Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond(130)
Author: Kim Harrison

Lilly frowned as she recognized her mother’s voice. She walked faster, anger making her misstep and almost twist her ankle when her foot rolled on a log. The creek gave her no cheerful chatter to warn her, and she found it with a shocking abruptness, almost walking right off the edge. Pulling up short, she blinked. If the creek looked drained at the house, it looked positively minuscule here, the once full-force flow now reduced until the tops of rocks that might never touch the bottom of a boat showed dry. The tall edges of the watercourse looked like raw wounds, and the once-loud chatter of the water was a bare hint. Fish as long as her arm lay in deeper puddles, their gills pumping as they struggled to survive another day in the hopes of rain.

A huge, glacier-dropped rock sat in the middle of the stream. The water had gouged a deeper hole before it, but rocks with dry tops showed to either side of the huge monolith her mother used to jump from, skinny-dipping before her fourteenth birthday when everything had changed. A tree grew at the center of the rock, finding enough soil over the ages to somehow survive.

"I know you can hear me, Penn. I’ve given you enough blood for a week. Show yourself!" her mother’s voice rang out, and Lilly’s attention jerked to the right.

Frowning, she ran from the stream, dodging around trees that bent over the creek as if to hide it from the sun. The ground slowly began to rise, the soil became dryer, and the trees were spaced farther apart, looking almost twisted. Who was her mother talking to? The squirrels? Almost she hoped so, for if she was shouting at a tree, Lilly was going to check her into the retirement home just outside of town.

"Mom," she whispered as she hauled herself up a rill and looked down into a shallow glen. The soil here was broken rock, not giving enough purchase for anything but grass and brambles apart from the very center where a pine tree eked out a living, its branches dead or dying as it stretched out its limbs as if desperately trying to touch its neighbors for help. Thorny berry bushes made an almost impenetrable fence, but her mother had gotten through somehow, and the old woman knelt at the base of the pine tree, her sun hat askew on the ground and her hair undone.

Lilly’s brow furrowed. Pissed, she pushed forward to find a way through the bushes. She took a breath to shout at her mom, wincing and drawing back when she walked through an entire spiderweb, backpedaling and brushing at her face.

Shuddering, she stopped, her lips parting when she looked up and she saw her mother wasn’t alone. The muscles in her face went slack, and she squinted, taking a step forward and snapping another web. The bright sun made it hard to see, but there was a long-limbed boy standing over her mother, his hands on his hips and the sun turning his shoulder-length, tousled hair to a flaming copper.

A thousand stories over a thousand summer nights passed through her mind. Her heart pounded, and she took another step, anger filling her as her mother began to cry, kneeling at his feet. "You!" she shouted, unwilling to believe. "Get the hell away from my mother!"

The boy looked up, his astonishment becoming a devilish smile. "Your daughter can see me, Em. How delightful," he said, and the sound of his whispery voice shocked Lilly to a halt. Something in her fluttered. Something older screamed out a warning. He was perfect, but only death was that beautiful. "I don’t love you anymore," he said, bending close over her mother. "But you knew that. Perhaps your daughter? Your . . . granddaughters?"

Lilly jerked from her stupor as her mother surged to her feet, rocking like a drunken ship. "You stay away from my girls!" she shouted. "I swear I will scorch every tree on the hill to ash if you so much as whisper in Meg’s ear again! Stay out of her mind, you hear me!"

Frantic, Lilly paced the edge, looking for the way in.

"No. I don’t." The beautiful boy touched her mother’s face, and Lilly burned at the sound of heartache her mother made. "You were so beautiful, Em. Now you’re dried up and withered. Beauty gone. You’re not good for anything now."

"Mom!" Lilly cried as her mother tried to slap him and the boy darted back, laughing.

"Wraith by moonlight, hunter by day; Bond is sundered by sun’s first ray!" her mother shouted, and the boy lightly danced forward, gleefully kissing her on her withered cheek.

"Blood is binding, blood is lure; Flesh is fragile, to blade’s sweet cure!"

"The tree no longer holds me, Em," he said, reaching up to pull himself into the broken, needleless branches. "The wood is dead, and you can’t bind me to it. I am free. And I will have the blood of your blood as my own for your penance."

"Sunder wraith from flesh ill-taken; And bind fey spirit to wood awakened!" Lilly’s mother cried out, and the boy dropped to the rocky earth. Lilly watched, the thorns pressing into her as he looked at her mother in disdain and then reached out and slapped her.

Lilly sucked in her breath as the sound of his hand meeting her cheek cracked through her. "Get away from my mother, you son of a bitch!"

"Oh, if only," the boy said. Without thought, Lilly pushed into the brambles, tiny thorns biting her as the canes locked as if to bar her. Fire pricked from a hundred wounds, and she cried out in impatience as she stomped forward, trying to crush the thorns under her feet and make a way.

"Leave my mother alone!" she cried out as she shoved her way through, only to get her foot snared and fall forward. The ground slammed into her, and she struggled for air, the breath knocked out of her. But then she froze as the boy was suddenly right in front of her, his feet even with her eyes. They were a rich brown with pale white nails, and she gasped when he fell to the earth before her to stare at her. Amber eyes flecked with gold arrested her attention, and everything in the world vanished. Behind him, she could hear her mother crying.

"You’re Lilly," the boy said, and Lilly could say nothing. His hair was like spun copper, glinting in the sun, and she sucked in her breath when he reached to touch her hair.

"Did your mother ever tell you that we picked out your name together? Ten years before you were even born. It was my idea. I do so like the forest flowers."

Lilly wedged an arm under her to get up. Thorns drove into her, and she looked down, hissing at the sudden pain. "Mom!" she called out as she finally got up, but the boy was gone. "Mom, are you okay?"

Brushing pieces of cane and leaves off her, she stumbled onto the rocky circle. "Mom?"

The questionable shade of the dying tree chilled her, and Lilly put a hand to her mother’s shoulder as she knelt, feeling it shake. Still her mother didn’t look up.