WHEN SKYE AND LIVY HAD DRIVEN AWAY, GRADY STAYED IN THE YARD BEHIND THE CABIN, HUGGING HIMSELF, GAZING up at the treetops.
Kit’s step crunched the gravel off to his left. “They live up there,” he said. “Up in the trees. Not here on the island really, but in the national forest on the mainland. I guess you know that, though.”
Grady had begun to guess as much, but he couldn’t nod or otherwise answer. He looked at Kit a second to show he was listening, then let his glance get pulled back up into the woods.
“They have these weird houses up there, like a treehouse village, like Skye drew. You can’t see it unless they invite you in and you take their path. Which you’ve never done, I guess. That’s what I made them promise they wouldn’t do to you. Lot of good it did.”
Right. Instead Skye had invited him—Help me—and he’d taken her path, stepping off the main trail and through the underbrush to reach her, to taste the enchanted fruit of her mouth. Grady forced his gaze down instead, to the solidity of the ground.
“They’re getting too damn bold.” Kit sounded bitter. “There’s no precedent for this, for them taking someone close to the liaison. Not that I’ve found in the records, anyhow. They usually just pick on random people.” Kit sighed. “Not that that’s any better. And I guess liaisons before me were better at protecting the people they ought to protect.”
Grady shook his head at Kit, with a slow blink to signal Not your fault, no hard feelings. Really, not Kit’s fault. Just rotten luck.
“Sucks for you too,” Grady said. The curse let him say that, at least.
“Oh yeah. That it does.”
Though it was cold out and starting to drizzle again, Grady wanted to linger out here a while, absorbing the air alone. But Kit hovered a few feet behind him, and finally said, “Will you come in? You’re making me nervous. I don’t want you to wander off into the woods this very night if it’s all the same to you.”
Grady could tell he was trying to sound ironic, throw a pinch of humor into the situation.
Grady nodded, and resisted the forest’s pull, following Kit back inside.
He tucked himself into a chair by the dark front window, his computer open on his lap. “How to write a will” was a Google search he’d never run before, never thought about nor wanted to think about; but now he ran it, and with cold fingertips copied and pasted a legal-looking template into a document file. He filled in the blank spaces with his name and the date, and read over the boilerplate.
I, Grady Michael Sylvain, being of sound mind…
Was he of sound mind? Probably couldn’t claim that anymore. But a lawyer wasn’t going to take a goblin hex into consideration, so he kept on filling in blanks. Pushing down the whirlwind of grief and terror, he typed his intention to divide his modest goods and bank account among his parents and siblings if he died—or at least, if he went permanently missing and was presumed dead. Probably it would be better for his family if they thought he was dead, so they wouldn’t have to wait and hope endlessly for him to return.
Then, if they found this document, they’d likely think he had killed himself, even if Kit—who would probably be the last to see him “alive”— swore up and down that Grady wouldn’t do such a thing. For what other reason than suicide would a healthy twenty-one-year-old in a seemingly safe lifestyle write a will?
He shut his eyes a moment, feeling so sad and nauseated he couldn’t even look at the screen. The thought of his family regarding him as a suicide hurt just as much as the thought of them waiting forever for him to come home. Screw Kit’s reservations on the issue. Grady opened his eyes, made room for a new paragraph after the preliminary boilerplate, and typed:
I am not dead. But I cannot come home. It is my wish that my cousin, Kit Sylvain, tell the truth about what happened to me, just as he told it to me shortly before my disappearance. He isn’t to blame in any way, but he has the explanation.
He was tempted to add Livy’s name, call her in as a witness as well. But he supposed it best to let the Darwen clan write their own letters and explanations in the ways they saw fit. After all, if they couldn’t break this spell, Skye would be leaving her family in the same bereft condition.
Grady rested his head back against the wall, looking at the ceiling’s log beams. He wondered if he should text Skye, ask her if she’d written a will. Maybe she didn’t need to. Her family was smaller than his. Everything she owned would surely go to Livy, who would know what to do with it. Livy seemed to know what to do about most stuff in life.
He grimaced at his makeshift will, which struck him as useless, and he closed it without saving it.
God, how he hoped Livy would know what to do here, and soon, before he and Skye gave up their human skins and crawled into the treetops.
“So I know you’ll have to go out into the woods alone eventually, one of these nights,” Livy said when they got home.
Skye shivered, feeling the tug of the tribe, tasting the increasingly appealing syrupy fruits, hearing the frolicking songs…
“But,” Livy went on, “if you could please stay inside tonight? Just— can it not be today? Please give me one more day with you…” She held her hands clasped before her chest, her eyes pleading.
Skye nodded. She was so tired anyway, she probably could just fall asleep in her bed and not be too tormented by the thought of the fresh air and starlight and glee she was missing.
Those thoughts had plagued her every night since the goblins captured her. She felt like a teenager grounded by her parents, exiled to solitary confinement while all the people she wanted to see were partying without her. Also, Grady wasn’t with her at night, and she pined even harder for him than she did for the forest. It should have been enough to know she’d see him the next day, in a matter of hours. Like anyone addicted to something, she had trouble seeing past her cravings, her current lack of the desired thing.
Even tonight, though she obeyed Livy’s request and stayed indoors, she stood by her bedroom window a long while after turning off the lights, and stared out into the forest. It had become a habit for her, a behavior she indulged anytime she couldn’t sleep, and one she performed every night before she went to bed. Livy didn’t know; Skye always shut her door, and moved quietly around her room.
Tonight drizzle spattered the windowpane, hitting harder in erratic gusts of wind, and all she could see of the forest was a vaguely shifting wall of black. Would it be cold and wet, living up in the treetops on a night like this? Would the gusting wind make the houses sway? Did the weather bother the goblins, or did they swing through the bending branches like squirrels, and splash into the rain like frogs, always in gleeful communion with nature?
She guessed it was the latter. That didn’t sound so bad. It had to be better than feeling torn in half like this.
Skye was well aware of what the others hadn’t realized until tonight: that Grady had become increasingly quiet and unsmiling ever since being enchanted by her. He’d grown less interested in cooking, in his job hunt, in any life outside of Skye and the forest. Even when alone together lately, they didn’t talk much anymore, not the way they had those first few days. They replaced most of their conversation with touch, and with gazes in which they seemed to be trying to read each other’s minds (unsuccessfully, but she still felt comforted by the attempt). It was almost enough. It felt intimate, and was intimate in most definitions of the word.
Being able to speak freely had become one of her strongest cravings, and he undoubtedly felt the same. Who wouldn’t? Turning into a goblin would restore that to them, though presumably they wouldn’t speak the way they used to, exactly. None of the goblins seemed to think like humans did, even if that’s who they used to be.
Still, what could she do? She was supposed to join them before Livy had any hope of shattering this spell. Much as they all dreaded it, that was the only instruction they’d gotten from the other fae.
Strange that she was so safe from her fate during daylight hours. Livy could leave her and go to work as usual, in the knowledge that Skye couldn’t be taken. Skye considered going out in the woods during the day and holing up there, waiting for night, letting it happen already. But that last sliver of humanity left to her was strong. It wouldn’t let her. When she did go out, she returned home before sunset, every time.
Grady came over today as usual. She felt an extra flutter of nervousness before his arrival. He’d been quiet in text—ordinarily they kept in touch every few hours—and she dreaded seeing the sadness or accusation in his face, now that he knew everything with clarity and had had all night to mull it over. Indeed, now she herself knew much more than she had before.
When he arrived, an hour after Livy had left for work, he set down the grocery bag and just held her, in the front entry, their chests rising and falling against one another. The scent of him, through the soft flannel of his shirt, made her tear up. Surely he wouldn’t smell quite like this anymore after their transformation. But I won’t care; I’ll be happy then, she reminded herself.
A glance downward into the grocery bag, gaping open by her feet, proved how far his interests had tumbled: pre-wrapped deli sandwiches. Canned soup. Boxed crackers. The real Grady would have thrown this Grady out of the house in outrage.
The human world would lose two artists when the tribe took them. Would she and Grady still use their skills in the goblin village? Would she be designing their next treetop houses? Clumping together glowing mushrooms to make light fixtures? Or—a shudder shook her at the thought—would Grady be mixing up next month’s batch of jinxed fruit pastries?
She lifted her face to him, hardly able to breathe in her panic. He read her expression, and leaned down to soothe her with a kiss. She closed her eyes, felt his heat melt her sharp edges away, and sank into it. This magic brought all sorts of cruelty, but being with him eased the pain. Almost.