Page 95 of Shifting Hearts

ONE

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T he forest’s silence might have been unnerving if I hadn’t grown up listening to the tree’s breaths.

The intertwined canopy closed up only a handsbreadth above my head, the twisted branches interlaced so tightly that they obscured nearly all light.

The whole effect created a shadowy blanket that stretched for miles beneath the crisscrossed wooden fingers letting in scant glimpses of the constantly overcast sky, situated between one small cottage.

One in a field of wild flowers at one end of the forest, and the other at a foreboding cliff face, assaulted by sharp winds and often snowed in during the coldest months.

But inside the forest neither sunlight nor snow touches the soft earth floor.

Here, quiet reigned. Only the trees whispered to one another, ignoring the cottages positioned like sentinels at either side of the range.

And me in the middle, traipsing beneath the creaking branches, followed by a trail of children who I barely knew.

I picked my way through the deepest of dark places, counting the steps in my head as we walked. A familiar tune fell from my lips despite that I understood the value of silence in the center of the forest.

Less than a mile to go .

So much could happen in the time between one cottage and the next. My feet didn't ache from the walk. Only the coldness that pervaded my bare soles eked in via the hard packed dirt of the newly carved path through the forest’s heart. A dichotomy of what was real, and what was not.

Out here I was used to that strangeness, too.

Every time I entered the forest, something changed.

Or everything.

Things we couldn’t see flickered between thick trunks that melded in the gloom to create a wall of impassable nothingness.

False shadow birds circled above us, as though the canopy itself had an imagination, creating the creatures out of their blackened, skeletal sticks like paper cranes.

Silent cries shrieked overhead, picking at the skills of my pitiful train of children, warning us against all the things that waited in the darkness.

Beyond.

A frisson of fear rippled through the children linked by their hands. I turned back to count dirty heads, ensuring I still had the same number as I did when we entered the forest so many miles back. I couldn’t lose any one now, not when we were so close to freedom.

Huge eyes stared back at me, hope simmering beneath the surface. My heart clenched at the simple signature of their so easily given trust.

It has been a long time since I lost a child to these depths, a long time since the eyes that watched let me see, if only for a brief glimpse, before the forest closed out the terror that waited.

Watching.

Something squealed, and my cloak yanked toward the ground. A small, warm body stumbled against my heels when I stopped, looking about us before I pivoted and knelt at ground level.

My heart raced but no scream ripped from my lips. Another fright I’d become accustomed to in my mere nineteen years that seemed so much longer. An eternity of fear living and playing near the forest. When I turned fifteen, I entered the path that opened for me between two trunks for the first time.

As though the forest expected me.

Invited .

Four years of escorting hundreds of children beneath the twisted sticks. Along the paths I swore grew just for my feet to pass between the ancient trunks.

Four years of wondering when the shadows might reach out and steal any one of us away at any time.

When the next breath each of us breathed might be our last.

When the trees might finally touch me.

Since I had been allowed to help out with transporting Gran’s foster children from one cottage to the next like a static heart between beats, a warden through the woods.

Haunted woods at that, the stuff of ghost stories.

All that was missing was a gothic house in the center of the forest, with turreted towers and a witch bearing spells to unwary travelers.

But that wasn’t our destination, and I’d never made it to the very center.

The forest never allowed it. And if it did, then I didn’t expect that anyone lived there.

The forest might breathe, but it wasn’t alive, exactly.

Not in the sense that we existed, all creatures of hearts and blood and bones and thoughts.

This was a place of earth and shadows, twisted thoughts where nightmares drifted, untethered.

“Brynnie.” The softest whisper and another tug of my clock reminded me that my attention needed to be at ground level, not with the trees, but still my mind drifted to our destination that called to us all.

A siren song in sunlight and sweet, open air.

My mother's cottage waited just outside the thick shadows in a green clearing where wild flowers bloomed year round, and the sun offered a gentle heat of the life giving variety. There, evenings were filled with clear skies, and constellations I named in the shapes of mythical beasts that one roamed the lands but no more. Nights were safe from the eyes that never stopped seeking within the forest’s boundary.

There, the world turned on. In here, it stopped, like me.

And when I looked down at the small boy who managed to faceplant into my ankles, all I saw was a dirty, ash-blond head of hair in desperate need of a haircut harboring a fragile, muted glow of innocence that I’d long forgotten.

Then he looked up, and the facade of purity was torn away by the pale, dead eyes that stared back and no longer held the wonder any boy his age should possess. A marbled pattern coated his cheeks in a variety of yellows and purples, reminding me that evils came in many forms.

“Up you get, Joey. We can’t stay here. Remember what I told you before we left?

” I strove to keep the tension out of my voice as I found the tiny pair of hands still tugging repetitively at my burgundy cloak.

It took a few goes, but I managed to peel his dirt encrusted fingers free, though I didn’t let him go.

Not that he would have let me, but I needed to give him some measure of security amidst his horrifying existence.

I held on to his tiny hands, squeezing gently. “Would you like to sing with me?”

The rescued boy who still bore signs of his abuse nodded. “Yes please, Brynnie.” His filthy thumb aimed for his mouth.

I tapped the petri dish of a digit away. His hand fell limply to his side. “Okay, here we go.” I hummed the opening bars to Follow the Yellow Brick Road in a terribly off key way.

The kids giggled, clustering around me as I tried to listen for sounds outside our little cluster, and not game to tell them my actual singing voice was just as bad as my humming.

It isn’t wise to stop for too long.

At least they’re laughing in the face of abject terror.

But fear didn’t reflect in their eyes. When I risked a glance around the small group clustered at my knees, I was rewarded with a glimpse of hope.

In me.

Swallowing bile at the memory of the child snatched from within my grasp, whisked away into the depths of the forest away from my reach, I danced forward.

Careful to keep each bobbing head close, we skipped toward the edge of the forest. Even though I knew the darkwood was unoccupied, I kept an eye out for shapes materializing close by that resembled some vaguely humanoid form.

But we wouldn’t meet a magical wizard within this darkened realm, or even a fake one.

The only rescue at the end of this path was my mother’s cooking.

Which, if I timed my entrance well and unscathed, the kids would devour and I’d be able to sleep for the night.

Tomorrow I’d take her offerings back to Gran’s for another load of recently freed children from the abuse they had suffered.

Recovered from a short period at grans, they would sleep in a bed safely for a scant night or two before they crossed the forest with only my fears and each other for company.

If my fears don’t join us every step of our journey.

Perhaps guilt weighed me down and made me look over my shoulder. Tried not to see what I thought I saw.

Pretended not to see.

Last night, trying to stifle my heavy breaths in my bedroom as I sought release from my fears that the trek through the forest heightened, I could have sworn those same eyes that observed me then when they shouldn't watch me now. That the heavy breaths weren’t mine alone, and that there, just through the iced-over glass in the spare bedroom where I lay, something that watched my path through the day drew closer at night.

That the eyes saw what I did: a ruin of sins and fear in a house of haven. A refuge that I tainted just by being there.

My shame and guilt quickened my steps. Was my observer of last night watching me now? I didn’t stare into the darkness too hard, because knowing what was beyond shattered that fine line between terror and pleasure.

Where illusion bled into reality.

I knew that tonight, when we were all safe on the other side of the forest in the clearing of sunshine and starlight, I’d try to reclaim that same blur between what was real or not again.

I am a ruined, dark thing, a creature who belongs to the shadows.

If only the shadows wished to claim me.

Instead, I was alone. Untouched and unloved except for the silent, dark hours I stole for myself when others slept.

And someone watched.

Shoving my selfishness aside, I skipped and sang and played children's games of hope and trust as though we meandered through trees without a threat above our heads or below our feet.

Cold tendrils teased my soles as I danced, though the paths were as clear and well edged as always, like they were designed that way, just for me.

To find oneself lost in the trees was to court death. No weeds grew here, and no true birds called. Nothing moved inside the forest, except sometimes me.

And maybe the trees.

I cast a shifty glance across the shadowscape before me.