- THREE
Jasper
I kept my head ducked as I walked, the girl, Cece, trailing behind me and, at that point, I was more dragging her along than anything.
I could feel the waves of anxiety and fear buzzing around her and, beneath that, her bone-deep distrust of me.
If she had just done what I said and left the fucking cell back at the apartment, I wouldn't have needed to wrestle her for it.
And, apparently, make her think I was going to assault her.
Of all the ridiculous ideas.
I had just crossed into The Green, acclimating to the climate change, when I had realized she wasn't behind me. I'd had a momentary surge of panic, thinking I'd somehow lost her already, before I realized she must have been holding something she shouldn't have been.
I'd pushed back out of The Green, having images of bears invading my head and I realized she had been having some kind of panic attack about being mauled.
Bears were the least of her worries.
I had wrestled the cell from her and pulled her onto her feet, wasting no time and pulling her across the threshold.
I knew she would get in. I had a feeling about her, and I was rarely wrong about that kind of thing.
As usual, The Green parted easily for me. But to my surprise, it practically sprang open for her.
Underneath my hold, her skin was cold, her body rigid. It hadn't even really occurred to me that she couldn't see as easily as I could. But, sure enough, she was walking with her free arm stretched out like she was trying to feel for her surroundings.
She was slowing me down. I don't know what the hell I had been thinking in bringing her along.
Obviously, she was clueless about what was going on, and I wasn't exactly the 'hold your hand and coax you through a completely life-altering revelation' kind of guy.
But Jade was gone. The apartment was ransacked.
And, if I wasn't mistaken, and I fucking wasn't, the air in their apartment reeked of Dark, and I wasn't cold-blooded enough to leave her to fend for herself.
I shook my head. What was done was done.
She was with me. And it was too late to turn back, and there was no way in hell I could leave her naive little ass alone in The Green where something, anything could get to her, and she would be none the wiser about the whole thing.
I didn't know shit about the woman, but Jade seemed to like her judging by the insane amount of gemstones she had scattered around the girl's room.
And, well, knowing how much she cared about my sister and her wellbeing didn't hurt either.
I felt my arm being tugged roughly backward, turning to see her looking right at me, but still unseeing. "What?" I barked, cringing a bit at how gruff I sounded.
"I don't know what is going on here, but it is hot as hell all of a sudden," she told me in that bedroom-sexy voice of hers.
And, sure enough, when I looked, the sweat was beaded up slightly on her brow as she wriggled uncomfortably in her woolen jacket.
I released her, and she quickly stripped out of the material, tossing it down and fanning herself.
She lifted her thick hair that had already dried off her neck.
"Freaking global warming," she mumbled to herself.
"We have to keep going."
"We've been walking forever," she complained, flexing her feet in her moccasins.
"And we have a lot further to go," I said, snagging her wrist and getting a move on already.
She was silent for a long couple of minutes, her frustration building by the moment before she finally tugged her wrist and declared, "You could at least tell me where we are going."
"I'm not sure," I admitted, the not-knowing making me feel completely and utterly useless.
"You don't know?" she shrieked, her voice getting a bit hysterical. "But you're just going to keep dragging me around aimlessly."
"Yes," I said, not giving her any further explanation as I quickened our pace.
The sun had just started rising, casting the woods in a strange orange glow when I felt her swirling emotions strong enough to choke on.
I turned back, releasing her hand. "Okay.
We'll stop so you can take a rest for a while.
I will go find us something to eat," I said, not wanting to waste the time, but knowing we'd be useless if we didn't have something in our systems to keep us going.
"You stay here," I said, turning away, then turning back and, more firmly, repeating, "Stay. Here."
--
Cece
I watched him leave, then looked around the woods, not seeing a clearing anywhere, not seeing an end to the canopy of trees.
There were no buildings, no clearings suggesting campsites.
No nothing. Even if I decided to be done with Jasper's surly ass, I had no idea how long we had been walking, where we were, how far from civilization we were.
With my luck - and awful sense of direction - I'd end up dead of dehydration before I even got halfway back to town.
I sat down and nervously tapped my sore feet on the ground as I waited.
Time passed. More of it than I thought should have, but then again, I couldn't be sure how much without my cell.
It was crazy how dependent I had become on that stupid pocket computer for everything: time, weather, directions. I was just a sitting duck without it.
Nervous, and with nowhere to direct that energy, I started counting slowly to sixty over and over and etching a line in the dirt on the forest floor each time I got there.
I had twenty marks drawn when I first heard it.
It was far off at first, just a twinkling sound on the breeze.
It wasn't a sound I could place. It wasn't footsteps or rustling leaves.
But it was sweet, sing-songy. I stood, figuring Jasper wouldn't be pissed if I wandered around just a few feet to try to place the sound, and followed it to where it started getting louder.
As it did, I felt the burden of fear and worry slowly start to slip away, replaced with a light, happy feeling, with heat, with a strange dizzy sensation.
As I got closer, the sound got clearer, and I could finally place it as some sort of wind instrument- a flute or clarinet, something familiar, but not.
I kept following the sound, clueless to how much land I had covered as the notes seemed to vibrate through my skin and then settle inside, filling me up.
The woods parted to a small, intimate clearing.
The sound was loud then, almost deafening, blocking out all the other quiet sounds of the forest, entering through my ears then moving through my whole body until every inch felt buzzing, then exiting through my toes. Over and over again.
And then I saw it.
The source of the music.
The small, thinking, rational part of my brain that wasn't completely consumed by the music forced me to plant my feet, to stop moving forward, to stop being beckoned forward.
I needed to turn around. I needed to find Jasper. I needed to run.
Because something was seriously wrong with me.
Because what I saw in the center of the clearing was a man.
Sort-of. He had a man's head and chest, the skin glistening slightly with sweat.
His long light brown hair flowed carelessly down his back.
His strong, muscular arms were raised, one at ninety-degrees, one at forty-five, holding a light wood flute, his nimble fingers moving slowly, creating the hypnotic sound that tingled through my skin, my nerves, my bloodstream.
That wasn't what was wrong.
What was wrong was that just below his ribcage, his body was covered in hair. No. Not hair, fur. He was furry. And he had four legs with hooves and, Jesus Christ, a tail. A tail.
My hands went up to my face, rubbing at my eyes, trying to clear them, trying to believe it was just a hallucination from not eating, from dehydration, from not sleeping. But when my hands fell, he was still there.
His head tilted slightly as if aware of my presence and I caught the sight of two small horns poking out of his forehead as the song turned lower, more melancholy. And I swear it called me forward.
It called me forward, and my feet started moving without me telling them to.
I forced my arms to throw out, to grab the limbs of the trees as I moved past them, to try to hold on. But the part of my mind that was still working properly started to hum with the sound of the song as well, started to fall into the spell of it.
My body felt flushed, warm, unusual. Sensitive.
Every inch of skin felt sensitive, felt receptive.
The wind blew, and it shivered across me, making me ache for more.
My breathing went shallow as a deep, intense throbbing started between my thighs, making me crave touch, making me want nothing more than to slip my hands up my skirt and into my panties to relieve the ache.
My dress felt itchy as my feet kept moving me weightlessly toward the music and I reached up to start sliding the straps from my shoulders, needing it off, needing to feel the air on my bare skin, needing uninterrupted access to my body.
I looked at my beautiful musician, needing him to touch me, needing his eyes to lift to mine, needing it like I needed to breathe, like I needed to feel fingers slide up my suddenly slick cleft and relieve the torment.
My hand held my dress around my waist as the other reached out, close enough to touch.
My palm landed on his back, feeling the smooth fur and stroking downward over it, then leaning forward and resting the side of my cheek against it, feeling it tickle over my exposed breasts.
I tilted my head up as the song stopped, and I knew.
I knew I was finally going to get what I needed.
He was going to look at me.
--
Jasper