Page 22 of The Bleeding Woods

I don’t think I’ve ever been quite this happy. Dancing with Jasper is effervescent paradise. I’d been so silly to deny him, to turn away from our sweet shadows.

Pills. How foolish. I don’t want those pills, because I don’t want to be human.

Why on earth would I want such a thing? Jasper’s saved me from the cacophony of the city.

Yet there I was, dreaming haplessly of going back.

Jasper’s whisked me from a world that could never understand me.

Here, with him, I am eternally understood.

All I’ve ever desired lives in him. All I could ever hope to desire lives in him.

“Clara?” a voice calls out. I barely recognize it. “Clara, where are you?”

Raymond, was it? Jason? No, that’s not right.

Grayson.

There he is. Grayson, all tall, blond, and dauntless. He’s entered my and Jasper’s speakeasy with only a quarter of my love’s grace. At the edges, sickly green light claws through. Slashes in the fabric of this reality are forming, and it’s Grayson’s fault.

I hate him for it. I love him for it. Leave me. Save me.

“Clara!” he yells.

Suddenly, I’m in his arms. He’s thrown one beneath my knees and the other behind my shoulder blade. He sweeps me up like a bride. The ground shakes.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of here! Just hold on!”

The ground trembles. I feel Jasper’s temper surging toward us, an inferno of emotion.

I feel him, invisible but still very much in our air space.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch him skittering behind a metal tile curled down by gravity.

He’s returned to his true form, our true form, and he’s taken to the walls in a spiderlike swirl of limbs.

“Grayson, I—I . . .”

You’re mine, little love. Not his. Mine.

My head lops onto Grayson’s chest. It’s too empty, too full. Too light, too heavy. “I’m sorry . . .”

He kisses the crown of my skull, and suddenly I’m safe.

Jasper’s rage multiplies tenfold. The roots he commands dive down through the tectonic earth that the complex is embedded in.

Vines surge toward the structure, shredding it like a piece of printer paper.

The ground crumbles and quakes. It collapses.

All around us, glass and gadgetry fall like deadly rainfall.

Every hit to the ground sets off a pocket explosion of serrated edges.

Grayson tears through the corridor I’d sleepwalked down, returning to the emergency exit chamber.

Jade is in a panic to collect all she can carry.

However, as the ceiling caves in, she abandons it all to scoop up Joey.

We climb back up to the mouth of the cave with only seconds to spare.

A belch of metallic air chases us alongside a tremendously loud concatenation of bangs.

Night has fallen over the woods but not over our souls.

Despite the odds, we’ve made it out alive.

Joey cries into Jade’s crewneck. I latch on to the lapel of Grayson’s jacket.

We return to the Hummer in complete silence, following hapless intuition and the ghostly glow of the moon.

Not his. Mine.

Mine, mine, mine.

I should be terrified. I saw what he became, and in him, I see all I can be. I’m not sure I like it. I’m not sure I want it. I’m not sure I’d like it even if I wanted it.

But . . . oh, how it felt to be shrouded in shadows his flavor of the dark.

When Grayson, sweet and sensible and sound asleep beside his brother, touches me, I turn to light.

Light has its limitations. Does he seek to impose them?

Does he plan to place me in a bulb? How much more, Grayson Warner?

How much of me will you take if I were to offer?

How much would you demand that I be if I let myself be something for you?

Jasper would never ask for more than I am.

Only Jasper accepts the beastly heart that beats in me, because only Jasper can.

He’ll teach me to dance. He’ll help me unlearn the steps I’ve been taught.

We’ll make melodies of motion all our own.

We’ll make everything all our own. Anything is possible with him; everything is possible with him.

Not his. Mine.

Not Grayson’s. Jasper’s.

I leave the Hummer like a wisp, following his footpath of harmonies.

The forest is his concert hall, his opera house, and his royal theater.

Every facet of the natural world becomes an instrument to create sonic picture frames for the art that is his voice.

Jasper. Jasper. Jasper. Space tastes like his strawberry-licorice lips.

Dark matter dusts it with delusion. In this place, we can be as we were meant to be.

We can be together, in a pocket of predestined forever.

“Clara.” He emerges from a veil between two trunks, his hands eager to anchor themselves on my hips.

He kisses me desperately, first with just the sound of my name, then with his corporeal form.

“I’m so sorry, my dear. You were never in any danger, I swear.

I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. ”

He lifts a palm to my throat, his fingers easily stretching to encircle it in totality. His sharp nails tease the nape of my neck, tickling it as his hold on me tightens. For a moment, I cannot breathe, but it’s a perfect opportunity to realize I don’t need to, not if he tells me so.

“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you,” he repeats.

“Of course . . . y-you wouldn’t have. I’m yours.”

His dark eyebrow arches. Shortly after, that crooked smile, pure nitrous oxide, returns with a blissful vengeance. “Oh, you—you are so . . . so good.”

My knees threaten to drop out from under me. I want to fall forward into his embrace, press myself to his chest, and never depart from him again. However, the space between us, the threshold between here and home, is interrupted when a shower of pebbles is hurled in our direction.

“Get away from her!”

Joey.

Jasper whirls us around, stepping in front of me to ensure I am shielded from the rocky rainfall.

As they hit him, they dissipate into tiny explosions of scarlet sparks.

His back is morphing, bones writhing like captive snakes beneath the skin.

His skin shifts in coloration, switching through every human tone before looping back to a spectral shade of gray.

Even the length of his hair moves, unable to decide on how to drape off his head.

“Well.” His voice reverberates through the ground, flying like telepathic bullets into Joey’s ears. “That’s not very nice.”

Joey holds his hands around his head, falling onto the leaves below with a whine. My first thought is to help him. Why is my first thought to help him? I should stay beside Jasper, shouldn’t I?

My legs are already moving. I’m already with Joey, on the opposite side of the battlefield. “Joey, you can’t be here. Go back to the car,” I plead, hauling him up, dusting him off, and giving him a push in the direction from which he came.

“I’m not leaving you here, Clara! Stop acting crazy!”

“I’m not acting crazy. I promise. Jasper and I were just—”

“That thing is doing something to you! Can’t you see it? It’s controlling you!”

A pang rips through my chest. Thing. No one should be called a thing.

I can’t entirely dispute him about something being done to me, though.

I feel . . . fuzzy. Wisps of red tingle through the folds of my irises.

I’ll handle it later. Right now, Joey is my priority, and he needs to be anywhere but here.

“Joey, I’m okay. I’ll come back to the car as soon as I’m done here. Go. Please go.”

“I’m getting Jade and Grayson!”

No! My expression speaks before my mouth does.

My head might not be steadily perched on my shoulders right now, but I have enough sense in me to remember how .

. . how dangerous Jasper is. If he’s half as powerful as I am, I don’t even want to imagine what he is capable of.

I’m in his good graces, but the same might not be true for the others.

Snap out of it, Clara. The same isn’t true for the others. He’ll kill them.

“No.” I balance my voice until it is hard and stern. “It’s not safe, Joey.”

His face twists into a terrified frown, his eyes going watery again as he reads me like a billboard.

He turns on his heel and starts running as fast as his legs will carry him.

The soles of his beaten sneakers fail to grip the murky mud below them, causing him to slip.

He’s back on his feet with feverish fury, charging for the Hummer too far away to be spotted in the gloom.

I turn back to Jasper. Something seems different about him. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I can quite remember that I’d forgotten to take my pill. I’d forgotten to build today’s chemical bridge back to my humanity.

“Are you doing something to me?” I ask, lucid.

He stalls. Then he smiles, creating a slit of pearly sharpness that rivals the crescent moon in the sky. “Allow me to correct this, my love.”

It happens too quickly.

He unravels into a bouquet of black, emaciated limbs. Like a recluse coiling around paralyzed prey, he gathers me in a flurry of crackling motion. The two of us sink into the shadows and ride them across spaces unseen.

We follow Joey, going impossibly fast. Too fast for him to outrun.

Once in front of him, Jasper extends a hand in the direction of a particularly spindly tree.

I am behind him, heart racing and head spinning.

The tree emits a horrific succession of snaps and begins bending like broken limbs toward Joey’s torso.

Its branches, those hungry hands, enwrap his small body like an owl’s claw around a mouse.

He screams, but the sound is short lived.

It is replaced by the worst kind of cry, the kind that is hushed by a surge of pain.

The limbs of the tree have started piercing through his abdomen, exploring his internal world.

It’s surgical and meticulous, but also lawless in the way all nature is.

Blood spills down his sweatpants, along with loops of intestines still keen on digesting chocolate.

The branches proceed to spiral up his spine, now exposed to the air.

Like a staircase, it climbs the length of his body until finally reaching the top.

Once there, a single stalk shoots beyond his jaw, coming through gaping lips that will never smile again.

The last glimmer of life in his eyes is filled with panic, pain, and fear.

It is extinguished too quickly to be caught, but too slowly to insinuate Jasper had been merciful.

As though the corpse has become some kind of art piece, small red florets bloom from his blood.

Jasper plucks them. One by one, he consumes the petals, and petal by petal, his human form stabilizes.

Everything about him, and about the forest, intensifies.

When he turns back to me, his eyes are sweet honey, and his smile is just as charming as it had been when he handed me back that ten-dollar bill.

I do not smile back.

“Joey . . .” I shake my head in disbelief.

“He’s just a human, love. He’s nothing.”

My throat is dry, and it aches as though I’d just ripped through my vocal cords with a scream.

I don’t scream, though. I can’t. The way Joey’s body hangs is too horrifying to conjure sound.

The fear won’t be cleared out by an outburst, no matter how loud.

All I want to do right now is run. Spinning on my shaking heels, I make a beeline back toward the road.

I don’t want to look at the dripping display that my friend has become.

My heart pounds relentlessly against my breastbone as the forest morphs into a blur of ebony branches.

There are no details, my surroundings reduced to tear-obstructed streaks.

If not for the fading moonlight, I wouldn’t be able to see a hand before my face in this darkness.

I wouldn’t even have the red glow of my own eyes to guide me, because it has been extinguished.

How am I going to tell Grayson?

The thought rattles my brain. Joey is dead, and it’s my fault.

If I hadn’t been so careless, he’d still be sleeping beneath a sherpa blanket.

He’d still be looking forward to telling his friends about our trip’s unfortunate mishap.

That mishap is now stained with blood that should never have been spilled.

I run until the sun rises. Only after its golden light claws between the trees am I able to get my bearings. The car becomes visible, so unnatural against the backdrop behind it. Before I know it, my hands are pounding on the passenger window, knuckles white and rapidly bruising.