Book Five: Chapter 135

There was a thump from upstairs. They looked at each other, and then Mike looked at the front door.

“Don’t suppose it would make sense for us to run, do you?” he asked.

The thump repeated itself. Mike pushed Kisa behind him and moved toward the stairs, his palms suddenly sweaty. Kisa shoved past him before they got to the top of the stairs, and he tried to grab her and pull her back, but he was too slow.

“What the hell?” Kisa looked over her shoulder at him. “I don’t get it.”

He climbed the last three stairs and saw what she was looking at. Instead of the upper floor, they now stood in a thicket of pines. Between a pair of gnarled trees, a massive stag stopped to regard them.

Kisa moved toward the nearest wall and ran her hands along it. “It turns into this tree,” she told him while peeking through its branches. “It’s almost like the cabin—”

“Is the forest,” he finished, then knelt to touch the soil. When he buried his finger in it deep enough, he