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 tr
ee, 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, menstruating 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.
Drosera nodded, taking in the sight of me standing among the forest, naked, and in the power of my ancestors. “You must remember not to fall back on your huldra abilities when you retrieve the succubi. With the hemlock in your system, those will not work and the Hunters will cut you down. As the hemlock is a plant, your huldra abilities that you share with a plant will be within your grasp. Those not in common with a plant, seeing in the dark and elevated scent, will be suppressed by the hemlock. But pressing poison into flesh, this will be deadly. Over time the poison will fade from your system. You are made of the stuff of plants, but not fully plant. The hemlock knows this and will seek to get out.”
She turned and began walking away.
I pulled my roots up from the earth and chased after her. “Aren’t you going to take me home?” I asked. The power of my ancestors I’d just felt covering me now dissipated with the thought of wandering the Portland streets in broad daylight, naked.
She didn’t turn to answer. “I have not the energy for another transport, not with you—”
I cut her off, sure of where she was going with that. “How will I get back to the house then? You said the snake Wilds are on their way.” Funny how one can go from I shall smite my enemies to please take me home in the blink of an eye.
“I will send your partner sister to retrieve you,” she said, gaining distance on me somehow.
“Shawna?” I asked. “She may not be up for it, she’s—”
But before I finished my sentence, the rusalka disappeared like mist on a sudden breeze, and I stood in a public park amidst birds singing their morning hellos, greeting the sun rising in the sky. Rather than waste my time standing around, waiting, I went to work connecting to different roots, asking for their guidance, and receiving whatever they were kind enough to offer.
Twenty-Seven
Shawna bounded up the hill, past evergreens, ferns, and wild ginger. “Are you okay?” she said on bated breath as she ran, her dreads smacking against her cheeks. The reusable shopping bag she carried, with what I assumed were my clothes, bopped the side of her leg with each stride she took. “I came as soon as Drosera told me where to find you.” A fresh dirt mark covered the right knee on her jeans, causing me to assume she’d fallen at least once in her search for me.
She reached me and checked me over before resting her hands on her knees to catch her breath. “I’m so out of shape,” she panted. “I need to do more physical activities.”
I almost corrected her, reminded her that we’d just fought a complex full of Hunters a week and a half ago. But then I remembered and shifted my point mid-sentence. “No, you fought the Hunters…at the winery.”
“Yeah, no,” she said, standing up straight and throwing the bag of clothes to me. “That wasn’t endurance. That was pure revenge keeping me swinging.”
I caught the grocery bag and pulled out a pair of jeans and a dark grey sweatshirt. I shook the clothing before putting it on, in search of underwear, but she hadn’t brought any, it seemed. Commando it’d be.
“Hey,” I said to change the subject as I dressed and also to share my newest major revelation with my partner sister. “Drosera told me about this cool thing our ancestors used to do. Want to try it?” I played it down, but not on purpose.
Shawna smiled. “I don’t know; does it involve sacrificing children?”
I laughed with my partner sister for the first time in what felt like forever. When the joking stopped, I showed her how to grow her roots into the earth and connect to other roots. I thought to hold her hand after she’d taken off her shoes and socks and allow roots to grow into the ground. I wanted to know if
the roots reacted differently, more intensely, to two bonded huldras. But I didn’t want to risk pushing the poison into her, not that it’d hurt her. I just knew I had to hold onto the stuff until I met a Hunter who got in my way of rescuing succubi.
Another idea appeared in my mind. “Are you connected?” I asked as she stood beside an evergreen. I hadn’t suggested she absorb poison hemlock because I didn’t intend on bringing her to the Oregon complex, which, I fully realized was my plan—to accompany the snake Wilds to the complex and release the succubi.
“I am,” Shawna said in a whimsical voice.
Yeah, she was feeling it.
“Okay, stay connected and I’ll try to connect to the same tree, see if it’ll link in to us both at the same time,” I said, already closing my eyes and concentrating on growing roots from the soles of my feet.
We each stood on opposite sides of the mid-sized evergreen. For living in a park, it was big. But compared to those I’d tree-jumped deep in forests full of old growth, this one was young. Its russet bark matched my own and a tiny smile pulled at my lips.
It being her first time, I assumed Shawna’s roots would connect with the evergreen’s slightly below the surface, so I pushed mine a bit deeper. Moist earth moved out of the way as my roots bore deeper; a sense of energy filled me as though the soil’s nutrients absorbed into my body and fed me. My roots found their target and wound around the much thicker tree roots. A shot of energy coursed through my veins. I shuddered.
With us both connected, the intense exchange between the three of us transcended words. Shawna’s emotions spoke to me as though they were my own. I suddenly longed for my “old self” back, for the days I had been ignorant to the darker things in life. A cloud of heavy worry caused my shoulders to slump forward and yet the fire to overcome raged in my heart. It felt like a necessary anger, the kind that creates steps to help you ascend the pit of despair and show you what you’re made of.
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