Once we entered a copse of trees, I kept myself safely tucked behind large trunks, moving in ever so slowly. It was creepy out here, with the furious, rolling winds and Ewan’s own intermittent howls.
He called as though he looked for something. Or someone.
A flash of red several feet up caught my eye. In the blinding snowfall, there was very little in the way of actual color, so the red stood out starkly. I froze in my tracks, gripping the tree tight with nerveless fingers, and stared hard at the spot. A second later, I was rewarded.
There was a woman up in those trees. She was crouching now, staring at Ewan as unswervingly as I gazed up at her. Her red cape swirled behind her kneeling form like blood.
It was Violet. But not the Violet I’d known before. This Violet reminded me of Lleweyn’s stories of his mother, before she and Ewan had fallen in love. Back when she’d been called the Heartsong. She was a physical manifestation of the high fairy council’s darkest and wildest magick they’d extracted from themselves. From the dark seed of their hearts, a child had sprung, but not looking as a child did. She’d been mature in form right from the beginning. It’d taken the Heartsong many, many lifetimes to learn to control her dark impulses and become a better version of herself.
And though Violet didn’t look as wild as Ewan did, there was a dark light gleaming in her eyes that hadn’t been there when I’d known her in our other life.
The glint of silver caught my eye. I sucked in a sharp breath, realizing what was about to transpire. This wasn’t Violet, but the Heartsong. Somehow, the Violet that’d been trapped in the ley lines wasn’t the kindhearted wife and mother, but the dark and evil killer of her youth.
“Ewan, don’t!” I cried to warn him, reaching with useless fingers toward his back, but it was too late.
He trotted beneath her branch, and she launched herself at him.
I watched in numbed horror as the two of them tore each other to pieces. Only once they’d ensured the demise of the other did they hold one another, a moment of calm and acceptance in a scene of terrible and grisly violence. I shook my head, watching as they each took their last breath. And when they did, there was a violent boom that sounded like the world imploding.
I screamed as I fell into a dark void of nothingness with their dead bodies falling beside me.
I fell until I feared I would never stop falling. Lights and sounds like speeding arrows whistling through air flew past me in a dizzying and excruciating blur. I felt myself being stretched to the point of snapping, and then just as quickly, I was compressed into a ball so tight that I knew I would die from the agony of not being able to breathe.
And just when I was about to black out from it all, it stopped.
I finally crashed onto hard earth. Shoving up so fast it felt as though I must be a blur of movement, I took stock of my surroundings. I still felt the agony of the terror and pain, and yet I was whole and well—and right back where I’d first begun. I tore across the trail, racing for the cave and the wild man I knew I’d find there.
And just as before, he was there in the cave, poking a stick into the fires.
But unlike yesterday, the hourglass still sat upon the rocks. Its sand was lower than when I’d first started, and a sinking realization hit me.
They’d made the wrong choice again, and until they made the right ones, we were destined to repeat this same day over and over again. But it had to mean something that the hourglass was there.
It meant time could change.
It meant this didn’t have to be permanent.
It meant we had a chance.
I stared at the wild man that was Lleweyn’s father. I’d not been able to reach him yesterday, but maybe, just maybe I could reach Violet. And now I knew where she was.
Turning on my heel I headed back for the woods.
Five
Violet
I sat up, staring around me with bewildered eyes. Where was I? What was I doing perched high up on a tree branch this way?
Glancing down at myself, I saw what I wore—a red cape, tattered and stained at the edges with muck and blood, and a dress that had definitely seen better days. There were slits up the sides of the dress, and it cinched tight at my waist. It was a dirty brown color, making me think it must have been white or even soft pink at some point.
My arms were bare, and there were feminine, curling ribbons fluttering in the breeze at my shoulders. But most of the ribbons were shredded or ripped off.
Why am I in such a ragged state? As I asked myself that question, the events of my life began to roll through my mind, and I started to remember waking up every morning stuck up in this very tree, asking myself every day why I was here, and watching as my outfit became more and more grimy with time.
But if I tried to go beyond that point, if I tried to remember the day before I’d found myself stuck in this strange and twisted place, there was nothing but a giant black void.
I huffed and plopped down onto my rear, kicking my bare feet over the branch, watching them dangle several stories high. A powerful feeling of déjà vu came over me. I’d done these things countless times before. Deep in my soul, I feared I’d be forced to do them countless times more.
“Red! Red, there you are!”
A voice, a strange female voice I’d never heard before, cried out from the woods, the tone brimming over with relief and strain. Her voice was hoarse and full of grit, like someone who’d been shouting into the void for so long that they’d nearly worn their vocal chords raw. I glanced up, noting a lone figure walking unerringly in my direction.
She wasn’t a tall figure, looking like she might only come to my shoulders, which would make her around five feet tall, possibly shorter. But her shoulders were straight, her spine taut, and though evidence of exhaustion clearly lined her mouth and eyes, there was a glint of determination that twinkled back at me from within her lioness-colored eyes.
The powerful freezing winds lashed out at her, sweeping the braids of her hair out, making them whip like a dark banner behind her. In her hand, she gripped something silver and small.
I looked back at her eyes, and she was already staring up at me, standing so close to my tree. I felt the corners of my mouth tug down into a hard frown.
“Come down, Red. We have to talk.”
“How…?” I started, before coughing, feeling like my own voice was strained.
Her eyes widened at hearing me speak. “Thank the gods, you can talk. Bloody hell, I thought you’d be a raving loony just like your mate.”
I jerked, twitching so hard that I nearly toppled off my branch. “Mate? I have no—”
She snorted, and suddenly her face, which had looked older and lined with worry, was youthful and pretty in its own exotic way. My heart raced to hear her laugh. She had a nice laugh, robust and full of humor.
Echoes of that same laugh played through my head.
The sense that I knew her took root in me. But then she clapped her hand to the base of the tree and shouted, “Either come down, Violet, or I’ll climb up. I’ve only been here two days and I’m already sick of it. The choice is yours, but I wanna go home, so…”
I shook my head, rattling loose the strange feeling that I had once known her as surely as she seemed to know me, and deciding to trust my instincts, I climbed down. Outside the perimeter of the tree, rain was beating down like a drum on the world, roaring with ferocity. But under the canopy of leaves, we were relatively safe and dry, though nowhere near protected from the driving, brutally cold winds. And once the sun set, the rain would turn to driving snow. That, at least, I remembered with perfect clarity.
An odd thing about this place was that, though I felt the cold, it could never seem to kill me. Nor could the hundreds of lightning strikes that happened each and every day. With as much rain as there was, and with how much of it had soaked into the very marshy grounds, I knew that as long as I remained beneath this particular tree, none of that could touch me.
When I w
as finally on terra firma once again, I dusted off my hands and turned. My first impression of the stranger who wasn’t quite a stranger was that I was right—she was incredibly short, only reaching my collarbone. But her limbs, what I could see of them, were smooth and muscular, her waist small, and her bosom rather significant.
She grinned and stuck out her hand. “I’m Rayale Pyper.”
I looked at her hand, confusion marring my brow. I’d not had company in… well… an eternity. I felt confused, lost as to protocol.
She sighed and, grumping beneath her breath, took my hand and slapped it into hers. “There,” she said as she forced us to shake, “now we know each other.”
I didn’t resist her. In truth, I felt far too confused to do anything other than stare at her with wide-eyed consternation. If I hadn’t felt her touch me, I would think she was a spirit sent to haunt me.
Planting her hands on her wide hips, she looked around and nodded. “Nice digs. I see the water and crap doesn’t reach in here, so at least the line gave you something, even if it is lamer than Ewan’s.” She ended with a shrug, then rounded on me and muttered, “So… yeah. I’m here to rescue you and stuff.”
I frowned so hard that my brows dipped, and I thought they might even touch. “What? Rescue… that’s not. It’s… impossible. I… I live here.”
She snorted. “Like Hades you do. Stupid bastard could have prepared me for what I was going to find in here. I bet he knew. The gods always know.”
Her words confused me, and her actions only made things worse. She spoke of rescue, and yet she was kneeling, pulling out impossibly large items from the ridiculously small pouch she had belted to her waist. She moved quickly and efficiently, placing several wrapped bundles by the base of the tree, before pulling out a flint and a bit of dried moss and twigs.
I gasped. “Fire? You have fire?”
She looked over her shoulder at me even as she continued to work briskly and efficiently. “Not only do I have fire, Red, I have food too.”
Her eyes sparkled as she winked.
At her wink, I felt as though I suddenly soared through the skies. There was nothing graceful about me as I dropped to my knees and began tearing through the bundles.
I’d not felt hunger for a long time, it seemed, but just the idea of food had my stomach growling with desperation.
Her only response was to chuckle. “Should have seen him. You’d have been ashamed by his table manners. Such a dog.”
Even though her words confused me, her laughter was full of good humor, and I couldn’t help but twitch my lips in return. She was easy to like.
Not having a single clue what she meant, I mostly ignored her words, content merely to listen to her easy cadence. With hands shaking from adrenaline, I practically tore the food wrapping in two, frantic with my sudden, unquenchable need. When my hand encountered the hard, lumpy shape of an apple, I cried.
I literally sobbed with relief.
“There’s another one,” she said, just as a tiny flicker of fire began to take hold and cut a brilliant light through the perpetually gray woods. “They’re yours. I was never all that fond of apples anyway. Way I figure it, I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain just so that I could eat vegetables, you know what I mean?”
She laughed, and the sound was dulcet, almost hypnotic.
I ate the first one, core and all, hardly tasting its sweetness even as its juices ran unchecked out my mouth and down my throat. But I savored the second gleaming red apple. I smelled it first, filling my lungs with the ripened sugar, before taking that first, large bite. A moan of pure delight spilled off my tongue.
“I haven’t had sex in an eternity, I’m ashamed to admit,” she went on, staring at me with large, unblinking eyes, “So why don’t we tone it down a bit there, hoss. Kay? That was practically orgasmic, what you just did. So, yeah… anyway.” She broke off a bundle of dried twigs she held in her hands feeding them slowly to the fire, “I’m sure you have questions. Fire away.”
I swallowed the bite in my mouth, studying her, wondering all the while why she was both a stranger and yet so familiar to me?
“Why… why are you being so kind to me?” I finally asked, stomach feeling pleasantly distended as I slowly nibbled and savored. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
Tossing the last of the twigs into the brightly burning flames, she dusted off her hands and sat back. I closed my eyes, feeling a creeping lethargy stretch over me.
Had I ever slept in this place? Felt warm? Full?
I couldn’t honestly remember, but I was fairly sure the answer was “no” to all of the above.
“One question at a time, Red—”
I wrinkled my nose, realizing that, for the past few minutes, she’d called me by that name. “My… my name’s not Red.”
A smile tipped corners of her mouth. “Gods, it’s good to actually talk with someone in this hell hole. And yeah, your name actually is. Well”—she shrugged an unblemished and gleaming dark-mahogany shoulder, and again I suffered the strangest sense of déjà vu—“if you want to get technical, it’s not. But it’s the nickname basically the whole world knew you by on account of that ugly arse red hood you always insisted on wearing.”
She wiggled her fingers at me, and I frowned, staring down at said red cape.
“That fashion is so medieval, which I guess, if we’re being technical about it, you basically are.” Again, she laughed. She laughed easily, this one.
I wrapped the end of the hood tight around my exposed bits of flesh, feeling toasty and warm for the first time in forever. “It has its uses,” I murmured, and she snickered.
“Guess it does, Red.”
She said it purposely that time, and I heaved a weary sigh.
“So why are you here?” I asked, trying to place where it was that I knew her from. I did know her, I was certain. Or did I? Gods, everything was so confusing inside my head.
She shrugged nonchalantly, reaching for a small wedge of buttery yellow cheese. I swallowed reflexively. I hadn’t even known what cheese was before just now, but seeing that triangular wedge between her fingers, I not only knew its name, but remembered its taste and texture in blinding, searing detail—nutty, aromatic, deeply robust, and even slightly sweet as it melted on the back of my tongue. I groaned, clutching at my stomach, which had been full just seconds ago, but was definitely more than ready for more.
Breaking off a piece, she popped it in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “I really should have packed more food. I only ever bring enough for me. But you guys are acting like you’ve been starved for the entire six months you’ve been trapped here.”
The only thing I’d been focused on was that cheese, until she’d said “six months” and “trapped.”
I blinked, no longer quite so desperate for food. “E-excuse me? What are you talking ab—”
“Oh, Violet.” She heaved a sigh that sounded, not impatient, but rather weary, like she, too, understood the depths of my exhaustion. Like she not only understood but shared in it as well. “You guys have no bloody idea what’s happened, do you? I tried talking to Ewan about this yesterday, and that went absolutely nowhere,” she said, sounding slightly grumpy about it.
I frowned. “Who is… Ewan?”
She winced, and I felt ashamed of myself for making what seemed to be a very nice stranger look so suddenly disgusted by me.
“I… I’m sor—”
Reaching out, she grabbed my hands and squeezed. “Don’t you dare apologize, Red. Don’t you bloody dare. If I get upset, that’s my own hang-ups at play. You aren’t the only ones who’ve been made to suffer, but that’s not your concern, and I’m sorry for making you think you need to apologize to me for all the pain and misery you two have been forced to endure. But—”
She shook her head and pulled back, and I felt a lump resting in my palm. When I turned my hand over, I found the remaining wedge of cheese sitting in it. With a watery-eyed nod of thanks, I delicatel
y ate the rest of it.
“I do need you guys back. Like yesterday.”
I felt her eyes watching me unflinchingly as I ate. I wanted to help her, I really, really did. But I didn’t know her. Even though sometimes it sort of felt like I must have once, I didn’t know her. I didn’t know what she wanted from me or what she needed.
“Why are you here? Why did you come here? I’ve never seen another soul save for the beast,” I asked.
She thinned her lips, and again, I got the sense that she didn’t like my question, but she was being patient, which didn’t exactly seem to be her forte.
“That beast is your mate,” she finally said, and something dark in me came welling up, surging up like a geyser, obliterating all thought and reason, drowning me in hate and darkness and violence, filling my mind with images of viscera and blood. I was no longer me, but the creature of madness that knew only one thing.
Death.
“Down with the big bad wolf,” I screamed, brandishing a gleaming silver blade in my grip as I lifted my hand and bore down on her with all my strength.
Rayale
* * *
“Bloody hells!” I grunted when her hand came down.
The light of lucidity was completely gone from her. A madwoman gazed down at me with eyes glowing the red of burning embers. Her face was twisted into a mask of determined hate, and I was in deep dog poop.
I didn’t want to hurt her. But when the tip of her blade nicked my cheek, I found I didn’t care all that much about hurting Lleweyn’s mother.
“Screw this!” I hissed, and shoving her back, I fumbled for the flute I’d slipped into my pocket. I whipped it out and blew on the reed with my very next breath, locking her body in place.
She glared at me with furious eyes, her arms high above her head and gripping tightly to the hilt of the very same blade I’d seen her sink into Ewan repeatedly the night previous.