Page 79 of How to Woo the Undead

She was curious and she was hungry, like a wolf finding bleeding prey, she hunted. He understood hunting for food. It was hunting for sport that made no sense. Because it made them feel alive, that he couldn’t understand. While she scoffed originally at his insinuation that she was understandable by the likes of him…she grew to enjoy his company.

For night after night, she returned to his cabin. They’d call a truce and he’d tell her about the humans outside the woods. She’d tell him all about her realm. She told him of her mother, of the magic, of places she’d visited. Night after night, she’d sit on his windowsill, watching him sleep. At first he wore a silver necklace, a warning for her to keep back. Silver was one of the few metals that didn’t grow in her realm. Its touch was enoughto melt the flesh off her bones. Granted, a hungry dog will eat through the pain, and she could heal herself. Or she could simply eat him from a different end.

But the more time she spent with the Hunter, the less she wanted to eat him. The less her stomach ached for humans, and the more his stews filled her up. Or maybe it was him. His smile and laugh, the way he taught her how to dance around a campfire on a starry night. Then there was the way he kissed her.

A thing she’d never expected of him, but her Hunter was always so full of surprises. From his ability to calm her unbridled rage to egg on her curiosities. Exploring every inch of him in that cabin during a cold winter’s night was a fond memory. Feeling his warm skin and hearing his heartbeat, she replayed that over and over.

Sabine was in love with her Hunter. And he loved her. They loved and kissed and made love and hunted for years together. Because for humans that were well tended to, 29 is spry. Then he was 39, and his beard was starting to grow silver streaks in it. Her heart could take him getting old. Her heart could take him living with her till his end. That was something her heart knew how to handle. Sabine swore to herself, that when her Hunter passed on, she’d take his bones to bury in her garden back in her realm. That way he could always live there with her, his memory preserved.

What her heart was not capable of handling was returning from her realm with supplies he asked her to gather…and finding her Hunter beheaded at the front of their cabin. She couldn’t withstand the feel of silver wrapping around her as the brethren of the clerics they slayed together returned for vengeance. Her little heart shattered into tiny, jagged pieces as they dragged her through the woods. Fingers buried in the soil, howling like a wounded beast as the last thing she saw was his eyes, wide and full of terror. Her Hunter who feared nothing, not even her.

There was an old rule.

Those who do not heed the danger of human realms are doomed to die in them. Sabine had played in the human realm too long, lost too much of herself to the mortals.Forgotten herself.But in that moment, feeling his blood saturating the soil, she remembered. Everything she was. Everything she could be. She ripped open her palms on the silver they chained her with and bled into the very woods around her.

“This is my home!” she proclaimed.

Because a grove witch is made. Not born. They are an Old Fae who has bled for a grove. They are tied to it. They live and die by that grove. And as she fed the trees the clerics’ bodies for nourishment, she made that endless forest her home. The portals to her old realm were closed off. Snapped shut and locked from the other side, specifically to her. As she had claimed her home. She’d sworn an oath to the trees in that forest. Her roots were planted. Sabine ate the bones of her enemies and fed her new home with her magic.

Groves are a symbiotic relationship. Her magic fed the trees, staved off the harsh winter snow, and helped new sprouts break through the tough earth. The trees sustained her, keep her company in her solitude.

For years, she mourned his life. Then for years, she haunted those trees. Lurking within the shadow of them as patches of humans appeared, then died off. Kingdoms rose nearby and collapsed. A manor was put up in the woods, but those that lived in it's shadow did not feel their lord’s protection. Not with the grove witch that hunted in that forest. She watched it all with impassiveness. Complete and utter disdain for the living but not enough desire to wipe them from her trees. If there wasn’t preyto keep her busy, then she’d have nothing but the hole in her chest to play with.

Until the dragon came and nearly burned her alive.

It scorched her precious grove down the middle. Like it struck her with silver again, she was nearly cleaved in half. Her heart practically stopped.

Sabine buried herself in her tree, the one right outside his forgotten cabin, for a long time, unable to breathe without tasting smoke. She thought being a tree for once would solve her ache. Because if she wasn’t alive, but she wasn’t dead, she didn’t have to watch her grove finally die. She slumbered. She wept. Then she slumbered some more.

Some fool must have heard her weeping and mistaken her for a squonk or something…for she awoke one day. Ripped out of her tree into the front yard of a home inside a city. A marvelous, glittering city made of metal and concrete and magic. It felt like being back in the old realm again.

It felt like being Sabine, from before her Hunter, from before the heartbreak and endless eternity. No longer hollow, she was back.

And Sabine was very…very…very…hungry.

Chapter Forty:

Austin

“Smith!Please,yougottahelp!” Austin yelped, waving his arms over his head as Smith and Kevin came rushing through the front gate. Everything was wrecked. There was water everywhere and half the trees beyond the gate were knocked over. But the rain stopped pummeling his head, and the tornados were gone, so that was a good sign!

Until he realized the tree ate Hyacinth.Kinda.He pushed through the tree branches to watch her be pulled down into the soil by a bunch of roots, all tangling up around her and dragging her deep. He dropped to his knees and tried to dig her out. But the tree hoisted him up by his thighs and chucked him across the yard. Austin didn’t even know the tree wassentient. He expected to face another dryad, only to stare at the unmoving willow.

That’s where Smith found him, fighting with branches and yowling Hyacinth’s name.

“What happened?” Smith panted for air, putting a hand to Austin’s chest. The slender walked him back a step to break his concentration with the tree. “Big guy, what’s going on?”

Austin whined, jabbing a finger at the tree. “Thatfuckingtree ate Hyacinth!”

Smith sighed, “How did it eat her?”

“It slurped her down with its roots!” Austin roared, reaching out to smack the branches that smacked him right back. “Let her go! She’s not yours!”

“Austin,” Smith warned.

“Let her go, ya hunk o’ bark! That’sMY flower!”

“Austin!” Smith snapped.