Chapter Fourteen – Thea
Chapter Fourteen
Thea
In my hurry, I tripped over a rock and almost lost my balance. Cursing under my breath, I turned to kick the rock and discovered it was a phone. I picked it up. It wasn’t mine. Mine was safely tucked in my backpack. Since there was no signal here, there was no reason for me to keep it handy.
“What’s that?” Taran asked.
Honestly, I didn’t think I’d ever get used to hearing a legit tree talk. Okay, he wasn’t a tree. A leshy. But he looked like a tree, except for when he morphed his face in such a way that it vaguely resembled a human. I’d have to ask him about that.
“I think it’s his phone.”
I walked over to where Markus had already knocked his box over. He was on the ground, on his back, trying to reach for the knife. His other knife was in my backpack. I felt better knowing that I had a weapon, and I couldn’t believe how silly I’d been to refuse to take one of my dad’s. I leaned over him and waited for him to look at me, then placed the phone in front of his face.
“Thanks,” I said, and walked away.
“Wait, no! Give me back my phone. You have no right.”
I ignored him and went into the phone’s settings to turn off face recognition. I didn’t know what I would find, but it was worth checking.
I knew Taran was behind me, and I stopped to wait for him. He must’ve not been paying attention, because his roots knocked against my boots.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You can walk beside me, you know. No need to keep up the invisible act.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “I will do that.”
We resumed walking, side by side, and I went into Markus’s messages first. The most recent messages were from two days ago. He’d exchanged a few with Kyla, but they didn’t reveal anything I didn’t know already. Most of the names in his message app were female, which made me think Markus was a busy guy. The name Soren Sinclair was nowhere to be found. Neither the name “Master”.
It was so ridiculous that I could barely wrap my mind around it. Maybe that was why I was so calm upon finding out that Soren was a cult leader. I was about to get married into a cult, and I wasn’t reacting like I should have. I was numb. Too much was happening, too fast, and I wasn’t ready to deal with it all. The first stage was denial.
“Anything interesting?” Taran asked.
I noticed he hadn’t gone back to his usual height. He was still a few heads taller than me, but looking at him was manageable. And when I said a few heads taller, I meant the part of his body that was his face. Above his eyes and what could be considered his forehead, his crown expanded into a tangle of branches and vines.
“Not yet,” I said.
I went into the photo gallery, and what I found made my stomach twist in a knot.
Pictures of me. Dozens of them, at various times during these past two days. Markus had been stalking me. As had Kyla. While I could live with the thought that Kyla had been watching me, it was worse knowing that Markus – a man – had done the same. All this time, I’d thought I was alone, and in fact...
This opened another can of worms. I closed the gallery app and slipped the phone into my pants pocket. I couldn’t look at it anymore. It reminded me that Markus and Kyla hadn’t been the only ones. The master stalker – the master watcher – had been Taran Sylvan, my bodyguard.
I felt myself blush to the tips of my ears, and on autopilot, I started walking faster. Taran matched my pace easily, and in frustration, I walked even faster.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “Don’t walk beside me.”
I knew my tone took him aback. He stopped and let me get ahead of him, but it still wasn’t enough for me. I picked up the pace even more, to the point where I was almost jogging. I knew I couldn’t keep it up, but right now, I needed to move. I needed to occupy my mind with something, exhaust my body in hope that it would exhaust my embarrassment.
Taran had seen me freak out. He’d seen me cry. He’d heard me talk to myself, sing to myself, behave like a total idiot, like people usually behaved when they thought they were alone. Taran had seen me in my bra and panties!
And I couldn’t forget the wet dream I’d had in the morning.
Wait!
I could’ve sworn I’d fallen asleep sitting on a log, and when I woke up, I was lying in a nest of roots. Had that been Taran? Had I slept... on him?
I couldn’t think about that. I didn’t want to. But the more I tried to shift my attention, the more my mind went back to that specific moment when I was horny as hell, so horny that I imagined rubbing myself against something hard. Or maybe I hadn’t imagined it at all.
No, it wasn’t possible. It was just a wet dream, and science said that when one dreamed, one’s body was in sleep paralysis. I couldn’t have acted out on my dream because I couldn’t move. If not for sleep paralysis, people would sleepwalk and do all kinds of crazy things all the time. I had to trust science.
“Thea, you’re going too fast.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I’m sorry, did I do something? Did I offend you in some way?”
“Just leave me alone, Taran.”
My face was burning. I felt so embarrassed that I could die. Maybe it would’ve been better if the assassin had done his job. Now I had to live with the question of whether I’d actually rubbed myself on Taran’s roots, while not wanting to know the answer.
“Okay but be careful. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
The terrain was rough and slippery after the rain. The forest was too dense for the sun to dry the wet leaves and mud, and Taran was right, I should’ve been careful, but I couldn’t focus on that. I wanted to run and hide. An impossible task when my bodyguard was a monster, but I still wanted to put some serious distance between us, at least, so he wouldn’t see my beet red face and ask me what was going on.
I was hot. I felt like peeling off all my clothes and throwing them on the ground, stomping them with my boots. I hated that I had to be so covered up because of my stupid phobia of all things nature. My hands felt clammy in my gloves. This nightmare was never-ending.
I pushed myself harder, walked faster, and then the ground just slipped from under my feet. I barely had time to make a sound before the wind got knocked out of me. I fell hard, then started rolling down a slope that had come out of nowhere. The soil was soft and crumbly, and I couldn’t grab on to anything.
I hit the bottom of the ravine, face-down in the mud. When I tried to get up, sharp pain shot through my left ankle.