Wildwood (17 page)

‘Sorry?’ I didn’t know what he meant until he rose to his feet and his erect cock brushed my thigh on the way up. Oh, was he hard.

‘It’s … not supposed to happen like this.’ He pulled a face as he took himself in hand. ‘I mean, there’s no way …’ He looked tormented. I had to stifle a laugh; this pierced and tattooed eco-terrorist was so much more gentlemanly than Michael Deverick.

‘It’s OK,’ I murmured. I was dizzy with excitement, but I tried to sound calm. ‘It won’t harm the magic, will it?’

‘Um. Technically it’ll help.’

‘Then that’s all right, isn’t it?’ I slipped my fingers around and past his, circling the hot shaft. The look of relief on his face was as sweet as honey. He put his arm round the small of my back and pulled me closer. There wasn’t much room for my hands.

‘Want some help?’ I whispered.

He bit his lip. ‘That’s not …’

‘OK.’ I let my head rest against his collarbone as I watched. Very carefully he began to squeeze his cock, pressing it against my skin and rubbing it up and down against the silken skin of my belly. I let him get on with it, leaning into him, giving him the friction and the solidity he needed. But as he pumped I reached down and caressed the silky and nearly hairless balls I remembered so well, my fingers dancing across his skin until he groaned out loud.

Tell me now you don’t want me, Ash.

It couldn’t last long enough to satisfy me. Sliding his arm tighter around me and burying his face in my hair, Ash clenched to his climax and unloaded in wet gouts upon my skin. His stifled groan sent a quiver through my whole body. Then he pulled away, steadying himself by gripping my hips until he got his breath back.

‘Avril …’ There was an expression on his face like that of a man who’s just looked over the edge of a precipice and seen the vista beneath his feet, glorious and utterly terrifying. For a moment he visibly struggled to refocus.

‘You OK?’ I couldn’t keep the wicked grin off my face.

‘Uh … yeah. Now … shut your eyes for me, Avril.’

I obeyed. As I held my breath he baptised me in kisses, his mouth feather-light on my eyelids, sensual across my nose, my cheekbones, my chin. He traced the whorls of my ears and ran his tongue around my lips. And all the while he did this, he gently caressed his jism into the skin of my stomach and flanks. I tried not to squirm as he smoothed his way from my hips to my armpits and wrote his secret alphabet upon my ticklish flesh. His mouth descended to my throat and I lifted my chin for him like a sacrificial lamb. His hand reached for my breasts.

I can’t cope with this, I thought, I can’t cope. His hand was writing poetry on the cleft and the swell of my tits. My nipples were standing out hard like acorns and his fingers brushed them with unintentional cruelty. I wanted to cry out but the cries were bottled up in my throat, choking me. I felt like if Ash didn’t fuck me then I was going to die, right there in his arms. Then his hand was gone from my breasts and moving back down over my belly. My hips twitched involuntarily. He was pressed up against me, one arm taking my sagging weight, and I was on fire inside. I shut my eyes, water oozing out from under the lashes.

All done then. All but the last few inches. He slid one firm hand over my pubic mound and squeezed me through my soaking panties. I dissolved in fire and water, a liquid ripple of orgasm spilling through my body, and slumped against him.

When the world stopped burning and I opened my eyes he was holding me upright. ‘Ah,’ I said weakly. ‘Have I gone and wrecked it all?’

‘I think we’ll manage.’ His voice was dry. I could only imagine what he was thinking as I covered my burning face with my
hands
. As he released me I felt bereft. The pulse in my crotch was so strong it actually sent aftershocks through my clit.

‘Oh,’ I whimpered as my legs wobbled.

‘You need to get dressed,’ was his next instruction.

We both dressed, he in a new set of clothes and I in the ones he’d been wearing earlier. They weren’t really skanky but they did smell of him; I suppose that was the point. The pheromone rush made my head spin. We were both a little self-conscious, I think, as we stood fully clothed once more; the desire we’d both given way to was at such odds to our expressed purpose. The clothes weren’t too bad a fit, considering, but his boots were far too big for me. Even with two pairs of his socks on they slopped around on my feet. ‘Do I have to?’ I asked.

‘I don’t recommend going barefoot.’ He looked me over one last time and nodded. ‘You’d better hold my hand.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘Ah.’ He actually looked embarrassed. ‘Just in case. It’s still easy to get lost.’

I couldn’t help grinning.

Taking my hand he led me out of the hollow on the far side and we turned uphill. I felt like a little girl being led by her big brother, which tickled me.

Climbing the slope all the time, we went deeper into the wood. The canopy was closing over now that we were well into summer, the leaves turning a darker, more opaque green, and soon we were in deep shade. Underfoot it was damp, every rock surface slippery with moss, and the lack of light ensured that ferns and dead wood were the mainstay of the shrub layer. Ferns and mosses grew overhead too on the twisting oak branches and, in the sunnier patches, tufts of grey-green lichen hung like Hallowe’en cobwebs from the twigs. My oversized boots found it hard going on the broken
ground
and I was glad of Ash’s firm supporting grip. We crossed many tiny gullies where streams hurried down the slope, clambered over fallen trunks and skirted great upthrust boulders which looked ready to slip from their mossy sockets at any moment. Once, from within an earthen burrow scraped beneath the roots of a fallen oak, we caught a sudden sharp reek of pig, but nothing stirred. As we stooped to follow the faint path under a hanging deadfall heavy enough to break every bone in my body, I was suddenly fiercely glad I hadn’t come this way on my own. The threats here were unconcealed. I felt like I was here on sufferance.

‘What’s that?’ I asked as we passed one of the bundles of twigs hanging from scarlet thread.

‘Rowan.’

‘Rowan doesn’t work against Michael Deverick. Neither,’ I added, ‘does holy ground.’

Ash cast me a questioning look.

‘I first met him in a churchyard.’

‘Necromancy?’ he enquired.

‘My cousin’s wedding.’

‘Ah.’

‘Necromancy would have been far more entertaining.’

‘It has its moments.’ Ash didn’t give me a chance to follow that one up; he stopped dead and I nearly ran into him. I followed his fixed stare up the slope. The tangle of dead branches and twisted living trunks made it impossible to get a clear view of anything, but I was sure there was movement and a moment later the crunch of breaking twigs confirmed it.

‘Wild boar?’ I whispered. There are feral boar running loose all round the South of England and they’re no joke. The smell from that lair had really worried me.

‘No.’ Ash stepped off the path, pulling me into the lee of a big rock. He put my back to the stone and stood before me,
facing
out but shielding me from the woodland beyond. The sensation of his body against mine was almost enough to distract me from whatever our peril was. His back was warm, his outstretched arm rigid, and I could only get a partial glimpse over his shoulder. I took hold of the back of his belt, mostly for security, but my fingers slipped down the inside of his waistband and nested against the small of his back where the skin was satin smooth, and I felt him shiver.

Then something came down off the path, moving ponderously, and passed by heading downhill. I couldn’t get a proper look but I heard it: the stertorous breathing, the rumble of its guts, the branches snapping under its mass. It was grey and brown and green, the same colour as the woodland, shaggy with moss and bearing – high on one shoulder – a livid yellow cluster of fungi. And it was about as big as a rhino would be, if a rhino walked on two legs.

I don’t know if it saw us. Slowly the noise faded as it disappeared downhill. Ash wiped the sweat off his upper lip.

‘What the hell was that?’ I breathed.

‘A troll.’

I goggled. I hadn’t let go of his belt and I had no plan to. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I told you, this is Wildwood. The forest as it once was.’ He twisted to face me, and with that movement my hand slid round his waistband to his stomach. The skin there had more heat than at the small of his back. He put his hand over mine and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to keep my fingers out or to trap them there. He bit his lip. ‘Careful, Avril.’

‘Or what?’ I said weakly, but I pulled my hand away.

For a moment he seemed to hold on to my fingers. Then he blinked and shook his head. ‘Come on. We’re nearly at the top.’

As the ground underfoot levelled off the trees changed:
instead
of big trunks with wide-spread branches this was scrub oak and birch, their narrow branchless stems tightly packed together, one canopy indistinguishable from the next. The ground between the stems was wetter – in fact standing water in some places, black and evil smelling. Devon, I thought grimly as I put my boot up to the ankle in a pool and felt the cold water rush in over my toes, was a county without the good sense to put its bogs at the bottom of hills where they should be. The water wasn’t doing the trees much good either; many were dead, and those gaps in the canopy were the only places where shafts of light found their way in. The ferns, the mosses, every sign of the verdant burgeoning life in the lower reaches of the wood had vanished.

Ash’s grip tightened as he led me through the maze, choosing with care which trunks to step between. I clung to him and tried not to get impatient, uncomfortable though it was with my soggy feet and the stagnant tang of the mud and the buzz of insects in my ears. Or at least I thought they were insects until one whipped past my left cheek drawing a stinging razor line of blood and, as I turned, I caught a glimpse, just for a moment, of a face made up of shimmer and shadow: a face so horrible that I yelped in shock and grabbed Ash’s wrist with my free hand.

‘Ignore them,’ he said grimly. But when he saw the scratch on my cheek he pulled me to him and licked it clean. I winced; though his tongue was gentle, the intimate gesture was far too primitive for comfort.

‘That isn’t healthy,’ I protested.

‘Healthy?’ He laughed suddenly. ‘No, you’re right. Magic isn’t healthy. Not in any way. It’s categorically no good for you at all.’

‘Why’d you bother then?’ I asked as he hauled us off again, splashing and stumbling. ‘If it does you no good?’

‘Why bother with magic? At bottom it’s about not being under anyone or anything’s control – freedom of will. It’s not about power as most people assume. Actually most people assume that it’s about dressing up and getting your rocks off in a magic circle which, I admit, is something that may have influenced my own entry into the art.’ He spared me a wry glance over his shoulder. ‘But it’s really about attaining freedom from coercion of any kind: other people, circumstances, the laws of nature and of physics. And when you’ve attained all that, when no one and nothing can bring you into submission, then you have true freedom. And then you realise that the coercion that comes from within, from your own pride and ego, your drives and instincts and beliefs and habits, are a thousand times more tyrannical than any outside agent, so you shed those. And then …’ He stopped, frowning.

‘Then?’

‘Then you have perfect will. And you are capable of anything, except that you no longer need or desire to do it. In many ways there’s no longer any “you”. That’s the paradox.’ He shot me another glance. ‘I’ve never known anyone get that far. But that’s the theory. We’re here, by the way.’

I followed the direction of his nod and realised that the darkness ahead was not the gloom of infinitely receding woodland but a wall of yew trees, their foliage so dark that it looked black. ‘Yews shouldn’t grow in boggy conditions,’ I said, then felt stupid.

Ash squeezed my hand. ‘Come on.’

He led me up to the wall. The yews in fact were rooted on a circular bank. We ducked beneath a branch and crawled into the space they enclosed. The first thing I noticed was that the ground inside was firm and mossy and the yews formed such a dense wall that they cut out all the daylight except for a circular patch over the centre of the clearing. My eyes went up
to
that, thirsty for a glimpse of the sky. Only then did I look about me for the thing we’d come all this way to see.

It was a tree. The moment my eyes fell upon it I recognised it, because every fibre in my body recoiled like I’d just received an electric shock. It was the stump of a huge oak, covered in green and black mosses, and though it still stood higher than my head there wasn’t a leaf on it. Great fissures had rent the bole. The only things holding even the remnant of that trunk together as a whole were two metal bands that circled its girth, and they were green and eaten away with corrosion.

All around the stump fluttered velvety-black butterflies.

‘That’s it,’ I stammered. The hair was crawling on my neck. This tree was unlike anything else I’d seen in my life. It seemed to radiate a palpable energy and I could feel it throbbing at my fingertips and catching at my pulse. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it was incredibly intrusive. I shut my eyes, then squealed and jumped back. Ash grabbed me before I could crash into a yew branch. ‘You can see it with your eyes shut!’ I cried.

‘Oh, I know.’

You could see it
better
with your eyes shut. Eyes open, it looked like an impressive woodland relic. Eyes shut and it stood out like a great black tower, outlined by crawling red worms of fire which reached out to the yews all around and into the ground and towards us. And the biggest cleft in the trunk glowed with a ruddy light like a furnace. It sent all my smug everyday conceptions into a flat spin. ‘Is it … evil?’

The question seemed to puzzle Ash. ‘Evil? I don’t think so. How does it make you feel?’

I decided to keep my eyes open, because that was far less disconcerting. For a moment I just stood, sensing that energy surging in my belly. ‘Horny,’ I admitted.