Where The Heart Lives Read Online Free PDF

were so deep and blue,
that she found herself leaning, leaning, until she felt the heat of his breath
and her fingers slipped away, only to be replaced by her mouth.
    Lucy had never kissed a boy. His
taste was sweet and hot—toe-curling, a delight. It frightened her, but not
enough to give it up.
    It did not last. Lucy heard a
weeping cry, and broke away, staring at the woods. She heard it again, a voice
calling out, and it took her only a moment to find that pale feminine face,
luminous in the rich green shadows of the forest. Lucy leapt to her feet and
ran. She felt Barnabus behind her, but did not look back, afraid if she did the
woman would disappear.
    Mary. A crow shrieked above her head—an animal caw that sounded very human.
    She reached the edge of the
forest just as Barnabus caught up with her. She thought she heard Henry
shouting, but Mary was there—right in front of her—and the woman whispered,
“Please, help me.”
    Lucy sucked in her breath—fighting
for courage—and jammed her hands through the underbrush toward Mary. Barnabus
grabbed her waist—another set of hands joined his, as well—but it was too late.
Something took hold of her wrists, yanking hard—and the face in front of her
changed. It stopped being Mary, and became instead a shadow, a gasp of night,
like that slithering tendril of nothingness she had witnessed in her vision.
    Raw terror bucked through her
body. She tried to pull back, fighting with all her strength. Whispers rose
from the trees—all those voices she had almost forgotten, soaring into her head
like a scream.
    Lucy was pulled into the
forest.
     
    ***
     
    The first thing she noticed,
when she could see again, was that the world around her seemed quite ordinary. She
was in the forest, yes, but she had been inside forests before, and this was no
different. The shadows were long and the canopy thick, and the twilight that
filled the air was neither gloomy nor particularly menacing. It was simply
dense—with vines of wild rose and new spurting growths of seedlings; poison
ivy, ferns, tiny bowing cedars and those massive trunks of oak that spread fat
like squatting giants all around her. She smelled the earth, something else—like
rain—and the air was still and warm and humid.
    Lucy turned in one slow circle,
trying to find the edge of the forest. She was close, she knew she should see
Barnabus or Henry—at least hear voices—but even the birds did not sing, and all
she could see was leaf and branch and shadow.
    “Hello?” she called out, thinking
of that creature who had pulled her inside the wood. Fear clutched her throat,
pounding against her heart, but she steadied herself, fought herself, and
regained control. She thought of Mary, too. Trapped here for twenty years. She
wondered if the same would happen to her.
    She heard something, and turned
in time to see an immense pale figure part the gloom. A white stag. Tall and
broad, with a deep chest and a long neck that glittered as though sprinkled
with dew. Its hooves had been polished to the sheen of pearls, and its eyes
glowed with a wild raging light. Tiny bells hung from its silver antlers, and
the sounds they made were those same whispered voices Lucy had heard in her
head—now louder, cries and sorrow ringing with every delicate knell.
    A woman sat upon the stag. She
was divine: pale and slender, sparkling as though spun with stars and diamonds,
her hair so long it almost swept the ground. A Snow Queen, with a manner that
begged a bow. White furs and silks crisscrossed her high breasts, which were
quite nearly exposed, though covered with faint lines of pale rose, curling
like poems and wings upon the skin below her throat.
    She held herself with such
lightness, Lucy imagined she might float to fall, and as the stag stepped near,
Lucy saw that the woman was perched on a fine dainty saddle shaped like a frog.
    “Witch” was not the right word
for this woman, Lucy thought. A witch was human. And