Free Wild, Tethered, Bound by Stephanie Draven Page A

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 in the 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