The Forest's Son (10 page)

Deciding Jakub and Donovan aren't ready for company yet, she rolls off the boulder and into the stream. She floats face-down, her hair bobbing on the surface the only movement for long minutes.

~

Bożena is tempted to pack bags and leave if only to get away from Edyta and her group of warmongers. There’s really no other way to describe them; if they had swords, they’d be rattling them as a background for the incessant clamor of their demands.

They are convinced Grażyna and her son must be hunted. Immediately. Every second she delays is one in which he grows stronger. One in which he has more time to prepare to wage war against the sisters.

Bożena rolls her eyes so much when they aren’t looking she’s convinced she will end up with one of the headaches humans are always complaining about.

Let him
, she wants to scream at them. Let him come and take over. At least that’s the best chance she’ll have of shutting Edyta up.

After the initial shock of feeling the boy child’s power again had passed, Bożena is back to being indecisive. All they have are stories that were passed down by sisters who came before her. They’ve never let a male live in her time. None of the sisters she’d asked had known of one that survived either.

So how do they know he will bring destruction? How do they know he will end them?

Bożena is aware that women all over the world, women far away from their forest home, are subjugated to the wills of men. She acknowledges the issues that have resulted when men have come to stay with the sisters, and when more than one sister has rutted with the same man.

But that doesn’t mean one they raised would do the same.

What if there was a male the sisters were able to teach, to train? What if they allowed a male to live with them and be one with them? Would he share the same way of thinking? Would he be kind and giving? Would he act as a sister, sharing their communal thoughts?

Bożena can’t help but wonder if they’ve been wrong all along. And if that wrongness is what’s keeping her from acting even now.

So she waits. And angers Edyta and the rest of Edyta’s group, sowing strife among the sisters.

But it’s important that she not be wrong. That she not be the one who leads them to their end.

Then again, maybe no matter what she does, they’re already there.

19: Connection

Jakub is torn between his mother's pain and Donovan's. One wraps itself in anger like a rose with thorns, daring you to try to touch it without drawing blood. The other turns inward, spikes jamming into the delicate organs, soft tissue and causing damage no one can see.

Right or wrong, he chooses Donovan. His mother's pain is old and scarred over. He knows he can’t reach her. With his memories restored, he knows he's tried and failed many times over. She’s lost without her sisters and knows she can never go back. She has believed for well over a hundred years that she will die for her choices and there’s no other way for this to end. He can talk to her for the next hundred years and get nowhere in convincing her otherwise.

Donovan is a different story. Her pain is new and fresh: an open wound he can still attempt to heal. She lacks the history of his mother's self-flagellation for violating the single most important law of her tribe.

He crouches beside where Donovan has curled into a ball on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest and hiding her face in her crossed arms. She tries to hide that she's crying, but her breath hitches every so often.

Carefully, he lowers himself fully to the floor and pulls her into his lap, resting his chin on top of her head. At first, she remains stiff, but she starts to relax when he rubs her back in concentric circles.

“I didn't know,
”
she says into his chest.

“No one expects you to.”

He continues rubbing her back, and they lapse into silence again. She's so still that he's sure she's asleep, but then she speaks again, sitting up and brushing some of her hair out of her eyes.

“Why am I here? This is so much bigger than I am. I can't possibly begin to understand everything that you know and are and …”

"Stop. I want you here. And beyond that, my mother has always wanted you here. She’s the one who first encouraged me to be friends with you. I was content not having any friends at school at all, but she kept harassing me about the girl who came home with me that one time to work on a project.

“She said you had eyes that were centuries older than you were, and that they followed me around the room, even when I wasn't talking to you. I won't try to second-guess her motives, but I think she means for you to be here for whatever is coming.”

“So these other women — her sisters — you're sure they will come after you now?”

He stalls answering her for a bit by lifting her off his lap and helping her up after he's standing. He drags his fingers through her hair trying to make the snarls do his bidding and fall back into the smooth sheets he's used to.

“They always have,” he says, finally. “We've moved every time they’ve found us. They only stopped coming after us once we found a way to remove my memories. Doing that has hidden everything about me they could track because I looked — and felt — like a regular human boy.

“We’ve still had to move every so often, as I age much slower than other children, but at least we weren't constantly running while looking over our shoulders, and we weren't living constantly in fear.”

Her hands grasp his and hold them still, almost as if they’re moving of their own volition. His nervous tics have moved on to fidgeting with her hair instead of his own now, and he freezes. Is this wrong? Should he not be touching her?

Before last night, he was so nervous all the time. Either he was in the process of remembering her, or he'd remembered enough to know he wanted her and couldn't have her. He’s kept a mentally constructed forcefield around her, which meant they rarely touched, and when they did, it was usually by accident.

Now, after last night, and her opposite reaction this morning, he isn't sure what he’s allowed to do. He finds he want
s
— need
s
— to touch her. He feels better when his skin is in contact with hers in some way, like he can feed off her energy and simultaneously protect her as long as they stay in physical contact.

“Did I do something wrong?
”
he asks.

“No, it's just … I'm not … you're not … I'm a mess, but …”

“You aren't a mess.”

“Don't interrupt me. I don't know what we are, and here you are putting me on your lap and holding me and kissing me and combing my hair and all sorts of things, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do, or how I'm supposed to act.

“Yesterday, you were my constantly forgetting best friend I was half in l
—
having feelings for, and today, you're this hundred-some-odd-years-old, non-human guy who may or may not be my bo— I might be in a — I don't even know what.”

He’s supposed to answer her with words. Logically, he knows this. But they’ve spent the entire morning talking in circles and explaining and running away and explaining more. So he walks her backward until they’re in the family room again and her legs are against the ratty old couch she loves so much.

“What are you doing?
”
she asks.

He gives her a gentle push until she's sitting down, then he sits next to her, leaning into her until her back is forced against the well-padded armrest and the bank of brightly colored pillows his mother always rearranges, and he whispers against her lips.

"You know what we are. You’ve felt it even when I couldn't remember your name. You’ve held onto it even when I’ve forgotten what the skip in my heartbeat means when I see you at the door, what my feelings for you are, have always been.”

And as he feels her melt under him, shifting back from fragile crystal about to shatter if he applied the slightest pressure to fluid silk, he allows himself to dip down and taste her lips, and they are lost together.

The rest of the questions can wait.

20: Floating

This is a dream; it has to be. Donovan remembers kissing him last night, but that was nothing compared to this, like teens experimenting with their first make-out. She feels Vance — Jakub — fully on top of her and this, this, power he has is moving over her. It’s like he’s surrounding them both in its skin, protecting her and pulling her closer at the same time. She wants to stay here, like this, under him, his mouth brushing there, under her jaw, forever.

“Dee, I —“

She shushes him, pulling him back to her lips. She sighs when his fingers skim her collarbone, then flick the first button of her jacket open. His hand brushes against her skin, and that same charge of his power flows over her like a warm wave. She needs to ask him what it is, what it means, but the moment is broken by the sound of wood slams against wood: the front door bashing into a bookcase.

He leaps off her and tries to comb his disheveled hair with his fingers while she sits up and tries to right her clothing, but Grace mentions nothing about their combined rumpled state; she's in no better condition herself. Donovan notices that Grace is soaking wet, her hair and clothes dripping onto the slate floor, leaves caught in her hair, which looks like seaweed in its current state.

“They know. They will come.”

Her words are staccato, like she’s panting, but Donovan notes Grace isn't at all out of breath. She looks to Va— Jakub for his reaction; she assumes “they
”
are the sisters he spoke of.

“Of course they will come,
”
he says. “Of course they know. They would have known from the first surge of my returning power. The question is,
Matka
, what do you want to do? Do you want to run? Do you want to hide again? Shall I go upstairs and do it all over again? Or shall we finally go home?”

Donovan turns to see Grace staring at her son like he’s a stranger. She doesn’t reply to him, so Donovan asks the obvious question.

“Where is home, Jakub?”

“
Puszcza Niepołomicka
,
”
he says. “A forest near Kraków. If we meet them here, we have the advantage of being more familiar with humans and the sisters having to be circumspect about what they are. But if we meet them there …”

“His power will probably be strongest,
”
Grace says.

“Which is better?
”
Donovan asks.

“We don't know,
”
Grace says to her. “We have always run. We have always hidden. I have only had to think of one thing: keeping him safe. I cannot do that if we fight. Then none of us are safe.”

“We’re not safe no matter what,
”
he says. “We’ve run and we’ve risked my life again and again with the drugs and the archaic methods of erasing my mind and hiding what I am. That isn't living. Hiding isn't living. You’ve lived half a life this way. I’ve lived nothing of one.

“I say we go back.”

“Nothing is the same,
”
Grace says. “I am not sure I will know my way. So much was destroyed in the War.”

“I will know the way,
”
he says. “I will know everything when we get there. Everything will be clear.”

Donovan hears the confidence in his voice, but she also hears the fear in Grace's. This is so far outside the realm of what she knows that she isn't sure which of them to put her faith in: the mother with experience or the son so sure of his inexplicable power? Yesterday her life was relatively normal aside from a best friend who kept forgetting who she was. Today it’s the stuff of fiction.

She watches as Jakub locks eyes with his mother: a battle of wills taking place with no words being exchanged. The only sound in the room is the relentless dripping from Grace's hair and clothing and Jakub's harsh breathing. At some point, the standoff ends with Grace looking down and away. The mother is no longer the leader, and the son has taken over as decision-maker.

“We leave as soon as we can make arrangements. You still have a passport?”

He directs the question to Donovan, referring to a high school trip to Quebec. She nods, still afraid to speak.

“She is not coming,
”
Grace says.

“She is. You think I'd leave her here, in case they divide themselves, hoping to catch us unaware, or worse, they all come here? We have no idea what they know, but they have to assume I’d go home, to be where I can fight them best.”

“She'll distract you.”

“She'll distract me more if I’m thinking about her being here alone, unprotected.”

“She'll die.”

Donovan closes her eyes and wishes she had a way to close her ears as well, to not hear the argument.

“Then I will know to die with her.”

She gasps, and he pulls her off the couch and into his arms.

“I need you with me,
”
he says to her. “I need to see you and know you are safe. And I need to end this — for me and for my mother as well. Will you come?”