The woman bent over the bodies and stroked the head of one. Clumps of curls fell away in her fingers. The skull wobbled under her touch, no longer bearing a familiar face. Gray skin stretched over cheek bones and sunk into an overextended jaw and hollow eyes.
“Okay, Jesse.”
His arm tightened around me. He walked us backwards and out of the shack. She didn’t follow. I doubt she moved from that bed. Jesse led me to the safety of the forest canopy and stepped back, but not away.
I held out the cold wet thing in my hands. An opossum carcass. I dropped it. My knees followed. Then I wrung out my stomach until nothing was left. What was wrong with me? It wasn’t a vision. It was fucking delusion.
Jesse knelt at my side. I dragged my sleeve along my mouth. “You saw that?” Tell me I didn’t hallucinate the whole thing.
“The nymph? Yes.” Ruts formed between his brows. “And I felt it. The same pain that haunts you.”
“I don’t know what…” I did know the nymph’s despair. To have children and dreams…then only emptiness.
He offered a sweatshirt from his pack, gestured to the blood and bile soaking mine. I gave him my back and switched shirts. His voice carried over my shoulder. “All living things share the same air. We are of one blood.”
I faced him. He stared at the shack, swallowed. “Even the mourning nymph.”
His gaze grabbed mine. He reached for my hands and interlaced our fingers. His eyes, whiskey warm, searched my face. “The Lakota believe the Great Mystery has two halves. Sometimes, the evil half shows us more than the good half.” His thumb caressed the back of my hand, stroked between my fingers. “I know you had children.” He squeezed my hands when I tried to pull them away.
“What? How, Jesse?” I never mentioned them. Never.
“You’ll save her, Evie. She is your path.”
I jerked my hands. His grip tightened.
How the hell could he think the nymph could be saved? Her mind was gone, her body half-dead. And what did I have to do with it? I didn’t even want her saved, did I? Our rotten race deserved what it got. Something pinched in my chest.
The nymph’s cries chased the wind, brushing the hair from my face and chilling the air. Jesse held on to my hands, the certainty in his eyes elaborating what his words did not. I came to that forest, to that foothill, to that cabin. I couldn’t deny the tug. The same force that pulled me east, to the ocean, and beyond.
Jesse tipped his brow to mine and a heavy silence mantled us. Our breaths melded. The charged current between us made me want to pull him closer. I needed Joel in the worst way.
I untangled our hands and stood. “I’m ready to leave.”
He let me go.
The Drone’s face floated above me, a brass knuckle dagger in his hand. “Are you pristine, Eveline?” His accent rolled the “p” like a “b.”
I spat in his face. His tongue darted out, reaching for the drops of saliva. Then he turned his head and sliced the abdomen of the nymph tied down beside me. Through the fountain of blood, he plunged his hand into her womb, sinking his arm to the elbow. Her wails filled the room.
His shoulders wrenched, and his arm reappeared. From his hand, dangled a fetus by its leg. It echoed its mother’s cries. The Drone snarled at it, revealing sizeable incisors. Then he tossed it over his shoulder.
The crack of bones against the wall silenced its cry. I raised my head, baring my own teeth. Another swipe of steel and the nymph’s head thumped to the floor.
The Drone’s onyx eyes flashed as he licked the gore from his dagger. Then he smacked his lips and purred, “If you are without an evil-doer’s scion, Eveline, you shall become my queen. Together we will populate the world with Allah’s chosen. My chosen.”
Consciousness came in a dance of shadows pierced by splotches of light. Akicita wiped my brow with a soft tanned skin.
“These aren’t visions.” My voice was raspy. “They’re nightmares.”
“Time finds truth,” he said.
“It’s been six months, Akicita.” Six months since my encounter with the nymph in the cabin. And that much again since I left my father’s home. In a year’s time, the enigma surrounding my survival, my arcane abilities, and my damn nightmares remained unsolved. What would I find if I followed the tug inside me? Did the answers lie beyond the Appalachians I called home? Beyond the people I called family?
A twisty Red Spruce sheltered our summer sleeping spot, where we’d moved further up the mountain. The hunting had been sparser at that elevation. But so had the aphids.
Akicita puffed on his pipe. “I’ll tell you a story about a widowed Lakota woman.”