Bird Song (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  “You know your friends were only kidding, right? The last thing on their minds is you and I getting married.”

  Robert sat down next to me, his eyes filled with humor, the smirk on his face quickly fizzling out the annoyance in me and replacing it with something warm and bubbly.

  “I know,” I replied. I tossed my head back and looked up at the sky.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to find a star to wish on.”

  He watched me as I searched the still sky. When I finally spotted a familiar twinkle, I closed my eyes and silently made a wish.

  “What did you wish for?” he asked me, gently lifting me from the cold, uncomfortable bench and placing me into his lap.

  “It’s a secret. Besides, couldn’t you have just heard it yourself?”

  He shook his head and laughed, his head tilting back to stare at the same shimmering light above us. “No—your wishes are your own. I only ask because I think you just wished on Venus.”

  I squinted and focused on the speck of yellowish-white light that I had pinned my latest hope to. “Are you sure?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, his body still shaking from his laughter. “I could be wrong, but just in case I’m not, don’t you think you should wish on something else? An angel, perhaps?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, laughing along with him. “I want to keep this one to myself for now.”

  His arms wrapped around my waist and he tugged me closer to him. Though I was sitting in his lap, his head still came above mine, which he used to rest his chin on. “Well, would you like to know what I wished for?”

  “Did you wish on Venus, too?”

  “So you do believe me!”

  I chuckled. “It’s the thought that counts, not the actual object you make your wish on, silly. And no, your wish is your own, just as mine is my own.”

  “Well then no, I didn’t wish on Venus. I wished on that star over there.” He pointed to a twinkling light closer towards the horizon and I burst into laughter.

  “What?” he asked, taking a closer look at what he had just pointed to and then smiled. “Oh. I guess if you can’t wish on Venus, I can’t wish on a 777.”

  I shook my head, my laughter turning into hiccups as I watched the twinkling light he had wished on slowly move towards the Newark Airport.

  “I wished that you would change your mind.”

  I stopped laughing.

  “Change my mind about what?”

  With a lone finger, he began to trace the line of my collarbone, slowly scraping across the rise of my chest, landing at the opposite end. “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

  “Too bad; you opened your mouth, now you have to tell me,” I argued.

  His curious finger climbed the length of my neck, stopping to memorize the quickening pace of my pulse before moving up towards the curve of my jaw. One finger turned into two as he lifted my chin up, forcing my eyes to look up in order to gaze into his.

  “I wished that you would change your mind about not turning, about not getting married, about a lot of things.”

  “I wished the same thing about you.”

  He chuckled, and smiled sadly. “See how well we suit? You are the yin to my yang, my perfect fit.”

  I frowned at the tone his voice took on, almost regretful. “What does that mean, exactly? I know what the words mean, so don’t try to patronize me by giving me literal definitions—I want to know what you mean when you say those things to me. I don’t want to hear the doublespeak you give to everyone else.”

  His eyes searched mine, the edges of his pupils pulling in and out as he sighed with such resolute sadness, I could almost taste it. “Just that whenever I think about what my life would be like without you in it, I see nothing.”

  “What do you mean by nothing?” I asked, turning my body around to face him, my hands placed on his shoulders to steady myself.

  “I mean just that—you want to spend the rest of your life with me, right?” He waited for me to nod before continuing. “What happens, Grace, if the rest of your life means the next twenty minutes?”

  I laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion—how could I die within the next twenty minutes if I were seated in the lap of Death himself?

  Robert’s hands gripped my arms and he shook me gently, the motion enough to put an end to my humor. “Grace, this isn’t funny. Don’t you see? I cannot be with you all of the time—I listened to you and stayed away from you, and now your mind is filled with memories that don’t belong there. What if whoever put them there had chosen to do something else to you? I’ve seen your heart struggle to beat, seen your body battered and bruised, but dying comes in all forms and I can only put it off for so long before the consequences become too grave.”

  “What do you mean, put it off? Put what off?”

  He looked away, his mouth set in a stubborn line, his eyes shut, as if to block images that I knew he could never fight away. “Your death.”

  I stared at him—the accusations, the gratitude stuck in my throat. He pressed his hand against the side of my face, pushing away some of the hair that had slipped from their pins and fallen into my eyes. “Each time I changed your fate, I lied to myself and said that it was because your father needed you, your friends would miss you, you didn’t want to die—the truth is that I did it because I couldn’t lose you. I refuse to.

  “But, I cannot keep doing that, Grace. I cannot keep you from harm much longer, and the longer we stay together, the more dangerous life will get for you.”

  The threat in his words caused a shiver to run through my body and for the first time, I felt the chill spring air against my skin. I looked at him and I could see the raw fear in his eyes. “I’ve already been hit by a car and nearly strangled to death by your best friend. I nearly froze to death waiting for you on New Years, and now someone is messing with my mind. How can life get any more dangerous than that?” I joked.

  He didn’t laugh. “Grace, I have already gone against my call to keep you alive after Sam, but even if that weren’t an issue, there are those of my kind who don’t appreciate our type of relationship—they believe that by my loving you, I am breaking rules that were set up to protect both of our kinds. While I do not believe that they themselves would do anything deliberately to harm you, there are...others who feel the same way-”

  “Wait…others—you mentioned them before—shape-shifters and werewolves—you were serious?”

  Robert placed an arm beneath my legs, another around my back, and then lifted me as he stood up. He began walking further away from the wedding party, towards the line of trees that acted as a perimeter of the park grounds. He continued walking as the darkness loomed towards us, the cover of the trees turning a bright, spring afternoon into something sinister and dark.

  Though there were thousands of leaves and twigs scattering the ground, I didn’t hear a single snap or crunch as Robert had stopped walking and simply floated through the maze of evergreens and oaks. I inhaled the scent of moss and wet soil, and something that I knew could only be described as green. It filled my lungs with its clean odor and, though I knew I should have been feeling nervous or slightly fearful, instead I felt giddy.

  We finally stopped moving when I could barely see the light from the edge of the trees that promised sanctuary from all this darkness. I gasped as Robert lowered me to the ground, my bare feet landing on the spongy and crackling earth beneath me.

  “Why are we here?” I asked, taking his hand and holding it securely in my own.

  “You’ll see,” he replied.

  I waited, but for what? I didn’t know what to expect and tried to keep an open mind.

  A snapping sound caused my head to whip around, and I stared, puzzled at an odd empty space to my right. I peered at it, the shadows seemingly not quite right. My hand reached out and I took a few steps forward before being tugged back by Robert, his head swishing back and forth in warning.

  A soft laughter
crept forth from directly in front of me and I watched in awe as the odd shadows started to blur, movement bringing the darkness of deep greens and browns closer to me. I gasped as a silhouette formed from the hazy jumble of colors, undistinguishable at first, but slowly melding together into something distinctly recognizable.

  Within a few short moments, the figure of a woman stood directly in front of me. Her long hair was thick and mossy, the variegated green strands covered with tiny pink and violet blossoms that opened and closed as she breathed. It draped over her nude body like a living curtain, moving and flowing about her to hide the parts that would have made me blush. Her eyes were dark as tar—there was no white to them at all, making them stand out like two holes in the pinkish green of her face. She smiled at me, her pearl-like teeth the only part of her that didn’t fit in the forestry of her body.

  “Silly child,” she said in an oddly musical voice that was too raspy to have been beautiful. “Do not be afraid of me—have you never seen a nymph before?”

  I shook my head roughly, which made the tree-like lady laugh, the sound seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  “N’Uriel, I am surprised at your current choice of human—she’s not at all like those vain creatures your Sam used to bring along for fun,” she said to Robert, the lilt in her voice teasing, mocking.

  The ground beneath her feet moved, pulling her forward though she herself never took a step, and stopped just millimeters from him. She was tall, I hadn’t realized just how much until I saw her stand, nose to nose with Robert. “Pity he tried to rid you of her, otherwise he might still be here to talk to me. Your sister hasn’t come to visit in far too long, and your mother has been busy with her little project.”

  She turned to look at me, her smile growing wider until it looked almost cartoonish in its size, the corners of her mouth reaching towards two leaf-like appendages that jutted out from the sides of her head that I could only assume were ears. “Perhaps now that we have met, you will stay and talk to me, tell me of things that go on in your world, yes?”

  “Grace is not here to become your companion, Bala,” Robert said woodenly.

  The nymph slid back several feet, her smile fading, her dark eyes turning into jet black slits on her face. “Then why did you bring her here?” she hissed.

  “She needs to see what else exists in this world, what else watches her when she thinks no one is looking.”

  Bala’s lazy smile returned. “Ahh, so you came to frighten the poor child—but how afraid of dying can she be with Death as her soul mate?”

  Robert turned to face me, a severe expression on his face. “Bala is a wood-nymph—hardly dangerous to you or me, but she can be very, very annoying.”

  I turned to look at the nymph Robert called Bala and bit back a gasp when she winked at me—it was like watching a piece of onyx disappear behind a leaf—and then slowly retreated towards her original location, speaking as she did so in a voice that sounded like the rattling of leaves against a piano wire. “Be careful, young one. He doesn’t know what he’s setting into motion by bringing our world into yours. He cannot protect you forever—you must learn how to protect yourself.”

  “How?” I asked before she disappeared once again, fading into the greenery around her.

  “It’s written in stone…” her voice sang, the sound disappearing into the rustle of leaves.

  “Was that it? Was that what I have to be afraid of?” I asked, turning around to face Robert. “Robert?” He wasn’t there.

  “Robert?” I called out, spinning around in place, my head whipping back and forth, looking for any sign of him amongst the greenery. “Where are you?”

  “He’s watching you.”

  I turned around upon hearing the gravelly voice behind me.

  “Uh-uh-uh, not over there either,” the voice taunted, this time to my left.

  I spun around, my heart starting to pick up speed. “Who are you?” I asked softly.

  “Why don’t you guess, and then I’ll tell you whether or not you’re right?”

  I shook my head. “This isn’t a fairy tale and you’re not Rumplestiltskin.”

  I heard a low rumble coming from directly behind me and I slowly turned around, my fear intensifying by what I saw. A pair of eyes with scarlet rimmed, phosphorescent-jade irises stared out at me from the dark canopy.

  They were deeply set in a face that should have been human but had lost its way somewhere, instead pulled down, long and narrow like that of a horse, but with a vaguely human nose and distorted mouth. That mouth, the lips grayish with cracks of deep black edging around them opened in a sick smile, baring horribly gray teeth that looked like they had been deliberately filed down to points.

  “You’re right about that for they never write about my kind in your fairy tales. I’m too real.”

  Something inside of me, something that I would later wish would have just shut up, forced me to stand up straighter, pushing my shoulders back and raising my chin—I stared at the creature defiantly as it approached me. “You’re not original enough to read about,” I said snidely as I took in its entire figure.

  Though its head was like a horse, its body was more human-like, with a muscular torso that extended into two hairy arms with claw-like hands at each end. It wore a dark cloth over the majority of its lower half with only its large, club shaped feet peeking through, the toenails curling upwards, almost like some macabre form of living, elfin shoes.

  “Interesting? I’m not interesting?” As if to prove me wrong, it began to shake, its body vibrating so rapidly it gave off a slight hum. I forced my feet to stay glued to the ground beneath me, unwilling to run away and leave my back exposed to whatever it was.

  The smell of burning hair began to mix with the scent of the forest around me and I wrinkled my nose, slowly raising my hand to cover my face in a poor attempt to block the pungent smell from turning my empty stomach. The humming grew louder, transforming into a high-pitched whine before it simply stopped.

  “Am I interesting now?” it said in a familiar voice and I screamed.

  The once muscular arms were now lithe and graceful, the claws transformed into feminine hands that gently pushed its dark hair from its face. The cloth, though still draped over its body, did nothing to hide the womanly curves beneath it, the dainty feet peeking from beneath the hem completely belying what they had been just moments before.

  “You’re not-” I gasped, looking into the eyes that had changed from jade to a deep brown with a faint, nearly imperceptible crimson ring surrounding it. “You’re not my mom,” I whispered.

  “No, I’m not, but I can see her in your face, I can see that she lives in your dreams, and that as frightened as you are, you’re slightly grateful to me for showing you a pleasant image before you die.”

  I watched, horrified as the creature drew closer to me, but I remained rooted to the ground, determined not to show him the fear that threatened to send me bolting into the dark forest behind me. A dark fog began to surround us and I shuddered with relief as the creature stopped his approach, instead staring with curious eyes as the smoke began to swirl around me, thickening, deepening until an arm was pushing me backwards and Robert stood between the two of us.

  “Hello, N’Uriel,” the creature said in a perverted version of my mother’s voice, contempt dripping from every syllable.

  “You overstep your bounds, Erlking,” Robert bit out.

  Erlking laughed, a feminine laugh that brought tears to my eyes, it was so beautifully familiar and yet so frighteningly different. “You left her here for the sole purpose of frightening her. I have done my part and now I want payment. I haven’t eaten human flesh in over a century, N’Uriel. I have behaved, I have followed your rules—let me have her; you owe me this much!”

  Robert growled a warning, his arm pushing me behind him, his feet firmly planted to the ground, bracing for something—I did not know what. “I owe you nothing—she is not yours.”

 
“She is not yours either, or have you forgotten the laws?”

  Robert shook his head. “I have forgotten nothing, but you obviously have. You threatened a wing-bringer, Erlking. You know what the punishment for that is.”

  Erlking’s eyes changed color, the brown quickly being swallowed up by the dark red rings as it began to shake with rage. “You did this deliberately! You used her as bait to get me to-” It roared in unrestrained anger and charged, its hair and cloak blending into a frighteningly familiar halo of black hatred.

  Everything that followed happened with blinding speed, and yet I didn’t miss anything. A hand pulled me backwards as Robert flew forward, crashing into the figure that still looked so much like my mother I fought several times to keep from screaming out not to hurt her, the sound of the impact reminding me of an egg falling onto the floor. I struggled against the restraints that held me back, the sudden fear for Robert’s life replacing every other emotion in me as the sound of scraping and crunching assailed my ears.

  Suddenly, a high-pitched keening replaced all other sounds and I screamed Robert’s name, needing him to hear me above everything else. The fight was over before I had gotten the last syllable out of my mouth, before I’d even managed a single blink.

  Robert straightened while the black cloaked figure crumpled to the ground, more liquid than man. I felt the binding around my chest loosen and I flew forward, rushing to Robert without any thought save him. He turned around and welcomed me into the cocoon of his arms, the strength in them doing everything to reassure me that he was okay.

  “Shh,” he whispered into my hair. “I’m okay. It’s alright. I was never in any danger, Grace. He never even touched me.”

  I didn’t believe him—I began to examine him with my hands and eyes, rapidly moving them around his body, looking for any signs of injury or damage and seeing that nothing on him was even out of place—it was as if the entire scene that took place before me hadn’t even happened. The only hint that alluded to anything having taken place was the odor of decayed foliage on his jacket. And…