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?

Chapter Two

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.

As Nick’s morning patrol fanned out, primeval scents rose, steaming from the forest floor in clouds of otherworldly mist. The lance corporal to Nick’s left was looking shaky.

“It’s just an intel mission,” Nick said quietly, to reassure the kid. “We’re not expecting hostiles.”

“You willing to bet on that, sir?” the surly sergeant whispered.

Nick—whose late-night poker games with enlisted men were getting him into trouble with the brass—just smiled. But in spite of his bravado, Nick was acutely aware that his life was on the line—their staggeredformation alone was a grim reminder that they had to keep outside of one another’s blast radius just in case someone set off an IED.

Getting his bearings, Nick paused beside an old tree with exposed roots all tangled together like bones beneath his feet, and squinted into the dark canopy of leaves. Nick kept imagining trip wires glittering like spider webs in the occasional patch of morning sun. What the hell? Was he bugging out?

That’s when Nick’s sharp-eyed scouts gave the signal up ahead. They’d spotted something. Nick saw it, too. A flash of white amidst the leaves, a blur of limbs in motion, and then it shot skyward into the canopy. Nick told himself it was some bird—no human being could leap into the trees like that. His finger steadied on the trigger nonetheless and a moment later, he heard a woman’s whisper just behind his ear.

“What are you doing in my forest?”

Jesus Christ! Nick spun to face her as a cacophony of shouts erupted from his soldiers. How had she ever gotten this close without his realizing it?

“Put your hands where we can see them!” Nick yelled this in the local language, as it was one of the few phrases he knew how to say in just about every dialect.

The beautiful woman staring down the barrel of his gun should have been frightened, but instead, she calmly and majestically lifted her pale arms, as if she were some kind of goddess. The scouts gave Nick asignal that everything was clear. She wasn’t some kind of distraction for an ambush, so he lowered his rifle and got a closer look at the woman he’d almost put a bullet in.

She wore a short white tribal gown that bared her arms and she looked to be alone and unarmed. Her nut-brown hair flowed freely over her shoulders, and captivating blue eyes peered at him above her cheekbones.

In spite of all his training, Nick could not help but stare in shock. It wasn’t her features that startled him, for many of the local Nuristani were said to have descended from Alexander’s Macedonian-Greek army and some extremely fair. In fact, some of these rugged mountaineers still worshiped ancient gods like Dionysus.

But nothing Nick had learned about their strange local culture could explain her. “Are you hurt?” Nick asked, because he could think of no other reason a lone woman would be wandering these woods, much less without a head covering. When she didn’t answer, he said the only other words he knew in the local language. “I’m Lieutenant Nick Leandros of the United States Marine Corp. We’re here to help. Do you need assistance?”

“Lieutenant Nick Leandros.” She repeated his name with an imperious stare. “What I need is for you to leave my forest.”

She couldn’t possibly be speaking English, but he understood her perfectly well. And from the looks ontheir faces, his men understood her too. Since the translator wasn’t necessary, Nick said, “We’re not here to stay, ma’am, but we do have a few questions.”

“You’re soldiers,” she said, her condemning gaze falling upon each of his men in turn. “So I imagine you’re going to ask me whether I’ve seen the Taliban fighters that exchanged fire with your forces the other night.”

Now the sergeant broke in. “Actually, we’d like to set up a shura with your menfolk—a meeting with local leaders. Where are they?”

“I don’t have menfolk,” the woman snapped and gave Sarge a peremptory glare that silenced him.

For some reason, this only emboldened Nick. “Well, have you seen any jihadists?”

“Sir—” the sergeant started to interrupt with a warning, and Nick knew why. They’d been trained to avoid even talking to Afghan women. It could be considered a grave insult and breed the kind of resentment that fed the insurgency. Yet, the strange woman had started the conversation, hadn’t she? She’d appeared like an apparition and it seemed worth a gamble that she knew something.

Besides, there was something powerfully attractive about her that went way beyond her beauty. Nick was enchanted. It was as if he’d fallen into some kind of web. “The men who fired upon us the other night—we think they’re hiding high up in these mountains. Are they?”

“I only know they aren’t here,” she said, suddenly reaching out long and elegant fingers to caress his cheek. “I don’t usually let soldiers stay in my forest.”

Nick was so surprised by her touch that he flinched away. She must be some kind of madwoman. Beautiful, but cracked. The war did that to people; and after all Nick had seen—all the blood and death—he was halfway down that road himself.

She wasn’t going to tell them anything. She wasn’t working for the Taliban, either; he was sure of it. But that wasn’t going to help her much when the next round of shelling commenced.

It was against policy to warn the locals of upcoming assaults, lest they pass that information on to the enemy, but Nick had seen enough civilians die because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. He could just about guarantee hostilities breaking out here. “Listen, this isn’t a safe place to be,” he blurted. “You should probably seek shelter in a village for a while.”

“I can protect my forest,” she said simply.

My forest. Why did she keep saying that?

“Sir, shouldn’t we get on with it?” the sergeant interrupted more forcefully.

Nick gave him a sharp look. Was he supposed to just leave this waif in the woods by herself and wish her a good day? On the other hand, what else could he do? There weren’t any psychiatric hospitals in this isolated corner of the world, and even if he couldget help for her, some shrink would just lock her up and put her in restraints.

Nick couldn’t imagine a worse fate, so he reluctantly led his men away.

It was a bleating goat that warned of their approach, and three startled little girls huddled together when they saw Nick’s soldiers and their guns. The oldest of the girls could have been no more than eight, but she picked up a cook pot and wielded it to defend herself and her sisters.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, it’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Nick said, and the translator hurriedly interpreted his words.

Nick fished some Tootsie Rolls from his pocket and held them out to the children. “Where are your parents?”

The littlest girl reached out tentatively and took a piece of candy from Nick’s hand. The eldest still held her menacing cook pot, and the middle sister cried.

“Their mother’s dead,” the interpreter told Nick after a few minutes of questioning. “The father’s a shepherd. They say he’s out grazing the flock.”

Nick’s patrol was supposed to ask about the Taliban fighters, about the nearest villages and about arranging a shura. But right now, all Nick could think about was how scared these little girls were. Given the way the middle one was crying, she’d probably seen soldiers before, and nothing good had come of it.

Crouching down, Nick took a deck of playing cards out of his pack and drew the joker. The girls stared at the card with fascination as he moved his hands over it, and—using an old trick he’d learned in Vegas—he tucked the card into his helmet while making it seem to disappear.

It wasn’t real magic, but the children reacted as if it were. The littlest girl laughed. The middle one stopped crying. The eldest lowered her pot. Card tricks weren’t going to win him a Nobel Peace Prize, but Nick thought he’d made a pretty good start. “Ask them about their older sister, or aunt. Or whoever that blue-eyed wild woman in the woods is.”

“They say she’s a nature spirit,” the interpreter said, then translated directly. “’Sometimes she dances with us in the forest, so we make offerings at her heart tree and she gives us her protection.’”

Nick eyed the translator as if he was full of shit.

“That’s what she said,” the translator said with a shrug. “She says that sometimes timber smugglers come through the area and the nature spirit scares them away. Other times, tribal warlords try to steal the girls, so they run into the forest and the nature spirit gathers them to her arms and hides them inside trees.”

Even the sergeant raised a grizzled eyebrow at that.

Unfortunately, before Nick could ask anything else, the shepherd returned and panicked to find armed men surrounding his daughters. He shouted at them to leave and Nick should have ordered his men to continue ontheir patrol—but the sight of those three little girls huddled together got to him somehow.

Most Afghans were fiercely proud, so the shepherd’s reaction shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the girls’ stories about nature spirits was putting Nick on edge. He’d been fighting this shitty war long enough that he wasn’t sure he could stand to see one more kid hurt. Nick said to the interpreter, “Tell him that until the fighting calms down, he and his daughters aren’t safe here. Tell him we can’t offer any security. Tell him he needs to leave this place and seek shelter in a village. This isn’t any place to be raising little girls. Take ’em somewhere with roads, electricity and hospitals. And they need to go to school.”

“No school for the girls,” the shepherd replied, angry and offended. “Besides, I have no money.”

Nick realized that he’d been more than a little condescending. Not everybody had the option of living somewhere safe, and he regretted shooting off his mouth.

Now it was as if the sergeant knew what Nick was going to do. “Don’t even think it, Lieutenant…”

Too late. Nick yanked his helmet off and tried to convey his sincerity by meeting the man’s eyes. “Look,” he said to the shepherd. “I’ll give you the money to move. Out of my own wages.”

Sarge scowled. “Sir, our instructions—”

Nick didn’t want to hear it. “You know our motto, Sarge: Improvise, Adapt and Overcome.”

“No, our motto is Semper Fi,” the sergeant snapped. “Lemme know when you need my help getting your head out of your ass, Lieutenant. You’re breaking every rule in the book. Sometimes I wonder why the hell you joined the Marines.”

“Lost a bet,” Nick said with his typical irreverent humor, then motioned to the interpreter. “Tell the shepherd I’ll pay his family to move to Parun City. Tell him. That’s an order.”

Emotions flittered across the shepherd’s face as if he wanted to accept Nick’s offer but was struggling against some tie that bound him here. In the end, he refused. “This is our home. Besides, once you go, the warlords will know who helped us, and they’ll kill us all. And you will go—you always do.”

From her walnut tree, Dessa watched with satisfaction as the soldiers left the shepherd’s cave, defeated. She’d never cared for warriors—not even when the most dangerous weapons they carried were swords—but these Americans seemed well-meaning. As much as it irritated her that they tried to make her people leave her forest, they’d been kind to the little girls.

Perhaps she should’ve invited the soldiers to sit beneath her heart tree. It was almost ripe. A few more days and the nuts would start falling. Then she could invite the soldiers to eat the fruit of her heart tree and choose one for her mate.

After all, they had mistaken her for a mortal woman.

Like most of her kind, Dessa could—and often did—pass for human. In her younger days, when there were other dryads into whose hands she could entrust her forest, she’d lived amidst the mortals now and again. She’d once passed herself off as a dancing girl for a Roman emperor. Another time she posed as a governess, and years later, a trapeze artist with a traveling circus in England. But always, she had returned to her forest.

Maybe it was because she’d never met a man whose pull was stronger than that of her heart tree. Could Lieutenant Nick Leandros be that man? She liked the way he gave candy to the children—the way he tried to comfort them with his card tricks. He’d make a good father to little girls of his own…

Dessa remembered how fascinated she’d been by the mortal sweat on his face and how she’d reached out to wipe it away. She’d startled him, and he’d flinched. But she could easily imagine how it would’ve felt if he’d turned his head and kissed her palm instead. She’d liked the lines of his square face, the dark knitted brow over intelligent eyes. Even now, as she watched him make his way through the woods, she liked the way he moved. He wasn’t stiff and precise like most soldiers, but languid as a Caspian tiger.

Maybe that’s why the desire to tether him to this forest was so strong. She saw the little tendril of mortal fascination billow behind him like a gossamer thread in the breeze, inhaled and drew it to her. It wasa weak tether, one he could break if he tried. But perhaps it would be enough to draw him back to her one day.

Chapter Three

It happened at dusk while Dessa tended her seedlings. They were the children of her mighty walnut, and they might one day replace her heart tree, becoming part of the unbroken chain of life. Dessa was stroking her fingers over the soft young leaves when suddenly the ground shook beneath her.

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