounds on her, and he wasn’t injured. Three steps and he was gone, fading into the woods. The voice of Jenny Sampson giggled in the distance, but otherwise, the night was silent. Even the frickens had stopped their chirping mating calls.

  And then the screaming started.

  Jonathan Healy screamed like a man who was having his bones ripped out of his body one by one. Alice didn’t think; she just reacted, letting her rifle swing wildly on its strap as she grabbed both her mother’s revolvers from their holsters. There was no pain left in her arm. Pain belonged in another world, a world where her father wasn’t screaming.

  His flashlight had clicked on when it hit the ground. She could see a dozen pairs of glittering eyes in the diffuse light of its beam, all moving wildly around the dark, flailing form of her father. The glitter was all she needed. Alice fired without aiming, never hesitating, and one by one, the glitters fell out of the air, until only the shadow of her father remained, no longer flailing as he started slowly slumping over.

  Then he fell. It only took a few seconds, as the muscles in his legs and back realized what his brain already knew—they weren’t needed anymore—and gave way. It only took a few seconds. It seemed to take a lifetime.

  The sounds of the wood were returning. The pain flooded back into her injured arm, now accompanied by sharp, stabbing cramps in her fingers, marking the points where she’d clenched them too tightly around the pistols. Alice didn’t care.

  “Daddy?” There was no answer from the figure crumpled on the ground. “Daddy!”

  In the distance, the frickens sang.

  5.

  * * *

  Carrying her father’s body out of the woods was one of the hardest things Alice had ever been forced to do. He outweighed her even when he wasn’t wearing his hunting clothes and carrying spare ammunition in his pockets, and she would have found the process difficult without an injured arm. As it was, she could only manage to go a few yards at a time before she had to stop and rest. The blood loss wasn’t helping. Black spots danced at the edges of her vision, getting larger all the time.

  Something will eat us before morning, she thought, with a vague, academic sort of interest. At least her bones would be in the Galway. At least she’d still be with something that loved her, even if it hadn’t been able to protect her. Something will smell the blood or hear the rustling, and that will be that.

  But nothing came.

  Alice Healy staggered out of the trees and onto Highway 18 half an hour after dawn, with the weight of her father’s corpse supported mostly by her back and shoulders. Her face and hair were caked with a mixture of blood and dirt that made her look like she’d just survived some sort of war, and there was a makeshift tourniquet she didn’t remember making tied around her left arm. It had probably seemed important that she not bleed to death out there, but somehow . . .

  Somehow it was hard to focus on that as she shuffled down the last embankment separating the wood from the highway, lowered her father’s body gently to the blacktop, and collapsed on top of him, closing her eyes.

  As she fell into blessed stillness, Alice thought of her mother’s face; the face she hadn’t seen since she was seven, when Frances Healy took her own walk into the woods. After that, there was only darkness, and the quiet resignation that came with realizing that her father had been right all along.

  She should have stayed out of the Galway.

  PART TWO:

  The Shade of the Tree

  1.

  * * *

  Franklin Rogers was hauling a truckload of potatoes up to Ann Arbor, getting an early start so he could make it back by dinnertime, when he saw what looked like two bodies lying in the road. Bodies near the edge of the wood weren’t uncommon, especially not bodies in hunter’s orange, but it was the off-season, and he hadn’t been expecting them. Swearing under his breath, he hit the brakes.

  Then he saw the face of the larger of the two bodies and started swearing out loud, opening his door and jumping out before the truck entirely stopped moving. “Jonathan? Jonathan Healy, are you alive down there? Dammit, Johnny, you answer me!”

  The Healys were come-latelies to the town, and sure, there were some that blamed Alexander and Enid’s settling there for that Price fellow moving in over on Old Logger’s Road, like letting one foreigner in just encouraged more, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have their friends and supporters. Franklin had known Johnny Healy since they were teenagers playing down by the old quarry, making grand plans to run off to the big city and live lives of dashing adventure. He’d danced with Frances at the wedding and told her what a gorgeous bride she was. Seeing him here, like this . . .

  It was no wonder some of the folks in town were starting to say the Healys were cursed, what with the way they kept going into the woods but not coming back out again. First Fran, then Enid, and finally Alex, barely two years before. As Franklin turned the top body over to see its face and caught his first glimpse of sunny blonde hair through the caked-on blood, he found himself wondering if maybe there wasn’t some truth to the idea of the family curse.

  “Alice. Alice, wake up now, that’s a good girl. Come on, Alice. Your Poppa’s going to kill me if you don’t wake up.” He felt her wrist—cold—before fumbling with the collar of her shirt, just enough to get his fingers pressed against her neck. He couldn’t find a pulse.

  “Oh, Alice,” Franklin sighed, and turned away from her, focusing on her father.

  If Alice looked dead, Jonathan looked like he’d been mauled. There were holes punched in his clothing, some the size of canning jars, others going all the way through to come out the other side. More holes marked his throat and hands, filled with black pools of newly-jellied blood. Only his face was untouched. A small mercy if there was no living family to attend the funeral viewing.

  Franklin had lived his whole life on the edge of the Galway Woods, and he knew what he was seeing, even as his mind started to fabricate careful excuses for what was right in front of him. It was plain they’d been hunting together; a father-daughter excursion. Everyone in town knew they’d been arguing lately. A little hunting trip could have seemed like just the thing to ease the tensions, and it being off-season wouldn’t matter, because nobody was going to accuse Jonathan Healy of poaching.

  So they’d gone out together to start smoothing things out between them, and Johnny had walked into the crossfire of some other hunting party. Maybe one that really was poaching and didn’t want reports getting back to town. He’d gone down, but Alice was only hit once—hit bad, if the looks of her arm were any indication—and she’d been a good girl. She brought her father’s body home.

  Even though it killed her to do it.

  Franklin had almost managed to convince himself this was the truth when Alice groaned. “Alice?” He turned back to her. “Alice, honey, you all right?”

  “ . . . Daddy?” she whispered.

  “He’s just fine, sugar, don’t you worry,” Franklin said hurriedly, moving to scoop her into his arms, leaving Jonathan staring blankly at the paling sky. “Come on, now. He’s asked me to give you a ride into town.”

  “ . . . wasps,” she whispered.

  “There aren’t any wasps in my truck,” he assured her, not stopping to let himself think about how those “bullet holes” could easily have been left by stingers bigger than stingers had any business being. “Come on, now, Alice. Let’s go visit the nice hospital.”

  She didn’t fight as he loaded her into the cab of the truck or seem to notice when he put her father’s body just as gently into the back, cushioning him on the potatoes that wouldn’t make it to market today after all.

  She never even opened her eyes.

  2.

  * * *

  Jonathan Healy was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, scarcely an hour after dawn. Alice was taken straight to the emergency room, where she was given antibiotics, three blood transfusions, and seventeen stitches in the back of her left arm. Another three inches to the right and whatever hit her would have severed a major vein. She would have bled out before her father could get to her. He might have made it out of the woods alive after that if he hadn’t felt the need to go after the thing that killed his only daughter. Things only played out the way that they did because of pure luck.

  Healy family luck. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad. And it’s always hard to tell the two of them apart.

  3.

  * * *

  They made her stay at the hospital under observation for twenty-four hours. Alice slept for twelve of them, out so hard and so deeply that the attending nurses checked her pulse several times, just to reassure themselves she still had one.

  “Let her sleep,” advised the doctor. “She’s had one heck of a night, and she’s going to have a great deal to worry about when she finally wakes up.” Medical bills, funeral arrangements, the death of her last known relative; those were certainly things she’d have reason to be concerned with.

  No one really considered that she might have cause to worry about the wound in her arm, or the wounds that killed her father. No one stopped to wonder whether those wounds might have been made by the stingers of giant, intelligent wasps, rather than by ordinary bullets. Everyone knew the woods on some level, but no one thought about it in that much detail.

  It was simply better not to.

  Like a woman who knew she wouldn’t have another chance to rest for quite some time, Alice Healy slept on.

  4.

  * * *

  Checking herself out of the hospital was easy. All she had to do was tell the doctor, very politely, that she felt perfectly well, if a little woozy, and wanted to begin the hard, unavoidable task of arranging her father’s funeral. There was nothing more that could be done for her, physically; she’d only suffered a little blood loss and a reasonably minor flesh wound. One of the nurses loaned her some clean clothes, and an orderly drove her back to the suddenly too-empty house on the edge of the wood.

  Alice had spent the majority of her life learning how to handle herself around people who weren’t part of the family. She was pleasant, facile, and polite for the duration of the ride—and a little distance was only natural, after all, in a young woman who’d just lost her father. She thanked the orderly for getting her home and promised to have the funeral home contact the hospital about arrangements for her father’s body before the end of the day.

  Her hand only shook slightly as she dug the keys out of her bag of personal effects and unlocked the front door, letting herself into the house. She even managed to return the keys to the bag, close the door, and turn the deadbolt before she sat down on the stairs and cried.

  The Aeslin mice in the attic had been with them for generations; had come over with the family from England when they first split with the Covenant. They knew what it meant when two fully-armed members of the family went into the woods and only one of them returned, more than a day later and still smelling faintly of blood. They didn’t intrude on her grief or bother asking her what had happened.

  By the time Alice finished crying—and she thought she was probably finished crying forever; there were no more tears left in her body, she’d used them all up—the sounds of their private mourning rituals were already drifting down the stairs.