Free Bind Our Loving Souls by April Marcom Page A

I was scared to leave it.
    As I waited, I felt the little leaves
brushing against my face and the thrill of a child playing a game
like her life depended on it. A smile crept over my lips as I
realized how badly I didn’t want her to find me. It didn’t take her
long, though, even with the large area she had to search. And the
way we both screamed when she saw me had us both laughing pretty
hard.
    We ended up burning a lot of time playing
hide and seek, catching butterflies, and eating her cherry
jewelry.
    Helena never said how old she was, but she
looked and acted mature enough to be my age. She just had a really
playful side.
     
    Sometime mid-afternoon I got a little too
into the game, and wanting to find a really great hiding spot, I
ran too far into the thicker trees surrounding our undesignated
hide and seek area. I figured if I didn’t go too deep, I wasn’t
really doing anything wrong. So I found a unique-looking tree trunk
that was especially fat with four medium sized trees growing out of
it. There were enough vines growing all over them to make it the
perfect hiding place.
    I barely had time to climb into it before I
heard the chilling voice of a Halvandor. My body froze as two men
came closer—Kristoffer and a man I remembered was Paul’s uncle.
Kristoffer’s hair began to swell as he became Anvilayan.
    “It is forbidden to do that in the open,” the
uncle said.
    “I know this, Mattias, but no one is near,
and I hate posing as one of these hideous beings. I cannot wait to
be free of this miserable world.”
    “Always with the complaining. It’s all you’ve
done since you got here. Why don’t you just leave?”
    “Not without Enock. And he’ll never leave as
long as the revoltingly filthy little Earth girl is here.”
    “Earth girl?” Mattias looked absolutely
horrified as the hair of my arms stood on end. “What Earth
girl?”
    Kristoffer growled angrily at himself. “No
one. I meant Halvandor girl,” he said, then turned to run away like
some wild beast.
    “Kristoffer.
Kristoffer!
” Mattias shouted before he took Anvilayan form as well and ran after
him.
    How much Enock’s brother hated and blamed me
for his being stuck here began to sink in as I saw something out of
the corner of my eye. Helena was creeping toward me from behind a
nearby tree.
    She was watching me carefully, probably
wondering the same thing I was—if what she’d just seen was all new
to her and if she was about to freak out and run away screaming.
She continued to keep her eyes locked on mine as she came closer.
“You can never tell anyone,” she said solemnly.
    “I won’t, but why is it so wrong for a
Halvandor to love a human?” The question slipped out. She knew the
big secret and she was fast becoming my closest friend here, so I
hoped I could ask her about it.
    “It’s wrong. You—” Helena gasped and covered
her mouth. “You’re the Earth girl.”
    “No!” She couldn’t find out. “It’s not me,
Helena. I just want to know why it’s so wrong.”
    Helena gave me the serious look I was
becoming accustomed to. Then she turned her head to stare through
the trees. I knew she didn’t believe me. “I want to show you
something, but it’s kind of a long walk…”
    “Sure,” I said uneasily, wondering if she
wanted to lead me to a Halvandor lover’s prison or something. But I
walked beside her in the direction she was staring because I was
curious, and my instincts told me that it would be okay.
    “This used to be a road, you know,” Helena
said, pointing to the ground. I realized the path we were following
was lower than the rest of the forest floor, like a wide trail that
had been abandoned and left to the overgrowth years before. We
followed it in silence, Helena staring forward with a look of
concern and me glancing around, searching for any sign of where we
might be going.
    The boots I was wearing were beginning to rub
blisters on the back of my heels by the time I saw the degenerate
old