The Calling (Darkness Rising) Read Online Free PDF Page B

across the water, as we’d hoped. We needed to head inland.
    As we walked in silence, Kenjii whimpered, reacting to the tension. I could feel it myself, bristling through the air like electricity. Every time she made noise, the others would jump, and look around as if they expected grizzly bears to lumber out of the fog. Only Daniel stayed steady, assuring everyone that Kenjii was just nervous because they were.
    I was, too. I think that’s what got her going the most. I kept telling myself I was fine, that the forest was right there. I could smell the sharp tang of evergreens. But when the wind whined around us, I jumped with everyone else.
    Finally, I saw trees and my heart stopped pounding. I walked faster, needles crunching under my feet, the sound, the smell so familiar that my throat ached, and I had to reach out, fingers brushing the boughs as we passed. The fog disappeared, as if kept at bay by the trees. Safe. I was in the forest, Daniel was beside me and I was safe.
    “Uh, Maya?” Corey said behind me. “Maybe … this isn’t such a good idea.”
    I turned. The others were ten feet back, barely inside the tree line. Nicole and Hayley had moved closer to Corey. Sam hung back, looking into the woods as if I was asking her to jump off a cliff.
    “The fog’s gone in here,” I said. “It was marine fog. It doesn’t penetrate the forest.”
    “Yeah,” Corey said. “I’m thinking the fog’s not such a problem. It’s very … dark. We don’t know what’s in there.”
    “Yeah, we do,” Sam said. “Bears, cougars, wolves…”
    “None of which are nocturnal,” I said. Actually, they were crepuscular, which meant they were most active at twilight—both dawn and dusk. In other words, right about now. But I wasn’t telling these guys that. “They’ll stay out of our way if we stay out of theirs.”
    “But how can we stay out of their way if we can’t see them?” Hayley asked.
    I turned and looked into the forest. I could see fine, but I was part cat. To them it would be dark. Very dark.
    “I’ll lead,” I said. “Kenjii and I spend so much time in the woods that our eyes adjust quickly.”
    “I don’t know,” Hayley said. “It’s really dark. And really spooky.”
    I turned again and saw a scene worthy of a tourist brochure—a rocky, natural path dotted with unfurled ferns and soaring, vine-ribboned redwoods. Somewhere to our left, a nighthawk trilled. Even the leftover fog was like fine lace drifting past on a cedar-perfumed breeze.
    “I’m not seeing spooky,” I said. “Dark, yes, but what’s spooky about it?”
    “What’s not spooky?” Sam muttered.
    Hayley pointed. “You can’t tell me that isn’t creepy.”
    I followed her finger to see branches draped in elegant, pale-green Spanish moss.
    “That? Seriously? It’s moss, Hayley, not an alien life-form. We just escaped a helicopter crash and a death brush with something in the water. That was scary. This is the forest. This is where we’re going to find shelter and water.”
    “Shelter? I don’t want a damned cave, Maya. I want a house, and we’re not going to find that in the middle of—”
    Daniel stepped between us. “All right. This isn’t helping. We have to get through these woods in order to find help. That could mean holing up for the night, but we’ll be okay. Maya knows her way around the woods and so do I. You need to trust us to look after you.”
    He spoke to them, but it was for my benefit, too. A reminder that they didn’t have our experience and they were not going to see the forest the way I did.
    I led everyone for a while without any sign of light or noise from a road, then I veered south. Instinct, I guess. On Vancouver Island, like anywhere in Canada, the population tends to shift south. Most times that’s for warmer weather. The island, though, is temperate rain forest, meaning we rarely see the white stuff. We gravitate south because it’s simply more hospitable land. While my sense of