Chapter 13

As she wandered through the trees, she congratulated herself for not shaking in her shoes. It was daylight, but the area she had wandered into was dark enough that it could have been night. Each time she lowered the camera away from her face and took a few steps, she would see something else that she had to take a picture of. It was truly breathtaking here, the dark woods with a few rays of light shining down through the canopy of leaves.

Memories she thought had long ago faded from came back. The hiking trips with her parents who had loved the outdoors. She always wondered why they had settled in Chicago. Lush, wild forests weren’t exactly common there. She really wished they were still here, now when she needed them. More than once since she’d made the choice to pack her life into the car, thoughts of her parents returned. Had her father known about Aiden’s business? He had worked for that family for as long as she could remember. Her soft-handed, soft-hearted father, could he have known? She would never find those answers, and that added to the confusing mess inside his head.

Letting the camera drop and hang on the cord around her neck she swatted at the bugs buzzing in front of her nose. Not everything here was beautiful, these mosquitoes were the size of moths, and it didn’t seem to matter how much spray she put on, they just kept coming. “Mean and determined, aren’t you?” She fished around in her bag for the spray and pulled it out. Instead of spraying her face again, because if she digested much more of this she was going to be sick, she blasted the swarm of insects in front of her. Frowning as she lowered the bottle to see that had helped for only a few short seconds. “It’s time to find some sunlight and leave you nasty things behind.” Rayne turned around in a circle, picking which way to go.

This had, at one time, been a well-traveled path, but now was overgrown with very little clear direction to follow. There were still remnants of last fall’s leaves with the new growth bursting through them. It was quite something to see the old and decaying mixed with the bright new green growth. Rayne had only ever seen moss and ferns like this in the movies, and it added to the mystical appearance with so much of it around her.

Taking slow and measured steps as she picked up the camera again, she held her breath. A large red-tailed squirrel paused in the path a few feet in front of her. Readying the viewfinder quickly, Rayne managed to take two pictures before it disappeared into the ferns and practically flew up the side of a thickly barked tree.

Life goes on Rayne thought as she headed down the incline of the trail. The new trees were pushing up towards the light, they’d have to fight to survive with so many larger trees hogging all the sunshine above them. The old trees that had their time, now lay on the overgrown ground, recycling back into the earth. She took several pictures of a huge rock that seemed so out of place among the trees, it looked like it had been here since time began, and the trees were new.

She headed towards the light in the trees, her thoughts went back to Devin. She knew she shouldn’t think about him. Don’t you have enough complications in your life right now? Wasn’t it because of a male that you’re hiding in this place? At some point, Rayne needed to figure out what she was going to do about Aiden, or at least figure out what she was going to do without Aiden, and find a life of her own again. A life of her own choosing; there was something she’d never had. Pausing beside a few plants, that she didn’t know the names of, she photographed them from several angles. If she was going to do this whole life-of-her-own thing, waiting for a man to kiss her again probably wasn’t what she should be focusing on. She exhaled long and noisily. “No men.” Hearing it out loud made her chuckle, not that she had them lined up, as the one she was near clearly didn’t want a lot to do with her. Putting the camera back up to her face, she turned around and focused in on the path that led back into the darkened area.