"Ask Dougal MacKenzie's ashes whether I am patient enough to do it. Ask Sean's blood whether I have the foresight. Ask Fiona's hearthstone and threshold whether I have the will. Give them back."
Her vision throbbed again, pulsing with her heartbeat. The cut on her hand had reopened and left a thin red smear on the gray bark of the beech. It looked like a brush-stroke of Japanese calligraphy, signing a contract.
The forest stirred around them. Something tapped Maureen on the ankle. She glanced down, slowly, without the strength for more than idle curiosity.
One of the briars looped its way around her leg. The tip turned black, curled, and dissolved into powder. A second branched off and quested upward.
Maureen watched a slow-motion video of Fiona's battle with the hedge. It was happening to someone else. She wondered how it would come out.
Chapter Thirty
{The price has been paid. The pact is signed in blood.}
Ghostly bindings unraveled. Misty fragments of Jo's soul floated free and reached out to each other, gathering.
She had been vast. That echoing voice seemed to trap her, compress her, and stuff her back into her skull. The claustrophobia of her own body was unbearable.
Images flickered back into her eyes, a scuffed patch of dirt and roots replacing the pattern of life for miles around. Rot offended her nose, and the harsh croak of ravens buried the song of leaves rejoicing in the sun. The caress of the earth and sky, the water and the rock, died away to the scant range of her own skin. She plunged from riches into poverty.
Worst of all, she'd lost a bond to David deep enough to make all-night sex seem like a picture-postcard from Detroit. Now that was gone.
A dull hatred simmered in her, residue of the land's fear of fire. It left her looking for the thief who had stolen bliss. She tried to move, to punch something in frustration, even just to vent her anger in a burst of pungent swearing. Nothing worked. Her body rebelled, demanding toll for the days of abuse she'd heaped upon it.
Jo coughed. Her throat felt like cracked mud in a dried-up creek-bed. Her wrist stung where the vine had rooted, her knees and hips ached like someone had cut them open and sewn burning coals inside, and her eyes were full of the sand of hours of unblinking sight.
A scream broke into the tangle of her anger. She sorted out the clashing images and found a focus.
It was David.
She forced her muscles to move and staggered to her feet. She managed one jerky step and fell face-first in the dirt. Her feet were numb, no feeling from her knees down to her toes. She blinked and cursed and crawled over to David, to the cage of vines that held David.
They shriveled into brown ash before her eyes, giving up a smell of burning foulness. Her hand reached out and then jerked back, afraid of what it would find under the dust. The forest had eaten him. Could a half-digested meal be human? Could it even live?
She looked at her own wrist, where the briars had joined her flesh. Red dots like a healing rash speckled her skin. She gritted her teeth and touched David, brushing the dust away from his face, from his closed eyelids and nose and cheeks, daring to look.
He was David. He'd lost weight, and his skin shone waxy pale under the angry red welts and pockmarks of what looked like the aftermath of the world's worst case of poison ivy, but he was David. He was alive.
His screaming stopped when she touched him. She felt his recognition, as she had felt it when she dove into the forest's web to find him and bind him and draw him back.
She'd won.
She'd wrestled the forest for his soul and won.
Someone offered her water. She drank it greedily, the cold wetness soothing her parched throat. She cradled David's head in her arms and dribbled water down his throat and held him against the racking coughs as he rejoined the human race.
His hand jerked and twitched and then steadied as he reached up and stroked her cheek. "Jo," he croaked, and then, "I love you."
"Hush." She held his head against her breasts. She felt a shivery warmth there, not sex but mothering. She wanted to open up her blouse and suckle life back into him.
Feet intruded into the Madonna scene. She traced them up legs to find Maureen and Brian.
"Where the hell did you come from?"
They shouldn't have been able to sneak up on her through the forest. The forest saw everything.
Then she remembered, hazy through the fading bond.
She remembered their coming into the forest, and she remembered the skulking bastard she'd shot creeping up on them, and she remembered the fierce hungry thrill when she and David had hurled the forest's rage at him and tripped him and swallowed him alive. She also remembered Maureen's threats.
The forest had wanted to eat them both, Maureen and Brian. The forest hated fire and feared everything on two legs. It had reached out for them, and Jo and David fought it back. The battle was vague in her mind, but a fox was bound up in it, and an oak almost as old as the hill on which it stood. Both had fought on Maureen's side.
"Goddamn you, why couldn't you just leave us alone?"
Maureen blinked. "Leave you trapped here? What kind of a bitch do you think I am? You're my sister! I had to get you out! Either that, or die myself!"
Jo gritted her teeth. "I should have let the forest eat you. We were happy. You've got no idea what it's like, joining the land. It's all your goddamn fault, anyway. You dragged all of us into this fucking mess."
Then the last threads of the spell finally broke. Jo shuddered, staring into the black chasm of what she'd done. She had nearly died. David had nearly died, and
