Dying, she remembered. Dying, inch by inch as the strangling python of thorns sucks his blood, his breath, his very soul out of his body and spreads it through the land.
The icy lump in her chest spread to her lungs and blocked her breathing. She forgot the racket of the crows. She forgot the stench. She knelt down by the green man and stared at it.
David.
The forest told her that was David.
She touched it. The thorns writhed away from her hand as if they refused to bite her. She'd touched the leg of the form and now she could see blue denim between the vines. David was inside.
The denim was warm, even though the trees shaded her. If she watched carefully, a slight swell and fall moved the briars around the thing's chest. David was still alive.
She fumbled the knife out of her pocket. She split a nail opening it. She slipped the blade under a single stem and cut carefully, delicately, away from David's leg.
The scream jerked her hand away--the deep piercing scream of torture as if she'd lit bamboo slivers under his fingernails. The cut end of the briar writhed like a snake, away from her, away from the knife. It dripped the thick crimson of human blood.
{I'll die if you cut me loose. I'll be trapped outside my body.}
The clarity of David's voice jerked her out of her robot movements. He was here. He was focused.
Fire had hurt him. The knife had hurt him. Jo sat back on her heels and stared at the vines. She could kill them with her eyes, she knew. If she could burn wet brush with her glare, set fire to a living tree in springtime, then she could scorch those vines into ash and charcoal.
And David would die.
She touched the vines again. "How can I set you free?"
{. . . master . . .}
Now he'd gone fuzzy again, just the single word coming through the static. Just before, he'd even said "I," not that goddamn "We."
"I'll fry your Master's liver for lunch," she muttered. She reached for another vine of the briar, and it twisted away from her in fear. The knife flashed in her hand.
{NO!} The mental scream was deafening.
David's pain wrenched her guts. Another vine leaked drips of blood onto the dry leaves. "Can't do that," she hissed. "Fucking blood loss will kill him even if the pain doesn't."
{. . . leave . . .}
He was fading. Even with her hand on the stems wrapping his arm, he was fading into the static. Heedless of the thorns, she dug down underneath the briars and touched the skin of his wrist. His pulse beat weak and slow, and she felt only the faintest echo of life and thought.
It was as if his soul was spreading out, like those drops of blood were mixing with the water of a pool, starting out pure red and gradually thinning away to purple smoke and then the merest dark haze before disappearing completely in the blue reflection of the sky. Another day, maybe another hour, and he would be gone beyond recall.
She dropped the knife. She squatted on the forest floor, staring at the vines forming the effigy of the man she loved, and thought.
David was dying. She was his only chance.
Every thought led back to the same point: the forest's hold was too strong and too intimate for outside force to work. She could only see one place where it might be vulnerable, one place she could fight it. She could force him to focus and hold him together, waiting for a miracle.
Slowly, gently, as if she was reaching for one of those over-trusting trout, she captured one of the rooted vines. The thorns twisted away from her flesh, and she jerked suddenly to force them to cut her palm. Her own blood touched the green stem.
"I will follow you," she whispered. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge." She felt her face set into a grim mask of stone.
"I will track you to the ends of this land and gather every bit of you and bring you back. I will search every hill and hollow, every root and branch, I will search the rock and soil and water and the very sky if it be necessary. I swear it by the sun and moon and all the stars above." She paused for breath and emphasis.
"I will bring you back or die with you."
{Jo, don't!}
Slowly, gently, precisely, as if she was arranging flowers for a Zen master, Jo draped the vine three times around her wrist and forced it to scratch the skin. She held the stem against her blood. She felt it root. She sent her mind into the thin filament joining her to the land and asked the darkness she found there to bring her David.
The wordless hiss touched her hand and embraced her. She wrapped herself around its fog and squeezed it into the semblance of a man and held it. She looked around for her body and the daylight of the forest.
Darkness surrounded them.
{David?}
* * *
Sean leaned against a tree and coughed again, gently, the noise buried under the ravens' calls. He'd heal so much faster if he didn't try to move.
But then he'd lose her.
That bitch was his weapon against Fiona and Brian. That bitch owed him blood. He tried to weigh the balance. Revenge would be satisfied, either way. He fingered the heavy knife Fiona had taken from Brian.
The woman knelt there by her lover. She didn't move.
He stared at her back, willing her to move, willing her to speak, willing her to smell or hear or feel him through the land, willing her to notice him and pull out that ugly piece of human metal that never
