“Stay,” I said, speaking the words I had longed to say from the moment I first saw her in the store. “Stay in Ticonderoga Falls for one more day. Then you’ll be free to go. I give you my promise. I only ask that you stay for the Hunt. Please.”
With a great reluctance, I pulled away. She was caught in that still and silent world between breaths, and there are rules about how much you can tell your prey to do.
Rules bind our worlds together, hold the moon and sun in place.
I know that now. Wished that I had known it long ago.
With a leap and a mighty surge of wings, I broke my spell and I soared away from her, into the heavens, high above the trees. Where I could resist her fragrance once more.
Chapter 9
A Secret Wound
Thane:
Dreams still hung in the air, mingled with the odor of spilled blood. The forest hung quiet and fixed in place, as if frozen by an invisible glacier. I crouched in shadow and rock, my flesh pressed thin and my bones crumpled into distorted, unrecognizable shapes. Even my face had been flattened in this narrow space between stone and boulder. Part of me watched a space between two thick lodgepole pines where River and I had hidden the human carcass, buried beneath a blanket of leaves before we had sailed off through woodland green.
And the other part of me watched all that happened back on that wood-chip trail.
Ash soared between thick trees and cast a Veil. Then my dear cousin dropped to the forest floor and approached the woman. At that moment, when it looked as if he recognized her, he suddenly winced and crumpled near in two, and the Veil he had cast—a mediocre piece of workmanship—began to melt.
That was when I knew that the stories from home were true.
Ash crouched in pain from a secret wound.
This sudden weakness in my cousin was exactly what I had been hoping to discover. It was worth my entire journey to Ticonderoga Falls.
Cousin Ash recovered, then mumbled a brief snippet of poetry and held his Veil in place. If it had been me, I would have sailed away, right then and there. But that’s not what he did.
I watched him with great care, trying to puzzle out his motive.
He pulled himself straight, cast a mournful gaze toward the human woman, then he leaned nearer to her, but to what purpose? To kiss her or whisper in her ear?
There was some secret between them. I needed to discover what it was.
Ash broke the spell then, sooner than I expected, and he flew away.
The human woman and her boy and their dog woke up, groggy at first and easily confused. I sang a brief song to them from my hiding place, twisting the wood in their mind, turning the trails into a maze that would lead them astray.
“Stay here,” I whispered over my shoulder to River. “Mayhaps Cousin Ash is still nearby. I’ll go out and test the air, see if his scent is yet strong in the timber. Wait ’til I return and say whether it be safe.”
“Aye,” my brother growled from his enclosure. “But don’t be long.”
Then I left him and I melted into twilight shadows.
Chapter 10
A Dark Tide
Maddie:
Time bled and changed, turned into something liquid, and I got caught up in a daydream. I must have stopped, right there on the trail, lost in some reverie, for when I finally came to, everything looked different. The sky and the trees wavered around me. Shadows grew longer—like a dark tide, they spread out across the forest floor until the whole expanse before me lay black and gray. I stretched, then yawned. It felt like I had been asleep, standing in the same position for a long time, my muscles stiff, as if a single instant had stretched out into a year.
I turned around slowly, searching the wood, now filled with the song of birds and the soughing of wind through pine needles. The mysterious creature had disappeared. Just a heartbeat ago, something had been flying through the trees, something dark and sinister. No. I paused and ran my fingers against my cheek. Not sinister. More like a long lost friend. But whatever I had seen, it now felt like nearly half an hour had passed, plenty of time for that winged beast to escape.
In fact, I could still hear the echo of my own words hanging in the air. I had just called out to the dog and he now snapped his head toward me, ears up. He charged back down the slope, a black-and-tan blur, running to me.
“What did you see, Mom?” Tucker asked, yawning first, then looking around. “What was in the woods? A coyote?”
“No,” I answered. I grabbed the dog by the collar, clipped on his leash and pulled him close. “It was just my imagination, there was nothing there.”