After she went home, Kit gathered up all the ugly gold-plated forks from the box under his bed. He drove across the bridge, parked at the edge of the vast forest, and tromped in.
He summoned the goblins with a whistled trio of notes. They sang a few other notes in response, and a path opened between trees. Luminous ferns this time, sparkling like they were coated with glow-in-the-dark frost.
“It’s not even the full moon,” Redring greeted, after morphing into her human-ish shape. “To what do we owe the pleasure, Kit darling?”
He held out the handful of forks. “I want to add another person to the list of the protected. Her name’s Livy Darwen.”
Behind Redring, among moving silhouettes and floating lights, laughter erupted. As usual.
Redring seized the forks, sniffed them, and rubbed the tines between her fingers. “You just invoked protection for your cousin last month. You cannot add anyone else until a year has passed.”
“I get one per year. I usually don’t even use it. I added Grady in December, and it’s January now, so it’s a new year and I get a new person.”
“As if we care about your calendar dates. I just told you. The agreement is, one year between the times you add each person. You added him, then a year must go by, then you add your little toy.”
“A year?” Shit, think what they could do in the space of a year. And Redring probably wasn’t lying in this particular instance, since when it came to their nonsense rules and contracts, the goblins did stick to what was agreed. He reached for the forks to take them back, but Redring scrabbled six feet up a tree, eerily fast. The move looked especially bizarre in her human form, dressed in pajamas and robe.
“We still get these!” she said, while the rest of the tribe hooted behind her like a bunch of damn monkeys.
“Well, fuck you too. Seriously?”
“Maybe they’ll convince us to be kind to this woman, whom we smell so strong upon you. Perhaps.”
Her minions kept giggling.
The razzing, the stealing, the smelling people on him, the way they’d wrecked his life and his ancestors’ lives for generations now…fury swept over Kit. He grabbed a fallen branch, thick as his arm and heavy with soaked-up rain, and swung it like a baseball bat at Redring’s legs.
He felt the crack and heard her feral screech, but he barely even got a glimpse of the damage, because goblins leaped onto him from all directions. Knobby hands covered his eyes; claws and teeth ripped at his scalp, his cheek, his hands, his legs. The creatures smacked him down on the ground, and he pummeled blindly at them. It felt like fighting a pile of stinky, moving tree branches.
Then, as if answering some call Kit couldn’t hear, they all whisked themselves off him. He sat up, looked at his scratched hands, touched his throbbing cheek and came away with blood on his fingers. He glared at Redring.
She still perched halfway up the tree, in human-like guise, looking totally uninjured. She waved the forks at him. “That hurt, you ungrateful pup. Lucky for me, we heal fast. If I were you, I’d remember that you do not.”
One of the goblins flung down the branch Kit had used against her. It whacked his shinbones, hard enough to make him grit his teeth.
Kit rubbed his shins and looked away into the darkness, refusing to answer. He felt a warm drop of blood trickle down his forehead from his scalp.
“Then we’ll see you at the full moon, Sylvain.” Redring darted upward to disappear into the treetops.
The others followed her, cackling.
“Kit. Kit.” It was a whisper; submissive, for a goblin.
He glanced toward it. The creature they called Flowerwatch crawled toward him on the ground, bending the ferns. She was a small female, and around her neck hung an ancient, tarnished pocket watch with a flower carved on its cover. She’d always been one of the meekest in the tribe, as far as Kit had seen, and sometimes she looked at him with pity, which was more than any of the others ever did. If his ancestors’ records were correct, she’d been an abducted human long ago. Then again, maybe all of them were, and they didn’t all behave like Flowerwatch did. He had no idea why she acted different, and right now he didn’t care to figure it out.
“What,” he said.
“You do not have to worry about Livy Darwen.” Flowerwatch glanced back fearfully toward the rest of the tribe before looking at Kit again. “The locals, they like her. She respects the forest and the water.”
“Yeah. She does. But what…”
“Flowerwatch!” Redring’s snarl from above sent Flowerwatch yipping and scurrying back from Kit. “Your mealy-mouthed weakness for humans is foul and disrespectful to all of us. To me!”
“Yes. Yes. I’m sorry.” Flowerwatch cowered so low her nose squashed against the mossy ground.
“You undermine me!” Redring cracked a branch against Flowerwatch’s back, making the smaller goblin yelp. Kit winced too. “I have warned you, do you hear? I will only hurt them more if I see you behave this way—and I will hurt you too!”
“Of course. Apologies. Of course.” Flowerwatch scrambled away with only one quick glance back in Kit’s direction.
Redring pranced after her, swinging the branch like a nightstick. That was how she’d held onto her dictatorial position all these centuries, he figured: tyranny and punishment, interspersed with favors and rewards. It seemed even immortal beings shied away from pain or the denial of pleasures, and they had lots of creative ways of punishing each other.
Kit watched them disappear. The rustles and whispers of the goblins faded until only the wind in the trees remained. The glowing ferns and little lights winked out. Kit heaved himself to his feet, switched on the flashlight on his phone, and limped back to his truck, not encouraged despite Flowerwatch’s enigmatic words.
Grady sat in the steamy warmth of Green Fox Espresso at a small table close to the counter. A book lay open on the table, whose pages he ignored in favor of gazing at Skye as she made drinks. It was dark out, after dinner now, and the little coffee shop was half-filled, mostly with teenagers. Not much else for the high school set to do in Bellwater on a wet winter night, he supposed. He barely gave any of them a thought except to be grateful they provided a crowd he could blend into, so he could sit here and bask in the sight of Skye without anyone thinking him strange.
If they did notice and think him strange, he didn’t even care.