SAGN: Chapter Six -Triage free porn video

SAGN: Chapter Six- Triage M'Tehr and Jacen Day Two: 2230 hours It was an uncomfortable walk for M'Tehr back to the borders of the Grove. It wasn't the steady rain that streamed down over her body that made it so for her. It wasn't those rivulets of water that flowed over her and fell to the pavement in silent streams, undistorted by her glamour. It wasn't even the conversation she had with Singh moments ago that made it so difficult for her now. In truth it was none of those things. They were nothing more than minor irritations to her and didn't actually trouble her. The rain least of all, that at least was natural. Something she had experienced so often that feeling its embrace now was almost not worth noticing; it was the pavement binding the earth below her feet muffling the voice of life beneath it that bothered her. That is what made the path back to the Grove difficult for her. Sometimes M'Tehr felt like cursing her lot when it was her time to bear the burden of being the Hamadryad. The humans she had interacted with over the years commonly misinterpreted her position as one of authority over those whose interests she represented. Just as they misinterpreted what it was that she truly did for them. It was her burden though, more often than not, because of how well she excelled in those interactions. The sisters of the Grove understood to a degree how all of those who bore the burden of being Hamadryad struggled against its weight and they tried not to impose its mantle on her more than necessary. It was the practice among her people to shift the unwelcome task as much as possible among those who were willing to venture forth, so that no one sister was forced into the human world for longer than they must be; but that was only to be done in ordinary times and this was not an ordinary time. It was so very far from ordinary. It ceased to be an ordinary time when they first heard the cry of their sister's awakening. It ceased to be an ordinary time the moment that the shriek split their awareness like the falling of an axe and with that stroke it had brought their plans to a halt as all within range of the cry shuddered at the raw force of it. There was no discussion over who would be sent to find her when the sisters of the Grove gained enough insight to realize what it was that had happened. Under those circumstances it was natural that it was to M'Tehr they turned. Even though it was not yet her time to again face the torment of walking in the strangled world men had crafted around them. M'Tehr knew this and she knew that she need not wait for them to ask; when their minds reached out toward hers, she was already preparing to go to their sister. It had to be her. M'Tehr held an innate touch that the others only possessed in pale shadow; she was their first choice in matters of serious import. There was nothing in their living memory that matched the importance of what was taking place now. To meet it they needed M'Tehr, she was the only one that could go the furthest distance of any other hamadryad and at the same time had a deeper understanding of how and what the human world around them really was. There was no other choice for them and there was no other choice that M'Tehr could make. When M'Tehr heard that cry rising unexpectedly from far away in the south, she had been as staggered by the implication as any other dryad in Morleth Phar'. But even as she struggled to regain her equilibrium, she had already begun to prepare herself mentally to make this journey. She needed to make it. Her sister's cry reverberated in them all, but the compulsion it roused in M'Tehr's breast frightened even her with the intensity of its need. Even though each time she did so, M'Tehr dreaded leaving the comforting environs of Morleth Phar' she always went each time she was called to. This was beyond any other call though and once this awakened sister was located by the humans the need to go to her grew even stronger. The single-minded focus of all of the Grove's dryads was a terrible thing to behold, even for them. When that focus had thrashed undirected in the aether, desperately searching for their sister and not finding her, even one of the older ones like M'Tehr began to feel the faint scratching of dread over the reaction it had roused within them. If their sister could not be found and found soon, what would become of them? Would they remain locked in their ever-frantic searching, neglecting everything they had been working toward for centuries? Would the work of centuries even matter to them anymore? Their entire existence since the last days of the Withering had been spent preparing for the inevitable Blooming that would follow. Generations of labor that had seen them spread their kind slowly, carefully across the land around them, reestablishing their place in the natural order in fits and starts came to an abrupt halt. It had occupied all of their plans and interactions with other races and it was considered the highest good of their kind. The prime focus of their being and that goal was cast aside in an instant. A single cry made by an unknown sister screaming 'I am here' to an unsuspecting world had wrought this among them and now nothing mattered to them except finding this sister and the Grove that had been reborn with her. Over the long years when her people contemplated the future that was coming and what their place in it would be; that thought was always built around the notion that it would be surviving Groves like hers that would lead the way into the Blooming. There was never even the hint that something like this would even be possible. Now though...on the cusp of the Blooming...the inconceivable was here. It howled at them in confusion, in fear and with a range of power that staggered them even from a distance. It called to them and none of them could stand aside and turn their senses away from its call. It was a needful thing and M'Tehr was helpless in her own determination to answer it. She feared what it may portend as much as she exalted in its possibility and she steeled herself for the approaching task as another would steel themselves before enter a burning building. As she rounded the edge of the line of barrier fencing that ended in the open land of the abandoned human home she paused for a moment and looked back along the row of houses that stretched in the darkness alongside the man stone that they used to lay their roads with. This one had been named Magnolia Circle; a mockery that she did not appreciate. She knew intellectually that men named things like this for all sorts of reasons, but with each excursion she made into their world she always found without fail that she did not have far to travel before she would find something like this. Streets named for absent life or worse no real life at all. Some in the Grove who shared the burden of Hamadryad with her pointed to it as evidence of humanities longing for the natural connection their technology and civilization had severed from them. But not M'Tehr; she saw corruption and the twisting of meaning of what was to what humans said it should be. She saw the taking of the name of something and gifting it to the lesser golem they raised in its place. Like the thin dead wood of the rotting fence that intruded in her path to the edge of the Grove's border, the taking of names was little removed in her mind from the taking of their enemy's heads. The name of what was before rendered into little more than a trophy displayed now to demonstrate the utter defeat and eradication of their foe. That they did not even recognize a foe they vanquished in the desolation they raised in its place made it even more galling to her in some ways. But she consoled herself still, that even here, framed by man-stone and sectioned away, the defeated and corralled life contained here still fought back. All that stood around her was nothing more than a temporary victory. No sooner was the land sculpted by man's hands then life was already moving to take it back. In the concrete beneath her feet she could feel water, roots and strands of grass breaking up the man-stone binding it; forcing it apart. She focused downward and gifted the wispy grass poking through a narrow crack with some of the life she carried within her. The shifting of life from one point to another came to her as naturally as breathing did to humans. All dryads were conduits for natural life, especially that of flora. It was their place and their purpose, encouraging it here, turning it away there. Life she could channel to aid the stunted growth of the grass flowed downward. She felt some more of the microscopic pebbles of the man-stone chip off and shift away, separated from the greater mass of the man-stone. She felt with pleasure the growth of the small plant moving against it and some small measure of peace at this minor victory settled in her center. She knew what she had just done was small and it was petty and still it satisfied her to do it. All up and down the little street she could feel the grass and other plants bound in the tight little square's men preferred to create around their dwellings responding and surging in growth in response to the influence of the newborn Grove. She turned from the street and walked toward its borders. They had shifted even further westward while she was speaking with Singh and the other human enforcers; they were spreading inexorably as ripples do when raindrops fall. She could feel the gathering life in the beaten soil being renewed as she passed into the expanding edge of her sister's home. But what she was seeing now was little more than a glass being filled. The growth was steady and undirected in any one direction as it had been since M'Tehr had contacted her sister and sent Jacen to her. Before that it had been a torrent driven by the raw fury of her sister's emotions, now it was almost an afterthought. She looked at it again and slipped into the aether; she needed to check on her sister's progress now that the humans were out of the way and would not be a further distraction from the important work she was here to accomplish. Jacen was still mating with her sister she saw. M'Tehr knew without having to see it happen that her sister had enveloped him the moment he crossed into her home. Until now she had only sampled the humans that she had bound, M'Tehr was almost envious that she had not seen her sister's reaction to one like Jacen. One who could meet her elemental force with animalistic fury and withstand even the building storm of her passions. She reached to outskirts of where the elm spread its roots and branches and stopped. She dared not come any closer lest she distract her sister now. It was too important to their people that she is successful here and it would likely be fatal for M'Tehr herself as well. The sudden appearance of a rival at this particular moment could rouse a killing frenzy in her sister's mindless nature that would not run its course until both her and any others within reach had fallen to her. There would be time for her to speak with her sister later, but for now M'Tehr kept well clear of her. She slipped out of the aether and back into the physical world. Her sister would still sense her and respond if she came too close but the physical world would add an extra layer between them and dampen her awareness. M'Tehr looked on her sister's body as she was cradled by the Grove itself beneath her Phar' ador while Jacen took her. An outsider who happened to peer into the bower that her Grove formed for her would only see M'Tehr's sister being repeatedly sensually being made love to over and over by the man Jacen appeared to be. Whatever their ideal in that regard was, that is what their eyes would see and no more. They would see the pair of them melding together; they would see the couple's passion rising to a crescendo and then fall away only to rise and come together again moments later. There would be nothing there to hold their attention for long. The inclination to stay and watch would be suppressed and such an observer would find something else more pressing to do before turning away to leave the couple to their placid lovemaking. In the aether though, where all true Fae mating took place, the scene was very different. Here where physical eyes could see it was tranquil, serene, a gentle playful melding of man and woman. In the aether though, where the two Fae were joined was where the true aspect of life manifested in all its naked power. There it was powerful demanding and insatiable; a battle between equals to create something greater. Balance in conflict spawning a new beginning, each tearing from the other in their need. M'Tehr turned away from them for now and moved deeper into the growing nameless Grove. Her sister would be occupied for quite some time to come and even after, when she had planted the future's seed; she would need time to recover. It would be after she had slipped from the noose of her nature that the real work would begin for them all. Her sister would have questions for M'Tehr then, as M'Tehr would have for her. And as the prime dryad and the hamadryad of her Grove her sister would have more than just questions; she would have decisions to make. Some of them would seem inconsequential to any but other dryads; like the naming of her Grove. But for them it was one of the more important things she would do. The name of a Grove gave it its identity and shaped all of the days that would follow. As a fallen Grove its name could never be a variation of Morleth Phar'. The two dryad lines would only share the word Phar' and nothing else; it was a statement of their common origin and nothing more complicated than that. That was dryad tradition no matter which line it was that survived worldwide. M'Tehr's Grove had barely survived the Withering when so many others, like this one, had ceased to exist. It had barely avoided perishing and unlike this Grove she now walked in, it had not been driven into hibernation so deep that its Fae embraced that slim chance for survival even knowing the fear they would possibly never awaken. They never slept so deep that not even the approaching Blooming would be able to reach them as they slept and expired lost in their slumber. When the pendulum turned back from the Withering; when magic incrementally began to grow again; it became dryad tradition that when a daughter Grove could be established that they took a variation of the Mother Grove as part of its name. Doing this honoring the root of their being as each branch extended outward. This was not a daughter Grove though she told herself again. This was one that had been lost. Lost so long that her kind had no idea it had even been here or which one it was and as a distant sister she had no real say in such a decision. She did not even have any notion that once her sister had regained her sense of self if she would be even welcome for longer than it took for her to become herself. Perhaps her sister would tell her these things when she regained her sense of self. Perhaps she would not remember. Her long sleep may have peeled that information away and discarded it in her struggle to survive; if that had happened then she might never recover it and never know who she was. M'Tehr would be here for her in any case for however long that need to be here would drive her and while she would not presume to impose an unasked name on her sister's home, she would respectfully suggest one to her in the proper time and in the proper way. Perhaps Khopthalmi Phar' would be most appropriate name in some ways for this place. She was just beginning to know her sister but she thought that she might appreciate the return of her home reflected in the name Resurgent Heart. Unlike her sister, M'Tehr had time now to think of things like that though. There was little else for M'Tehr to do since Jacen had taken her sister into the aether but think. Her sister was fully occupied there sating her nature's driving need and without her nature striking blindly all around her, the Grove had settled as well. It was still expanding, but in a general outward way rather in the specific direction that her sister was focusing it towards when M'Tehr had first contacted her. When she answered M'Tehr the first rootlings were already starting to reach into the patch of barren soil where her branch had knocked the injured pixie. Before long they would have reached her. They would have enveloped her, slowly wrapped their woody tendrils around her still form and begun to squeeze around her. They would have squeezed in relentless coils like a constrictor and they would not have stopped until the pixie's fire had been extinguished. M'Tehr reached out and laid her hand on one of the larger oaks on the edge of the border of the Grove. The boundary of the Grove had only started to reach the soil that it clawed through. She needed a temporary Phar' Ador if she were to remain here for any length of time. Her hand touched the gnarled bark of the tree, bark so like that of her own heart tree and felt the dormant power animating the living wood. She withdrew her hand. There would be time for this task later she thought. It would still have to be soon, before the Grove's borders spread much further but with her sister otherwise occupied, time was something that she had a little more of at the moment. What she needed right now was space. The two men that her sister had taken needed to be located and removed from here. That would mollify the humans for now and they would put less pressure on M'Tehr to break with them before it was necessary to do so in certain other areas. As she walked back into the heart of the Grove, she silently took stock of the entire situation. Her human allies had removed their kin from the area. Those ones were no longer a concern for her now. They were sealing off the area around them so no wanderers would disturb the Grove and the human guardians would not venture within without her present. That privacy would give her options. Singh may present an issue. She liked the man, as she did like many of his kind; just because she did not like what they had done as they developed did not poison her against them. But they were on opposing sides in this even though they were not enemies. The Grove could not be removed as they desired though and the notion that her sister should cede what was hers long before men walked here was out of the question. Her sisters hummed in agreement with her thoughts as she continued on her path. The hump of vines and roots sloped up from the floor of the Grove in front of her. She sensed the human essence deep within the layers of life around him. She needed to be careful with what she was going to do next. Her sister may be occupied with Jacen, but she would still feel possessive in this matter. Jacen would succeed in giving her a sister; but this one was still hers and not M'Tehr's to tamper with. What M'Tehr was going to do next would be dangerous and her sister could be yet spurred to attack a rival that dared touch what she had claimed for herself. Even with that possible outcome she needed to look and see what had been done to the man M'Tehr knelt and laid her palm on the knotted crisscrossing net of roots and vines that had buried the human. He was exhausted. That much she could feel, even in the physical world. Although less than two days had passed for him outside the aether, he had commanded her sister's full attention there for nearly the full length of that time and M'Tehr could feel the toll it had taken on the human. M'Tehr released her physical form and slipped into the aether. She did not resume her true form there though. The human had already been through so much that seeing who she truly was would not be helpful now, especially after her sister had taken him in the way she had done so. There was a form that lingered in his thoughts; she felt its outlines resonating strongly in the man's core thoughts. He had a connection with that one and her form would aid her now. M'Tehr felt the glamour fall into place and looked over to where her sister and Jacen had begun another coupling. In the aether the land shifted from lush forest to barren field and swiftly back again. It often did that and M'Tehr rarely paid the changing view any attention. It was the land remembering what had touched it and dreaming of what may be, one of the elders had told her when she was young and asked why that was so. M'Tehr laid her hand on the brow of the exhausted man. He groaned and his head shifted in response. She doubted that he would awaken while she was examining him, but she was prepared now if he did. It was a good thing that she had arrived when she had she realized as she reached out and touched his dwindling reservoir of strength within him. Her sister had practically devoured the man in her frantic efforts to produce a sister. Without Jacen to divert her she believed that this human would have died sometime in the early morning hours to come. That did not bode well for the other one that Singh had told her of; the one that had awakened her sister from her sleep. That one had already been here far longer than this one. "Carol?" The voice was weak, barely audible. It was more a thought made manifest than something made with sound. "Shh," she said to him, leaning over so that her blonde hair draped over his face and hid them both. "You need to rest," she whispered to him. "Get me out of her Carol. Please. I can't move. I'm so tired. Get me out of here before she comes back." The man's eyes rolled around looking for M'Tehr's sister. M'Tehr closed her eyes and shook her head no. "I can't move you," she told him. "It isn't safe to do that." "I can't feel my body," the man whispered. "What has she done to me? M'Tehr couldn't answer that. In truth she had barely begun to examine the man before he drifted back into consciousness and interrupted her examination of him. "You'll be fine," she lied to him trying to sound comforting as possible. "That woman is gone and I've found you now. Try not to move. You need to rest. As soon as I know you're safe I'll go get help." "No, don't leave me," he pleaded. "Rest," M'Tehr said to him and coaxed him back into unconsciousness. M'Tehr watched his eyes slide shut and his face slacken as sleep took him. In truth it was the best thing for him. Without his mind roving around in the aether he would get the deep sleep that his body desperately needed to begin to restore his drained vitality. That was something that she did know about the man's condition. She looked down at him. She supposed he was attractive enough for a human. Under other circumstances she might be tempted to have offered herself to him as a diversion for a day and a night. She had done so before with humans that had caught her fancy and she would do so again. But here was where what her sister had done and what she had done had split paths. As exhausting as it had been for her human partners, they had never seen their vitality ebb this low. It was a stern lesson to M'Tehr on the dangers of what happens when a Fae succumbs to the rule of their nature without the moderation of their mind. And still she could not even begin to fault her sister's actions. All she could do now was set herself to mitigating them as much as she could. She reached into the loam beneath the man and gathered some of the aethereal soil. It was already bursting with life as it echoed in symbiotic growth to its counterpart in the physical world. She began to rub a light coating of the earth over the unconscious man while continuing to croon for him to sleep. The life contained in the aethereal earth would supplement this part of his drained vitality. It could not restore it though. Only time and undisturbed rest could do that, but it would help him to survive until she could see that he was taken from here safely. Once this one and the other were safely removed she could leave this distraction behind and turn back to her mission. The man's color returned slightly as his body soaked up the energy that she was feeding him. He took a deep shuddering breath and fell deeper into sleep. With the man stabilized she turned back to determining just what it was that her sister had done to the man. His energy was at extremely low ebb as she had determined, but there was something else. Something she had just started to look at before the man had awakened and diverted her from completing her examination. She traced his body with her fingertips from head to toe twice to be certain, tasting the changes fermenting within him as she did so. Then she removed her hands and slowly rose. A vibration ran through the Grove and through her as well. She felt it strike her core and resonate back at the source. She turned in her sister's and Jacen's direction. They were still coupling but it was near the end of this joining. M'Tehr turned away. She could not be certain yet, but she had the strong certainty that it was done just then. She hoped that it was truly so. She needed answers to begin to cope with what would come once this Grove's hamadryad was ready to meet with the men waiting around her. She slipped from the aether into the physical realm and looked down at the mass of roots and vines beneath her. "I am sorry for you human," she said softly as the call of a night bird echoed for the first time in the Grove. "I am sorry for what was done to you. And I am sorry for what you have lost." M'Tehr turned away from the cocooned man and began to walk through the heart of the Grove. *Did you feel it sisters? * She asked them. There were not as many there now as there were when she had made her first contact with their lost sister, but there were still a majority of them in contact with her Phar' ador. *Yes,* came the answer. *He is missing part of himself,* they said to her. *It is more than that,* M'Tehr said back to them. *Much more.* *What can be done?* they asked her. *Nothing,* she answered. *Form will follow function and all will be as it must be.* M'Tehr had reached the far edge of the Grove where it was butting up against the empty earth surrounding another abandoned human home. As she stood back from the metal that made up the rusting linked fence partitioning it off, she saw tendrils moving under the earth and grass blades moving into the area to colonize it. Without someone making it their home the Grove would have little difficulty claiming it as its own in the coming days. M'Tehr watched as a vine slithered up to the back porch and began to climb one of the support posts. The one who rented out this property would try to fight this she was sure. And he would lose. Human law may say he owned this empty place, but natural law would claim it. It would claim it and it would tear it down. She turned back to the Grove again and resumed her search for the second cocoon that she was told would contain the missing man. *Our sister is not right yet,* the others said to her. *No, she is not,* M'Tehr answered. *Has she shown you her true form yet?* they asked. *Seeing that would go a long way toward us helping her to remember what Grove this is. To remember and find what lineage she sprang from.* *I don't think that may help us,* M'Tehr answered. *I think she has remained asleep so long that this may be her in her true form now.* *How can that be? She is a human female. None of our sisters would take that for a true form.* *And yet she has,* M'Tehr answered. *She is our sister and she has the form of a human woman. Her true form is not obscured, it is just that.* *She is our sister,* they agreed. *But she is not like us, not completely.* *How would we know that?* M'Tehr asked them. *Our Grove survived the Withering, while hers fell. None of us know what such separation and trauma would do to us on awakening.* *This is so. * The voices replied. *But in such a long sleep she should have returned to the core of who she is.* M'Tehr could not argue against that. She did not want to since she also took that statement as an article of faith. But seeing her reawakened sister in human flesh was shaking that faith. M'Tehr turned away from the abandoned home being claimed and walked along the edge of the Grove. The second cocoon was here somewhere and she needed to find it before morning. The sooner the both of these men were far away from her sister the better for all of them. *She slept too long,* M'Tehr said finally. *When she awoke too much of what she was had been stripped away. Her empty mind cast around and took the form of the humans around her as a pattern.* *How could such a thing be?* her sisters chorused. *I do not know," M'Tehr replied, "but it is the sole idea that fits what I have seen.* *When she has seeded, when she rests you must look for her Grove mark. It may tell us who she was,* the others whispered to her. *I will do so,* M'Tehr answered. It was an obvious suggestion to make and she would have done so even without her sisters reminding her of it. This sister's mind may have survived with only the core intact, but the physical memory of who she was should still mark her. Each dryad carried such a mark somewhere on their body. A brand incorporated into the marking of the tree whose bark pattern inscribed her flesh and linked them to their home. M'Tehr's Grove mark was centered between where her breasts would be if she showed herself in her human glamour. Most who saw it peeking through the bodice of her glamour took it for a tattoo. Her sisters would be somewhere similar on her body. When she and Jacen were finished and after she slept M'Tehr would look for it. *Where did the second mind come from?* her sisters asked. The question was direct. Something they usually were not so open in doing. The disturbance of her sisters awakening had shaken them all from their moorings in a multitude of ways it seemed. *I cannot say,* M'Tehr said to them. *Could she have merged with one of her sisters during her sleep? Could that be how she even survived?* they suggested. *That would explain the fear,* M'Tehr said. *Confusion and trauma from such a narrow escape with the void would not let them pass unscathed. But it is not the source of that fear, I think. The second voice was speaking of someone she has seen recently, not of losing her sense of self long ago.* The voices of her Grove fell silent contemplating her answer. *And there is another thing that preys on my thoughts,* M'Tehr admitted uneasily. * The silence that remained even as she spoke the thought that had been gestating in her mind told her that she was not the only one in the Grove to think on this. *When we first spoke, she said that she was the only one of her kind. A strange choice of description in any case; one would think that she would have said she was the last one.* *One would think so. But that may not be the reason we think it is,* her sisters said slowly. *And there is the possibility that the Blooming has birthed for us a new sister unlikely as that could be,* they said to her. *It is possible. I have already suggested that may be the case to the human shaman though that may have been a mistake on my part. The thought clearly troubled him when we spoke of it as a possible eventuality,* M'Tehr said to them. *But it is more likely our sister has slept too long and her mind has been wiped clean of what she was as well. And does it really matter? Old or new. What of it? She is our sister regardless.* *Agreed,* she heard her sisters reply. *She is new to us and she is of us. That is all that matters.* *This Grove must not be moved,* M'Tehr thought to her distant sisters. *No it must not,* they replied. *It must root and grow.* *The humans will not agree. * She said to them. *They insist already that our sister be sent to us and this Grove allowed to Wither again.* *It must not wither. * Her sister's insistence resonated with her but that was not unexpected. The swelling of how the circumstances of the world to come were being felt more certainly by their kind with each passing day; a reborn Grove or one hatched newly formed. How this Grove came to be was immaterial to M'Tehr and her sisters. That it be allowed to be was their concern. *You must join with our sister there then as we discussed,* M'Tehr heard them whisper to her. *Bind yourself to her Grove until its roots are sunk so deeply that nothing will tear it from us again.* *I have a temporary Phar' ador in mind. This will be difficult though and there is no guarantee of success. The Grove may reject me. You know this is a possible outcome we spoke of before I left Morleth Phar',* she said to them. *If I am rejected, we may do great damage in our relationship with our sister. Is this still the wish of my sisters?* *It is,* they replied to her. *The risk justifies the need. Bind yourself there until she is safe. Nothing else matters, not even you. You are our will manifested in flesh and this is our will.* *I am your will,* M'Tehr echoed and felt a disconcerting solitude envelope her as they one by one began to withdraw from her distant Phar' ador. They could not be connected to her when she did what needed to be done next. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim and Mitch Day Two: 2200 hours Jim watched the dim shape of the fly tent recede in the rear-view mirror as they drove slowly through the rain out of Magnolia Circle. Mitch groaned harshly beside him. "You going to be okay?" he asked him. Mitch gently rubbed his mottled throat and muttered that he would be. The lights from the houses on the other side of the outer ring of homes evacuated on the far edge of the street winked at them through the spaces between the trees where the light could burn through the murk. The quartet of officers manning the barricade at the edge of the street met them as they approached and a pair of them shifted part of the blockade out of their path. "Where has the command post been set up sergeant?" Brighton asked the man through a crack in the window. "Around the corner Detective. At the four-way crossing where Willow and Grove streets are. Any word on what's going on that you can share? They haven't told us anything except to blockade this point, allow you and the other detective access and to report anything no matter how trivial." "Keep doing that and remember that when they say anything, they mean exactly that. I can't tell you more than that I'm afraid." "Someone has an ironic sense of humor," Mitch croaked as they drove past the men in their slickers and turned down the street. "Putting it on Grove Street I mean." "I'm sure it's just a coincidence Mitch. It is the closest central point," he answered as he carefully guided the sedan along the other checkpoints dotting the road to where the CP was supposed to be. "Is it just me or is the rain getting worse?" he said in his raspy voice as he stared at the sheets of water streaking the windows. "I think so too, so no it's not just you," he said as the glow of the lights ahead of them loomed out of the darkness and cleared into the shape of a large long tent with at least a dozen city vehicles scattered around it in various positions. The light from the sheltered interior bled around the entrance, a rectangle of dim barely blocked light framed against the darkness of the bulk of the tent. Jim turned off the engine and hurriedly opened the door. Mitch did the same and the pair of men hunched their shoulders against the elements and stepped quickly through the driving rain toward the shelter of the light. Lt. Clayton was already inside the main room when they entered. She was standing near the radio set that was placed on one of the long folding tables that had been set up in the command post. She looked up when the flap door was lifted and watched as the two men dashed inside and shook the rain off them as best they could. "I've been waiting for you two," she said catching sight of them. "Come with me," she dipped her head toward the far end of the tent and motioned for the two of them to follow her as she began walking through the crowded tent toward it. As the flap separating the smaller room from the larger one dropped into place, she motioned for them to come closer to the small folding table she was using as a desk and told them they could speak now. "The others only know that we are ordered to seal off this area," she said. "They aren't allowed to know any more details than that at this time. So, what can you tell me?" "Has Singh told you anything yet?" Jim asked her. "The only thing I know is what a Bravo three seven four protocol is supposed to contain. Any details beyond that have to be relayed to everyone else by the officers who were in contact with the occurrence. That's you three so I need you to bring me up to speed. I have an entire city leadership having kittens because of the call Singh sent out this afternoon and having a Fae rep arrive because of it isn't helping matters." "I'm not sure that you should be talking to us then," Mitch croaked. "If this goes as high up as you say, maybe you should hear it directly from Singh. I don't think we're supposed to talk about it even with you ma'am." Clayton turned her gaze on Mitch and Jim could see that she was already considering what she was going to say to him, but whatever it was going to be was set aside when she got a good look at him. "Jesus! You look like you've been dragged through the wringer by the cock Mitch," she said taking in the thick mottled ring of bruising around his neck where the root had gripped him. "And you don't look much better Jim," she added. "I'll be alright," Mitch croaked. "The hell you will be," she retorted. "As soon as we're finished here you need to go to get that checked out ASAP. Now what happened? I need to know everything you can tell me now." "I'm still not sure I should say," he answered. "I'm sorry ma'am but from what Singh said and what you've already suggested I think I need to keep quiet for now." She reached into the bag lying on the desk and drew out a thick folder before handing it to him. "That's the Bravo three seven four protocol," she said. "What you're looking for is section four, paragraph three. It's the authorization for you three as the contacting officers to brief me in full." Mitch flipped the folder open and found the passage. He looked it over and passed it to Jim. He quickly read it and then closed it before handing it back to her. "What do you need to know ma'am?" "As much as you can tell me. I know you don't know as much as Singh does but right now you know more than me and that needs to change now," she said firmly. "Mind if we sit ma'am?" Jim asked and as soon as she waved them to sit down, they both gratefully sank into the folding chairs. "Singh said that it is a Grove," Jim said. "He said what?!" she demanded rising to her feet again. The two men could see some of the color draining from her face. "He said there is a dryad in the center of it and that she is responsible for Barnes's and Phillip's disappearances. We were attacked when we were investigating and as soon as we got clear that is when he sent out the call." "Please tell me you're mistaken and he just overreacted and did not do what you just told me. Please tell me that this is just a case of Singh overreacting." "I'm afraid not ma'am," Mitch croaked again. "That nymph...she did this to me with a root that she used like a bullwhip to choke me with when she attacked. We almost didn't get out of there. If Pantra wasn't there I don't think we would have gotten free, even with what Singh did." "What did he do?" "He caused the earthquake," Jim said in a low voice. "He did it after Pantra was injured." He looked over toward Mitch. "Maybe I should take this for now. You still sound like you still have a throat full of broken glass, Mitch." Mitch nodded gratefully and Jim turned back toward the lieutenant. "We arrived and interviewed the witness to the Phillips disappearance this morning. After we completed that we went to Barnes's home to bring Singh up to speed. Singh examined the residence and determined that from what he could tell that Barnes had been forcibly removed and taken into the wooded area behind the house. He told us that he had strong indicators that whoever it was had a connection to a possible Fae origin." Lt. Clayton listened intently to Jim as he walked her through the sequence of events. With each word he could see her growing more agitated as the reality of what was going on sunk in. "We entered the wood following the same path that Detective Travers took in his initial investigation before. One the way to the back of the Barnes residence we noticed that there had been multiple changes there since yesterday." "What kinds of changes?" Clayton asked. "Incredible fast growth to the plant life there for one thing. It was practically impassible and according to Mitch it was in no way like that when he investigated it earlier," Jim answered. "Anything else?" she asked. "There was a hump of roots and vines that wasn't there the day before. Singh suspected that was what happened to Phillips after he examined the other side of Barnes's property." "How so?" "He said that he suspected that what we found was some kind of cocoon and told us to keep our eyes open for a similar one on the way back to examine it. Before we could reach it, we made contact with the nymph and he screamed at us to get out of there." "Singh screamed?" she asked. "I didn't think there was much that would get that kind of reaction from him. That man is almost a parody of unflappable." "He screamed for this, Lieutenant. We almost didn't get free. That nymph tried to capture us and nearly did. If Pantra hadn't intervened when she did, we wouldn't have gotten out of there." "We were covered in vines and we were almost unable to move when Pantra lit the vines holding us down on fire. She burned enough for us to get free." "What happened to Detective Pantra?" she asked. "She was hit by a swinging tree branch and was knocked away. She was hit pretty hard. There's no way she wasn't in a bad way after that." "She is," Clayton said. "The initial assessment I got from Mercy General is that she is in critical condition." "Any word?" Mitch croaked. He hadn't known Pantra for more than a few hours but the stress of what had happened in those hours had bound them all to her in their concern. "Surgeons are working on her now. More than that that I can't tell you now. What happened after that?" "We made our way out of there and as soon as we reached the car Singh called it in and we started the evacuation." "Did Singh say specifically that it was a Dryad?" "He did," Jim said. "The Grove representative later confirmed it when she arrived. After that we stayed on site and coordinated the blockade." "Anything else?" she asked. "It was suggested after she returned that this dryad might be responsible for all of the missing persons that have been swamping the department the last few months, but M'Tehr, the Fae the Grove sent dismissed the idea." "Why?" she asked. "What was her reasoning?" "She claimed that this dryad hadn't been awake long enough to be responsible, but I still think that we should begin cross referencing all of the outstanding files anyway. She may be trying to protect the other dryad and it's the only break that we have that could possibly connect all of the disappearances. I think we need to see where that takes us lieutenant." Jim expected that Clayton would have been all over that piece of information. There hadn't been any possible connections between the cases that had swamped them and Jim's instinct told him that, regardless of what M'Tehr said about it, there was something there. It had been driving the whole section to distraction trying to find anything that could explain the missing men once it became apparent that there had to be a connection of some kind. But Jim was surprised when she didn't seem to place as much value on this possible lead as he did. She clearly thought about it for a moment and then told him that she would have another detective team look into it later. She insisted that the fallout from today took precedence over everything else and the two of them were to concentrate only on the Barnes and Phillips disappearances as soon as things settled down. Jim took her dismissal of his suspicions quietly, but he didn't like hearing what she was saying to him. It made a certain kind of sense and he could see the merit to what she was saying, but at the same time he got the strong impression from her that there was more to it than what she was saying. He wasn't going to make an issue of it right now, but he resolved that he would look into it quietly later on himself and then bring it back when he had something more than suspicions to work with. "Where's Singh?" she asked. "He was talking with M'Tehr when we left," Jim said. "He said that he would be checking in as soon as he was done." She asked then if he had given any estimate of how long this cordon would have to be maintained. When Jim told her that it would be days at least before they could move the dryad her face fell even further than it had when they had told her what was going on. She started to objected and almost sputtered in trying to do so. She said that there was no way that they could maintain the blockade for so long without the general population finding out the reason for it. Jim agreed with her and started briefing her on the cover story they discussed and before she could object, he told her that Singh had already initiated it. "When will you be able to interview this dryad?" she asked. "She may have some valuable information even if she isn't responsible for more than just two people missing." "I think she is responsible ma'am," Jim said to her. She may have minimized and seemingly dismissed the possible connection but he didn't buy it. "And no, M'Tehr said it wouldn't be possible for us to speak with her for a few days at the earliest." Lieutenant Clayton scowled and looked like she had bitten into a lemon when Jim said that. "If it were other circumstances, I would tell you to go in and take her into custody now," she said. "That sounds like an open invitation to come up with an alibi and muddy the whole investigation beyond measure." "Normally I would agree ma'am," he said, "But in this case I think that she is telling the absolute truth. You didn't see what she was like in there. Anyone you send in there may not come out. It's better to play this the way the Grove representative suggested. And that's going to take time." "Time is something we don't have. Even with this explanation the four of you dreamed up, it won't hold for long. We need to wrap this thing up tight and drop it down the memory hole as quick as we can. Every minute that this situation persists is one more minute that we can't afford. This level exposure is unacceptable." "It may be unacceptable ma'am, but what choice do we have at the moment?" "Unfortunately, we have none," she answered. She looked at the two men. "That's enough for now I think," she said. "I'll get the rest from Singh when he comes in. Right now, the two of you are on mandatory rest. I don't want to see either of you for at least twelve hours." "Yes ma'am," Both of the men murmured in response. Neither of them was in any shape to argue against her right now. "Forensics has finished transcribing that diary you found. You both have a copy of it in your secure department account. I suggest that after your mandatory rest that the two of you look it over before coming back. Take your time with it; I want to hear your assessment of it in light of what you have uncovered here." Jim and Mitch both rose and started making their way out of the room. As they reached the door Clayton called to them and told him that if he did find anything there that suggested there might be a link to the other cases the department was investigating, they should let her know immediately. Jim said he would. Clayton repeated that she didn't think that it would amount to anything anyway but to Jim's tired ears it had the distinct sound of someone not wanting to believe it rather than someone who genuinely doubted it. The two of them left the tent and made their way to the car just outside. As they dodged the rain getting in it seemed to Jim when he considered it that she had made a special point about dismissing that there could be a larger connection in the disappearances. He didn't know why she had done so and the fact that she had done it at all struck him as wrong in some way but he couldn't see just what is was and that bothered him. He cranked the engine and pulled away slowly. He needed to get the two of them checked out at the medical tent. Mitch was looking rougher than he let on and Jim muscles were stiffening in places he didn't know he had. As they got further away from the neighborhood it seemed to him that the rain was letting up a little but he couldn't be sure. He hoped it was. It may be a good sign that it was doing that and he was tired of being wet every day anyway. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- M'Tehr Day Three: 0455 hours What M'Tehr needed to do to join with this Grove could not be done here; the physical world was ill suited for something as costly to her as this next action was going to be. She needed to be somewhere where she had access to all of who and what she was to take this step. M'Tehr entered the aether and felt the rush of that plane rising around her. She closed her eyes as she left the physical world behind and felt the comfort of the aether surround her. In the aether the branch of her Phar' ador was not a staff of polished wood that human eyes saw but a limb bursting with life, death and rebirth that moved in time with the land remembering and dreaming around her. She started to move toward the tree she had examined earlier. She would have to pass near where Jacen and her sister were seeding to get to where she must go and she needed to be careful even now. That would be a difficult thing to do in the aether, where one moment you would be obscured by ghosts both past and future and the next moment exposed and easy to see. Even in the throes of mating with Jacen she could easily lash out, even at M'Tehr a fellow sister. For her own safety she would have to pass widely around them to make her way to her goal without drawing her sister's attention. As she began to pick her way carefully across the shifting landscape, she felt a deep shudder wash across her and it caused her to freeze into immobility in reaction to the sensation. If she possessed the hair that her glamour displayed in truth, she would have felt it rising from her flesh to stand up; bristled and alarmed. The ears that she did not possess would have lain back flat against her scalp as well. Not in alarm, there was no threat that would have affected her so. It was rather, the opposite of a threat. I was the fulfillment of a connection long broken being re-forged. She felt it echo deep in her being and even with her connection with Morleth Phar' severed for the moment she was certain that her distant sisters felt the distant impact as well. M'Tehr stood silently drinking in the sensation of feeling the Grove respond to the creation of its first new dryad in only the land itself knew how long. But it would still take time for the pair of them to draw down from the apogee of their nature and during that time it would still be dangerous, even for one like her. Broken stumps thrust up to the darkened sky half hidden in drifting sands around her. She felt the soft desiccated sand sift and fall over her feet as she walked toward her destination. The slithering sound it made as it shifted to make way for her tread was loud and seemed to echo into the distance around her. In the absence of everything standing between them, Jacen and her sister were easily seen and avoided. The vision shifted and became an open field dotted with the hewn stumps of fresh cut trees. A truck of the kind that men had not used in decades was parked silently at the end of the lot, its bed loaded with logs shorn of their branches waiting to be borne away. M'Tehr blinked and opened her eyes to a primordial forest untouched by man. She heard a growl uttered in refusal nearby and reflexively turned her head toward the sound and froze into immobility. Her sister had forced Jacen off of her and the angry growl she heard had come from him. Jacen's horns curved back along his skull and dipped downward where the points of them hovered near his broad muscled back. His biceps stood out, straining against the roots she had willed to wrap around his wrists to pull him away from her. M'Tehr breathed a quiet sigh of relief at the sight. That she was asserting her dominion over him now was a positive sign. She would not have done so while she remained alone. While she was lost in her nature, she was Jacen's to do with as he pleased and even then, she had marked his hide in the depth of her nature. There were long bloody tears in his chest, face and back where she had met his fury with her own. M'Tehr had mated with satyrs many times herself and even with her reservoir of knowledge she could not fathom how it was that they drew pleasure from such injury. She supposed it was a good thing that they did though. Without their embrace of what her kind would do in such circumstances both races might have faded. M'Tehr paused and watched the two of them. Jacen's bulk overtopping the small human looking woman. He strained against the vines and growth restraining him as he continuing to thrust his engorged phallus in her direction. His face was a mask of raging undiluted lust that balked at being interrupted, but even in his fury at being denied his desire at this moment he was not to be feared. She was. Now that her sister had regained her control somewhat, she turned on her mating partner as was the nature of their kind. She turned on him not in anger or for revenge, but to establish her own rule over him as was also their nature. Satyrs may be allowed to have their way for a brief time amongst them, but not past a certain point. The order that ruled their kind must reassert itself regardless of what Jacen wanted. He strained toward her bellowing at the open sky around them. The sound one moment echoed off of the trees and then disappeared into the distance as the trees vanished. He may be the image of raging fury, but she was force incarnate. Her face had morphed from the undirected visage of a woman ruled by instincts she could not comprehend nor defeat into a maenad's mask of cruel calculation and purpose. She was no longer his plaything to do with as he chose; he was hers. M'Tehr watched in silence, still as a stone as she bridled him and pulled him down to the earth. She would still mate with him for a time but until she was finished it would now be by her choice and according to her will. It would continue only so long as she chose and it would end as she willed it. M'Tehr watched as he strained against the earth lunging up at her. She stood above his supine form and then knelt to tease and torment him. That was something M'Tehr knew intimately as well. Goading a bound satyr was something that the bellows issuing from them belied how much they enjoyed. She watched her dominate him for a few moments until she was certain her sister was once again focused on Jacen and then, when it was safe to do so, she moved on. Her sisters would demand every detail of what she had seen just now, since their separation meant that none of them could see her as she did. Jacen's bellows grew fainter behind her as she made her way to the Grove's border and then past it to the oak she had marked earlier. M'Tehr heard the shifting of small animals and birds as they moved in their slumber around her. The twitching of their limbs in their sleep meant little just now. But soon they would start to move with purpose as the sun rose again. She felt herself pass just beyond the edge of the Grove's border and paused to feel the land. It was good there. The land itself swelled in anticipation of the approaching Grove, but it had not yet been integrated with it. It was important for what she needed to do that the tree she had selected had not yet been subsumed by the Grove. It could serve her purpose but if she could gain its cooperation. Crafting a Phar' Ador, even a temporary one without the permission of the Grove's prime dryad would be impossible, but if the Grove were to incorporate one already created as it expanded there would be no need for such permission, it would be implied by accepting the tree as one of its own. It would not be long before morning would come, she thought. Already she could feel the faint warming of the air that preceded the first splinters of light before they pierced the horizon. She paused and stared at the tree she had selected, watching it flicker in the aether. She watched it sprout and grow into a sapling. She saw its forebear rising up and spreading powerful limbs over this land. She saw it cut down and rise again. This was a good choice this tree, it would have a strong resonance with this Grove. This oak was connected to this place through the generations and left alone would rival the size of any of its lineage in time. She would need that connection and the Grove was unlikely to reject it while it was there. She reached into the wood and felt the flavor of her sister in it. She had passed through this tree as well sometime recently. But she did not choose it. No, she was only traveling when she did that, she had already taken a Phar' ador by then. M'Tehr reached into the wood and felt some of the tree's lingering disappointment over not being selected by her sister and asked if it would accept a traveler like her for a time. She promised the oak that she would speak with her sister when the time came in favor of a future sister choosing such a distinguished specimen for herself and felt the gratitude that the tree offered in return. She felt the acceptance of her offer and stepped completely into its trunk folding her arms around her staff as she held it close to her breast. Her staff reached out with slender rootlets and joined with the oak. The branch grafting itself into trunk and binding M'Tehr to this place for now. She felt her awareness of the area leap into sharp relief as she anchored herself here. No longer at the end of her tether she could feel some of the pressure operating at a distance imposed on her lift away and dissipate. She thanked the oak and slowly stepped out of it. She would have to rest soon. It took effort paid for in exhaustion for what she had just done and even with the oak anchoring her now it would be a long rest. She reached out for her sisters. *It is done,* she told her sisters feeling her far off Phar' ador throb so as to draw her sister's attention back to her. M'Tehr felt their minds rise and rejoin hers as they once more merged with her heart tree in distant Morleth Phar'. She waited for all of them to indicate their presence before she told them what she had seen in the Grove's heart. From the excited tenor of their thoughts M'Tehr could tell that they had indeed felt the far-off ripple of their sister's success. *Has she resumed her true form now that she has turned on Jacen?* they asked her. M'Tehr looked back at where Jacen was being enveloped by her sister. *No,* she said. *I thought for a moment she was starting to emerge as I waited for her to focus on him again. She began to shift her appearance between the face she is using and another but it was still not clear.* *What was not clear?* her sisters asked. *Who she is. For brief moments as she brought him to heel, she was traced with the mark of her Phar' ador but it was only for a few brief moments. She remains in the form of the human female even now.* *But she has turned on him. She binds him now and soon she will feel her nature run its course,* her sisters said to her. *She has. There is no doubt that should be entertained. She is one of our kind. A human woman, especially in the aether, would not be able to bend one like Jacen as I saw her do. She is not a human woman and she is not the same as us even though. In the physical world her form is not glamour, it is her essence reflecting who she is. But in the aether her essence is in flux. She is our sister, but she is becoming something I do not recognize. Something I do not fully understand,* M'Tehr admitted. *Speak with her when she rules her nature,* her sisters told her. *It is imperative that we know fully what secrets she holds.* M'Tehr couldn't agree more. She acknowledged the command and felt them mostly slip away from her. She entered the oak again. She needed rest and the answers that would come would have to wait for until she was refreshed from the strain of all that she had done this night. If she had eyes they would have long since drooped from exhaustion. She settled into the warm wood and felt the slackening rain sinking into the earth the oak drove its roots through and the drops sliding off of the leaves overhead. Whatever her sister had to tell her when they spoke again could wait until both of them emerged. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Singh Day Two: 2300 hours The water from the heaving sky had pooled thickly on the street of the cul- de-sac. The storm drains, strained by the load they had been forced to carry since the commencement of the storm several days ago had been overwhelmed by the rush of water that had hurtled from the sky after the three of them had escaped from the Grove. Already the dark water was spreading across the pavement of the street and had submerged a couple of the lower points completely. When Singh was a child there had been a few storms like this. One of them had completely drowned a low-lying street near where his family lived and he remembered how happy he and his friends had been to suddenly have a shallow pool available to swim in until it had dried out and was gone. As he watched the water slowly creep across the pavement that long-ago pond welled up in his memory and he wondered if something similar would happen here with other children on other streets when the rains ceased to fall. It was a different time but he thought it was likely. Brighton and Travers had departed half an hour ago and M'Tehr had left to reenter the Grove about ten minutes ago. He had remained and tried to get some kind of handle on what she was telling him once she was certain that only his ears remained to hear her words. A fallen, reawakened Grove was bad enough but that could be dealt with. There were agreements in place between his people and hers; although he could not recall any instances where such agreements had needed to be enforced in his knowledge. It was the other possibility that kept him here deep in thought. A single remnant of a fallen Grove would be possible to relocate. The treaty between his people and theirs was quite clear in that regard and would be only a matter of gaining the agreement of the dryad in question and devoting the resources required to uproot and transfer her tree to a new location in the Grove reservation. It would be difficult and would possibly cause more trauma to the dryad in question, but if done properly it would be the best solution for all involved. Singh didn't think it was going to happen. The Fae negotiators had stubbornly resisted even the idea of relocation over the course of several meetings and it had taken a lot of effort and many concessions to get them to agree to this protocol. For a long time Singh had thought that, when he had been required to study both the finished treaty and the notes leading to its creation, this particular sticking point had not been so much about what they would do in the event that a fallen Grove were to reawaken as much as it had been about providing an extra layer of protection for existing Groves. That protocol had lain dormant in the text of the agreement and since it was unlikely that it would ever be needed no one, including Singh, had given much thought to it. It seemed to him the first time that he had gone over it more something that was there more as an exercise in defining an impossible scenario than something likely to have occurred, but now he wasn't so sure of that. For one thing the main focus of what they were bound to do in the event of a lost Grove being found or reawakened was based on two factors. The first was if a Grove held some remnant of its dryads in any numbers. In that case the Grove was to be kept intact; the land designated as a Grove reservation and ceded to them for that purpose. The second was only operative in the case of a single survivor. Then it was agreed, after much hard negotiation, that the dryad in question should be removed to an existing reservation. It seemed a small thing to disagree over, but the Fae had fought the very idea of relocation for a long time before they had finally conceded the point and agreed to abide by it. Now, as he thought over what was happening in the nearby Grove, he was beginning to suspect that those Fae representatives had not conceded anything at all. He racked his memory to find if there was any mention of a minimum number of dryads that had be present to forestall removal and he didn't think that it was even mentioned. The only specific item he could recall was that in the event of only a single dryad remaining they had agreed that the survivor would be evacuated. He almost admired their cleverness when he finally grasped that they had really given nothing up at all. The dryad that was causing so much difficulty in the nascent Grove was alone. By agreement she should be removed and the land restored as much as it could be too its previous owners when she was safely away. But more than one dryad was an established Grove and could not be removed. The owners of the land would have to be the ones to adjust in the case of a Grove claiming it again. The dryad in these woods was insane because she was alone. But she could only return to sanity by spawning another and when she did so the removal provisions ceased to apply since there was no longer a single survivor. There were no other provisions in the agreement he could recall that addressed the status of a Grove that contained a survivor and one spawned after revival; probably because it was considered an unlikely outcome. When M'Tehr had told him that the dryad she had contacted was not alone he could feel his throat tighten with the implications and he didn't look forward to being the messenger of them. The water on the pavement crept toward the area sheltered by the fly tent. He was tired. Much more than he had let on to Brighton and Travers. The earth and stone that had supplemented his strength was only a temporary measure and the fallout from all they had done today already weighed heavily on him. He had borrowed from the earth in great amounts to augment his strength today and now the bill was coming due. Singh reached for the radio on the table and instructed the CP to send a minimal team to break down the tent and collect him. Once they acknowledged he sat in the chair to wait for their arrival and he tried to formulate what he had to say into words. Lt. Clayton would not be pleased to hear his initial assessment and her displeasure was only going to be the tip of that particular spear. He watched the headlights of the approaching truck creep through the deeper water over by where the level of the street dipped in a slight angle toward the storm drain. The splatter of raindrops on the water's surface was obscured momentarily by the tires moving through the six-inch groundswell of water that the drain could no longer handle. He told the driver to turn around and leave the engine running while they loaded up. The less time that they were in the vicinity the better it would be for them in his opinion. M'Tehr and Jacen may have drawn away the attention of the revived hamadryad for now, but he still didn't want to leave these men this close to her any longer than necessary. One of the men slipped on the wet pavement and sprawled into the gathering water while they were breaking down the equipment. Singh could hear him cursing about it as he got to his feet and picked up what he was carrying. It only took a few minutes to clear the area, but for him it seemed to take much longer. That was more because he was more attuned to the danger that the men were in, he supposed. When the last load of gear was lashed into the bed of the truck, he heaved a sigh of mental relief and climbed into the crew cab of the truck. He watched the water engulf the space that the fly tent had sheltered behind them in the mirror as it pulled away. The only sign it had been there now was the parked car that Jacen and M'Tehr had arrived in still resting silently in the middle of the street. The deep throbbing of the truck's diesel engine gave a low growling counterpoint to the higher pitched steady spatter of rain when the driver stopped by the command post and Singh clambered out of the cab. The driver had paused long enough for him to exit and make his way to the long tent that had been pitched in the empty front yard of a house that in years past had been where one of the mill supervisors had once resided. The deep roar of the departing truck as it pulled away blended with the murmur of noise inside the tent. Singh blinked his eyes at the brightness of the lamps suspended from the ridgepole as he entered and asked one of the officers where he could find Lt. Clayton. The man, a desk sergeant pressed into service to augment the sudden need for manpower dipped his head toward the right half of the tent, told him she was over there and then went back to monitoring the radio. The chatter of men speaking as they coordinated the cordon thrown around the Grove hummed around him, a buzzing hive of activity even as what they contained appeared still and silent. As he made his way back toward the sectioned off portion of the tent some of the officers made way for him as he weaved between them and he dipped under the canvas divider hanging there that formed a small room separate from the crowded space of the main room. Lt. Clayton looked up at him as he flipped the fabric door to one side. "I was wondering how long it would be until you got here," she said. "I just sent Brighton and Travers home a few minutes ago. They both look like hell, but right now I think you have them beat by a few miles." "They only have to deal with the physical part of today," Singh answered. "I have to deal with what is coming." "And what is that?" Clayton asked him apprehensively. "We have a confirmed Grove Lieutenant. It's there and it's growing. Right now, it's confined to the space between the houses but its spreading and it will continue to spread." "Shit!" she swore in frustration. "Brighton and Travers told me a little about that when they checked in," she said, "And I've been paying attention to the radio chatter since I got on the scene while I've been waiting for you here. But I was so hoping that you were wrong about that initial assessment." Her phone beeped and she glanced down at the text message on it before putting it back on the folding table. "Every city official in Stafford has been calling me and until now I haven't had a thing, I could tell them other than a Bravo three seven four was issued by one of our special detectives and I have nothing more than that to tell them presently. They're not happy about that one little bit Singh and what you told right now isn't going to make them any happier." "There's nothing any of them can do except adapt for the time being while this is sorted out," Singh answered her. "You know that you're the first person to initiate a Bravo three seven four on the southeastern seaboard since the Methuen water demon back in 1963." "No, I didn't know that," Singh answered her wearily and had to think for a moment to identify which case that she was referring to. He didn't have to think about it for long though. It was one that came easily to mind, even if the mind in question was as exhausted as Singh's was. In 1963, in the town of Methuen, what was referred to as a water demon had begun plaguing the family of the house she had awakened near. The freezing water that started springing from the walls of the home was a confusing curiosity as well as a nuisance at first. It soaked possessions, floors, walls and people without explanation. It was confusing for the family and initial investigators from the very beginning because the water was ice cold and the outside temperature was not low enough to account for how cold the frigid water erupting in the home actually was. Moreover, there was no evidence that the piping itself had suffered any damage nor was there any other apparent source for the water to spring from. The nuisance part was that the water kept leaking in greater quantities with each occurrence the longer that the phenomenon persisted; eventually the frequency of the leaks drove the family to leave the house to stay with a nearby relative. The idea that there was something different about this family's flooding problem was cemented when the water demon followed them and continued to plague them there as well. Gaining no peace by leaving they gained less by returning. When the family returned to their house they found that the initial streams of water that had occasionally caused jets to spring from the walls and splatter everything up to two feet away from them had been subsumed by pulses of water that would emit gallons of freezing water for twenty seconds at a time even with all water connections to the house were shut off and severed. The problem remained unresolved and with the phenomenon following them wherever they went to, the family was forced to return to the home over and over and endure the escalating situation until the source of the problem was identified. Once all physical reasons were exhausted, they turned in desperation to supernatural causes. The family was lapsed Catholic so it was natural for them to turn to the church at first. Exorcisms were authorized by the cardinal and attempted, but only when the family became desperate enough to forgo their disbelief in the ability of such things to help them. They found it hard to believe that was even possible, but even then, their efforts proved unable to change the outcome in any fashion. Eventually government investigators attracted to the unusual nature of the case realized that they were dealing with Fae and not supernatural sources in this instance. When they were able to make some form of contact they found that the source of the entire incident was a naiad who had gone into hibernation during what the Fae called the Withering and she had awakened to find that not only had her river shifted; it had been channeled and rerouted to supply water to the area to such an extent that it had ceased to exist as a separate body of water. This enraged her and she retaliated against those she saw as responsible. The Fae who could help were summoned and over the next few weeks they slowly coaxed her out of the house and away from the people who lived there. The fragmented mind of the naiad had focused on the family there as the source of her home's dissolution and it was why she had followed them when they left. Once she was convinced that the people, she was plaguing were not responsible for the state of her waterway she was eventually convinced to leave. The investigators gave out to the public that the phenomena were the result of excess moisture build up and left the story to fade away into a local curiosity and be forgotten. The incident did have one long lived effect though. After 1963 the possibility of such an occurrence having happened once spawned a revamp of department procedures resulting in the creation of the entire Bravo call sign system of response. Singh had rarely had to invoke anything higher than Bravo ninety-four before today and he didn't look forward to having to deal with the civil sector fallout that was coming in addition to handling this situation. "I doubt that I'll be the last one to need to do so," he said to her trying to impress on her the gravity of the situation by his weary bearing and the tone of his voice. The Lieutenant was a cop, but she was also a politician to some degree and law enforcement was not the entirety of her concerns in matters such as this. She asked him why he said that this particular way and he gave her a quick summary of what M'Tehr had told him. Paying particular emphasis to the gradually strengthening presence of magic in the aether, what the Fae like her called the Blooming. It wasn't the first time that Singh had this particular conversation with her though. He had brought it to her attention several times before now and while she didn't dismiss what he was saying he could tell that part of her was still blindly hoping that he was just being overly sensitive and cautious. "It's going to be bad Lieutenant," he said, "and the thing is that I got a strong impression from M'Tehr that there was more to this than she said to me as well." "What do you think the crux of it is?" she asked him. "I don't know," he answered. "I just know that she already knows more than she is telling us and whatever it is has shaken her. She wouldn't have let slip what she did if she hadn't been disturbed by whatever it is that she saw in there." Lt. Clayton pursed her lips. The idea that it was worse than it already appeared was bothering her deeply but she had to know its full extent. She braced herself and asked him if what Brighton and Travers had told her so far about how the dryad had reacted was accurate. He told her a few more details to confirm it and watched her face fall as she absorbed the entirety of the situation. "I was hoping that you were overreacting," she said finally. "I was hoping that after what they told me when you came in that this is something that could be cleared out in a few days and quickly forgotten." "That's not going to happen," the detective told her. "This isn't going to be swept away in a few days and in all likelihood, it's going to be a major factor on our part to contain the fallout from today. I recommend that we institute the cover story that Detective Travers came up with immediately. We get ahead of this story and we go ahead with the managed conspiracy theory as well to keep eyes directed elsewhere as long as possible. We're going to need all the breathing room we can squeeze out of it in the next few days." "I gathered as much when Brighton gave me his initial briefing. I just hoped that it wouldn't be necessary," she said rubbing her forehead just over her eyes to reduce the muscle tension that had gathered there while she was waiting for them and had suddenly increased when Singh confirmed its severity a moment ago. She dropped her hand and looked up at Singh. "But I'm not the one who has to deal with it completely at least. Protocol says that you're in charge until the federal response team arrives even after briefing me. So, what do we do now?" she asked trying to convey her slight amusement at her subordinate suddenly being elevated to her superior in the chain of command as well as the slight relief not being on the spot afforded her. "When are they expected to be here?" Singh asked. "Their advance section already is on the way. I got the call from them just after the Grove representative arrived," she answered. "They should be here sometime after dawn tomorrow." "We need to continue to lay the groundwork for the F.R.T. then," Singh said in his slow deliberate manner. "We have to maintain the blockade of this area and maintain contact with M'Tehr for as long as is needed for now. We still need to nail down all the details so we can give a believable cover story to the population and we need to start preparing for what is coming for every day after tomorrow." "And what do you think that might be?" she asked him. "How do you see this playing out?" "Among other things, the possibility that this Grove may become a permanent part of Stafford," Singh told her. The lieutenant's breathing hissed inward through her teeth. "That's not good," she said gesturing for him to take one of the folding seats. "Why do you think that is even a possibility?" "M'Tehr told me there was a second mind in the Grove before she left and after she told me that I had some other things to consider as well before I came in." "What things?" she asked him. "Specifically, how the agreement with the Fae about how things of this nature are supposed to play out. I think that we may be bound to keep her here regardless of what we might want to do." "The agreement says she goes. She's the only one so it shouldn't even come to anything more than a few days of this," Clayton said. Singh shook his head. "But there is not only one from what we've been told," And he started laying out what he had been thinking over and how it might apply to them based on what the facts were as he saw them. From the amount of denial that he heard from Clayton in response he figured that he had called his shot correctly so far. "Christ it's a fat dress question times infinity," she said as she leaned back into her chair stunned by the possibilities scrolling through her mind. Singh hadn't been involved very much romantically very often. His abilities as a shaman and the work he did with the department precluded him from sharing hardly anything meaningful about his life with any potential intimate partner. With so much of what he did off limits to others he had found that, without meaning to do so, Pantra had shifted into that position in his life even though there was nothing physical possible between them. Clayton looked at his quizzical expression and asked him how he had never heard of that expression before. When he reminded her of why that was, she dropped the matter, but he could see a brief flash of comprehension over how solitary his life really was flash over her face before she suppressed it and moved into explaining herself. "It means that there are no answers you can possibly give that won't mean trouble for you. If your girlfriend or wife asks you if something, she's wearing makes her look fat, the only thing you can do is choose your flavor of pain and take it," she said. "Why? That doesn't make any sense." "It makes perfect sense. It's a damned catch-22," she said. "If you tell her no, that dress doesn't make her look fat and it does, she's going to find out real fast that you lied and then you are going to get it in the neck. On the other hand, if you do the stupid thing and say yes it does, you catch hell for it right away for drawing her attention to the fact that it makes her look fat, whether she is or not. And even remaining silent is a dumb thing to do because then she'll get her tail twisted because you ignored her. So, nothing but trouble see?" "I see what you mean," he said. "And you're right. It's exactly like that." "Singh, we've managed to keep the Fae and what it means that they are real and not imagination separate from the general awareness of the public for a good long time. I'd like to be able to continue to do that and you know that a lot of levels above our pay grade want that as well." "I don't think we can," he said. "This is just the tip of the spear Lieutenant and we won't be able to change that. We just have to deal with it," Singh watched the grim expression settle on Clayton's face. The seriousness of what they were into made her look much older than she was and he could see a hint of what he woman she would become would look like. It was a hard thing to face for anyone and in addition to that there were their own personal concerns that would flavor the larger ones. "Is there any news on Pantra's condition?" he asked her. Clayton seemed only a bit relieved to switch topics for now. "She's already at the Mercy General," she said and watched as his shoulders sagged slightly with relief. "How is she?" he asked. "Surgeons are working on her now, but the last time I was given an update they told me that there was strong possibility that she would lose a wing. They hope to save it but you know it's always tricky when the Fae is involved." Singh's shoulders tightened again. "I'll be heading there after the F.R.T. takes over then." "I expected that you would say that Armin," she said gently. "I hate to ask this of you, but I'm going to need you at the precinct to update me on the status of the operation as soon as they relieve you and you check in on her. I'd like to send you home as soon they cut you free here but I can't." "I'll manage," he said wearily. "I still want you to have at least twelve hours of downtime as soon as you're clear for the moment." "You won't get any objection from me," he said. "Are you going to be able to handle things until the F.R.T. arrives and takes over?" she asked him. "You look like you're about to keel over as it is. If policy didn't put you in charge, I'd order you home for some rest like I did with Brighton and Travers." "Just get me a cot while I'm here and tell them to let me know if anything changes in the boundary situation, if M'Tehr or Jacen comes out or anything happens to change Pantra's condition," he said tiredly. Lt. Clayton nodded. She didn't think that he would take the chance to leave even if she asked him. She had known Singh since she had taken command of her section and she knew that he wouldn't hesitate to push himself when it was necessary to do so. She called to one of the officers in the next room and told them to bring a cot to the room for Singh. As he waited for it to be brought in, she asked again if he could handle his duties. Singh knew that it was part of the protocol and assured her that he could. She gave him a long silent evaluation and, in her gaze, he could see that she really didn't believe him completely. She got up and headed for the panel dividing the small room from the main one and told him that she would be here for a while longer if he couldn't continue after all. "Remember twelve hours rest minimum," she repeated to him as she let the heavy material fall behind her and walked away. She had to bring others into the loop now that she had finally spoken with all officers involved in the affair and she had something concrete to pass on to them. The officer was bringing a portable cot in to set up while Lt. Clayton left Singh in the room behind her. Singh thanked him as he set it up and took off his torn and earth stained suit jacket and draped it over the folding chair. When the officer finished and left the room, he lay down on the stiff army surplus cot that the department used now that he was alone and allowed his left arm to hang over one side. His fingers brushed against the ground sheet and he felt some of earth's strength begin to flow slowly into him as he rested. He was exhausted but this would do to keep him going for now. Lt. Clayton walked out of the tent and made her way through the downpour to where she had parked her car when she had arrived. The steady drumming of the water on the cars roof almost made a loud enough tempo to drown out any chance of her being overheard. She slipped into her car, closed the door and reached into an inner pocket of her jacket to draw out the small disposable phone she kept there. She dialed the single number and waited for it to be answered. When the ringing ceased and she confirmed who she was speaking to she looked around quickly through the rain stained windows out of habit and told the receiver that the package had been located but due to circumstances it was now impossible to retrieve. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- M'Tehr and Jacen Day Three: 1140 hours Jacen grunted roughly as he struggled with his bonds at M'Tehr's feet. Some of the vines had been cast off since she had seen him bridled, but only a few. "I have sired a hundred of your kind and half as many of mine my Lady," Jacen said grunting as he shook off another set of roots still binding him to the earth, "And rarely have I experienced a coupling like the one your sister inflicted on me. Even now she is fury barely kept in check I think." M'Tehr looked down thoughtfully at the satyr as he struggled to loosen the last remaining vines and roots from himself. She had rested until long after the sun stood overhead before leaving her temporary Phar' ador and sometime while she had done so her sister had tired of Jacen and left him lashed to the earth while she retired to her own elm to rest. M'Tehr could not assist Jacen in freeing himself. That was his task now and for some reason satyrs took great perverse pride in how much effort a dryad used in bending him to her purpose. M'Tehr supposed that they viewed it as some sort of confirmation of their potency when it took hours for them to work themselves free afterwards. They were a strange breed of Fae she thought each time she saw them like this. "I felt her spark," M'Tehr said quietly. "Yes, it happened just before dawn," Jacen acknowledged worrying at a thick root curling over his abdomen. She tired of me not long after that." "So, it is done then?" M'Tehr asked. "It is done," Jacen answered grunting as he lifted the root free. He curled the twisted wood away from his body and wriggled out from under it. He was almost free now. "Will we be returning to Morleth Phar' then?" he asked. "No," M'Tehr answered. "The sisters there have other more important tasks for us. We remain here for the time being." "For how long? " he asked straining to move another root. "Until this Grove is rooted as deeply as Morleth Phar'," she answered him. "The humans will oppose that my lady," he said finally slipping free of the last net of entangling roots. "I listened to them while I waited for you to return. They are determined to restore this Grove to what it was before it emerged." "They will not be allowed to interfere. The Grove will be restored. My sisters have already decided this," M'Tehr said firmly. "They will still resist. It's part of their nature," Jacen said quietly. "Their resistance is immaterial. It will be swept away. This Grove will endure." M'Tehr looked away from Jacen toward the elm. "She is not what we thought is she?" she said changing the subject. "No, she isn't," Jacen said. "I would have thought that she would have resumed her true form while you coupled," M'Tehr said trying to broach the subject that had occupied her thoughts since seeing her sister emerge from the elm. "No nymph would maintain such a seeming for long once they began to breed." "She did show her true form," Jacen said looking at the elm tree. "It's just not what you think it should be my lady," he said. "She is an enigma," M'Tehr said. "She is more than that," Jacen answered. "How do you mean?" she said, her gaze moving from the tree to fall fully on him. "She is like no dryad I have seeded," he said. "When she turned on me. When she bent me to her desire, she did not just spend her fury and her need on me. She took from me as well." "She took from you?" M'Tehr asked puzzled by what he could mean. "She did. I felt her drawing animus from me. Great draughts of it while we were coupling. She was drinking it almost," he said. "Strange that you say this, the man she took. The one that the shaman told me that they were looking for when they encountered her. He was almost drained completely of animus as well when I found him," she said. "Easier to do that with his kind than with mine," Jacen said. M'Tehr rose and walked slowly to the elm. She passed her hand into the wood and rested it on her sleeping sister's form. She was still deeply sunk in slumber. M'Tehr felt her shift slightly and then removed her hand from the elm's trunk. "She should not have done that," M'Tehr said. "It should not be possible for her to do such a thing as that." "She should not, but she has," Jacen said. M'Tehr knelt beside the elm and remained there unmoving and unspeaking for a while. "She is not what we think she is," she said finally. "Does it matter my lady?" Jacen asked coming over to squat beside her next to the elm. "No, it doesn't. No matter how unexpected she is in her nature we will still protect her. Whatever the cost." "If she is not what you think she is why do that then?" Jacen asked. "Because we must," M'Tehr said and resumed waiting in silence for her sister to emerge. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Singh Day Three: 0650 hours The Federal Response Team arrived just after dawn. There were just under a dozen men and women in the group. Agent Carla Fitzhugh identified herself as the agent in command and Singh was very glad to see her when she walked through the doors of the tent in the pre-dawn grey that the sun had barely managed to pierce with its murky light. Singh hadn't slept very long on the cot nor had he slept deeply while he was there. It wasn't that there was a sudden influx of reports or other demands to keep his attention; the border of the Grove remained static throughout the rest of the night and there was not yet any word from M'Tehr as to the status of the wild dryad that was contained in the Grove itself or of the two men still kept within its borders. It was the potential for something to happen that kept him from sleeping too deeply as the night passed though the hours. Lt. Clayton had left several hours before after telling him that he was to make certain that he took at least twelve hours off to rest as soon as the F.R.T. had taken things in hand. Agent Fitzhugh closeted herself with him in the small makeshift office so he could brief her before leaving the command post. The sudden demand that the invocation of a Bravo three-seven- four had placed on department resources had been a strain on them and he was very glad to see them here now. One of the younger officers, impossible to tell which one had made the sound of someone breaking wind as the two of them left the main room. He could see her brow furrowing in disapproval as the two of them entered the office and even in his exhausted state he didn't blame her for doing so. "There's always someone with a juvenile sense of humor," she fumed as she sat in the folding chair beside Singh. "Yes, there is," Singh commiserated. "One would think that when they assign acronyms for task forces such as this one, they would take such things into account." "Well they don't," she said. "So what do we have here?" she asked. Singh detailed in his slow meticulous fashion all that had occurred since detectives Brighton and Travers and he had arrived to investigate the Barnes property. Much of what he told her she already had been briefed on while she was enroute, but the additional details that he provided, especially concerning his firsthand experience with ward placed around Barnes's home and with the Grove itself seemed to strike her as firmly as they had himself. He asked her when additional forces would be arriving and she told him that state police detachments were already beginning to relieve the city officers who were maintaining the perimeter around the Grove as they spoke and additional agents were already on the way to supplement them as well. He thanked her and was not surprised to hear from her that he had been seconded to the task force as liaison with M'Tehr based on keeping some degree of continuity in place. After a few more housekeeping details were exchanged and she briefed him about the scope of the operation now that the F.R.T. was here he provided her with contact information for himself and both of the absent detectives. He told her that he would be at the hospital checking on his partner for now and left her in charge in the small room. An officer he didn't know drove him to the hospital in a black and white. Now that daylight was fighting its way through the hazy morning and he was released from his position of overall authority over the Grove cordon he could attend to one of the things that had been keeping him awake for the last few hours. Pantra was now out of surgery and had been moved to the ICU for the time being and as important as giving Clayton those updates were to her, he had no intention of doing so until he had checked on Pantra's status personally. The lieutenant had obviously been floored by the scope of the situation and as important as keeping her in the loop was, she wasn't fool enough to think that he would do anything other than what he was doing right now. As the car slowly made its way along the rain-soaked streets his main concern was if the injury she had sustained would trigger her metamorphosis. It was a distinct possibility and the idea that it would be forced on her as a result of injury in the line of duty didn't sit well with him. Although she appeared much younger than him, she had been the senior member of their partnership ever since he was a rookie. The years they had spent working together had forged the two of them into a single unit and there were few that he knew that he could honestly say that he was as close to as Pantra. Having her metamorphosis triggered this way would end that partnership and he had to suppress the deep feelings of dread that the possibility churned up within him. He had asked her once, just after they had been partnered for a few years why he had never met any male pixies on the department roster. She had made a sour look when he asked that and told him it was a preference of her breed of Fae and told him to leave it alone. Seeing her reaction, he dropped it and didn't speak of it again with her until she broached the subject during one of the few times; he had seen her well and truly drunk. The entire reason that they had even spoken of it at all was they were talking about what he was going to do when he eventually had to retire from the force. The possibility was more than a few years away when she broached the topic and he was curious why she thought it worth bringing up at all. She called him a jackass and reminded him that as far as she was concerned the few years that he had left may as well have been a few weeks and she was curious about what he had in mind. The fact was that he hadn't really considered it past the financial aspect of his pension and the few investments he had managed to make so far. As for what he would actually do with his time beyond a few ideas that were little different than what he would do on a vacation he hadn't considered it that much. He asked her what she would do when she finally hung up her badge and was surprised to hear her become very quiet in response. Usually Pantra was a lively creature and drinking amplified that aspect of her personally so hearing her become a quiet bordering on morose was not what he expected from her. "Retirement is the end for me," she said gloomily after she finally broke her silence. "I won't be me anymore." Singh had been shocked to hear her put it that way and pressed her to explain what she meant by that. Not every cop that hung up their shield was able to make that adjustment and the idea that Pantra already looked at herself as one of their number was disturbing to him. Even drunk she was not that forthcoming and he had to slowly work it out of her. When she admitted that she would cease to exist as she was, he at first didn't understand what she meant by that. It was only later in the conversation that he understood that she would be forced to step down after her metamorphosis; after she became male. Male pixies were not as numerous as female ones and due to that scarcity, her breed of Fae was particularly protective of them. They were larger than their female counterparts and in some ways were even more intelligent, but the process of becoming male was in some ways traumatic for them. He asked her once she opened up what the difference really was and didn't expect her to tell him as much as she had spoken of. The metamorphosis started when they lost their wings. Male pixies were flightless and had a lesser connection with the elemental forces that pixies could tap into. That made them more vulnerable. Pixie custom was for a male to take a more protected role after the change, not because they were considered lesser, but because they had become more valuable to their sisters. It was out of a desire to safeguard them that they found themselves circumscribed in what they could do and Pantra had no desire to live her life in that fashion just yet. The car stopped and Singh looked out of the rain streaked passenger window to the main entrance of Mercy General. He asked the officer to find him after he had parked and went inside. As he mounted the wet steps, he hoped that her wings hadn't been as badly damaged as they appeared to be. He didn't know what he would do if he lost Pantra. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim and Mitch Day Two: 2347 hours The steady thump of the windshield wipers beat out a steady staccato of motion as they moved over the rain swept glass. He hadn't been sure at first but now he was. The rain was definitely slackening the further that they moved away from the Grove's influence. He stole a quick glance over at his partner sitting beside him. Mitch was leaning against the coolness of the window his eyes half closed. The flash of a pair of oncoming headlights splayed across his face; the brief light illuminating the mottled band of bruising around his throat making the darkened flesh stand out in high relief against the paler flesh of his neck. "Are you sure you want to go straight home Mitch? Andrea will want to skin me for not taking you there the moment you tell her you didn't go to the hospital," he said. "Leave it Jim," he said answering him without opening his eyes. "If I need to go, I'll have her take me in. She's going to be up all night fretting over me the moment she sees me anyway. And if she is inclined to skin anyone it'll be me. You she'll just rake over the coals with her tongue." Andrea was an outspoken woman. In all the time that he had known her she had never hesitated to light into either of them when they were doing something stupid like treating her like some delicate curio that might be broken at the slightest touch. In a way it was kind of endearing rather than annoying since she only did such a thing with people that she cared for. Jim had figured that out the first time she had shown him how rough the sandpaper that coated her tongue could be when he crossed one line too many. "I think I'd rather have her skin me," Jim retorted. "You should go in though. You look like someone tried to lynch you and that can't be just surface damage." Jim thought that Mitch was going to ignore him and was considering how he could change his partner's mind without causing the man to lash out at him as some mother hen type when he finally replied. "Andrea's been waiting for me since I called her and told her that the situation was going to keep me there and I didn't know how long I would be. She heard the change in the sound of my voice and she already knows I'm not a hundred percent. If you take me to the hospital now all it's going to do is keep me from getting back to her and the longer, I'm gone the more her anxiety is climbing." Mitch gently rubbed his throat and winced slightly at the touch of even that ginger touch. "The EMT's gave me a once over already. If it was serious enough, they would have taken me to Mercy General on the spot. I need to get back to her Jim. She knows I'm hurt already and if she is the one to take me in if it's needed it will go a long way toward letting her feel she has some control over what's going on instead of feeling helpless. She needs this Jim. She needs it and I need her to have it." It was the longest explanation that Jim had heard from him since his injury was inflicted. While they were waiting for the hamadryad to arrive, he had rarely spoken until he needed to speak and even then, once he said what was needed to be said he had resumed his silence. Jim could tell that this was something that his partner felt strongly about and he would let it go. "Don't try to tough it out," he said. "You feel the least bit off you have her take you in," he insisted. "I don't need to," he said. "She'll try to have me on my way there before your car is around the corner if I know her. She needs to be part of it like that and I won't take that from her. What I really need most of all is rest, same as you." "That's a point that you won't get any argument from me over," Jim agreed. "I can't remember the last time I felt this whipped." "I can," Mitch rasped. "It was the Simmons case." "Right," Jim answered. "The Simmons case." There wasn't anything more that could be said about the Simmons case. What looked like a garden variety runaway teen had turned into a complicated mess that had resulted in a running gunfight with the southern branch of a human trafficking ring. Jim remembered each time he had to squeeze the trigger in the line of duty and the Simmons case was one of the worst instances that he had experienced. By the time he turned onto Mitch's street his partner had already started to softly snore in his corner. Jim didn't begrudge him getting a jump start of the rest that both of them needed so badly at the moment. Considering what was waiting for him at the house midway down the street it was probably the only rest he was going to get until Andrea was satisfied that he was really alright. After she finished exploding at the two of them that is. He eased the car into the empty part of the driveway. Mitch's car was still at the station where he had left it when he reported in this morning. So was Jim's for that matter, but then it wouldn't be the first time either of them had ended up taking their department vehicle home after a long day either. He saw a shadow moving behind the curtain of the window where the living room faced the street and reached over and nudged Mitch awake. "Head's up partner," he said to him. "We got incoming," Mitch jerked his shoulder where Jim had nudged him and slowly swiveled his head toward the tall redhead who was already stalking across the wet lawn toward them. Jim cracked open the door and felt his joints pop as he stood up. "He's going to be okay Andrea," he said to the woman as she rounded on him. "I'll be the judge of that," she snapped at him and skipped nimbly around his effort to intercept her. She moved around the front of the car and was already opening the passenger door before Jim could do more than duck back down and shoot his partner an 'I'm sorry, I tried' look. She saw the mottled flesh around her husband's neck and Jim could almost see the gears shift in her mind as the pent-up worry found its outlet and started spilling from her mouth. "Mitchell Avery Travers where the hell do you get off telling me you got hurt but it's nothing," he voice had raised an octave or two when she said that. She did that every time anything happened to either of them on the job. It may sound to someone else like she was taking out her anger on him but Jim knew it was really just her concern talking. "It is nothing Andrea," Mitch protested feebly. "Just let me get inside. I just need some rest and it really just looks worse in the dark is all. You'll see honey." "Oh no you did not just 'you'll see honey' me!" she shot back. "You look like someone tried to unscrew your head and Jim looks like he went four rounds with a wood chipper." Jim had come around the car to help Mitch inside. He didn't need it but with Andrea's fuse well and truly lit any little bit that would help bleed off her head of steam and let her focus on him and not just the relief she felt that her worst fears had come up short was what needed to happen now. "And you!" she said shifting her focus to Jim. "My husband may try to sneak this kind of crap past me but I expected better from you. You should have called me!" "It wouldn't have changed anything baby," Mitch said leaning onto Jim's shoulder slightly. "You couldn't have come down there and I couldn't have left. Don't hit Jim over this, I told him it was better to let me call you." "Right this is so much better. I feel like floating I really do. Thank you so much Jim," she snapped at them even as she was clinging to Mitch as Jim walked him into the house. She sent a burning glance over Mitch's head at Jim and even knowing how she really felt he couldn't help flinching as she muttered "Asshole" at him. "Seriously honey," Mitch said as they helped him into the house. "Dial it down. I know you're not really mad, but I'm going to be alright. I really am. I already told Jim when he tried to talk me into going to the hospital that if they needed me to go, I'd be there already. You can let it go. I'm home. I'm knocked around but I'm safe. I didn't leave you." Andrea deflated a bit and hovered over him. "You better not," she choked at him. She looked over him one more time to be sure and turned to Jim who was still standing by the couch where he had dropped Mitch onto. "Thanks Jim. I know you probably did try to get my Mitch to go." "I did," Jim said quietly. "But he insisted that he get back here." Her head swiveled back to Mitch. "You're going to the hospital. No buts," she said firmly. "Give me till morning hon," Really, I'm alright and if that changes, I'll be the first one to tell you different. Honest." "Alright. In the morning then," she said grudgingly. She stepped back from them. Jim felt her wheels spinning as she looked at the two of them and matched what she saw to what she had heard already. "This has something to do with that gas explosion in Olympia doesn't it. That's what happened to both of you isn't it?" she blurted at them. "Yes, it does Andrea," Jim answered. "We were both in the middle of it. It's a case and I can't really tell you any more than that." "How did one of your cases end up in the middle of a gas main rupturing?" she demanded. "You're both in missing persons not counter-terrorism." "We were in the area when that earthquake hit," Jim said. "That ruptured the main. After we got up and made sure everything was in one piece we got caught up in the evacuation, that's all." "What did that to his neck?" It looks like someone tried to strangle him!" she demanded. "The blast wrapped a piece of garden hose around his neck. I thought it was going to be much worse when I checked him out just afterward Andrea, but he's right. It looks much worse than it is." "You're damned right it does," she said shifting her focus back to Mitch. "And if you think you're going back into work tomorrow I'll cuff you to the damned bed," she said to him. "No worries there," Jim said. "Lieutenant Clayton ordered us both not to come in tomorrow. I think that she'd have us chucked out of the precinct if either of us dared show our faces there right now." Jim started moving toward the door. "Since you two are good for now, I'm going to get back to my place guys," he said, "I'll be by later tomorrow Mitch to take you in to pick up your car." "You do that Jim," he said wearily in that raspy tone he had been speaking with since this afternoon. As he shut the front door behind him, he heard Mitch tell her that the handcuff idea had some possibilities and heard her laugh for the first time since they had pulled into the driveway. It was a high titter of relief that was punctuated by her telling him that she didn't think he was up for it even if he was remotely serious. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- M'Tehr and Jacen Day Three: 1500 hours M'Tehr shifted her gaze slowly over her sister's naked back. The bare skin was marked only with dappled sun spots that managed to work their way through the canopy of leaves overhead and fall on her where she sat on the earth below. The spots moved with the sighing of the wind overhead. A product of how the breeze shook the leaves and made the light dance below. The clouds that still hung leaden overhead were breaking now. Dispersing and letting shafts of sunlight lance down from where they parted to dry the sodden world below. The storm, like the grip of her feral nature had broken not long after Jacen had seeded her sister within her. With her mind reasserting its control so too did the impact that her nature had on the world around them dissipate when the instinct that had called it into being faded away. Her sister had yet to speak meaningfully even after she had emerged. She was still integrating her sense of self in light of what her hibernation and her nature had wrought on her awareness. She made no comment or objection when M'Tehr asked her if she would allow the visiting Hamadryad to examine her. M'Tehr and Jacen had both resumed their glamour now that they would be dealing with a conscious mind. Their human appearance seemed to set her sister at ease and for the sake of gaining her trust keeping the illusion in place was a small enough price for them to pay. M'Tehr was slowly parting the thick mane of black hair that tumbled from her scalp and flowed along her spine in search of the Grove mark that had so far eluded her. "Have you found it?" her sister asked her in a small monotone voice. A child's voice, hesitant and afraid of consequences that imagination had unleashed to grow in stature and threat in her mind. She sensed that M'Tehr finding her Grove mark was of utmost importance even as she had no idea why that it should be. "No," M'Tehr said softly. As gently as she could manage even with frustration building over her failure to find it. "Not yet sister," she said. "What does it mean if you don't find it?" she asked in a small, hesitant voice. "Maybe nothing," M'Tehr answered her continuing to look through the thick hair. "Maybe everything. Can you yet remember anything from before yet?" she said, hoping to get a different answer this time. Each time she asked there had been nothing she could tell her, but M'Tehr still did so. "Not quite," the woman answered. "There is something there. I feel it there, but I don't know what it is. It has some meaning for me but I can't place it. It dances on the edge of my memory but when I look for it, it flies away. I'm sorry." The strange dryad had apologized over and over to M'Tehr as they had gone over this topic with gentle probing questions since she had awakened. Each time she did so M'Tehr reassured her that it was of little consequence and that the answers would come to her in time. But inside, in the private recess of her inner mind where even her sisters could not hear she was starting to despair that this unknown sister would ever recover anything that would point them in the direction where the knowledge they sought was laired wherever it was that it had hidden itself away in her mind. M'Tehr parted the mass of hair away from the last part of her scalp she was examining and told her again that she was not to let this bother her if she could do so. She walked around her and leaned down to seat herself of the mass of roots that rose unbidden from the earth to form a seat for her. When she had arranged herself in the degree of comfort that she preferred she turned her human face back respectfully toward where her sister was seated in a similar fashion. The only difference was that the seat that the roots had created for her was far more detailed. "And you are sure that this is not it?" the dryad asked her again pointing at her wrist. The 'it' in question was the stylized outline of a rose. It started with a thorny stem winding around her wrist and climbing up the inside of her arm to bloom just at the junction of where the inside of her elbow was. It was for all appearance little different from how a human woman would choose to adorn herself and M'Tehr, although she did not know why such a design was there had no explanation for why it was. "It is strange that you have that on you but no sister, that is not the mark I am looking for," she repeated. Now that M'Tehr had finished her examination of her sister's body and moved away the roots that formed her chair had risen up and woven their woody stems into a high back that overtopped her sister's head and supported her back. Compared to the more basic bench that had been provided by the Grove for her, the one formed for her sister was more throne-like. A reflection she supposed of her sister's higher status as prime dryad. Recognition extended to her by the Grove itself. Her sister had been almost pensive when M'Tehr had first broached the idea of examining her body for a trace of the Grove mark. Her confused request for M'Tehr to tell her just what such a thing was had only added to the inner disturbance that she felt as her sister acceded to M'Tehr's request and presented her naked flesh for M'Tehr to examine. She does not know the mark of the Grove nor what it signifies, M'Tehr thought in her most private part of her mind. Can she have lost so much of what she was that even that was washed away, that deepest part of her? Could such a thing be even possible? M'Tehr couldn't conceive of anything that could separate her from such a central part of her very identity, but as her sister was proving by her existence alone it was definitely something that could be so. Here was her sister scoured so clean that she literally had no knowledge of even what a Grove mark was let alone what hers would signify. Or was she? Looking at the naked human flesh of her sister sitting in the seat given to her by the Grove itself it was hard to accept that she was anything else. The Grove itself proclaimed what she was, not a vanished mark. The savagery she had shown Jacen as he warred with her when she was lost in the violence of her nature and how she had bent him to her desire as only a true dryad could do only argued that, whatever her form, here was M'Tehr's sister. Here was the prime dryad of this grove; a hamadryad just as M'Tehr herself was. Regardless of the disquiet her sister's appearance provoked and her ignorance of the ways of their people was spawning inside her secret self; M'Tehr forcibly reminded herself over and over again that the toll of long hibernation was something that none of them had any experience with. It was new ground for all but her sister and impatience would ill serve either of them. When M'Tehr had shown her sister her own Grove mark both as it manifested upon her glamour and where it stood in light contrast here on her dark hide in her natural form; her sister had only stared at it uncomprehendingly. She stared at its intricate form and hesitantly asked M'Tehr for her permission to touch it. M'Tehr had agreed and stood silent as she ran her soft human hand over the twisting spiraling design that marked her as a nymph of Morleth Phar'. "Perhaps..." M'Tehr said haltingly, "You could ask your sister? You have lost so much already. It will take time for you to return to what you were. For both of you, but she may remember what you cannot." The nymph mused what she said as she sat in her seat. M'Tehr could tell that she was trying to find the answer that would match what she knew M'Tehr was asking for and failing to do so. "I cannot hear her now," she said after a long period of concentration. "She is silent and does not speak to me any longer. All I remember is her voice speaking to me before you came. And now you are here and I feel she is near, but she says nothing to me anymore." M'Tehr leaned toward her and started to reach for her sister to offer comfort and as she did so the forest bristled slightly at her approach. M'Tehr was only a guest of the Grove. A temporary sojourner and it did not allow her to forget her place. She withdrew her hand. Words would have to suffice in place of denied contact. "I don't know how she came to be joined to you, nor would any of our sister's care. We rejoice no matter the circumstances. That two who were lost are returned is more than we could have dreamt possible. But we desire to know more. There may be others like you who will awaken soon. What you tell us will help us when they do. Ask her if you would, when she speaks again. Perhaps her memory may spur your own and together return you both whole." The black-haired woman shook her head in negation of the suggestion. Her hand moved to the slight mounding of her abdomen. Another manifestation of her difference that disturbed M'Tehr on a deep primal level. Newly seeded dryads usually chose to express their condition as a budding of some sort in harmony with the Grove around them. One of her sisters in far off Dhok'leth Phar' had a penchant to expressing her condition when her time came to seed as a wreath of budding roses that moved and encircled her natural form until the time came to seat the new sister into her own Phar' Ador. That this strange contradiction of a sister chose to express her seeding in such a human fashion was both perplexing and bewildering to M'Tehr. "She says nothing now," the woman repeated. "She's been silent since this happened," she moved her hand gently in a slow circle over the bulge in her abdomen in an unconscious and very human gesture as she said that. "I think this is where she is now." When M'Tehr had discussed the possibilities that two hibernating sisters had merged into a single being as a survival mechanism it had naturally led to a discussion amongst her sisters concerning if it was possible to separate them. One of the options presented by their combined intellect was the possibility that the second sister might withdraw into the new seeding. The idea was an unfamiliar territory for them, but it was considered possible. Even as some dismissed it, others had argued why not. This sister was different from them in so many ways already; such a thing might well take place. Now looking down at her human representation of her condition and hearing nothing more from the other sister's mind since the seeding was successfully concluded; M'Tehr could only surmise that was where she was now as well. What would come of such a seeding she wondered? Would she be expressed as dryads were? Her essence seated in a Phar' Ador as was done by all dryads that she knew? Or would it be something different. Would she enter the world as humans did instead? So many disturbing questions. So many unexpected possibilities. They would have to wait for a time though. Regardless of how her sister chose to seed, the one that was now silent would not answer again until they were separated. But which one was the one she was speaking to now? M'Tehr's next objective in her mind was to find out which of them she was speaking with now. Regardless of how fragmented her sister's knowledge was, it was all she had to draw on. What this sister knew great or small was vital for the success of her mission. But who it was that now sat on the Grove's throne was the question she had yet to answer. Was it the one who embraced who she was first or was it the one who was tormented by her fears? If it was the former, she thought that there was a better chance of finding out some of the details that she was searching for; if it was the latter there were still other answers to other questions possible to her now that her mind was returned. But which one was directing the human appearing form of the Fae she faced? That was the question that circled in her mind and the answer to it was something she both desired and dreaded to hear. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Singh Day Three: 1340 hours Pantra's face was so pale he thought looking at her as she lay in the padded alcove where the hospital staff had placed her after her surgery. She was normally a little pale. That was a trait of her breed of Fae and while it was a little off-putting to some it had never bothered Singh until now. Looking at her now he realized that he hadn't really understood what pale really was and why it had such an effect on others. Sadly, he no longer could say that, least of all to himself. The doctor who had performed the surgery was a human. A short compact man of Vietnamese descent with extremely delicate fingers. Singh hadn't met him until just a little while ago when he walked in to perform one his frequent post-op checks. Singh had arrived later than he wanted to do so. But that was an inevitable, if regrettable consequence the events that had transpired over the last few hours. As he watched her, he saw her take a deep breath and then slowly, as if she were doing some sort of breathing exercise release it. She had been doing that for over an hour now and Singh supposed that it was some sort of instinctual reaction to her condition. The silvery threads that had already started to weave themselves over her limp, battered form when M'Tehr had found her had been cut away as much as the surgical staff had dared to do so. From what the doctor had told him when he asked about her condition and what his prognosis for her recovery was; there had been a lot more damage than just to her wing. The branch that had moved with such lethal precision had not just struck and tore her where the muscles in her back controlled how it was that she flew. It had shattered her upper arm and stove in three of her ribs as well. The arm, damaged as it was, would not have been salvageable if she were a human officer. As a Fae though, particularly one who had an inborn ability to heal the way that Pixie's did that was not the case. But regardless it would still be a narrow path back to even a partial recovery for her and a full recovery would take even longer. The ribs as well presented a particular challenge. One of them had been threatening to puncture her left lung. A degree of injury that would have immediately triggered a full metamorphosis in the body's natural effort to preserve her life. All that the doctor would tell Singh was that it was a team effort and that it had taxed all of their abilities, but he was hopeful that she would make a full recovery and that they had staved off triggering a full protective metamorphosis. Singh though knew different. As the man tried to play down his efforts and chose his words with great care, he couldn't hide the recent memories that the words were describing in his own mind. Singh saw the frantic efforts of the surgical team churned once more in the man's' thoughts. The constant effort to keep her healing cocoon from forming and ending their involvement in her care. The hours the man spent with his eyes fastened to the lens as he guided a micro surgical robot in the careful precise movements needed to reattach what had been sundered and keep the damage dealt to her to the exact minimum so that when the cocoon reasserted itself it moved to heal her rather than transform her. Since she had been moved here, to ICU there had been little indication from her over whether their efforts would be successful or not. There was just her pale, wan face; snow bright against the hospital linens. Only her measured breathing gave hint that she was likely to recover. It was not the laboured, ragged breath of one who was holding to life tenuously; it was a steady, rhythmic pattern that gave him hope when he heard it. As he watched another light silvery strand was expelled from her body and looped itself around her still form to join with the others that were already weaving their ways around her. Her feet were already encased by the Pixie silk and the pressure from the cocoon as it locked into place had drawn them together tightly so that they looked more like a single limb than a pair of bound ones. He reached out with his hand and gently smoothed the hair from her face where it had fallen down as she moved slightly. There was little for him to do here. All he could do was continued to wait and yet he couldn't bring himself to leave. If he had been in the regular ICU, he doubted that he would have been allowed to remain here in the way that he had. But the part of the hospital that handled severely injured Fae was more limited in hosting patients and there were no others being treated when she was brought in. Singh had simply entered and made sure to stay out of their way when they needed to attend to her, but he had also made it quite plain, if not in words, that he had no intention of leaving as long as he had a choice in the matter. That is part of what made the call to him on his mobile phone so annoying. Yes, he was still exhausted from his exertions yesterday. Yes, he was more than just ragged from the lack of sleep and the need to stay conscious because he was in charge. The latter reason was already compounded by what he had done to offset the drain on his bodily reserves. The earth he had been drawing strength from and which had sustained him so far could only do so for just so long. He would need to leave soon. To sleep and restore what he had lost and that was becoming a need more dire with each moment that he forced the issue by refusing to succumb. He raised the small phone to his ear. "Singh here," he said simply. It was one of the F.R.T. on the other end he found out after forcing his tired mind to process what he was hearing without the haze of exhaustion that clouded him. M'Tehr had emerged from the Grove boundaries shortly after he had left the station after he had briefed Lt. Clayton. She had informed the agents manning the checkpoint that she had located one of the men that she was told were in the Grove itself. She insisted that he return and assist her in retrieving the man and evacuating him. Singh grunted and told the man that he was to inform her that he was on the way and that he would be there for the handoff shortly. He snapped the lid of the phone shut and slipped it into his breast pocket. He brushed Pantra's cheek with the back of one of his fingers gently and told her that he would be back soon. Faint tendrils of sunshine peeked past the heavy clouds as he stepped out the side door of Mercy General. The officer who had brought him here earlier had already left, but he had been replaced by another patrolwoman that Singh knew, but in his exhaustion, he couldn't connect her face with a name. As she slowly navigated her car through the water swollen streets Singh realized that the rain had finally well and truly stopped. Storm drains were still submerged in places and struggling in others but finally after days of storm the water fell no more. He asked the patrolwoman when it had stopped and she responded that it had petered out just after eight or nine this morning and had outright ceased only an hour or so ago. Now that the near flood condition that the storm had brought on them had receded, the people were out in greater numbers. The conspicuous presence of the blockade around this part of the Olympia mill housing district was beginning to draw the attention of both nearby residents and passers bye. The initial stages of the cover story had been set the night before and others were continuing to add to them as he approached the containment zone, but with the number of those coming to look increasing it wouldn't be long before they had more problems to add to the ones that they were already struggling to manage. What surprised Singh as he approached the Grove itself wasn't that it was in such fulsome growth; that was to be expected given the nature of the place. It was, rather how that growth had spread in the few hours since he and detectives Brighton and Travers had stumbled out onto the street only bare hours before. The house whose yard they had used to access the woodlot had already been subsumed by kudzu and was almost completely concealed by the new growth. That kudzu would move and spread so thickly was of little news to Singh. As fast-growing plants were considered, only bamboo in his knowledge grew at the same frighteningly aggressive rate and with all of the rain and the presence of a Grove to spur growth even further he was only surprised that he could see the outlines of the rental home at all. The other thing that struck him was the grass itself. This was not suburban grass that spread like oil across water. It was much sturdier than that. The crossbred strain that curled in a thick mat and rolled like a carpet across the yards of the nearby homes had very little in common with what he saw when he looked into the area between the homes now. Most of the grass had grown high and spiky. The tough blades shooting up to half a meter in some places and a full meter in others. This was no longer the straggling clumps of grass that had clustered together wherever it could colonize of the area between the houses, it was not even a gone to seed version of some homeowners abandoned lawn. This was a wild strain of grass; tough and hardy. If the Mistress of the Grove ever allowed such a thing to pass, even during times of drought this grass would hunker down, grow tougher and wait for gentler climes. The bushes that crawled among the trees had grown as well as the grass he noticed; their woody branches had spread out and were tightly interwoven with the bracken now. If they had waited until today to investigate, Singh doubted that they would have been able to find a passage through the dense thicket that had sprung up to surround the heart of the Grove. Even from a distance he could see that the thorns on the branches of those plants that produced them had grown long and sharp. They curved like a natural barbed wire and slithered through the other non-threatening bushes that had joined with them. In some places he could see vines starting to sag from some of the trees, but not that many yet. It was not a completely wild place yet, but it was making clear to the outsider who gazed on it that this was no tame wilderness. Singh had entered the Grove's edge alone. It was better that way. There was less chance of expanding the circle of people who knew what was truly happening here that way. A pair of agents with a portable stretcher waited in the shadow of a house for his signal to draw near and collect whichever man it was that M'Tehr and Jacen had managed to locate. The E.M.T.'s who would carry him to the hospital afterward were waiting on the pavement just out of sight. They were needed to transport this man, but that didn't mean that they needed to know more than that. As M'Tehr approached Singh could see movement in the grass beside her. When she drew closer, he could see that the movement was caused by scores of roots bearing the man's body and carrying it toward the border. For a moment, upon seeing it, he had been strongly reminded of a lioness worming her way through the tall grass as she moved closer to her quarry. The waving tips of grass and the silence of what had set them in motion made the hair on the back of his neck stand up and he suppressed a strong desire to withdraw completely from the area lest what was coming find him. Once he was clear of the majority of the grass Singh waved the men over to him. He watched them as they picked up the man and moved him to the folding stretcher. Singh took a long look at the man before waving them off to get him out of here. As bad as he felt, now, looking at whichever man they had retrieved, he knew that he was immensely better off than him. The roots, where they had slithered over his body had painted his skin with the earth they had carried. The soil had blackened his flesh and torn his clothing away as they had wound around him and held him close to the soil. Small lacerations decorated his face and neck where thorns had bitten him in passing. Where the cloth had been stripped from him there, he also had felt the thorny kiss of the Grove. Just looking at him the thing that struck Singh about him was that he could not tell which of the men that they had retrieved by image alone. In addition to the man's dirt caked features there was the matter of how he appeared now. His body was wasted in appearance. If this was Barnes, then the attention paid on him by the feral nymph had supercharged his metabolism in an effort to cope with the demands placed on him by her. He easily could be said to have lost at least two clothing sizes if the tattered cloth he was wearing was any indication. Singh was familiar with the toll that being with a dryad sexually took on a human body, but even knowing that, seeing how this man had been drained over the course of his captivity was unexpected. There was only one good thing that he could see about the man's condition. If this was Barnes then Phillips would weather the demands of the dryad better than he had. And if it was not Barnes it boded extremely ill for him if this was Phillips and he looked like this after little more than a pair of days. He hoped it was Barnes. The two F.R.T. agents picked up the handles of the stretcher and it was telling to him that neither man seemed to strain very much to do so. Singh told them to get him to the ambulance while he remained to speak with M'Tehr. "Your burden weighs on you, my friend," she said once the two men were away from them. "It does," he responded. "Do you know which of the men this one is by any chance?" "He was found in the location that you spoke of when you were telling me what transpired before I arrived. Hank Phillips then, Singh thought. With one sentence of explanation M'Tehr condemned Barnes then. They had a firm timeline for that man and if this was what remained of him after such a short time, then Barnes's chances shrank greatly in his eyes. "Is there any trace of the other one?" he asked. M'Tehr shook her head no. It was a studied, practiced gesture. One that he knew that she made only in an effort to put the humans that she came into contact with at ease. "Jacen still seeks this man, but he has been unsuccessful thus far." "We need to find him," Singh said quietly. "His condition will be much worse than this one." "Jacen seeks him in the aether," she said. "This one I found there as well. He was badly drained when I did find him. Almost drained to the last. I strengthened him before we sought you out, but he may be too drained already." "Can the dryad who did this be questioned? She may be able to tell us where he is. It could be the difference between us taking him here alive or not," Singh tried not to sound too insistent. Expressing urgency sometimes struck members of the Fae the wrong way; even a Fae as experienced in her dealings with them as M'Tehr. "She has barely regained control of her mind," M'Tehr said evenly. "In her state she will be of little use to you. Perhaps she may be able to speak something that will make sense in a day or so, but insisting on speaking with her before then may have dire consequences." "We must speak with her though," Singh said. "What she knows is the keystone here." "We will work to soothe her mind," she said. "And in the meanwhile, Jacen will continue searching for the missing man," M'Tehr drew herself up to her full height and half turned back toward the Grove. It was clear to Singh that she was through speaking here and she was anxious to get back into the Grove itself. "It is all we can do for now." Singh watched the branches swallow the Fae woman up and it was disconcerting even to him how she completely vanished within a few steps and all that remained was bent grass and scuffed earth to mark than anyone had been here. He turned back to the road and made his way to the car. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- M'Tehr Day Four: 1922 hours "Have you remembered where the other man I asked you about is hidden? You or your sister must have placed him somewhere. Somewhere near us? Somewhere safe perhaps?" M'Tehr asked her, hoping that a change of direction in the topic might loop back and bring with it information that would reveal something to her. Her sister shook her head. A strange human affection that one of M'Tehr's own Grove would not even venture to make; not even one like her who moved among them frequently. So many of the small things that she had seen her do since her sister regained control over her nature had argued for a dominant human influence rather than dryad one and the choice of actions and even how she spoke confused her when it was brought into stark jarring relief against knowing what her sister must be and what she presented herself as. "The humans will want both of the men returned before they will calm and see reason sister," she said. "It will help ease tensions with them if we can do this as soon as we can." "They already have the one you asked me for first," she said. "I don't know where the other one they want is. I was barely aware of the one that you showed me as it is. But there is something concerning him that is familiar to me. Something important but I have no idea what it could be." If M'Tehr had lungs she would have exhaled softly in frustration. The men were very clear that there were two of their kind in the Grove. But her sister was right as well. Even knowing where to find the man he was barely discernible in the condition he remained in. If M'Tehr had not already known where to find him she didn't think that her sister would have been able to show her where to look. The things that she had done while lost in the depths of her feral nature it seemed were just not as accessible to her reasoning mind. Gaining her permission to remove the man had been a simple thing now. While last night her sister would have unleashed the full force of her feral self on any who attempted to take her prize from her, today doing so was a relatively simple task. Almost an afterthought for her. She no longer cared that he was there and in her indifference his absence was of little import to her. M'Tehr as a temporary grafting onto this Grove was able to release him from where she had brought him down and bound him. She was allowed to bid the vines to bear the unconscious man's body to the edge of the Grove itself. The human E.M.T.'s waiting there had done the rest after that. They transferring him to their gurney and were moving him to their vehicle in a matter of moments. An almost sedate process that belied the danger that such an action would have involved bare hours earlier had it been attempted then. But that was something else that bothered M'Tehr. If she, a hamadryad in full control of her nature, was barely aware of the man lying under the hump of vines and roots, a man who had barely been under her sister's control for two days; it seemed to M'Tehr that there was even less chance of her sister remembering what had taken place while she was lost in her nature. It was likely then that the location of the one still missing would remain lost to her now that she had regained her senses. But then perhaps she had never known what had happened to him at all. Perhaps capturing and binding those men had been the work of her now silent sister and this one had no knowledge of the other man of whom there seemed to be no trace remaining. It would take time M'Tehr reminded herself. Time and patience. But there were signs that gave her hope, even after just a few hours since her sister had seeded. She was becoming more organized in her thoughts the further she moved from the feral dryad she had emerged into this world as. After getting her to focus, a task that was proving require less and less effort now that her mind was reasserting itself; M'Tehr had gotten her permission to search for him and bid Jacen to hunt throughout the boundaries of the Grove for wherever the other man's body might be hidden. "Can you remember your name?" she asked again, hoping that the diversion onto another topic would let her switch back this time and allow her to blurt out an answer, even if she was not fully aware of it or its significance. "Cecil," she said slowly almost hesitantly, not wanting to speak the words for some reason. "Cecil?" M'Tehr asked her. This answer confused her. It was no sister's name that she had heard ever before. In the archive where her Grove preserved the story of the fall of the Fae after the Withering were many names and none of them were the one that her sister had just spoken to her. "The thing I said I couldn't quite remember. When I tried to before, it kept slipping away from me. It's a name. I remember it now." "What name?" M'Tehr asked. "Who holds this name you speak of?" This was something positive in her opinion. Her sister's mind was finally starting to grasp and latch onto the fragments that had been lost in its depths while she had been lost in her nature. "Cecilbarnes, that's the name," she said almost breathlessly running the two words together into a single one. The realization of some tiny scrap of what she had been racking her memory for made her almost giddy with the realization that not all that she had known before had been lost. "I know it now. Now that I remembered it, I don't know how I could have forgotten it. How could I forget it?" She swung her eyes now brightly animated and locked them with M'Tehr's own. "The man that Jacen is looking for? Is that his name? Do you remember where he is then? It would be best for all of us if you could remember where he was and what happened to him when he woke you. Is he somewhere close? Safely concealed like the man we returned already? Can you find where he is?" "No, I can't," she said as she processed the realization and absorbed what it meant. "He's not here. Why is he not here? He should be here, but he isn't. Not anymore." "Was he the one you were so afraid of? Did he do something when he woke you? Something that made you fear him?" M'Tehr asked gently. She wasn't certain that this was the frightened sister, but she decided to play the odds and hope that she was right. "What happened to this Cecilbarnes? What did he do to make you fear him so?" Her sister shuddered at the hint of the suppressed memory as it rose in her mind. Whatever it was that was lurking there was not a gentle memory. It was a torment and M'Tehr wished that she could avoid excavating it and just let it sit and be forgotten but she couldn't do anything of the sort. There was too much that was dependent on what she could draw from her sister's fragmented memory as rapidly as possible. "No, it wasn't him I was afraid of. I wasn't ever afraid of him," she said quietly. "Not him," she repeated. "He didn't do anything to make us fear him. He was afraid too, but I don't remember why. There was something that we were both afraid of. Someone we needed to hide from and then there was nothing. Nothing, but rain and rage and fear. I think... my sister... found him. I think that we tried to hide with him but then I lost him, and I can't remember where I lost him." M'Tehr didn't answer her sister. As she listened to the hesitant voice was it worked its way through what had taken place in her madness a dark idea of her own began to bloom in her inner mind. Jacen had said that she had taken from him and the man she found had nearly the last of his animus drained as well. If Jacen had not come, if he had not interrupted her focus on the human what would have happened to him? What would happen if her sister had taken everything that the man was? Would he cease to be? And if he did would something of him linger on inside of her? A remnant of a separate being now consumed and made part of her whole. A fragment of the man mindlessly absorbed perhaps? M'Tehr looked carefully at her sister and wondered how she could ask the question that was forming in her private mind and if it would even wise to do so at all. It had to be asked though. M'Tehr needed to know. "What happened to the first man, the one who woke you?" she knew that whatever she said next would be fragile. A wisp drawn from her abused mind that could just as easily withdraw back into oblivion as a worm retreats into the earth and be lost. It was a terrible thing to ask of her. For her it would be like she would be groping in the dark for a single detail that was hidden in a pile of shattered glass. It would cut and scar her and it would wound her, perhaps deeply to do so but it needed to be done still. M'Tehr wished she was not the first to do this. There was almost nothing that she wouldn't give right now to have even an inkling of what she could do, but there was only the two of them blundering in their blind way to some kind of resolution. "I think he became part of me," she said hesitating as she slowly spoke the words. "He was there with me. In the beginning, he was there. He was there and then he was gone. But he's not gone, is he my sister? If he is he's still, here isn't he?" "How can you mean he is part of you?" This was not what she was expecting to hear but she had been dreading it when the other sisters in far of Morleth Phar' had raised the possibility. "What happened to him?" M'Tehr asked afraid that she already knew what her sister was going to say. Even the Grove seemed to become still waiting for her to speak the words and make it so. "I think that name belongs to me. I think it's my name," she said hesitantly. "I think I'm the man they're looking for. I think I was Cecil Barnes."