The Forest of Forever (The Soren Chase Series, Book One)

by Rob Blackwell

  Soren wanted to keep going forever. He had plans to work his way slowly down her body, washing her legs and kissing the inside of her thighs. But watching her, listening to her, he couldn’t keep control any longer. His mouth closed on hers and she instantly responded, the moaning growing louder and more insistent.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said as they broke apart. “I didn’t know how much longer I could stand it.”

  But Soren couldn’t stop. His hands found her hips and he pushed her back against the shower. She wrapped one leg around him and he reached down to grab the other so that her legs encircled him.

  And in that moment there was no Reapoke Forest, Association, pretenders, or gaunts. There was only him and her and the feel of her body against his. He put his lips to her ear and whispered her name.

  They made love twice more in rapid succession, only reaching the bed on the third time. They lay there intertwined, her hands occasionally touching his face.

  “So that was . . . intense,” she said, and smiled.

  “Hopefully fun, too,” he replied.

  “Oh, it was definitely that,” she said. “I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything like it. I don’t want to give you an ego, but you were really, really good.”

  “I had a great partner,” he said.

  “How long’s it been, Soren?” she asked.

  “You were my first,” he said.

  She laughed, and Soren smiled. He kissed her again, enjoying the way she tasted on his lips.

  “You almost seem ready for a round four,” she said.

  He didn’t know where their energy had come from. A couple hours’ sleep shouldn’t have been nearly enough recovery time, particularly for the relatively aerobic activities they’d engaged in. But he felt rested and relaxed, almost at peace.

  It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time—at least eight years. A voice came to him in that moment, clear and unmistakable. “I don’t care who you tell, but you have to tell somebody.”

  Just like Sara to intrude on his thoughts when he had a naked woman lying in bed beside him. And he was pretty sure if he told this tale, a round four would be out of the question. There were other considerations as well. They had a job to do. While he didn’t know it for a fact, he suspected their window of opportunity to complete it was shutting fast.

  And yet if there was ever going to be a perfect moment, he thought, this was it. Here was his chance to unburden himself, and if he didn’t take it . . . Well, he thought that window of opportunity might be shutting as well. It would not be long before he was incapable of telling this story. He wondered if he already was.

  “Soren?” she asked, a concerned look on her face. “You okay?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not okay. I don’t even know what ‘okay’ feels like anymore.”

  He sat up in bed and looked down at her.

  “I . . .” he started, and then stopped.

  What if he couldn’t do it? He had kept this buried so deep inside, hidden behind every mental barrier he could possibly construct, he didn’t know if he could tear them all down. Or maybe he was just scared of what would happen once he did.

  He also didn’t know if Annika was the right person. He felt affection for her, but it wasn’t as if they were in love. He hadn’t even known her that long. But maybe that made her the right listener. He wasn’t sure he could share this with someone he’d known for several years.

  “Soren?” she asked.

  He made a decision and committed. There was no going back.

  “I need to tell you a story,” he said. “It’s not one I’ve ever shared with anyone before. But I think I’m ready to talk about it, and I think you’re the one to hear it.”

  She sat up beside him, and he tried not to notice the way the covers exposed her naked body.

  “Listen,” she said, “you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I know . . . I know it must be hard for you. But if you do want to share it, I’d be honored to listen. I think it could help you. And I swear on my soul I will never tell another living being.”

  A switch in his head seemed to turn on, and his mind was suddenly floating on a sea of memory. He didn’t know where to begin at first, but then suddenly he did. He would start at the true beginning. He would start with John.

  Soren opened his mouth and spilled his secret—kept for eight long years—at last.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “I met John Townes when I was six years old, and we became instant friends. I can barely remember a time before I knew him. Some friendships are only about proximity, especially in childhood. But ours wasn’t. We liked the same comic books, the same games, the same sports, you name it. We had different parents, but we were brothers in every other sense of the word. Except for one difference—we never really fought. We had disagreements, but they were minor and easily glossed over.

  “We met Sara Ignatius about two years later. She was a black girl in a nearly all-white neighborhood, so she was something of a novelty at first. We spied on her the day her family moved in.

  “John mooned over her from the very start. All three of us were just eight years old, but he loved her with the intensity and dedication of a man twenty years older. At first I think she thought it was cute, or perhaps even something put on for show, a cruel prank that he was waiting to spring on her. Sara had a hard life and trust did not come easily, even when she was very young. But it was the real deal. John loved Sara, and in time she came to love him, too.

  “When they officially became a couple at the ripe old age of fifteen, I think their families thought it wouldn’t last. In certain circles, interracial couples could still get themselves into a world of trouble and sometimes the pressure made them crack apart. But once John had Sara, he never let go. Most of the other guys I’ve known were downright idiots about women. They didn’t know what they wanted until it was beyond their grasp. But not John.

  “As a couple, they survived high school with almost ridiculous ease. I went through a string of girlfriends during that period, never serious about any of them. Our friends had breakups and makeups and all sorts of drama. But John and Sara were drama-free. They were solid.

  “His mom hoped it would end in college. She all but told John that it would. As tight as they were, they went to separate schools. John and I went to Mary Washington, while Sara got accepted into Harvard. We were never the best of students; Sara was also a lot smarter than us. But the long-distance thing didn’t faze John. He didn’t panic. He could have grabbed on too tight or taken the opportunity to look elsewhere. He did neither. He gave her enough space to make her own friends but made sure he was around enough that neither one of them was ever truly lonely.

  “He waited until a week after college graduation to propose. He and Sara were just twenty-two, but the writing was on the wall at that point. Everyone knew they were getting married, even John’s mother. When he called and told me, my only question was, ‘What took you so long?’ I’d been surprised he didn’t ask in high school, even though I knew Sara well enough to know that would have been a mistake.

  “She said yes. Of course she said yes. Yet he reacted as if he had doubted the answer he would receive, and he walked around an almost comically happy man. John was always one for wearing his heart on his sleeve, one of the few traits that he and I did not share. And I was the best man—for both of them, really. By the end I was as close to Sara as I was to John.

  “Four weeks before the wedding, I took John and our two best friends from college—Mikey and Edward—for a bachelor party weekend at his parents’ lakefront cottage. The plan was simple. There wouldn’t be strippers. John only had eyes for one woman, and he was marrying her. But there was going to be alcohol, and plenty of it. Mikey, Edward, and I bought a beer kegerator as a wedding present. We had it topped up and ready for one last reminder of the benders we used to go on during college. The four of us arrived at the cottage ready for one hell of a party.

&nb
sp; “But we were not alone.

  “The lake was almost totally deserted that weekend. September was still the high season, but that weekend was rainy and cold. School had just started, so even the folks who had weekend cottages mostly didn’t bother to show up. But we didn’t care about the weather because that wasn’t the point. We had beer, movies, and a couple Xboxes.

  “You know about my memory loss. Most people fall into two camps. Either I really hit my head in the accident and I don’t know what happened that weekend, or I’m a faker whose amnesia was merely a convenient excuse. The truth is that they’re both partly right. The accident was real and so was the memory loss. I can’t remember whole chunks of my own life. I can’t remember my first kiss, or losing my virginity, any of it. I’ve forgotten entire people and events. You need to know that’s true. But I didn’t forget a single moment of what happened that weekend.

  “You don’t know how often I wish that wasn’t the case. It would have been so much easier not knowing. Maybe safer, too.

  “I wish I could say we had a great time before it all came apart. It might make me feel better to know that John and the guys had a fantastic final day before they were murdered. But you don’t know when your last moments are going to come. We go through our lives pleasantly oblivious to our eventual fate. We never know when we’re having our final dance, the last time listening to our favorite song, the last fuck—whatever it is. Maybe that’s for the best, but it feels unfair.

  “If I had known those were our last moments together, they would have been different. But John was acting distant and weird, and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried to press him a couple times but he was pretty adept at evading a question when he wanted to. And so I let him sulk for a large part of the last day of his life.

  “I’d expected to stay up late drinking and watching Monty Python movies, films I can’t remember now but I know I used to quote like crazy, but John called it quits around ten, claiming he had a headache. I tucked in not long after, already feeling like the big bachelor weekend was going to be a bust.

  “Something was waiting for us. ‘Waiting’ is not the right word. It was hunting us. I don’t know why. Maybe we just passed by at the wrong time. That’s what I thought for a long while. Lately I’ve begun to wonder if there was a more sinister agenda behind it. In retrospect it seems so purposeful. But I can’t fathom what the larger goal would be or why it would target us.

  “It could have sneaked inside and killed us one by one while we slept. But this thing wanted to play with its prey.

  “It took Mikey first. It was a rainy Saturday morning, but Mikey got up early and went for a jog. He was on the track and field team in college and was never really happy unless he got a run in. He didn’t give a damn what the weather was outside. It could have been hailing large ice stones and he would have gone running. I was up early and watched him suit up. He asked if I wanted to come along, but he didn’t mean it. Mikey liked to run alone; he was just being polite. So he left the cottage, and I never saw him again.

  “Only that’s not exactly true. Mikey came back from his run—a little late, I think—but he walked in the door an hour and a half later and gave us all a dazzling smile. But the thing is, it wasn’t really Mikey anymore. It was a pretender.

  “I didn’t know what those were, of course. I’d heard the word ‘doppelgänger’ but never figured that they might be real. At some point during Mikey’s jog, the monster ran him down and killed him. I’d like to believe that Mikey didn’t suffer, but that’s not how pretenders operate.

  “I even know how it probably happened. Pretenders are devious, awful creatures. It likely let Mikey know there was someone chasing him just to watch him try to get away. And just when Mikey thought he was free and clear, the thing closed in for the kill. Then it stole his face.

  “The monster came in looking exactly like Mikey, and none of us could tell the difference. It didn’t just appear like Mikey, it acted like him, too. If anything, he seemed more jovial and friendly than when he’d left. I attributed that to the endorphin rush of the run. But I had no sense there was anything wrong. The pretender had taken on a role and it played it to the hilt.

  “He made Mikey-like jokes, Mikey-like facial expressions, and Mikey-like random asides. Mikey had a bit of ADD and it was hard to keep him focused on anything for very long. The pretender’s version was exactly the same. About the only difference was that Mikey suddenly seemed interested in getting one of us alone.

  “I thought Mikey was just being clingy. He kept asking if anyone wanted to walk down to the lake, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was raining. Then he wanted someone to help him search through John’s dad’s record collection upstairs to see what we could find. But we didn’t. Not because we sensed anything was wrong, but just because we didn’t want to.

  “If you knew him, you might find it ironic, but it was video games that killed Edward. His mother always insisted they would be the death of him, but I don’t think she meant it literally. In this case, however, that’s what happened. The fake Mikey finally hit on an idea that worked. He suggested we play some Halo.

  “There were only four of us, and we could have played it all on one big screen. But Edward and John were both fond of having as big a screen as possible. So we hooked up two Xboxes together so we could play the same game in different rooms. Edward and Mikey were in the master bedroom upstairs, which had a decent forty-two-inch HDTV, and John and me in the living room, which had the mammoth sixty-five-incher that John’s dad was so proud of.

  “I don’t know if you’ve played Halo, but its premise is simple enough: kill the other guys. The person with the best kill-to-death ratio at the end of the match is the winner. And for the first couple matches, everything was fine. And then Mikey came downstairs to the kitchen. He said he was grabbing a snack. About two minutes later, Edward’s digital self stopped moving. John and I assumed he was taking a leak and kept on killing the undefended avatar, racking up points in the process.

  “Mikey kept playing for a while and then, eventually, his digital avatar stopped moving, too. It took us a bit to catch on to that, and when we did we thought the connection had severed. What we couldn’t figure out was why neither Mikey nor Edward were saying anything about it. I called them both several times, but nobody responded.

  “I finally got up in frustration and walked down the hall and up the stairs. It was cold and drafty up there. The main bedroom was at the end of a long hallway and someone had left the window there open. I marched over to shut it, shivering as I did so. When I lifted my hands to close it, I noticed something odd. There were two red handprints on the glass. At first I thought it was paint, but then I realized it was blood. Suddenly I didn’t want to touch the window.

  “‘What the hell?’ I said out loud. I turned to go into the bedroom, and that’s when I saw him. Edward was sitting near the headboard, staring at the TV screen. His expression seemed surprised. I called his name before I realized he’d never respond to it again. There was a thick coat of blood covering his shirt and running down onto the bed. A kitchen knife was lodged in his chest.

  “I didn’t speak and I couldn’t move. I just stared at Edward’s body, so sure I must be caught in a nightmare that I waited to wake up. It was only when I heard the sound of feet behind me that I screamed and jumped away. But it was just John.

  “‘What’s taking you guys so . . . ?’ he started, and the words died on his lips when he saw Edward. Our eyes met, and I could see the blood drain from his face as he realized what he had just seen. He opened his mouth to say the word ‘Who?’ when we heard a voice downstairs.

  “‘Sooooooooooooooooren,’ Mikey called. ‘Jooooooooooooohn. Where aaaaaaareeeee you?’

  “I felt like I’d lost my mind. I couldn’t accept that Edward was dead or that Mikey was somehow behind it. I kept hoping Edward would jump up and demonstrate it was some elaborate fake. Instead, John and I just stared at each other, growing more afraid by the sec
ond. We didn’t understand exactly what had happened, only that we were in terrible danger.

  “‘What do we do?’ I asked.

  “‘I tried your game,’ Mikey called from below. ‘Now it’s time to play mine.’

  “‘That’s not Mikey,’ John said. ‘It’s something pretending to be him.’

  “I don’t know how he jumped to that conclusion, but John was far more interested in the supernatural than I was. Maybe he’d heard of pretenders. Or maybe he just knew on a deeper level that the real Mikey was incapable of doing this.

  “I nodded, but I’d begun shaking all over. I felt water in my eyes and knew I was so scared that I was crying. Still, I had an idea. ‘The window,’ I told him.

  “I wasn’t thinking about revenge then, only escape. I wanted us to get the hell out of there. We ran out of the room and looked at the window. I tried to pull it up, but it wouldn’t budge. I hadn’t noticed when I approached it earlier, but there was a screwdriver jammed into the track. I tried to yank it out but it didn’t move. The pretender had lodged it there with such force there was no way to pull it free.

  “We ran to the other windows on the upper level, and they were all the same. The pretender varied what was blocking the windows, but all of them were stuck. We weren’t getting out that way. We tried the phones next, but the lines were dead.

  “‘Why don’t you just come down here and we can talk?’ Mikey shouted up at us. ‘There’s no getting out of here, you know. No one here gets out alive.’

  “John put his finger to his lips and gestured to his bedroom on the other side of the hall. I didn’t know what he was playing at but followed his lead. He opened his closet, and I kept a watch on the door. I kept waiting for Mikey—or whatever was pretending to be him—to walk through it.

  “‘Don’t make me come up there!’ Mikey shouted from nearby, and I flinched.

  “John dug around in some boxes, while I stood helplessly looking between him and the door. Finally, he pulled something out and turned around. He was holding an object wrapped in tissue paper. He unwrapped it slowly to reveal two hunting knives. I recognized them immediately. John’s parents had bought them for us when we were on a trip out West when we were only nine years old. I had assumed they were lost. He handed one knife to me.