Page 20 of Consumed
The illusion faded, and though the pain ebbed, the exhaustion of the experience did not. I sank onto the earth and curled onto my side, trembling. The frozen earth was cool and comforting against my cheek.
My sisters gathered around me, equally cool voices and hands welcoming my return to where I belonged. As I lay there, I couldn’t shake the familiarity. And though it was still blurry and distant, a memory struck me with a heated blow.
Why did I feel like I had been herein this exact position before?
A whimper rose at the back of my throat, and when I peeked my eyes open, I expected to find the forest floor around me soaked in red.
But there was nothing.
And I was safe.
8
Light frost still covered the barren branches of my favorite perch weeks later. This winter was harsher than most, but I did not feel the cold. It wasn’t the elements that would harm me—it was the all-too-human longing searing a constant hole in my chest that I was certain would do me in.
Time passed, and I forced myself to reckon with the reality that this loneliness was here to stay. Day by day, I drifted from clearing to clearing with my sisters, forcing myself to remember the eon I had already spent here observing, perfecting, and protecting alongside them before Eoin had entered the forest. Before his blood had touched the same soil as mine.
He would become a beautiful, painful memory. Centuries would pass before the image of his face was entirely erased from my mind.
No,I thought.Even then, I will remember him. It will take thousands of years, and stillI will know him.
I was plaiting my sister’s hair with snowdrop blossoms when I felt a disturbance in the air. The wind shivered. Goldfinches burst into flight, scattering into the gray sky.
Someone had entered the woods.
I stood, letting my touch drift from her hair. My sister seized my wrist, her ice blue eyes wide and cutting—
Do not go.
I wrenched away, pushing onward as though in a trance.
I must.
Before I knew it, my legs had taken me to my clearing—crawling along gnarled branches, leaping from tree to tree, bare feet padding along frozen earth—where my favorite oak tree unfurled toward the ground, its ancient branches like an outstretched hand clawing for freedom it would never find.
The glow of a lantern resting upon the ground caught my eye first.
A human knelt at the edge of the creek—my human.
My idiotic heart leapt at the hope that I would not have to suffer centuries alone to forget him. Eoin had come back for me, at last.
A soft sound cut through the meadow, and it took me a moment to realize he was crying.
I slowed my steps, not making myself visible yet as I circled to get a better look at him. Eoin had never once dared to visit me in the night. He was slumped with one shoulder against our tree, his eyes bruised with lack of sleepand swollen from crying. A haze of stubble darkened his jaw as though he hadn’t shaved in days. His stare was fixed on nothing in particular, still shuddering out half-formed sobs that shook his shoulders.
Oh, how he suffered without me.
I approached from behind, touching his head delicately as I lifted the magic that cloaked me. Eoin started, looking back at me in the lantern’s light. My heart gave another odd lurch at that empty stare—a hollowness that didn’t look likehim.
“My Eoin,” I all but whispered when I found my voice. “What pains you so?”
He attempted to form the words several times. I carefully allowed my expression to crumple when he finally choked out, “She’s dead.”
Somehow, uttering those words seemed to ground him back into reality. “She was taken in the night with no warning. One moment, she was laughing by the fire in my arms. The next…” His expression became faraway again as he was tossed back into that memory. “We brought her to theliaig,but none of his herbs or tonics could turn the sickness. Brianna wept of a fire in her chest, but it was a fever the healer had not seen before. No one had. Three nights we stayed by her side, and still she—she slipped away.”
Eoin’s last words choked off. As he broke down, I wrapped my arms around him and murmuredwords of comfort. While he wept into my gown, I was glad that he could not see the soft curve of my smile. He allowed me to stroke his hair just like I had done countless times before. At last, our world was settling back into what it should have been all along.
I forced tears to spill down my cheeks. Carefully catching one in my palm, I felt it harden against my skin.
