Page 23 of The Bleeding Woods

Jade shoots forward, sending her skull into the roof of the car. The impact is followed by a string of colorful curse words on beat with whatever is pounding on the window at this ungodly hour.

I rise, eyes heavy and likely surrounded by pools of purple.

I didn’t sleep well, not after what happened back at the lab.

Clara had been so untethered. It felt like she was floating above us, shackled to her body with a rusty chain.

I didn’t know someone could look so far from themselves.

Yet again, she’s the primary resident of my mind, because she’s the one banging on the glass, crashing her fists into it with enough vigor to draw blood.

“Clara! Are you all right?” I shout, clambering outside. “What happened? Did something hurt you?”

Words do not come to her. Her lips, along with every inch of her body, quiver like leaves fighting the wind.

I want to protect her from whatever’s caused this, illusionary or otherwise.

The passenger door squeals, then slams, and I realize I’ll have to protect her from a very real Jade.

She stalks toward us, each step more violent than the last. I stand between them, a wedge between warring worlds.

“You better have a good explanation for waking us up at the crack of dawn.”

“I-it was—it’s—I need to . . . w-we need to—” Clara stammers. Jade growls.

“Easy,” I warn her.

“Could you, for fifteen minutes, stop telling me what to do, Grayson? She’s my sister, remember?

I know how to talk to her.” Jade bares her teeth, and I am more than willing to take it as a challenge.

We start bickering with sleep-deprived viciousness in our arsenals until Clara screams to stop us.

Bullets stop firing, our tongues like triggers that have suddenly gone stiff.

“Stop! Please!” she begs, her eyes swimming in their sockets. “I need you to come with me.”

“Get back in the car. I need at least two more hours of sleep before dealing with your bullshit.” Jade shoves her toward the Hummer.

Her hands hit the glass before her face can, and I rush forward to prevent further damage.

On gazing into the backmost window, however, it becomes dreadfully apparent that we’re missing a member.

“Where’s Joey?” I ask, every muscle in my body turned into stone.

“Clara.” A hissing breath slithers between Jade’s teeth. She takes hold of Clara’s shoulders hard enough to bruise them. “Where is Joey?”

My stomach acid turns into liquid lead. I’m almost surprised it hasn’t burst, sending streams of molten metal to make a chrome car engine of my insides.

Joey wouldn’t wander off. At his age, I had all the survival mechanisms necessary to keep me from gullible galivants through danger.

I was only half as intelligent and a quarter levelheaded, what with my mosaic of average letter grades and detention summonses.

Joey’s always been the smarter of the two of us, from his heart to his head.

I’d never admit it out loud and risk inflating his ego, but it’s the truth.

If Joey’s not here, it means . . . he’s safe.

It means he found his way to help.

Clara yanks herself away from Jade, whose nails leave lines like chemtrails on her triceps.

The taciturn ambiguity returns to her eyes, and as though guided by a compass’s needle, she whirls away from us.

Facing the forest, her knuckles turn to fists, each locked to a hip.

She walks at a pace that speaks without words.

She’s either inviting us to keep up or trying to lose us in the tiny plumes of dust left in the wake of her heels.

“Clara, wait!” I call out.

She doesn’t so much as tilt in the direction of my voice.

Jade releases a rattling groan that rises up her throat like a geyser of pennies.

Unsure if she’ll follow, I take off to tail Clara.

Wherever she’s going, whether it leads to Joey or not, it’s important.

If not to us, then to her, and at this moment, that’s all that matters to me.

As dawn arrives on the scene, the sun looks too timid to haul itself over the horizon.

It looks as though it is cowering behind the distant mountains, sleeping eldritch beasts beneath pine tree blankets.

A great black mamba snake coiled around the forest, fangs out, venom dripping with promises of paralytic pleasure-pain.

Once I am away from the road, everything is swallowed by espresso bark and withering green foliage.

The lidless eye of the serpent that stalks us falls out of sight, yet still I feel watched by it.

The shadows at this time of day are extraordinarily long.

Each tree trunk, some as thick as a redwood and some as thin as my ankle, shoots a dark line across the ground.

Clara and I move through them, inmates behind a wall of bars.

I can’t breathe out here, not this far from the car, from the road, from the only place that feels remotely safe.

Joey’s found his way. He is all right.

Jade pulls up at my side, her nostrils flared.

She huffs with each thunderous clomp into the earth, snapping twigs and flattening clovers beneath her feet.

The branches that reach for her meet an unstoppable human tsunami.

The weaker ones split on impact, speckling the silence with crackles.

I turn my head to the left to acknowledge her, but my veins tremble when I realize she’s on my right.

The presence I’d felt wasn’t Jade’s. It was some transient penumbra, now hooked around a tree yards away, gazing back from the gloom.

I turn my gaze back to Clara, who may as well be in another world.

“Clara!” My throat is clamped at the trachea. I throw both hands around it, but only after her name dies in my vocal cords does the spasm subside.

Jade powers ahead of me. Despite the onslaught of lightheaded nausea, I do everything to keep up with her.

The black mamba doesn’t feel so far away anymore.

It feels like it’s just behind me, slithering in perfect stealth, its maw widened to the edge of impossible.

I make the mistake of peering backward and find a single shadow pointing in the wrong direction.

It isn’t bending westward, as all physics-obeying denizens of our dimension should.

It bends to the east. It stretches to the sun, the light from it so red, I could swear it was a deviant lunar eclipse.

Joey is fine. Joey is safe.

He has to be.