Page 5

A person was in my forest.

Not your forest, said the sensible part of my brain, the part that knew better than to claim ownership over something that had been here longer than I had.

I listened. Nothing but birdsong, until a woman's voice drifted through the trees.

“...further observation required.”

I sighed under my breath.

A researcher. Every few years, one of them showed up, convinced that Screaming Woods would reveal all its secrets, and every year the woods outlasted them.

I stepped off the maintenance track. Might as well point her back toward the public trail before she hurt herself.

The undergrowth thinned around the old oak, its roots rising from the earth like the backs of sleeping animals. I rounded the trunk and stopped.

She was kneeling in the moss with her back to me. Blonde curls had escaped the braid hanging over one shoulder, and one bootlace had worked itself loose without her noticing. Her backpack lay open beside her, revealing plant presses, sample envelopes, field notebooks, and a hand lens. She was so completely absorbed in her work that she hadn’t heard me coming.

To be fair, most people didn’t notice a seven-foot bear until it was too late.

“You’re very territorial for something without a central nervous system,” she said to the vine.

She’d uncovered the root of one of the protected woodland vines. She wrapped both hands around the root and leaned back experimentally. It didn’t move. She frowned, then pulled harder.

No.

“Who are you?” My voice came out lower than I meant it to. “And why are you tugging on my root?”

The soil answered before she could. The hair-thin roots she’d exposed lifted out of the dirt all at once, like grass moving in the wind, and found her wrist. They wound up over her glove in fine, pale spirals, one loop, then four, and the moss around her knees began to travel.

To her credit, she didn’t scream.

“Oh,” she said. “That's⁠—”

The roots tightened. Her hand went down toward the soil an inch, then another. She braced her free arm against the trunk but couldn’t stop it. I crossed the clearing in three strides and went down on one knee beside her. She smelled even better up close—a dangerous, distracting sweetness that made the part of me that wasn't human stir uneasily in my chest. I ignored it, mostly.

“Don’t pull. It’ll close harder.” I got my hand into the moss below hers, palm up, offering. “This network runs the width of the clearing. You hurt one thread, and the whole thing responds.”

I lowered my voice, but my words were not for her. “Here. Take mine instead.”

The roots hesitated. Then they came, unspooling off her glove and reaching up over my wrist, my forearm. Where they gripped, the fur came—coarse and dark, rising under the pressure like the forest was calling it out of me. It burned.

“Back you go,” I murmured, turning my arm slowly and steadily, guiding them down until the fine ends found the soil again and took hold. I pressed the loose moss over the top, easing the edges down with my thumb until the seam disappeared.

When I looked up, she was staring at the coarse dark fur on my forearm. Pulling my sleeve down, I stood and braced for her reaction. I’d had twenty years to get used to the fear that came when a person saw me for the first time—the widening eyes, the scramble backward, the suddenly remembered appointment somewhere far away from here.

Color crept up her throat and into her cheeks. She blinked, not frightened, but surprised. The flush could have been exertion, or cold, or the adrenaline of being grabbed by a living root system. I told myself it was one of those things. And I told myself that the approval that came when it wasn’t fear was merely relief, not something warmer that coaxed the animal inside me, restless, closer to the surface.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. A drop of water fell from the oak above and landed squarely on her jacket. She didn’t notice.

Her attention remained fixed on my face with an intensity that made me acutely aware of how little distance there was between what I looked like and what I actually was. I folded my arms, needing to occupy my hands.

She pulled the glove off the hand the roots had held, turned it over, then looked back at the moss. “That looks worse than it is.”

“It belongs to a protected colony.”

“I was following the growth pattern. I wasn’t going to remove anything⁠—”

“That moss is the only thing keeping the surface roots from drying out. Once it’s disturbed, it takes two years to recover.”