Hidden in the Heartwood {sapphic paranormal}

CHAPTER EIGHT

08. || twin fawn.

Finley had taken one step too many off the mossy slate patio, no longer protected within the boundary of the hemlocks. The beast now stood between her and the cabin.

Backlit by the fire, it's spine bent like the very mountain ridge they stood upon. Bloody velvet draped in tatters from its antlers where each of its twenty-one points shined with a wet crimson that had never dried, never washed clean, and never would. Where its fur had once been as white as the first breath of winter, mud and not-mud saturated what was left of its hide. Beneath it, exposed rib bones reflected in the moonlight, all picked clean with just a few stray strings of sinew swaying each time its empty chest swelled to take a breath that it didn't seem to breathe.

The beast lurched forward with a staggered step, balancing upright on the skinny bones of its hind legs; its front two had been chewn clean off by the coyotes as River had explained earlier. From the shoulders up, its head remained mostly intact if you could ignore the clusters of red, tumorous growths that marred its face. With every step closer it took, white worms and thousand leggers spilled from its snout.

Rooted to the ground by no will of her own, Finley could only stare up into the black coal eyes of what had once been a deer.

And this one, she remembered well.

This one had been meant to be hers, to be hunted and shot, gutted and processed, then mounted to a wall, the bedroom wall in particular to cover where her own head had put a hole in the sheetrock. But when the time had come to take sight and pull the trigger, no shot rang out.

See, if you were to look back far enough, you'd find that every ancient culture once held a high holiness for creatures that defied their natural pigmentation. In the old country, long before the Christians drove out the snakes, the white stag was a sacred beast born from the fires of the Otherworld, sent to transcend the realms and wander the forests. And those highland forests of the old country were all once carved from this same limestone and pleached with these same trees. An ocean may have split the mountains in two, dividing the continents, but there was no denying their roots and the ancient spirits embedded within them.

Killing such a sacred creature would not only be heinous, but unforgivable under the eyes of the old gods so Finley had lowered the rifle all those months ago, knowing full well she in turn had made herself the target that night. Then again, maybe she had been all along. Wasn't that why she cut open the fence in the first place? To escape her own killing? Both she and the white stag had been so close.

But now, as the beast leered over her in a way no deer should ever stand, it wasn't fear that snaked up her spine. No, instead of calling out for help, she swallowed back River's name that'd crept to the tip of her tongue and found remnants of guilt in its place.

"I'm sorry," her jaw trembled, "I'm sorry you didn't make it out."

<I'm sorry you didn't either, Finley.>

The voice seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere except from the beast, clinging to her name as if it had said it a hundred times before. And maybe it had. Maybe she hadn't been hallucinating when she'd heard it calling for her last fall as she dragged her limp body through the wet leaves and the brambles towards the hole in the fence where the stag stood ensnared and half eaten.

But the advocate had told her that couldn't be true. The voice wasn't real. Just her head processing the trauma in full-on survival mode. Just like that time she fell from the black hemlock and woke up in the reservoir with the Green Man. And here she was again. Ignore it, ignore it, she told herself as she shut her eyes tight. This isn't real. The Green Man wasn't real. The Demon—it's eyes scorched through her mind, forcing hers to open. The beast that was once a deer remained before her.