Free The Gathering Dark by Christopher Golden Page B

thought plunged into her brain, how the tinkle of broken glass upon the walk sounded like wind chimes. Then the display window of the store exploded outward and the shadow things began to leap out after her, crouching and dancing madly in a way that drove home her thought that they reminded her of monkeys.
    But she was out of the shoppe now. Sweet Somethings was behind her. Paul was worse than dead and there was no way to know what had happened to anyone else. All she knew was that she had to get off Currier Street and she had not torn herself up crashing through that glass door to die here on the sidewalk or to have herself hollowed out and leave some demon behind wearing her face.
    The shadow things came at her and Keomany was already in motion. She felt herself simply flow off the ground as though the sidewalk were helping her up. I am not going to die , she thought.
    She ran for her car. The sky had darkened, that rotten pumpkin orange seeming to thicken the air, and she understood that whatever was going on here in Wickham, it had been a mistake for her to think that it had happened while she was away. It was happening right now, this moment, still going on, and whatever it was, she had drifted right into the middle of it.
    Blood trickling from her hands and slipping like tears down her face where she had cut herself rolling in glass on the sidewalk, she reached into her pocket and grabbed her keys and raced for the little Kia. It seemed to call out to her, to beckon, to urge her on.
    I’m not going to die , she told herself again.
    Which was when strong indigo talons clamped on her shoulder from behind and others slashed at her legs and then one of them barreled into her from behind, clinging to her back and driving her down to the pavement again. Still no traffic on the street. Nothing moved except the shadow things and her . . . their victim. And she felt it then, the thing she had feared most of all, the thing that made hot, disgusting bile rage up the back of her throat.
    Something sharp pushed into the flesh of her back, injecting itself beneath her skin, probing, and she thought of mosquitoes.
    “No!” Keomany screamed, her face mashed against pavement. Then, more definitively: “No!”
    All of this was unnatural. These things, demons, whatever they were . . . they were an abomination against nature, an atrocity perpetrated against the earth itself. All of this, the putrid orange sky, the fetid air, and the surreal texture of the world of Currier Street . . . it was all wrong, and yet beneath it she could feel the earth, the natural world she worshipped, bucking against it, fighting this cancer that was growing on its flesh.
    She felt the thing’s filthy proboscis under her skin and the weight of them on her, talons holding her down, cutting her, and a rage blossomed inside Keomany unlike anything she had ever felt before.
    Her teeth bit down on her lower lip.
    “Get . . . the fuck . . . off of me!” she shouted.
    Then Keomany pushed .
    The pavement all around her shattered as tree roots thrust up from the earth and impaled the shadow things that were on top of her. Other roots twined around their legs and necks and hauled them down to the buckled road. Keomany heard their carapaces crack, saw the living roots slithering through wounds in their bodies like serpents in the bones of the dead, and she knew that it was her doing.
    The natural world was striking back at these parasites upon its flesh, and yet it was more than that. It was her. She had summoned them. Even now she felt in the core of her, not in her heart but in her gut, that she was controlling each root as though they were her own fingers, extensions of her self.
    Earthwitch , she thought giddily as she staggered to her feet, watching the roots tear the faceless, armored things apart.
    “I’m an earthwitch!” she screamed at them, as though it meant anything at all to them.
    Keomany had seen power in others who worshipped as she did, but she