Page 35 of The Bleeding Woods

I awaken. If not for the thick coil of branches positioned like a seat belt around my waist, the motion would have sent me plummeting to an untimely demise.

I am in the canopy, but I am no longer at the heart of Jasper’s domain.

I am at the edge of it. From here, I can see the same gas station in which we’d met.

It looks small as a matchbox, but it’s visible.

Beyond it, but somehow closer, a group of unmarked buildings sprout from the earth, caged in by ragged barbed wire.

Footsteps crunch below, and the consequent dread creates a heaviness in my stomach.

Viciously enough to draw blood from my palms, I tear away the thorny shackles and stand.

I’m unsteady. Still, there’s no time. I expect to find Jasper stalking toward my tree, but instead I see Grayson’s familiar mop of blond hair.

The ground is a long way down. I could attempt to jump, but I’m no use dead.

I dig my fingernails into the bark and begin inching my way toward the forest floor.

Every motion threatens to be my last. Still, slowly but surely, I get close enough to release my weight without significant risk.

Gravity takes over, and when I hit the crackling leaves, the pain is more obligatory than injurious.

“Grayson!”

“Clara?” He looks like a frightened puppy as he emerges from a patch of underbrush, ravaged by stress. He rushes to my side and pulls me into the tightest hug we’ve ever shared, shaking so hard, it vibrates my arteries. “I thought I lost you.”

At first, I’m not sure how to respond. My senses are still coming back online, deciphering the timeline of my life like a computer clearing corrupted files. Prioritization kicks in only after hugging him back and thanking every star in the sky for his safety.

“Where’s Jade?”

“I don’t know. I just lost sight of her. I think that thing took her.”

“No.” I can’t breathe. “No, no, no—”

“She was headed that way.” He points ambiguously into the trees. It isn’t much, but right now, that vague direction is our only lead. I lace our fingers and start walking, feverish, unrelenting.

The way the branches claw for us is anything but tender.

When I was under Jasper’s influence, their touch was captivating enough to gain my consent.

Now I can feel their depraved intentions.

Jade is in trouble, and unless she can resist, we are her only hope.

Grayson suffers the most damage, as the dark, warped wood tears into him hatefully.

His shirt gathers slashes deep enough to draw blood, making a gory collage on his arms, back, and chest. Though I’m being outright defiant, my skin is only nicked.

Playful abrasions create patterns on my cheeks, spelling out the word stay a hundred times over.

The fingers of the forest run through my hair with too much love. No, not love. Infatuation. Obsession.

“I see her!”

Grayson tugs on our conjoined hands, forcing me to stop.

His gaze scales its way up the side of a ridge, one I haven’t seen before.

Nothing in this place seems tethered to reality, at least as we know it.

It is ever eager to bend and change to accommodate an assigned purpose.

Jade seems to have succumbed to a similar sentiment, standing with eyes aglow at the edge of the granite.

Not granite. Cement. I throw my eyes to the side, and they land on exactly what I’d expected them to.

Barbed wire, with a sliver of bloodstained white cloth stubbornly entangled between the barbs.

This isn’t a ridge. It’s a wall. It’s part of a building made cadaverous by the nature that’s grown through it.

It is a piece of the laboratory, another echo of Jasper’s crime scene.

And that cloth . . . it must have belonged to . . .

Every part of me wants to call out Jade’s name, but I know better.

Jasper has been in my head. His voice is always the loudest. Instead of making feeble attempts to combat it from this distance, I let go of Grayson’s hand and climb.

Grayson shakes his head in denial. Some part of him must still be grappling with the reality we’ve been forced into, unwilling to accept it.

By the time I’m close enough to see Jade’s face, my fingernails are scraped down to crimson stubs.

Blood pours down my hands in thin rivulets, but the injury goes unfelt.

My eyes, and my focus, are on my sister.

My sister. She has tears welling in her eyes, and her lips are drawn downward into a quivering scowl.

She’s scowling at no one in particular, but her glassy gaze reveals something hiding in the darkness behind it.

“Jade! Jade, can you hear me? Y-you’re going to be okay! I promise!”

I grab for her ankle, fingertips just grazing it. Only now does the sting of my shredded nails register. Nervy pain shoots up my arms, causing them to slip. The gravelly surface of the aging rooftop excoriates my skin effortlessly.

“No, I’m not . . .”

“Yes, you are! Don’t listen to him! Don’t listen to anything he says!”

“He’s right. He’s right about everything.”

“What do you mean? What did he tell you?”

“There’s no reason for me to go home, Clara. I have nothing back there.”

“That’s not true. You have Grayson, and whether you like it or not . . . y-you have me too. I know you wish it had been me. I get it, I really do. I didn’t mean to kill Mom and Dad, but I did. I’m sorry.”

Resistance appears.

“You . . . what?”

“I killed them, Jade. It was me. It was always me.”

The light in her left eye flickers like a light bulb begging for rest. Then she tilts her head to the side as though receiving a transmission.

The way her expression distorts sends a metallic chill, like a sword unsheathed, through my chest. She’s angry—beastly, even.

The same eyes that burned through mine at our parents’ burial return with a vengeance.

“Explain.”

I look down at my hands, watching as the bones within them wriggle. I reach one toward her, fingers cracking as they elongate beyond human proportions. I’m transforming, becoming true, and for the first time, letting myself be seen.

“I haven’t been honest with you,” I admit.

“I want to, though. I want to tell you everything, just like when we were kids, when you loved me, when you could l-love me. I don’t know what I am, but I’m not human.

You were right to look into the EHKI. They’re not a conspiracy theory.

They’re real, and they’re the reason I exist. Well .

. . Mom and Dad are the real reason, I suppose.

They saved me from something awful, and I .

. . I killed them. When I found out, I killed them.

I thought I w-wanted to, but I . . . I don’t know anymore.

I was just so angry and confused, and I couldn’t control it.

I—I still can’t control it. Still, even if I didn’t want to kill them, I did.

It was me. It was all me. They’re dead, it’s my fault, and you have every right to hate me.

Just, please, please fight him so we can get out of here and you can keep hating me for it. ”

Her hands clasp over my wrists and haul me up onto the wall. The weatherworn edge threatens to crumble as though to express Jasper’s distaste. Jade grabs my shoulders, an enigmatic swirl of emotion beclouding her pupils.

“I don’t hate you. I never did,” she says.

Her hands shoot over her ears, and she hinges at the waist as though attempting a standing fetal position.

Her legs stumble dangerously close to impending doom, a stifled scream tumbling off her tongue.

I rush forward to grab her, but a stray bundle of thorned limbs from within a long-deceased bush ensnares my ankle.

We fall at the same time.

My inconsequential trip lands me on a handful’s worth of pebbles.

Jade plummets much farther. Her body meets a slab of exposed bedrock with a thud I’ll never unhear.

Grayson tried to catch her. His legs scrambled to soften the blow, audibly pounding against the ground just before the impact.

Both of us failed to prevent the inevitable.

Going against my better judgment, I race to the edge to see if Jade is still alive.

Hope has turned into a hateful force. Her body is still, save for automatic twitches emptying out the last of her neural activity.

I’m surprised her brain even has the capacity for it, considering it has been spilled from her skull in soft, gray clumps.

The crack that splits the left and right hemispheres of her head suggests it was what hit first. All of that building momentum came to a halt at one distinct location.

Crimson seeps from between the bits of her muddled mind.

It is thick and slow moving, like syrup dripping down a slashed maple.

The mixing shades are vomit inducing, and the coppery smell that infests the air is even more so.

I don’t want to get closer, but Grayson is alone, on his knees, shaking like a leaf as he mourns.

The wounds are all the more graphic up close.

Details I could have gone without seeing become torturously clear.

Severed veins and blood vessels twirl through pulpy, red-soaked meat.

The skin is grisly and scrunched in some places and bruised into indigo seas in others.

What was once my sister has become no more than a corpse, and every quality she consisted of has been drained away.

Eyes lifeless and blank, there is no trace of her to be found.

There is nothing left, nothing but blossoming blood roses.

Grayson does not look at Jade’s body. He looks only at me, and at the way my features are slowly morphing to match Jasper’s.

“So, it’s true.” His voice has hardened. His eyes are steel. “You really are as strong as he is.”

Confusion makes my heart seize. It beats so rapidly that I’m almost certain he can hear it.

“What?” I breathe.

He moves too quickly for me to process. One of Grayson’s hands rises to tear my jaw apart while the other shoves a familiar pink orb beyond my uvula, his knuckles painfully grazing the back of my throat.

When he pulls his fist out of my mouth, it comes away slick.

Saliva splatters my face as he rams it into my temple, and I am sent spiraling into oblivion.