The Forest's Son Read online

  He may not be quick about it, but he manages to make his way out of the car, unfolding his long legs and steadying himself on the side of the car like it's his first day walking. Donovan's impatience vibrates off her in waves, but he drags his feet, walking slower than anyone his height has a right to.

  She locks her car repeatedly with the key fob pointing over her shoulder; the series of paranoia-fueled beeps for such a beat-up old car would be funny if the situation were different.

  “Follow the schedule,” she says. “No one should bother you. If it's like all the other times, your homework is all neatly organized in your backpack — oh, god, please tell me you grabbed your backpack before you left the house. I forgot to ask you — and you'll have a bunch of notes about what's going on in each of your classes.”

  He pulls the black backpack off his shoulder and holds it out to her, hoping it’s the one she's talking about. She nods quickly, and he looks at her more closely. She isn't supermodel-gorgeous, but she's very attractive. Hot, even, in that Suicide Girls sort of way. She could have any guy on this campus, in all likelihood. Why would she bother with him?

  “Good luck, dude. I'll meet you for lunch, then back here after your last class. We'll go back to your house and see if there's a new video or just the same old thing.”

  Something flickers across her face before she walks away from him, and he can't help but stare after her, bereft. There's a strange feeling in his stomach, and he thinks it must be like what baby animals experience when their mothers send them out on their own. That thought leads to another, wondering if he's always been such a whiny crybaby on these days without memory, and how he can remember all this useless trivial knowledge like baby animals being sent off from the safety of their mothers and Suicide Girls, but not a beautiful girl who's apparently his best — and only — friend.

  2: Forgotten

  Donovan has all but forgotten what life was like before the first time Vance didn’t know who she was. She’s so accustomed to her virtual erasure that it’s become normal — well, her kind of normal — but normal is becoming too much to live with. This normal is no longer something she can survive. The irony isn't lost on her that she's sitting in a class on rhetoric, yet learning all the forms for structuring your argument and trying to win people over to your side means nothing; all these lessons on making your point and getting people to agree, and her best friend is still frying his brain somehow and forgetting her on a semi-regular basis.

  Once upon a time, Vance had been the new kid in school: the unknown quantity everyone wanted to solve for. There's a reason new kids in school are always the subject of books: They have a mysterious quality. They’re new and scary creatures in a sea of the familiar. They contain the possibility of changing the status quo.

  He arrived sophomore year, she thinks. He and his single mother had moved to the tiny rural town, an event in itself, and into the odd house of glass and stone plopped right in the middle of the woods.

  The first time Donovan ever picked him up for school to spare him the horror of the high school bus was maybe a month after he'd appeared, when she still thought maybe they could end up as more than friends. Vance had told her his house was easy to find: Pass three trailer parks, two cow pastures, a grand total of 15 shot-up signs; turn right onto the dirt road; drive a mile into the woods; and there you were.

  He hadn't been joking about how to get there, or his house being smack dab in the center of the woods. Anyone visiting would be able to tell where Vance's property line is: It’s where the dense line of trees began.

  The house looks like it belongs to witches, or the fae, as her great-gran used to call them. Just enough trees had been carved out of the dense woods to fit the house in, and it’s so dark inside, even on the sunniest days, that Vance and his mother have lights on all the time. Parts of the house are sided with wood, blending easily with the forest, and the copper roof has a patina that adds to the house's other-worldliness. Donovan finds it depressing to be in the house very long with the darkness of the forest seeming to close it in, but Vance and his mother seem comfortable out there — Grace, especially.

  Donovan isn't sure exactly where the money for the house and their cars comes from. She has a vague idea of what Ms. Welburn seems to do for a living; there's a greenhouse with a lot of plants, and Ms. W brings them into town and sells them to some of the hippie natural healing stores.

  Occasionally, Donovan helps her with some of the inventory and bookkeeping for extra money. Once or twice, she and Vance have run into his mother when she’s out, and Grace always seems out of sorts out when they do. It’s as if she's uncomfortable in public, even in the small college town. Out of the house, Ms. W seems afraid of everything including her own shadow, which seems ludicrous to Donovan when you consider the woman has to be at least six-foot-five. She’s crazy tall, with tan skin and long black hair she wears to her waist. Around the house, she never wears shoes and moves as gracefully as a dancer.

  In town, however, Donovan always thinks she looks like she doesn't know where to put her feet. Or her long arms or legs, for that matter. Vance gets his height from her; that’s for sure. At 21, he's six-six, and Donovan isn't quite sure he's done growing.

  With one ear barely tuned into the class discussion and her making a half-hearted effort at taking notes, Donovan goes over everything she knows about Vance and his mother. One: They showed up halfway through high school and moved in, knowing no one in town, and with no apparent reason for moving here. It wasn't like they moved for a job or to be closer to family in the area. Two: They’re almost unnaturally close. Not in any sort of disturbing or — god forbid — sexual way, but Donovan often wonders about the two of them living out in the woods like that. Even in high school, Vance and his mother got along when most of their peers were at a point when they hated their parents, Donovan included. Three: There are no pictures of his father in the house, or of any other family, for that matter, and no cards or packages ever arrive on holidays or birthdays. Come to think of it, Donovan isn't sure which holidays — if any — Vance and his mother celebrate. She's never seen a Christmas tree or menorah in their house, or anything seasonal at all. Four: Ms. W has a weird sort of accent Donovan can never quite place. Five: Vance somehow manages to fry the ever-loving hell out of his brain fairly regularly, and his mother either doesn't notice or doesn't care. Even though a lot of the time, Vance's amnesia extends even to his mother at first, Ms. W never bats an eye. For someone who watches over her legally-an-adult son like he's a baby hawk made of spun gold, she seems awfully unobservant about something so huge going on right under her nose.

  In other words, things are piling up, and nothing makes sense.

  At one point, a few years before, Donovan might have — okay, she definitely did — entertained the idea of herself and Vance as a couple. He's attractive, with his close-cropped blond hair and his gray-blue eyes, if you can get past the social awkwardness he shares with his mother and the near-permanent furrow in his forehead that probably results from either worrying about what he doesn't remember or worrying he's remembered too much. But then, you add in the knowledge that he'll forget your name monthly, and you can be pretty sure anniversary gifts are out of the question. If you take it out even farther, he'll probably forget his own wedding date, if he ever manages to date someone long enough to get married.

  Beyond any lingering dregs — okay, so maybe a little more than dregs — of that hopeless high school crush, however, she’s starting to get seriously concerned. How much of whatever he's doing can a human brain take? Worse, what’s he doing to himself that makes him forget everything? And why is he doing it in the first place? It has to be intentional, right?

  Every time a new bout of amnesia begins, there's a reference to a video he's made in which he talks to his future, brain-wiped self. Usually, the video has instructions for getting through the next few days until things start to creep back in, and she's seen all of them, or at least she thinks she has. It's
obvious there are things he's not telling her, or showing her, because how else does he know what to do when he starts remembering? Does someone tell him to do it?

  Sitting in class listening to the professor drone on about the Greeks and the basic structure of a successful argument, she thinks the Greeks had it all wrong. Talking about things and writing about them only goes so far. In order to get anything done, you have to act. Sure, their culture and mythology has been studied for thousands of years, but is it still what it once was? No, she thinks. It was overtaken by cultures that quit arguing and writing and thinking and philosophizing and starting doing.

  She’s done waiting for answers that never come. Tomorrow, she vows, she'll get them herself.

  3: Adrift

  Grace moves around the greenhouse, her toes curling in the damp earth. Home, she thinks. Matka. Her body swims through the dank, humid air: fluid, lithe. The damp clings to her skin and holds her tight in its embrace, bringing a sense memory of warm, humid days in the depths of the forest. It's warmer here than it was there, much warmer in the greenhouse, but the humidity is the same as she'd feel on an August morning.

  She misses her sisters and their warmth and comfort. The plants and the soil and the warm air here are no match for her sisterhood. She misses the men, a bit. The companionship of a lover's touch has no equal, but it has been so long since she felt a man inside her she feels untouched again. Were it not for Jakub, she would almost think she'd never been with a man, never lived in that forest, never had her sisters — that it had all been nothing more than a dream. Yet her soul cries for her sisters as if the wound is fresh: a bleeding stump of a sudden amputation that happened mere hours ago instead of so many years before.

  She feels the moist air brush her breasts, idly wondering how long until J— until Vance is home from class. She'll have to get dressed, especially if Donovan comes home with him. He understands her connection to the mother, even in his other state. He feels it too, even without her explaining, but Donovan— Donovan will never understand, and she will especially not understand her friend's mother being nude around their home. People already talk about them. She doesn't need to give the girl fuel to add to the gossip fire.

  The girl loves her son. She can feel it. Donovan is a good soul and would have made a good sister had Vance been female. But he is male, and they are here, and nothing has been right since he came brawling into the world, all red and screaming and wrinkled and covered in white wax and red blood and that white-blond hair.

  All wrong, they'd said, and yet, so perfect. All that pain and struggle, and suddenly, there he was, bright and glowing and beautiful, and he'd looked at her with the dark gray eyes of an old soul, and Grace had known she would give anything for him.

  She had.

  Donovan, she knew, would do the same. She could sense it in the girl, and yet, the girl has no idea what she would have to give. Could she sacrifice everything? Could she give up Vance when the time came? He was nearly a full adult. He was starting to remember things, she knew. She could hear him crying out in his sleep and then…

  She shakes her head. He's not ready yet. She promised long ago that the choice would always be his. She wants him to make it for himself when the time is right, but hasn't she already made the choice for him? When they'd tried to take that perfect, squalling wrinkled boy and she'd run? When she had given him the angielski name and dreamed up a father who'd died instead of telling him the truth of the lovely boy she'd made love to on a bed of leaves with a canopy woven of stars and moonlight? That boy had gone back to his family, lived to a ripe, old age, and never been the wiser. She'd just been a beautiful woman on a warm summer night. But her son needed a different story, and she'd given one to him.

  All these years, and it's still so difficult to think with only her own mind. If she were with her sisters, the decisions would be so much easier to make. Thinking alone makes everything so much harder for her, and there is so much to think about here: what to wear, and what to eat, and where the money should come from.

  Things had seemed simpler when she left, but now she has so many things to keep track of. She is grateful Vance is such a smart boy. He picks up everything so quickly, and he stores everything, even though he doesn't realize how he comes by most of the knowledge.

  Over time, he has learned to do so many of the complicated things for her. All the electronics, and when the Internet became important, he took that over, too. She tries to acclimate, but forever feels out of step with the time and place she's living in. He adapts more easily.

  He was the one who figured out how to best keep their secret. The sisters found them — more than once — before he realized that if he totally suppressed everything, he vanished. As they sought — and felt —only him, and his strangeness, there was no thought of finding her among other sisters or distant blood of the sisters out here in the world. So she disappeared the moment her son did, and he makes sure he returns to that state every time there is a threat of revealing enough for the sisters to find them.

  Which is where he is now.

  There is no sense of the boy in him. He has the history, but none of the true knowledge. He senses the mother, but doesn't know why. He finds his mother’s nakedness some eccentricity, chalking it up to a modern version of pagan worship.

  Once, in high school, he'd come home and asked her if she was Wiccan, as some of the girls at school had expressed an interest, and he was still trying to fit in at that point. She struggled to explain it's a perversion of connection with the mother, but she no longer tries to explain. He will not understand. Not yet, anyway. Not for a while, and then only for a few days, at most.

  Her ears prick at the sound of a car. The exhaust system needs replacing, and soon, but Donovan won't have enough money. Grace will find a way to get it to her, for befriending her son, for staying with him even when things are so very strange in this seemingly normal world, for the things Donovan will lose in the end.

  She mourns the feel of the air on her body even as she reaches for the loose dress she pulls over her head before the tires begin their crunch on the gravel driveway. Looking down, she sees mud caked on her feet from the dirt floor. Ah, well. Too late to do anything about that now.

  Vance will shrug and hug her anyway. Donovan's eyes will widen, and she'll try to hide the smirk. And Grace will ask for help with the computer and beg Donovan to help her fill orders in exchange for the money she needs to help the poison-spewing metal beast that takes Vance away and brings him back safely each day run better.

  And pretend that she and her son are normal.

  ~

  Bożena floats on her back in the water; her hair, neither blonde nor brown, billowing at her side, creating a halo around her head that is nearly as wide as she is tall. Floating this way blocks the incessant chatter of her sisters, a blessing these days, when she can sense the unrest among them. Edyta seems to be at the center of much of the grumbling; as usual, she is sowing discontent.

  It’s been decades since the last time they had any sign of Grażyna's son. There is always the chance that he is dead. That isn't enough for Edyta — to let things lie — she wants to hunt down Grażyna, to be sure there is no longer a threat, to "make sure" she says.

  Bożena huffs and rolls from her back to her front, keeping her eyes open. The water is clear, and she stares at the pebbles on the bottom, smooth from the water washing over them. They sit motionless and allow the water to do whatever it will. She tries to do the same, and wishes Edyta would be more like the stones. Instead, she is śliwa tarnina — a pricker bush, always trying to poke at everything that might come near it.

  She remains face-down in the water until she runs out of air, then tucks her legs under her and brings herself to her feet. Her hair is a long sheet down her back, and she pulls some in front to cover herself, although no modesty is required with her sisters. For whatever reason, today she wants privacy, for both her mind and her body. Being what she is, she gets neither.

&
nbsp; She focuses her mind on calming thoughts, on what the tribe was like when Grażyna lived among them. Until she fled, Grażyna was as true as any other sister — certainly a better sister than she herself is. Even now, Bożena is willing to bet Grażyna keeps the sisters' ways, no matter where she might be living.

  If her son still lives, odds are he has been raised peaceably, to use his powers for good, or to not use them at all. How else can the complete absence of his presence be explained? Either he is a docile being unwilling to bring harm to the sister or humans or he is dead. No matter which, the sisters need not be concerned with him, and certainly don't need to mount any sort of offensive as they have in the past. Each time they have, Grażyna has always been able to get away anyway, and it always draws attention.

  Legend has always said any male would come back to assert his reign. Better he do so on their ground, where they have the advantage, than they go out into the human world again as they have done before. While some of the sisters are able to move about, most of them have grown more out of touch with the machines and the modern technology, and as the years pass, they look more and more out of place.

  Even Bożena, with her too-long hair, would be far too obvious. With their height and their discomfort, the sisters stand out. Better not to draw attention. Better to wait.

  She feels the prickles of Edyta withdraw somewhat, like a porcupine drawing back its quills. Edyta will wait for now, but who knows for how much longer. It has been so many years. Surely he must be nearly full-grown. Surely if he is going to return, it will be soon. What will that bring?

  Bożena is afraid to wish for changes. There are things she would like — things she dare not even think of lest another sister like Edyta catch wind of them. An image flickers through her mind, but she casts it away like a leaf on the breeze. She has no time for wishing or dreaming or wondering what might come if Grażyna's son were to reappear and assert his dominion over the sisters. There is always work to be done. She had best go do it.