Forest of Shadows Read online

  The door flew open, blowing off Olaf’s robe and mask, and sending the snow globe falling to the floor with a crack. The wolf had found them. Its sharp shoulder blades jutted up and down as it moved, like some sort of terrifying carousel creature. Its long legs brought it closer and closer, following Anna, Elsa, and Olaf as they backed up and skirted around the long table.

  Before Anna could scream, a wall of ice erupted from the wooden floor. Jagged crystals raced up to the ceiling in the center of the room, knitting themselves together to form a thick protective barrier, with Anna, Elsa, and Olaf by the doors and the wolf walled off on the fireplace end. Anna’s gasp of surprise turned white in the cold of Elsa’s magic.

  “Now do you believe me?” Anna asked her sister.

  Elsa ignored her. Her eyes swept the room. “We need to go find—”

  But Elsa’s words were cut off.

  THUMP. THUMP. SCREEEECH!

  Cobweb-thin lines scattered across the ice wall as the wolf pawed at it, its claws screeching. It was a terrible sound, even worse than the sound of teeth scraping against a fork, which until then Anna had thought to be the most awful sound imaginable. The ice wall wasn’t holding. It was shattering.

  “Run!” Elsa shouted, raising both her arms.

  Anna didn’t need to be told twice—and Olaf was already right by her side. Sprinting out the doors of the council chambers, they made their way for the stairs, down toward the great front doors that would take them to the castle bridge. But as Anna and Olaf neared the landing to the first floor, two pairs of yellow eyes shone at them from the shadows, blocking their path to the front entrance. Kai. Gerda.

  Anna’s stomach twisted. She’d been right, but oh! How she wished she’d been wrong. Gerda’s friendly face was now an oval of agony—her eyes and mouth were all wide and round as she screamed and lurched toward them, something glistening in her hand: a pair of sewing scissors. And next to her, Kai clutched a red-hot poker.

  “Put out the flames. The house is burning,” Kai croaked, jabbing the iron at them as though they were the phantom flames attacking him. “It’s burning!” he cried.

  “Well, this can’t be good,” Olaf whispered as Gerda stepped forward with the blades of the scissors snapping open and shut, open and shut.

  The look in their yellow eyes was not human, but something else.

  Predatory.

  Wolflike.

  It’s a wolf pack, Anna realized with horror.

  Suddenly, a great shattering sound erupted above them, as if a thousand crystal goblets had been smashed…or one gigantic wolf had managed to break through a magical ice wall. A second later, Anna heard her sister’s footsteps on the stairs behind her and Olaf.

  “KEEP GOING!” Elsa shouted down to them.

  “But Kai and Gerda want to prevent us from imminent escape and possibly cause us harm!” Olaf called back, darting behind Anna’s travel cloak and away from the hot poker.

  “Don’t stop!” Elsa called.

  Anna didn’t know what to do—Kai and Gerda were blocking the only path to escape the castle, and a massive wolf was barreling down the stairs toward them. The only direction left was down—but there was no castle exit in the below-ground kitchen, and they would end up trapped there, or worse, in the ice room.

  Wait. The ice room. There was something important about the ice room. Something Anna had wanted to check out…the blueprints! The blueprints that had shown a secret passageway that led out from underneath the castle.

  “Elsa!” Anna yelled at the top of her lungs. “Meet us in the ice room!”

  Anna and Olaf practically flew down the rest of the stairs with Elsa bringing up the rear as she blasted the stair landing with mirror-smooth ice, making it difficult for the pack to follow them down the stairs. Anna didn’t turn around, not even when she heard two thuds and a whoosh that she assumed were Kai and Gerda slipping on the ice, unable to chase any farther.

  But that didn’t mean the wolf, with its large hooked claws, couldn’t navigate a bit of ice.

  Anna, Olaf, and Elsa continued racing downstairs. They burst into the kitchen, only to discover they weren’t alone.

  Kristoff sat in the middle of the room at the long table, scarfing down a sandwich, and by the number of crumbs scattered in front of him, it wasn’t his first sandwich of the night.

  Relief washed over Anna: Kristoff was back, and he was okay! Anna took stock of the details. Kristoff’s blond hair was tangled, as if he’d spent the night in the woods or the mountains. His patched traveler’s pack, lantern, and pickax were slung across his shoulders, as if he’d been too hungry to wait even a second more. Sven made happy munching noises as he buried his nose in a bag of carrots. They must have only just returned from the Valley of the Living Rock. Horror collided with her relief. Horror, because she’d thought—she’d hoped beyond hope—that Kristoff and Sven were far, far away from the castle and somewhere safe in the woods. Relief, because she wouldn’t have to face this terror without him. Kristoff looked up, a crumb dropping from his chin.

  “Hi, Kristoff!” Olaf darted into the kitchen and sprinted past the table. “Bye, Kristoff!”

  “RUN!” Anna yelled, barreling toward him. With one hand, she grabbed Kristoff’s elbow and pulled him after her.

  “Mwaf?” he asked, his mouth full of sandwich.

  But Anna didn’t have time to explain, because the wolf was there, there in the kitchen. And though it was impossible—all of this was impossible!—the wolf seemed to have grown three feet since they had left it in the second great hall. Its shoulders brushed the sides of the door as it swaggered into the room, eyes glowing, jowls drooling a thick slime.

  Kristoff dropped his sandwich onto the floor. “MWAFFFF!” he yelled.

  Now all five of them—Sven, Elsa, Olaf, and Kristoff, with Anna in the lead—sprinted toward the back of the kitchen, to the door that led into the ice room. Anna pushed open the heavy door and held it as Kristoff, Olaf, and Elsa ran through. But where was Sven? Peering back, Anna’s heart stopped.

  Fear seemed to have frozen Sven in his tracks. He remained still, a carrot in his mouth, as the wolf loped closer to him. It knocked aside the long wooden table with an ear-bleeding screech of its legs against stone.

  “Sven!” Anna shouted. “Run!”

  But it was as if Sven couldn’t hear her. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on the wolf’s glowing ones. He lifted a hoof, and took a step…toward the wolf.

  “SVEN!” Kristoff yelled from over Anna’s shoulder.

  At the sound of his best friend’s voice, the wolf’s strange hypnosis over Sven seemed to shatter. Sven staggered backward, tripping over his hooves as he twisted on his haunches and stumbled through the door, leaving Anna just enough time to slam it shut on the wolf’s slick snout. Sven wobbled beside her, shaky but safe, and Kristoff threw his arms around him. Elsa blasted the door with ice to hold it, and with a wave of her hand, thirty or so blocks of ice scraped across the rough stone floor to settle in front of the door, for good measure. But would it be enough?

  Elsa panted and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “It might be a strange wolf with glowing yellow eyes, but it has to have a hard time clawing through stone and ice!”

  The sounds of the wolf clawing and pawing against the door made it sound like perhaps, just maybe, it was making impossible progress.

  “Now what?” Elsa called, taking in the room. “Why did you want us in here?”

  “One second!” Anna said, squeezing her eyes shut, not just to try to keep out the mental image of the wolf hunting them, but to try to remember what the blueprints had said about the entrance to the Earth Giant’s Passage. Something about three flagstones…

  She counted three flagstones in, and two across, and hurried to one in the center of the room. As she knelt down and placed her fingers around the edge of the stone, she hoped with all her might that the blueprints had been complete, that they weren’t just a fanciful wish of her heroic grandfather K
ing Runeard, who had built the castle.

  Holding her breath, Anna pulled, and the flagstone lifted away, revealing carved stone steps leading down into darkness. “Yes!” Grinning, she gestured to the entrance. “Olaf, you first!”

  “Oh, I can’t wait to go somewhere new!” he said with an excited wave of his arms.

  Arooooooooooooooooo! The sound of the wolf’s howl seemed to burrow its way toward them, twisting and tumbling around Anna, surrounding her, becoming both up and down and around.

  “Me first!” Olaf hopped down the steps.

  Covering her ears to drown out the howling, Anna followed him, along with Elsa and Sven. Kristoff was last, and as he clambered down, he pulled the flagstone securely back over them, plunging them into utter darkness. For a moment, Anna was aware of everyone’s breathing, and she wondered if they could all hear the pounding of her heart.

  “What was that thing?” Kristoff finally whispered.

  No one responded, but Anna knew.

  It was not just a wolf.

  It was a nightmare.

  Her nightmare.

  And it was coming for them.

  ANNA’S HEAD POUNDED, her stomach twisted, and her heart hurt.

  She wasn’t sick, and yet, in a weird way, she wished she were, because colds came and went of their own accord, but this—this aching feeling—she’d brought that upon herself. Just as she must have brought the wolf upon the castle. She wanted to believe it was a coincidence that the wolf had appeared after she’d read aloud the “Make Dreams Come True” spell, but she couldn’t.

  Anna had dreamed of the wolf her entire childhood. Now, Kai and Gerda—people who had loved and raised her—had yellow eyes and were trapped in their own nightmarish realities. Why hadn’t she listened? Elsa had told her to leave the secret room alone, that their parents had probably left it a secret for a reason. And now, Anna had unleashed her nightmare on Arendelle.

  “It’s a good thing it’s so dark,” Olaf said from somewhere to Anna’s left. “If there are flesh-eating monsters down here, at least we can’t see them!”

  “Always looking on the bright side,” Kristoff’s voice called back. “Anna, what is happening? What is a wolf doing in the castle? And where are we now?”

  “Elsa,” Anna said, fumbling in her cloak pocket for the scrap of spell with one hand, and reaching blindly out into the darkness for her sister’s shoulder. “I need to tell you something—”

  “One second, Anna,” Elsa’s voice said from a little further away. “Kristoff, can we get some light?”

  There was a rustling, followed by a scritch as Kristoff struck a match and lit the lantern clipped to the outside of his traveler’s pack. Usually, Anna felt better when there was light, but the wavering lantern flame cast huge shadows across the rough rock walls and across her friends’ faces, distorting their familiar features and turning them into strangers. And—Anna’s breath lodged beneath her ribcage—was that a glint of yellow she’d spotted in Kristoff’s eyes?

  “Seriously,” Kristoff said, his face twisting with frustration as he ran expert hands up and down Sven’s withers, and then peered into Sven’s ear. The poor reindeer was trembling from his close encounter with the wolf, and was standing so close to Kristoff he was almost on the mountain man’s toes. “Would someone please tell me what is going on?”

  As he patted down Sven’s quivering legs, he turned his head, and the yellow speck Anna had thought she’d seen disappeared. It had only been the lantern reflected in eyes. Her panic dissolved, just a little, and she took in where she had led them. They were at the start of a tall, wide tunnel, hewn directly from the rough rock of the castle’s tiny island. The path led away from them, disappearing into more darkness.

  “Where are we?” Elsa tilted her head back and looked up, wide-eyed.

  “It’s called the Earth Giant’s Passage,” Anna said. “It was on the blueprints in the…the secret room.”

  Elsa looked at her for a long moment. “You and that secret room.”

  “What?” Anna said. “It was! And that secret room’s blueprints got us away from the wolf!”

  “So,” Elsa said, clasping her hands together, “do you know where this passage goes?”

  “Not…exactly,” Anna admitted. “I think it goes under the fjord, but it wasn’t clear on the blueprints.”

  “So, you’re telling me it could lead to anywhere, including a dead end?”

  Anna’s stomach twisted. “I…I didn’t think of that.”

  Elsa sighed and shook her head. “It’s fine. I’ll think of a solution.”

  The words stung Anna, as though Elsa had physically thrown them at her. Anna had let her down. If Elsa was this upset about just the blueprints, what would she say if Anna told her she had recited the spell? When exactly was a good time to admit to your sister you’d messed up big-time?

  Suddenly, Sven bellowed. His eyes rolled back, and Anna could see white ringing them. In that same instant, from high above, Anna could hear knives being sharpened. No, not knives. Claws, scraping against a flagstone floor. The wolf was digging for them.

  “We have to go. Now!” Elsa whirled away from Anna, transforming from annoyed sister to commanding queen. “I’ll go first, in case…in case there’s anything up ahead. Olaf, do you think you could…?”

  “Put my eyes on the back of my head?” Olaf swiveled his entire head 180 degrees. “Already done.”

  Elsa nodded. “Thanks. And if things happen, I want you all to run without stopping. Got that?” Without waiting for a reply, Elsa took the lantern from Kristoff and strode forward through the tunnel, the lantern scattering pale shadows across the rough stone walls.

  Kristoff offered his shoulder to Sven, who rested his head on it. “What kind of things do you think Elsa meant?” he whispered to Anna.

  “I think she means if anything goes wrong, we’re supposed to leave her to handle it,” Anna explained.

  “Like, if there’s a cave-in,” Olaf added helpfully. “Or an avalanche, or if there’s a monster, or if you lose a nose, or if the wolf or Gerda or Kai attack us again, or if Kristoff’s eyes turn yellow—?”

  Anna threw a hand over Olaf’s mouth, stopping the plethora of awful possibilities. “We’ll be fine if we just stick together.” She wished and hoped that was true. She withdrew her hand from Olaf, and smiled. “Besides, we have something the wolf doesn’t have.”

  Kristoff raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

  Sven’s ear perked also, waiting for an answer.

  Anna nodded toward the light, and felt her own frustration fade. Even though her sister’s outfit was simple enough—a sensible heather-blue split dress perfect for long days at a desk or afternoons visiting a farm—it still glimmered where the lantern’s light kissed it, just the way that everything Elsa touched seemed to sparkle afterward.

  Anna smiled. “We have Elsa.” And with that, she hurried to catch up.

  They ran as fast as they could through the passage, which is to say not very fast at all. In part because the passage was so roughly hewn that it proved tedious to navigate, and in part because Sven still seemed shaken and terrified of the wolf, which was presumably still scrabbling at the flagstone somewhere far above them. Sympathy flitted through Anna. As terrified as she had been, it must have been a thousand times worse for a reindeer, whose greatest natural threat was the wolf. Anna noticed that Kristoff kept a hand on his best friend’s neck, and now and then, she caught an occasional note as Kristoff sang to him.

  Meanwhile, Olaf, his eyes facing backward, kept treading on the hem of Anna’s travel cloak. The third time it happened, Anna stopped, recalling how Elsa used to carry her long ago, and crouched in front of him. “Olaf, how about a piggyback ride?”

  “Don’t mind if I do!” Olaf said. But without his eyes facing forward, it took him more than a couple of attempts, one of which knocked Anna flat onto her belly. “Ta-da!” Olaf climbed onto her back. “I did it!”

  “You did,” Anna gr
unted. “Just stay put while I try to get up.”

  “Anna?” Olaf asked, sitting on her back. “Are you okay?”

  Anna replied, somewhat breathlessly as she pushed down with her palms, “I’m fine.”

  And that’s when Elsa screamed.

  “ELSA!” Anna cried as a new strength flooded through her. She launched to her feet. Pulse in her throat, she flew down the passage, Olaf clinging to her neck. The tunnel was dark but for the slightest halo of light.

  “Elsa! Kristoff! Sven!” Anna cried. “What’s wrong?!”

  Horrible thoughts stampeded through her mind, but Anna was able to slam them all out except for one: an image of the wolf, silent as the moon, stalking Elsa, while Elsa’s blue eyes drained of their color and shifted to a glowing yellow.

  The tunnel bent slightly, and then there they were: Elsa, Kristoff, and Sven. Anna scanned them for any signs of injury, but nothing seemed amiss. No one was bleeding. In fact, there was no sign of anything wrong. And, the more she thought about it, there was no way the wolf could have possibly passed her in the passage to have reached them up ahead.

  “What’s happening?” Anna panted. “Why did you scream?”

  “Sorry,” Elsa said, her cheeks flushed pink. “I guess I’m a little on edge, and then when I saw it, I, well…” She gestured behind her.

  The tunnel had widened into a chamber, though Anna could see that it narrowed again on the far side of the hall. It looked like a python that had swallowed a whole egg, the egg visible in its gullet. And in the farthest shadows of the chamber, Anna saw—

  “A dragon!” Anna exclaimed, stepping backward only to tread on the hem of her cloak.

  Olaf spun his head around to face forward again, prodding Anna’s ear with his carrot nose. “Silly Anna. It’s not a dragon, it’s a boat shaped like a dragon.”

  Kristoff rested a hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Elsa thought it was a dragon, too,” he said with a kind smile.