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like their little bones?
    He couldn’t just leave them here for the scavengers, so Nick used his helmet to dig a grave. His other selves did the same; one using bare hands, the other using the discarded cook pot. He could not say how long the three of him dug, but the sun was high in the sky by the time they had buried the bodies. With each set of his hands, he tenderly pulled a quilt of dirt over each girl, tucking them into their final beds.
    Some instinct he could not explain compelled him to plant the remaining walnuts atop each grave. Maybe someday, the girls could become mighty walnut trees, as beautiful and ethereal as the woman they’d called a nature spirit.
    That’s when Nick had to acknowledge the girls in the graves were dead and he wasn’t. He’d simply gone mad. He’d cracked—just like the beauty in the woods. Perhaps there was only so much horror a person could take in before it shattered them.
    Experimentally, Nick reached out with filthy hands, and clasped hold of the second self to his right. It was real—it felt like skin. And as he grabbed hold of it, there was a sudden jolt before the body began absorbing back into his own. It hurt, but not as much as it had hurt coming apart.
    The sickening squish of flesh as it melded together made Nick gag, but then he was no longer three—only two. Looking at his remaining extra self, Nick shuddered. Now he didn’t want to touch this creature, so foreign and so familiar. Steeling his courage, Nick reached out with both hands and explored the contours of the face opposite him. It was his own. The same dark brow, the same square shape. He felt his own fingers upon his skin, rough and calloused as he absorbed the extra body back into himself.
    This time, he did gag. Then he was one again.
    Perhaps he’d imagined it. By now, his men would be combing the woods for him. And what would they find? Would they see his body in pieces? Would they notice three of him? Or would they find a blithering madman to lock up in some asylum. It was the one thing he couldn’t endure. So when someone shouted his name in the distance, Nick didn’t answer.

Chapter Five

    Evergreen Resort Casino, Queensland, Australia, five years later

    The dryad was on her lunch break. She’d been living amidst the mortals for five years now, but there were still things she couldn’t get used to. Hard floors, straight lines and steel buildings all made her feel confined. And that’s to say nothing of the high-heeled shoes!
    With a sandwich in one hand, Dessa kicked off her pumps and stretched out on the park bench in the resort’s botanical gardens. She’d taken the job as assistant manager at the Evergreen Resort Casino because it was a nature preserve, nestled inside many acres of wild parkland.
    Now, with her free hand, she brushed the friendly cycads. They were amongst the oldest trees in existence—as old as the dinosaurs—and, just like her, completely out of place here. Like Dessa in the mortal world, this cultivated landscape was too clipped, too restrained and too well-groomed. After all, overhead was not an open sky, but a marvel of mortal architecture—a geodesic dome.
    She told herself she shouldn’t complain; perhaps glass and aluminum would protect this forest as her dryad magic had not protected the forests of Afghanistan.
    She’d just finished eating when the radio at her hip crackled with an update; casino security suspected a card-counting team in the casino. Dessa found it hard to care. The only card that interested her was the one she kept always in her pocket—the joker, with its scorched edges, a reminder to her of all she’d lost. Since she left the forest, her powers had been slowly waning. Soon, she supposed, she would forget her heart tree; she would forget she was once a dryad at all. But until then, she used what little magic she still had to tether guests to the resort.
    Dessa was so good for business, in fact, that her boss predicted she’d be running