25
Iwatch them sometimes, still trailing the woodland hand in hand, their faces aging, their smiles dimming as the years slip through their grasp.
Isabel now wears a simple golden wedding band, her belly swelling with unborn life. Francesca’s eyes are dark as she turns to my little sister, sadness woven through the veins beneath her pale skin.
Anger festers somewhere inside me, though it’s dulled to near nothing as my feet silently press to the earth. I’m tethered here, in these trees, doomed to watch the ones who killed me continue their lives as if I meant nothing at all. A ghost of the fables, tied to the forest.
“I’ll always love you,” Francesca whispers, her hand gripped to Isabel’s jaw, forceful in her consumption. She plants kisses to her jaw, her lips lingering against my sister’s skin as her fingers grip tightly to her neck, holding her in place. Urgent and possessive.
“I’m sorry,” Isabel whispers in return, tears clinging to her cheeks.
“It doesn’t matter now,’ Francesca says, drawing back from her, wiping away the wayward tears and trailing shaking hands down Isabel’s arms.
“I really did want to go, Frannie. I did.”
There’s a fracture in Isabel’s voice, and for a moment, it’s as though I’m watching that small girl again.
That baby sister who followed me around, longing to be involved in everything I did.
My heart cracks beneath the weight of it.
The knowing that it will never be that way again.
“But I couldn’t leave mother alone. I was all she had left.”
“She doesn’t deserve you, Isa. You deserved better than this.”
Francesca’s eyes blaze with hardly contained rage, her jaw clenching as she recalls the hopeful plan that slipped through her fingers.
“It’s not so bad, truly. I’m excited for the baby. Excited for the future.”
“A future of being a wife, slaving to your husband? What kind of future is that, when you could have been free, with me?”
Isabel blanches as Francesca spits at her, disgusted by the choices Isabel made. She can’t understand it, the roots that tether us here. But I do, I understand how it feels to want to leave, to long for it, but feel bound to the earth when our feet stray from our path.
“That’s not fair, Frannie,” Isabel sighs, her eyes red and swollen as she blinks through tears. “This life may not be for you, but when Heather died, something changed in me. I realised I wasn’t cut out for more than this. This is who I am, this is my blood. I’m meant to be here.”
“Right,” Francesca laughs, a bitter sound that echoes sharply through the damp leaves.
“I’m sorry, Frannie. I love you; I do love you.”
Isabel steps forwards gently capturing Francesca’s fingers inside her own, rubbing the back of her hand with a tender brush of a thumb. Francesca stills for a moment, her jaw loosening, her eyes drawing back to Isabel’s with unbridled adoration.
“Well, I’m glad everything worked out for you,” Francesca sighs, relenting, stepping to close the distance between them.
There’s something rotten inside of me as I watch them, a bitterness that swarms through my soul. Anger and envy and spite that twists and digs into every one of my nerve endings.
I clench my fists, fury beginning to blister through my arms, and scream.
I scream so hard that my body aches. I scream so hard that the empty place in my chest where my lungs should be begins to scrape raw.
I scream so violently, expelling every molecule of pent-up anger, that the trees begin to sway and the leaves begin to rustle in response.
Birds screech as they flee from the branches, before an eerie silence descends between the trunks, moonlight sharp across the faces of those I once called family.
Isabel startles, glancing around, assessing for danger. Her cheeks flush white, terror lancing through her expression.
“Do you think she’s still here? Heather? In these woods?” Isa whispers to Francesca.
Isabel presses herself close to Francesca, who in turn smirks with dark eyes. Her gaze lingers on the spaces between the trees, a palpable satisfaction shifting the air around her.
“I don’t think so. I don’t believe in ghosts, Isa. When you killed her, she ceased existing, she’s just…. gone.”
A tear slips from my sister’s lashes, colour flooding back into her face as she swallows through a guttural sob.
“I wonder how things might have been, had that winter turned out different, if things had worked out how we hoped,” Isabel whispers, glancing around once more before she steps onto the worn path, moving further into the shadows of the woods.
“I image things would be very different, Isabel. Probably better, more free…. Happy,” Francesca says quietly, forlorn as they are swallowed by shadow, hand in hand through the forest of secrets.
That emptiness inside me fills with soil – with beetles and earth worms and rotting green matter as my body catches up with its decay.
The forest is full of secrets, we were told.
I just never realised my death would be the one the trees kept.
“Oh Rabbit, you really are predictable,” she whispered as she lowered herself to the ground. Her gaze was sharp as she watched me, the full moon setting a halo of light around her head.
Dirt filled my eyes as I tried to open them, to see her through the darkness. All warmth had been sucked from my body, every corner of me suddenly frozen and still. But my heartbeat – I can hear it flooding my ears, a thrum so loud in my head I couldn’t think straight.
“You think I don’t know?” Francesca said, head tilted.
I blinked, swallowing, my voice somehow unreachable.
“You think I don’t know you love me; you want me for yourself? That you watched Cole and I through the trees as he devoured me, wishing it were your hands, your mouth. That you had hoped we would run away and be together. That you hoped I loved you the way you loved me?”
She sighed; eyes cast to the leaf canopy overhead where the forest hummed with life. My chest ached as she lowered herself atop of me.
A depraved, traitorous part of my heart quickened as her thighs gripped my ribs, as her eyes tore back to mine while a sinister grin warped her face into something unrecognisable.
“Well, I don’t love you, not like that. I never have. You are my best friend, but my heart, my soul, my body, belong to Isabel. We’re running away together tomorrow morning. We’re going to be free. From here. From you.”
Her smile twisted into something darker then, something sinister, the corners of her eyes narrowing as she lowered her face to mine, breath ghosting my cheek.
“I knew you’d be a dirty shadow who followed us everywhere. So, you had to go,” she sighed, eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I am sorry, though. I do value our friendship, but if I want a new life with Isabel, you can’t be trying to follow us. You would only ruin it.”
Nearby, a branch cracked and landed against the earth with a violent crash. The dirt beneath me shuddered with warning, a chill beginning to creep down my legs as Francesca’s weight bore down on my chest.
“You know what I love about your sister?” she asked, her finger tracing the edge of my jaw with slow deliberation. “She’s as predictable as you are. She’s devoted to me in a way you never were. She, Heather, would kill for me.”
In an instant, the pressure relieved from my chest as she stood, moonlight eclipsed behind her.
She was curves and glowing edges – a demon sheltered in the darkness of the trees, free to satiate her hunger.
I could see the way it consumed her, the way she prowled through the underbrush, her footfall slow and heavy as she circled me like prey.
“It turned out better than I could have ever hoped. You’re both so easy to manipulate, to urge in directions I wanted you to go. A few fake tears, a few spun stories about how Cole took advantage of me, of how he threatened to kill me if he couldn’t have me.
I knew you would have run home and told her when you saw us in the woods, when I ended things with him. I knew you wouldn’t have resisted spilling that secret, in hopes the other one I loved were you.”
My breath stilled as she lowered herself to me once more, my mind screaming for me to move while my body remained frozen against the forest floor. Leaves itched my thighs, my fingers fighting for purchase but getting lost within the loose dirt.
“You should have seen how quickly Isa ran to me, Rabbit. God, she was so angry. Vengeful. I had to talk her back from murdering him right then and there. She’s fiery, your sister. And when she’s angry, god do her hands work magic, if you know what I mean.”
Francesca laughed, a dry scrape of noise that is so unfamiliar feels as though there’s nothing recognisable remaining.
The Francesca I knew was gone as she towered over me, pupils wide and ravenous.
“It is a shame it had to end like this. It’s just… If we’re to leave these woods behind, we can’t have a shadow following us, you know? I’m sure you get it.”
She brushed a fingertip against my nose, my lips, down my chest to where our matching tattoo remained.
“I had never imagined the way Isabel used the bow I gifted her though. I gave it to her to shoot rabbits in the woods, to harden her soft edges enough to go through with this plan. I had hoped she would use it by its intended purpose – an arrow through the heart. Your heart. Cole’s heart.
But using the string to strangle you, to hear the breath leave your lungs – that was quite a telling choice, a choice that I can only love her more for. We’re soulmates, she and I. Darkness meeting darkness. But there needs to be more done now. We can’t have this traced back to us.
Because as fiercely loyal and defensive of me that Isa is, I am equally ready to burn the world for her. She can’t know what’s going to happen from here. But I’ll tell you, while you can still hear me, Rabbit.”
She reached to her hair, loosening the black ribbon from her plait, tightening it in her tense grip. She snapped it taut, sending whatever birds remained flying away above us, screeching through the night. The forest falls silent as she tilts her head, licking her lips.
“I’m going to finish what she started.”
The satin was cold against my throat as she wrapped the length around my neck, a chill creeping beneath my skin.
“And when that’s done, I’m going to carve a pentagram into your chest. I’m going to leave the bow somewhere Cole can find it, knowing his penchant for owning pieces of the young girls of the woods.”
When she gazed at me again, all kindness had drained from her face – her jaw tensed, her gaze shadowed by the deepening night.
“Then, I’m going to bury you in a shallow grave. In a few months, you should be found. Except Isa and I will be gone, and Cole, with his pentagram tattoos – that I gave him by the way – and bow, and other pieces of evidence I plant, will be blamed for your murder. It’s quite clever,
how this all came together.”
She drew a sharp breath, pressing her feet into the earth on either side of me as she tensed the ribbon in firm fingers, then whispered –
“Goodbye,
Rabbit.”