BAZ

I'm a wreck. All I really want is to climb into bed, but I have to feed. After the Crowley forsaken plastic cups of coagulated slop I've been surviving on (if you can call it that) I'm almost looking forward to the taste of fresh blood.

It's the catacombs or the woods. If I'm outside the moat too late I'll have a hard time getting back into the castle, particularly with my magic at such a low ebb. But I don't think I can stomach being in the dark right now. It's going to take some time before I'll willingly close myself up underground again. Sorry Mother. The Wavering Wood it is.

As my foot falls onto the dried leaves at the Wood's edge, a dryad emerges from behind a tree. Her skin is like bark, gray and ridged. She frowns at me.

"Your chosen one seeks you, bloodeater."

"Who?" I ask. Which shows how off I am. Of course it's bloody Simon Snow, and of course he was looking for me. Is he ever not?

"Your chosen one," she repeats. "The boy with the sharp sword and the golden curls."

"They're more like bronze." I frown. "And he's not my chosen one."

"More yours than mine, magician." She twirls and begins to drift away. "If you don't want to hear what your bronze-haired seeker was doing in our woods that's none of my affair. Though my sisters and I would appreciate it if you'd tell him to cool his jets." She stops moving and tilts her head at me. Waiting for what, I don't know. For me to ask about Simon? Her toes are hanging in the air just above the ground. She taps one booted foot impatiently on nothing.

I don't say anything, but she has the patience of a typical dryad, which is not much, so the silence is short.

"He spoke of fire and enemies but his words…" She trails off, flipping her wrist dismissively and raising her mossy eyebrows. "…did not match his actions."

"That's nothing new," I mutter.

She begins to drift away again.

I follow her. "Well?"

"Well what?" She stops and settles just above a decaying log.

"What were his actions?"

She tilts her head again and squints at me. "Desperate. Look around." She gestures with her arm and for the first time since I walked into the woods I really focus on what I'm seeing. The trees have been thinned since my last visit; several smaller ones are been lying on the ground and those that remain bear slash marks, as if someone came through hacking at every obstacle with a machete. Or a sword. It wasn't like this on my most recent visit to the woods—that day last spring when I held Agatha's hands purely to spite Simon and he got the better of me anyway—letting the Humdrum whisk him away like that. Taking my breath away with him.

The dryad is talking to me again.

"One who hunts an enemy uses caution. One who works so impetuously," she curls her lip in disgust at the destruction around us, "is seeking something precious."

There's nothing I can think of to say to that. And I'm here because I have to feed, after all. I start to walk away.

"He asked after his roommate," she says. "His Baz."

I turn. "His Baz? He said that?"

She shrugs, the parasol over her shoulder rising and falling.

"Not with his words."

Dryads! This is why I stopped bothering with them them years ago. Even though I know they watch me when I'm in the Wood. At fifteen, confused and changing and lonely, I thought maybe they would be my friends, but they're all enigma and meddling, and protective of their precious forest.

As if is she's read my mind, she turns her head towards me again. "Feed, dead one. Then go to your chosen one. Calm him, so he leaves our trees alone."

I snort. Calm him. As if.

"There is a doe," she says, "there." She points the tip of her umbrella through the trees before floating away in the opposite direction.