Page 17 of The Girl in the Forest

Other times, I remembered what it was like to belong, before realizing belonging had been impossible. Because not belonging was the way I’d always been. Like being not human, not wolf. Wandering with no place to call home. Those were the nights when I closed my eyes and wished for nothing.

But there were days when I talked to the magic like a friend.

“How are you today? Know any good jokes, magic? No?”

Effa would find me and tsk, mutter how I was shell-spunked—whatever that meant—and urge me back to the house and into the bath. More days passed, but on the day Effa came dressed like a pink tulip, she wasn’t alone. Another nymph was with her, flighty as a butterfly and just as transparent.

Caerwen, Effa murmured. She’d once guarded a sacred grotto in Wales, destroyed long ago, during a battle lost to the mists of time. She’d moved from wrinkle to wrinkle over the centuries, and as I stretched out on the bed, waiting for Caerwen to begin the massage Effa insisted I needed, I thought the grotto nymph was a warning—of what could happen if I stayed here too long.

I’d become like Caerwen, little more than a shadow in certain light, or the flutter of a passing bird in flight. A caress that was nothing more than breath.

“Let me know if it bothers you,” she murmured. “I haven’t wanted to feel my weight in centuries.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because weight connects me to the earth, where the memories are.”

Although, as Caerwen pressed her slim-fingered hands over the bones of my shoulders, I felt the weight and warmth of living flesh. She touched each pale moonstone rune decorating my spine, then my arm to the wrist. Across the curve of my shoulder to the rise of my breast.

“These keep you safe. But they cannot heal your heart,” she said, her voice more breeze than sound. “Not here, lady.”

“Caerwen.” Her name was sweet on my lips. “What do you know of my heart?”

She said nothing more, pressing the heels of her hands against the tension that gripped my body, while I thought of the earth, where the memories lived.

Caerwen came more often. My body eased beneath the pressure of her hands, and I asked how she did it. “Like you, lady.”

“I don’t understand.”

Her long fingers curled around my shoulders, then stroked the length of my spine, the way Grayson once stroked.

“Your gifts are considerable,” she murmured. “Failles draw the life force from everything. The rocks, trees, water. Living beings. What I am doing is what you do with silent wolves. Something goes wrong for the silent wolf, and if he cannot release excess energy, it builds up to a dangerous level. It is the same for you. Energy builds until it becomes volatile, and while you can help ease the silent wolf, you cannot help yourself. You need someone else to do it for you.”

“How do you know this, Caerwen?”

“I have offered this service to many failles over the centuries,” she said. “They entrusted me with their journals, the writings they left behind.”

Tension whipped back into my body and I jolted upright on the massage table, ignoring my nudity. The nymph had brought the table into Grayson’s cave, since I seldom left, and I supposed I looked fracky with my hair in disarray and my collarbones pressing whitely against thinning skin. I’d lost muscle tone. No one remarked about it because the mushrooms kept the light low.

My bare feet sank into the soft sand while I searched for the clothes I’d been wearing, jeans and a tee shirt, both of which hung loose on my body when I dressed.

“Lady.” Caerwen placed her hand on my arm. “No need to rush. I’ve brought them for you.”

Caerwen’s concern deepened as she watched me, and I breathed in, breathed out. “Can I read them here? Is there not enough light? What about the sand? Will it damage the pages?”

Leaving the cave had become abhorrent when I thought of the rock walls as a shield. They blunted the magic. The sameness. I wanted the small pleasure found in feeling hungry or thirsty without having dozens of choices thrust upon me.

And with the comforting glow of the mushrooms, my fear of the nightmares eased.

But now, my hands twisted, child-like, and I hid them in the folds of my shirt. “It’s just that… I’m running out of time.”

“There is time,” Caerwen said. “You need to learn before you can decide.”

Over the following days, Caerwen sat with me, helping to decipher the ancient languages, the scrawled handwriting. Failles who sheltered in the wrinkles left testimonies for those who followed, and I learned that what I had, instead of a wolf, was a gift. A skill I could understand and use for good or ill.

When heat flowed into my hands, I was syphoning energy, what I’d done for the silent wolves. But also, I’d done it to the pig in Azul—the first one that deflated into mush beneath my clawing fingers. And the second, the one I’d left unrecognizable in Leo’s clinic, when I’d melted the scalpel.

I hadn’t turned feral. With my emotions so high, the desperation so great, the faille part of me took control. I couldn’t stop syphoning until there was no life force left. Not in the pigs, at least. And there was the risk.

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