He dipped his rootlike toes into the dirt, and for a minute nothing happened while I shifted my attention between the two threats. Tendrils exploded through the earth and wrapped my ankles, the move so sudden I lost momentum and toppled forward onto my hands and knees, where more grubby strands bound them together. Behind me, Isaac was likewise restrained in a burst of dirt clods and roots.
“What are you doing, Arno?” Flower demanded. “She has the pendant.”
Suspicion narrowed his eyes. “Show me.”
“I’d love to, but unlike you, I can’t sprout another hand. Either come over and look or let one of mine free.”
“I’ll show him.” Flower huffed when it became obvious neither option appealed to the boy. She crossed to me and knelt. “Excuse me.” Her fingers brushed my cleavage as she dug the pendant from between my breasts then held it up, triumphant. “There. See?”
The roots binding me slurped back into the dirt, and the boy’s toes solidified into mostly humanoid feet. “Mistress has been right worried about her brother. She’ll be chuffed to see you’ve come on his behalf.”
“You’ll take us to Branwen?” Vinelike coils encircled Isaac’s wrists, and sap oozed over his fingertips. “Just like that?”
“Only the pendant’s owner can transfer it off their person to another. Mistress’s brother gave you that pendant, put it around your neck with his own hands, or you wouldn’t be wearing it now.” Arno, whoever he was, was well-informed. “I have no reason to fear her brother, therefore I have no reason to fear you.”
“Can you let me up now?” Isaac resisted against his restraints, but not hard enough to hurt the boy.
“Right.” The pinky toe on Arno’s left foot wriggled, and Isaac was freed. “Sorry about that.”
Arno stepped into the light, and I marveled at his full head of hair styled from the tidy leaves of a hedge. He wasn’t just brown-skinned, his arms were patterned and textured like bark. His eyes were chestnuts and his teeth the yellow meat of acorns. He was as beautiful as he was bizarre.
Leaves rustled overhead, a shushing noise that carried from yards in every direction.
“I’ve sent ahead a message.” His knees groaned, the ache of dry wood bending with every step. “We’d best hurry. Mistress can only wait so long before she must leave, with or without us.”
“Are you catching a lift with us too?” I backed a step toward the RV, ready to get our show on the road. “We’ve got plenty of room for one more.”
“No. There’s no time for that.” He waggled his thorny eyebrows. “You’re going on a walkabout with me.”
I spared a lingering glance in the general direction of the RV, weighing my options. Fast was good. Leaving without telling Tiberius was bad. But the quicker we left, the sooner we could return. And the prince probably wouldn’t notice our absence until he ran out of virtual cash for his games. Arno must have noticed our tumble from thin air when Bea headbutted me in the solar plexus. The last thing we ought to do was draw more attention to the prince’s hideout, but that meant trusting Tiberius to fend for himself until our return.
Isaac shook his head once, and I nodded. We were on the same page. Tiberius would have to babysit himself for a few hours. Longer than that, and he would have to send Bea with an SOS to Stone’s Throw.
“Step lively, you lot. Hold hands, and I can take us all through. We’ll be there lickety-split.” Arno’s expression screwed up into a frown. “Don’t let go. Whatever the trees tell you, ignore them. They like to chatter, but they don’t grasp that humans don’t live as long as they do. Lose your way, and you’ll get stuck between. It could take years to find you, if we found you at all. One thing trees excel at is keeping secrets, and with dryads all but dead on this plane, they hold on to any unwary travelers as best they can. Gets lonely, does the trees.”
For the first time in my life, I gazed around at the surplus of oaks, maples and firs, and shivered as a sliver of doubt wedged itself between my vertebrae. For as long as I had lived, trees had signified the freedom of running on all fours. Never had I considered they had any type of consciousness, let alone their own wants or needs. Suddenly I was grateful not to be a male of the species. Sorry I peed on your cousin’s foot that time. Ankle? Thigh? What part of tree anatomy did wolves mark?
“We’re traveling through a tree?” I locked my knees. “Is this like in the Harry Potter movies when the kids run straight at the wall between Platform Nine and Ten to reach Platform Nine and Three Quarters?”
“It’s all right.” Flower took my hand much as I had taken hers earlier. “It won’t hurt. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Smiling down at the girl, I took another piece of Isaac’s advice and let her be my anchor. She squared her shoulders as we reached Arno. The message was clear. We were under her protection, and she would tolerate no monkey business from the boy.
Flower wrinkled her nose as she took his hand. “What did you hang around here for anyway?”
“You weren’t there when we left.” His cheeks burned deep crimson. “I worried ’bout you is all.”
“Sometimes he pulls me through so I don’t have to walk as far,” she explained. “It’s dark in there, tight, and I don’t like it much.”
Crestfallen, the boy acted like she’d whipped a saw from her back pocket and cut off one of his limbs.
God save me from teenage romance.
“I won’t let go,” he promised her, all sincerity and puppy-eyed adoration. “You’re safe with me. You’re always safe with me.”
“No one is ever safe.” Her voice gentled, the softening of a blow. “You do try, though. That’s more than most. I don’t forget that. I never will.”
A dull thud to our left drew my attention before a self-inflated voice squeaked, “Gods the foot odor was killing me. And those claws! My lovely complexion is ruined. Do you know how many years of current it will require to smooth these furrows?”
“You have got to be kidding me.” I strolled over to the source of the ruckus, and a pair of googly eyes peered up at me, recognition in their depths. “How did you get here?”
The last time I’d seen one of these rocks had been when the púca dropped its proof in the cell with me in Faerie. I’d blacked out soon after and hadn’t given it another thought. Was this the same one? Had to be.
“I was minding my own business, having a chat with friends as one does, and it started raining—” it began.
“I don’t have time for your life story. Give me the short version.” I shook it, and its eyes rolled. “How did you get here? Who dropped you?”
“How rude.” Its water-smoothed forehead pulled low. “After you lot left me buried in that grimy prison, a rather nasty bird-thing uncovered me. It’s been carrying me around in its claws for weeks. The smell! It was nigh unbearable.”
Bird-thing? Alkonost? Siren? Lots of mythological wiggle room there, but none of it good.
“Wait.” The bizarreness of its previous statements sucked me into its babbling. “You have a nose?”
“Well, no, but if I did, it would be quite offended by the stench.”
That’s what I got for talking to a rock.
“We’ve got company,” I called to Isaac while shoving the stone in my pocket. “I think Rilla—”
Thick forks of lightning zinged across the sky, and a masculine squawk erupted at a point past my shoulder. Color me surprised. Bea was actually being useful for once. I didn’t know she had it in her to attack someone who wasn’t me. Maybe I owed her an apology.
A bullet-shaped feather torpedo clipped my shoulder, and I windmilled before hitting the dirt.
Or maybe not.
Her throttled cry drew my attention skyward, where four winged women hovered, naked but for the feathers dusting their unmentionables and the curved swords they each held. The nudity didn’t bother me. But the swords? Where had they been carrying those? I didn’t see any sheaths for the weapons. Then again, this might be one of those things I’d sleep be
tter at night for not knowing.
Warning given, Bea rocketed back into the sky and provided cover fire, zapping the warrior women I suspected must be harpies, giving us a chance to escape.
“We’ve got to move,” I panted. “Arno?”
“Ready.” He pressed a palm against the nearest tree, a scraggly pine, and it slid right in without extending through the other side. “Waiting on you.”
Isaac, who had started running toward me when I took the hit, reached for my hand. A tickling sensation caused me to glance down, and I almost yelped. He had taken the boy’s blood, sap, whatever, and used it to create an intricate tangle of roots that bound our linked fingers together in a wooden cage as delicate as filigree.
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” I twisted our hands, admiring his work as he yanked me to my feet.
“I let you get away once.” Another tickle wrapped a vine around our wrists. “It won’t happen twice.”
Ridiculous man.
Though Bea couldn’t hold off the harpies forever, I hesitated a heartbeat. “Will the package be safe until we return?”
“The package looks to be well in hand.” He spared the thunderbird an admiring glance. “We’ll draw them away. It’s the only choice. Returning for the package now would only compromise its location.”
Flower ran for us, fierce determination in her expression, and clamped her hand over my wrist. “Come on.” She hauled Isaac and me into the softwood portal after Arno. The scrape of bark, the punch of otherness across my senses, had me reeling long before the way sealed behind us.
Chapter 20
“Daughter of the forest, we welcome you.” The solemn voice tolled in my head, battering its way through in a mockery of the fluid ease of the pack bond. “It has been so long since your kind ran here. We welcome a wolf in our midst.”
Figuring it couldn’t hurt, I attempted communication the same way. “I appreciate your hospitality.”
Thanking a talking tree seemed like a bad idea.
“Isaac?” I reached for him, curious if this mode of travel had linked us all.
“Who is Isaac?” demanded the tree. “Why would you speak to him and not to me? Do you know how long it’s been since a warg traveled these paths? Do you not value the shade we trees provide? The sustenance? The protection?”
“Of course I do,” I soothed. “I was only worried for my mate and sought to reassure myself of his presence.”
“I do see the others. One is ours, one is his, and then one is yours.” The tree paused. “They rush so, always flitting about. Why not let them go ahead? You can stay awhile with me. We can talk of the rains and the seeds, the growing things and cool, dark places.”
“I can’t.” I suppressed a flicker of panic when earthy magic flowed over my wrists. “I have to—”
“You will stay with me,” he decided. “I like your hair. It’s as red as leaves in autumn.”
The magic solidified into tiny pinpricks of hurt similar to when Arno had first attacked me, and then again when Isaac joined our hands to prevent us from separation. Except this was so much worse, the wooden spears piercing my skin in an attempt to hold on to me. Thick roots the width of my thumb skewered my palms, and blood ran down my fingers.
Behind me, Isaac struggled, his nails biting into my flesh. Ahead of me, Flower cried out in alarm. In front of me, around me, the tree pressed down on my body, which was somehow here and yet not. I screamed when sharpened stakes stabbed through the toes of my shoes in an attempt to pin my feet.
I was pulled apart, my muscles protesting and joints popping under the strain.
Panicked, the wolf rose to the forefront of my brain and seized control of my mouth. “We are cousins, tree, but we are not the same. Would you trap me here as man has confined your seeking roots with his buildings and roads? Would you let me wither as you would without sunlight or rain? Or would you honor our kinship and allow me trespass this one time in exchange for the blood you have spilled?”
“Apologies, cousin.” The tree sounded contrite. “Your skin is so human at times I forget your heart is as wild as ours.”
“Release me and mine, and I will grant you a boon. I will return with a till to churn the earth and aerate your soil so that your roots might seek new depths. I will bring fresh manure to enrich your grounds and rainwater to wet your parched throat.”
“The deal is struck,” the tree intoned. “Your passage is paid by blood and vow.”
The world stretched into a long tunnel, and I emerged from it dripping blood and sweat from my ordeal. Isaac jostled me as he exited, withdrawing his vinelike cage and grimacing at what he saw.
“What the hell happened in there?” He traced the holes left in my palms as the skin mended. “It tried to snatch you out of my hands.”
“It wanted to keep her,” Arno marveled. “It liked the wildness in her, and now that it’s tasted her blood, they will forever be linked.”
“That sounds bad.” I wriggled my toes to check the damage. Still functional but sore. “What does that mean?”
“I can’t say.” He gave a loose roll of his shoulders. “I’ll have to find one of the local dryads, the earthborns, to ask. The meaning may differ here than home.”
Great. I might be blood sisters with a tree. Call me crazy, but I doubted that was a good thing.
“Can they track us?” I put the question to our guide.
“I don’t see how.” Leaves rustled as he scratched his ear. “Trees have no names for their locations or kin as most understand them. Their directions are impossible to decipher unless you speak their language.”
That was a comfort at least. Maybe if we scattered the harpies long enough, over a wide area, we could sneak back into the RV without incident once we finished our recruitment pitch to Branwen. Patting the rock, safe in my pocket, I exchanged a glance with Isaac. As eager as I was to quiz the stone on its ordeal in greater detail, we had to reach safety first.
“Whatcha got down there?” a cheery voice called from across the way. The outline of a young girl, the sun warming her back, bounced on the roof of a blue-and-pink house on stilts, her energy manic. “Food?”
“Margay, what did Branwen say about eating the locals?” Arno sucked in a tired breath, as though this were a conversation they’d had before, one he was tired of repeating.
“That they don’t taste good?” She waved a hand. “I’m a great cook. I think the flavor can be improved, myself.”
“Humans are, well, people.” He set out toward the house, shaking his head. “We don’t eat people. It’s wrong.”
“Wrong.” She scoffed. “When is anything fun ever right?”
“Kill a human, and see if she doesn’t send you back.” The thread of his patience snapped. “Fill your belly once, Margay, go ahead. See what happens. You’ll be packed off to Faerie before you finish wiping the grease from your fingers.”
With a yowling shriek that set my teeth on edge, Margay exploded in a torrent of cats that leapt nimbly from the roof onto the porch then set out to prowl at their leisure.
“I want to ask what that was almost as much as I don’t want to know,” I admitted.
Isaac stared after one of the cats, tracking it like he might test himself against the peculiarity of Margay’s magic, but he carried on. Once upon a time, he would have been unable to resist. That he cast off a chance to taste such rarified blood turned my heart to mush. Time and time again, he kept handing me proof he was working on himself. I won’t say he was trying to mold himself to fit me. Such perfection was false. That way led to regret and disappointment. But he had been standing at a crossroads in his life all those months ago, and he had taken the path that paralleled mine closest. It made struggling with my urges easier knowing he had his own bad habits to kick.
As the shock wore off, I surveyed our surroundings. The house wasn’t on the beach, but the roar of waves crashed in the distance, and gulls cried out overhead. The soil was sandy and littered with seashells. A bu
rn started in my calves after the workout I got crossing the sand to reach the first step leading up and up to the one-level house.
Arno took the stairs at a jog. Flower, hesitant to leave us unchaperoned, lingered. I kept pace with her, and Isaac took up the rear. He kept a comforting hand on the small of my back, letting me know with a touch that he was there.
A petite woman met us at the door. She wore a knit dress the color of sealskin that brushed the floor and complemented the faint grayness of her skin and the heather-soft color of her gaze. Her wide eyes glittered as though they held unshed tears, but her smile was warm for Arno and Flower.
“I received your messages. Your warning about our guests and those hunting them was much appreciated. The others are preparing to fight, if we must.” She rustled his leafy hair, and her posture relaxed. “You were kind to return for Norma. It would have been a long trip for her otherwise.”
Norma? Who named a kid her age— Oh. Yeah. A couple centuries ago, I’m sure it was all the rage.
The boy, who only had eyes for Norma, ducked his head. “I didn’t want her getting lost.”
“I can follow clues,” she huffed. “I’m not a child.”
“Children,” the woman contradicted them both at the same time. “Can you go inside and wait while I talk to our guests?”
That a girl hundreds of years old was still a child to Branwen was not lost on me, and my skin pebbled.
Arno executed a perfect bow. “Yes, Mistress.”
“Branwen,” she urged on a resigned breath. “Call me Branwen.”
“Yes, Mistress,” he said, a twinkle in his eyes. Full of daring, he hooked his arm around Norma’s shoulders and hauled her over the threshold.
“We can take the children out of Faerie,” she told us, “but we can’t take Faerie out of the children.”
“I’m Dell Preston, beta of the Lorimar Pack out of Butler, Tennessee.” I handled introductions so there would be no confusion later. “This is Isaac Cahill, cousin of the Lorimar alpha, and my mate.”
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