Page 29 of The Bleeding Woods

Blankets of snow pelted each window of our small sedan, making tinkering sounds like jingling Christmas bells. Whimsical holiday music crackled through the radio, disturbed by cyclical bouts of static every thirty seconds.

My parents sat in the front seats, concern peering out from behind their bespectacled eyes.

I had been acting strangely all day. They were writing it off as nerves and preshow jitters.

Still, I could barely stand the feel of my tulle skirt and the skintight leotard beneath.

I winced at the scalp-hugging bun my hair had been twisted into and fidgeted madly against my ribbony slippers.

My skin was crawling, my head was pounding, and every note, every frequency that emerged from the car speakers, was like an aural razor blade.

“Clara,” my father whispered, his hands shivering on the wheel, “did you take your vitamins today?”

I tilted my head, scouring my memories for evidence that I had.

I hadn’t.

“No.” My voice shook like a dying leaf rattled by an autumn wind. “Why?”

The car seized to a halt, my father’s foot plunging onto the brake pedal so hard, I thought he might have gone through it.

“What time did you take them yesterday?” he demanded, suddenly sounding nothing like himself. There was no warmth, no forgiveness. His tone was as icy as the snowcapped hills on the horizon.

“Before school.” I shuddered.

My mother whirled around; her face was an unfamiliar mask of sharp, astute, dutiful observation.

“That was over thirty-two hours ago,” she said. “Turn the car around, Cedric. I’ll see if I have any in my purse, but turn the car around.”

At my mother’s command, my father whirled the steering wheel at a whiplash-inducing angle.

Our sedan lurched into a sharp turn, sliding on black ice to form a U with its path.

I slammed skull -first into the child-locked door at my side.

With a rev of the engine, we were soaring down the hilltop highway, heading back toward home.

The speed . . . the pain . . . the stress .

. . my body blared with internal red alerts.

Everything about the situation screamed of imminent doom, and if this wasn’t enough to terrify me, the shifting muscles beneath the skin of my palms were.

My fingers began to extend in length, and my honey-colored skin glazed over with tones of ash.

Smoke wafted from them and into the air, like plumes of cream dispersing through cold coffee.

In the rearview mirror, I caught a glimpse of my eyes.

They were sinking backward into my skull, replaced by pools of darkness and pinpricks of scarlet light.

“What’s happening to me?” My voice shook the ground like a sonic boom.

My father’s eyes went softer. He gave me his gaze, along with a hand to hold. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’s okay. You’re okay. You just need your vitamins.”

“My vitamins?” I screeched. “Th-they can do something about this?”

“They keep it from happening,” my mother hissed, urging my father to place both of his hands on the wheel before returning to the abyss of lipsticks and grocery receipts in her handbag. “That’s why you have to take them every day.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Both of them fell quiet. The Christmas music continued to crackle, a choir now spewing something about Santa Claus and his dutiful elves.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded again.

With a harsh swallow, my mother opened her mouth to answer. “We couldn’t.”

“No. We could have,” my father corrected. “But we didn’t because we didn’t want you to know about . . . this.”

My fingertips continued to stretch, and my arms followed suit.

My elbows popped out of place, the pain as excruciating as it was liberating.

In the same mirror that revealed my eyes to me, I dared a glance at my morphing face.

It had grown long and gaunt to accommodate the rows of jagged teeth erupting from my gums.

“We wanted you to live a normal life,” he continued. “Once we get home, you’ll take your vitamins, and it will be normal again. I promise.”

Suddenly, the words I’d trusted all my life became hollow and empty.

How could I believe a promise from a man who’d grown so comfortable with lying daily?

How could I lean in to my mother for reassurance when she looked at me like I was a raging beast barely holding back the urge to shred her throat?

How could I keep myself under control with the world so heavy and unbearably loud?

How could I exist, when I had no idea what I was existing as?

“You lied to me,” I seethed. “You lied to me all my life.”

“We did it to protect you,” they seethed back in unison.

“From what?”

Neither of them had an answer. In fact, they’d never answer another question again, for the next and last time they used their voices, it was to scream their way down a mountain.

“From what?” I grabbed my father’s shoulder, forgetting myself and the inhuman sharpness of my new hand. It sawed through his flesh, and from the wound gushed a river of red.

I was sorry, though I didn’t get the chance to say it. With one arm dangling by a web of meaty threads, Father couldn’t have stopped our sedan from crashing through the guardrail. Mother couldn’t have grabbed for the wheel, and I couldn’t have reversed time.

There was a biomechanical boom that rocked the world. Then there was only the sound of wind and snowfall.

I stood facing the plume of smoke that erupted from the wreck.

In my elongated fingers, the strap of my mother’s purse dangled, its periwinkle hue coated with splotches of ash.

I rummaged through it myself until I found the godsend she’d been searching for.

An unmarked plastic snack bag filled with pink orbs.

Only after popping one into my mouth did my bones crack back into place and my skin become human again. Only after they were dead did I shed the form of a monster capable of killing them.

This is where I should wake up.

This is where I always wake up when this nightmare surges to the surface, but here I stand, watching my parents burn inside an automotive inferno.

The sea of evergreen trees dusted with powdery snow behind the flames begins to wither, poisoned by the noxious perfume of death.

It begins to look familiar, and far less distant in the depths of my memory.

It isn’t their forest.

It is his.

Jasper comes through the emaciated branches in the form of a human child, a younger version of the man I’d met at the gas station.

A version no older than me. His eyes remain a striking shade of glowing vermilion, identical to the eyes I saw looking back at me in the rearview mirror of the car.

He stares down at my parents, then, with a furrow of his manicured eyebrows, kneels down for a closer look.

My sister’s distant sobs echo through the sky.

I shudder, and in an instant, he is back on his feet.

Carefully, curiously, he makes his way across the reddened snow.

A branch extends from deep within the forest, just thick enough for him to stand on.

The level of balance he maintains as it brings him up over the cliffside edges on ethereal.

In moments, he stands just beyond the torn guardrail, those vibrant eyes stunning me into stillness.

They are not sinister, nor brimming with blackened charm. The only emotion that stirs behind those unnatural irises is curiosity.

“Why are you crying?” he asks.

It is now that I feel the droplets running down my cheeks, the terrible burn tearing through my throat. I am crying. I hadn’t cried when it first happened, but now I am.

“Because I killed them. Because Jade is going to hate me forever. Because I’m a monster.”

The inkling of a wince seems to add tension to his muscles, but he steps closer anyway. A hand that is far gentler than expected grazes the apple of my cheek. It comes away sparkling with salt water.

“It takes one to make one.” He smiles, though there is a hesitance to it. “Or in this case, two.”

The breath I’d been taking lodges in my throat. Still, I don’t pull away. For some reason, I don’t pull away.

My eyelids are featherlight when I force them open.

I’m in the arms of a red-eyed silhouette that smells of pine needles, cinnamon, and sin.

Jasper. Instead of donning the vaguely retro clothing he’d worn to disguise himself as a gas station clerk, he hovers over me clothed in thorny vines, ebony leaves, and bright-red flowers.

I shove myself away from him, and between ragged breaths, I snarl, “You killed Joey.”

“And for that, I am sorry. He’s still here, though. He’s still here somewhere.”

This time, the shove I deal out isn’t a means of escape. It’s pure wrath, and with so little pink left in my system, I’m strong enough to send him back a few feet.

With an amused chuckle, he steadies himself. “Careful,” is all he says.

“Leave. Me. Alone.”

“You don’t want that.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I want.”

“What about what happened before Joey interrupted us? What did you want then?”

Damn it.

“I . . . I don’t know. But trust me, whatever it was, it’s gone.”

His eyes grow two times in diameter, starlight seeming to fall from above just to dance along the dark edges of his scleras.

With an easy smile, he kneels and creates a small inferno.

I’d shivered; he’d noticed. As he slides his gaze through the flames, his inhuman irises cloud, their focus following each red-hot whorl.

His aura bleeds a shadowy darkness that threatens to swallow up the world.

The moonlight falling from the sky is absorbed on touching him, lost to his garb of barbs and blossoms.

“What do you want from me?” I take a step in his direction. It isn’t an olive branch; I’m all out of those.

“Are you genuinely curious?”

“You stalked me miles into a forest, did something to my mind, collapsed a laboratory on top of me, killed one of my friends, and now you’re standing here, practically naked, asking me what I want from you. I think I’m entitled to a little curiosity.”

He laughs this time, the sound no more than a silky-smooth wisp. It makes me dizzy.

“Good point.” Rising to his feet, he folds his arms over his considerably muscular chest. I suddenly realize that the thorny brambles and scraggly blossoms are not resting on his skin.

They are emerging from beneath it like an uncontrollable rosebush.

“I want you, Clara. I want to inspire your every smile. Ignite your every laugh. I want to wipe away the tears left on your cheeks for far too long. I want to be the reason you forget what sadness feels like.”

My breath hitches in my throat, and it takes a considerable amount of effort to urge my lungs back to life. The words pour from him with such ease, such unbearable elegance.

“I want to make you feel safe and powerful. Held when you fall and triumphant when you fly. I want to hear the innermost workings of your heart and fulfill the dearest dreams and darkest desires lurking in your mind. Most of all, I want to share this strange, terrible, wonderful world with you.”

He glides over to me, swallowing up the moonlight that had gathered at my feet like a sip of white wine.

His voice becomes a caress in every corner of my brain.

Like the tenderest talons, they scrape across the grooves of my gray matter, and again, it becomes far too easy to sway in his direction.

Logic reminds me that these are the ramblings of a stranger, the deranged admissions of the man who killed Joey.

Logic, like the rest of the world, is beginning to feel very far away.

“Why?” is all I can get myself to utter.

He flashes the sweetest smile yet, though his teeth are rapidly turning razor sharp. “Because we are made of the same darkness, Clara. I felt it the moment you entered my garden.”

“Garden?”

“This realm is all I’ve ever known, all I’ve ever had. It was desolate once, but all things grow when they’re nurtured. The more I nurture it, the farther it grows. And when it grows, I grow with it.”

His hand rises to touch my cheek, and it is as otherworldly and skeletal as mine had been all those years ago. “I thought I would always be alone.”

My irises tingle, sparks of red surging through them until the world goes rose-colored. “What are we?” I dare to ask.

His razor-sharp smile sends my attention to the aching within my own mouth, the bone-deep soreness raging through my teeth. The hand he’s placed on my cheek slithers down my jaw until just one finger is tucked beneath my chin.

“I will show you.” He guides me forward, away from the camp and toward the answer I seek.