Sword raised, Bannon faced the primeval forest, hoping he would not have to go inside. The twitching branches and gnarled, spasming vines unsettled him, but he shored up his courage. Drawing a deep breath, he called out, “I’ve come for you!” He meant to shout, but it came out as no more than a whisper. His voice cracked.
The vegetation snaked and curled. In the starlight, as his pupils dilated with fear, he spotted more movement, heard a stirring that was more than frenetically growing plants. They had heard him.
Beautiful feminine forms glided between the trunks, branches, and undulating vines. Even with the camouflage of their mottled skin, he could make out the beautiful bodies that were so familiar to him.
He said, “I came to save you.”
Though the young women were fundamentally transformed, he still recognized Audrey, Laurel, and Sage. His breath was hot in his mouth, and his pulse raced. He had seen what these forest women could do, and he knew they were monsters … yet still he wanted them. Their enhanced scent was thick in the air, making him dizzy.
“Come with me,” he begged. “We can go back to Cliffwall. We’ll find a spell to make you normal again. Don’t you want to be with me?”
They laughed in unison, a musical sound that made all the branches stir. “Don’t be silly,” said the thing that had been Sage. “We are so much more now. Why don’t you come with us? Think of how we could pleasure you with all of our new skills.”
Bannon could barely breathe. His vision blurred. They seemed more intensely lovely than he remembered them, more than anyone he’d ever seen, any woman he could imagine. Something about their scent …
Flowers suddenly sprang up all around them, a spray of intense violet-and-crimson blossoms that he recognized with a shudder. The deathrise flower! The smell made him dizzy, and in the back of his mind he knew that Nicci must have been wrong about these blossoms, because surely this was the most beautiful, exquisite poison in the world!
Unbidden, he took a step forward. The three young women extended their emerald arms, exuding a mist of attracting chemicals. The lovely, but deadly, flowers bloomed around them.
Tears filled Bannon’s eyes, because he wanted them so much. He remembered how wonderful they were, how sweet and caring, how innocent, and yet how skilled when they had made love to him.
“We can be together,” he said, “if only you’ll just—”
Laurel interrupted him. “Yes, we can be together. Always.”
“We want you now more than ever,” said Audrey. “We are more fertile, more filled with desire.”
“We can be everything you want,” Sage added. “And you will give us everything we need.”
They spread their arms, and their breasts beckoned him. Their dark green nipples looked like flower buds. Bannon yearned for them. He had meant to come and argue, to fight to take them back. The sword felt slick in his hand. Even with its leather grip, his palms were so sweaty, he could barely hold on.
“Come to us, Bannon,” said Laurel.
The other two echoed the invitation.
He could not resist. He succumbed, gliding toward the edge of the jungle.
With a great blow, a growling, furred form crashed into him. The full weight of a sand panther knocked him off his feet and tumbled him out of the reach of the vicious forest girls.
The beautiful apparitions snarled, their mouths opening to reveal long woody fangs. Their arms stretched out, coiled with vines, corded muscles, and tendons. Their fingers reached out for him, tipped with hooked thorns. The smooth, perfect green skin on their arms became studded with deadly barbs that dripped with milky venom.
Gasping, Bannon rolled over and tried to catch his breath. The spell was broken. Mrra bounded away, then circled back, snarling. The forest women reached out with a thorn-studded embrace, trying to catch Bannon before he got out of reach.
He instinctively slashed with Sturdy, lopping off one of Audrey’s arms. It dropped to the ground, and its severed stump twitched, extended, and grew roots, digging deep into the ground while the arm continued to grope upward for him.
Howling, Audrey raised the stump of her arm, and a new limb grew from the severed end, a tangle of vines, muscles, and blood vessels reemerging to restore her.
Bannon hacked at them, swinging his sword sideways, then up, then back down, splintering the female forms. They did not bleed red, but spilled oozing green sap.
“I wanted to save you,” he cried.
The three just laughed as they regrew into contorted new forms with additional branchlike arms that sprang from their shoulders and torsos. Their hair became a wild, marshy tangle of strands.
The sand panther retreated, growling to Bannon. He backed away onto the rocky, desolate ground where the forest avatars could not yet go. From their verdant refuge, they simply glared at him, and Bannon stared back, sobbing. Tears ran down his cheeks. “I thought I loved you.”
“We will have you again,” the women said in a single rasping voice like dry leaves crackling in a fire. “We will have you forever.”
CHAPTER 65
The broad grin on Nathan’s face made Nicci immediately suspicious. “I may just know where to find the answer, Sorceress!” The old wizard stopped her in the hallway as she made her way to her chambers, where Thistle was already asleep.
She allowed herself a moment of hope. “You are certain of this spell?”
Nathan’s smile faltered. “‘Certainty’ is an overused term, to be sure. I am confident, let us leave it at that. See here.” He set the thick volume on a bench in one of the corridors.
He opened the pages, drew his fingers down a line of archaic text. “It is just a clue, but the best clue we’ve had. You already gave me the incantation and the spell-form that the memmers think Victoria used, and that provided some excellent parameters for a counterspell or a weapon. We knew the essence of what we were fighting, but not how to do so.”
He tapped a stained page where tight handwriting had run together as the ink dissolved. “This gives us somewhere to look, a listing of other books that also shed more light about the Lifedrinker.”
“He is no longer a concern,” Nicci said. “I killed him.”
“Yes, yes, but think of how they are connected. Roland’s spell stole too much from the world, and now Victoria’s will restore too much. It is all a matter of control, finding a way to modulate the flow of hungry magic, the power of giving and taking.”
“Like a valve,” Nicci said, unconsciously biting her lower lip. “The Lifedrinker said he had opened up the magic with his spell, but the flow was too strong. He could not stop himself.”
“And neither can Victoria,” Nathan said. “Both Roland and Victoria were conduits for the magic. When you destroyed the Lifedrinker, you shut off his flow of death. Now we must destroy Victoria and stop the flow in the opposite direction.”