- THREE #3
Jasper stopped suddenly, looking around and I stooped to pick up the perfect red strawberry I saw lying in a small pile of brush toward my side. My belly grumbled hard as I rose it to my mouth.
"No!" Jasper yelled, grabbing my wrist hard and yanking it roughly away. He reached for the strawberry and tossed it far into the distance.
"Christ, it was just a strawberry," I objected, putting a hand over my belly.
"Nothing is 'just' anything here," Jasper objected, sounding exasperated, as if I should have already known all of this. He looked at me for a long second and sighed. "Look," he said, his voice more reasonable, "you can't eat or drink anything here that I haven't given to you."
"Why not?"
"Because you can't trust fae."
"But you're fae."
"Right," Jasper said, rolling his eyes. "But you can trust me. But only me, got it?"
I really wanted to say something snarky, but fact of the matter was, he was the reason I wasn't some brainless concubine or dead from a possibly-poisoned strawberry. "I got it."
"And don't go following anything," he added as an afterthought. "You can't trust anything you see here. Some fae can appear as whatever they want. They can cry like lost children or appear as injured animals. You have to look away and keep moving; they are just trying to lure you in."
"Alright. So I don't fall into any traps, and I'm good," I said a little flippantly though inside I felt like my stomach was wobbling.
"No," he said, catching my gaze and holding it. "There is no such thing as safe here. But if you stay close to me, we should make it out of here."
With that, he turned and started walking again, leaving me sputtering.
Should? We should make it out?
I picked up my pace to catch up with him and stayed a tad bit closer than I had before, closer than I really wanted to be to him.
We started up a steep hill, my leg muscles screaming in objection and I realized just how sedentary a life I led.
I sat at a desk at work. I went home and bummed around the apartment with Jade.
I wasn't even sure of the last time I had hit a gym or taken a long walk.
In front of me, Jasper scaled effortlessly, no doubt used to some sort of regular physical activity if his lean, strong body was anything to go by.
"Um, do we have any sort of solution for the lack-of-water thing we have going on?" I asked, my mouth feeling like sandpaper as the air seemed to get nothing but hotter as we moved.
Jasper stopped suddenly and turned, looking at me for a long second. "Oh," he said, brows furrowing as if he somehow wasn't about to die of thirst as well. "If we walk this way," he said, turning to the right, "we will hit a stream. We can follow it for a while."
"Great," I said, following behind, wondering why the hell we hadn't been following it all along.
Apparently, Jasper wasn't the brightest fae in the forest. Then an image of a tiny Jasper flashed into my mind with filmy white wings and a little Gandhi-like diaper, making me bite into my lips to keep from smiling.
"Oh, for God's sake," Jasper grumbled ahead of me.
A few minutes later, we happened upon the stream. I fell down on my knees on a downed tree limb and drank greedily while Jasper took on handful and moved a few feet away, yet again staring at the distance.
I felt small droplets of water hitting my face, but couldn't see anything.
"What is splashing in my face?" I wondered aloud, making Jasper whip back around and look at me for a minute.
Then he reached down, grabbed my arm, and yanked me back onto my feet.
"Let's especially keep away from water fae, okay?
You don't exactly strike me as a strong swimmer. "
"It's barely six inches of water," I objected.
He made no response to that, and I followed behind him, standing close to the stream as I moved. "Do you have any idea where Jade is?" I asked a while later, trying like hell to ignore the burning sensation of blisters forming on my feet.
"She could be a million places," he said, not easing my worry in the least. "But I think she is most likely with our family."
"Oh, well... that's a good thing, isn't it?
" I asked, not knowing the first thing about their family.
It wasn't something Jade talked about at all.
In fact, I hadn't even known she had a brother, let alone a twin brother, until he showed up.
It wasn't that Jade was secretive. Far from normally, but it wasn't a topic that came up often.
Maybe that was my doing, not wanting to talk about my own family who I'd never had the best of relationships with.
"No," Jasper said, his tone clipped, inviting no further conversation.
With that, we slipped back into silence. And walked. And walked. And fucking walked. Until every inch of me was sweaty and sore. Until my feet screamed with enough pain to make tears sting my eyes. Mortified, I stopped walking and turned away from Jasper to swat at my eyes.
I hadn't slept in two days. I was exhausted, hot, and in pain.
I'd held on as long as possible for Jade, but I just... needed a few. I needed to sit and rest and eat and cool down.
I heard Jasper stop and then move toward me, stopping behind my back just as I sucked in an embarrassing sniffle. "We're going to stop for the day. It's getting dark. We won't make much progress. But I need to get us more food. I don't think you should stay..."
"I can't walk anymore," I objected. "I promise if I hear more music, I'll stuff my fingers in my ears and hum until you get back."
Jasper paused like he was weighing the plan. "Alright. But stay the fuck away from the water."
With that, he moved away.
And I had a pleasantly fae-free couple of moments to wallow in my misery before I heard Jasper return with a supply of blackberries, nuts, and some other small berries.
"Juniper," Jasper answered the question in my eyes as I reached for one.
"And, um, dandelions?" I asked, picking up one of the useless weeds my mother had sprayed with poison my entire childhood.
"The leaves are good, and you can eat the roots if you boil them. They're high in vitamin A and C."
"You're like a walking, talking survival guide," I said as I threw some leaves into my mouth with a handful of blackberries in the hopes that they would cut the taste of the dandelion.
"I grew up in The Green," he said casually, not eating more than a few nuts. I wondered if he had gorged himself while he was foraging. There was no way he wasn't hungry.
"How much longer until we get to your family?"
Jasper paused in raising a rock to smash the nuts. "Another day if we keep the pace we kept today. But we'll be heading into a more... populated area tomorrow. Go ahead," he said as he watched me eye the last of the blackberries. "I'm not hungry."
"So we'll be seeing more... creatures?"
"Not all fae are half-animal. Many of us appear human. Or near-human."
"Like you and Jade."
"Exactly."
"So then... what makes you fae? Do you have some sort of... powers or something?"
"Some. Some turn into other creatures like the selkies and the kelpies. Most water fae transform," he said, and I turned to look at the stream a little suspiciously. "Others have senses or skills."
"What do you have?" I blurted out without thinking. And, judging by the way his eyes went guarded a little, asking that was at least mildly inappropriate.
"Some of us, like me and Jade, have the strengths of the gemstones we are named after. I sense things, emotions mostly. Sometimes I get images associated with strong emotions." His smile went a little bit wicked when he added, "Like bears mauling people in the woods."
So he could sense what I was feeling? That felt like a gross invasion of privacy.
I was sure he couldn't help it, but that didn't help me feel any less exposed around him.
Hell, he had probably been feeling my disdain for him all day.
Not that it was my fault that he was so easy to dislike, but still.
"Is that all?" I asked to try to hide my discomfort at his revelation.
"No," he said, standing up suddenly and I figured our conversation was over. "You're taking that patch of moss to sleep on?" he asked, gesturing toward me. When I nodded, he did too, sitting down against a tree. "I'll be sleeping here."
Then, with that, he did.
He slept sitting up... against a tree.
What a freak.
I mean, not that I had the right to judge.
If anything, I was a little jealous. Sleep and me, we didn't get on all that well.
We never did. Not because I didn't want a good nights' rest, but because I had been plagued with nightmares for as long as I could remember.
And no matter how often I had them, nothing dulled the terror I woke up in.
So in general, I didn't sleep too much, and when I did, it was broken.
And I usually had to sleep with the light on.
But in the woods, that luxury wasn't an option.
I lowered myself down onto the soft moss and forced my eyes closed, trying to block out the incredibly shrill, haunting sound coming from a distance.
It didn't beckon me like the music had, but it made me feel chilled even in the unyielding heat.
I shivered hard as I tried like hell to ignore it.
Finally, exhaustion pulling at my sore body, I drifted off to sleep.
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