The Forest's Son

by Aleo, Cyndy

  There's a choice to be made here: scream for Jakub or follow along? If she screams, he'll know immediately what's happening and run to her. If she doesn't …

  If she follows along willingly she has to trust, he'll figure it out eventually. He told her he can hear things — that the trees talk to him. It sounded creepy at the time, but now, as she stares at trees that are beginning to surround her as the women drag her into the forest, she hopes he was telling the truth. If the trees can talk to him, they can tell him what they see happening to her right now.

  If she keeps her mouth shut, if she does whatever these women tell her to do, it will give him time to change his plan. He can listen to the trees, and hopefully they'll tell him where the Dziwozony have taken her; they'll lead him right to her. All she has to do is stay silent, do what they tell her, and stay alive.

  It's the last part that may be trickier than she anticipates. The women obviously have a plan, but they must not have ever been around humans enough to know how slowly they move. The longer they run, the more she falls, and the one dragging her is quickly losing patience.

  “What is wrong with it?” she asks the others.

  “My legs are shorter than yours,” Donovan answers, lifting herself off the ground for what feels like the hundredth time.

  “Then you should move them faster,” the woman says, and begins dragging her again.

  When they stop, Donovan is exhausted and so thirsty she’s ready to beg them for something to drink. She assumes since they want her alive to use as bait, they’ll have brought her to some sort of village, but when she looks around, it isn't even a clearing. There's no water, no shelter, no nothing.

  “Here?” asks the one who's been dragging her.

  “Yes, do as you were instructed. We'll let Edyta know.”

  Donovan begins to panic. This doesn’t make sense if the plan is to use her as bait. It’s looking like she was wrong; they do plan to kill her. The woman ignores her trembling and shoves her roughly to the ground, binding her to the tree with some type of vine or rope; she can't tell by feel.

  “We are not far from where we live, if you have ideas,” she says to Donovan as she binds Donovan. “Some of our houses at the outermost reaches of our village, I think your word would be, are just a little way behind you. My sisters already know you are here. However, we do not want you too close to where we sleep.”

  Donovan should be too frightened to speak, but her curiosity wins out over her fear.

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, because the animals might make some noise when they come for you.”

  The woman laughs, and a sharp stone appearsin her hand. She cuts — Donovan’s arms, her legs. The blood begins a slow trickle to the forest floor and Donovan gets it now: once they leave her here alone, animals will probably be drawn to the scent of fresh blood.

  She's too scared to cry. Passing out would be welcome, but she refuses to give in and be the stereotypical damsel in distress. All she can do is wait here and feel her blood trickle down her arms and legs until small puddles begin to form underneath her on the leaves and try to think of something — anything —to save herself. And Jakub and his mother along with her.

  30: Faultline

  Grace knows, not from the trees, but from her son's reaction, the moment that it happens. His head snaps back to the castle, and the look — and feeling — of anguish that he gives off nearly take her to her knees.

  So this is how it begins, she thinks. With my mistake, compounded.

  He takes off at a run, and she follows, even though she knows there is no need to run. By the time they get back to the room, her sisters will already have taken Donovan out of the castle. By the time Grażyna and Jakub figure out how they did it, Donovan will already be deep in the forest. They have failed before they have even begun.

  Jakub is bellowing her name the moment they enter their suite's hallway, but Grace knows it is no use. It is grief — nothing more, nothing less. He pores over every inch of the room, but nothing shows any sign of a struggle: the door wasn't forced; the furniture isn't overturned. Every sign makes it look like Donovan went willingly, but why would she have done so?

  Grażyna sits on her bed while he tears through their things, examining every item in Donovan’s suitcases.

  “All her clothes are here, and all her shoes. She didn’t even change out of her pajamas. Why?”

  She shrugs. As much time as she has spent with humans, she knows she will never understand them at all. Who knows why the girl would have left with them. Maybe they lied and said Jakub had gone with them. Maybe she was curious.

  Grażyna makes the mistake of verbalizing her thoughts.

  “Without shoes, Matka? Really? You think she would have gone sightseeing with the Dziwozony without shoes? In the forest? No. Whatever happened here, Donovan was frightened. You can still feel the shadow of how afraid she was here in the room. But she left willingly because she thought that was smarter than fighting them. Why?”

  Alcove, desk, doorway. He follows the same path repeatedly as he paces. Grażyna sits on her bed, unmoving, her face in her hands. Her son will be destroyed if they kill Donovan, and it will be her fault. Why would the girl have left? Why would she have left willingly but without shoes?

  Alcove, desk, doorway. The pacing isn't helping her think. No shoes. They left quickly. She didn't want to delay or argue. She didn't call out once they were all outside, or they would have heard her.

  All put together, Donovan wanted to get out of the room quickly, without a struggle. Before Jakub came back. She wanted to get to the forest before they realized she was gone. She didn't want a confrontation here in the castle, or on the grounds.

  “She wanted to give us time,” Grażyna says.

  Jakub stops his pacing.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said she wanted to give us time. She did not struggle. She did not try to stall them. She left as quickly as they wanted her to, and she did not call out. That means she did not want us to know they were taking her. More than one of the sisters must have come.

  “Jakub, she gave us time to plan. She was actually thinking.”

  “Then she's insane.”

  “No. She is smart. If there were two of them, we may have had a chance. Three? More? With us completely unprepared? No chance. Now, we think. We decide what to do and we go into the forest and we get her.”

  “Maybe she's already dead. Have you thought of that?”

  His heart is breaking. He promised to keep Donovan safe, and he has already let her down. Grażyna knows she should have anticipated how the sisters would think and plan and act, but instead, she is more impressed by the girl's quick thinking.

  Donovan protected them. She thought on her feet. And she went into the forest knowing anything could happen, but trusting Grażyna and Jakub could get her out.

  “You need to have more faith in her,” she says. “You also need to start acting more like her and less like a quivering little boy. She trusts you to have a plan. Can you trust her to stay alive until you can come up with one?”

  He scrubs at his face in frustration. She can tell he's angry, and scared, and torn between tearing off into the forest to blindly search for the girl and curling up into a ball on the floor of the room here and mourning. But it is too early to mourn.

  “Come, Jakub. We must plan. They will expect us to come the way the paths lead. I need you. You can hear them. You can find them. You can tell me what we are up against: who will always be against us and who may be willing to help us.

  “I refuse to believe so much has changed that harming a human would be allowed now by my sisters. This cannot be a unanimous move. Help me here. You are the only one who can get her out.”

  His hesitation is easy to see, and for a fraction of a moment, she thinks maybe it is all lost. Then resolve washes over him. He stands straighter and barely glances at her before he walks out of the room.

  She exhales and follows him. Fin
ally, he is ready. Her part in this is close to being over. He will get the girl. He will survive. She won't worry leaving him alone in this world. It's a relief to not have to make the decisions anymore. She puts her trust in her son now.

  ~

  Bożena has to remind herself that the second most important law is not to kill another sister in an impulsive act. Without the full agreement of all the sisters. While Grażyna’s treason is obviously grounds for it, she finds Edyta’s far worse.

  They have taken the girl. They have left her bleeding in the forest. Bożena could gladly snap Edyta’s neck right now and leave her for Matka to reclaim. How could she do this? Taking a human.

  Janina asked her what she wanted to do the moment they realized there was a human this deep in the forest and Bożena’s temper got the best of her.

  Damn Grażyna. Damn Edyta. Damn any sister — including herself — for ever rutting with a human man. They should have remained celibate. If they would have ignored their hormones or only been with each other, they would never be here, in this position, with a human bleeding in the forest and a vengeful male with who knows what power on his way to avenge her.

  For the first time, Bożena wishes the sisters who had come before her had planned for something like this. Why had they not come up with some sort of banishment she could do? Send the sisters outside the forest. Force them into the human world. Let Edyta and the rest of the sisters she’s recruited for her cause go out into the world and figure things like cars and computers out.

  Let them rot in the human world. They have no place here where things are supposed to be peaceful and harmonious.

  The risk they have taken is unfathomable. Surely the girl has family, friends back wherever she came from. They’ll notice her missing. They’ll track her last known whereabouts.

  Bożena resolves that whatever happens from here, she is going to force the sisters out into the world more. They need to understand things like identification and how governments track their citizens. How nearly impossible it is to completely disappear. How much risk they've brought to the tribe.

  This isn’t the old days when you could simply whisk a human off and no one would be any the wiser. There will be things like credit card receipts and airport security and all the things that Bożena doesn’t entirely understand, but is at least aware of, which is more than she can say for Edyta, stuck in the past.

  She doesn’t dare risk thinking of Tadeusz, but she wishes she could meet him. Could sneak onto the computer in his apartment and find out who this girl is, where she’s from, how she can possibly get her out of this without humans finding the sisters, revealing them.

  Edyta may have done far more damage than Grażyna’s boy is capable of. And Bożena has a hard time thinking of why Edyta deserves any more mercy than Grażyna.

  31: Hunt

  His head clears the moment he gets outside the castle. Inside, it was like he was suffocating. The idea that they had Donovan, that they were hurting her, or worse, that she was dead, was more than he could stand. The panic had overtaken him and made him unable to think. Without his mother, he'd have been lost. Now that he’s outside again, he can listen and feel and think again.

  There's a fight going on inside him: His heart tells him to run to the forest, to focus on Donovan, make his way to her, grab her, and get her out of Poland to somewhere she'll be safe, as ridiculous as the idea is.

  The smart thing to do, though, is to wait. He needs to listen to the sisters, to get into their minds. Instead of running, he walks calmly to the edge of the forest, to the same place he stood just a short time ago with his mother.

  His mother asks what he's doing, but he shushes her with a gesture and closes his eyes. He opens his mind again to the voices. He knows he can hear them all if he just concentrates hard enough.

  At first, the words are a jumble, and he tries to sort those he doesn’t know out from those he recognizes. He expects to see an image of Donovan in Edyta's mind, but that's not where he finds her. He should see her, scared, afraid, but an image is forced into his mind against his will.

  This is not how he'd intended things to be. Edyta is supposed to be his problem. She's aggressive. She wants him dead along with his mother. But the one he knows now is Zuzanna has shown no sign of taking sides one way or another when he listened before. Until just this moment, he assumed she’s completely loyal to Bożena and would follow her every command.

  In the vision, Donovan's skin is so pale it's nearly translucent, and there are dark circles under her eyes. Zuzanna's fingers clutch Donovan's arm tightly enough to leave bruises, and the eyes he’s seeing her through look down to see Donovan's fingers have a tinge of blue to them. He's not sure whether she's cold or short of oxygen.

  Either way, she's uncomfortable, in danger, and his stomach is pitching wildly. His mother has been right all along. He should never have brought her here.

  He presses his own thoughts back at Zuzanna, hard, sending his message through the trees so she — and the rest of her sisters — will know what they are up against.

  “You don't want her. She's just a human. I'm the problem. And Grażyna. The human has no part of this.”

  “That's where you are wrong, syn diabła,” she replies. “The human is very much a part of this. She should not be here. Just as you should not be here.”

  In his mind, he takes a step toward them, and Zuzanna tightens her grip. Donovan makes a gasping noise and he backs up.

  “She is the only thing you will be willing to bargain for,” Zuzanna continues. “Your mother gave up the moment she ran from us, but this one—”

  She stops for a moment, and he can feel her smile, her eyes wide and staring. “This one you haven't been told will die for as long as you've lived. This one I think you dream about having a life with, don't you? As much as one who lives as long as we do can have a life. All you have to do is kill all your mother's evil sisters and that is exactly what you planned to do.

  “Instead, syn diabła, I have brought her to the sisters. You will come with your mother in an hour, and you will bow to us as we will never bow to you. And once we have decided how to dispose of you and that which spawned you, then, if you have done as we asked, we may let your human go.

  His feet are cement blocks holding him where he stands while he watches a memory of Donovan being dragged down the hall and out the side door of the hotel. He knows she’s doing nothing more than replaying the events as they occurred, or at least some version of them, but he still swallows hard.

  This one is crazy. He'd counted on them having no interest in Donovan and focusing on him and his mother. Now, Donovan is in danger, and more are against them than he'd thought. Edyta, Zuzanna, and the two who'd been with her at the hotel when they took Donovan. Possibly more.

  He shakes his head clear of the vision and turns to his mother.

  “Edyta. Zuzanna. Two others, but I'm not sure of the names. Probably at least a few others. They knew we would be in the hotel. They bet we would leave her at some point. They knew how to get her out without humans seeing her. Edyta wasn't even with them.”

  “Do you know where they have her?” Grażyna asks.

  “I don't need to know. I can find her. But you were right; they expect us to follow the established entrances. Follow me, then split when you know where you are. I’ll find Donovan, but you — I think maybe you want Edyta for yourself?”

  He doesn't wait for her to nod before entering the forest. She follows him without question.

  32: Found

  Donovan should be afraid, but she isn't. She’s bound, wrists together, hands behind her back, ankles together and shoved up to her rear, and then all of her neatly tied to the tree behind her shoulders. Everything hurts, and she has to pee, but she knows Jakub and Grace will come for her. She's sure of it. However, she’s also sure all three of them are going to die here, in this forest, this afternoon.

  She no longer has any idea what he was thinking, bringing them here. They shou
ld have kept erasing his memory for as long as he could have survived it and run as far and as fast as they could.

  There are dozens — perhaps hundreds — of women here, all of them at least as tall as Grace, if not taller. They all move with the same preternatural agility that had always unnerved Donovan when she saw Grace moving around the house, and now she knows why; these women aren't meant to move around in human society. They’re meant to move around in the trees and run quickly over long distances. Grace must have felt so trapped living among humans for so long.

  Some of them are sharpening sticks into what look like stakes, and Donovan bites her lower lip until she draws blood. The last thing she needs to do now is burst into hysterical laughter at the idea that these women are some sort of mythical vampire-hunters out here in the Polish forests. Then again, maybe she should.

  Selfishly, she hopes she dies first. She doesn't want to watch Jakub die in front of her. That would be the worst kind of suffering she can imagine — far worse than even this interminable waiting. She only hopes that whatever happens, there's some way he can escape and save himself.

  Some of the women look at her occasionally, stealing glances under their lashes as they sharpen their sticks or carry out other tasks. If Zuzanna or the one they call Edyta catch them, angry words are exchanged, but for the most part, she tries to ignore them, or at most, offer a small, apologetic smile. It doesn’t seem like they want to fight any more than Donovan does.

  She wishes she could move and look around; the whole idea of them living out here in the forest is so strange to her. She's had no idea from the limited information Jakub and Grace gave her about how these women live, but from what she can see, the small moss-covered huts she got a small glimpse of are dug into hills and have real windows.

  They look so much a part of the landscape that if you don't know they’re here, you'd never see them. You could walk right through this section of the forest and never have any idea the tribe existed.