by Molly Ringle
“Could be a long wait. City’s getting expensive.”
“Sure is.”
An awkward silence fell between them.
“Well hey, can I buy you coffee?” Kit said after a few seconds, and Livy was so startled she stared at him. “I owe you for this.” He slapped the driftwood with the flat of his hand. “And for not busting me.”
“Oh. Thanks, but—” She flipped her thumb toward her boat. “I’ve got the kayak. Have to get it back to the dock in town, where I parked.”
“I can fit it in here.” He nodded toward the truck bed. “Plenty of room.”
She was tempted for a second, which was bizarre. Kit was so not her usual type—her usual type being older guys with a couple of college degrees and a tranquil love of science. Not that those had been working out so well. In school, Kit had belonged to one of the years between Livy’s and Skye’s classes. She remembered him as a rebel with torn jeans who didn’t talk to people much, but who could sometimes be seen making out with a girl in his truck cab in the high school parking lot. Which, she had to admit, always inspired some curiosity in her, but she and Skye had both kept their distance from him.
Maybe that had been snotty of them. Maybe she ought to give him a chance, now that they were older.
Then she thought of Skye back home, of the doctor appointments she had to take her to, the symptoms and treatments she had to Google, the way her life had a pall thrown over it lately. She was only twenty-six, but these days she felt old and tired.
Livy shook her head. “I just got started. I ought to finish the paddle, get the exercise.”
“You sure?”
She nodded.
“Okay, well.” He jingled his keys in a pocket. “Come find me at the garage if you want a raincheck. I’d be happy to, anytime.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“Happy New Year.”
“You too.”
She walked down the beach as he went around to the driver’s side of the truck. Automatically she picked up a juice-box straw lying in the tide line of sticks and seaweed.
His truck door squeaked open. She frowned at the straw as if it were of deep significance. A few seconds after the engine revved to life, she dared a glance up. His eyes met hers in the side mirror, and he splayed his fingers in a wave. She returned a weak wave with her numb hand. The engine revved and Kit drove away, the cedar stump bouncing in the bed as if excited about its new journey.
Kit glanced again in the rearview mirror. Livy’s form descended toward her kayak, reduced by distance to a collection of items and muted colors: navy baseball cap, green rain jacket, brown boots. Nothing fancy. She was still cute, though; always had been, even chilled and without makeup. But then, she’d never been the nail polish and hairspray type, as far as he could remember. They’d never been classmates, but their school was small, so he’d seen her around plenty. To his mind she was a babe with a nice rack and blondish hair that curled in a way he liked, and sweet pouty lips.
To her mind, he was evidently not worth accepting coffee for. Kit smirked, coming to a half-stop before steering onto the island’s loop road. Oh well. A guy in his position couldn’t get tied down in a relationship anyhow.
That didn’t stop him from casual dating. Ordinarily he let the women do the asking, which happened often enough in the form of vacationers coming through town and needing cars repaired, or stopping to delight in his chainsaw carvings. But by December, he usually had been going a couple of months without many vacationers around. So when fate threw him together with a fellow local, he thought he’d give it a shot.
Or get shot down. Whichever.
Could be she was seeing someone, though. Maybe nothing personal.
He glanced at the hunk of driftwood in the mirror, and told it, “She was nice, anyway. Gave me a hand.”
Deciding he’d make Grady help him haul the stump out of the bed later, he drove off to get coffee. Alone, for now.
CHAPTER FOUR
HELP, I’M UNDER A SPELL PUT ON ME BY GOBLINS IN THE WOODS. THE WORDS WERE SIMPLE ENOUGH. THERE WAS even the outside chance Skye could find someone who’d believe them. But when she tried to speak them, her voice vanished in her throat. It felt blocked, like the times in dreams when you try to scream but can’t make a sound.
She had tried writing the words as well. That was equally useless. They turned into the wrong words, different each time.
Today, while Livy was out for her Saturday morning paddle, Skye picked up a sharpened graphite art pencil in her left hand and stared at the blank white journal page as if challenging it to a duel from which only one of them would emerge alive. She began writing.
Holly around a scroll with a jellyfish in the woods.
“Argh,” she said, teeth clenched.
She smacked her palm down on the page, intending to rip it out. Then she let her muscles wilt in resignation, and uncovered the page and gazed at it. She leaned her temple on her right hand, and sketched the strange picture the words described: a holly bush growing around a parchment scroll flaking at the edges and tied with a limp ribbon, with a jellyfish drifting through the air like a strange butterfly. In the background she added the tall trunks of fir trees and their interlaced canopy of branches.
Her words remained in a white space at the top, like a title for this bizarre piece. She should tear it out, and stuff it deep in the recycling bin. Anyone who saw it would be convinced she was insane.
And wasn’t she, in a sense? She added flourishes of pencil to the trunks in the picture, deepening their bark texture, growing little broken limbs upon them. The exercise felt like the obsession that had consumed her when she was a teenager and sketched the faces of her crushes. She lifted her head to gaze out the window at the real deal: the dark green, pointy-topped forest on the hill above town. Her heart yearned for it; her feet shifted under the little kitchen table, restless to push her out into its mossy arms again.
That was what she hated most about this spell, sometimes. The goblins had taken her love of the forest and tainted it, bound it up with their magic.
They had carried Skye up, up, up the trunks into a fantastically weird bunch of cobbled-together houses and bridges and mismatched dim electric lights that they had built all around a huge swath of evergreens. A treetop village, but its surfaces slimier and its inhabitants more disgusting than any of the fantasy faerylands Skye used to envision. Somehow she understood she could only see the place because she had taken their path and eaten the blackberry tart. She also understood that although she had only been carried a few hundred yards off the road, she was now almost totally out of reach of regular humans.
“You love these trees, yes?” their leader had said. Skye gathered her name was Redring.
“Yes.” Skye couldn’t lie, her tongue answering as if under some honesty potion. She still lay in the arms of half a dozen goblins, their prickly hands clamped all over her body.
“And you wanted to see us. You accepted our invitation. We are so flattered, darling one.” Redring leaned closer, her foul breath spilling across Skye’s face. “Some we would simply steal from, and leave to fall apart, but not you. You we would like to keep.”
“Me. I want her,” another goblin said, bulling his way in against Redring’s shoulder. Or at least, Skye assumed it was a he. His voice was deeper and his gaze upon Skye more lustful—it made her shudder, but all she could do was avert her eyes.
Redring shoved him. “Be patient, Slide!” She grinned at Skye again and softened her voice. “You see, there is a procedure for this. You will go home again, but eventually you will come to us.”
Someone shoved another sticky bite of food into Skye’s mouth: orange marmalade. She grimaced, but her obedient enchanted mouth chewed and swallowed it.
“You will want to,” Redring continued.
A different goblin crammed what tasted like musty mince pie into her mouth. She swallowed that too.
“You will lose your way in the human world.”
>
Another stuffed her mouth with stale cake with raspberry filling, gelatinous and with too many seeds. Tears of despair ran down her temples, yet she ate it.
“You will come to the woods and choose your mate.”
“Me!” the gruff goblin shouted, while someone smashed a handful of candied cherries into Skye’s mouth.
“Shut up!” Redring told him, and the others cackled. “She called to us, so she gets to choose. Besides, it’s more fun, watching to see who she picks.” She turned to Skye again. “And when you have withered enough among the humans, you will join us here. You will become goblin.”
Skye shuddered, alone at home over her weird holly-and-jellyfish art. She picked up her mug of coffee. It was three-quarters gone and the remainder was cold and stale, but she swilled the rest anyway, welcoming the bitterness. Anything to rinse away the memory of those sticky, horrible fruits.
That first night, back at home, after she’d climbed into bed shivering with a fever, Livy had brought her some mint tea and offered to make toast. “With blackberry jam?” Livy had suggested, and reeled back in shock when Skye had abruptly found her voice and shouted, “No!”
Skye flipped back a few pages in her sketchbook, and glowered at the pencil drawings there. The day after the assault, she had drawn Redring from memory, along with the goblins’ treetop dwellings. Apparently she could do that much. But so what? She’d shoved the drawings in front of Livy, who had dutifully examined them and said, “Huh. Those are really cool. Trying something new?”
The spell wouldn’t let Skye say anything about the connection between her silence and these drawings. She couldn’t even pantomime it. All she could do was gaze at Livy in burning frustration.
No one would get it. Of course they wouldn’t. Why would they, if they hadn’t seen what she’d seen?
She should have been tearing things apart in her fury over how little she could communicate. Her former self would have, the Skye who had walked into the forest that night, the Skye from every day of her life before that. But when the doctors said she’d been hit with a sudden depression, they weren’t entirely wrong. The spell brought with it a lack of desire to do much at all, an inability to care strongly about anything. Or at least, anything beyond following the dictates of the spell: feel the pull of the woods, retreat from human life, come and choose your mate…
She did want to fight it, ached to tell Livy or someone. But the fight in her was as dampened as her voice. Even drawing this unsuccessful sketch had proven exhausting.
The front door opened. Livy peeked into the kitchen, tugging off her rubber boots. “Hey.”
Skye closed the sketchbook. “Hey.” She could echo words well enough, usually. It was coming up with her own that had become challenging.
Livy had grown accustomed to it and kept up more of the conversation alone than she used to. Which was also pretty damn depressing.
“Cold out, but the water’s nice and smooth today.” Livy took off her baseball cap, tugged the ponytail holder out of her hair, and shook the curls loose. They had gotten frizzier in the damp outdoor air. Skye had always wanted tighter curls like those, and Livy’s blonder color, rather than her own dark brown, sort-of-wavy, sort-of-straight combo. She’d told Livy so in the past. She wished she could compliment her again today.
“Nice,” Skye echoed instead. Goddamn magic.
Livy peeled off her raincoat and hung it over the back of a chair. “Also, I caught Kit Sylvain stealing driftwood.”
Skye lifted her eyebrows.
Livy gave a one-note chuckle. “I didn’t bust him. I helped him put it in his truck. We all know he does it. I mean, how else would he carve that stuff? He’s part of the local color; we can’t mess with it.” She wandered to the coffee machine, sniffed at the remaining brew, wrinkled her nose, and dumped it in the sink.
Skye looked down at her sketchbook with a sigh. It would be useful to tell Livy what other sorts of local color existed around here.
“He kind of asked me out, too.” Livy rinsed the pot under the tap. “Offered to buy me coffee. I took a raincheck.”
She leaned sideways against the counter, her curves hugged by her faded jeans and dusty-pink hoodie. She looked so solemn and lovely with her downcast eyelashes and full lips. Men should ask her sister out, and Livy should go out and have fun. Skye hadn’t wanted much lately except the goblins and the woods, and at the same time to be free of the goblins and the woods, but she wanted this.
This desire helped her rebel against her spell long enough to push two encouraging words to the surface.
“He’s cute.”
Livy looked at her in astonishment. The water filling the pot overflowed and ran down her hand. She shut it off, then sent a grin at Skye. “It’s true. He is, damn it.” She set the pot on the counter and shook off her wet hand. “Suppose I could take him up on that raincheck.” She glanced at the clock. “But not today. Got to do some work, even though it’s Saturday. You’re working too, right?”
Skye nodded. Her hopes sank back down into their usual mire as she envisioned another afternoon of trying to serve customers at the cafe without being able to converse freely, nor even smile. God, why did they have to make the spell so she couldn’t smile? That was a diabolical touch. The fever had gone away after one day, but the rest of the magical symptoms were only getting worse by the week.
She glanced up to find Livy chewing her lip as she regarded Skye. “Might want to…wash your hair?” Livy cringed in apology.
Skye lowered her face again. Not giving a shit what she looked like: another side effect. She scooped up her notebook and shuffled off to the shower.
CHAPTER FIVE
SKYE SAYING “HE’S CUTE” ABOUT KIT WAS UNUSUAL ENOUGH, IN SKYE’S LIMITED COMMUNICATION LATELY, THAT IT made Livy think all week about how she probably should go find him and have coffee. After all, Skye seemed to think she should. So maybe, somehow, it would improve Skye’s well-being if she did—which made no sense. But the thought wouldn’t stop pestering Livy, and by the end of the week she’d decided to act on it.
Saturday she took the kayak out for a paddle again, and circled Crabapple Island as before. She knew he lived somewhere on it, though she wasn’t sure which house. But today she saw no one on the gray shore except a woman walking a golden retriever.
That afternoon Livy stopped by the drugstore, right across the street from the garage. Bellwater Auto, the old red-lettered sign shouted at her through the windows as she picked up deodorant, conditioner, and dental floss. The auto shop’s neighboring garden of chainsaw carvings drew her eye too: bears, Sasquatches, orcas, and gnomes all seeming to watch her.
After emerging from the drugstore, she set the bag of purchases in her trunk, then glanced up and down the two-lane street. No traffic coming. She shut the trunk and crossed the street. She paused at the edge of the sculpture garden, looking up at the wind chimes that hung from the high crossbars of the fence posts. On chains of all styles and colors swung miscellaneous bits of metal and plastic: silverware, switchplates, jar lids, gears, doorknobs, bottle openers, washers, rusty bells, oarlocks. They jingled with surprising musicality in the cold wind. She closed her fingers around the sparkly streamers fluttering off one wind chime, and identified them with a smile as strips of Mylar balloon.
When I pick this stuff up I swear at it and throw it away, she thought. He turns it into art.
“Car trouble?”
Kit strolled out of the garage, wiping his hands on a black-stained towel. He was dressed for work in zipped-up gray jacket, industrial-thickness jeans, and steel-toed boots.
Livy let go of the Mylar strips, suddenly feeling absurd for showing up like this. “Nope. I was just nearby, and got curious what you used the cedar stump for.”
“Ah.” He lifted his chin in invitation. “Come see.”
He beckoned her forward and she followed, as if they were old friends rather than quasi-neighbors who hardly ever spoke to one another. He led her through the ti
ny office with a cash register that, as far as she could tell, served both garage and art sales, then out the back door. They emerged into an open-air work space with a roof covering it. Cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire protected its sides. Sawdust coated the concrete floor, and heavy, sharp-edged tools and hunks of wood stood all around.
“Here she is so far.” Kit swept his hand toward the partially-carved driftwood stump. “What do you think she’s going to be?”
Livy skirted the teeth of the chainsaw lying dormant on the ground, and drew close to the sculpture. “A woman?” With her forefinger she touched the long waving hair of the figure, and found it still gritty with fine sawdust.
Kit stood rocking back on his heels, arms folded. “Sort of.”
Livy moved around it, studying the head and shoulders, which were all that had taken shape so far; the body melted back into its natural stump shape below that. “I can’t tell yet, but she’s nice-looking.”
“My plan is mermaid,” Kit said. “Cheesy, I know, but people dig mermaids. They buy stuff like that. And look.” He bent to point to a thick upward-curving section at the lower back of the stump. “This’ll make a perfect tail.”
Livy tilted her head. “You’re right. That’s so cool. How do you see things like that?”
“I spend a lot of time thinking up weird stuff, what can I say.”
Livy examined the serene face. “She kind of looks like my sister.”
“Yeah?”
“Skye. If you’ve bought coffee at Green Fox, you’ve probably seen her.” Livy heard the melancholy note in her own voice, though she hadn’t intended to let the emotion show.
Kit apparently noticed. He took a couple of seconds to answer. “Ah. Sure, I remember her from school, anyway. I don’t get down to Green Fox much. Carol next door keeps us fixed for coffee. She’d get jealous if we went anywhere else.”
