“What are you thinking about?” Marcus asked, stirring beside me. He cracked an eye open and turned on his side to pull me into a horizontal hug.
My cheek nestled between his bare pecs and I breathed in his clean, masculine scent, like soap and faint traces of crisp cologne. I exhaled. “I learned a lot last night and I’m processing it all,” I said.
Marcus yawned and his chest expanded enough to push me backwards on the bed. He pulled me to him again and I gladly accepted the nearness. “Was it a dream?”
“No, more like a rusalka waking me in my mind and then waiting for me out front, and then an incubi leader lurking on the side porch to add another layer of knotted intel for me to work through,” I explained. Really though, despite the fact that they decided to impart this information in the middle of the night and pull me out of bed for it, I was grateful.
Marcus released me from his hold and sat up. “Why is Aleksander here?”
I pulled myself to an upright sitting position and faced him. “Because I’m his apparent life mate.”
Marcus flexed his jaw. “He’s pushing it,” he nearly growled.
I thought to remind him of Aleksander’s insistence that he can’t help his need to protect me, but I’d just be telling Marcus what he already knew. So I got to the point instead. “If you decide to be changed, I want to be the woman used for the energy exchange. I know it’s immature and territorial, but I just can’t see you with another woman—even if it’s strictly for business reasons.” I hated feeling this…this…claim to a male. It was unfamiliar and uncomfortable and so very not huldra-like.
Marcus ground his teeth and looked to the ceiling before meeting my gaze again to speak. “Was that his idea? Because we can’t trust him, we barely know him. What if once he has sex with his life-mate the bond is sealed and felt by both parties? What if he transfers his mate energy rather than his incubus energy, or alongside it, and you all of a sudden want to be with him?”
I cocked my head and studied him. “If you can’t trust him, and don’t want me involved because you worry this is some sort of trap, why the hell are you considering joining his brotherhood?” I asked.
Marcus exhaled and rubbed the blanket over his legs. “I don’t know.”
But he did. I could see it in the way he pinched his brows that he was holding something back, hiding something from me. “Yes, you do know why. It’s not like you to make rash decisions like this. You’ve thought this through and mentally weighed the pros and cons.”
Marcus leveled a blank gaze at me. “It’s what you want. Deep down, I know it’s what you want.”
I almost jumped off the bed in response. “Excuse me? Since when did you start reading minds?”
He shook his head. “I’m not saying I can read your mind, but I just know…”
“Um, no you don’t know,” I blurted. I slid from the bed and stood a safe distance. Nothing pissed me off more than someone telling me what I was thinking, unless it was the rusalki of course.
“Really?” Marcus said, his voice getting louder. He stood from the bed and crossed his arms over his chest. “You want to explain to me, then, the growing distance between us? Your refusal to admit that we’re anything more than for-now friends with benefits to your coterie? Give me a good reason for your constant reminder to me that huldra don’t have long term relationships or marry? From my vantage point, you’re dropping hints left and right and I’m doing my best to pick them up and figure out what the hell you want from me.”
Goddess, how could I be pissed and heart-broken at the same damn time? What kind of sorcery was love to do such things to the heart and mind? I thought of what Marie had said about the love she felt swirling within me. I thought of her and Celeste, how quick and easy they seemed to act on desires of the heart, and how controlled and reluctant I’d been.
I stared at the beige carpet long enough to pull together enough courage to say how I really felt. I wasn’t sure if there was such a thing, enough courage, but I pushed forward anyhow. “You being a Hunter complicates things, yes,” I admitted. “And I don’t mean to add salt to your wound, but huldra don’t marry, they spend their days and raise their kids with their partner sisters.” I wondered how much thought Celeste had given to this fact and if she’d discussed any of this with Olivia, her partner sister. I wished I’d had the foresight to ask my sisters before diving into this heated conversation with Marcus.
“It would be easier if I were an incubus,” he said plainly. He wasn’t wrong.
But easy was a relative term and if I’d learned anything these last few weeks, it was that change brings about its own difficulties, new hurdles to jump, most of which we don’t see until they’re scraping the fronts of our thighs.
“Maybe so,” I said quietly, still concentrating on the carpet. “But you wouldn’t be you, and I’m in love with you, the way you are, right now.”
I looked up to the ex-Hunter standing across from me and waited for an indication on how my secret, one I’d even kept from myself, was received. The man took two long strides and wrapped me up in his arms, my feet dangling from the ground.
“Faline Frey,” he said with more bass in his voice than usual, “you’ve just made me the happiest man on earth.”
He pressed his lips to mine and I wrapped my legs around his midsection, eager to be as close to this man as physically possible. He placed my hair at my back and kissed the exposed skin of my neck.
Before things got hot and heavy past the point of return, I had one more thing to mention and I knew before even opening my mouth that I’d kick myself for it.
“One more thing,” I said between heavy breaths.
“Oh? What’s that?” he asked, and it sounded as though he spoke through a smile, but I wouldn’t know because his lips were grazing across my chest, stretching the V-neck on my night shirt lower than it was made to go.
“I think I’ve come up with a third option in this whole incubus thing,” I answered in-between kisses on his forehead as I thread my fingers through his thick, dark hair.
“Okay,” he said past his tongue as it trailed lower.
I reconsidered my thoughts before I spoke. If we pretended to agree to Aleksander changing Marcus, but instead of Aleksander shifting his incubus energy to me through sex and then me shifting it to Marcus, I simply kept it for myself, then I could use it to get past the blood stones at the Hunter complex and rescue the succubi galere. Of course, I’d hinted at a similar situation to Aleksander and he’d shot it down saying the incubus energy is highly masculine and unsafe to harbor in a female host for too long, just long enough to transfer. Still, I figured being a Wild, my body was well acquainted with supernatural attributes and probably able to handle the raw energy of an incubus.
Marcus laid me backwards onto the bed and all thoughts of a night with Aleksander for the good of the succubi melted from my mind as Marcus’s weight on top of me melted my body.
It didn’t take long before our proclamations of love ended in love making. And maybe it was just in my head, but it felt like the man on top of me was fixed on proving his worth as a lover, what the strength of a Hunter could bring to the bed as opposed to an incubus.
His mouth tugged on my breast at my moment of climax, the very same moment I arched my back and suppressed a scream of delight, the very same moment my body disappeared from underneath the six-foot-two, tan muscled man and reappeared on a damp forest floor, pine needles poking into my bare back.
Twenty-Six
“Thank you for coming,” Drosera said dryly as she stared down at me.
I blinked twice and took in my surroundings. Once I realized I was naked and laying on the forest floor, still half writhing in pleasure, I jumped up and hurried to smooth the pine needles from my hair.
Drosera’s welcome struck me as a possible double entendre, but then again, it was a rusalka who’d said it, so maybe not.
“How did I get here?” I asked, looking around. “And where is here? What did
you do?’
“We are in Forest Park of the Tualatin Mountains,” Drosera answered. “It is not ideal, as we’re essentially in a public park west of Portland, but I hadn’t enough energy to transport you much farther than this.”
I noticed a narrow dirt walking trail and listened for humans. I heard none. It was probably too early in the morning and too cold for them to venture out into nature. “Is your kind able to teleport people?” I asked.
Drosera didn’t so much as crack a smile, for good or for bad. She only stared at me. “No.”
Ah, so the comparably chatty rusalka that was her under the oak tree last night had been just a fluke. Made more sense that way. I took another approach. “Then would you mind explaining why I’m here and why you took me…when you did?”
I would assume she’d frozen in place, glitched, if it weren’t for her rising and falling chest.
“The snake women are landing in Oregon momentarily.” She paused.
“The harpies have already arrived,” I said, updating her on a fact I assumed she already knew.
“Yes,” she responded. “We sent them before settling on our new plan. They will still be of help, though.”
Awkward silence hung between us as I waited for her to finish. It was odd to have to speak my questions rather than her read my mind. For instance, at this moment I wondered what she was mulling over, if she was deciding how much to tell me. I’d grown to trust the wisdom of the rusalki, and I appreciated their kind. That didn’t mean I adored their communication skills, though.
“My sisters and I have spoken and realized a different path for you,” she continued. “One walked through trees with deep roots rather than city streets and Hunter complexes.”
Experience had taught me to be patient in waiting for a rusalka to express herself. Sometimes, dancing around the point gave it a sharper edge when it finally pricked. At least I assumed the rusalki thought so.
“Despite your connecting us to our Goddess, Mokosh, our energy stores are low, limiting our abilities,” she explained. “An orgasm carries with it heightened energy, the burst of which I needed to transport you here.” She unfroze and walked to a nearby plant. She squatted to stroke its leaves. “Do you know the meaning of my name?”
“No,” I said as I made my way over to her.
“I am named after a carnivorous plant,” she said, as if she were speaking to the plant. “Each rusalka in my coven was named after poisonous and medicinal plants.”
The plant stood about five feet tall, looking as though it were somewhere between a bush and a flower, with branch-like stems and little white petals alongside thin, green, curved leaves.
“Death leads to birth, which leads to death, as a cycle of nature,” Drosera went on. “Both cause new beginnings and both bring about change. One is not possible without the other.”
Her gaze shot to a different plant with tiny, dark green leaves and beautiful white flowers streaked with red on the insides. “Azalea, the plant for which my sister was named, grows in Oregon, did you know?”
“I didn’t know that.” I took a solemn minute, missing her sister. When Drosera’s attention fell back to the plant she knelt beside, I continued. “But what does the cycle of nature have to do with the snake Wilds?” I asked, incredibly confused.
A stiff wind blew past me and I covered my skin in a bark façade to keep warm.
“The snake Wild Women are sending their elders, those who no longer bleed,” Drosera answered. “This, we have discussed, but my sisters believe we can offer more assistance. We have spent time consulting our ancestors in spirit, daughters of Mokosh.” Mokosh was the rusalki Goddess, also known as Moist Mother Earth. “And they have told of the old huldras, those who aged with the trees until they too bore branches and hosted squirrels and birds.”
An image and the piece of a story entered my mind, and at first I assumed it’d come from Drosera, but I quickly realized I was remembering a story spoken from my mother’s lips. “Long ago,” my mother had said one night as she tucked me into bed. “Our grandmothers aged gracefully.” I remembered now, my own grandmother, my mother’s mother, had left our coterie early one morning and never returned. She’d kissed me goodbye and told me to watch over my mother. She then held my mother tight, so tightly and mournfully that as a small child I knew something was wrong. Proving my worry to be true, tears rolled down both of their faces as they whispered into each other’s ears and kissed one another what was to be one last time. Two days later I noticed a new, freshly dug grave in our private graveyard back in the woods behind our tree homes. That was the night I’d asked my mother where grandmother had gone.
“When huldra aged gracefully, they had time to find their connections, to locate the tree in which they would live out eternity,” my mother had said. “Young huldra didn’t have to say goodbye to their grandmothers, or even their great-grandmothers.”
“Grandmothers lived in tree houses back then too?” my young self had asked.
My mother had chuckled. “No, darling, they became the tree. Picture a great oak opening her trunk, pulling back her bark like curtains, and inviting a huldra inside. The aged Wild Woman would enter, when her time as a huldra came to an end, and she would become one with the tree, her memories sinking into the roots and her personality bursting up from the bark. For a huldra to visit her ancestors, all she had to do was grow her roots deep into the earth, right beside the tree that ancestor had become, and connect her roots to the tree’s.”
“That’s how they talked?” I’d asked.
“Yes,” she’d answered. “That’s how trees communicate. And we can too. At least we could. In that way, the huldra were able to learn the wisdom of the ages and seek direction and counsel from souls much older than the living huldra.”
For weeks I’d believed my mother’s story as truth. But when new graves began showing up in our graveyard—the grandmothers of my sisters—and I’d overheard my aunts explaining to their daughters that huldra lives are short due to the difficult lifestyle and that it is natural and normal for a huldra grandmother to know when her time is up and breathe her last breaths alone, among the trees on our property, I’d just assumed my mother had told me another fairytale to ease the pain we both felt at the loss of her mother.
Drosera and the plant she knelt beside came back into focus. And for the first time I figured I understood why the rusalki spoke so little and took long pauses in between their words. It was as if they were giving our minds time to reach deep within our souls and dislodge memories, old knowings we’d long since forgotten.
“Drosera, are you going to help me seek wisdom from an ancestor of mine?” I asked. I peered at the trees around me, wondering which held my huldra kin.
“I am not,” she answered, focusing on the plant. “Huldra did not grace this land back during the times they stepped into trees.” She waited. “But you will use your ability to grow your roots and connect them with roots of others, much in the way we helped you to do in our lake dome. You will connect to the roots of this plant.”
I knelt beside her to get a closer look at the plant.
“Those who fear nature fight it,” Drosera started. “Nature is change. They fight change. Nature is death and rebirth. They fight death and rebirth. Nature is predictable in that it is unpredictable; they demand rules and order, predictability. Hunters fear nature. It is why they hate the snake Wilds so, for the snake sheds her skin and still she lives.”
I finally understood. “It’s why their blood stone debilitates menstruating Wilds,” I said. “Because by the very definition, we are able to create life and yet when we bleed monthly we are actualizing death. It scares them.”
Drosera paused from petting the plant and turned to look at me. “It terrifies them.”
I continued explaining, mostly to myself. “So they find a stone that’s from nature, but pulled out of its element so that it never changes. And they use it against those of us who personify nature in every way, menstruati
ng Wilds, which, because they’ve stolen our wild nature, many of us don’t live much past the post-menopausal age anyway. They’ve pulled us out of our element.” The realization hit me like a swift punch to the gut. Tears welled in my eyes and I blinked them back.
The rusalka only nodded and gazed back at the plant as though it brought about a trance state.
I quickly moved on to the next thought. Sitting with that last one had the power to take me to dark places that I didn’t currently have the time or emotional energy to visit. “But I’m of menstruating age. How will connecting with this plant help me to fight the Hunters and get the succubi galere back?”
“This plant,” Drosera began, “is a poison hemlock. Its roots carry most of the poison, a deadly substance that you, being huldra, are immune to. It is a battle trick your ancestors used, one forgotten in time. I am told some of your ancestors harvested the poison for female human healers to use against those who sought to hang them for their gender.”
I didn’t waste any time in asking further questions. Drosera said I was immune, and that was all I needed to know. I stood, closed my eyes, breathed three deep breaths in and out, and willed roots to shoot from the soles of my bare feet, into the earth, toward the base of the poison hemlock. I wasn’t sure how to communicate with the plant, or how to absorb its poison into me, but within seconds I felt my roots connect with others and less than a second later a feeling of acceptance filled me. Suddenly, a thick, cold substance absorbed into my roots and rushed up to my feet, settling in my torso and spreading through my body to pool in my fingertips and the palms of my hands.
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