“SO WHEN DID YOU FIND OUT?” LIVY ASKED. “DID YOU GROW UP KNOWING ABOUT THIS?”
They were sitting in Carol’s Diner again, this time with Grady and Skye. Each of them had a cup of coffee. A shared plate of hash browns sat in the middle of the table—mostly untouched, Kit noticed. Not a lot of appetite among the four of them today.
He glanced at Livy, beside him. “Nah. My dad told me during his final illness, seven years ago. I thought he was off his head with pain meds, of course. He told me where to find the ancestral records, and I read them, but I still thought it was just a hoax, my ancestors keeping up some weird story for fun, or maybe they were all honestly crazy. I put the box away. I didn’t know what to think. Then one night after he died, these voices started calling to me from the trees. I followed them and…met them. And realized all those obligations Dad told me about were true.”
“Did your mom know?” Grady asked.
Kit nodded. “He says she did. But she’d forgotten by then, what with her own illness.” He dragged his fingertip around in some spilled salt on the table. “Explains why they seemed so stressed a lot of the time when I was growing up.”
“So when you said you moved to Idaho and Wyoming, but your problems moved along with you,” Livy said, “does that mean they followed you?”
“Yeah. They showed up wherever I tried to go. I’d think I had escaped them, then within a month they’d be chirping at me again. Calling down from trees to tell me they were going to start stealing people if I didn’t fall in line.” Kit formed the salt into a square, boxing it in on each side with the edge of his finger. “Same thing happened to our great-grandma. When she and her family emigrated to America, she hoped the gob—” He cut off the word, glanced around, and continued, “She hoped they would get left behind in France. But no. They followed her across the ocean, then across the continent. Then all the way out here.”
“How?” Livy asked. “In a boat, or…”
“They can shape-shift. They probably became fish or dolphins or something. Then birds, on the continent. Who knows. But it’s definitely the same group. Riding us to keep getting their gold.”
“That’s why the locals called them weeds.” Livy sounded glum. “They actually are an invasive species.”
“Yet another way Europeans have fucked up America.”
“Gold,” Grady echoed. “Why?”
Kit’s gaze moved to Skye, at Grady’s side. She watched Kit, dark brown eyes pinned to him like a student who knew the answer and wanted to be called on, but who couldn’t talk if he did call on her. “It’s their magic material of choice,” Kit said. “They can make just about anything out of it. Anything inanimate, at least. Maybe living stuff too, I don’t know.”
“What do they make?” Livy asked.
“Everything. Their houses, their furniture, whatever they want. The other month they wanted an espresso machine and a milk steamer.”
Grady’s eyebrows lifted in disbelief.
“They did not,” Livy said.
“They did. They’re into food. Not only because they like it, but because it’s one of the ways they tempt people. If they can get you to eat or drink something of theirs, you’re under their spell right away.”
“I thought you just had to follow their path,” Livy said.
“That’s how you see them. You might be okay if you follow the path and don’t eat anything. But…” He looked at Skye again, feeling guilty for bringing it up. She lowered her face. “It doesn’t mean anyone’s gullible or anything, if they get enchanted. The tribe probably does whatever they can to cast that spell. They basically assault people, so I wouldn’t doubt if they…forced food on someone.” He said the last few words softly, since, to judge from Skye’s traumatized face, that was exactly what they’d done.
“Did they?” Livy demanded of her sister. “Did they force you to eat?”
Everyone watched Skye, who only closed her eyes a moment, cringing. No nod, no head-shake.
“What else did they force you to do?” Livy’s voice shook. “Did they—they didn’t—was there anything sexual?”
Grady slipped his arm around Skye, gaze fixed on her, hardly seeming to breathe.
Skye straightened up and shook her head, just a little. She met Livy’s gaze.
Grady breathed again, and touched his lips to her shoulder.
“They better not have.” Livy clenched her hands in fury, on either side of her mug. “This is just…oh my God.”
Kit felt sick. He wished he could assure them the goblins never molested anyone sexually. But the past liaisons had heard of them doing exactly that. As with most of their crimes, it was nothing anyone could prove; more like hearsay and bragging from long after the deed was done. They mugged, ensorcelled, and assaulted people, and sometimes left them to die, so why would they draw the line at groping or raping someone?
From the little that Redring had said about Skye’s spell and the “mate” status she had conferred upon Grady by choosing him, they probably had played a slightly different game than usual with Skye. He got the impression they wanted to keep her rather than abandon her like they did with the fisherman a few years back, so they had cast some sort of mating magic on her with the idea of making her choose one of them as a mate. Instead she’d chosen Grady, which was a clever loophole find on her part. Then the goblins had outfoxed her by claiming Grady for their side too.
Grady cleared his throat. “The gold. The stealing. How do you do it?”
Kit glanced around uneasily. No one in the diner seemed to be eavesdropping; only a few other groups of people sat in the place, all talking to their companions, several booths away. “I hate it. It sounds like this awesome opportunity, like you get to be Robin Hood, right? But it isn’t. It sucks.”
“There must be people who deserve to be stolen from,” Livy said. “Or who have so much they wouldn’t miss it.”
“Yeah, and sometimes I do go to rich people’s houses, or ostentatious boats at marinas. But still, say you find gold, what’s it likely to be? Jewelry, right? These days it’s hardly ever coins or anything. And jewelry’s got sentimental value, and I don’t know the story behind it. Maybe this rich guy is a dick, but what if this necklace was his mother’s and he’s saving it for his daughter, who’s a perfectly nice person? How can I know?”
“Hmm.” Livy tapped her fingers on the table. “Fair point.”
“So for the most part I don’t even try to get gold, not during the thefts. I just look for cash. Cash is impersonal. Then I use that to go buy gold, somewhere or other.”
“Pawn shops?” Grady suggested.
“I go to those too. With them, I don’t mind lifting gold quite so much, at least in the ones where the owner seems shady. Still, the stuff might’ve been stolen in order to end up in the pawn shop, and someone out there might miss it.”
“What about big chain stores?” Livy said. “They can afford it. Or those overpriced jewelry stores in downtown Seattle. Or banks! Can you rob banks?”
“Would you keep your voice down? And yeah, I can. Sometimes I hit all those. Even then, it sucks for someone. If a couple thousand dollars goes missing from the till, a bank or a store can absorb the loss, but what’s going to happen? They’re probably going to fire whoever was on duty. So then I’m responsible for some innocent teller or cashier losing their job.”
“Oh. Huh.” She frowned at her coffee mug.
Skye and Grady abstractly gazed at the table too, maybe trying to imagine how they’d go about stealing if they had to.
Livy squinted at him. “How does it work, though? You just walk into some store or house, with some magic word…?”
He smiled bitterly. “I say, ‘For the tribe,’ before I walk in. That makes the magic kick in, and then, yep, they just don’t even notice me. Made me sick to my stomach the first few times I tried it. Thought for sure I was going to get arrested.”
She lifted the coffee mug to her lips, but didn’t drink. “Every month for the last seven years,” she mused, speaking against the mug’s rim.
“Yeah. I spread it around, a lot of different stores, houses, towns.” Kit tensed his shoulders. “But it’s a pain in the ass, and I still end up feeling like a thug. Which I am. I’m completely a criminal, there’s no way around it.”
“No.” Livy set down her mug. “You’ve got no choice. We’d all do it, if it were that or have people get assaulted. Not that it seems to stop them assaulting people.”
He shut his eyes a moment. “Well, that’s the rest of it. Sometimes…I come up short for the month. I can’t stand to go out and steal, or I don’t have time, or whatever. And then…well, there’s no way I can be sure, but those seem to be the times they act out against people. Like it gives them the right, if I don’t hold up my end. My ancestors’ records suggest that’s how the magic works.”
“So before they got Skye…” Livy was clearly putting the clues together.
“I came up short that month.” He stared at the salt crystals. “They were pissed. The timing matches up. I brought them more stuff a week later, but in that time…” He trailed off, and looked at Skye.
She met his glance for a second, then looked forlornly out the window.
Everyone was silent for a stretch.
“Where did Redring even come from, anyway?” Livy said in despair. “Why is she like this?”
Kit pulled Élodie’s letter from inside his jacket, and leafed through to find the right part. “That’s in here. Or at least, as much as we’ll ever find out.” He handed the relevant page to Livy.
She frowned at it and read aloud Élodie’s words:
“I asked her once, ‘Who are you? Were you once human as well?’ And she got angry and sneered, ‘What does it matter? What could you want to know? Once upon a time there was a girl whose whole family was slaughtered by Vikings, and she swore revenge and called upon the fae, and one answered her. He made her a goblin like himself, and she became his mate, and though he was but one lone creature when she met him, together they became powerful and amassed a mighty tribe, who drove out any humans who tried to live in their forest. When he overstepped his magical bounds, the nasty neighboring fae stole him and transformed him into a river-nix who cared nothing for her anymore, only for the water and its creatures, but the tough goblin girl kept on. She has survived and her tribe is one of the mightiest in the world, and everyone knows you cross her at your peril.’ ”
Livy let the page sink.
“Vikings?” Grady echoed.
“Yeah,” Kit said. “We’re talking a long, long time she’s been doing this.”
“We’ve got to end it,” Livy said. “Whatever it takes. This is absolutely unfair, to everyone involved. Including her.”
They paid for their food and went back outside. Kit needed to return to the garage, and Livy had an afternoon of work to do.
Grady and Skye wandered into the sculpture garden, arms around each other’s waists.
Livy watched them. “If this doesn’t work, I guess I have to stay on good terms with you,” she said to Kit. “How else will I find out how she’s doing?” Her voice cracked on the last words. Tears pooled in her green eyes.
Kit’s heart squeezed. “Listen.” He grasped her wrist, at his side. “This will work. We will do this.”
She tried to smile, a twitch of an expression that soon slipped away.
What he didn’t tell her, because he didn’t want her talking him out of it, was that he’d had enough. He planned to offer the goblins whatever the hell it took to let Skye and Grady go. Twice the monthly gold, ten times, he’d do it. Even his life, if they wanted it.
It would be worth it. He was done.