The beast feels like nothing I have ever encountered before. Such overwhelming malice that I fear it may stop my heart in my chest.

It presses down on us like a great weight, and even the rain seems to be sluggish as it falls.

I reach into my pocket at David’s prompting.

The glittering gem hums with an arcane power I have only recently begun to understand.

It is warm in my hand, a comfort against the cold and the weight.

I offer the gem to the tree line.

“In exchange for passage, Great One!”

The world stilled for a heartbeat, even the rain hanging frozen in the air.

Then the gem cracked and the light vanished.

“Did it work?” William asked, his voice trembling.

The malice receded and the trees parted to reveal a narrow path.

Soon boys. I’ll save you soon.

~<>~<>~

The air was filled with the scent of pine and rain as we walked along the north road.

The sky was a dark gray, though the rain was thankfully light, and the wind had settled down.

Fortunately for us, the trailhead was only a fifteen-minute walk from the graveyard. Less fortunately, we had to walk through Grumpy’s domain to get there.

Grumpy was… I didn’t have any idea what the hell he was. Other than old, powerful, and grumpy.

He gave off a presence like few things I’ve ever felt, and he generally disliked everything that came across him. However, I’d long ago struck an agreement with the ancient thing, and while he didn’t like me, he also wasn’t going to kill me for talking to him.

The problem was going through his domain twice in one year wasn’t part of that agreement. I was ready to bargain with him, but I wasn’t sure how high his price would be.

The rain picked up, and I started walking faster. I had absolutely no desire to be on the north road during heavy rainfall. It would turn into a swamp, and I didn’t want to start this journey covered in mud.

Blair glanced down after we had to step around a particularly massive pothole. “How do you get around with a road like this? I feel like the damn thing wants to kill me.”

I chuckled. “To be honest, I don’t deal with the road. Not having a car is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I don’t have to worry about dying because I dared to drive over 15. On the other hand, I don’t have a car.”

Blair grunted in agreement.

I stopped as we approached the edge of Grumpy’s territory.

From the sharp glances Blair was giving our surroundings, I guessed they had driven past Grumpy on their way in. Bad luck that. The north road was one giant loop, so it had been a coin toss for whether or not they would have to experience his foul mood.

“Blair, before we go any further, I need to make sure we’re clear on a few points.”

She’d stopped when I had and now turned to look down at me, her expression a neutral mask. When I say that, I really do mean a mask. It wasn’t just hard to read. It was utterly blank of any emotion.

It was a little unnerving, if I was being honest.

“I know werewolves aren’t huge on taking orders from people who aren’t their alphas. But I also don’t want to insult you by suggesting you won’t listen to me just because I can’t benchpress a truck. I just wanna make sure we’re clear crystal clear on this because some of the things on this Pass will kill us if we do something even slightly wrong. So while we’re on this trip, if I tell you we need to hop on one foot through twenty feet of trail, then we hop on one foot. Cause if we don’t, we might get pulled limb from limb.“

Blair was silent for several uncomfortable seconds. Was she angry? Thinking? Curious about the weather? Her poker face was good enough that it could be any of those or none of them.

I didn’t really expect her to have a problem; she had listened to me in the Manor, after all. But some of the Pass’s rules were weird even by spook standards, and I really didn’t want to get torn apart because she hesitated at the wrong moment.

“Understood.” Blair’s mask cracked as she broke a small smile. “I share your disinterest in dying, and I get the need to clear the air. Some werewolves wouldn’t listen to you since you can’t bench a truck.”

She shuffled slightly, then reached up to scratch her chin.

“And understanding werewolf society when you’re not part of it can be a little confusing, to put it lightly.”

I sagged in relief. Traveling through Old Tom’s Pass with a stranger was going to be difficult, but it was infinitely better than traveling with an unreasonable stranger.

Blair glanced towards the road, then back to me. “Unless the thing just moved in, you know what’s down the road. Right?”

I nodded. “That thing is our destination.”

Blair frowned. “Are you a warlock?”

“No, I’m not a warlock! Where did that come from?” Blair pointed towards the road. “Whatever the hell that thing is, it isn’t normal. I don’t know if it’s a demon or an elemental or what. But it is exactly the type of thing a warlock would pact with.”

Well, I couldn’t really argue that point. “Yeah, fair enough. Grumpy feels… Like Grumpy.”

Blair blinked, then gave me an incredulous stare. “Grumpy?”

I shrugged. “Well, he always feels grumpy, so…” I said, my tone defensive. The name made sense! Though I had been pretty young when I came up with it.

Blair sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Fine, fine. Is… Grumpy, really going to let us walk up to them without killing us? And what do you mean he’s our destination?”

“The trailhead is part of his turf, so we have to go through him to get to the Pass. And he probably won’t kill us. I have a deal with him.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Not that kind of deal! I’m not a warlock!” I scowled. “I paid him with some of my magic a while back. I get safe passage through his territory once a year in exchange.”

“You said he probably won’t kill us,” Blair noted.

I winced and scratched the back of my head. “That’s the thing. I’ve already gone through the Pass once this year. So I’m going to have to renegotiate.”

Blair looked between me and the road several times. Then, she took a deep breath, and her mask was back up. “Alright. Let’s go talk to Grumpy.”

The werewolf certainly wasn’t a coward.

You didn’t stand in the presence of something like Grumpy without feeling the utter certainty that it could kill you if it wanted to. And that there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to stop it.

But Blair was walking towards it regardless. That either spoke to bravery or that she was as stupid as I was. I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and say it was bravery.

We took a few steps forward, and Grumpy’s aura hit us like a truck. Blair stumbled before catching herself, and the only reason I wasn’t mirroring her was because of how many times I’d felt it before.

The air was heavy like gravity had suddenly grown stronger, and there were other things subtly off, but they were drowned out by the sheer malice that pressed against us from every angle.

Finally, after about a hundred miserable feet, I stopped and shouted into the tree line. “Grumpy! It’s me! Quit being a dick and lay off a bit!”

Blair looked at me like I was insane, which was fair.

The malice in the air shifted. It gathered up until it wrapped around me like a cloak. Grumpy’s thoughts came through a moment later. Well, not thoughts exactly, but emotion and intent flowed into me.

Annoyance, exasperation, recognition, question.

“I need to go to the Pass again.”

Payment.

“Yeah, I expected as much. How much do you want?” A confusing stream of signals poured into me. Things like Grumpy didn’t do great with concepts like the minute or the year. They tended to look at things in terms of centuries or millennia. But, eventually, Grumpy managed to send the amount he wanted.

It was disconcerting since I felt the passage of time in my mind. I saw the sun rise and fall over and over, saw leaves drop only to be covered by snow, then for that snow to melt.

A year. That was ridiculous.

“I’m not giving you an entire year.”

Anger. Demanding. “No, a year is way too much. I’m not asking you to give me anything other than passage. You literally just have to stand aside for the two of us.”

Insistence.

“Our first bargain leaned heavily in your favor. Three months.”

The sense of malice grew stronger until it itched along my skin and pressed against my scalp. “Three months isn’t enough? Fine, four and a half months. And you know that most mages wouldn’t give you half that.”

The next string of emotions came fast and layered, but it evened out into something like grudging acceptance.

I shifted my focus away from Grumpy and towards my aura. As I did, I noticed that Blair had grabbed ahold of my pack at some point. Her body was tensed, and I had a feeling she was ready to sprint away the second things turned south. And judging by her grip on my pack, she was going to drag me with her.

I shook off the thought and unveiled my aura. I didn’t bother with trying to keep it close to my body, while in Grumpy’s presence, I didn’t really need to worry about attracting the attention of anything nasty. No predator would even come within a mile of Grumpy’s territory. Instead, I focused on my shroud, feeling along the condensed loop of power.

Four and a half months. It wasn’t chump change.

Due to the nature of my magic, I didn’t often need to use my shroud, so I had a healthy amount of power to spare. But giving up this much still irked me.

A day's worth of power represented an entire day spent draining and then refilling my magic directly into my shroud to increase its size.

I would have to spend the same amount of time focused on growing my shroud to get back to where I was right now.

I sighed, then got to work. I felt along my shroud until I had a mental grip on a section roughly the length of my arm span. Then I twisted, gathering it up like a ball of dough.

I needed to think of that section as something different than the rest of my shroud. Visualization was important. If I wasn’t careful, I could end up tearing away more power than I intended.

Once I was sure I wasn’t going to tear away too little or too much, I pulled on the ball of power until it broke away from the rest of my aura.

It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, but it wasn’t quite painful either. Instead, it was a nebulous, ripping sensation that came from everywhere on my body at once.

I gave the now free section of my shroud a gentle push, and it started to drift away from me. It made it a few feet before it suddenly jerked and zipped into the tree line.

A moment later, Grumpy’s presence surged. The sense of discomfort grew. My teeth started to itch, and every hair on my body stood on end. Then it settled back down to a more reasonable level.

The trees rustled as a deep sigh blew through them. Then the underbrush directly in front of us parted as Grumpy’s presence split to form a narrow path.

I turned to Blair and smiled. “See! He didn’t kill us.”

~<>~<>~

The path was narrow, the forest around it barely held at bay. Roots slithered across it, just waiting to catch an ankle. And the brush and trees seemed to stretch out towards the path, trying to block it with creeping branches and drooping leaves.

We were only a couple hundred feet down the trail, but the forest had already changed. The trees were older and… Maybe meaner? I wasn’t sure what the right word was. But they gave off a presence that I could feel not just with my aura but in the air itself. A heavy weight of age and awareness.

The forest recognized me in a sense. There weren’t any dryads in this area, none that I knew of, at least. But the forest was still very much alive and aware as we crept through it.

I say it felt old, but the word wasn’t enough to describe it. It was a primordial feeling and almost as crotchety as Grumpy.

A gust of wind swept across the trail, rustling the trees and causing a few of the low-hanging branches to swing closer to Blair. She sidestepped them but then had to dodge again as more swung near her. We both noticed that none of the branches had moved towards me.

“It was like that towards me at first, too,” I said as she was forced to jump over a root that had been a foot lower just a moment ago.

“The forest will warm up to you. Probably.”

The werewolf glanced around as the branches slowly settled. “Any tips for speeding up that process?”

“Don’t say anything bad about the forest. Words don’t translate one to one, but it can pick up your intentions loud and clear. These trees aren’t dumb.”

A root slithered closer to the dirt ahead of me only to pop back in time to force Blair to step a little higher.

“It took me several years to get this place to warm up to me. You’ll probably have an easier time.”

Blair hopped over several roots in quick succession. “Why is that?“

I glanced at her in surprise.

I expected her to know why the forest would warm up to a werewolf faster than a human, but then again, there’s a decent chance she’d never been in a grumpier version of the enchanted forest.

Just because I was a human didn’t mean I knew how every supernatural thing would interact with me.

“This place appreciates those… primal aspects that werewolves are known for. Resonates would probably be the word for it. “

Blair nodded as she scanned the surroundings. “There is something about this place that feels…familiar. “

We continued on in silence, save for the rustling branches and the odd call from some animal or another.

In that silence, the weight of the forest really started to press in. The feeling was inescapable. I could still remember how much it had scared me my first couple of trips through the Pass. It was still a little overwhelming, but I’d found some comfort in it.

The feeling was vast and really hammered in just how insignificant a lone Telss was compared to the slumbering behemoths of the supernatural world.

This place held a power, one that I could feel in my bones. A power that dwarfed me so many times over that I was little more than an insect in comparison.

But despite all that, it wasn’t overtly hostile towards me, not anymore. I might just be an ant crawling across the forest floor, but at least that ant was part of the forest.

After a half-hour of walking and the forest making at least a dozen attempts to trip Blair, we came upon a small clearing. And at the center of it sat a towering, twisted tree. The gnarled trunk was easily a dozen feet around, and the top stretched into the sky.

Its branches were patchy with mis-matched leaves that ranged in color and shape with no discernible pattern tying them together.

While one branch was covered with brown maple leaves, another was a mix of half a dozen different types of leaves. And the branch next to that held jagged pink leaves that looked like they’d been pulled straight from a Doctor Seuss book.

The clearing smelled faintly of lilac, roses, and some other flower I couldn’t place.

I groaned. Blair glanced between me and the tree, then she noticed its residents.

Grouped among the branches in a dozen clusters of threes and fours were ravens and crows that ranged in size from a little bigger than my head to alarmingly big. And all of them had turned to face us as we approached. Or, more specifically, to face me.

“Goddammit. I was hoping it wouldn’t be here this time.”

A cluster on a branch with purple leaves cawed at me and began to parrot my words.

“Dammit. Dammit. God. Be here.”

I groaned louder.

Blair took a wary step forward to put herself in front of me. “Are they dangerous? “

I scowled. “A dangerous pain in my ass. “

Several flocks cawed. “Pain in ass!” In unison. I rubbed at my eyes as the cawing continued.

“All these years and you stupid Corvids still think this is funny!”

“Funny, funny, funny!” They cawed back.

Well, what was I expecting?

Blair glanced between me and the tree several times before speaking. “You don’t seem to be treating them with much respect. I thought the forest didn’t like backtalk.”

“It doesn’t in general, but The Wandering Tree is the only one that puts up with these birds. When I call them annoying assholes, I might as well be the Lorax because I speak for the trees.”

Blair chuckled as she swept her eyes over the tree. “The Wandering Tree? And you said you hoped it wouldn’t be here, so I’m guessing it moves.”

“Yeah, it well, it wanders. But, as annoying as the birds are, they aren’t outright malicious since the Tree never appears in areas where noise could get me killed.”

“A moving, multicolored tree covered in ravens and crows...” Blair paused for a breath as she ran a hand through her hair. “I’ve seen weirder, but I don’t think I’ve seen so much weird packed into one town.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Silver Spruce is…Silver Spruce.”

Turning my attention back to the tree and the stupid birds that were cawing “spruce” over and over, I pulled off my pack.

“There isn’t any big trick to getting past the Wandering Tree. Obviously, you don’t want to attack it or the birds, but you can just walk around it.” I opened up my pack and started digging through its insides. “But if you do that too quickly or without offering something, it’s likely to show up again to annoy the hell out of you. So I came prepared.”

“Do you know why it’s covered in birds?”

I glanced up at Blair then paused. Her question had been filled with dry amusement, but what took me off guard was that the woman’s face wasn’t set into a cold mask or tight with nerves. She was smiling. The expression bright and honest as she listened to the raven's parrot and remix her words.

Finding the can I was looking for, at the very bottom of the pack, of course, I pulled it out before throwing the pack back on.

“A teleporting, multicolored tree is weird on its own, but the birds are what’s really throwing me. Are they magic ravens and crows? How did they end up here in the first place?”

The werewolf cocked her head, her smile widening as she continued to stare at the tree.

“Honestly, I haven’t got a clue. I wondered about it the first couple of times through the Pass, but now it’s just one of those mysteries of the universe that I ignore or risk bringing on a headache.”

Blair laughed. “Something tells me you have to chalk a lot of things up to mysteries of the universe when living in this town.”

I nodded at the point. “True.”

I took a few steps back then cupped my hands around my mouth. “Martin! Get your feathers down here unless you want your spoils to go to a different bird!”

A raven immediately launched from the tree. He was one of the biggest of the lot and had a smug air about him.

He landed in front of us with a caw. “Huh,” Blair grunted. “Never seen a raven with a white tail feather.”

Martin spread his wings out and puffed out his chest. Looking up at us with a haughty tilt to his head. “Yeah yeah, you’re a good-looking bird. Now take your prize.”

Martin scoffed at me, then hopped over to the can. It was a literal can of worms. I had no idea where Barry even got them from, but they made for a good bribe.

The raven picked up the can and let out a smug caw. He flew over to me, obscuring my vision with his flapping wings before landing on my shoulder with one leg, the other still grasping his prize.

“What’s gotten into you? Just so excited to see me twice in one year?”

The bird hopped several times in quick secession before giving me exactly one nuzzle with the side of his head. Then he cawed again, painfully close to my ear, and took off back to the tree. “Ow! You dick!”

Blair, the traitor, started laughing, and a heartbeat later, all the flocks mimicked her.

I scowled as I rubbed at my ear. “Not helping!”

She laughed harder.