The Killing Forest Read Online Free PDF

stomach in a mud puddle.
    Slowly she stood up. Besides being shaken by the fall, she was covered with mud. She walked over and sat down with her back against the tree. A wet pile of picked-over food lay where the boy had been sitting. She thought it looked like leftovers from a grill party. It troubled her that the boy had been eating it. Some animals in the forest seemed to have been feasting, too, from the looks of the several gnawed bones scattered around. But they’d left some of the food. They must have been interrupted. Maybe by the boy, she thought, shuddering.
    She was getting cold, sitting there in her wet jogging clothes, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the boy. Though the forest was private property, everyone had the right to walk through it, meaning that he had no reason to run. Some people did drive in, which was forbidden, but Frederik or the manager gave them hell when they caught them.
    Camilla winced from the pain in her knee. After standing up and carefully shaking her leg, she leaned over to wipe the mud off. Strangely enough, the mud was more red than brown. Suddenly she realized it was blood, not mud.
    Desperately, she wiped her hands on the tree trunk, then she jogged through the trees toward a small stream she’d discovered earlier. She felt foul, unclean. Along the way she tore off leaves from saplings and bushes, and tried to wipe the blood off.
    She was freezing by the time she found a path down to the stream. Cautiously, she stepped onto the stones sticking up out of the water and squatted to wash her face. She cleaned her arms with leaves and let the icy water run onto her legs. Muddy blood streamed down her thighs and calves. She scooped up more water; the thought of being covered in blood nauseated her.
    She heard a sudden noise in the forest behind her, twigs being stepped on, something being dragged along the forest floor. She whirled around in fright and almost lost her balance at the sight of an old woman in a broad-brimmed straw hat, a long braid hanging down over her right shoulder.
    “The wagons are rolling on the Death Trail,” she said. Her clear, ocean-blue eyes looked earnestly at Camilla. Then, using a sturdy limb as a cane, she turned on her heel and vanished silently and astonishingly quickly into the forest.
    Camilla stood midstream, too shocked to speak to her. She had no idea where the woman had come from; had heard nothing until she was practically at her back. She didn’t even know if there was an entrance to the forest anywhere near the stream.
    She hurried home in the twilight, dripping wet, her heart hammering in her ears.

5
    S une tried one more time. He’d found some dry twigs inside the hollow tree where he’d hung his hoodie up to dry, but couldn’t get a fire started with his lighter.
    He thought about his mother. She always backed him up, like the time he wanted to be a Boy Scout. His father had said it was a silly idea, that he’d started playing handball when he was seven, and he couldn’t understand why his son wouldn’t give it a shot.
    Your son doesn’t have the talent for it, she’d told him, after Sune did try. In the Boy Scouts, however, he earned every merit badge. Each time he brought one home, she proudly sewed it on his scout shirt.
    Now his teeth chattered and his fingers were stiff from the cold, even though the rain had stopped. He’d waited over an hour before returning for the food he’d abandoned when the woman came running up and yelling at him. He knew he shouldn’t eat it—he could get sick—but he was so incredibly hungry. His body, not his brain, steered him to the trees toward the clearing. To the food.
    Another group of Asatro held their sacrifices at the old oak. It was their leftovers he’d been eating. He’d watched them from his hiding place as they gathered around the bonfire. He had never met them; they were the ones who had expelled the Asa group his father belonged to. That he also belonged to now. The thought