The Forest's Son (14 page)

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 should 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.

Whatever material is binding her wrists rubs uncomfortably against her admittedly hipster watch that they let her keep for some reason, and she flinches. How much time is left? Will she see him one last time or will they slaughter Jakub and Grace the moment they step into the forest?

Zuzanna hadn't bothered blindfolding her on the way in. She said there was no point; all the humans would know where they lived if they thought about it. The area of the forest barred to public access, preserved for the
Żubr,
makes the ideal spot. All the women are watching the various ways in from the publicly accessible areas, so Donovan watches them, hoping to spot Jakub before they do, to be able to shout a warning if they move first.

She’s still looking when she feels swift fingers on the bindings at her wrists.

“Don't move a muscle.”

Her eyes close involuntarily. It’s Jakub, and he’s somehow come up behind her. The women are still looking for him to be coming from another direction. His voice is barely a whisper, but her adrenaline is running so high it sounds almost like he's shouting at her.

“I’m untying you, Dee, but I don't want you to move yet. The second I move, though, I want you to roll to your side and crawl. Stay as low as you can and try to get into one of their homes. If you have any clue which is which, go for Bożena's, or maybe Agnieszka’s."

She wants so badly to answer him, to thank him, to say everything she hasn't said before now, but all that comes out is a pathetic whimper. His fingers brush the bare skin of her back where it's exposed at her waist.

“I know,” he says. “I promise you; I'll find you. Remember? I said I could find you the same as I could find this place, and I did. Be ready.”

Before she knows it, he's gone, and she tries to hold herself in exactly the same position she was in before he untied her. It's so much harder when she knows she's free and her body is screaming for her to stretch her tired and cramping muscles. Her eyes dart everywhere as she tries to keep track of where his signal will come from.

When it happens, it's sudden and there's no mistaking it. One minute, she's trying to find him in the trees, and the next, there’s blood all over her and the vines that had bound her. She flings them away and rolls to her right side, away from the direction the blood came from and the chaos that’s ensued. She crawls on arms and legs she can barely feel after being tied up for so long and braves one look back to see what he's done:

Zuzanna is pinned to the tree, her hands grasping at her neck while her feet kick at the air below. Blood flows from her mouth and meets the current running from the wound in her neck where Jakub has taken one of her own spears and impaled her through her jugular to the tree.

Donovan throws herself into the first doorway she can find. She hopes she chose correctly, but she can't remember which doorways she might have seen anyone using. Using her sleeve, she scrubs at Zuzanna's blood on her cheek. Nothing else is more important than getting off all that blood until she feels the hand close over her mouth.

33: Loss

Why, of all the huts Donovan could have chosen, did she have to pick this one? Grażyna wonders if the girl is fated to get them all killed or just herself. She knows Jakub had sent the girl here and told her to hide, but in this clump of five hill-huts, only one holds danger: this one, where she has been waiting for Edyta. The sisters expected them to approach from the public paths, but Jakub somehow senses where to find things.

She doesn't have the time or the space in her head to think about it. She saw him kill Zuzanna; she felt the loss to the tribe in her own soul as if she had never left. But the others will have felt it as well, and their only hope now is to eliminate at least Edyta as well before they are found. Without the two of them, the rest of the sisters might listen to reason.

Surely, they have to see that taking a human, torturing her, and leaving her bleeding in the woods for the animals is not what they have been taught and brings great risk to the tribe. Even in their killings of the males, they have done their best to be kind and merciful. Binding a girl and slashing her so the scent of her blood will draw carnivores to eat her alive is anything but.

Donovan is struggling in her arms, and she shushes her, first by identifying herself, then singing the
kolęda
Jakub sang to her before they came on this fool's errand. As the girl relaxes, she wishes once more they were back in the house in the woods, with Jakub being Vance, not Jakub, and the possibility of death something that hovers over your head instead of staring you in the face.

“What are you doing here?
”
the girl whispers.

Grażyna knows she means in this hut not in the forest. At least, she hopes the girl has that much sense.

“I’m waiting for Edyta. She'll return, because she has something here Bożena doesn't know she has: a bayonet she kept from a soldier she bedded and slaughtered even before I'd left.”

“Isn't that —?”

“Against the laws?”

Grażyna spins; the answering question came from behind her, in heavily accented English. She pushes the girl so that she’s behind her, so she can protect her, best she can.

Edyta has not come alone. Helena, Beata, and Adela are with her. She cannot fight four of her sisters, and she hopes Jakub realizes more were siding with Edyta and changes his course, or he'll soon be alone in the forest with the sisters.

“Many things are against the laws, aren't they, Grażyna? But we find we make our own decisions to do what we feel is right. You made yours, and I have made mine.”

“They are not right,
”
Grażyna says. “You have seen him. He is not the demon of legend. He is kind and caring and has learned all our ways.”

“What I see, sister,” Edyta says, “is Zuzanna dead on a tree. That is kind? Caring?”