Page 195 of Shifting Hearts 1
Away fromher.
I wished I kept a talon out to slice across the tree dweller’s sap filled veins as they softened from whatever the fuck else ranthrough them when he was the forest, compared to in his human form.
When the tree god reverted to a mortal being, for a few scant moments.
“Bryn has it wrong.” I didn’t realize I spoke aloud until Dagan looked at me.
“Which part?” he whispered, his voice crackling like dry leaves born on a wind of fire.
“She thinks things live here. Evil things.” I knew she thought many creatures existed in the shadows, which was true of the living forest itself. The rest of the wood’s inhabitants left long ago. But the pure terrors…those bloomed on the other side of Dagan’s control. Outside my realm.
"You can talk.” Dagan stared at the forest's edge like he might call her back to us.
It had been long weeks since she last tread the forest floor with her bare feet, connecting us all. Since then, our combined need for her grew. An odd coupling, perhaps—a wolf shifter, a tree god or demon, depending on who we killed—and a girl who walked where she shouldn’t.
But then, Bryn had no real place in the world. Not here, nor there, nor the other place. Always sleeping in a borrowed bed in her family’s home, always welcome to be unwelcome beneath the knotted trunks and darkened shadows that touched and teased her.
The Woodsman raised his fingers to his lips, and licked the tips. “I can still taste her.”
Hackles rose at the back of my neck. “If you take her off the path, she’ll die. She isn’t made to take your…girth.” I pursed my lips, licked them, trying to eke back that remnant of her scent from the still air.
My addiction.
His, too, though he’d never admit to it. Three thousand years his trees had stood, a barrier between two points, and he never tasted the humans who traveled between. Not since a girl he met when his trees were green, his boughs laden with forest fare.
She didn’t survive his version of love. We both feared the same fate for Bryn.
Dagan stiffened. “I won’t touch her. She has lived here for nineteen years, and I have never taken anything from her.”
“No, you just gave her a dose of fear. Liar,” I added idly to my snark. “You touched her today.”
“Only the briefest caress.” His whisper floated around us like a broken promise. Dagan canted his dark head. His features stilled, carved. “You are jealous.” He made the truth a statement. Not that he talked to many; if he left his forest it would wither, and so would he. “Perhaps if you talked to her like a normal person, you might earn that which you crave."
I close my eyes, breathing out slowly. "What do you know of cravings?"
His lips twisted at one end of a sardonic smile. "Do I need to remind you?"
"Always answering a question with a question,” I grumbled. "If you have nothing real to say, then…" I leaned back under the facade of stretching, though I peered through the trees, still seeking her like a stalker.
My prey.
Dagan scuffed at the path he created for her to walk. “I heard something last night. Down by the western hills. A sour scent on my leaves. Snow.”
I shot him a sharp look. "Snow?"
He watched me idly with the patience of the forest. "I assume it wasn't you." His words came out soft and raspy still, unchanging.
“I slept on that side of the forest too. Near the…house.” My lips curled. “But I didn't see snow. She was at the cottage, and it was battered by sleet in the night, as always. Wind and ice, but never soft snow.” I forced the words out through clenched teeth, making myself recite the truth I wanted to keep for myself. The secrets she thought no one else heard that I savored. “I watched her.” My wolf lurked so close to the surface, that my skin grayed with his markings. "I slept beneath her window, listening to her sounds, the ones she made there all night." Dagan made a disparaging noise, and I sent him a sidelong look. "She's not that innocent, " I finished softly, unwilling to share what I scented on the air through the thin, cracked glass.
The mountain plateau’s house wasn’t nearly as secure as my red-haired obsession would have me believe. The mortar between mud bricks grew thin, its upkeep failing under the grandmother’s distracted attention. The stone house was an inch from crumbling with age, and other things. Mice nested in the crevices, and the walls bowed out from the presences ensconced within.
Her presence was the only one I cared for, the children in transit to and from their horrors a necessary distraction. When she wandered outside the house, collecting the drier sticks that blew away from the forest's edge, I stalked her. When she slept, I crept to her window in my full wolf form, my ears pricked and waited. It wasn’t long before sweet moans reached me, muted beneath her hand as the other worked her body with its pine hewn toy. Dagan would rip her apart if he knew she used a carved, smoothed piece of himself to bring herself pleasure, soaking the handmade toy with her heat.
I broke my promise to myself then, finding my human form, standing naked in the sleet, and worked myself into a frenzy beneath the windowsill. I reaching my peak with her until our breaths matched and we came together.
But the tree man didn’t need to know any of that at all.
“It is nearly time to end this,” Dagan murmured.
