Page 12 of Consumed (Shot in the Dark)

L ight frost still covered the barren branches of my favorite perch weeks later. This winter was harsher than most, but I did not feel the cold. It wasn’t the elements that would harm me—it was the all-too-human longing searing a constant hole in my chest that I was certain would do me in.

Time passed, and I forced myself to reckon with the reality that this loneliness was here to stay.

Day by day, I drifted from clearing to clearing with my sisters, forcing myself to remember the eon I had already spent here observing, perfecting, and protecting alongside them before Eoin had entered the forest. Before his blood had touched the same soil as mine.

He would become a beautiful, painful memory. Centuries would pass before the image of his face was entirely erased from my mind.

No, I thought. Even then, I will remember him. It will take thousands of years, and still I will know him.

I was plaiting my sister’s hair with snowdrop blossoms when I felt a disturbance in the air. The wind shivered. Goldfinches burst into flight, scattering into the gray sky.

Someone had entered the woods.

I stood, letting my touch drift from her hair. My sister seized my wrist, her ice blue eyes wide and cutting—

Do not go.

I wrenched away, pushing onward as though in a trance.

I must.

Before I knew it, my legs had taken me to my clearing—crawling along gnarled branches, leaping from tree to tree, bare feet padding along frozen earth—where my favorite oak tree unfurled toward the ground, its ancient branches like an outstretched hand clawing for freedom it would never find.

The glow of a lantern resting upon the ground caught my eye first.

A human knelt at the edge of the creek— my human.

My idiotic heart leapt at the hope that I would not have to suffer centuries alone to forget him. Eoin had come back for me, at last.

A soft sound cut through the meadow, and it took me a moment to realize he was crying.

I slowed my steps, not making myself visible yet as I circled to get a better look at him.

Eoin had never once dared to visit me in the night.

He was slumped with one shoulder against our tree, his eyes bruised with lack of sleep and swollen from crying.

A haze of stubble darkened his jaw as though he hadn’t shaved in days.

His stare was fixed on nothing in particular, still shuddering out half-formed sobs that shook his shoulders.

Oh, how he suffered without me.

I approached from behind, touching his head delicately as I lifted the magic that cloaked me. Eoin started, looking back at me in the lantern’s light. My heart gave another odd lurch at that empty stare—a hollowness that didn’t look like him.

“My Eoin,” I all but whispered when I found my voice. “What pains you so?”

He attempted to form the words several times. I carefully allowed my expression to crumple when he finally choked out, “She’s dead.”

Somehow, uttering those words seemed to ground him back into reality.

“She was taken in the night with no warning. One moment, she was laughing by the fire in my arms. The next…” His expression became faraway again as he was tossed back into that memory.

“We brought her to the liaig, but none of his herbs or tonics could turn the sickness. Brianna wept of a fire in her chest, but it was a fever the healer had not seen before. No one had. Three nights we stayed by her side, and still she—she slipped away.”

Eoin’s last words choked off. As he broke down, I wrapped my arms around him and murmured words of comfort.

While he wept into my gown, I was glad that he could not see the soft curve of my smile.

He allowed me to stroke his hair just like I had done countless times before.

At last, our world was settling back into what it should have been all along.

I forced tears to spill down my cheeks. Carefully catching one in my palm, I felt it harden against my skin.

“Eoin,” I whispered. His sniffling went silent when I offered my open hand—a tiny opalescent gemstone awaited in the pit of my palm. “It’s time. You need not be alone. Don’t suffer this anguish any longer.”

I awaited the satisfaction of watching relief flood his face—that I would graciously allow him back into my life after he betrayed me so cruelly. But the hesitancy in his expression quickly gave way to a flicker of fear—and then, a hardness that rivaled a wildfire.

Face contorting, he struck upward, seizing me by the throat.

The gemstone flew from my hand as he launched to his feet and loomed against me, pressing me against the tree.

A small, curved blade was at my throat, ripped from his belt.

The sting of cold metal sent a jolt of shock racing through my entire body.

“It was you ,” he said in a guttural voice. “I know it was—don’t you dare lie to me.”

His eyes were bloodshot, still flayed with fresh tears. I wanted to trace the path of each drop that streaked across his sun-kissed skin with my tongue.

“Let me go,” I gasped. You’re breaking my heart .

Eoin bared his teeth, pressing the dagger closer. The blade did not hold pure iron—just enough to convince him it would make a difference.

“Some thought it was a wind-illness,” he gritted out. “Others say she angered the gods. I don’t know how— how it was that you did it, but…I know it was you. I should have been wed today, but instead I walked my love to her tomb.”

“Grief has clouded your senses,” I said with what little breath I could draw.

I struggled for leeway to buck him off me, but Eoin’s taller frame easily corralled me back into place against the unforgiving bark.

I could feel the hard-earned strength from his years laboring as a craftsman, the way he could easily throw me about if I allowed him.

There was a new gleam surfacing in his eyes, as though he was just realizing this, too.

Unbidden memories of running, sobbing, hiding cut across my mind—the girl I had once been. I clenched my jaw and silenced the mourning that threatened to unravel me.

“No—I’ve never been more clear of mind.” Eoin sneered as though seeing something hideous instead of my perfected, ethereal beauty. “The Wild Hunt is fast approaching.”

My eyes widened, and I stopped struggling. His words sank in slowly, painfully.

“You…you brought hunters here?”

The blaze of satisfaction in his eyes was answer enough. “They’re close now. I saw them coming. They know precisely what to do with the likes of you. A monster .” He leaned forward, the last words brushing against my cheek.

Enough .

Something severed in me, something hungry and animal and terrified to die a second time. I could no longer afford to be gentle.

I slammed both my palms against the tree at my back.

The oak’s roots burst from the ground, writhing at unnatural angles like starving serpents.

Despite the winter, the clearing erupted with feverish green.

Vines, coarse and covered in thorns, sprouted from the many chasms now littering the soil, twisting around Eoin’s ankles.

Blood, the forest roared to him. There will be blood.

He shouted, jumping away from me. He slashed at the vines with that pathetic little blade of his, and I winced as he successfully severed a pair of vines.

I narrowed my eyes, honing my target. The roots slithered fast, faster than Eoin could react.

They knocked him to the ground, winding over his arms and legs as he gasped for air.

The dagger was lost, devoured by the mess of vines along the ground, along with the light from the lantern.

When Eoin was barely able to struggle against the earthen bindings, I approached him slowly, cloaked in shadows.

Tree limbs parted, allowing only enough moonlight for him to see me—a beautiful, bloodthirsty creature of the forest with jagged branches haloing me overhead.

Tears coursed freely down my cheeks, thudding gently onto the forest floor as gemstones.

“I am not a monster,” I said, my voice returning to its quiet strength. “You see, I understand what I am now.”

The vines parted for my every step to offer a cushion of the moss that lay beneath.

I knelt over him, smiling gently even though a terrified sweat glistened on his brow and turned his gaze wild.

A single lock of his hair was strewn across his forehead.

I tucked it back into place, unflinching when he growled in his throat, trying to lean away from me.

“My life was taken here, on the very ground you lie upon,” I explained. “The forest took me in, gave me a new life. A lonely life—one without passion and true purpose… Until you found me. Until you bled upon the ground where I died. You made me remember what it was like to feel .”

I smiled widely at him, breathless. Finally, I could tell him everything. Even speaking of it, I felt every emotion with keen, intoxicating fervor.

“You made me know desire again. Joy, lust, and heartache. You had no idea the gift and curse you set upon me.” My gaze briefly lost focus as I considered the soil beneath our bodies—and who lay beneath it.

“But other things came with it. Memories. Terrible fragments of another life. What it felt like to perish, to claw for survival while my soul is ripped away.”

“Róisín,” Eoin rasped in a thready semblance of a command. “Release me. Now .”

I cupped his face between my hands, even as he gritted his teeth and tried to pull away. I held him steady, forcing his eyes to me.

“Don’t you see? We are two souls entwined by the thread of destiny. The forest delivered you to me as a gift after all these years. A chance for me to love again—for both of us.”

Eoin spat, catching me full on the cheek. I brushed it away, my gaze shuttering.

“I don’t love you,” Eoin growled. “I will die before ever loving a creature like you.”