“Don’t I?” One hand hooked on her hip, pulling her closer as the other cupped her face. His thumb dragged roughly over her cheek, pulling down her bottom lip. “I lost my parents. I almost lost you.” A tremor went through his scarred fingers. “I know what that fear is like, and you will not make me feel it again.”
Heat flared in her middle, stoked higher by anger. “So you’re ordering me around now?”
“I certainly am.” And his lips crashed into hers, and she dug her nails into his shoulders hard enough to hurt, and it was exactly what both of them wanted. A release. A reprieve. Anger and lust and lostness tangled together, and this was an outlet for it, a way to fight and heal in equal measure. His teeth sank into her bottom lip, and Red gasped, tangling her hands in his hair.
He pulled back just enough to look at her, one hand on the back of her neck, the other running up her side as he dragged her tunic off. Burning mouth moving down her throat, over her collarbone, closing over her breast until her back arched and her gasp became a moan.
Eammon licked her, hard and rough, then moved down. He kissed her hipbone, pulled at the waist of her leggings, mouth on every inch of skin he revealed. When he’d pulled them off, Red anchoring her hands on his shoulders to kick them into the underbrush, he looked up at her, kneeling on the golden leaves like a penitent, his eyes bright and his dark hair mussed.
“You never let me lose myself, Red.” His voice came out hoarse, his hands moving over her even as he spoke, as if she were something he couldn’t quite believe he could hold. “You dragged me back every time, even when I wanted to kill you for it. So I won’t let you lose yourself, either.”
“I won’t.” She tugged at his shirt, pulled it over his head, threw it into the trees. Went to her knees, too, because that way she could touch more of his skin, press herself into his chest until his scars traced themselves onto her. “I won’t lose myself.”
“No, you fucking won’t.” His mouth pressed open against hers. “You don’t get to make me need you this much and then go kill yourself trying to tear open a door. Understand?”
She didn’t say it, but the way she moved against him, the way she pressed him down onto the earth and settled over his hips showed it instead.
He didn’t let her stay there. She rode long enough to feel that familiar coiling in her middle, for sweat to sheen both their brows despite the chill of eternal fall, before Eammon gripped her waist and rolled her over, her back against the dirt and him above.
“Too quick,” he said, bending down for a kiss as he pulled out of her. His mouth dragged against her hip, the tender skin where her thighs ended. “It’ll be over too quick like that, and I want you to remember this.”
She was going to tell him she always remembered, but then his mouth was on her and coherent speech was impossible.
When Eammon did this, he didn’t stop until she saw stars, until the coiling heat within her exploded more than once. And only then did he rise over her, into her, arms braced on either side of her head and shoulders blocking out the sun.
They didn’t speak. No need. And when they both peaked, he kissed her through it.
Later, they lay naked in the forest, pillowed on her cloak. Red rested her cheek against Eammon’s chest, listening to the forest-chased thud of his heart. Her thoughts stretched, languid, nearing the syrup-slow of sleep.
And she saw fog.
She’d been lying down with Eammon, and now she stood, but she could still feel his skin against hers, still feel the weave of her cloak pressing into her side. A glance around revealed Eammon wasn’t there, though—Red was alone, just her and the mist. A half dream, then, somewhere between awake and asleep.
She wasn’t naked anymore, either. Instead, she wore something long and pale and gauzy, similar to the gown she’d worn when she was blessed as a sacrifice to the Wolf. Her mouth twisted wryly as she plucked at the fabric. Another dream-thing, taking pieces of life and desire and memory and stitching them together in odd ways.
But the fog sliding over her felt… palpable, almost. And Red knew, with crystal clarity, that she was being watched.
That’s the kind of love you needed. Feral and fierce and capable of drawing blood.
She whipped around—as much as one can in a dream—peering narrow-eyed through the mist. No shapes appeared, nothing to give her a clue as to what might be speaking, though the voice sounded masculine and nearly familiar.
This was a dream, she was sure, but it was a damn strange one.
Unease prickled along her shoulder blades. She crossed her arms. “Who are you?”
A long-enough pause that she didn’t think she’d get an answer. Then: I don’t know, really.
The fog parted slowly, drifting away like breaths on cold air. Its leaving revealed where she was.
A tree. But Red was in the branches of it, perched on a bough as wide as she was tall with thin golden veins winding through the white bark. Below her, endless mist, a trunk stretching downward for what looked like miles. If she squinted, she could see tangles of roots down there at the base of the impossibly tall trunk, touched with darkness.
Almost like what she’d seen in the mirror.
Red fell to her knees, leaning as far over the side of the branch as she dared, screaming down into the dark, “Neve!”
Not yet.
The voice sounded weary but firm, like a tired parent admonishing a rambunctious child. You have your key. Your half of the Tree was within yourself, but she has to journey to her half and find her key there. You must be patient.
She frowned. The voice came from everywhere at once, like the fog itself was whispering. Still, that sense of familiarity, a memory that wouldn’t quite lock into place but might if she just saw who was speaking. Slowly, Red stood, tentatively walked forward along the branch.
Something caught her eye on another branch, a glimmer of incongruously bright color. Red frowned.
Apples. A cluster of three, one gold, one black, and one bloodred.
The Tree is the key is the mirror, came the voice, reverberating in the fog. The Tree exists and doesn’t exist. It is you, and it is the piece you carry.
“I don’t understand,” Red murmured, eyes still on the apples.
Mirrored power and mirrored love, the voice answered. That’s what opens the Shadowlands. Opens the Heart Tree. Opens you.
“That cleared up exactly nothing,” Red muttered, but the rest of a salty retort died in her throat when her eyes slid sideways.
When she saw the mirror growing from the trunk of the tree.
The same mirror she’d brought with her, the mirror she’d been trying so hard to force to show her Neve. She saw her own reflection in it, half forest and half woman, wild-eyed and kiss-bruised. But then there was a shimmer, a gray-scale world reflected for half a moment. A woman both like her and not, with long black hair and black-welled eyes and thorns along her wrists.
Neve.
But as Red tried to run forward, heedless of the branch she stood on and the endless drop below, the dream slipped, became more like something her tired mind would form and less like its own reality. Her steps stretched too long and too slow, her grasping fingers couldn’t touch the mirror’s frame. It fell back, disappeared, and she followed it into the dark.