Chapter 2 #4
He couldn’t properly articulate how he’d felt—that he’d wanted to shut out the beauty and joy of a world that would take his only living relative from him.
“When it happened to me,” Beatrix murmured, “I was angry, too.”
He twined a hand into hers. This was the first real conversation they’d had in two weeks. That almost—almost—outweighed the subject matter.
He turned from Nan to look at Beatrix and realized that some of the sharp sadness he felt was actually hers. Her eyes were red. Her cheeks glistened, tracked with tears.
A thought struck him. “You lost your mother the same year I lost Nan. You were only thirteen, too.”
She nodded. “Then Dad …” Her voice gave out.
He tightened his grip on her. How had she managed after both her parents died within a few years of each other? How had she pulled herself and her family’s tattered finances together and raised her sister to boot?
How could she stand to be in this place?
He cast one more glance at the memory-Nan, there and not there, before turning away. “Let’s get out of here.”
The apartment shimmered. The dull, stained floor sprouted patches of moss that crept up the bottom few inches of the wall. The wooden lamp on the table by the door stretched both upward and down, growing over the table, thickening, sprouting bark.
But there the transformation stopped. Beatrix stood with her eyes squeezed shut, breathing hard, and around them, the room stubbornly remained a room. The almost-tree was a trunk without limbs, lit up from the inside by a lamp that would not let go. Nothing else grew.
“I can’t get out.” She slumped against him, panting. He could feel her heart racing. “Peter, I can’t—can’t—”
“It’s OK,” he said, chest constricting. He blinked to stave off the impression that the room was closing in. “Give it a moment. Why don’t you tell me—”
She screamed, rearing back. The walls were closing in. The tree vanished, the door was gone—there was no way out except magic.
He wasted precious seconds trying to wish up another red leaf—damn it, why wouldn’t it come—and lost more time frozen in horror, his mind two weeks in the past when he nearly asphyxiated in his cellar. The walls were eight feet away. Seven. Six. Five. They were going to die—perhaps for real—
“No,” he shouted. “Beatrix, it’s a dream. You can stop this.”
He grasped her face, trying to force her to focus on him. Her pupils were so dilated he didn’t know if she could focus on anything. “Breathe.”
She blinked and gasped for air. One of the walls hit his backside, pressing him inexorably forward.
“Again,” he said, half-carrying her into the small space remaining. “You can do it. We can. Tell me how to help!”
She exhaled, eyes closing, her grip on him easing. The walls came to a shuddering halt inches shy of crushing them.
He forced himself to look at her, not the walls that could so easily slam shut. “Are you trying to go to the forest between your house and mine?”
“Yes. The clearing. Just—close your eyes and picture it in your mind.”
“Right.” He tried to remember the spot as it had looked on his last trip through. An impression of branches reaching overhead, growing into each other. Damp earth, decomposing wood. Light breaking through the bower in a dozen places.
Or before that. Night. Exhaustion. The weapon in his arms, a twining, thorny branch of multiflora rose catching at his pants, giving him an idea of where to hide his misbegotten creation.
The remembered relief of getting it well-hidden swept over him. And then he smelled it—soil and wood and sharp, cold air.
The walls were gone. Bare trees towered over them, the sky above as dark as the witching hour, and they stood in the clearing of moss and fallen leaves, safe.
Beatrix broke into deep, heaving sobs.
“It’s all right,” he murmured into her ear. “It’s over.”
She made a sound halfway between a sob and a bitter laugh. “It’s not over. It will never be over. First my mother. Then Dad. And finally … finally …”
And that was when he realized what they’d just come through had been no nightmare. It was a panic attack.
And finally Lydia.
“Beatrix, I—”
“Make me forget,” she said, a demand as fierce as a threat, and kissed him.
It wasn’t hard to comply. The nerve endings that had so recently zinged with fear leapt back to attention.
He worked on the buttons of her void-black dress as fast as he could manage until finally he could take it no longer and ripped the awful thing open, pulling it off her as if he could cast away her quite reasonable fear with it.
As she pressed against him, nothing between them but her shift and his clothes, he had a dizzying sense of déjà vu. This was how their very first twined dream had ended—in the forest, doing and wearing exactly this.
She worked her shift off, letting it pool at their feet—calling back to another dream. He groaned, lightheaded from the melding of past and present lust, and pressed her to the ground, cushioning her on the ruined dress.
The other time he’d been in this clearing rushed back at him. Beatrix’s dream—from the early stages of the Vows, when he would experience hers or she his. She had danced with Garrett here. They’d kissed.
She might truly have no feelings for Garrett now—of her own accord, uninfluenced by her Vows—but between the two of them, Garrett and him, she had freely chosen only one. And he was not that man.
“Tell me you want me.” The words tumbled from his mouth before he could stop them. Of course she did. Her Vow to him made sure of that out of some twisted idea that harm would come to him if she didn’t.
“I want you every second of every day,” she said.
It wasn’t untrue. But it wasn’t real.
His eyes burned with impending, mortifying tears.
He tipped his head up to force them back, trying to hold on to the fact that the state of his heart should not be his primary concern right now, and felt snow, wet and shockingly cold, on his cheeks.
It was swirling down through the trees at a fast clip.
She laid her palm on his chest, the heat going straight through his shirt. He forced himself to look at her, into those dark eyes that saw straight through him.
“I want your good opinion.” Her words were barely audible. “I want your counsel, your company, your touch—I want you, Peter, mind and body and soul.”
“You have them,” he whispered over the lump in his throat.
He let her finish unbuttoning his shirt and then he shucked off his clothes and knelt over her, shivering. He supposed they should have the power to switch off the snow, but there was something welcome about the way it numbed him.
Beatrix lay on the black dress, her riotous hair dusted an unearthly white that wasn’t far off its true, concealed color. Under the enchanted brown, it was magic-induced silver like his—because he had tempted her to cast spells on the sly. Because he’d set this roiling mess in motion.
Something urgent bumped at the edges of his memory, something he was supposed to ask her.
She hooked her legs around him and pulled him down to her. She was so warm—everywhere she touched him, the numbness receded, feeling roaring back, desire overmastering him.
Make me forget.
He made her writhe and scream, and then he lost what remained of his mind.
It wasn’t until he woke in his bed, bathed in cold sweat, that he remembered what he hadn’t done. The question he hadn’t asked.
Had she been trying to make him forget?