by Kristen Pike
UNWILLING
Book One of the Compelled Trilogy
Kristen Pike
Copyright©2015 by Kristen Anne Pike
Sale of the paperback edition of this book without its cover is unauthorized
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever without the express permission from the author.
ISBN-13: 978-1517717698
ISBN-10: 1517717698
For my husband, Jacob, who, for the first time when we were 16, said “I love you,” and the first thing I said was, “no you don’t.” I love you always and forever.
And for my two beautiful babies, Madison and Cooper, who beeline straight for the laptop every time I turn it on, making it incredibly difficult to type a word, much less write a book, but who make every day worth living. You are my everything and I love you to the ends of the world and back.
ONE
PRESENT DAY- AUGUST
Rowan could smell the death, foul and consuming and overwhelming. It lingered in the towering grass that had grown unkempt and brown in the summer heat. The tall blades reached almost to her knee and swayed slightly in the breeze. The suffocating smell spewed over the cracked stone walkway and large tan weeds shot up through the fractured rock, desperate to seek the sun and choke the pale gray stone that held it captive under the earth.
The smell choked her throat as she made her way woefully up the small neglected porch, eyeing the rotted wood suspiciously. A portion of the left side of the roof had collapsed onto the porch, caving it in and ejecting timber into the grass as if trying to expel that part of itself in disgust. The grass around the fallen wood pieces were a yellowed brown from sitting for years next to the timber chunks, an obvious sign that the owners hadn’t cared that their house was falling to pieces around them. The wood was soft beneath her feet and bowed slightly when she walked on it, as if it might give in any moment and cave under her as well.
Rowan pushed open the dark wood door. It screamed in protest, forbidding her from entering the abandoned cottage. Rowan didn’t bother to knock, she could tell just by looking at the house that no one was there, hadn’t been there for months, at least. Rowan narrowed her eyes, holding back tears as the smell of decay hit her like a hammer to the stomach. She wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve and forced the bile in the back of her mouth down, the acid in it stinging her throat. Patches of sunlight fell from gaping holes in the ceiling, spilling unbearable heat into the cramped cottage and illuminating the small space.
Rowan made her way down the long entryway, stepping into the kitchen at the end of it. A table, previously sat for a family of four sat in the middle of the room, by the stove. Thick logs lay in it as if the family that had once lived here would return any minute and begin to make a stew or roast a rabbit. On the other side of the room was a seating area, with a child’s blanket neatly spread out on the floor. Atop it sat a beautiful set of blocks, hand carved with animals, sheep, cows, bears, and even a bird. Rowan found it odd that such care and detail went into the toys, but the same attention was not be spared for the home. Someone’s father had obviously created these for their daughter or son with a great deal of love, and she could only hope that the child had been spared his cruelty. He couldn’t be that much of a monster could he, to murder children? She had to have hope in that, at least.
“Rowan?” She heard a gentle voice say behind her, her stomach twisting into knots. She turned slowly, painfully, already knowing what Jace would be telling her to come see. “They are through here.” He looked at her, a sad expression plastered to his handsome face as he gestured through a door on the opposite side of her, one she had missed when she first stepped into the damned cottage. She took a last fleeting glance at the undisturbed blocks and entered the bedroom, bracing herself for the horrors she would find there.
The smell of death and rot poured out from the room like fog, clinging to the walls and covering every surface possessively and it took every ounce of self-control for Rowan not to expel everything she had eaten in the past year. She took several moments to compose herself before she could take in the monstrous scene before her.
A young woman, maybe in her late twenties, lay sprawled on the floor on her back, her face was sunken in on one side as if it had been bashed repeatedly in a mindless rage and black blood seeped from the wound to pool across the floor. Her poorly made dress was torn across her mid-section revealing a deep gash that exposed worm like intestines. Her insides were dragged out of her body and lay chewed and regurgitated by her side in a mushy mess. Her left leg had been ripped viciously from the rest of her body at the knee. From her crudely amputated leg a trail of blood smeared across the floor, leading to a gleaming white bone picked clean of all meat by some animal or the other.
There was also a man sitting on the floor, his back propped against the bed as if he just wanted to take a rest, his arms lying limply in his lap. Besides his filthy and torn clothes he appeared unhurt save for the fact that his neck ended in a ragged, festered stump. Where the head should have been only sat stale air. Rowan looked around the small room as if the man’s presence might still linger there and she shivered despite herself as if his ghost was watching her silently, its lifeless eyes looking down at her, judging and condemning her for her family’s sins.
“Search the grounds Pickard, Chev? See if you can locate the, uh, rest of him.” Rowan asked, not taking her eyes from the dead man. She could not rid herself of the thought that, should she look away, he might rise and vault himself at her, demanding to know where his head had gone.
“Of course, Rowan.” Pickard said behind her, turning to leave the house with Chev in tow, his face set in a taut frown as he went about his gruesome task.
“Rowan!” She heard Jace call, his voice tight and uneven as he summoned her from another room in the cottage. Rowan made her way through the dark halls, the wood beneath her feet creaking with every step she took. Jace stood framed in a doorway ahead of her, his head turned to the side, his jaw clenched in anger.
He turned to look at her as she approached, his eyes dark and he shook his head, his dirty blond hair tumbling into his eyes. He stepped aside when she drew near and Rowan nearly fell to her knees as the room was revealed to her.
The room was eerily clean. The toys were organized neatly on one side of the room and the covers on the two beds were pulled tightly, tucked in underneath so the edges didn’t scrape the dusty floor. Soft light from the only window spilled into room, casting a warm glow over everything, making the whole scene feel like a dream… or maybe more a nightmare.
On the first bed was a little boy maybe around ten years old, his eyes closed and his face deathly white, his head slumped to the side as if he might just be sleeping. On the second bed lay a tiny little lump of a girl, not even five years old. Her brown hair was brushed neatly back from her round face and her blue dress was smoothed out of any wrinkles. Her arm was flung out toward the little boy as if to hold his hand as they travelled their way through to the afterlife.
Both children had deep stab wounds in their chests, and blood, once red now turned black and dried, pooled underneath them and ran down the sides of the beds like a grotesque waterfall. Rowans stomach heaved and she sprinted from the house, gagging on the bile that had at last made its way out of her throat.
Had they played with those blo
cks together? Rowan wondered as stinging tears of grief and guilt assaulted her eyes, blurring the tall trees around her and falling to the ground in a thousand shards of betrayal and happy memories she would never get back and an anger so deep Rowan thought it would rip her body in two. Had they sat at the feet of their parents and giggled, telling each other some secret only brothers and sisters could share. Rowan herself had shared a few, but that was a lifetime and a million years ago and a version of herself that had died a hundred miserable deaths. Did their parents even fight for their baby’s lives, or had they handed them over happily, like a present. Maybe they had wrapped them in a bow and made them smile nicely for Elias. Rowan knew it was more likely that he hadn’t used his “Gift” as he stole the children from their parents. He liked to hear them scream, and cry, and beg for their lives. It made him feel like a God, or so she had been told.
Rowan heard the crackle of dry leaves behind her but did not even need to turn around to know that Jace would be standing there, his eyes concerned as he looked at her. Jace wrapped his arms around her, turning her to face him and wiping the salty tears from her eyes.
“He is lost to me.” Rowan said to him weakly, her voice cracking with sorrow. Jace folded her to him, squeezing her tightly as if that could wipe away the memory of the dead children in the cottage, and the hundreds of other dead that swam around Rowans thoughts every second of every day. You could not save me Rowan, you were too late, the ghosts would say, staring at her accusingly with their hollow, blank eyes.
Rowan closed her eyes, allowing the sounds of the forest to encircle her and try to drown out the condemning voices in her mind. Jace cupped the back of her head and she nuzzled it to rest in the crook of his neck. He smelled like pine needles and safety and everything that was still good in the world. Rowan could feel the steady cadence of his heart where her forehead pressed against his neck, and for one brief moment the world melted away and they were the only two people left in it. Rowan took solace in the last place that felt like home to her.
“Rowan?” Pickard said, causing Rowan to withdraw reluctantly from Jace’s arms back into a cruel reality she wanted nothing more to do with. Pickards face was grim and he nodded his head in reply to Rowans unasked question. Jace grabbed her hand as Pickard turned his back on them and began to return to the scene. Rowan followed, each step she took compounding her dread, filling her with lead and making every step an agonizing decision she wanted to escape from, to run from and hide from but she couldn’t turn back and couldn’t return to the life she knew and she could never get back what had been taken so callously from her. A heavy weight settled in her stomach and Rowan thought she might be sick again.
Rowan wound her way through the trees, their massive brown trunks growing close together in the wild forest. The trees were tall and their vibrant green leaves blotched out the sweltering sun, making the ground cool and dark under their luscious canopy. Wind whistled through the branches, a high shrill sound that sounded much like the voices of the ghosts in Rowans head. Birds trilled to one other, their wings taking flight as they soared from one knobby branch to another, gossiping to one another in their bird language about the humans making their way through the forest. A woodpecker hammered high above her head, a warning perhaps: turn back now. Turn back, it beat, its beak pecking into the thick tree bark a hundred a thousand a million times, its warning disregarded.
Rowan blinked, her eyes shifting back to Pickard as he stumbled over a tree root sticking up through the dirt. He righted himself with a small shake of his head and scanned the ground for any more obstacles. Pickard was clumsy, always running into unseen objects and dropping things, though he was good humored about it most of the time. Now though, he only grumbled to himself. Pickard claimed he was an avid adventurer, he had seen all of Varisin- including all of their land, Lamarina, from Daria all the way in the east, to the Jamine Ocean in the west- and all the other lands that made up the vast world of Varisin. Rowan didn’t know the names of the other lands Pickard had been to and knew she was likely never to see them.
Pickard slowed in front of her and Rowan peered around him to where the rest of the men in her company had gathered. They stood in a semi-circle, their faces downcast. Chev made eye contact with her as she stopped, his eyes knowing, as though he could see Rowans inner most thoughts; her doubts, her fears, her dying hope. Pickard moved aside, allowing Rowan into the tiny clearing barely big enough to hold all of them. The day’s light was just beginning to slip from them, the sun retreating as if to say it would not bare witness to this crime, this was Rowans burden to shoulder; to take on, to be crushed, trampled, decimated under until there was nothing of her left, and hers alone.
A thick sturdy branch was plunged into the ground, its tip, no doubt, sharpened to spear the head through where the man’s neck should have been, acting proudly as the man’s torso. The branch was dark, soaked in blood and flies buzzed around it, trying to lick the sickly metallic liquid though it had long been dried. Their buzz filled Rowans ears until she heard nothing else, and even the sound of her ghosts were drowned out in the all-consuming sound.
Where the man’s eyes should have been sat only jagged red holes, with blood seeping down his cheeks like tears. His brown hair was long and held back by dark string and the wind danced through it, making it seem like the head was swaying, caught in some deadly dance between Elias and the Devil, though she was beginning to wonder if they truly were one in the same. Rowan cringed, knowing the man would more than likely have been alive when he had had his eyes ripped from his body. Rowan could just imagine his screams echoing around the forest, the birds picking up his shrieks and replaying it back to him, almost as a game, as he begged for his inevitable death, whimpered for the freedom and painlessness of no longer having life fill him.
“Where is it?” Rowan asked, her voice eerily calm, though her heart was racing and pounding and striking her rib cage so hard it might bruise and she felt like falling to her knees and striking at the ground and screaming until her voice was hoarse and raspy, destroying the broken splintered world with her bare hands until nothing was left standing but her and Elias and she could demand the answers that had so long and agonizingly eluded her. Rowan stood, unflinching, the others unaware of her inner demons.
“Here,” Jonquil said to her, moving to stand beside a tree located behind the grisly effigy. Rowan made her way to the tree, all eyes following her gravely as she stopped beside the tree. It was almost dark now, stars popping their way into the sky as it faded from red to deep blue, tiny pinpricks of hope in an otherwise bleak surrounding.
Rowan eyed the mark, hating it with every fiber of her being, wanting to erase the image from her mind but it plagued her, filled her, and followed her as she followed it. It was his signature mark; he left it almost everywhere he went. Rowan could count the number of times on one hand where this forsaken mark had not been present. Sometimes he would carve the mark into flesh, wood, or once even stone, though Rowan could only guess at how long it had taken him to accomplish that feat. This carving was about the size of her palm, it would not have taken him very long to create.
Rowan could imagine him standing here, calmly, a small dagger perched in his hand like a paintbrush, his brow furrowed in concentration as it had when they were children, as his latest audience, the eyeless head, watched him work silently. Rowan placed her hand over the carving; she felt its slits and groves, the way it twisted around the smooth bark, forever marring the dark wood. She wound her fingers around the chilling picture, as if committing it to memory though it was already seared into her mind. The smooth curved lines of the eye stared intently at her, not as if it was carved into wood, but as if it had a life of its own, as if someone was actually watching her out of the eye. Rowan shivered, a chill snaking its way down her spine despite the warm evening.
Rowan’s stomach churned in knots as she traced the last of the image, letters; words, sprawled at the bottom in ancient words her and Elias had learne
d as children. Shockel loviled ser Moval. Shockel loviled Tal.
“He is lost to me.” Rowan repeated, heavy-hearted, to the men surrounding her. A bird trilled in response, in either mockery or solidarity she did not know. The warm evening was eerily silent as she closed her eyes and rocked on the balls of her feet, hoping she did not collapse. Rowan wished to be somewhere, anywhere, far away from this wretched cottage and the dead that would add to the ghosts she dreaded seeing in her constant nightmares. Elias is lost to me, she thought one last time, my brother is lost to me. She sighed deeply as she accepted that Elias truly was the monster everyone else had known him to be. She could no longer hope for anything else.
TWO
TEN MONTHS AGO- OCTOBER
Rowan sat beneath the Great Tree bundled in furs and rubbed her palms together to stop the tingling feeling that had crept into her fingers while she had sat in the early winter cold. She sat with her back straight, looking at her home, which rose in front of her like a formidable fortress. Her father had bought the home from a traveling prince when she was a very small child, who had to have had dozens of children, judging by the size of the mansion. The home was isolated in the woods, and it was at least a two-hour walk to get to Market, though Rowan didn’t really mind the walk.
There was a river that Elias liked to fish in in the summer a little ways away from the house, though Rowan had only ever been there once or twice. Sometimes Rowan liked to imagine all the children that might have lived in this expansive, elegant, home. Rowan could hear them now, running beneath the Great Tree squealing in laughter as they chased one another. Rowan could imagine the smell of baking bread as their mother cooked for them, humming to herself as she busied herself about the kitchen, glancing with a smile out the kitchen window every so now and then at her children.
