By now Grady couldn’t speak of it either. His words had been getting locked down inside him more and more over the past few days, and now that he was dying to speak, he couldn’t. About other topics, he could still talk more freely than Skye could, but not about that.
Grady glanced at her, and their eyes held for a long moment. The curse was spreading in him, and he could tell she knew it. Had known it from the first day. Her gaze overflowed with sorrow, as it always did when she looked at him, and now he fully understood why.
He ought to be furious at her for doing this to him. But he couldn’t be. Help me had been her first words to him; she had been drowning, casting out for anyone’s hand, and Grady’s happened to be available. He couldn’t regret going to her. She was his mate and he never wanted to be separated from her, and soon he would never have to be, and that, at least, was a comfort.
But everything else in his human life—his parents, siblings, hometown; the career he might have had; the man he might have been—for all that, about to be swept into the trash heap of history, he felt immense sadness. Because he was still human, not a gleeful, callous goblin. Yet.
Skye stirred, slipped out of his grasp, and walked across to the bathroom.
As soon as the bathroom door shut, Kit glanced over at Grady. “You’re quiet.”
Grady let his hands dangle over his knees. “Yeah.”
“I get it. I was pretty freaked when I first found out too. Also I guess you and her are…” Kit sighed, and chucked a notebook back into the file box, then plucked out a different one. “Shit, man. If I’d honestly thought that was what was wrong with her, I’d have warned you. I’d have done something. What, though, I have no idea.”
“Yeah,” Grady whispered again.
Kit paged through the notebook. “Look, maybe Livy’s right. Maybe catching it early this time, there could be some way to break it.”
“Maybe.” Great, now he was echoing words too.
“But it’s like I said.” Kit kept leafing through pages. “At least you’re protected, so you don’t have to worry about yourself. If that’s any consolation.”
Grady stared at him, furrowing his brows, willing Kit to look up and understand that he wasn’t protected, that it hadn’t worked, that he was cursed right along with Skye. Kit kept searching through their ancestors’ records without looking up, his face grim. “If she doesn’t call after half an hour, I’m going out to find her,” he muttered.
Kit said you had to go to the woods alone at night, so that’s what Livy was doing. He also said it was rare for the goblins to show up on Crabapple Island, so she drove back across the bridge and through Bellwater toward the national forest. He reported he’d only seen the goblins on the island a couple of times, when he was trying to avoid them and they came to bug him anyway. They didn’t like it out there, probably because they had to get people alone to work their magic. That tended to be tricky on the island, where there were too many houses close together, which, Livy figured, must be why Kit continued to live out there instead of on the mainland. That way, at least at home, he could usually avoid them.
Good God, how was she even thinking about this rationally? As if goblins were a real thing? She gripped the steering wheel tighter, continued on out of town, and made for the nearest Forest Service road. First things first. She’d test this “summoning” procedure and see if anything even happened.
She bumped Skye’s car along the muddy road, her headlights washing across dark tree trunks, fallen fir needles, and the waving arms of ferns growing over into the roadway. A couple of miles out of town, she decided she’d gone far enough, pulled over, and turned off the engine.
She creaked open the car door and stepped out. Cold wind whispered. The forest canopy moved high above, just visible against the night clouds. She told herself she wasn’t afraid.
She tapped the voice-memo option on her phone, and listened to the playback of the six notes Kit had whistled as a recording. She let it play a couple of times into the darkness, and looked up, waiting.
The wind gusted, the trees swished. Nothing else.
Maybe it had to be her own voice, not a recording. She whistled it herself, imitating the notes. The partial tune sounded eerie to her; a minor key, if she wasn’t mistaken, more suited to Halloween than to the middle of winter. She wondered what the rest of the song sounded like, and her heart pounded at the possibility that she’d know in a minute, if anyone answered.
No one did. Just the wind, rustling and moaning. Unless the moaning was something else.
She shuddered, picturing ghosts now and actually believing in them in a setting like this. She drew her back up against the car, her gaze darting around the dark forest.
Still nothing.
Her fear ebbed, and frustration surged in. Skye’s sanity, maybe her existence as a human, hinged on finding out what was going on in these woods. This explanation, absurd though it was, seemed to have absolutely convinced Skye and Kit, so Livy would unearth the truth behind it, whatever it took.
“Hey!” she shouted, her own voice shocking her in the stillness. “Goblins! Show yourselves! You out there? Huh?”
She was alone. It was dark. She had whistled the tune and shouted out their name in invitation. These creatures ought to be opening up glowing pathways to her about now.
Nothing happened.
“Hey!” The rage ignited her voice. “What did you do to my sister? How do I fix it? Show your faces and tell me!”
No one answered.
Livy stood there a few more minutes, shivering, stamping her feet to keep them from going numb. Even after her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough for her to watch individual branches moving in silhouette above, nothing glowed, and nothing unearthly showed up.
Screw this. Tomorrow she was going to call Morgan Tran and set up a psychotherapy appointment for herself; in fact, maybe for Kit too; she’d drag him along whether he wanted to come or not, and she’d bring Skye and Grady as well, have a nice, big group session.
She turned to the car. As she laid her fingers on the door handle, something fell from the trees, bounced off the VW’s roof with a clink, and hit her in the eye.
“Ow!” She scrunched up her eye, rubbing at it, and looked down at the ground to see what had hit her. It had felt and sounded like metal rather than a fir cone or twig.
After switching on the flashlight bulb on the back of her phone, she found it, and picked it up: a ring. Gold and heavy, with rounded edges, smooth and slightly tarnished as if it had been handled by many owners for many years. It had designs engraved into it, which she examined as she turned it around in the flashlight beam: a mushroom, a feather, a sun or maybe a flower, a cockle shell.
She looked back up, as if she might be able to see where it had come from, which was unlikely given all the darkness.
Except suddenly it wasn’t dark up there.