Lips Touch: Three Times(25)
Author: Laini Taylor

"No. I even heard about it on the radio," she insisted. "They’re saying they must have escaped from some wildlife smugglers or something."

"I’ll have to keep an ear out," he said.

"Some of us are going up to the roof tonight to watch for them," she said, adding shyly, "You could come."

Mihai only smiled at her, and he saw how her gaze lingered on his fangs.

She gave him his tea for free, slipping chocolates onto the dish and brushing her knuckles across his as she handed it to him. Her face was luminous and hopeful; she’d go into the dark with him in a heartbeat, sharp teeth and all. Human girls were stupid that way. No, not stupid. Primal in their skin, without even knowing it. The things that made their pulse quicken were all the wrong things, but

Mihai didn’t take advantage of it, except for the free tea. He’d been waiting fourteen years for someone else, all fever and slick teeth and longing, and judging by the furor of the wolves last night, he didn’t have much longer to wait. For Druj to hunt openly in a human city, so far from their dominion in remote mountains, they had to be crazed with a long-sought scent.

It was almost time. Esme was nearly ripe.

While Mihai sipped his tea, he found himself so anxious he could hardly sit still. He thumbed idly through a free newspaper, the kind with music reviews and advice for lovers. He enjoyed human music as he enjoyed their tea: casually. It was their plain discussions of love that enthralled him. As if it were no more a mystery than bread or arithmetic! As if it were not utterly unique to them in the catalog of all things that had ever lived, on all planes, in all of time. Love was theirs alone, and it was why Mihai had helped a red-haired girl escape from Tajbel fourteen years ago with her belly full of child, and why he waited alone in this gray city, year after year, his mind on fire with hope.

Fourteen years, and his waiting was over.

Mihai winked at the blue-haired girl and left the tea shop, seeing wistfulness in her eyes as he turned away. He cut across the street with his head tilted back, his predator’s senses filtering through the hundreds of fresh human trails until he picked out Mab’s and Esme’s. In his mind their scent was the color of their hair, and it grew brighter as he drew nearer to their flat. He followed it up the fire escape to their ash-dusted window ledge and peered in. Their fragrance was bright and coppery — he could almost taste them — but the flat was quiet, no stir of breath or murmur of moving blood.

Then he saw the braids hanging from the chandelier, and he knew that they’d fled. He felt an instant flood of fury at Mab’s trickery, and a twinge of panic to think of them getting away, but those feelings were quickly drowned out by the visceral thrill that came over him — despite everything he wanted to be, and all he tried to un-be — at the thought of a hunt.

THREE Blank Meadows

Some say the Druj are demons, children of chaos brought forth long ago to plague the archangels and seed wickedness into human hearts. Others call them fey, forest spirits who hunt hunters, born of the bones of the earth before mountains were mountains or God was God. Most people have never heard of them at all, and of those who have, many are inclined to believe they’re just folk tales and fancy. But there are yet good people in this world who know too well that they’re real. Who have been pierced by them, like an icicle through the soul, haunted by them, and hunted by them, and whose nightmares won’t let them forget it.

There are places in the furls and fissures of mountains, from the Zagros to the Tien Shan and even as far west as the Carpathians, where humans never stray into the forests, not to hunt or gather firewood, not to meet secret lovers, and not to hide. They go no farther than the edges of the black meadows, those ashen strips they burn to divide their land from the forests.

Twice yearly, on the equinoxes, village elders tend to the meadows. It is only the hunched and white-haired who will go so near the forests, and for good reason: Druj aren’t tempted by the old. So while the young wait in the safety of the villages, the old go forth and scorch the boundary meadows with firebrands. After the black grass cools, they walk across it, feeling it crunch and crackle under their soles, and they leave their tithes just under the forest’s first shadows for the Druj to come and carry away. Brandy, bread, dried fruit and meat, sugar, knives, baskets of new kittens with their eyes still tight. Tales tell that the Druj don’t eat, so the humans don’t know who the food is for and they don’t ask. They simply do as their own grandparents taught them, leave the baskets and keep their eyes down, no matter how great the temptation to peer into the forest. They don’t want to see what might peer back.

The forests belong to the Druj. Everything in them belongs to the Druj and the Druj are supposed to stay there — agreements had been made — but sometimes boredom gets the better of them.

Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.

Every village in the foothills of those varied mountains has its tales of Druj stalking among them. They come as crows and owls, foxes and magpies, stags whose antlers carry the moss of centuries, and wolves, huge and hunched, padding silently through the center of town. Whatever cithra they keep, their eyes are always the same, that desolate blue, and that’s how humans know them. When they come as animals, they perch on rooftops or at the market’s edge and watch in their terrible unblinking way, and the villagers go inside and bar their doors to wait until they leave. They might fright a young girl or boy by following them home, but usually in animal cithra they don’t do much more than that.

When they come for mischief, they come as humans.

The story is nearly always the same, and it might go something like this:

"The youngest Margitay girl, the pretty one, she heard her cat mewling piteous by the sheds so she took her lantern out after him, and that cat’s cries got farther off whilst she followed, till she found she was under the big black poplar in the bottom of the field. There in the darkness like a shadow’s own shadow stood a stranger. He was mewling to sound just like her cat, but he stopped when she came near and he smiled to bare his fangs. He was beautiful as the devil’s reflection and she couldn’t help but stare at him, black-haired and sharp-toothed, with those eyes that shone like coins in a frozen wishing well. She knew what he was and she knew she should run, but like she’d grown roots she stood there whilst he came to her, and she never even moved when he slid his long, cold fingers under her chin and tipped her face up to his, like he might give her a kiss.

"But it wasn’t a kiss he gave her. He fixed her brown eyes with his blue ones, and she knew she should squeeze hers shut. She’d been taught since she was a suckling that there are a hundred things the Druj can do with eyes! They can fish out your soul and keep it for a trophy, or they can pass visions in and plant dreams that will grow in the dark like toadstools. They can pluck out your eyeballs and put them in their pockets, or they can whisper spells that will turn your glance into a curse to wither crops and cripple horses!