Page 34 of The Bleeding Woods

Night burns away. When the sun finally comes, it isn’t to give me a reassuring embrace.

It erupts over the sky with a fanfare of eerie, unearthly birdsong.

It scowls at me, searing my skin with disappointment.

All night, it says, You’ve been wandering all night, and you’ve yet to find them, you failure.

A failure. That’s exactly what I am. My mother’s voice, stern and correct, sits like an earworm outside my eustachian tube.

One task, Grayson. One duty. You’ll only ever have one task, Grayson. One duty.

My legs knock into one another, twins battling over the final chocolate chip in the cookie jar.

My arms are loose, hands hanging at my hips without the strength or stamina to ball into fists.

The forest has taunted me for hours, but never has it given me a sign of Clara or Jade.

There isn’t a single path to follow, a single leaf out of place.

It all looks so impossibly untouched, like I am simultaneously the only man here and the only man on Earth.

A crow squalls, soaring overhead. A singular, black feather descends from its tattered mass of them, floating down on idle breezes until it is in line with my eyes. I’d call it a bad omen, but at this point, I’m unsure the situation can get much worse.

Never say never, my mother says to me. The worst things happen when your guard is down.

She’s not much of an optimist. My father was the optimist, and as though to prove her morbid point, he went and died too soon.

It might be the creature’s influence on my thoughts, but I can’t help but wish for the same sweet release right now.

I could reunite with him. I could find Joey.

I could leave this place and the exhausting world it’s embedded in.

I could leave this place . . .

I could leave . . .

My surroundings dissolve beneath a shimmering red mist. It falls.

Glitter, snowfall, spores. I pull in a deep breath, but whatever this is, it isn’t airborne.

It passes through the semipermeable membrane of my mind and weaves through my psyche like a barrage of leeches.

They suckle on my thoughts, on the parts of my brain responsible for sight, sound, and sensation.

I’m swept away. I’m everywhere. I’m nowhere.

I’m . . . at the bar beneath Eastriver Road and Wolfeye Alley.

My clothing has changed, copied and pasted from a memory buried in my undergraduate years. I’d accompanied Clara on a night out. She wore a dress the color of my eyes, and it made my heart do strange, strange things. It made my heart do things I knew my mother would scold me for later.

The patrons are dead-eyed and uncanny, swaying with their jaws agape. They look like badly rendered images or belly-up fish. The only thing that feels real is what I shudder to imagine is.

Jasper guides Clara by the chin to his side, to the stage.

Drowning in the ocean of his spell, she sways to his rhythm, aligning her cells to his frequency.

He tosses the microphone aside, freeing an arm to shackle her waist. Even through the pale-blue gossamer fabric of her dress, his skin sends an ethereal wave of pleasure over her senses.

One by one, they surrender. I can see it. She’s surrendering.

She’s gone.

He is all she sees, all statuesque beauty and chthonic allure.

He is all she feels, all silky-soft strokes and voltaic vulnerability.

He is all she smells—absinthe, pine, cinnamon, and frankincense lightening her head like helium.

He is most definitely all she hears. Now there is only taste, and . . . and . . .

Jasper hits a powerful, elongated high note on a lyric that steals all that’s left of her away. He dips her body backward, making sure she is completely and utterly engulfed by the sound. Then he captures her lips in a kiss. Tentacles of red smoke fall from his mouth and pour down her throat.

I grit my teeth hard enough to crack a molar. I may have had some working knowledge of Jasper, but I’ve never seen him in action. I could have gone my whole life without seeing this.

It can’t possibly get worse, though. Can it?

He pulls Clara back up. She is going to finish this dance.

Her eyes are far away. Her steps are fluid but drunken.

She is exhausted, hypoxic. High on him, lost to him.

Lost, lost, lost. As the lights come up higher and the music crescendos, she dances.

He pulls invisible strings, and she becomes his ballerina.

He moves with her, exploring her body with ravenous elation, and she melts, eyes spun back in ecstasy.

His hands grip her waist as it undulates like rolling waves caught in a riptide.

They are in perfect synchronicity, one in the same.

Him leading her, her following his lead.

His touch advances up and up and up. Her waist, her chest, her neck.

He stops at her neck, gripping it with pure possession.

He tips her head back and breathes more red smoke into her mouth.

If the previous dose was a trickle, this is a roar.

She breathes it in. She is putty in his hands. I’ve lost her. I’ve failed her. I’ve failed everyone, and Jasper is making it very known.

His eyes dart to mine. A challenge. A threat. A promise.

Then he kisses Clara hungrily. He sends his tongue down her throat, his hand still round her neck like a collar. The message is clear: She’s mine. I can do with her as I please.

Rage boils my blood as my eyes narrow to vengeful slits. I make my own challenge. Threat. Promise.

Locked in a stalemate of inflamed eye contact, Jasper smiles wide enough to break away from Clara’s lips. She parts from him like someone rescued from a burning building, gasping for air, for anything but his suffocating exhales. I surge forward to pull her off the stage.

Jasper is faster, stronger.

He sends a hand outward, and with just one flick of the wrist, pulls hundreds of blood roses from between the floorboards at our feet.

“Feed,” he instructs her. “You’re not human anymore, my Clara. Accept it. Feed.”

A rose grows close enough for her to pluck. She does so, and trembles as it coils around her fingers.

“Good girl,” he purrs. Then he gives me his gaze like a monarch throwing pennies at a peasant. “My good, good girl.”

I burn hot enough to incinerate the world. My fingernails draw blood from my palms, but adrenaline blocks the pain as they produce streams of thick crimson. More roses grow from the droplets.

“Oh, this is going to be fun,” Jasper says.

With a mischievous wink, he twirls Clara into a spin.

I race to the stage’s edge, arms splayed out to catch her.

She lands in them, giggling painfully, her head whirling, her eyes spellbound.

I hold her to my chest, one hand on her head to keep it pressed firmly to my heart.

She’s safe. She’s with me now, and she’s safe.

I look up at Jasper; I have another promise to make. You’ll never touch her again.

He cocks an ebony brow and smiles too wide. Wanna bet?

The sunbeam that flashes over my pupils is blinding, but when it clears, I see better than ever.

I’m not done here, not yet. That thing may believe it has the upper hand, but of course it doesn’t.

It’s likely never faced someone like me, and it’s definitely never faced someone like Clara.

She’s the reason I haven’t crumbled, a force to be reckoned with, whether she knows it or not.

Wherever she is, she’s fighting. If she’s fighting, we stand a chance.

I tighten the muscles in my legs and straighten out my spine.

There will be no more dreaming, no more wallowing, and no more lazy steps through the brush.

When my second wind arrives, it does so with a simmering vengeance.

All I feel is fear and anger. If both are going to be here, both are going to be useful.

We’d been heading north. Venus hangs on the eastern horizon.

Getting my bearings, I construct a compass rose out of twigs and mark each direction with crude handwriting in the dirt.

The forest sprawls endlessly to the east and west, but to the south, it’s limited.

I start hiking, eyes bloodshot but thoroughly peeled for that rusty retro gas station.

Astronavigation proves dependable, even in an environment so maddening.

The sunlight that slithers around the tree trunks becomes more and more confident.

Without as much density to combat, it triumphs with increasingly wider beams.

I adjust, letting Venus take me southeast. The road isn’t safe, but I’ll need it when the morning star drowns in daytime’s cerulean sea. Just as the crackling split in the matted rug of greenery comes into view . . .

“I can hear it,” Jade says.

It’s like she spawned out of thin air. She stands with her back to me, swaying with the rigid fluidity of a wooden puppet.

“Clara was telling the truth about them too. The trees are singing.”

The world becomes a motion blur. I’m at her side so quickly, my mind barely registers the location change.

Her eyes are as red as the bloodstains on my pant legs.

Red as the fireflies. Red as Jasper’s glare.

She looks beyond me, hearing voices I’m deaf to and seeing images I’m blind to.

She’s been entranced into a catatonic state, just bait on a hook for me to bite.

“Jade, can you hear me?”

Her ear tips toward her shoulder, her neck losing some of its structural integrity. My veins fill with ice water because, for just a breath, I worry it’ll tear at the seams and send her skull tumbling toward my feet.

“Jade,” I repeat.

She focuses on me too quickly. Her eyes blaze through mine, and the heat of our crossing gazes leaves grill marks on my corneas. She grabs me by the triceps, digs her bitten nails into the skin, and locks her jaw with a sickening crack.

“Grayson, you have to get out of—”

As though pulled by an iron chain, she stumbles back and away.

She lurches into a sprint, heading southwest. Either he’s taunting me, or he has some other sinister surprise up his sleeve.

Either way, there’s no time to mull over the details or debate the odds of running headfirst into a trap.

My selection of multiple-choice answers has been made tremendously difficult to work with.

Hamstrings crying out as they surge with lactic acid, I race after Jade and away from the deceptively safe allure of the road.

Together, we descend, two puny morsels of food on a one-way trip to the digestive tract of the forest.