Forbidden (A New Adult Paranormal Romance) (6 page)

“It’s all right,” she consoled herself, “I have superior intellect, if nothing else. I’ll collect samples.”

Before she could take this significant step for mankind, the cocoon emitted the brightest light she’d seen so far. She had to shield her eyes. For the first time, doubt crept into her. She had never been harmed by insects before, but this was an uncharted species, possibly cranky and dangerous.

From the cocoon came the sound of crackling, as though many sticks were simultaneously snapped. The smell of honey was stronger than ever. The insects ran wildly from the disintegrating structure. Snow White wondered if she should do the same, but her curiosity – the very one that made her venture into the garden barefoot to look for glow worms at three in the morning – stayed her feet.

Cracks snaked all over the cocoon. Tufts of matter fell off. To Snow White’s amazement, a human hand struck out from the top.

It was pale and perfectly formed.

“Oh no, someone’s trapped in there,” she exclaimed.

With renewed vigor, she clawed at the cocoon. The material came away like pieces of a dry cake. The hand was encrusted in a light gold dust. As the cocoon was destroyed from inside and out, more of it emerged – a forearm, then an arm – and before Snow White could bemoan the need for documentation, a man covered in bits and pieces of the amber sediment clambered slowly out.

He was completely naked.

He stared at Snow White, whose jaw dropped to the floor of the cave.

CHAPTER FOUR

Snow White was unable to take her eyes off the man.

She had never been swayed by beauty, but even she could not deny the effortless appeal of the amber-dusted dark hair that fell in a wave across his brow, his shining brown eyes, and his sculptured cheekbones which had a slightly otherworldly cast to them. He appeared to be about twenty, and he stood tall within the cocoon, unashamed of his nakedness. His limbs were long and pale. His very presence held her, as though the air around them was magnetized. She had to tear her own eyes away lest she tremble from the shock that flooded her.

Snow White’s eyes roamed down his magnificently lean and muscled body, and her cheeks began to burn.

I’m not a prude, she scolded herself. I’ve seen plenty of men naked. Well, almost naked. Dozens!

Well, OK, maybe two.

The youth did not move. He appeared to be contemplating what to do next. Confusion flickered on his face as he looked down upon his limbs, then back at her.

I’m not, not, not, Snow White told herself hotly, interested in boys. Never have been, never will be. I’m a rational scientist. I have things to do, places to go, universities to build!

His skin, she observed, was like a newborn’s. Almost as pale as hers, and pink, as though he had slid out from a womb. His chin was hairless, shaven to the flesh. He was so beautiful that he was unnatural. Crafted from an ideal, it seemed.

No! she tore at herself savagely. She must not think this.

Proudly, she held her chin up and tried to avert her gaze from his glaring privates. “I suppose,” she said, coming off a little haughty, “you were trapped by that thing.”

Uh oh, she thought, my princess complex is at it again.

The man did not answer.

“Because if so,” she went on hastily, trying to ameliorate her tone, “I’d like to interview you about your experience . . . for future scientific annals to be stored in my library, of course. I mean . . . what we learn here today might change our paradigm of understanding of the insect world. So this interview is not for myself, but for science.”

When he didn’t reply, she wondered if she had rambled on too much or if he even understood what she said. He might be soft in the head. Or, God forbid, had his brains sucked out like nectar. Anything was possible.

“Well?” she demanded, her natural impatience seeping through.

She suddenly thought of another possibility. Surely he couldn’t be one of the Greek gods come down to Earth? She couldn't even speak Latin, let alone ancient Greek. He was certainly beautiful enough to be a Greek god.

Greek gods weren’t easily offended, were they?

“You must be a native,” the man finally said.

His voice was strong and deep, even though his accent suggested he might be from (Snow White racked her brains to think where) the East, which of course she had never been.

“A native? You mean of here?” What an odd question. “I’m not from Lapland, if that’s what you’re asking.”

His eyes arrested hers. “Yes,” he said softly in that strange accent of his, “a native from here. This world.”

Slowly, the man stepped out of the cocoon. His movements were uncertain, as though he were using his legs for the first time after a long convalescence. He almost fell when his feet touched the ground. He balanced himself by clutching the side of the cocoon.

Snow White began to back away. There was an undercurrent here. It lurked like a shadow in the corner of her vision. Every time she tried to focus on it, it fled.

“What happened to you?” she said.

“I do not remember.”

A sixth sense told her that he wasn’t telling the truth.

“Are you from around here?” she asked.

“No.”

“Where do you hail from?”

A long pause. He was evaluating his answers, she knew. His eyes roamed from her face to her throat, and she suddenly felt more naked than he. He studied the contours of her neck the way a farmhand does a chicken’s when he contemplates snapping it. Unease fingered her marrow. He was a stranger after all, and she had no clue where he came from or what happened to him.

He could be a killer. He could be a mad man. He could be a wild beast!

Had she exchanged one sort of death for another?

She took a step back, and another, and considered running for her life, but was held by a crawling sensation at her feet and ankles. She looked down in alarm and saw that an army of insects – ants, beetles – were rapidly ascending her legs. Some wormed their way inside her pants, and if she wasn’t already used to them, she would have leaped.

She stood her ground, afraid that any movement might crush the insects.

She felt the stranger’s eyes on her and lifted her face. He wore an awed expression. A movement caught her eye and she saw that the insects were also massing onto his bare feet and legs, creeping upward, covering them both in a writhing, scurrying, squirming layer of soft bodies.

The insects stopped at the level of her mid-trunk. As for him, they rose to his chest. Where his heart lay beneath, they roiled in a thickened mass, every species intermingling in some cosmic state of harmony. Bees and dragonflies hovered around him, landing on his shoulders and head. He gazed at them but made no move to brush them away.

She raised her hand, and for one fleeting moment, a look of dismay crossed his face. Perhaps he was afraid she would quash the insects. But when a dragonfly settled on her fingertips, fluttering its wings slowly, she gazed upon it in wonder.

They don't want us to harm each other. Not yet, anyway.

When she looked up, the stranger was smiling at her.

He said, “My name is Aein. What is yours?”

#

Clothing him was trickier than she thought. She held up her coat. The sleeves could be tied around his waist like an apron and the rest of it could be used to shield . . . well, whatever.

“This is the best I can do for a loincloth,” she said. “You’re not cold, are you, Aein?”

“Loincloth?” He pronounced it as though it were a suspicious type of medicine.

“It’s for . . . you know.” Helplessly, she waved it before his genitals.

He took it from her, frowning. “But I have never covered myself.”

“Not even once?” she said. He must come from some place seriously liberal. Hanna Cherry would have a fit to know she was talking to a naked man and discussing his state of undress as though it were an entomology dissertation.

“No.”

“Well,” she said firmly, “you’ll have to cover yourself in these parts. It’s the rules, or you’ll be hung for indecency.” Not really, but that would put a spur into him. “This will do until we get you new clothes. Or unless you trap a bear and skin yourself a new coat.”

Don’t expect me to trap one for you, she didn’t say, thinking of the rabbits.

“Are you going to hang me?” he said.

She was taken aback. “No.”

“Then I am not going to wear that loincloth. There are only two of us, and as you do not wish to hang me for indecency just yet, I will remain as I am.”

She was flummoxed. So he was going to parade himself naked in front of her while they traipsed through the woods? Wait . . . he wasn’t intending to have his way with her, was he? The idea of it sent a warm flush down her neck. She clasped the knife by her side to reassure herself. No one was going to have her way with her unless she dictated it, so there.

“Fine.” She sniffed, turning away from him.

He was going to be one of those argumentative foreigners, she could tell. She had seen those foreign dignitaries at court, haggling, mispronouncing everything, behaving as if they owned the place. Let him have his way for now. He would soon run into a reckoning. Or a chill. And when he was shivering and coughing and rattling at death’s door, she would calmly thumb her nose at him and say, “Indecency begets ill humors.”

“Fine,” he repeated, but his tone was agreeable, not miffed.

He began to probe in the ruins of the chrysalis, breaking huge chunks of it off and sifting through the golden pieces. His brow was furrowed with concentration.

“What are you looking for?” she asked curiously.

He held up a handful of golden matter in dismay. Embedded in it were broken shards of a brown crystalline material.

“What is it?” she said.

“Something that belongs to me.” For the first time since she’d met him, he seemed at a loss.

“Is it broken? Can you fix it?”

“No.”

“Well, what does it do?”

He hesitated, then turned back to sift through more crumbling matter. After about twenty minutes, he gave up.

“I hope it wasn’t important,” Snow White said pointedly, feeling a little impatient to be setting off. She was right. Not only was he an argumentative foreigner, he was tardy.

He flashed her a worried look. “No. Not important at all.”

She just couldn’t get a handle on him. Her head told her that she should be wary of him at all times, because he was a foreigner, and he was naked and strange. It was probably best to leave him here to his own devices and set out on her own haphazard, North Star-chasing, extremely parched and hungry way. After her brush with Wolfsbane, her energy levels were all drained out. She didn’t need to be looking over her shoulder for this suspicious foreigner to do something unspeakable.

“Well,” she declared, “I’ve got to be going now. Seeing that you’re fine and all, I’ll leave you to go on your own merry way and I’ll go on mine, so – ”

She was in two minds as to whether she could turn her back on him. Would he jump her? Would he do something, God forbid, indecent?

“Actually,” Aein said, “I seek a place. Do you know of it? It is a mountain surrounded by seven hills. A green lake that looks like a mirror sits at the bottom of it.”

Her geography being only slightly stronger than her Ancient Greek, Snow White frowned. “Does it have a name?”

He looked sheepish, stealing a glance at the broken chrysalis. “I do not know of it. But I must reach it by the time three moons become full in the sky again.”

Three moons. He spoke a failed poet.

“Why? What’s going to happen in three moons? Where do you come from anyway, Aein?” If that’s really your name. Once again, her hand went to the handle of her knife.

A pause. “The East.”

“Which part of the East? Hungary sort of East or farther, like in the lands of the Tartars?” She couldn’t recall reading about any Tartar refusing to wear clothes.

He seemed perplexed. “You ask too many questions,” he finally said. “I do so as well, as people tell me time and again. But there are some things you best not know about me or I would have to kill you.”

That’s it, she decided. She withdrew the hunting knife as her eyes narrowed. The pointy tip caught a flash of sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves. “Are you threatening me?”

“No.” His tone was level. He did not seem perturbed by the gleam of wicked-looking metal. “I do not threaten well. I am merely stating a truth. As I have told you nothing noteworthy about myself as yet, I do not have to kill you. To get to the mountain, I wish to pass through as many towns and villages as possible. I wish to meet and mingle with the natives.”

“So you can kill them?”

“No.” He frowned, missing her sarcasm completely. “I wish to learn more about them. Can you guide me to the next village? Perhaps a native there will know of the mountain I speak of, since as a native, you do not seem to know many things.”