SKYE TORE THROUGH THE FOREST, BREATHING HARD, STUMBLING AND CATCHING HERSELF OVER AND OVER AS SHE leaped rotting logs and whipped through thickets of young cedars.
What had she done? She didn’t know that guy from Adam, and she’d grabbed him and started kissing him like a strung-out maniac. Even at parties during college she had at least exchanged names.
It had been a wonderful kiss, and a corner of her mind still glowed with thrilled triumph over having done it. But it was a seriously insane thing to have done, and her mind raced in terror as fast as her feet bounded across the forest floor. Because, oh God, what were the goblins going to do to her—or to him—if this did work, and he had now been tapped as her chosen mate?
The afternoon light was fading. She stopped, panting, and turned around. She fumbled her phone out and checked the time, and gasped. It was later than it should’ve been; somehow she had lost an entire hour. Part of the enchantment? Could they have stood in that kiss for an hour?
Whatever the explanation, twilight had arrived. Which of course meant…
“Sky-eye…” The rasping voice from above turned her name into two singsong syllables.
“No,” she whispered.
“What have you done, sweet sister?” Redring’s voice said, closer. Others chuckled in the background, sinister and low.
Though ninety-five percent of everything in her longed to approach the voice, reach her arms up to the trees, accept the invitation, accept even the fruit, she squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the five percent. That still belonged to herself, to the human world, maybe even partly to the stranger whose warm body she could still feel upon her own.
“No,” she said.
“Come in and talk to us.”
“No!” She opened her eyes, pivoted, and took off running again, down the slope, back toward town.
“What…have…you…done?” The voice reverberated behind her, furious now.
Skye faltered, turned around like a child seeking her mother, then caught herself and spun toward home again.
“You will weaken. You will be back,” Redring called. “And he will follow you, and be ours too.”
She broke free of the forest, raced over the railroad berm, and sprinted across the grass. She was almost sobbing when she reached her gate, its peeling white boards standing out in the twilight.
“Skye!” It was Livy this time, sounding scared and relieved. Her sister jogged down the concrete steps from the house. The screen door banged shut behind her. “Where were you?”
Skye shot into the garden, shut the gate behind her, and wilted back against it, nearly fainting from exertion. “Walk,” she managed.
“You were taking a walk?” Livy planted her hands on her hips. She was breathing fast too, like she was just coming down off a panic. “Are you okay?”
Skye nodded.
“You need to leave a note, or text me or something. Can you at least do that? I was worried.”
Skye bowed her head, eyes closed. Her heart still galloped, blood circulating dizzily through her.
“Look, I’m sorry.” Livy’s hand settled on Skye’s arm. “It’s fine if you want to go for walks. I just get worried if you don’t let me know, all right?”
Skye nodded, not opening her eyes.
“I’m happy to go for walks with you if you want.” Livy was making an effort to sound upbeat. “I mean, it’s usually dark by the time I get back from work, but hey, we own flashlights, right?”
Skye finally opened her eyes, and focused on Livy’s blue and white running shoes. “Right.”
“Come on in. It’s getting cold. Let’s find something for dinner.”
Skye let her sister lead her back into the house.
The goblins were right. Someday she’d weaken. She would go back out there, and she wouldn’t come back.
She didn’t even know yet what fate she might have brought down upon a well-meaning stranger with his whole life ahead of him.
Grady’s desire to forge a life in Seattle screeched to a stop. Everything in him concentrated upon the mystery woman. Presumably she was here in Bellwater, but where?
For the next three days, during non-work hours, he walked up and down every one of the few streets in town, and along the shore and around the bobbing docks of the marina, and of course through the forest too. His feet were blistered and the soles of his sneakers starting to peel off at the edges.
The woman was nowhere, vanished like a ghost.
While working at the garage he watched Shore Avenue in distraction, hoping to see her pass.
“What are you looking for?” Kit demanded on the third day.
“Nothing. Just looking.”
He couldn’t bring himself to ask Kit about her. Obviously he couldn’t say, “Hey, I kissed this babe in the forest, but I didn’t get her name and then she ran off. Dark hair, medium height, around my age. Any idea who that is?”
He considered altering it to a story about seeing a girl in passing, thinking she looked familiar, and describing her to see if Kit could identify her. But after the way Grady had teased Kit for his milkshake date with Livy, he didn’t dare. Kit would razz the hell out of him.
What was her name? He couldn’t leave town again without at least learning that much, without seeing her one more time, without asking what exactly had happened in the forest.
Yes, he knew it was crazy to be this obsessed over an encounter that had taken up maybe sixty seconds of his life. (Or had it been an hour and sixty seconds?) But what an encounter. His fingers still felt the bones and flesh through her sweater, his tongue still tasted her mysterious bitter-greens mouth, her voice still haunted him with that whispered Help me.
He needed an explanation. He had to know why she needed help. He might very well go insane if he never saw her again.