Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
FOREST
We don’t make it very far out the front door of the manor before Tucker jogs off to the side of the path, unzipping his jeans and pissing on a tree. I grumble under my breath and look away, because there’s no way it’s a coincidence that he’s pissing on the same tree I jerked off onto last night.
He’s a fucking voyeur, eyes like a hawk. Always watching.
When he’s finished, he zips up and returns to the tree-lined path. He pats his unwashed hand on my cheek. “What’s this weird expression on your face?”
“We just left the house. You couldn’t piss inside?”
“Do I look like the kind of man to piss inside? I spend as little time as possible in that house.” He leads the way forward, his bare feet leaving tracks in the dirt. “We’re meant to be outdoors.”
He’s finally right about something, but I’m not about to tell him as such.
All these parts of me I’ve tried to hide have always managed to manifest. Back home, I slept in my trailer, ate in my trailer, and fucked in my trailer.
The rest of the time, when I wasn’t slinging tables, I was outdoors.
Hiking. Running. Swimming. It’s like they say, you can take the man out of the wilds but you can’t take the Wilde out of the man.
Or something like that.
About a half-mile walk from the manor is the village, and when the visage of it appears over the mountainside, I stop in place.
It’s bigger than I remembered. More houses.
More buildings. More people. The area is housed in a clearing on the east side of the mountain, but individual cottages stretch back into the forest surrounding the clearing.
Tucker backs up to meet me where I stand and wraps an arm around the back of my neck.
“I see that look in your eyes. Seen it so many damn times. Eyes filled with yearnin’ and wonder, like you’ve found home for the first time.
” He turns on his feet to stand directly in front of me.
“This has always been your home, and I need you to remember that.” He pokes me in the chest and stays there.
“Dig deep and remember who the fuck you are.”
“I’m the one that got away,” I say deadpan. “If that’s my legacy, if that’s scribbled beneath my portrait on the manor walls, I’m more than content with that.” I shrug. “You look at this place and you see community. I’m looking at the same damn thing as you and all I see is a fucking trap.”
He places a hand on my back and guides me forward, pointing ahead at a woman in a long flowery dress carrying buckets of water with a girl who can’t be any older than eight or nine. That girl wears the exact same dress.
“Look at that woman and her child,” he says. “What do you see?”
“A child who doesn’t know better and a mother that should.”
He shakes his head and smiles. “The first thing I notice is their smiles.”
“People smile in the real world, too, Tucker.”
“This is the real world. The true world. Humans aren’t built for whatever lies beyond the fog. What’s so great about life out there?”
It’s a difficult thing to explain to someone who’s never known anything but this place, but I do my best to try.
“Freedom. Billions of faces out there and most of them aren’t concerned with what you do with your life.
Out there, I choose what I eat, what I drink, who I want to fuck.
I choose if I want to go to work or lose the roof over my head.
What to watch. What to wear. I choose what I want to believe and what color I want on the walls in my room. I choose—”
“I choose this place, always,” he says softly. “Deep down, you choose it too. And look, people come here for their own reasons, but they stay because this place offers safety, stability, and yeah, community. You can’t find that out there.”
“Safety?” I scoff. “How can you say that when you know goddamn well the things we did when we were kids?”
Screams echo in the back of my mind, a needle cut of laughter slicing through the soundtrack. The things I do remember terrify me, and they should terrify Tucker too. But it’s the things I don’t remember that scare me the most.
Tucker purses his lips and sighs. “We didn’t do anything we weren’t supposed to do. We just listened to—”
“Shut up,” I bark. “Just shut the fuck up.”
I run away from the conversation because that’s my M.O. Besides, Tucker is built physically and mentally like a brick wall. Can’t fight him. Can’t argue sense into him. Yeah, I threw him through a glass window, but only because I had the upper hand.
Hell, I didn’t even know I was going to do it.
Surprise, bitch!
Tucker matches my pace, his shadow following me as I approach the village square where an ancient pine tree’s trunk sits. It’s been glazed over with some kind of chemicals to keep it like this forever. Carved into the rings of the tree are three symbols—a wolf, a raven, and a brook trout.
The wolf is the hunter within.
The raven is the messenger.
And the trout sustenance.
The Wilds gives…
And it fucking takes.
An older woman in an ivory dress and a darker green hood approaches. The fabric of her dress sweeps against the dirt, staining the bottom. She smells of pine and honey as if she wears the essence of the wilderness on her clothes.
She pulls back her hood and smiles. “It told us you were coming home.”
Tucker introduces the woman, “This is your Aunt Camila.”
But she needs no introduction.
My father had only one sibling, and he died a few months before I left.
Camilla is the widow he left behind. She has aged like fine milk.
Back then, she was one of the few blondes.
Now, she’s like all the other elders—grayed, wrinkled, and tired.
A loony lady, convinced she’s an alchemist or some shit.
Makes potions for everything from love to healing.
Made a name for herself around here by bringing the dead back to life once, but like everything else, it was an illusion.
Dead people are dead.
They don’t come back.
There’s a cemetery east of the village on a treacherous slope that faces the sun when it rises in the morning.
It’s a cemetery in name only, as no bodies are buried there.
The only evidence anyone was ever alive lives on in our memories and with a headstone engraved with their name.
When we die, we are burned in public ceremonies as our final offering to the Wilds.
Everyone but the chosen one who rests in a proper coffin in an improper mausoleum in the tunnels underneath Wilde Manor.
“I never thought I’d see your face again,” Camila says, lips barely parting as if she can’t exert the energy.
She’s softer than she used to be. Her hand shakes as she reaches forward, caressing the side of my face.
“You’re marked by the world. Your father won’t be happy about this, but I must say, it fits you. ”
“Does it?” I arch a brow.
“You weren’t always a reckless boy.” She pulls her hand back and sighs. “You were born the sweetest apple. Shy and hindered, more into staying inside than embracing the land. And then you changed after your mother ran away.”
“She died, Camila.”
“Oh…” Her eyes sink. “That’s terrible to hear. Nothing good comes when we choose to lay our feet upon the rotted soil of the outside world.”
“Well, it’s been fucking nice seeing you, Camila.” I grab Tucker and pull him away to a bench opposite the monument. “I’m losing my fucking mind.”
“You’re tainted,” he says, almost lost in a daze. His eyes don’t move. Stays still, his voice hollow. “It’s like your Aunt said, you’re poisoned by the outside world.”
“My mother died when I was six. She got sick and died.” I drop onto the bench and cradle the back of my head in my hands.
“Father dearest locked me in my room because I was too emotional and couldn’t handle it.
My memory has all these gaps, but I remember this.
I remember the sound of my fist pounding against the door, begging to see my mom one last time.
I remember my cries echoing off the walls and taunting me.
The more I tried to be strong, the harder I cried.
The smell of her body burning seeped into the house, and I fell asleep beside that fucking door, comforted because I knew there was a part of her in that room with me. ”
“Are you sure there isn’t poison in all this ink?” Tucker grabs my arm and studies it, guiding his rough fingers over the sleeve tattoo. “Has to be toxic.”
I rip my arm away from him. “You know there are people here with tattoos, right?”
“Derived from ash and natural ingredients.”
Fuck this holistic shit. “Why did you bring me down here?”
Tucker shrugs and bats his lips. “I thought we could jog your memory. Maybe it’s working. You seem to remember your aunt, so that’s a first step in cracking that head of yours open.”
I shift my gaze to Camila, who continues to stand in front of the monument, hands held politely in front of her. “She’s impossible to forget.”
Tucker squats before me and lifts me by the chin. “I brought you down here for a clearing.”
I shake my head, look at Camila, look back to Tucker, and think about punching him in the fucking face.
Tucker, Camila, and I stand on the bank of the creek.
Down yonder, the creek bleeds into a river that feeds a nearby waterfall.
We’re about a mile from the village and the quiet stillness is downright eerie.
Branches rustle in the calm breeze and birds squawk in the sky.
The water, clear and crisp, swims upstream, cascading over a bed of colorful rocks.
I pry my shoes and socks from my feet, stuff the socks inside, and place them beside a tree. The mud is cold to the touch, squishing between my toes.
It’s been a decade since I’ve taken part in a clearing ritual, and it was always done begrudgingly. I tried to put up a fight, but Tucker wasn’t going to take no for an answer any more than my father ever did.