Dirty Eden Read Online Free PDF

below.
    “Oh, man,” Tsaeb said, “I really hate bugs.”
    “Shhh,” I said with a forceful gesture of my hand.
    “Maybe the field is a better choice,” he added in a whisper.
    “I get the feeling that either way is going to suck.” I moved my way quietly back toward the edge of the trees, stopping next to Tsaeb. “Maybe if we go through really quiet....”
    “Norman!”
    I snapped around.
    Perched on a protruding black root not fifty feet away was a bizarre woman. Her arms twisted backward at the elbows like a bendy toy, her legs abnormally long and thin with knees like fists and toes as long as fingers.
    She slinked off the root and onto the ground, like a beetle scuttling over a log.
    I swallowed my throat.
    I moved the rest of the way around with a mechanical ease to face her. She held out a pale, slender hand from afar, but I could be nothing but motionless and so she withdrew it.
    Finally, I stepped backward, stumbling as my foot caught in the folds of my trench coat.
    “You must leave here,” said the creature with words as soft as powder.
    I bent over, clumsily untangling my heel from the sleeve of my coat. “Sorry to disturb you,” I said, feeling like any second now I could shit on myself and it would be perfectly justified. “We’ll just be on our way then.”
    “Not you,” she said, her hand coming up, index finger unfolding slowly. “The child.”
    I looked over at Tsaeb.
    “The company you keep is evil,” she added. “This is a place of light. We do not permit black souls to pass through our forest.”
    My brows drew together. Light? This forest hardly knew the definition. Wait a second. We ? There were more of them?
    “But I’m supposed to help him...I think.”
    “He cannot pass.”
    She moved closer. Tendrils of red hair fell against her chest, tumbling past her waist like silk.
    “Let’s just take the field,” Tsaeb spoke up.
    “Wait, Tsaeb.” I turned to the creature again, trying my best not to run away in complete fear of her. “Can’t you make an exception? That field will kill us both, and I know I can’t go anywhere without him.”
    “You should reconsider,” said the creature.
    “But he’s just a kid....”
    “ Is he?” She inched toward me, her movements so awkward, yet strangely ethereal. “Smells more like treachery.”
    Tsaeb lingered just inches from the border of the trees, his back to the field. My eyes passed between them, but more often to the creature who continued to move closer every few seconds. I caught an unfamiliar, intoxicating scent lingering in the air.
    “Umm, by chance, could you tell me where I am exactly?”
    “You are in the Forest of the Cursed,” she said, looking up for a long moment at the many cocoons. “And out there is the Field of Yesterday, a dark place living under a lie of the light, just as this forest is a place of light living under a shroud of darkness.”
    Absently, I took another half step backward.
    “If you tread through that field,” she went on, inching ever closer, “the past will come back to haunt you and will surely kill you before the heat has a chance.”
    I turned to Tsaeb. “Is that true? Please tell me she’s kidding.”
    Tsaeb manipulated his lip tensely between his teeth. “I would’ve told you if you decided to go that way.”
    “ Would you have?”
    Tsaeb clenched his fists at his sides and shot a cross glare at the creature.
    The irresistible scent, which I still could not place, became even stronger, whipping up into my nostrils, sending me into a brief high.
    I shook off the daze.
    “What are you?” the creature asked me.
    “What am I?” I glanced down at my own hands, and then the rest of my front. For a moment, I wondered if maybe I had been turned into something unnatural. Maybe there were scales on my arms, or I suddenly had a tail.
    Anything was possible now.
    “Well, I’m a man....”
    “Man?” she said, inspecting me from top to bottom. “Allow me to view your ribs.”
    I