KIT WAITED MAYBE THREE MINUTES BEFORE PROWLING BACK TO WHERE HE’D LEFT LIVY. HER FOOTPRINTS IN THE snow vanished into nowhere, just as Grady’s and Skye’s did. The fae had brought her into their world.
Empty and rattled, he walked back to his cabin, but stopped at the door. What was he going to do while the three of them were in the goblins’ hands? Build a cozy fire and heat up a pot of coffee in case they came back? Hang out warming his feet till then? Screw that.
He wheeled around, went to his truck, and dug out the tire chains from the metal box in the bed. He hooked them onto the tires, then climbed into the cab. If Livy did succeed, and broke all of them out of the goblin hideout, then they’d probably wind up in the national forest where those dwellings were.
Also, if they—goblins and his loved ones alike—thought he was going to sit here pointlessly while they did all the important stuff, they were sorely mistaken. He was summoning them and going in, whether anyone else liked it or not.
He drove down the bumpy, icy lane to the loop road, then out to the even icier bridge, and eased the truck across it. Bellwater slumbered on the other side, everything covered with pristine snowfall, lit up by streetlights. It was 12:30, though the timing might be different in the fae world.
He drove past the closed-up shops, up Shore Avenue, and on into the woods. His truck’s weight and the tire chains kept him from skidding too much, and he arrived at his traditional stopping point without sliding into any ditches. He got out. The snow lightened the world; he saw more than he usually could when he came out here at night. But everything was quieter too. The trees still creaked in the breeze, but they sounded muffled by the blanket of snow. The winter wind rose with a moan for a moment, like a tundra soundtrack, then died away again.
Kit whistled a few notes.
It took a minute, but someone whistled them back, and a voice taunted in falsetto, “Who is it?”
“It’s me.” He used a neutral, conciliatory tone. After all, going in swinging hadn’t turned out so well lately. “I want to come visit the dwellings. Just want to be there, for the big night. Just to see, okay?”
This was so dumb. Even if they brought him up there, what chance would he have to accomplish anything brave and useful? They’d throw him out of the treehouse the second he made a move against them. But if it bought Livy even a few seconds to do whatever she had to do, or if it inspired Grady and Skye to resist and not become goblins, then he was going in.
They opened the path for him: snow sculptures tonight, knee-high mushroom shapes leading him into the woods. They didn’t glow; the snow made things light enough to see without it.
Once he reached the end of the path, three goblins crawled down the snow-dusted trunks to meet him. He glanced up at their dwellings, a hundred feet up in the trees. Things looked livelier than usual up there, like a party was going on. Lanterns and lightbulbs blazed. Bouncy music, eerie voices, and laughter floated down.
“He wants to come up,” one of the goblins said.
“Yeah.” Kit glanced at the three. Redring wasn’t among them. “Where’s your leader? She usually comes to talk to me.”
“Tonight is a big night, as you say,” another said. “She is quite busy. She sent us to get you.”
“Super. How do I get up there?”
“Like this.” One of them jumped onto his head, faster than he could anticipate, and knocked him sideways into a bank of ferns and snow.
“Hey! Get off—” But while he tried to pry loose the one on his head, the other two wrapped a gag around his mouth—a grimy cloth whose dirty-laundry taste made him shudder. They seized his hands and bound them with a chain, and whipped more chains all around his body, pinning his arms down. God damn, the goblins were strong for such puny creatures, and fast too. It always surprised him.
“Rrmmf!” He made the growl of protest as menacing as he could, glaring at them as they stood to beam at their handiwork.
“Redring’s orders,” one said. “You are far too troublesome to be unbound in our dwellings. But you may come and watch, she says.”
“Your blood contract does not allow us to use magic to immobilize you,” another said, sounding regretful about that. “So we must use clumsy human ways.”
“Up we go!” the third said. She picked up Kit like he weighed about twenty pounds, and threw him over her shoulder.
They scaled a huge tree trunk. Dangling over the creature’s shoulder, tied up and with his mouth stuffed with disgusting cloth, Kit watched the snowy ground sink away from him.
At this rate, Livy and Grady and Skye were definitely not going to thank him for showing up.
Livy stood between the lines of glowing sea creatures, her boots a few inches from the lapping edge of the water. Was she supposed to swim? In Puget Sound, the hypothermia could kill a person even on a summer day. This was a frozen winter night.
Trust the path.
“But the path’s underwater,” Livy said, to no one in particular. She stared at the illuminated blue lines rippling under the clear, dark water, until they faded a few yards out. As far as she could see, the path stayed on the bottom for the whole span.
Everything here was magic. This was her path, so there must be a way.
She gripped the ring and walked forward until she waded into the shallows. She paused, ankle deep. These weren’t waterproof boots; none of her current clothes were designed for being submerged. As she hesitated and took stock, she realized the water wasn’t getting through her boots. She bent over to look; the water was pulling back from her feet, surrounding her ankles as if a bubble of air held it there. “Huh,” she said. She waded another step deeper, and another. The water was up to her knees now, and still it didn’t actually touch her. It surrounded her on all sides, but hovered behind an invisible wall that moved along with her.
“Right, so.” She continued forward until the water was around her chest, then paused, looked back at the beach longingly, and faced forward again. A black expanse of saltwater gleamed at eye level, stretching far out to the mainland. “Brave.” She took a deep breath and walked forward.
She closed her eyes when the water level rose above her face, holding her breath with the next step. But air continued to surround her head. Tonight it was warmer under here than in the snowy weather on land. Her squelching footsteps bounced and echoed within her bubble, like the sounds of water slapping beneath marina boards. Everything smelled of saltwater and seaweed. But she could breathe. She was dry, if clammy, and she could breathe.
She opened her eyes. Green-black water curved around her in a giant wall, like an aquarium. It had closed over her head, smearing a transparent ripple between Livy and the free air. She drew in a breath to make sure she still could, and looked at her path. The blue glowing bottom-feeders rested in their two lines, some of them temporarily exposed to the air by her bubble. One of the sea stars lazily moved an arm, curling it out with extreme slowness as if searching for a clam to snack on while it was lying here.
She kept forward—or rather, downward, for the path sloped steeply. These fjords were carved deep, as she knew well from her studies of the local environment. Now she saw what no one except divers ever saw in person: the sea floor of Puget Sound, the deep sections never exposed by low tide. It was one mucky, slippery place.
The beach pebbles and rocks at the high end soon gave way to sticky mud that she sank into up to her ankles with each step. She learned to step on rocks or shells wherever possible to avoid getting mired down. But after descending for a couple of minutes, the path became a mess of seaweed, or sea grass, or algae, or kelp, or some mix of all of those. It came in various colors—hard to tell with only bioluminescent animals to light the way, but it seemed to be brown, red, purple, and off-white in addition to green. Slipping in the knee-deep layer of slime, Livy struggled to keep her balance with every step. The lightweight glowing sea stars and sand dollars rested easily on top of it, but her full-sized human weight kept sinking until she resigned herself to crawling this path too. Even on hands and knees, she slid as she progressed, and plunged to her chin often.
The steep pitch of the path wasn’t helping. She was still going down, so she couldn’t have even hit the halfway mark yet. The air in her bubble was dank and chilly, her breath making humid clouds. She worried she would use up all the oxygen before getting to the other side. The fae wouldn’t let that happen, would they?
Above and around her, through the magical aquarium wall, everything was black. She rarely spared a glance at her surroundings, finding it too scary to dwell on how she was crawling along the bottom of Puget Sound in the middle of the night. But a glimmer of something light-colored caught her eye, and she paused a moment to look aside at a bank of white sea anemones, hundreds of them covering a patch of the slope, their wispy tentacles waving in the current.
She could see them more clearly than she expected, and as she continued downward, she realized other glowing things dwelled here beyond just the creatures forming her path. Whether it was because she was in the fae domain or whether bioluminescence was common down here in the ordinary world too, she wasn’t sure, but she began to catch glimpses of more things emitting light. A squid darted past, no longer than her forearm, its whole body outlined in blue-white sparkles. A sea slug with long wide spikes like water-lily petals rested on the sea-floor and glowed softly in pink. A school of skinny fish zoomed around her bubble, separating into two groups as they passed and then reuniting, each fish wearing a glowing green-blue stripe down its belly. Something reddish-orange undulated next to her, which turned out to be a large octopus, lit up by the ping-pong-ball-sized glowing jellies drifting around it. Livy shuddered and hurried past. She remembered anecdotes about the wiliness of octopuses, and could too easily imagine it reaching a tentacle in to wrap around her ankle and tug her off the path into a quick drowning.
When something black and white and gigantic soared over her bubble with a rumbling swoosh, she yelped. The animal turned, a gleam of white in the murk, and glided past again, one eye upon her bubble.
Ordinarily she’d have been delighted to spot an orca. Orcas didn’t tend to attack humans, she knew, but they ate nearly everything else that swam, and she probably didn’t look like a typical human at the moment. Plus she had forgotten how utterly huge orcas were. This one looked to be the size of a bus, and surely weighed a few tons. If it decided to ram her bubble just for sport, could she count on magic to keep all her air from shattering into a million mini-bubbles and leaving her to drown, or die of the bends when trying to ascend?
With her attention on the orca, she didn’t heed the path closely enough. Her knee hit an especially slippery patch, and she went sprawling. The steep slope became a slide—she picked up speed, skidding on her front, and grabbed frantically at strands of kelp for something to hang onto. They tore free, or slurped through her gloves like escaping eels. She pulled up a knee to slow herself, making her body pivot. Her foot swung outward—and crossed the line of blue glowing sea stars.
Instantly water poured down upon her leg, icy cold, its weight slamming her foot into the seaweed floor. With a sob of terror, she yanked her foot back within the confines of the path. The flood stopped; the bubble calmly resealed its wall.
“Oh my God,” she said aloud with a whimper. She shook from head to soaked foot, and had to spend a moment cowering with her head on her knees until she regained the composure to continue.
Skye needed her. Grady needed her. Kit was counting on her, and he loved her. And the bottom of the Sound was no place to dawdle.
She unfolded herself and kept crawling.
Above, the orca circled and came back for another pass. “Hey, water fae,” Livy said to whoever might be listening. “You’re not going to let this guy hurt me, right?”
Something gurgled, low-pitched, from out in the depths—a laugh, or an answer. It didn’t sound like a whale, somehow. A moment later, something seal-sized swirled past, then circled back and bobbed upright next to her bubble. A harbor seal, she thought at first: silver with black speckles, and long whiskers on its dog-like face. As she sent it another glance, it gestured with one flipper in a greeting, exactly the way a person might wave.
Then it spoke. “She is only looking. She wants to tell her pod about you. You are safe on your path.”
The voice had the contours of a seal’s bark, and the message echoed and sounded muffled, like someone talking to you while your ears were underwater in the bath. Livy glanced in amazement at the creature, who followed alongside as she slid and slogged. “Thank you,” she said.
The orca kept gliding around overhead, showing up as an occasional flash of white.
“We don’t mind helping you,” the seal added. “You aren’t like some of the others, who fling their nastiness in our water. You take it out. You think of us.”
“I try.” Livy decided against telling it that until lately she’d had no idea the fae even existed. She supposed her consideration for regular seals, orcas, fish, and other sea life probably still counted for something. She remembered another strange moment, and glanced at the creature. “My kayak paddle. Did one of you send it back to me when I dropped it? I thought I saw your…hand. Or flipper. Um.”
The seal spread its flipper again to display it, and this time Livy noticed it was more like a human hand—albeit a long-fingered, shiny hand webbed between the digits. “My tribemate did. We were near you.”
“I appreciated it,” she said, still sliding downward in the seaweed, though the slope was becoming less steep. It seemed the path was leveling out at last. “I’m sorry about the other humans. The ones who mess up the water. We’re working on them.”
“We smash holes in their boats or overturn them with waves when we must.” The seal said it matter-of-factly, which sent a chill through Livy. She recalled that fae-world values were not the same as human ones.
“So,” she said. “Am I in the middle of the inlet now? The path seems flatter.”
“Yes, you are at the depths for our small pool.”
“Good to know.”
She supposed for a sea creature, a half-mile-wide, hundred-foot-deep stretch of water was a small pool compared to the open ocean.
“We would like you to destroy the goblins,” the seal added. “They steal our fish sometimes, and fling things in our waters, just as humans do. We drag them under and turn them into water fae when we can catch them, but they are often too fast.”
She would have opted not to get in the middle of an otherwordly war, but apparently such was her lot tonight. She sank up to her shoulders in muck again, and pulled herself free. “I’ll do my best.”