KIT SUMMONED THE GOBLINS THAT NIGHT.
They were cackling extra hard, as if they’d never finished laughing about his beating last night. He did his stoic best to ignore the laughter, and focused on Redring. “I want to talk about adjusting our deal.”
“We do not adjust deals. Deals are sacred. If you wish to make a new deal, we could talk about that.”
“Fine, a new deal. What do you want in exchange for letting Skye and Grady go?”
“Oh, but we have invested so much time in them, and grown so fond of them. We could not let them go.”
Kit clenched his fists, reminded himself not to attack. “We’re fond of them too. We’re their tribe. What do you want for them? More gold? I’ll do it.”
“Really?” Redring skittered closer. She didn’t quite move like a person; more like a two-legged lizard. Kit tried to hide a shudder. “How much more would you give us? Twenty times the weight of my ring?” She picked up the ring from against her chest and swung it by its chain.
“Twenty? Are you seri—okay, look.” Get the rules straight. Look for the loopholes. There was sure as shit going to be loopholes. “Say I did. Say I got you that much every month from now on.”
“For the next thousand years.”
“Oh, no no. I’m not falling for that.” That made the rest of the goblin tribe scream with laughter, like tricking élodie had been one of their best jokes ever. “Just for my lifetime.”
Redring sighed in disappointment. “Fine. Twenty times as much, every month, for your lifetime.”
“Then you’d release them from the spell?” Even with this onerous new obligation about to fall on him, his heart sped up with hope.
“I would, much as it would hurt me.”
He scanned the deal, and found the loophole. “Immediately? You’d let them go right away, effective today, and never bother them again?”
The tribe cracked up anew, and Redring said, “Oh, I cannot promise that. After all, we are entitled to some time enjoying them.”
“Wait. I thought after they became one of you, they couldn’t go back.”
“Well.” She shrugged, as if it didn’t really matter. “We can return them, but we almost never do.”
“And do they come back…” He thought of Stephen King stories and other creepy tales. “…the same as they were?”
“Who does time and experience ever leave unchanged?”
He expelled a breath through his nose. “Nice. And just how long were you thinking you were ‘owed’ with them?”
“What do you think is fair?” she asked over her shoulder to her minions, who shouted all sorts of nonsense numbers from “five thousand” to “three-eighths.” She turned to Kit again. “Seven years.”
“No. The fuck? All right, what if…” His tongue felt dry; he swallowed to moisten it. “What if I offered my life? Myself. What if you could have me instead? Then would you let them go?”
“Why would we want you? We’ve already chosen such a delicious one, and she hooked us another. Two lovely, juicy, young ones.”
“But couldn’t I exchange myself for them?”
The goblins catcalled him; he heard at least one, “I’ll take him!”, but most of the remarks were along the lines of “Ewww” and “Never.” Like Kit was the repulsive one in this assembly.
“Oh, Sylvain.” Redring sounded pitying. “You are worth far more as our liaison than you’d ever be as our tribemate.”
His body sagged in defeat. “And you’d just latch onto a new liaison if you did take me. Grady or some other poor relative of mine.”
“But of course. That is the deal.”
“What about taking my life? Just killing me. Is that worth anything, any magic, anything that would erase all these deals?”
She snorted. “No. No use.”
“Are you kidding me?” He spread his arms. “I’m offering complete self-sacrifice here. That ought to be worth loads of magic.”
“Not to us. We prefer the deals the way they are. But this idea of extra gold, I am liking that.”
“Forget it.” He turned away.
“Are you sure?” She was cackling now too. He was apparently pretty damn hilarious. “But it is such fun to make new deals.”
“No new deal. Forget I stopped by.”
There was no way he’d come out the winner in any arrangement with them. A banker’s box full of written records back in his cabin had already told him as much. He was a slave, a procurer of gold; even his life or death counted for nothing. Evidently all he could do was wander around Earth trailing destruction after him.
The clouds blew away and a clear freeze crystallized western Washington. The sky became bright again, a blue Grady hadn’t seen since autumn, arching over a frigid, dry land. As he walked through the woods with Skye, the ground resisted, hard and brittle under their boots, without the usual sliding give of mud and moss. The fallen leaves had been transformed from a carpet of mundane brown into a mosaic of individual shapes, every leaf standing out individually, veins and serrated edges highlighted in frost. The twenty-degree air iced his lungs with every inhalation, and Skye’s hands were cold in her fingerless gloves. He wrapped his hand around one and pulled it into his coat pocket.
They investigated a row of icicles hanging off a branch like clear jagged teeth. Below the icicles, a puddle in the path had frozen over. Skye crunched her boot heel against it to crack it. She picked up a shard, looked at the sun through its milky clarity, then shivered, let it drop to shatter on the ground, and stuffed her hand back into Grady’s pocket.
With his free hand, Grady grasped the needles of a Douglas fir, drawing them through his fingers. They were still green and supple. “Why don’t these freeze?” he murmured aloud.
He looked at Skye, and she shrugged. Her gaze traveled up the trunks to the evergreen canopy, and his followed.
She shrank closer to him. He slipped both arms around her, although through their coats and scarves and other layers, the amount of heat from the embrace was minimal. He knew they were both thinking the same thing: how somber, how dismal, to live outside on a day like this.
Or, perhaps, how glorious, for probably they’d become as impervious as the evergreens, as tough and eternal as the stones.
It merely came at the cost of your life as a human.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
IT BECAME A PATTERN OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS: LIVY FINISHED WORK EARLY, BEFORE DARK, AND WENT home. Then she and Skye went to the Sylvain cabin on the island, where they collectively put together dinner (they didn’t make Grady do it all anymore) and researched goblin magic. They read the journals and notes from previous liaisons, and Kit and Livy searched the internet for new ideas. Skye and Grady put on hopeless expressions when Livy suggested they run searches too. Apparently the spell wouldn’t even let them type queries related to goblin curses. Of course not. Why would it?