Stephanie Draven - Wild, Tethered, Bound

To the U.S. soldiers interviewed for this novella, their fellow Marines who gave their lives in Afghanistan and the soldiers who are still fighting there

Evergreen Resort and Casino, Queensland, Australia

Nick Leandros slid his chips forward with a satisfied smile. The table was ready for his plunder and the green felt beneath his fingers was smooth as the skin of an eager mistress. The game was blackjack, and some said it all came down to luck. But Nick knew it was a numbers game.

The casino played with a six-deck shoe, which meant that, by counting cards, Nick had a slight advantage over the house. He was the big player. His job was to join the game when the count was high and rake in the cash.

He didn’t even glance at his partner. Nick just tucked his expensive sunglasses into his shirt, winked at the pretty redhead at the end of the table and doubled down. You see, it was signaling that gave card counters away, and Nick didn’t have that problem because the two other members of his team were each a part of him.

Literally , a part of him.

His goateed teammate, who was stubbornly betting the minimum, was another incarnation of Nick—an incarnation that sometimes called himself Vic, could count for himself and refused to shave for days at a time. But he was the same man, or at least a third of him, so they worked perfectly in tandem and didn’t need a signal to tell each other when the table was hot. The third teammate—the one with the leonine mane of dark hair who occasionally called himself Rick —sat across the smoke-filled casino wary as a hunter on the prowl. He had preternatural instincts about when security was getting twitchy. And Nick didn’t even need to glance in his direction to know that two big, beefy guys with radios were making their way toward Nick’s table; he could see it through Rick’s eyes.

Card counting wasn’t illegal but if security caught him there’d be trouble. So Nick gathered his winnings and swiped a pen with the Evergreen logo. Not exactly an effective defensive weapon, but it’d have to do. It wasn’t that Nick was particularly afraid of casino security; sure, they might break his legs, but Nick had been wounded before. His real worry was that they might put his face into a database and alert the authorities. And if they figured out who he really was— what he really was—they’d lock Nick up for good.

Rick and Vic fled toward the botanical gardens where guests went to escape the jingling of chips and ringing slot machines.

Security was already about halfway across the floor, so Nick stood up and followed his partners in crime.

As the doors of the glorified greenhouse closed behind him, Nick found himself awash in green foliage and serene music.

It was a geodesic dome—a nature enclosure and a wonder to tourists. But Nick knew what it was like to be in a real forest. He had met her in the wilderness whereas this was just a man-made mimic.

He rounded a cluster of bushes and found Vic right away. Urgently grasping his arm, Nick pulled the recalcitrant body into his own. They’d merged a thousand times before, but it seemed to get more painful every time. His sinews threaded together and muscles strained as if under a thousand-pound weight. By the time both bodies had become one, sweat pooled between his shoulder blades and glued his expensive dress shirt to his back, whereas Vic’s clothes lay in shreds by his feet.

There was no time to catch his breath. Nick’s more savage third was crouched low behind the fanned trunk of a buttress tree. He pounced, grabbing Nick’s ankle and they both nearly went down with the force of it. It felt like bones crushing as they melded together as a complete whole.

Gasping in pain, Nick tried to regain control. It was easier now that he was one man, not three. But security was still after him and the crackle of their radios cut through the garden’s tranquility.

Looking for the nearest exit, Nick stumbled into an open expanse of cultivated flowers. There was nowhere to hide.

Bad fucking luck.

In moments, security would find him, and then it’d be all over. All over. Is it any wonder that he imagined hearing her voice. He wanted to hear her sweet whisper just behind his ear, as it had been the first time he met her.

“Lieutenant.”

It had been a long time since anyone had called him that. He almost dared not turn around. But when he did, there she was.

Was that figment of his war-fevered imagination actually standing in front of him? Could she be real?

Nuristan Province, Afghanistan, five years earlier

It was an autumn morning and the moon was still up. In the high leaves of a walnut tree, Dessa caressed the graceful branches. The limbs were covered in gray bark, a smooth skin over the tree’s lifeblood, which pounded in a secret rhythm only she could hear; this was the dryads’ heart tree and its pulse was just one pace behind her own.

Dew drops glistened on the leaves like perspiration on the skin of a fevered lover. With a sensuous tongue, Dessa reached out to lap at the sweet water, and she felt the tree shiver with appreciation for her tenderness. After all, the walnut tree was straining, laboring, to give birth to the ripening nuts that weighted down its branches in clusters of fat green orbs. Soon the husks would turn brown, the fruit would fall and, if a man were to happen by and taste the sweet walnuts, Dessa might finally have a mate of her own.

Dessa missed the old days when Alexander first brought the dryads here and she had frolicked with other nymphs. Now there weren’t many dryads left inthe wild; most had long since abandoned their forests to live amidst the mortals. And in Dessa’s loneliness she ached for a child. A daughter to love, to keep her company and to help her protect the last forests of Afghanistan. A little dryad to help her bind nature together in this old and legendary land…

As this dream played in Dessa’s imagination, the wind rustled the leaves and she heard the trees whisper a warning.

Someone was coming.

In earlier times, Dessa might have allowed a stranger to pass through her woods unhampered. But those days were long past and there had been shelling the night before—the acrid stench of destruction still lingered in the air, muted only by the peppery perfume of her walnut tree.

Dropping out of her heart tree, Dessa followed her senses. If a timber smuggler or a warlord intruded here, Dessa would frighten him away. But if one of the wounded stumbled into her lair, Dessa would try to help.

Her bare feet were accustomed to the luxurious carpet of husks and pine needles that blanketed the forest floor, so she moved silently in the darkness, stopping only now and again to comfort a fretful cypress or to praise the bravery of one of the boastful pines.

She told herself that the nighttime intruder must be part of the mortal family who lived at the edge of her woods—the shepherd or one of his three daughters who sometimes came into the forest to dance. But it alarmed her that the intruder moved so quietly—this was no bumbling shepherd who had lost his way.

Luckily, not even a stealthy fighter with night goggles could move through her woods without tripping over the tendrils of magic Dessa had threaded between the trees. And with those tendrils she now sensed not just one intruder, but many.

Soldiers .

Second Lieutenant Nick Leandros had encountered difficult terrain in Afghanistan before; his memories were littered with the gaping maws of booby-trapped caverns, impassably jagged mountains and sun-baked deserts. But he didn’t like the look of this forest at all. It was foreboding, shadowy and ominous—with gnarled yew trees shedding their scaly bark like reptiles emerging from the deep.