Page 60 of Ravished By the Revenant

My voice startles birds resting in the canopies. Nothing answers but their wings.

I lengthen my stride. The forest I have walked for seven centuries suddenly feels foreign. The trees spit me out at the lake gleaming gold in the late afternoon sun. The lavender at the water’s edge is thick with butterflies, orange and blue, exactly where she would be. Where she should be.

She is not there.

“Clara!”

She must be at the far shore. She circled the lake before, that first week, pretending to admire the flora, and again later, walking the full loop, lost the light. I’ll find her there, and she will laugh at herself for getting distracted.

I run.

I have not run in decades. There was never anywhere to run to. Now my boots tear through the reeds as I round the northern point calling her name. Then I call for her at the eastern shallows, and at the old fallen oak where the herons nest, but all I hear is the echo of my own voice.

I stop where the old forest meets the waterline, my chest heaving, and make myself think like a soldier instead of a drowning man. Tracks. There will be tracks—the ground here is soft.

I spot boot prints. Hers, small and dainty, pacing around the lavender, deeper where she must have crouched low to take her pictures. But then…

More prints. Larger. Three sets, coming down out of the trees, spreading wide along the shore like a fisherman’s net before it closes over its prey.

“CLARA!”

A yowl answers me.

Schmetterling stands twenty paces up the shoreline, where the boot prints converge. He followed me, and now he stands rigid with his tail lashing, staring down at something in the dirt. He yowls again, a low, awful sound I haven’t heard since the night Greta didn’t wake.

I cross the distance and stop breathing altogether.

Her phone.

It’s lying face-up in the pine needles, the screen alive and glowing in the dusk, filled with a picture of a butterfly. There are furrows gouged through the needles beside it. Drag marks. Heels, dragged toward the treeline.

I pick the device up with a shaking hand. A hand that has held a sword through the deaths of ten thousand men and it has never once shaken. I feel like I’m standing on a ship’s deck, the ground tilting under me.

I teased her once that she has legs like a newborn foal. She laughed, saying that her legs outran the Italian mafia. She laughs at everything, my Clara. And she was standing here alone, and he took her. Because I said he will not come here. Because I, the great strategist, the siege-master, calculated that a man’s pride would exhaust itself in town, and he would not search the forests.

Marco has her. The knowledge hits my chest much like the mace that took my ear hit the side of my head.

Schmetterling presses against my boot and looks up at me. For once, he’s not looking at me with judgement.

I narrow my eyes at the drag marks. At the darkening forest they vanish into. At the phone in my fist.

Seven hundred years, I could not leave this land.

Now nothing on this earth will keep me on it.

“I will need my greatsword,” I tell the cat, then turn on my heels and march back toward Blackthorn Keep.

Marco wanted a warlord’s bride.

He will meet the warlord.

32

CLARA

The cabin hasn’t changed in my absence. Same steep alpine roof, same wall of glass facing the valley, same overpriced everything. The last time I saw this place, I was going out its bathroom window with my boots in one hand. Now I’m coming back through the front door with a bodyguard’s fingers around each arm and blood drying on my chin.

I’ve come full circle. The universe really does have a sick sense of humor.