This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

police training kicked in. “We shouldn’t move him,” she said to Hammar. “There might be…damage to the spine.”

“Skitsnack,” Hammar said. Nonsense. He kneeled to take the boy in his arms.

Blood blossomed on the child’s face. For a sick second Brand thought of a hemorrhage, but she realized Hammar’s nose was dripping bright vermilion drops whenever he moved.

“Lilla vän,” Hammar said, still favoring Swedish. “Säg något!” Can you say something?

Brand looked over at Hammar. His face was smeared with blood. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” Hammar said. “Näsblod.”

The child in his arms would not quit moaning. “We need a…” Hammar said.

“A blanket?” Brand said.

“A phone,” Hammar said. Brand felt like an idiot. She could only conclude her cop competence had been left behind when she had flown across the Atlantic. She wondered about the effects of shock, for the child as well as for her and Hammar.

She dug into her pocket for her cell phone.

Hammar began delicately probing the limbs of the whimpering child. “I’m not sure, but I can’t find anything broken.”

“No coverage,” Brand said, staring dumbly at the cell phone screen. Her phone had been failing to connect ever since she arrived in Sweden.

“I’ve got a phone in my—” Hammar began to say, then he cut himself off. His face expressed alarm.

Brand followed the direction of his look. A sneaking clutch of children had crept around the Saab, ten meters back along the road. They displayed the same unseasonably skimpy clothes as the injured boy. There were four or five of the waifs. Brand couldn’t tell exactly how many. One halted at the open passenger door. Another ducked inside. A third was already dashing away from the car, dragging a leather satchel belonging to Hammar.

Brand couldn’t think straight. Evidently the Saab had been set upon by a gang of thieving street urchins who for some reason chose to inhabit the woods. Forest urchins.

“Hey!” she called. From her kneeling position she pulled herself upright.

The key-alarm dinging abruptly ceased. The child who was reaching inside the car had snatched the ignition keys.

“Fuck!” Hammar exclaimed. “Era små djävlar!” You little devils! He lurched forward, causing the boy in his arms to moan afresh.

The looting of the Saab went along like lightning. Before Brand could step back onto the roadway, she saw the children gather up Hammar’s camera and cell phone.

Seeing Brand emerge from the ditch back onto the road, one of the gang of lost boys, an older, taller one, emitted a sentinel-like alarm, a quick, chirp-like whistle.

The children scattered. Dragging their treasure—Brand’s sweater, a bag of potato chips, Hammar’s leather satchel—they disappeared, crowing, into the shelter of the woods. Brand realized that they weren’t all lost boys. One was a tiny girl in a ragged black dress and tattered leggings. She had crawled out from somewhere, seemingly from beneath the car.

Behind Brand, Hammar had straightened up also. He still dripped blood and still cradled the injured boy in his arms.

With a violent animal-like twist of his body, the child slipped out of Hammar’s grasp. He ducked away and ran again out onto the roadway. He displayed no apparent injury from his recent impact with the Saab. Scooping up his wayward boot, he hopped along while slipping it onto his bare foot. Then he staggered off on the trail of his partners in crime.

The boy flung a middle finger behind him as he fled.

Cursing volubly, holding up the sleeve of his jacket to his streaming nose, Hammar lurched after the boy at a run.

“Wait,” Brand called to him. Then she stopped. My pistol, she thought.

“There’s a loaded weapon in there,” she murmured aloud to no one. The awful truth served to stun her as sure as if she had just received a sharp blow to the head.

Had she really seen what she thought she had seen? The girl in the shabby black dress had grabbed Brand’s backpack. Now the child scampered down the slope with it, thirty meters away and disappearing fast.

With her went Brand’s smuggled firearm.

22.

The blizzard hit full force while Brand struggled through the deep drifts in the forest outside Västvall village. She had left the disabled Saab behind to follow the tracks of the fleeing kid thieves. Once she stumbled across the blood-spattered trail of Hammar and his quarry. She almost instantly lost that track, too, becoming increasingly disoriented.

“Hammar,” she called out, only to hear her words swallowed by storm winds that had risen quite suddenly to a howl. Soon the human footprints on the forest floor became obscured by blowing snow. The air around Brand filled with swarms of glistening crystals, sharp and stinging. Darkness dropped with a velocity that astonished her. Any leftover daylight became eclipsed by the blizzard.

Brand’s only possible choice was to follow the sloping ground downward. She assumed that eventually she would come to the floor of the low-land and the village.

If I don’t freeze to death first, she thought morosely.

She knew the Swedes believed or pretended to believe in spirits loose in the forest. The urskog, as Hammar had called the woods she found herself in. On the night of the Dalgren family reunion, Lukas had told ghost stories about the forest spirits, entertaining the numberless nephews, nieces and grandchildren that had gathered.

“Huldror, pretty ladies of the forest who will lead you to your doom,” he had said, using a dramatic, woo-woo voice. “From the front, they appear to be beautiful maidens. From behind they’re hideous, and sometimes they have a tail!”

The children screamed with frightened delight.

Now Brand was in pursuit of a huldra of her own, a tiny girl in a black dress, dragging a backpack with a loaded weapon in it.

She felt enveloped in a dream. The larcenous children certainly hadn’t seemed real to her. They were wood imps summoned forth by the trespass of a citified foreigner, an intruder who had dared to enter the depths of the urskog. They were here to bedevil her.

Such mythical creatures never came unaccompanied. Not only huldror haunted the forests,