chapter fifty-four

She shifted to face me, putting more distance between us in the process. It felt like she had physically struck me. "The Porters have encountered a handful of dryads over the centuries, but the things you can do don't match their accounts. I've been reading about dryads ever since we found you."

She set the book on the coffee table and slid it toward me. It was an old library book, the spine heavily creased. She had tucked an origami butterfly into the pages to mark her place.

"Nymphs of Neptune?" The hairs on my neck and arms rose when I touched the book, like I had entered a haunted graveyard. I had to force myself to read the opening pages.

The words made me ill. I could get through brief passages, but the longer, descriptive sections left me dizzy and confused. I struggled to focus as the words blurred and doubled, and when I looked up, it felt like the house was tumbling around me. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the effects to pass. "What is this?"

"The Porters who found you believed your tree was magical, created through libriomancy. I think they might have been right."

I closed the book and read the back cover. The summary text didn't hit me as hard as the story had, at least not physically. "You think I'm a character from this book? A slave?" I whispered.

"A fantasy." She answered so quietly I barely heard.

I wanted to destroy the book, to rip it apart and burn the pieces. Instead, I carefully set it back down and tried to absorb what I had read. If I was one of these nymphs—and both my reaction to the story and the description of the nymphs' powers suggested I was—then Nidhi hadn't been helping me. She had been molding me, transforming me into her perfect lover. I dug my fingers into the cushions, feeling the rage expand in my chest, a scream demanding release.

I had never experienced anger like this when I was with Frank Dearing. He had wanted an obedient, compliant companion, and so he had denied me my anger. He couldn't have known. He hadn't noticed or cared that I was… incomplete. What else had he taken?

And what had Nidhi kept from me?

"Why?" Humans asked the same questions. Why am I here? What's my purpose? But my question could be answered. James Wright had deliberately written these nymphs into his book, describing every curve in meticulous detail.

I was here to fulfill the needs and desires of my lovers.

"We think someone pulled an acorn or sapling from the book," Nidhi said. "I doubt they even realized what they had done. If it was a fluke, an untrained accident, they probably scared themselves and ran away, leaving you to grow in this world."

That's why I had been alone when I awoke.

"I'm so sorry, Lena." This angered her, too. I could see it in the tightness of her body.

I refused to cry. "What will you do now that you know what I am?"

"I'm not sure. Nobody has the right to…to control another person like this."

"But I'm not really a person, am I?" My hair, my skin, my favorite flavor of ice cream, everything about me was a reflection of her. I was a fantasy. I had more in common with the airbrushed centerfold of a men's magazine than I did with a real human being.

I stormed away to our bedroom and slammed the door. I could hear Nidhi crying, and part of me longed to comfort her. Instead, I clung to the anger, nurturing it like a sapling. What if she sent me away? My next lover could be someone like Frank. I might never experience this kind of hurt and anger again.

When Nidhi joined me, hours later, I was sitting amidst a circle of her comic books. Ridiculously clothed women stared up at me from the pages, bodies contorted into bone-bending poses that better displayed their exaggerated curves.

"If you leave me, what then?" I reached out to turn the page of a recent

issue of Catwoman. In one panel, the breasts straining to burst from her leather bodysuit were larger than her head, and her waist was thinner than her neck. "Who will I be passed to next, and what will I become?"

Nidhi didn't answer. She didn't have to. My anger was nothing but a reflection of her own conflict, meaning she hated this just as much as I did. And dammit all to hell if that didn't make me love her more.

She sat down beside me, kissed my hair, and whispered, "Huun tane prem karuu chuun."

"I love you, too," I said automatically. Whatever I was, those feelings were real to me. "When I was born, I looked for the other dryads of my grove. For my sisters." I picked up a Red Sonja comic. "I've finally found them."