Wild, Tethered, Bound Page 2

  Now it was as if the sergeant knew what Nick was going to do. “Don’t even think it, Lieutenant…”

  Too late. Nick yanked his helmet off and tried to convey his sincerity by meeting the man’s eyes. “Look,” he said to the shepherd. “I’ll give you the money to move. Out of my own wages.”

  Sarge scowled. “Sir, our instructions—”

  Nick didn’t want to hear it. “You know our motto, Sarge: Improvise, Adapt and Overcome.”

  “No, our motto is Semper Fi,” the sergeant snapped. “Lemme know when you need my help getting your head out of your ass, Lieutenant. You’re breaking every rule in the book. Sometimes I wonder why the hell you joined the Marines.”

  “Lost a bet,” Nick said with his typical irreverent humor, then motioned to the interpreter. “Tell the shepherd I’ll pay his family to move to Parun City. Tell him. That’s an order.”

  Emotions flittered across the shepherd’s face as if he wanted to accept Nick’s offer but was struggling against some tie that bound him here. In the end, he refused. “This is our home. Besides, once you go, the warlords will know who helped us, and they’ll kill us all. And you will go—you always do.”

  From her walnut tree, Dessa watched with satisfaction as the soldiers left the shepherd’s cave, defeated. She’d never cared for warriors—not even when the most dangerous weapons they carried were swords—but these Americans seemed well-meaning. As much as it irritated her that they tried to make her people leave her forest, they’d been kind to the little girls.

  Perhaps she should’ve invited the soldiers to sit beneath her heart tree. It was almost ripe. A few more days and the nuts would start falling. Then she could invite the soldiers to eat the fruit of her heart tree and choose one for her mate.

  After all, they had mistaken her for a mortal woman.

  Like most of her kind, Dessa could—and often did—pass for human. In her younger days, when there were other dryads into whose hands she could entrust her forest, she’d lived amidst the mortals now and again. She’d once passed herself off as a dancing girl for a Roman emperor. Another time she posed as a governess, and years later, a trapeze artist with a traveling circus in England. But always, she had returned to her forest.

  Maybe it was because she’d never met a man whose pull was stronger than that of her heart tree. Could Lieutenant Nick Leandros be that man? She liked the way he gave candy to the children—the way he tried to comfort them with his card tricks. He’d make a good father to little girls of his own…

  Dessa remembered how fascinated she’d been by the mortal sweat on his face and how she’d reached out to wipe it away. She’d startled him, and he’d flinched. But she could easily imagine how it would’ve felt if he’d turned his head and kissed her palm instead. She’d liked the lines of his square face, the dark knitted brow over intelligent eyes. Even now, as she watched him make his way through the woods, she liked the way he moved. He wasn’t stiff and precise like most soldiers, but languid as a Caspian tiger.

  Maybe that’s why the desire to tether him to this forest was so strong. She saw the little tendril of mortal fascination billow behind him like a gossamer thread in the breeze, inhaled and drew it to her. It was a weak tether, one he could break if he tried. But perhaps it would be enough to draw him back to her one day.

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  Chapter Three

  It happened at dusk while Dessa tended her seedlings. They were the children of her mighty walnut, and they might one day replace her heart tree, becoming part of the unbroken chain of life. Dessa was stroking her fingers over the soft young leaves when suddenly the ground shook beneath her.

  The explosion was so loud that she covered her ears and dove to the ground. The fighting was fierce. She heard shelling high on the mountain, and she heard a staccato answering call from the valley. In Alexander’s time, armies clashed swords here, but those were the old ways. Now, men launched mortars at one another—woe to anyone or anything in between.

  Dessa was an immortal; bombs couldn’t kill her. But she could feel pain, excruciating pain, and she felt it now as her forest burst into flame. It had been a dry autumn, and the fallen leaves and pine needles made perfect kindling for the fire. Distraught, Dessa tried to bind the night mist to extinguish the fire, but for some reason, she couldn’t. Confused by what was happening to her, she felt a lead weight, a hollow horror that pinned her to the forest floor.

  Then came the agony—a splintering down into her soul. A snapping, as if every bone in her body were cracking in half. Then she felt the weak and desperate flutter of her second heartbeat.

  Her heart tree.

  Grimly, Dessa raced into the destruction. The flames licked at her ankles, but she ignored the burn. She had to save her heart tree. Whatever magic she had, she must reserve it for that! She fell twice and was almost trampled by a fleeing stag. Choking on the smoke, Dessa pulled herself along the forest floor.

  Thump-thump.

  Her heart tree still pulsed with life, but slowly. Fleetingly. She followed the sound until she felt the husks of the walnuts beneath her. Amidst the smoke, Dessa found the great walnut tree in pieces. The trunk was split, life force oozing out. One broad branch snapped off and hung like the arm of a broken doll.

  “No!” Dessa cried, throwing herself onto the splintered wood, willing her flesh to bind the wounds. But the damage was too great, the tree mutilated almost beyond recognition. Dessa wept, pressing the broad walnut leaves against her cheek as she felt the tree’s final shudder. Its heartbeat pulsed once more through Dessa’s veins then was still.

  Dessa stumbled back, covered with sap and soot. Her once-mighty walnut tree was felled, its excavated roots exposed at her feet like tangled limbs in a mass grave. Her heart tree was dead. Her forest was burning. All the life she’d bound together with her magic tethers was coming apart.

  She was too horrified even to scream.

  As Dessa staggered toward the edge of the forest, her foot hit something hard, cold and metal. It was a cook pot; the burning forest illuminated its shape perfectly well. Dessa knew she must be near the cave, so she called out to the little girls, climbing over fallen rocks to get to them until she felt something soft and fleshy beneath her fingers.

  It was a foot, five cherubic toes curled stiff in death.

  Little toes belonging to a little girl who would never dance with her in the forest again.

  The whole family was dead. Dessa knew it for a certainty, because the tethers were now as broken as their bodies beneath the stone. Just as certainly, Dessa knew it was her fault.

  In the rubble was a scorched playing card—the lieutenant must have dropped it from his helmet—and now the joker on its face seemed to mock her. If only the family had gone with the lieutenant, they’d still be alive. But Dessa had bound them here, hoping she could protect them. She’d loved those little girls, thinking of them as the only daughters she might ever have, but Dessa’s dryad powers had been no match for bullets and bombs.

  A light rain began to fall, dampening the fire, but there was no saving her forest now and she’d been wrong to think there was still a place for dryads in the modern world.

  There was nothing left for her here, nothing left of the old races. It was time for her to live amongst the mortals, this time for good.

  Heartsick and sobbing, Dessa stumbled away.

  Chapter Four

  Sudden tracers of gunfire flashed across the blackened sky, and Nick took cover. He hated night patrols. He hated them because he ended up shooting at muzzle flashes and silhouettes, never seeing the actual enemy and never knowing whether he hit his target. He also hated night patrols because of the ease with which you could get separated from your patrol—like he was now. And it would be just his luck to be the victim of friendly fire.

  Nick scanned frantically for sudden motions amongst the trees. He knew the enemy was salivating to get their hands on a lone American soldier, so he was more worried about being capture
d than he was of the blasts.

  It was raining fire; flames literally dripped from the tree canopy and Nick was forced from his hiding place by the heat. As he scrambled through fallen leaves and brambles, sweat leaked into his night goggles, which illuminated the dark mountain pass in an alien shade of green.

  His training told him that Pakistan was to the east and that base camp was to the west and he should head in either one of those directions, but his instinct was to go deeper into the forest.

  Damn it.

  If he lived through this, he was never going to live it down. Sarge would add this to the list of reasons why Second Lieutenant Nick Leandros was never going to make first lieutenant—not that he cared too much about that. He just needed to get his shit together.

  Just then, the bombardment stopped as suddenly as it started. Though Nick’s ears were still ringing, his footfalls crunching on the forest floor were the only real sound. Everything else was deafening silence. But something was still drawing him into the forest, where scorched trees loomed like skeletons in the night.

  Some force, some strand of recognition, guided him as if he were following a string through a maze. And then he knew why.

  This forest. He recognized it even in the dark, with the stench of soot beneath his boots. He remembered the woman, her delicate features and haunting blue eyes. Was she huddling somewhere out here in fear or, worse, burning alive?

  Thinking of her, he was more determined to follow his instincts over his training. He had to find her and the little girls. He had to get all of them out of here before the shelling started again.

  Nick picked up the pace, pounding over cooling embers. The sun was starting to rise, and through its glow he saw the trees were shorn by fire; even the conifers were black and naked.

  And in the midst of the destruction, his foot came to rest beside a cast-iron cook pot. It took him a few moments to make sense of what he was seeing. The cave—where he had found the shepherd and his daughters—was a pile of rubble. And protruding from the rocks was a tiny foot with a dried trickle of blood down the ankle.

  God. They were under the rubble!

  Nick dropped his rifle. With gloved hands, he shoveled pebbles aside and hurled stones into the forest. Past and present horrors twisted together and under Nick’s hands and the stones became the warped steel of a wrecked. The struggle was the same. The result was the same. Three broken bodies emerged.

  From the way they were laying together, Nick knew the little girls had huddled with one another for protection from the shelling, just as he had seen them the first time. It had not saved them. He had not saved them. Again, he had not saved them.

  How many air strikes had he called in that ended up like this one? How many mistakes had he made in his life that ended up with people dead?

  Lifting the littlest corpse into his arms, he saw she was clutching something. Gently, he opened her hand and found a half-eaten candy still in its wrapper, a little piece of sweetness she had not lived long enough to finish. And a sound of grief came out of him—something between a retch and a sob.

  That’s when pain hit him between the shoulder blades, a searing sensation like being cleaved with an ax. He was out in the open, so he shouldn’t have been surprised to be shot, but he’d never heard the bullet coming. Still, it threw him to the ground. Reeling from the pain, Nick crawled a ways before he was hit again. He fell face-first into the dirt, the taste of scorched pine needles in his mouth along with the bile.

  Whatever hit him was tearing him apart. It ripped through his torso, exploding behind his skull. He was sure he’d lost his right arm because, in the fog of the pain, he saw it move away from his body. He shrieked as his left leg came apart with a hideous shredding sound.

  Then Nick lost consciousness altogether.

  Soldiers near death sometimes claimed to see Jesus. Some saw a bright white light. Nick wondered what kind of narcissist he was that he saw himself. It was like some out-of-body experience, looking down where his corpse lay on the forest floor. But then he saw his own face looking back at him.

  It was his face, wasn’t it? Only with as fierce a stare as a lion. Nick turned his head and saw a third self sitting naked beneath a destroyed walnut tree, arms stubbornly folded. It was like he’d been split in three. Three heads. Three bodies.

  What the fucking hell?

  Nick felt himself for blood and bullet wounds, but found none. It was the dissonant sounds of the dying forest amplified through six ears that hurt him. His limbs were stiff and unwieldy. He tried to lift his right arm, but the Nick under the destroyed walnut tree was the one whose arm moved. Now, with six arms to move, it took a moment for him to get the correct limbs under control.

  Still convinced he was dead, the uniformed Nick pulled himself to his feet so as to better appreciate whatever hell he’d been condemned to. He was shocked to find himself weak with thirst and hunger.

  So this was hell, then.

  He finished what little water remained in his canteen then noticed the walnut shells cracking beneath his boots. He doubted they were real. It had to be some kind of trick. Like Tantalus in Greek myth, would he reach for the nuts only to have them disappear? Experimentally, Nick gathered a few and popped them into his mouth, only to be rewarded with the rich taste of walnut.

  Dazed, Nick pocketed the rest of the nuts and started walking, somehow knowing that his other selves would follow. And they did.

  All three of him ended up where the little girls still lay dead. Was it his eternal punishment to endure seeing their tiny corpses through three sets of eyes? Was this his fate—to be split and broken into pieces like their little bones?

  He couldn’t just leave them here for the scavengers, so Nick used his helmet to dig a grave. His other selves did the same; one using bare hands, the other using the discarded cook pot. He could not say how long the three of him dug, but the sun was high in the sky by the time they had buried the bodies. With each set of his hands, he tenderly pulled a quilt of dirt over each girl, tucking them into their final beds.

  Some instinct he could not explain compelled him to plant the remaining walnuts atop each grave. Maybe someday, the girls could become mighty walnut trees, as beautiful and ethereal as the woman they’d called a nature spirit.

  That’s when Nick had to acknowledge the girls in the graves were dead and he wasn’t. He’d simply gone mad. He’d cracked—just like the beauty in the woods. Perhaps there was only so much horror a person could take in before it shattered them.

  Experimentally, Nick reached out with filthy hands, and clasped hold of the second self to his right. It was real—it felt like skin. And as he grabbed hold of it, there was a sudden jolt before the body began absorbing back into his own. It hurt, but not as much as it had hurt coming apart.

  The sickening squish of flesh as it melded together made Nick gag, but then he was no longer three—only two. Looking at his remaining extra self, Nick shuddered. Now he didn’t want to touch this creature, so foreign and so familiar. Steeling his courage, Nick reached out with both hands and explored the contours of the face opposite him. It was his own. The same dark brow, the same square shape. He felt his own fingers upon his skin, rough and calloused as he absorbed the extra body back into himself.

  This time, he did gag. Then he was one again.

  Perhaps he’d imagined it. By now, his men would be combing the woods for him. And what would they find? Would they see his body in pieces? Would they notice three of him? Or would they find a blithering madman to lock up in some asylum. It was the one thing he couldn’t endure. So when someone shouted his name in the distance, Nick didn’t answer.

  Chapter Five

  Evergreen Resort Casino, Queensland, Australia, five years later

  The dryad was on her lunch break. She’d been living amidst the mortals for five years now, but there were still things she couldn’t get used to. Hard floors, straight lines and steel buildings all made her feel confined. And that’s to say nothing o
f the high-heeled shoes!

  With a sandwich in one hand, Dessa kicked off her pumps and stretched out on the park bench in the resort’s botanical gardens. She’d taken the job as assistant manager at the Evergreen Resort Casino because it was a nature preserve, nestled inside many acres of wild parkland.

  Now, with her free hand, she brushed the friendly cycads. They were amongst the oldest trees in existence—as old as the dinosaurs—and, just like her, completely out of place here. Like Dessa in the mortal world, this cultivated landscape was too clipped, too restrained and too well-groomed. After all, overhead was not an open sky, but a marvel of mortal architecture—a geodesic dome.

  She told herself she shouldn’t complain; perhaps glass and aluminum would protect this forest as her dryad magic had not protected the forests of Afghanistan.

  She’d just finished eating when the radio at her hip crackled with an update; casino security suspected a card-counting team in the casino. Dessa found it hard to care. The only card that interested her was the one she kept always in her pocket—the joker, with its scorched edges, a reminder to her of all she’d lost. Since she left the forest, her powers had been slowly waning. Soon, she supposed, she would forget her heart tree; she would forget she was once a dryad at all. But until then, she used what little magic she still had to tether guests to the resort.

  Dessa was so good for business, in fact, that her boss predicted she’d be running the place in a year or two. So she should care about card-counting teams in the casino; but mostly, she just wanted a few quiet moments to herself.

  She switched the radio off.

  It was harder to ignore the newspaper a guest had left behind on the bench beside her. If she opened it, Dessa knew what she’d see. The war in Afghanistan was still raging and the forests were almost all gone. Without the forests, the soil was eroding, and creating an ecological misery for the people. Perhaps she’d been wrong to leave, but she couldn’t do it alone. If only she’d had a daughter…but that dream had died with her heart tree.