“I don’t ... I can’t think when...”
Lukan takes my face back from his brother, relegating Roan to my throat.
“Don’t think, sweetheart.” He sinks his teeth into my bottom lip. “Feel. You need to let yourself remember. Remember that afternoon in the forest. The heat of the sun. Your skin glistened beneath its sharp light.”
I do remember that.
I remember everything about that afternoon in the park. I remember Aunt Sammy yelling at her kids to stop hitting each other with sticks. I remember Mom waving Uncle Jordan over to help drag two picnic tables together. I remember drifting away from the crowd, searching for silence and solitude amongst the thicket of trees.
It had been so still, so quiet. I maneuvered down the neatly marked path. I followed the winding dirt leading deeper through the peace. I remember thinking how I could stay there, lost in the gossamer drapes of sunlight crashing through knotted branches. I could build a house, tend a garden and simply live off the land with not a soul for miles to tell me I was doing it wrong. It was an impossible fantasy, but one that kept replaying in my head when I slipped off the trail.
Not far, I told myself.
But what was the world like off the path? What would happen if I went a little deeper where no one else ever ventures because the little, plastic signs told them not to? What was over there? Why weren’t we allowed to go?
It lured me.
Something shimmering far into the distance coaxed me to step off the trail and wander aimlessly through the canopy of leaves and over arched roots. I gathered fistfuls of beautiful flowers Mom would love.
It was all so innocent.
And then the tiny, purple blooms. So close to the ones stamped on my dress. Planted in a perfect circle beneath a deliberate halo of light that made the petals glisten.
“Keep going, sweetheart,”a voice in my head whispers.“You’re almost there.”
Leaves crunch beneath my feet. Twigs snap. There’s a faint rustle from somewhere to my left, but there’s nothing there when I glance over.
The flowers are inches from the toe of my white flats. Tiny. With speckles of yellow at the center.
I don’t know what, but something propelled me to step over. Step into the circle.
My eyes snap open and I find Kellen’s. The desire in them is now a steady focus. The pleading of a man begging for his prayers to be heard.
“I stepped into a ring of flowers,” I whisper.
“A fairy trap,” Roan mutters.
“Fairies?”
Even as I say it, my brain struggles to register that I was kidnapped by tiny people with wings.
“Assholes,” Lukan adds with an edge of irritation in his voice. “Hate those fuckers.”
Okay. This is fine.
Snake women.
Dead aunts.
Shades.
Fairies.
A memory I can’t fucking pull to the forefront of my thoughts no matter how hard I keep clawing at it because it’s right there. It’s right ... fucking ... there. I can feel it picking at the barrier keeping it from me.
“Easy.” Kellen leans forward and lightly puts a hand on a knee that I can’t feel because some snake lady stabbed me with venom so she can eat me.
And I think I’m starting to lose it. That well of panic I’ve been trying to shove down is beginning to overflow.
