Page 443 of Evil Hearts

Chapter Six

And then oneday, she awoke and he wasn’t there. She stood and did her daily routine of stretches and old-school calisthenics. No Madoc. She sat back in her hammock and waited. He didn’t come. Maybe this was her chance? She waited longer but something in her patience snapped and she jumped up.

Nora quickly untied the hammock from the stalagmites and tied it around her, starting carefully up the corridor on the left. Feeling along the way, one hand aimed outward and slightly up to avoid hitting her head, and the other at chest level, feeling for turns in the tunnels.

Once in a while, she felt like someone was watching her. She couldn’t say for sure why, but it just *felt* like someone was there, but when she reached around, swinging her arms, she found nothing but the blackness she’d grown used to. She wondered if it might be Madoc, tracking her through the passages.

She made slow progress, tripping once and bloodying her knee. “Dammit Nora,” she said to herself. “Haven’t you had enough of that?”

She used the hammock to wipe the blood away and commenced creeping through the cave. She had no idea if she was going toward an exit, or if she was just getting herself lost inside a mountain. The sounds of the other people hadlong since faded, and she was left with the sound of her own breathing and water moving off in the distance. She knew if she followed the water, it would eventually lead out into the open air, but there was no guarantee she’d survive without getting stuck in small passages. She believed that if she kept moving upward she would eventually find an exit; she only hoped it would be large enough for her to get out.

Again, she had the weird sense that someone was watching her. She swung around again, but found nothing. If it were Madoc, he’d’ve stopped her and taken her back to their… HIS alcove, she corrected herself. If it were another of the People, they’d have called for help in stopping her or simply taken her back themselves. Did she want that? Did she want to be stopped? To be prevented from leaving? She was concerned that Madoc had not appeared, and was testing theories about that as she walked. But she answered her own question by continuing on.

Nora moved her hair off her forehead, as a breeze tickled her long bangs across her nose.

Wait. A breeze. She hadn’t felt a breeze the entire time she’d been in the cave! She had to be near an opening of some kind! Yes!!

Using an old scouting trick, she stuck her index finger in her mouth, wetting it, and held it up. The side that cooled on the breeze was the direction from which the wind blew. It was a useful trick, and if one were lost in the woods, could help narrow down the difference between east and west.

The breeze was coming from a smaller opening than the one she was planning to go through, but at this point, there was no convincing her to skip the breezy passage.

She shuffled on for what felt like years, and she realized that the temperature was getting warmer. And she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, but there looked like a spot far in the distance, a tiny speck where the darkness faded into light. Shetried to maintain a steady pace, but her legs refused to stay slow, and she sped up, moving as quickly as she could toward that slowly growing speck.

She gave up trying to be quiet and began a full-on limping jog when she realized that the speck had become a dot, which then became an indiscriminate blob of light. The closer Nora got, the more her eyes squinted, and the more her head hurt from the light. She had to start climbing over rocks and up boulders to make her way to the growing light at the top. Closing in on it, she heard several rocks fall below her. Refusing to look back, she climbed on. Her leg throbbed and her head ached from the light, but she kept moving. She knew if she stopped and Madoc were behind her, she would hesitate, and she did not want to have to make that choice again. She had decided to leave, had taken the chance to leave, and was now so close to freedom that she smelled the heat of the sun on the verdant forest outside the cave.

The opening was just big enough for her to climb through. She could barely see. Her eyes felt like thousands of tiny needles danced on her irises and tears streamed down her face. She told herself it was because of the intensity of the daylight, not because she was actually torn about leaving. She saw some trees and scrub bushes but that was all. She reached up through the hole to pull herself up, and froze as Madoc called her name.

Chapter Seven

“Please Nora,” hesaid. “Please don’t leave me. Did we not join? Were you not happy?” She could not deny him the truth. They had joined; not just physically, but emotionally too. In those long cavern nights, their conversations and gone into dreams and deities, family and futures, real and imagined. She knew that in a different place in a different time, Madoc might be a man she could live her forever with. But in this time, in a cavern under the Great Smoky Mountains, she could not stay.

Without looking back, she said, “I can’t live in your darkness, even if the love you showed me burned as bright as the sun. I can’t stay. But you could come with me.”

“You do not know what I am. And when you do, I fear that you will run in terror and loathing.”

“Show me, and we’ll see,” Nora replied. “I can only promise that I will try, Madoc.”

Her heart swelling, she slowly began to turn, her eyes closed. Easing herself down, she sat, and slowly opened her eyes.

Before her stood a man, but not a man. He was covered in soft gray fur, and by covered, she meantcovered. Everything from the top of his head to the tops of his feet was covered in a fine dusting of silvery gray fur. Madoc’s ears were long, and floppedover at the tops, kind of like a rabbit. He looked her straight in the eye and slightly opened his mouth to show her the tiny fangs that peeked out from below his full upper lip. Other than those three things, Madoc looked like a man on the cover of a sexy firefighter magazine. Shirtless, the skin beneath his fur was golden brown, and Madoc’s beard, mustache, and hair were a shaggy russet brown. He was beautiful.

But it was the shy nervous look on his face that nearly did her in. “Madoc, you’re…”

“...a bat,” he said. And suddenly, Madoc was gone and in his place now fluttered a small gray bat. It fluttered and hovered for a bit, then slowly made its way to Nora, who stood with her mouth hanging open.

In a blink, Madoc–the man version–was before her, reaching out, needing reassurance. Nora scrambled backwards, her back against the cave wall. The logic in her brain could not reconcile the fact that Mattock had turned into a bat and suddenly reappeared in front of her. It made no sense, and it made perfect sense. He was a bat. Of course he was.

“Do it again,” she demanded. So he did. Several times, over and over as Nora watched deep in awe and fascination.

Finally, he paused and stood before her.

“That is the coolest fucking thing I have ever seen.” A grin slowly spread across her face.

“Does that mean you’ll stay?”

Her grin disappeared. “Madoc, I can’t. I have to go home. I want to stay with you, but I can’t.”

She put her hand on his face and cupped his cheek gently. Madoc wrapped his arms around her and hugged her as closely as he could. “Will you do one last thing for me?” she whispered.

“Anything,” he whispered back.

“Change for me again. I want to see it one last time before I leave.” She pulled away from him just enough that they could stare into each other’s eyes. “It’s magical. You’re magic.”

He stepped back from her, his eyes never leaving hers. And just as quickly as he changed, Nora grabbed him, wrapped him snugly in the hammock, and secured the wriggling bat tightly against her.

“It’s only fair,” she reasoned with herself as she crawled out of the cave into the burning light, with Madoc, her very own bat man, tied against her for safe traveling.

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