Page 197 of Shifting Hearts 1
I never touched, and I never interacted with those who entered my trees.
Not anymore. Not until her.
Bryn.
I heard her name once, spoken by the children. Usually they didn’t learn her name, with her too short a time. They knew nothing about her at all except that she traveled between the trees and that with her alone, they were safe.
Like they used to be with me.
Unless they had done something wrong. Something abhorrent to earn their punishment.
Runaways. Unable to behave.Shut up. Sit still.
All the things adults expected of children that they often couldn't do because of the pure energy bursting out of them that nature provided. .
My leaves whispered their secrets to me. I stored each one away for safekeeping, and remembered everything.
One footstep, and I knew exactly who tread my paths, rearranging them just for her as she needed them, never doubling up on a path that she already knew, a puzzle just for her. Reaching through my roots and shifting the ground beneath her with the faintest tremble I created new twists and turns through the trees. Waited for the hint of scarlet she often wore to stain the shadows I couldn’t let her escape.
Paths that led not to the other side of the forest, but to me.
What the fuck am I doing?
The wolf’s vernacular had infected me. I wasn’t the predatory one. Wolf took that mantle on with the pride of his kind. But me? I didn’t want to devour her. I wanted her as my…
Plaything.
My leaves whispered above her head as Bryn strode determinedly forward. Her chin lifted, defiance lit of their own kind of flame within her eyes.
Absolutely perfect.
I might have smiled, should my trees have let me. Instead, I let her reach the first forked path, a distance from the forest’sedge where no one would hear her sounds before I raked my gnarled fingers through her hair from above.
Bryn screamed, and ran. Or perhaps she tried to run, but her feet weren’t quite on the ground anymore. I let her dangle like that, a breath above the earth, screaming and failing at nothing at all.
Then I let her go.
She tumbled to a heap in the dirt, small and fragile and warm. Her trembling form lunged forward and shrank back all at once, not cowed like I might have expected. Breaths came fast as she swiped at the stilled air around her. I laughed softly, gusting wind around her in tiny eddies that picked at her hair, the seams of her clothes in the most intimate of caresses without being there at all. She batted at her clothes, panting softly, and wrapped that pretty red cloak around herself like it might offer herself some form of protection.
What is it the wolfman said at times like these?
Ah, of course.
Spoilers. She was wrong.
Stepping from tree to tree I reached out, patting her soothingly.
Bryn’s head snapped up. “Stop!” she shrieked, waving her hands at the nothingness above her head, where I had been mere breaths before, but didn’t stay to torment her.
Or maybe I did, but not there. My laughter strained through my trees, a creaking sound I could not stop.
Breath interested me. I no longer used air the way she did, coveting it away inside her body only to expel it seconds later in a poisonous cloud. I wondered what would happen if I cut her air off, if only for a second.
While I was lost in my head of fantasies, the girl beneath me ran. Sprinted like a dryad who found her feet. She pounded the cold soil of my indifference, curved around corners I created justfor her, leading her to the absolute center of my forest where she had never been before.
And there she stopped. Right where I stood in human and tree form in the middle of the clearing. The darkwood's heart. There, my skin marled with the patterns of ten thousand trees, she found me.
Right where the paths ran out in a star pattern, every one leading her to this place. As she stepped into the grove that was nothing more than a patch of bare, sunken earth, my trees closed around her in a tight circle blocking out every exit except for the one who would come to find her later.
