Free Christopher Golden - The Veil 01 - The Myth Hunters by The Myth Hunters Page B

for him to go, to run alongside the massive barrow. He snapped his head, indicating the urgency of their situation, and Oliver began to run. In three paces he found the winter man sprinting beside him and the two of them raced to the east with that ridge on their right and something rushing through the woods to the left, brush crashing and swaying.
     
     
Low branches seemed to reach for him but Oliver swiped them away. His stomach rumbled— a reminder of the hours since he had last eaten. His throat was raw, his chest constricted and his legs felt as though they were moving of their own accord. He caught sight of a fallen tree just in time to leap over it and glanced back to see it frost over with glistening rime as the winter man passed by. The finger of a branch scratched his forehead and he hissed but did not slow. He glanced over his left shoulder time and again, trying to catch sight of whatever paced them in the brush, but after several long seconds of running, the sounds from the woods ceased and he began to think it had given up the chase.
     
     
“What is it?” he gasped as Frost prodded him in the arm with an icy finger, urging him still onward.
     
     
“I do not know,” the winter man said, his voice seeming to come from the breeze itself. “Something magical that does not wish to be seen.”
     
     
That was enough for Oliver. If Frost thought they ought to run, he was not about to argue. They ran side by side, the legendary creature moving effortlessly even as Oliver got a stitch in his side. Still he forced himself on, feet pounding the soil. They had to put some distance between themselves and their pursuer, or at the very least find a clearing where it could not approach them unseen. All of these thoughts mingled with the fear in his mind and with thoughts of home, of people he was beginning to doubt he would ever see again. It was only physical and emotional momentum that carried him forward. He had nowhere else to go.
     
     
The ridge gradually sloped downward and soon he could see the tops of the trees on the far side. Ahead in the yellow light of the moon he could see that the forest floor seemed to flatten out again, and then beyond it there seemed a vast open space with no trees at all.
     
     
“There,” he rasped.
     
     
“Yes,” Frost agreed. “We can take our bearings.”
     
     
In that moment, though, there came a snap of branches behind them. Oliver cursed under his breath and Frost bared his teeth and cut across in front of him. Oliver nearly stumbled before he realized what the winter man intended, but then they were both running up the steep ridge. It had diminished so much by then that the place they climbed up was less than ten feet high, and they scaled it without effort. Oliver glanced back even as they topped the rise and then he turned to catch a quick glimpse of the clearing that stretched out in front of them.
     
     
Oliver grunted in astonishment and flinched back as though he’d been struck. He teetered on that narrow ridge and his hands flew to the top of his head, holding the sides of his skull as though he was afraid there simply wasn’t room in his mind for any more of what the world beyond the Veil had to show him.
     
     
The being that lay in the clearing ahead could only have been called a giant. He must have been seventy or eighty feet from end to end and his skin was a leathery, wrinkled brown. Yet size was only one of the facets of the thing that left Oliver speechless. Tatters of rough linen that once could have been considered clothes hung on the enormous creature, but the forest itself covered him now. The giant lay on his side, his knees and part of one foot buried in the ground, and saplings grew over them. A thick layer of moss had formed in crevices on the giant’s body, where the sun rarely shone. It grew up in the crook of his neck and behind one ear. Weeds and mushrooms and flowers grew from the moss, and a bush with dark green and red-tinted