KIT HAD LIVY OVER AT THE CABIN AGAIN THE NEXT DAY AFTER WORK. HE ARRANGED TO HAVE GRADY BE ELSEWHERE, and Grady cleared out willingly, almost cheerfully. Probably “elsewhere” was wherever Skye was, like down at Green Fox for her shift.
It wasn’t unusual for Kit to see a woman more than once. If it got to more than four or five dates, then that would be shading into unusual. His vacationer hookups usually only stuck around town a week, if that. But being treated again to Livy’s soft curves, slick heat, enthusiasm, and laughing wit was enough to make him start formulating plans he didn’t often entertain.
To his surprise, she voiced one of them, lying comfortably beside him afterward. “So are we friends with benefits?”
“I would not object to that.” He touched the cute plump tip of her nose. “Though at the moment I may have a teeny crush on my ‘friend.’ Hope that doesn’t complicate things.”
“You need a teeny crush for these things to work.” She lifted herself up on her elbow, wheat-colored curls tumbling around her bare shoulders. “Does this mean I can booty-call you if I want?”
“Yeah. Why would I ever say no to that?”
She laughed. “Thank goodness. This winter was looking bleak otherwise.”
After she went home, Kit gathered up all the ugly gold-plated forks from the box under his bed. He drove across the bridge, parked at the edge of the vast forest, and tromped in.
He summoned the goblins with a whistled trio of notes. They sang a few other notes in response, and a path opened between trees. Luminous ferns this time, sparkling like they were coated with glow-in-the-dark frost.
“It’s not even the full moon,” Redring greeted, after morphing into her human-ish shape. “To what do we owe the pleasure, Kit darling?”
He held out the handful of forks. “I want to add another person to the list of the protected. Her name’s Livy Darwen.”
Behind Redring, among moving silhouettes and floating lights, laughter erupted. As usual.
Redring seized the forks, sniffed them, and rubbed the tines between her fingers. “You just invoked protection for your cousin last month. You cannot add anyone else until a year has passed.”
“I get one per year. I usually don’t even use it. I added Grady in December, and it’s January now, so it’s a new year and I get a new person.”
“As if we care about your calendar dates. I just told you. The agreement is, one year between the times you add each person. You added him, then a year must go by, then you add your little toy.”
“A year?” Shit, think what they could do in the space of a year. And Redring probably wasn’t lying in this particular instance, since when it came to their nonsense rules and contracts, the goblins did stick to what was agreed. He reached for the forks to take them back, but Redring scrabbled six feet up a tree, eerily fast. The move looked especially bizarre in her human form, dressed in pajamas and robe.
“We still get these!” she said, while the rest of the tribe hooted behind her like a bunch of damn monkeys.
“Well, fuck you too. Seriously?”
“Maybe they’ll convince us to be kind to this woman, whom we smell so strong upon you. Perhaps.”
The razzing, the stealing, the smelling people on him, the way they’d wrecked his life and his ancestors’ lives for generations now…fury swept over Kit. He grabbed a fallen branch, thick as his arm and heavy with soaked-up rain, and swung it like a baseball bat at Redring’s legs.
He felt the crack and heard her feral screech, but he barely even got a glimpse of the damage, because goblins leaped onto him from all directions. Knobby hands covered his eyes; claws and teeth ripped at his scalp, his cheek, his hands, his legs. The creatures smacked him down on the ground, and he pummeled blindly at them. It felt like fighting a pile of stinky, moving tree branches.
Then, as if answering some call Kit couldn’t hear, they all whisked themselves off him. He sat up, looked at his scratched hands, touched his throbbing cheek and came away with blood on his fingers. He glared at Redring.
She still perched halfway up the tree, in human-like guise, looking totally uninjured. She waved the forks at him. “That hurt, you ungrateful pup. Lucky for me, we heal fast. If I were you, I’d remember that you do not.”
One of the goblins flung down the branch Kit had used against her. It whacked his shinbones, hard enough to make him grit his teeth.
Kit rubbed his shins and looked away into the darkness, refusing to answer. He felt a warm drop of blood trickle down his forehead from his scalp.
“Then we’ll see you at the full moon, Sylvain.” Redring darted upward to disappear into the treetops.
The others followed her, cackling.
“Kit. Kit.” It was a whisper; submissive, for a goblin.
He glanced toward it. The creature they called Flowerwatch crawled toward him on the ground, bending the ferns. She was a small female, and around her neck hung an ancient, tarnished pocket watch with a flower carved on its cover. She’d always been one of the meekest in the tribe, as far as Kit had seen, and sometimes she looked at him with pity, which was more than any of the others ever did. If his ancestors’ records were correct, she’d been an abducted human long ago. Then again, maybe all of them were, and they didn’t all behave like Flowerwatch did. He had no idea why she acted different, and right now he didn’t care to figure it out.
“What,” he said.
“You do not have to worry about Livy Darwen.” Flowerwatch glanced back fearfully toward the rest of the tribe before looking at Kit again. “The locals, they like her. She respects the forest and the water.”
“Yeah. She does. But what…”
“Flowerwatch!” Redring’s snarl from above sent Flowerwatch yipping and scurrying back from Kit. “Your mealy-mouthed weakness for humans is foul and disrespectful to all of us. To me!”
“Yes. Yes. I’m sorry.” Flowerwatch cowered so low her nose squashed against the mossy ground.
“You undermine me!” Redring cracked a branch against Flowerwatch’s back, making the smaller goblin yelp. Kit winced too. “I have warned you, do you hear? I will only hurt them more if I see you behave this way—and I will hurt you too!”
“Of course. Apologies. Of course.” Flowerwatch scrambled away with only one quick glance back in Kit’s direction.
Redring pranced after her, swinging the branch like a nightstick. That was how she’d held onto her dictatorial position all these centuries, he figured: tyranny and punishment, interspersed with favors and rewards. It seemed even immortal beings shied away from pain or the denial of pleasures, and they had lots of creative ways of punishing each other.
Kit watched them disappear. The rustles and whispers of the goblins faded until only the wind in the trees remained. The glowing ferns and little lights winked out. Kit heaved himself to his feet, switched on the flashlight on his phone, and limped back to his truck, not encouraged despite Flowerwatch’s enigmatic words.
Grady sat in the steamy warmth of Green Fox Espresso at a small table close to the counter. A book lay open on the table, whose pages he ignored in favor of gazing at Skye as she made drinks. It was dark out, after dinner now, and the little coffee shop was half-filled, mostly with teenagers. Not much else for the high school set to do in Bellwater on a wet winter night, he supposed. He barely gave any of them a thought except to be grateful they provided a crowd he could blend into, so he could sit here and bask in the sight of Skye without anyone thinking him strange.
If they did notice and think him strange, he didn’t even care.
She wore a black apron over her tank top; she had taken off her sweatshirt to leave her arms bare among the heat of the espresso machines. Her hair was wrapped up and held with black-and-white painted chopsticks. It looked like her boss had moved her off the order-taking duties at the cash register (probably because she barely spoke), and had her mostly putting drinks together. She did everything he’d seen baristas do a thousand times—measuring ground coffee, packing it into the machine, punching buttons, swirling foam in—but now every move plucked a chord deep inside him.
He’d ordered a latte, and left it untouched for the first fifteen minutes because Skye had made a heart on top with the foam. It struck him as a declaration, a Valentine of sorts, and he didn’t want to destroy it.
He couldn’t love her yet. It wasn’t possible. But, God, it was starting to feel that way. He started drinking the latte, his lips dragging the heart all out of shape, just to prove he wasn’t being over-sentimental, and because anyway it would be a waste to let it get cold.
A while ago a woman in her twenties had come in and talked to Skye for ten minutes. (Skye only nodded or echoed a word here and there; the woman did most of the talking.) Someone else behind the counter called, “Hi, Jamie!”, and Grady recognized her as Skye’s friend from some of the photos on her phone. Jamie wore a puffy red winter coat and a green hat, and had rosy plump cheeks. Skye hadn’t mentioned her much lately. From the regretful twist to Jamie’s lips when she gave Skye a goodbye hug, Grady got the impression Jamie didn’t see her often anymore and didn’t know what to do with Skye when she did see her, and was sad about it.
He ought to ask Skye about Jamie, and about other people in her life who cared about her. It was completely the kind of thing he would ask her about, if he were behaving normally himself. But that was just the thing. He wasn’t. Though he recognized it as unhealthy and felt unnerved by it, he knew he’d choose the path of keeping Skye all to himself.
She seemed to glow in his vision like a spotlight had picked her out. The rest of the cafe, the rest of the world, fell into shadow. She kept looking at him too, between orders, when she had a moment, and he would have sworn she was promising Soon. Soon they’d steal another hour alone like this afternoon in the woods. Soon they’d do more than that. Soon he’d understand what had silenced her and erased her smiles, and how to fix it.
Soon they’d never have to be apart, could be together in the woods forever, dropping society’s rules and adopting new ones.
That thought was crazy. It was unlike him. It was frightening.
But it all came wrapped up with Skye, and somehow he knew he had signed onto it the minute he started kissing her in the forest without so much as a “What’s your name?”
A text buzzed in from Kit. Livy’s heading home. Come back whenever you like.
Cool, see you in a bit, Grady answered.
He finished the latte and brought the foam-stained mug back to the counter. Skye wandered up on the other side.
“Livy’s on her way home,” Grady said.
Skye nodded. She’d probably gotten a text from her sister saying as much, and it was likely Livy would stop here first to see her.
“I should go. Just wanted to say goodnight properly.”
Skye hadn’t told Livy about this relationship yet. Grady didn’t like the whiff of secrecy, but he agreed telling Livy or Kit would raise more questions than he currently felt like answering.
Skye glanced behind her, ascertaining her two coworkers had their backs turned. Then she leaned across the counter to meet Grady in a kiss. It lingered a few seconds, coffee-flavored and steamy, enough to amp up his already-sky-high hormones. “Goodnight,” she whispered.