Out of the Woods by T.J. Land

Author:T.J. Land
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, lgbt, fantasy, lesbian, fairies, ya, sunfire
Publisher: NineStar Press

Chapter Twelve

Hermana had come to accept that she was crap at giving comfort. She just didn’t have the knack. Everything she said came out sounding forced or stupid. So when the sun rose six days after Ned’s death, and Ruth still lay on his bed, staring blankly up at the ceiling, Hermana went to fetch Daniel.

When she followed the path up to the chalets, something went wrong.

In years gone by, she and Ruth had often bartered with travellers who had gotten lost in their woods, exchanging directions for small items of food or clothing. When she was younger, Hermana had assumed that they were all idiots. The woods weren’t that big. How could anyone with a lick of sense not be able to find their way out? Since then, she had come to realise that people who lived their lives surrounded by buildings had an entirely different way of looking at things. They saw no difference between a line of rough-barked conifers with an uneven row of smooth beech trees. They missed all the telltale landmarks—the woodpecker, the strawberry bush, the pile of boar crap. Living in a town made their brains too brittle to navigate their way through anything that wasn’t a town.

Knowing that had always given Hermana a smug glow of superiority. So it was with extreme disconcertion and annoyance that she found herself totally lost.

The smell and the yellow slime coating several of the trees was distracting, but that wasn’t all it was. The woods seemed to be playing with her. The rocky outcropping shaped like a tortoise had gone, or she’d missed it. The sycamores were at least thirty metres from the spot where she’d expected to find them, and both of them were leaning the wrong way, forcing her to wonder if they were not two entirely different sycamores that she had never noticed before.

“Stop mucking about,” she said aloud, in the voice Maggie used when her pet pig was making a nuisance of itself.

Every few steps, something seemed to slither or hiss behind her. Once, a fluttering noise came from the shadows on her left; it sounded about the right size for a partridge, though the image that immediately came to her mind was of giant fibrous moth wings, not feathers. Of course, when she looked, there was nothing there.

“I’m not in the mood for playing games,” she told the woods under her breath. “I know you’ve been out of sorts of late. We’ve been doing our best to fix it.”

As she passed by the larger patches of yellow muck, several of them flickered as though reflecting light from a candle that she definitely wasn’t carrying.

“That’s a new trick,” she muttered, to stave off the urge to piss herself. Bugger, when did it get so cold?

She wasn’t certain she was going in a straight line. Every time she tried to reach a target, a clump of weeds or a tree, something wriggled in the corner of her vision, distracting her. When she looked ahead again, the path was subtly different, although she couldn’t say quite how.

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