Page 42 of The Bleeding Woods

Anger is not easily felt toward one so beloved.

Still, the emotion makes a monster of me.

We will prevail, of course. Some healing may be required to recultivate trust, but we’ve already made so much progress.

Everything about her thorns, about her betrayal, is becoming clear now.

She’s confused. Grayson has confused her.

He is an obstacle to be triumphed over and nothing more.

Nothing. More.

I command a bundle of branches to grab her wrists and ankles and pull her from his arms. Without them, she’d hurt herself attempting to stop the inevitable.

They tuck her to the side, none coiled harshly enough to scar.

I’m tempted to tighten them only because her feverish thrashing makes me fear for the integrity of her bones.

“Jasper, stop!” Even enraged, she sounds so lovely.

“All I want to do is free you, love. You have to let me.”

There’s a hundred different things I can tell she wants to say, but panic freezes her tongue.

It is prompted by Grayson’s idiocy. Like the pathetic carbon cage he is, he begins firing beads of metal through my alchemized anatomy.

I whirl toward him, letting him watch as vines, thorns, and branches sew me shut.

The thunderous whipcracks of his bullets fade from the air in silvery echoes. I hiss into a pocket of silence.

“Grayson . . . ever the knight, aren’t you?”

“Let her go,” he demands with misplaced confidence.

For someone so aware of his own defeat, he is holding his stance well.

Unwavering, emboldened, and half witted all at once.

Surely he doesn’t think the gun will do much damage, does he?

The way he’s using it is suggestive of hope, which makes me question whether he’s brave, stupid, or both.

“She doesn’t want you, Grayson. She said it herself,” I say, slinking away from my Clara, close enough to Grayson to hear his ragged breathing. “She wants me. She wants to be with me. Not you. Me.”

He is lighter than I expected he’d be. With one hand stretched around his torso, I pin his body to the nearest tree trunk and take note of the frailty of frightened creatures.

His skin erupts with goose bumps and adrenaline-induced shivers.

Even his dangling legs manage to shake while kicking for freedom.

The strong ones falter most miserably when defeat is imminent.

The princes turn into paupers, the knights into damsels.

There is something familiar about this particular damsel.

How hadn’t I seen it before? While he doesn’t sport her head of black hair, Grayson possesses features I haven’t had the displeasure of seeing in years.

He has the same sort of eyes that once observed me through overhead lights.

He has the same sort of jawline that once went taut at my glimmers of disobedience.

He has a perfectly straight, dainty nose very much like the one that used to hoist rectangular spectacles.

He isn’t just Grayson. He is most definitely, most deliciously, Dr. Hemlock’s human spawn.

“So I see Dr. Hemlock embraced a new kind of procreation once she was through with me. It’s very nice to meet you, brother. I’ll give your regards to Mommy dearest.”

“Go to hell,” he spits.

“I’ve already been there and back.”

Clara’s strength is increasing. She is beginning to rip through her restraints. “Grayson, hang on! I’m coming!”

“Clara! Hang on! Just hang on!” he calls back to her. The sound slithers through the nonexistent spaces between his perfectly aligned teeth.

I give his torso a savage squeeze. Ribs crack inward, and I thank every sweet star in the sky for the shrill way he screams. With her teeth, Clara tears through the vines winding up her arms with vigor like I’ve never seen. Streams of hot salt water clamber down her cheeks, my poor little love.

“No! Let him go, Jasper! Please! This is between us! Please!”

Of course it’s between us, little love. Everything is, and from now until the end of time, everything will be.

“I’m sorry, Clara!” Grayson yells to her. “I’m so sorry! You didn’t deserve this; you didn’t deserve any of it!”

“Grayson, wait— I-I’m coming! I-I’m—”

“I need you to know it was real, okay?” he huffs, breathless, lungs punctured. “I-it was all real, and . . . and if I could do it all again, in another time, another place, a-another life . . . I’d—”

For my Clara’s sake, I grant Grayson death before he finishes his statement.

It’s even more efficient than Jade’s. My fingertips elongate into knives to impale his thin skull, pinning it to the bark.

He’s ripped from life at an unexpectable speed, soul parting from the body like a Band-Aid from a wound.

What’s left is a corpse doused in red rain.

I leave him pinned to the tree for a moment, an ornament with eyes drifting downward as they lose their light.

His jaw hangs open, blood pouring from between his teeth alongside a final breath.

His nostrils and ears cry crimson, capillaries shattered by the sudden impact.

A heartbroken screech tears through my Clara.

With a telepathic wave to the branches, I free her.

The poor thing still doesn’t understand this is for the best. As she cries, I remove my hand from within Grayson’s head.

Purplish bits of his brain matter burrow under my nails, and despite every effort to conceal it, a new smile crackles across my face.

Grayson, the prince, the knight, the final obstacle . . . hits the ground with an inconsequential thud.

“Grayson! N-no! Come back! You’re okay! Come on, you’re okay!” Clara pats at his lightly freckled cheeks, but he is gone. He is the very definition of dead on impact. “Don’t go, please! Don’t leave me here, d-don’t go!”

“Clara—” I start.

“Get away from me!”

She looks unhinged, rocking and weeping over Grayson’s lifeless cadaver.

She’s holding on to him hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

If not for me, she’d still be tethered to a miserable world of human hubris and obnoxious noise, noise, noise.

She said it herself. She said it. I offer her freedom.

She is conditioned to choose containment and complacency.

This isn’t her. This is her earthly programming, dribbling out, purging, clearing.

It will end.

“I’m never going to hurt you again, my love.” Her heightened biology is already healing, as I knew it would, but it is the sentiment that counts. “I am . . . sorry.”

Sobs trickle past her lips, delicate, quiet, and fleeting.

She’s too blind to be reasoned with. We’ll have to continue this discussion after calmness has taken hold.

Grayson’s blood roses will provide me with enough power to pull her under.

I lap it ravenously off the petals poking out from his body.

None of this nectar will go to waste. All of it will be used for her.

Her, her, her. The beautiful and misguided her.

Strength floods every vein in my body, causing them to shift in consequent coloration.

“Shhh . . .” I make my voice an auditory sedative. “I think you should get some sleep for now, yes? It’ll all be all right when you awaken.” First, she looks terrified, but watching her eyes glaze over soon after soothes my turbulent soul. “That’s right. Sleep, love. Sleep for me.”

In seconds, a blissful grin has blossomed across her pretty face. Her cheeks are still tearstained, so I caress them to wipe the pain away. She leans in to my touch. Her head is heavy in my hands. To my delight, her fingertips woozily release Grayson’s blooming carcass.

“Sleep.” I whisper this time, knowing all of her thorns have been clipped.

Just as her eyelids threaten to close, resistance rears its homely head. She shoves me and presses her palms to her ears. Getting away is out of the question, so the way she stumbles back makes me want to smile through a cringe.

“Why are you making this so hard?”

“I don’t want this. I don’t want you. I don’t want you.” She sounds positively desperate.

“Stop fighting, Clara. Stop fighting what we can be. What we should be. Think of all we can do as one. We can end the horrid, hypocritical rule of humanity. There will be no more noise, no more nuisances. We will reign supreme, the sovereign overlords of a planet desperate for the next phase in evolution. Among them, we will be gods. And our love, oh, my Clara . . . our love will be their religion. They will worship at the altar of us, mortals in awe of a new Hades and Persephone. I will be ruler of the dark, and you, my love, will be all the sprawling life and sacred decay that accompanies spring. We were made for this, Clara. Trust me. This is who we are. This is who we were always meant to be.”

She backs herself against the tree from which Grayson hung, coating her shoulder blades with his blood.

It leaves her hair wet and matted. I approach, cornering her.

It’s taking every spark of energy to resist me.

She’ll tire herself out. Indulging in the fantasy of escaping poses no harm, but I’m becoming impatient.

I miss her lovely smile.

Horror drowns my senses when it begins dripping red.

Too quickly for me to stop, she brings her hand to her mouth and wedges one of Grayson’s blood roses between her teeth.

Each crease is highlighted with gory vibrancy.

A metallic scent fills the air, along with a thrum of unearthly power.

The empty look that exists in her eyes instills emotions long forgotten.

Below that hollow, unreachable gaze lies a smile.

It isn’t the smile I fell in love with. It isn’t the smile that awakened a craving for connection and intimacy beyond what always felt feasible. It isn’t my salvation. It is a conglomeration of red and white concealed behind gradually receding lips.

I’ve never felt fear before, not really.

Everything akin to it had always come up in distant, echoing thrums of emotion.

I’ve always lounged at the apex of earthly power, and beings of apex power needn’t worry themselves with it.

However, for the first time in my excrescence of a life, I am afraid.

I am afraid because right now, I am prey.