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My back slams against the sharp bark of a tree trunk. The scent of the forest engulfs me from every direction, all sweet leaves and ancient wood, the cold bite of late-October night air and the lingering nostalgia of prior rainfall. The world is heightened, dramatic. I taste moonbeams and the starlight that penetrates the blanket of leaves above. I grip hold of Luke’s shoulders, the furthest part of him I can reach without help, and whine deeply into his mouth. His tongue slicks slowly against mine, a thorough ravage, a merciless onslaught, as though trying to expel whatever demon he’d just witnessed.
He doesn’t say what. But in all my time of knowing Luke, with all that he has endured, he has never once cried in my presence.
If this is how he wants to forget, then who am I to deny him? I curl my leg around his hip, tugging him closer to my body. He responds eagerly, the hardness beneath his clothes commanding attention. I rock into him, a collision of feel-good sparks that I want to last eternally, but as swiftly as Luke responds to me, he suddenly pulls away.
I see him swimming. I see him swim to the surface of clarity once again.
I hold back my groan.
“What are we doing?” he pants, his warm breath fanning across my mouth. He looks confused. His lips are plush and achingly kissable, but as I push myself toward them, he takes a conscious step back, running a hand over his hair and colliding with his metal crown in surprise, as though he’d forgotten its existence.
I sag against the tree trunk, staring at him incredulously. “Kissing,” I answer, trying not to sound so curt. “It’s good. I highly recommend it.”
Luke’s mouth flickers at the corner, but there’s a distracted, faraway look in his eyes as he glances once more at the treetop where dream-Becca had been. “This forest is warping me.”
“She’s gone?” I ask, when his eyes drift away from the trees.
He nods. “I believe so,” he answers, sounding uncertain. His gaze alights on me again, as if seeing me for the first time. He looks incredibly fond. “You stopped it. You broke the connection. Whatever I was seeing. You put yourself out there for me.”
“A necessary sacrifice,” I say with all the glib self-righteousness Finlay ever could, and Luke laughs. He approaches me slowly this time, less fury and more love, and tilts my chin up with two long, curled fingers. He lowers his mouth to mine, his lips hovering a hair’s breadth away from everything I want, and holds himself there for an achingly long time. Coils of pleasure warm my core, softly building. I feel myself growing wet beneath my skirt.He isn’t even kissing me, I think to myself, and I wonder if Luke knows the effect he has on me by just standing there, teasing out and elongating this not-kiss. Through fluttering lashes, I catch the knowing smirk that pulls at his plump mouth, the glitter of his eyes as he assesses how badly I crave his touch.
“We should go,” he murmurs, close enough that his lips brush against mine. I shiver against him, this tiny touch enough to spike my blood like electricity.
Only then do his words register.
“Are you kidding?” I ask, my mouth forming into a disbelieving, humorless gape. He is such a damn tease.
As he says it, Luke pulls away from me. With sincerity, he explains, “As it stands, I’m only half-convinced in what’s real and what’s not. Iknowyou’re real,” he adds, the instant I begin to protest, “but I don’t want to kiss you and end up seeing unspeakable, horrible things. Not now I know what this God-forbidden place is capable of. I don’t want us being together to become tainted by the memories of this. This forest has it in for me and I have a feeling Becca wasn’t a one-off. We need to get this done as quickly as possible.”
This, at least, I understand. I wouldn’t have wanted to make out with anyone after the things I saw, the faceless bodies dangling from trees. “I’m here for you,” I inform him, holding his hand tightly in mine. “Permission to kiss you again if you’re acting like a zombie?”
Despite the severity of the situation, Luke’s lips quirk. “Permission granted.” He squeezes my hand as we walk together. “I’m grateful you’re here with me. Had it been anyone else… Maybe Rory, I suppose.” He pauses, looking deep in thought. “But then he’s very flighty around me these days.”
“Flighty?”
“Like he needs to keep me at the right temperature else I’ll explode. Everything is for my benefit — eventhisis for my benefit, you being here. This ritual. He’s put his own needs far behind mine for a long time, which is admirable in one sense and utterly awkward in far too many others. In trying to treat me like a normal person, he still manages to treat me differently. You at leastdotreat me like I could be normal.”
I flush at the comment, because only a few months ago I’d been paranoid about his royal status to the point it had dominated my thoughts during all our interactions. “Roryhasbeen abnormally stressed lately.”
“All because of tonight,” Luke murmurs. “And already it isn’t going according to his planned version of events. It hurts him, being so precise. He’s not one to give up control easily, so when it all goes wrong, he blames himself.” Abruptly, Luke stops walking. His eyes flick up to the trees again, before sliding down the thick trunk of the one closest to him. His hand around mine turns into a vise, clamping me in place. It’s the only indication of his terror. “No,” he says loudly to whatever specter looms behind the tree, and his voice in that moment sounds godly.
He continues walking ahead. I glance back at the tree, but again there’s nothing for me to see but sticks and branches. This isn’t my ritual but Luke’s, and all at once the significance of this hits me hard: that like me, Luke is seeing haunted fictions within the shapes of the trees. If we were both receiving visions, then perhaps external, natural causes could explain it: fungi with doping effects, hallucinogenic powders, weird plants giving off weird properties that mess with people’s minds. They exist in nature, so why couldn’t they exist here?
But I see nothing. I see absolutely nothing — no specters, no spooks, no anything. After the torrent of freakishness, the carnival of horror, that had assaulted me last year… seeing nothing, perhaps, is the oddest thing I could possibly experience tonight. It feels like my stomach is sliding into the ground.
“I don’t see anything,” I say in startled realization as Luke resolutely strides forth, away from whatever demon he’d rejected. “I-I haven’t seen anything all night.”
All at once, everything I thought I knew about the world alters. It collapses, the foundations on which I’d built my belief system. The soft, secret pity I’d felt for Rory, the one chip in his glorious shining armor, for believing so faithfully in so-called Lochkelvin magic. I’d traveled through the forest myself at Samhain, but the visions then had been explainable: foremost that I’d been drunk.
But the fact that Luke can see things I cannot hits me in an entirely different capacity now. As I look around the dark woods, the vertical bodies of trees and their stumpy, decapitated siblings, ducking under the seeking, outstretched arms of branches, I’m creeped out and confused in a way that hanging bodies in the trees had never made me.
The world is full of magic.
* * *
“On Samhain, sure,” Luke agrees when I point out my grand revelation. “Although privately, I’d assumed it must be something more psychosomatic, but…” He trails off, his gaze wary as he peers into the trees again. “I don’t think what I’m seeing can be fully explained as mentally induced.”
