Page 14

“Dinner with a view,” I say under my breath, since I’ve become the kind of man who talks to himself in the woods.

The night has that kind of chill that feels good after a long day, enough to sting my cheeks and nose, but not enough to make my fingers numb when I unscrew the thermos lid. I pour coffee into the small cup; the steam rising in a thin curl, carrying the familiar sharp scent that’s somewhere between comfort and coping mechanism at this point.

I bring the cup to my lips, ready to take the first sip, when something shifts at the far edge of my vision.

It’s subtle at first, a disturbance in the pattern of dark trunks and darker space between them. I lower the cup slightly, eyes narrowing, and focus past the immediate circle of my clearing into the deeper layers of forest. Everything looks the same, just a horizon of vertical lines and irregular shapes.

Then, between two thick pines about thirty yards out where no trail should have a marker and no camper should be wandering this late, a single light sways in the dark.

It’s warm—a soft, steady blue-white hue that wavers just enough to indicate flame rather than LED, and it hangs higher than a person’s hand should. It’s not bright, not searing white like a headlamp or the aggressive blue-violet of a phone screen, and it sways gently… the way a lantern would.

The light doesn’t come any closer.

I set my cup down carefully on the log beside me, and keep my eyes on that solitary, swaying light without saying a word.

6

Onyx

I wait in the dark long before he sees the light.

Moonlight slips between the branches and paints the wet leaves silver, but it does not touch me unless I allow it. My skin takes on the shape of whatever I’m standing next to: bark, shadow, moss, or the pale break of stone through roots.

The forest knows how to keep me. It has kept me through centuries of hunger, storms, fire, and hollow wandering. Tonight, it keeps me while I watch my mate sit on a fallen maple, unaware that he has stopped in the reach of my gaze.

My Little Ember.

The name fits, even though he is called Lucas, because he carries warmth in a body made for this land. Red hair that catches every scrap of light and turns it to copper red, the color of autumn leaves just before they fall. When the sun touches it in the mornings, it glows; when the moon touches it now, it looks like cooled embers. Pale skin marked by those maddening sun-spots that still pull my attention.

Freckles. I know the word. I know humans use it without weight, as if such marks are nothing. They are not nothing on my mate. They scatter over him in uneven places across his nose and cheeks, down his throat and disappearing beneath green cloth where my eyes cannot follow.

They make me want to come closer, but not to hunt or threaten. Simply to understand how one human can carry so many tiny marks and make my hands ache with the need to count them.

I do not come closer.

I have learned caution over these months, though it sits poorly inside me. Cervari do not court the way humans court. We circle, observe, and learn the shape of danger around the chosen one before stepping near. We leave signs for the mate to smell, to see, and to begin understanding that the forest has recognized them.

My kind was never made to kneel at doors and speak gentle sounds. My skull was not shaped for human mouths, and my throat has never learned to bend air, lips, and tongue into their language. With him, I have only the bond, and I have not yet touched it hard enough for him to know what brushes his dreams.

Every night, he runs.

Every night, I follow.

It is the only place I can be near without making his waking fear rise too sharply. He runs, and the chase pulls life into his breath. He turns his head sometimes, almost seeing me, and understanding that I could have caught him at any time, yet chose not to.

The bond grows there, reaching through his sleep while he wakes with my scent still in his nose. I have watched him look for the plant around his den, confusion tightening his mouth. He will not find any there because Labrador tea grows close to my den, miles away from here.

I left my full moon offering tonight.

I watched from the trees as he came home carrying mud, cattle scent, and anger from speaking to someone over the glowing rectangle device I so loathe. I placed the offering just before dusk, knowing where his eyes would fall first.

I bound it carefully with inner bark, tight enough to hold through wind, loose enough for him to see each piece. I made it with claws meant to tear bone and wood, and still I did not break a single leaf.

When he crouched in front of it, every instinct in him stilled and I smelled the recognition in his scent. He reached toward it and stopped before touching. That pleased me more than taking a kill.

He did not destroy it, either. He stepped over it and entered his den while speaking aloud to himself again. But he left the gift where I placed it.

Accepted it, a part of me insists.