Her whole tribe was laughing—they laughed at everything, it seemed. “As happy as we are,” Redring said.
I had no way to know if she told the truth. I hoped she did. I returned to my life as best I could.
Jeannot eventually came back to me. We became engaged.
I kept stealing. From the church I took a candlestick. I walked right into the mayor’s house and carried off several of their gold serving plates. I never liked it. Getting away with it was not satisfying, not even when I reflected on the pomposity of the people who owned these things. But it was the deal I had struck, and I feared what Redring and her tribe might do if I failed to come at the full moon with their gold.
Then, about a year after I married Jeannot and was pregnant with our first child, I found out what had really happened to Fran?oise.
Livy stopped speaking and paged ahead, needing to know what became of people under this curse, unable to take the delay involved in reading aloud.
Kit told her, after a spell of silence, just as her searching eyes found the information herself. “She became one of them. A goblin. Far as I can tell, she’s still there. Their whole tribe came here, followed our great-grandma to America when she moved. My ancestors say Fran?oise became known as Flowerwatch, and…there’s still a goblin they call that. I’ve heard them say it. I’ve seen her.”
Livy stared aghast at Kit, then at Skye. Skye didn’t look shocked, just miserable. Like she already knew, and had known for some time.
Livy sank into a wicker chair by the fireplace. Her legs felt weak, her insides hollowed out. “So that’s…”
“That’s likely the curse on you,” Kit said, his gaze on Skye.
Grady, pale and grave, nuzzled Skye’s head. Great, Livy thought, a new relationship to make this mess even more complicated. But that hardly mattered right now.
She leafed frantically through the pages. “Then how do we stop it? What did they learn? Where’s the goddamn handbook on this?”
“Oh, I’ve got lots of information.” Kit sounded exhausted. He still stood with arms folded. “Whole box of it. Every liaison kept records, as best they could. We’ve put together some clues, at least, about how the goblins do things. But how to stop it…” He rubbed his face. “That, I don’t know. No one’s ever caught one of these enchantments early enough to have a chance to stop it. Seems like in every case so far, no one realized it was a goblin curse until after the person had disappeared for good. After that, I’m not sure there’s any bringing them back.”
“Then this time we’re lucky, right?” Livy refused to give up. Not when Skye still sat right there in front of her. “We can figure out a—I don’t know, a counter-curse. A way to break it. There has to be one.”
“Look…I want to say yes.” Kit paced back and forth. “But I also have to point out that if there was a way to break it, my family’s done a shit job at figuring out what it is, because we’re still stuck with this curse, four generations on now.”
Everyone absorbed that for a moment.
Kit caught Grady’s glance, and added, “You’re protected. I mean, from getting enchanted. So even though you’re in the family, at least you don’t have to worry about them trying to take you. As to whether they’d make you liaison if anything happens to me…I don’t know. I don’t think I get to choose what they do there.”
Grady and Skye exchanged a silent, charged look. “Protected?” Grady said.
“It’s all in there.” Kit gestured toward the pages Livy held. “Once our great-grandma realized the goblins sometimes enchanted people into leaving the human world forever, she got scared they’d do that to someone close to her. Her kids, her husband, who knows. So she asked them for some sort of guarantee, and they said she could request one person a year, and they’d never enchant that person for their whole life. In return for that clause, of course…” Kit sighed. “The monthly payments in gold would have to keep going through future generations too. That’s why I’m stuck with it, and my dad, and his mom, and so on.”
“Why would anyone agree to that?” Livy said.
“If you read through it, you’ll see. She was tricked. That’s how they operate. There’s always loopholes. They said, ‘We’ll let you protect one person a year, but if we do that, we have to make your agreement go for a thousand years.’ And she said, ‘But I’m not going to live a thousand years,’ and they said, ‘Exactly, then go ahead and agree to it.’ So she did.”
“Okay, damn it.” Livy rose to her feet, reanimated by anger. “I want to meet these people, these things. I need to see this. And if it’s for real, I’m going to find out how to end this.”
“I doubt it’s as simple as that,” Kit said.
“Just tell me how to see them! I have to start there. I can’t even believe all this until I see it, or hear it, or something.”
Skye made an urgent sound, a sort of whimper. Livy and Kit glanced at her. Her eyes were wide, and she managed a small head-shake at Livy.
“If she doesn’t take their path, it’ll be okay,” Kit assured Skye. “They can’t get her if she doesn’t take it.”
Skye looked back to Livy, and acquiesced with a nod.
“How do I do it?” Livy asked Kit. “How do I summon them?”
“I’m not sure they’ll come, but…here.” He sighed, and held out his hand. “Let’s see your phone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LIVY HAD LEFT ON HER OWN, UNDER KIT’S INSTRUCTIONS. GRADY AND SKYE STAYED BEHIND WITH KIT, WHO DRAGGED out the box of goblin-related files and sat at the kitchen island with it, digging through notebooks and scowling.
Grady remained seated on his bed, with Skye huddled under his arm, and examined the ghoulish picture that had finally crystallized into focus in his mind.
Desperate words clogged his throat like a logjam. He would have spoken if he could have, lots of times. He would have told Kit and Livy how the woods had been calling to him too, how this all wasn’t exactly a surprise because the eerie truth had been sneaking up on his brain ever since he met Skye. After all, for the past couple of weeks—and he wouldn’t tell them this part, but—he’d been having various kinds of sex with her daily, out there in the woods, despite drizzle and chill, despite having to lie on damp moss or prop themselves against muddy trees. He could have done all this with her in her room, so why had they kept at it that way instead? The forest must have drawn them, made them unable to resist. He had worked that out already, bizarre though it was, though he didn’t know why it was happening.
Mostly, he wished he could tell Kit he must be wrong about Grady being “protected,” because the goblins had fucking gotten him anyway.