“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.”