LIVY HAD LEFT ON HER OWN, UNDER KIT’S INSTRUCTIONS. GRADY AND SKYE STAYED BEHIND WITH KIT, WHO DRAGGED out the box of goblin-related files and sat at the kitchen island with it, digging through notebooks and scowling.
Grady remained seated on his bed, with Skye huddled under his arm, and examined the ghoulish picture that had finally crystallized into focus in his mind.
Desperate words clogged his throat like a logjam. He would have spoken if he could have, lots of times. He would have told Kit and Livy how the woods had been calling to him too, how this all wasn’t exactly a surprise because the eerie truth had been sneaking up on his brain ever since he met Skye. After all, for the past couple of weeks—and he wouldn’t tell them this part, but—he’d been having various kinds of sex with her daily, out there in the woods, despite drizzle and chill, despite having to lie on damp moss or prop themselves against muddy trees. He could have done all this with her in her room, so why had they kept at it that way instead? The forest must have drawn them, made them unable to resist. He had worked that out already, bizarre though it was, though he didn’t know why it was happening.
Mostly, he wished he could tell Kit he must be wrong about Grady being “protected,” because the goblins had fucking gotten him anyway.
By now Grady couldn’t speak of it either. His words had been getting locked down inside him more and more over the past few days, and now that he was dying to speak, he couldn’t. About other topics, he could still talk more freely than Skye could, but not about that.
Grady glanced at her, and their eyes held for a long moment. The curse was spreading in him, and he could tell she knew it. Had known it from the first day. Her gaze overflowed with sorrow, as it always did when she looked at him, and now he fully understood why.
He ought to be furious at her for doing this to him. But he couldn’t be. Help me had been her first words to him; she had been drowning, casting out for anyone’s hand, and Grady’s happened to be available. He couldn’t regret going to her. She was his mate and he never wanted to be separated from her, and soon he would never have to be, and that, at least, was a comfort.
But everything else in his human life—his parents, siblings, hometown; the career he might have had; the man he might have been—for all that, about to be swept into the trash heap of history, he felt immense sadness. Because he was still human, not a gleeful, callous goblin. Yet.
Skye stirred, slipped out of his grasp, and walked across to the bathroom.
As soon as the bathroom door shut, Kit glanced over at Grady. “You’re quiet.”
Grady let his hands dangle over his knees. “Yeah.”
“I get it. I was pretty freaked when I first found out too. Also I guess you and her are…” Kit sighed, and chucked a notebook back into the file box, then plucked out a different one. “Shit, man. If I’d honestly thought that was what was wrong with her, I’d have warned you. I’d have done something. What, though, I have no idea.”
“Yeah,” Grady whispered again.
Kit paged through the notebook. “Look, maybe Livy’s right. Maybe catching it early this time, there could be some way to break it.”
“Maybe.” Great, now he was echoing words too.
“But it’s like I said.” Kit kept leafing through pages. “At least you’re protected, so you don’t have to worry about yourself. If that’s any consolation.”
Grady stared at him, furrowing his brows, willing Kit to look up and understand that he wasn’t protected, that it hadn’t worked, that he was cursed right along with Skye. Kit kept searching through their ancestors’ records without looking up, his face grim. “If she doesn’t call after half an hour, I’m going out to find her,” he muttered.
Kit said you had to go to the woods alone at night, so that’s what Livy was doing. He also said it was rare for the goblins to show up on Crabapple Island, so she drove back across the bridge and through Bellwater toward the national forest. He reported he’d only seen the goblins on the island a couple of times, when he was trying to avoid them and they came to bug him anyway. They didn’t like it out there, probably because they had to get people alone to work their magic. That tended to be tricky on the island, where there were too many houses close together, which, Livy figured, must be why Kit continued to live out there instead of on the mainland. That way, at least at home, he could usually avoid them.
Good God, how was she even thinking about this rationally? As if goblins were a real thing? She gripped the steering wheel tighter, continued on out of town, and made for the nearest Forest Service road. First things first. She’d test this “summoning” procedure and see if anything even happened.
She bumped Skye’s car along the muddy road, her headlights washing across dark tree trunks, fallen fir needles, and the waving arms of ferns growing over into the roadway. A couple of miles out of town, she decided she’d gone far enough, pulled over, and turned off the engine.
She creaked open the car door and stepped out. Cold wind whispered. The forest canopy moved high above, just visible against the night clouds. She told herself she wasn’t afraid.
She tapped the voice-memo option on her phone, and listened to the playback of the six notes Kit had whistled as a recording. She let it play a couple of times into the darkness, and looked up, waiting.
The wind gusted, the trees swished. Nothing else.
Maybe it had to be her own voice, not a recording. She whistled it herself, imitating the notes. The partial tune sounded eerie to her; a minor key, if she wasn’t mistaken, more suited to Halloween than to the middle of winter. She wondered what the rest of the song sounded like, and her heart pounded at the possibility that she’d know in a minute, if anyone answered.
No one did. Just the wind, rustling and moaning. Unless the moaning was something else.
She shuddered, picturing ghosts now and actually believing in them in a setting like this. She drew her back up against the car, her gaze darting around the dark forest.
Still nothing.
Her fear ebbed, and frustration surged in. Skye’s sanity, maybe her existence as a human, hinged on finding out what was going on in these woods. This explanation, absurd though it was, seemed to have absolutely convinced Skye and Kit, so Livy would unearth the truth behind it, whatever it took.
“Hey!” she shouted, her own voice shocking her in the stillness. “Goblins! Show yourselves! You out there? Huh?”
She was alone. It was dark. She had whistled the tune and shouted out their name in invitation. These creatures ought to be opening up glowing pathways to her about now.
Nothing happened.
“Hey!” The rage ignited her voice. “What did you do to my sister? How do I fix it? Show your faces and tell me!”
No one answered.
Livy stood there a few more minutes, shivering, stamping her feet to keep them from going numb. Even after her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough for her to watch individual branches moving in silhouette above, nothing glowed, and nothing unearthly showed up.
Screw this. Tomorrow she was going to call Morgan Tran and set up a psychotherapy appointment for herself; in fact, maybe for Kit too; she’d drag him along whether he wanted to come or not, and she’d bring Skye and Grady as well, have a nice, big group session.
She turned to the car. As she laid her fingers on the door handle, something fell from the trees, bounced off the VW’s roof with a clink, and hit her in the eye.
“Ow!” She scrunched up her eye, rubbing at it, and looked down at the ground to see what had hit her. It had felt and sounded like metal rather than a fir cone or twig.
After switching on the flashlight bulb on the back of her phone, she found it, and picked it up: a ring. Gold and heavy, with rounded edges, smooth and slightly tarnished as if it had been handled by many owners for many years. It had designs engraved into it, which she examined as she turned it around in the flashlight beam: a mushroom, a feather, a sun or maybe a flower, a cockle shell.
She looked back up, as if she might be able to see where it had come from, which was unlikely given all the darkness.
Except suddenly it wasn’t dark up there.
Fear and wonder splashed over her in a cold wave. She sucked in her breath and reached out to steady herself against the car—then stumbled, because the car wasn’t there. Neither was the road; bushes and trees stood all around her, as if she had walked out into the middle of the forest without noticing.
That would have been alarming enough. But none of it astonished her as much as the little lights, the figures, flitting and crawling in the trees, some of them descending toward her.
“No,” she said. “Oh, no. I did not take any path. This shouldn’t happen unless I take your path!” She shouted it up at them, as if defiance might change reality.
Something floated down to the level of her nose. The thing was about the size of her hand, and looked like a frog with wings, its whole body glowing in a nimbus of pale gold light. “You picked up our token,” it told her, in a voice like a tree-frog’s chirp. “That is the same as a path.”
She opened her palm to glare down at the ring. “Well, he didn’t tell me about that.”
The frog thing laughed, as did the others, in a ripple of chittering sounds. The creatures weren’t beautiful, or at least not in a human way, like the faeries in children’s books. Instead they took forms from the natural environment: a clump of lichen ambling down a tree trunk, a foot-long dragonfly with a quasi-human face, a gnome whose hat you could easily mistake for a pointy brown mushroom, a bushy flying twig of spruce needles with a green smile.
They didn’t particularly look like the spooky creature Skye had drawn, but then, apparently goblins could shape-shift.
“What did you do to Skye, and how do I reverse it?” she demanded.
“The goblins enchanted her,” the frog said. “Not we.”
“You aren’t goblins?”
They all reacted again, this time in what sounded like offended grumbles.
“Of course not.” The frog continued hovering in front of her, glowing gold, its wings not even moving, as if they were just decoration rather than a means of levitation. The air wafting off the creature smelled oddly warm and pleasant, like beeswax. “The goblins are invaders. Weeds. They followed the liaison and took over much of the forest. We are the proper fae of this land.”
“Oh. Sorry. I’ve never…well, I never knew any of you were here, exactly.”
“Most humans do not. But you, Olivia Darwen, respect our forests and our waters, and therefore we wish to assist you. You called out, so we are answering.”
Livy drew in a breath. “Good. Are you…well, if I can ask, I know the goblins used to be humans…”
“Yes, most of them.”
“Is that what you are too? Humans who were changed?”
“Only a few of us. For the most part we are merely fae, and always have been.”
She glanced around at the glow-spangled nighttime forest. “And where are we now, exactly?”
“You are in the forest as before, but you have stepped into the fae realm. It is always here, overlaid upon your world, but humans usually cannot see it or enter it.”
“But they can get stuck in it, if someone like a goblin gets hold of them?”
“Yes. That is always a danger. That is why such paths are treacherous.”
“How can I save my sister?” Livy asked again.
“Her enchantment was within magical law. Unfortunately she asked the fae to appear, and the goblins, common weeds that they are, answered her. They showed her a path and she took it. This makes it fair, even if some of us do not like it. They have been taking more than they should, and pushing the boundaries of the rules too far.”
“So what can I do? Is there any way to stop the spell? Or is she just doomed to become one of them?” Livy’s heart wrung itself tight at the thought.
“When the time comes for her to leave you and go to them, then you may act. For then you are the one wronged, to lose your sister, and you never accepted such a deal.”
“No, I didn’t. So when does that happen? When does she go to them?”
“We do not know. Only that it would surely be at night, and probably soon.”
Livy swallowed, fear sweeping over her. “What do I do then?”
“Come to the woods, any woods, and summon us. Keep that ring.” The frog-faery nodded at her clutched hand. “Possessing it enables you to see and hear us.”
“Then what happens?”
“Then you will have to be brave, Olivia Darwen.” The frog looked grave—Livy was beginning to read expressions better on its stretched, wide-lipped face. “We will help you overcome their magic, but it must be you who approaches and infiltrates them.”
“Why me? You’re the ones with magic. I don’t have any.”
“We would like to defeat the goblins. Since coming here they’ve been pests to us. But magic has rules that we cannot break, and the goblins are always out of our reach unless they overstep rules themselves. They do so sometimes, and we do retaliate, but it has only taken their numbers down a little. They build them back up with new victims. They are strong. Weeds always are.”
“Yes.” Livy thought of her battles against Himalayan blackberry, Japanese knotweed, and English ivy. “They are.”
“But you, a human from the tribe who was wronged—you, with our backing, may be able not only to save your sister, but to open a way for us to eradicate the goblins. Are you ready to be so brave, young human?”
It sounded scary. Maybe the kind of thing a person never returned from, like all those people who disappeared into the woods or the water and were never seen again. But she thought of Skye—the Skye who used to laugh, tease, gesture enthusiastically, spend a whole weekend perfecting the colors of a painting while listening to loud hip-hop. The Skye who was already almost lost to her and would never come back unless Livy stepped up.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be ready.”