Wicked Grove (Wicked Grove Book 1)

  Their hair was made of twisted twigs and thistles, while their skin was green, like an emerald forest in spring, with veined leaves that spread across their bodies like emblazoned tattoos, creasing along bent appendages formed much like a human’s. How different they appeared yet still so very humanlike. They wore moss and long grass woven into capes and pants. Their eyes glowed like cats’ eyes at night, their feral orbs reflecting the moonlight. They fought us bravely, falling into droves as our weapons got the best of them. Iron arrows and lead bullets were more efficient than their crude hand weapons.

  Their sheer numbers pushed me farther from my brothers as their army also spread apart. We fought to keep up with the rampage. Sweat gathered on my brow as my heart hammered in my chest, muscles tiring from the constant action. If we didn’t end this soon, we’d be no match against them. It was looking more hopeless with every second that ticked by as bodies covered the ground and we grew weary.

  As though they’d heard my thoughts, the attack slowed, the warriors backing away in bunches as I continued to swing my knife through the air and fire the handgun I’d somehow found a second to reload. The faeries gave me a wide berth, curiously eyeing me as they created a thick wall of bodies, effectively trapping me. I fired off my last round, and the lack of gunfire from the darkness told me Craig and Jay had run out of ammo too.

  I glanced at Craig but couldn’t see Jay anywhere near us. The silence was alarming and sent panic searing through me like flashing lightning. I held out my knife, its blade dripping with sticky blue-green blood, but it was all I had left of my arsenal.

  One faery reached out and grabbed the hand holding the knife, squeezing it hard enough for me to yelp out in pain as I let go, the dirtied blade dropping onto the drenched mulch below. He moved fast, in a blur as he twisted my arm painfully backward, holding it tight. Bucking, I grunted and tried to push him back, but he was like a rock buried in the ground, unmoving. My muscles screamed and burned from the effort, shaking as they gave and I tired from the fight. I had nothing left. This had to be the end for my brothers and me.

  I felt him grip me tighter before shoving me forward, deeper into the forest, away from the sudden outburst of calls from my brothers. The pain in my arm shot through me, making my eyes tear up as I stumbled against his impatient coaxing. Where was he taking me? What little energy I had left was used to take each painful step forward as my vision blurred from the constant agony shooting up my arm.

  We approached a clearing, and he shoved me down to the ground, where I caught myself before my face smashed into the forest floor. Struggling without success to get back onto my feet, I felt the tiny pricks of sharp rocks and twigs dig into my hands. It was pointless to continue to squirm. I chanced a look up, and my eyes rested on yet another faery, who stood staring down at me intently.

  “Let me go!” I yelled. His still face remained unmoving and his gaze bore down into mine. I tried my best to look away, knowing from our research on faeries that staring back into the glow of a faery’s eyes was to become a prisoner of the faery. I pulled my gaze away, tears spilling down my cheeks as I fought to keep my eyes on the ground.

  “Please don’t hurt my brothers,” I wheezed. The pressure from the faery holding me down was working all the oxygen out of me. “I’ll go with you, but please don’t hurt them. Let them go.” My voice quivered as my body shook, exhaustion and terror crawling over me and threatening to drain the last bit of strength I had left.

  I waited, glancing back up briefly to study his features, which were like the rest of his kind. But he was somehow different. He wore a crown of twigs and vines laced with moss. His eyes glared at me, seeming to suck my soul into him as the world swam around me. My eyes fluttered as the swaying overwhelmed me. Fearing I’d pass out, I closed them until the seasick sensation ebbed away, but something else replaced it. I could hear a haunting whisper flittering in my head as he softly spoke inside it. Reaching out, he tenderly touched my cheek.

  Don’t be afraid. You’re home now. There will be no more fear or suffering. Just let go.

  A searing pain ran from his touch and down my neck, setting my body writhing in pain. It burned through my bones, like a raging inferno eating away what was left of my humanity. A moment later it began to recede. Lying on the ground, I blinked back into consciousness, the sway of the tree branches above lulling me back to awareness.

  “What’d you do to me?” I asked, but my voice was lost in the rustle of leaves and wind.

  Slowly getting up, I stood and stared at the woodland faery king. He gave me a curt nod before turning back toward the forest and motioning for me to follow. The clan didn’t speak, but instead communicated through some sort of telepathic connection. Glancing down at my hands, I realized that the same leafy green texture of their skin was now tattooed across my own.

  Reaching up, I touched the twisted twigs and vines that were now my hair and felt the mossy softness of the grassy dress that had replaced my cargo pants and shirt. Gulping, I watched the faeries retreat behind their king. The pull to follow tugged at my mind, but I fought it for a moment and turned away. I saw my brother Jay tied to a tree, watching in terror everything that was happening before him.

  “Amy, no! Don’t go with them. Don’t let them take you. No, no, no!” His head was bleeding from a wound, wetting his dark locks and trailing down his neck. Craig lay sprawled on the ground near him, knocked out but breathing. He too had blood and green faery gore splattered across his clothes. If not for the movement of his chest, I’d have believed him dead.

  I let out a breath, relieved to see them alive. I somehow knew they’d be left alone now. I smiled at my brother, placing a finger to my lips while whispering an “I love you guys” into his head. The telepathy came naturally and felt like a subtle hum in my brain.

  Jay continued to shake his head and struggled against his restraints, hollering out to me. Turning away, I ignored his pleading and walked along with the procession of retreating faeries. It felt almost soothing to walk along with them, following the king. Whatever he wanted, I had to obey, but I didn’t feel any animosity toward the faeries as I continued onward. A calm washed over me, letting me relax. Through the euphoric fog, I felt I would never see my brothers again, and my mind was trying to tell me that would be okay.

  Even so, an uncomfortable tingle whispered in my head from deep inside my memory, which seemed cloudy and confusing. There was something still there, fighting against the spell of the faery king.

  Don’t forget us. Hold on, Amy. We’ll find you, you know we will….

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  Present Day

  Jay

  I shoved the towering stacks of paperwork off the edge of the conference room table, letting the piles slide to the ground as some floated away. Slipping into a chair, I covered my eyes with one hand, rubbing at my temples. “We’re wasting time.”

  The headaches were increasing. The agony had not let up in the three days since Amy had been taken. In fact, it had gotten worse. It made me wonder if it was in any way connected to Amy’s ordeal. It had to be.

  “We should’ve tried harder,” I groaned, raking my fingers through my hair.

  Craig looked at me, making me feel self-conscious. I knew my face turned the color of a plum when I was angry or frustrated.

  “We did our best,” he answered. “Amy knows what the job entails. She knew what the risks were; we all know. Now we just have to figure out how to get her back.”

  “Do you think she still remembers us?”

  “Yes. Of course, she does.” Craig’s terse answer did nothing to reassure me. “Look,” he continued, “we should treat this like any other faery abduction case. What do we know about this clan?”

  I scratched my head. “Well, the faery clan doesn’t appear much different from ones we’ve terminated before, but obviously they’ve adapted to our techniques. Like blasted cockroaches… always finding a way to survive. They’re like the others, all
linked via telepathic channels, meaning they work as a unit. But each individual is still able to think for itself, for the most part. Autonomy is treasured, but not at all times. They’re drones, like bees, even though they’re connected to a king, not a queen. He’s their leader and holds the reins. Males beneath him are warriors, and the reproductive females are prized above all other workers. The king usually has several wives and may like to sample the new females when they transition, to ensure they are fertile.”

  I threw Craig a knowing look, and he pressed his lips together, trying not to shudder. We both knew what it meant. Amy was a new female in a faery clan. Neither of us wanted to think about her fate if we failed to extract her. Some things made anyone’s blood run cold and sent shivers down the spine.

  “Well, we do know that the people they kidnap fully assimilate within two weeks,” Craig said. “After that, it’s damn near impossible to break them away from the hive. They’re never quite the same if you do it after that timeframe, so we need an extraction plan and need to execute it successfully long before the deadline.”

  My frown deepened as I scratched the scruffy beard occupying my once-smooth face. I hadn’t shaved in three days. Such things were irrelevant with Amy gone. And this clan was strong. Too strong. Unnaturally strong.

  The silence weighed heavily in the air.

  “I miss her.” Craig’s somber tone matched my mood: miserable. He never usually voiced such things out loud to me, and I had to admit that he and I were not as close as both of us were to Amy. Still, when it came down to it, we knew what needed to be done.

  “I know. We’ll get her out of there if it’s the last thing we do. We owe it to Amy, and we won’t be failing this time. Got it?” I glanced at the mess I’d scattered across the floor, frowning.

  Craig nodded, his eyes gleaming with a sheen of unshed tears. Clearing his throat, he peered out the window and across the city skyline, lost in thought.

  “What if she doesn’t want to return with us?” he finally asked, his voice hoarse. He looked like he’d aged a decade in the past three days. As the oldest of us, he was already sporting premature streaks of grey hair even though he was only twenty years old. The difficult and stressful hazards of the job certainly didn’t help.

  “We won’t give her the choice. Remember, most of these people end up with some sort of Stockholm Syndrome when we pull them out of a clan assimilation. We should take it slowly. She’ll have to be isolated, desensitized, and completely cut off from the hive connection if we’re going to do this right. It won’t be easy.”

  Craig nodded. “The iron room is prepared.”

  I sighed at the mention of the medieval-sounding isolation chamber in the sublevels of the S.R.A. building. Faeries were vulnerable to iron, and to cut the connection between an abducted human and the hive mind of a faery clan, they had to be surrounded by iron. It would sever the connection but was an extremely painful procedure. Neither of us wanted to put Amy through that, but there was no other way.

  “Yep, the iron room. It’ll save her from that clan, but it’s almost as bad as leaving her with the faeries.” I rubbed my face, the weariness hanging on me like a wet towel.

  “I don’t think I can put her in there myself,” Craig muttered.

  “Me neither. We’ll have to get the other guards to do it. She’s going to scream. A lot. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it, but to save her, we have to take her there.” I closed my eyes. I could already imagine the agony she’d go through during the process.

  Amy was at risk, and no matter what we did, it all ended in sacrifice and pain. One thing was for sure, if anyone could endure such torture, it would be her. In the end, she’d understand better than anyone else how necessary such suffering was to sever the tie to the faery clan. If only she would forgive us for putting her in that room.

  But that would be the easy part. First, we had to get her, and neither of us had any idea how to do that.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  Amy

  I peered around, confused and hazy, every limb heavy with an achiness I’d never known. Everything was utterly unfamiliar. It made my stomach roll just being there in that strange land. I closed my eyes, squeezing them shut and hoping to stave off the unsettling feeling, but instead of peace and quiet, I got poked in the side with a dull tree branch and screamed at in a language I didn’t understand.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying,” I snapped at the lady faery madly motioning for me to get up and follow her. The faery either didn’t understand the words I’d said or she wasn’t interested. Nudging me again with her fingers, she poked my side before reaching out to snag my tunic and yank me up by my elbow, dragging me to my feet with one fluid movement.

  “Okay, okay. I’m coming,” I hissed at her, but she didn’t respond to the tone of my voice. She stepped a few feet away before turning and waving for me to follow her, which I did, wincing as I stepped on sharp pine needles, twigs, and probably even thorns from the rough bushes surrounding that area of the forest. Where were my shoes? Without them, the soles of my feet screamed in pain. I was far from accustomed to walking on the forest floor. But no one around me wore shoes of any kind, and it was more than likely mine were sitting at the bottom of an ash pile in one of the campfires.

  I groaned. Glancing around at the fae dwellings, I felt a thousand eyes settling on me as I followed behind the woman, resigned to the fact that there was nothing else I could do now. They all looked the same. Everyone had leafy green hair and black dark eyes that reflected the firelight with an unnatural glow. Plant leaves or moss was woven like linen for clothes, and I was quite certain that was the style there. It felt like we were all clones of each other, printed off the same press repeatedly. It left me uneasy as I continued to watch the others gather to gawk at me on my procession to who-knew-where. I didn’t know where I was or how far from home they’d taken me.

  My mind was a black hole, swallowing my thoughts as soon as they appeared.

  I racked my brain trying to remember what had happened to me and how I’d gotten there. It was obvious I was the new attraction, a morbid curiosity for all. It wasn’t just the lapse of memory that confounded me, it was the undeniable feeling I didn’t belong there, and it couldn’t be more obvious by the way the others behaved toward me. If only I could turn and run away. But as I swung my eyes across the small village of fae which stretched for a good mile or so, I realized there were many more miles of forest and trees looming beyond the boundaries, and there was more than fae in the darkness. It was safer to stay the night than to venture out there. Even I knew that.

  But these forest people… what did we call them? My mind drew a blank. I’d named them just moments before. I frowned. It was on the tip of my tongue. Oh, wait… faeries. Yes. That sounded right.

  No. That couldn’t be, could it? Yes, it had to be right. But… no. Shoot.

  I couldn’t remember for the life of me what they were called. They had changed me, made me part of their group, and my memories were slowly evaporating like cool morning mist under a noonday sun. Thoughts faded more quickly than I could think them, but I knew deep down inside of me that I belonged somewhere else, not there. Somewhere my brothers would be close.

  Brothers? I had brothers? How was that possible? Everything about them seemed to be erased from my mind as I strained to call forth their names, their faces, their voices. But I couldn’t bring them to the surface of my mind. Everything about them blurred, like someone was slowly erasing each memory right before I could reach it. Soon, I realized, I wouldn’t be able to recall that I’d ever even had any brothers.

  I swallowed, trying not to step on any sharp twigs or pebbles as I continued, tears welling up in my eyes. Fear, longing, and resolution bombarded me as my head emptied like a recycling bin. If only I could halt the process, extend it a bit, that would help so much and buy me the time I needed to figure something out. I had no idea where I was, how far from the city I’d been take
n, or in which direction was what. There was no visible sun or moon; the trees grew thickly above our heads, blotting out all light. Everywhere I looked was an endless sea of trees, swallowing any path I might choose to take.

  My heart died just a little as I wiped a fallen tear from my cheek.

  This had dark magic written all over it. The woman leading me through the forest turned slightly at my slow movement, beckoning with her eyes for me to hurry, but she then focused her eyes back in front of her. I didn’t know where she was taking me, but I knew where I wasn’t going. I would not be leaving this place anytime soon. That was obvious. There were plans in place, protocols of some sort for newly assimilated people like me, and I was being led through the steps like a good little puppy. I had to be obedient, or the consequences could be grave.

  The thought made my skin tingle. k'12

  After approaching a small group of women sitting around a fire near a bubbling creek, we finally stopped. The women were washing themselves and cleaning some type of woven material. I wasn’t sure what kind of clothes they wore since everything appeared to be made from leaves or moss, but there was some type of fabric involved too, for the women were washing it in the river. I stared in horror, realizing that the clothes were the discarded remnants of previous lives. They were sewn, washed and magically layered with moss to match everyone else’s attire. Nothing went to waste, but there could be no reminders of our past lives.

  The woman leading me began speaking in her odd language again, one that for the life of me, I couldn’t comprehend. Not a lick of it. She pointed at the river and then to the women surrounding the fire, trying to convey what was going to happen next. I shook my head, shrugging. I’d never heard that dialect before, and no amount of gesturing would make me understand.