Page 97 of Shifting Hearts

TWO

WOLF

I tasted her fear and reveled in it. The way she stared between the shadows, right through me like she knew exactly where I stood, left my hips jerking with the need to slam her to the ground and remove any sliver of innocence she might still possess.

That, and the way she protected the kids. Not that I had the luxury of morals, not in my line of work. Still, her fear tasted like prey I chased beyond the forest for hours, edging myself to satisfy the type of hunger that only came with the chase, and never with catching the object of my desire.

She thought the forest watched her, that evil stalked her steps, ready to snatch her wards from her fine, pale hands.

She was right. And she was wrong.

My little treat didn't live by the grace of her sacrifices, thinking that here, she alone protected them.

Nor did she have any idea why I followed her, or why I let her see my eyes years ago, when she first entered the forest. Then, when I approached her, even in the shadows, she baulked at my presence, pushing me away.

And even though I knew she was the perfect mate, I kept that knowledge inside as it ate at me.

And I watched. Waited, just like the other creature in the forest who knew that she belonged to us, though he hadn’t admitted to knowing it yet.

Soon, she would know. Because I refused to wait any longer. Then she would be mine, perfect and tender and ripe. Like the hunter I’d been for so long, her stalker, I tasted her footprints, searing her flavor into my tongue.

My treat was addictive, the drug I kept myself high on between jobs. And this would be my sweetest delicacy yet.

“Are you done?” Dagan’s raspy voice moved with him as he flowed between trees.

The forest dweller slid from trunk to trunk until he stood next to me, his skin bearing the patterns of the elm he stepped from last, his surfaces hard and roughened next to my muted gray fur.

His feet pressed over her imprints, removing the last of her lingering scent.

I growled my displeasure. "If you insist on touching her with your leaves and branches, you’ll scare her off and we won’t have this…pleasure again.” I glared at the treeman as his skin returned to normal.

Two out of time beings who shared an obsession in a human world.

Bryn.

My claws and teeth retracted painfully as I worked my jaw, letting my body find its way through the fur that decorated the forest’s path. A path that would cease to exist the moment we stepped away from it.

Away from her .

I wished I kept a talon out to slice across the tree dweller’s sap filled veins as they softened from whatever the fuck else ran through them when he was the forest, compared to in his human form.

When the tree god reverted to a mortal being, for a few scant moments.

“Bryn has it wrong.” I didn’t realize I spoke aloud until Dagan looked at me.

“Which part?” he whispered, his voice crackling like dry leaves born on a wind of fire.

“She thinks things live here. Evil things.” I knew she thought many creatures existed in the shadows, which was true of the living forest itself. The rest of the wood’s inhabitants left long ago. But the pure terrors…those bloomed on the other side of Dagan’s control. Outside my realm.

"You can talk.” Dagan stared at the forest's edge like he might call her back to us.

It had been long weeks since she last tread the forest floor with her bare feet, connecting us all. Since then, our combined need for her grew. An odd coupling, perhaps—a wolf shifter, a tree god or demon, depending on who we killed—and a girl who walked where she shouldn’t.

But then, Bryn had no real place in the world. Not here, nor there, nor the other place. Always sleeping in a borrowed bed in her family’s home, always welcome to be unwelcome beneath the knotted trunks and darkened shadows that touched and teased her.

The Woodsman raised his fingers to his lips, and licked the tips. “I can still taste her.”

Hackles rose at the back of my neck. “If you take her off the path, she’ll die. She isn’t made to take your…girth.” I pursed my lips, licked them, trying to eke back that remnant of her scent from the still air.

My addiction.

His, too, though he’d never admit to it. Three thousand years his trees had stood, a barrier between two points, and he never tasted the humans who traveled between. Not since a girl he met when his trees were green, his boughs laden with forest fare.

She didn’t survive his version of love. We both feared the same fate for Bryn.

Dagan stiffened. “I won’t touch her. She has lived here for nineteen years, and I have never taken anything from her.”

“No, you just gave her a dose of fear. Liar,” I added idly to my snark. “You touched her today.”

“Only the briefest caress.” His whisper floated around us like a broken promise.

Dagan canted his dark head. His features stilled, carved.

“You are jealous.” He made the truth a statement.

Not that he talked to many; if he left his forest it would wither, and so would he.

“Perhaps if you talked to her like a normal person, you might earn that which you crave. "

I close my eyes, breathing out slowly. "What do you know of cravings?"

His lips twisted at one end of a sardonic smile. "Do I need to remind you?"

"Always answering a question with a question,” I grumbled. "If you have nothing real to say, then…" I leaned back under the facade of stretching, though I peered through the trees, still seeking her like a stalker.

My prey.

Dagan scuffed at the path he created for her to walk. “I heard something last night. Down by the western hills. A sour scent on my leaves. Snow.”

I shot him a sharp look. "Snow?"

He watched me idly with the patience of the forest. "I assume it wasn't you." His words came out soft and raspy still, unchanging.

“I slept on that side of the forest too. Near the…house.” My lips curled.

“But I didn't see snow. She was at the cottage, and it was battered by sleet in the night, as always. Wind and ice, but never soft snow.” I forced the words out through clenched teeth, making myself recite the truth I wanted to keep for myself.

The secrets she thought no one else heard that I savored.

“I watched her.” My wolf lurked so close to the surface, that my skin grayed with his markings.

"I slept beneath her window, listening to her sounds, the ones she made there all night.

" Dagan made a disparaging noise, and I sent him a sidelong look.

"She's not that innocent, " I finished softly, unwilling to share what I scented on the air through the thin, cracked glass.

The mountain plateau’s house wasn’t nearly as secure as my red-haired obsession would have me believe.

The mortar between mud bricks grew thin, its upkeep failing under the grandmother’s distracted attention.

The stone house was an inch from crumbling with age, and other things.

Mice nested in the crevices, and the walls bowed out from the presences ensconced within.

Her presence was the only one I cared for, the children in transit to and from their horrors a necessary distraction.

When she wandered outside the house, collecting the drier sticks that blew away from the forest's edge, I stalked her. When she slept, I crept to her window in my full wolf form, my ears pricked and waited. It wasn’t long before sweet moans reached me, muted beneath her hand as the other worked her body with its pine hewn toy.

Dagan would rip her apart if he knew she used a carved, smoothed piece of himself to bring herself pleasure, soaking the handmade toy with her heat.

I broke my promise to myself then, finding my human form, standing naked in the sleet, and worked myself into a frenzy beneath the windowsill. I reaching my peak with her until our breaths matched and we came together.

But the tree man didn’t need to know any of that at all.

“It is nearly time to end this,” Dagan murmured.

His body wavered, and I knew our conversation had reached its conclusion. I bared my teeth. We’re not done. The tree man’s eyes danced with his brand of odd humor.

“Nice seeing you," I muttered as I leaned down and grabbed my clothes from the hollow of a tree where I stored them last time I was in this part of the forest. Fiddling with the undershirt, then the jacket and jeans, I danced in a twisted pirouette. “Taa-daa.”

I strode toward the edge of the forest, intent on watching the cottage a little longer before I went into town to find an unsatisfying dinner of the cooked variety. Dagan didn’t like me killing in his woods, not unless it was absolutely necessary.

"Haven’t you forgotten something?” His voice halted me.

I glanced back, tapping my face, and shrugged. “Fur’s all gone.”

He cleared his throat, amusement coating his voice. “Shoes, wolf. You always forget.”

Cursing, I stopped and looked down at my feet, still bearing my wolf’s claws. The pads created large, and very inhuman, marks in cold ground.

"Fuck.” I always forgot something. "Faces, shoes… Why can’t humans go barefoot all the time?"

“Who knows.” Dagan’s voice drifted away like the rest of him. Indistinct. Forgotten.

When I looked back, he had already melded into the forest. Leaves rustled above me as he moved seamlessly from place to place, returning to his place as the forest’s heart.

I found my boots and threw them on, not worrying about socks – damned things. Each step I took forced me closer to my human side, the less controlled aspect of my beast. Or not-beast.

As a wolf I chose my actions, sought my prey, hunting her with a sole focus in mind.

But in my human form, chaos and need ruled me, with no singular focus to narrow my actions.

I tried to calm my wildness into something more relatable on my way to town, barely sparing a glance for the cottage that glowed with warmth and love and family.

All the things it was supposed to be, with Bryn ensconced behind its closed doors. No, my place tonight had to be far, far away from what I craved in both forms, lest she not survive the night.

After all, my wolf was hungry.