Page 30 of The Bleeding Woods

“Clara?” Grayson’s nauseatingly noble voice ripples over our tiny fire. His eyes are overcome with trepidation that positively delights me, but my dearest Clara . . .

“Grayson . . .” She tears away, his name falling from her lips like a sigh. My blood reaches its boiling point as she runs to him. Not me, him.

He scrambles over, his jacket hanging haphazardly from his shoulders. As it falls from him, he throws it to the side, one of the arms stirring up enough dirt to extinguish our flame. Above the orange glow of the embers, I watch helplessly as she takes his cheeks into her palms.

“Clara, y-your eyes—they’re . . . they’re red.”

Indeed, her eyes irradiate the same shade that mine do. We’re connected, Grayson. Does all that perfect blond hair blur your hearing?

“I don’t . . . I don’t know what to do,” she says. “Grayson, I don’t know what to do.”

He catches her beautiful face in his hands and brings her close.

They are forehead-to-forehead, gazing at one another, a star and a satellite.

He is an ephemeral, blinding flare. She is radiant, reflective mystique.

He is a moment. She is the beginning and the end of all things.

He is misaligned. She is mine. She is mine, and right now, she is being touched by someone who is not me.

“You weren’t lying . . . I—I knew you weren’t lying,” he sputters, sounding like an engine as arthritic as his car’s. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what’s happening right now. Everything. Tell me everything.”

Her mouth opens and closes. Opens and closes.

She’s searching for words that I am stealing.

I reach across the unseen space, tightening my telepathic touch.

Her skull may as well be a goblet of warm liquor being swirled and sampled in my hand.

Her muscles loosen, and those dainty hands of hers slip right off his skin.

They dangle at her sides, drooping with her shoulders, which he is quick to catch.

“Clara! Clara, no! Wake up! Come back to me! Come back!”

I despise the sound of her name on his lips.

Does he think he has some sort of claim on her?

You would think a man so straight spined and proper would know how to respect a woman’s wishes.

Yet he stands his ground. He glares at me, making certain the semi-impressive mounds of muscle beneath his sleeves catch my attention.

If this is to be a contest, I’m in.

The sound of stretching flesh and splitting bone echoes.

I grow skyward until I am looming overhead, shedding my human form and reverting to what’s true.

My natural appearance is far more comfortable after all.

Head reaching the canopy, I gaze down through the landscape, right at little Grayson.

My limbs elongate to mimic the trees beside them.

His grayscale gaze follows my body from toe to head.

The horror on his face multiplies the closer he comes to seeing my smile.

We lock eyes, my own sunken and surrounded by voids.

Body trembling and breath hitching in his throat, he takes a series of clumsy steps backward. Then he falls on a bed of leaves, twigs, and pebbles, similar to the ones his little brother had so rudely thrown.

In the tumble, he takes Clara down with him.

She gathers one too many scrapes, and now, this is more than personal.

With purposeful slowness, I summon a branch, and it grows toward me with one of Joey’s sneakers caught on the end.

I lower it into Grayson’s lap, coated with blood, shoelaces only half undone.

When realization overtakes his expression, it twists with delectable horror.

I allow my jaw to drop open as though it had lost a bolt.

It falls quickly and hangs wide as I mimic Joey’s final whimper.

They come out like a distorted, reminiscent record.

Tears stream down his face. A scream erupts from deep within his chest, so loud, terrified, and angry.

Joey’s voice morphs into a laugh—my laugh—because this is just too precious.

It shakes the treetops and claws its way down into the earth like thunderbolts.

Jade throws a rock. “What the hell is that?”

I dodge and, in my slink, gather Clara up in my arms and place her safely behind me. To my utmost dismay, she appears a lot less comfortable than she had before Grayson decided to cause a commotion. She looks at Joey’s sneaker, at Grayson, and at her sister’s thinly veiled concern.

A muscle feathers in my jaw as it clicks back into place.

“Clara,” I sing, my voice more pleading than I anticipated it would be. My body twists itself back into a human shape, bones snapping and muscles turning fluid to fit them. Once my head is on straight and covered with a thick helping of raven hair, I let her name flow from my lips once more.

“Don’t listen to them. They don’t understand. They never could.”

“Joey . . .” Her voice trembles. Perhaps I shouldn’t have reminded her of that unfortunate circumstance just to prove a point to the others.

I wanted them to pay for the way they treated her when she told them about the little nuisance.

I wanted them to believe her when she spoke of Joey’s premature departure.

More than that, I wanted to paint a picture of what exactly I’m willing to do in defense of our destiny.

“You understand better than anyone what an accident looks like.”

I can change tactics, too, my love.

Something shifts behind her eyes. Incredulousness drifts off her like the tendrils of red and black power drifting off me.

A white lie for a golden result. I make my eyes, my human eyes, sincere as a sunrise, and reach out to offer her my hand.

“I have so many things to explain, so many things to show you, if you’d only allow me to. Please, Clara. Please trust me.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Jade yells as she pelts my back with a shower of stones. “Give her back right now, you freaky son of a bitch! Clara! Come on, wake up! It’s me! It’s Jade!”

Clara’s eyes flick down toward my fingers.

“Don’t you dare!” Jade’s voice crescendos. “Clara, please don’t!”

My heart flutters when Clara’s fingertips slip into my palm. I close my hand around hers, holding it like a precious jewel. Red light ripples at our feet, a vortex of shadows rising from the ground to swallow us.

“No!” Jade screams.

Both of them claw at the air to catch us, but we disappear together, carried by darkness, wind, and primordial power that even I still struggle to understand.

We travel through the shadows of my forest, moving far too quickly for the others to comprehend, let alone catch up with.

We move deep into its heart, where even the rays of the moon dare not tread.

I bring us to a halt at my most sacred spot.

It is a clearing accented only by a tree with jet-black branches twisted in every horrific direction at the bottom of the forest. Its roots reach down into the center of that infernal, sprawling laboratory, built by the bones of the scientists that dwelled there and nourished by their blood.

This is where I broke free. It is fitting for her to break free here too.

She gawks at the tree with uncertain eyes.

Hesitant reverence lingers at the edges of her expression, just as droplets of glimmering silver linger on the edges of her eyelashes.

Swirls of vermilion smoke still surround us, and I coil an arm around her waist to keep her secure as we lift into the topmost branches of the tree.

I set her down on a particularly thick one, promising with my eyes that I’d never let her fall.

The red luminescence of my sliver of the world illuminates her delicate features.

The windless night allows her hair to waterfall in stillness down her back, her face unobstructed and unreadable.

“It’s the closest thing I have to a home,” I admit.

She places a hand on the bark beneath her, studying it. “Was it really an accident? What you did to Joey?”

“Control doesn’t always come as easily as I’d like it to,” I lie.

That seems to spark something introspective in her, something buried beneath layers on layers of guilt and denial. I can’t say I’ve ever felt such emotions. I can’t possibly imagine why she bothers with them, seeing as they only seem to make her miserable.

“I wish I could say the same for myself.”

“Your parents . . . ?” I start, my voice lilting inquisitively.

“I loved them, but when I killed them, I . . . wanted to. All my life, they’d been lying to me. I was angry. I was so . . . so angry. Before I knew it, they were dead, and I—I wasn’t human anymore.”

“We’ve never been human, Clara.”

“Then what are we, Jasper?” Her eyes, still red, shine with desperate determination. I’ll never get tired of the way my name sounds in her elegant tongue. Still, she frowns, and it feels like a spire has been plunged through me.

“I can show you what I know. I can try, at the very least.”

“How?”

“The same way you showed me.” I reach into the midnight air, tapping a fingertip against her forehead.

After a moment of consideration, she offers me a soft nod, and with her consent, I begin sending her off to sleep.

The whispers that surround us shift into a lullaby, hums overlapping to create a tune in time with the heartbeat of the forest. I make music with every leaf that crumbles, every stick that snaps, and every crow that caws.

They lace together to form one unified melody.

The entire realm becomes a dreamy orchestra of natural sounds.

I allow my hand to move up and down her softening jaw, cherishing the lovely curves of her facial design.

Her eyes are heavy and fluttering, like the wings of a beaten butterfly.

“Sleep, Clara.”

Streams of red light fall from my fingertips and pour into her eyes, dousing them in vibrant luminosity.

Her eyelids fall as though weighed down by raindrops.

She’s sent to dream in darkness, and I shut my own eyes to follow suit.

We will continue our conversation in a place far more chaotic and far more honest.