Into the Woods: Tales From the Hollows and Beyond

by Kim Harrison

  Penn sat up, his clothes catching the moonlight like still water as he spread his arms wide as if to take in the world. “Everyone has to be somewhere.” Stretching out again on his side, he leveled his amber eyes with hers, glinting with challenge. “Run with me. I know a tree where fireflies gather every year. They’ll shine like stars for you. I can show you. You will run without tiring, Lilly, if you run with me. Remember running without tiring? The moonlight a river in your lungs, your bare feet hardly touching the ground as the darkness opens and closes behind you? Run with me.” He reached to touch her face, and she pulled back.

  Oh God. A young girl could never resist this. “You are cruel.”

  Penn smiled all the wider, his teeth white and catching the light. “I am life at its strongest, and life is cruel.” Shifting his body, he leaned in as if to tell her a secret. “It is exhilarating—if you live it right. It’s not too late. You are beautiful, Lilly, your scars becoming. Exciting. I like them. You’re not like anyone else who can see me. You . . . might understand.”

  The masculine scent of him was rising between them, familiar but promising something new. A shiver ran though her, and Penn’s smile widened upon seeing it.

  “Oh, you long to find out. It glows from you like an ache. Come with me. Live.”

  She shook her head but didn’t pull away. She felt so young with him. It was a false feeling, the only one that was keeping her sane. “What do you want?” she asked, and he blinked.

  Slowly he sat up, and moonlight fell between them. “I live as a spirit, though I feel the ache of having had flesh once,” he said, and Lilly levered herself up onto the bridge. “The gods took my soul from me when I disobeyed them, giving me the power to feel the world only when I existed within a tree, hoping that I’d stay in one. It’s a sad thing, to feel only what comes your way. I want to be whole again, not just for a night, but forever. I need a soul.”

  “That’s why you like women, not men,” she guessed, and Penn blinked, clearly surprised.

  “Oh, I like you best,” he said, his voice deepening even more as he looked her up and down in an entirely new way. “Yes. Women have the power of creation; they are lesser goddesses, though they know it not, believing the lies that men tell. A soul is pure creation energy, and only a woman, even one just born, can divide a million times and never be less, only more. I want a soul, Lilly. I want freedom. Is that wrong?”

  She drew back into herself as he put a hand between them and leaned in, the heat of him giving her goose bumps. His copper hair was a thick wave and his muscles had taken on the weight of maturity, of strength. He was becoming what she wanted, and she couldn’t help her fascination.

  “I want the freedom to go anywhere, do anything,” he whispered. “You have everything, and you do nothing with it! My penance is to be without a soul until a woman gives me one anew. But only the young ever see me. Until you.”

  “What would you do?” she asked, and his artless guile fell from him.

  Putting a finger to his lips, he drew away, pulling himself up to crouch on the balls of his feet before her. “Such a question. Let’s run to the middle of the field and stop for a time. There are ways to make the moon move slowly. I will share them with you.”

  Fear slid through her as he extended a hand for her to rise. She had sacrificed so much, and for what? It would be so easy . . . This was no angel, but a demon. “Did you kill the man my mother found?” she asked, and Penn slowly stood, his hand dropping to his side.

  “No.” He looked older, thirty perhaps, but a lean, confident thirty, and her lips parted when she recognized Kevin’s youth in him. “The boy with her did.”

  Stunned, Lilly blinked up at him. Kevin’s dad?

  Penn shrugged, moving with a dancer’s grace and looking more and more like Kevin with every step. “He thought it was me talking to Em, and the boy killed the man as your mother watched.” Lean and slim, he turned sideways, the light catching the glint in his eye. “He meant to save her, but the guilt pinned her to the earth to die. She grew old, just as I warned her. But it’s not too late for you.”

  Horrified, Lilly touched her mouth, turning where she stood to look at the silent farmhouse behind her. She jumped, startled when Penn sat down beside her, the scent of a frog-rimmed pool flowing over her.

  “Why do you sully yourselves with unfaithful men? This is why you mourn, Lilly—no man can be true to a goddess. But I’m not a man. I know the patience of the winter, the glory of the spring. I will be true where mere mortals cannot. You ask too much of them, then weep when they fail you.”

  His breath on her cheek made her close her eyes. The unsaid promise was there, and something in her responded, wanted it even as she knew it was a lie.

  “Run with me,” he whispered. “That’s all I ask tonight. No more than that. It will bring you alive. Remember being alive? Aching for something you know is there and willing to give all to have it?”

  Frightened, she pulled from him, shivering as his hand hung a breath from her jawline, almost touching. Eyes widening, she rose, backing up until she found the earth again. Penn stood in the middle of the bridge, waiting for her.

  “Run with me,” he asked again, a hand outstretched.

  “No.” It was a harsh croak of denial, and her breath came fast as he looked past her to Meg’s dark window. “No!” Lilly cried out again, this time in fear for her daughter, and from inside, Pepper began to bark.

  When Lilly looked back, the bridge was empty.

  Parental instinct turned her back to the house. Within three steps, she spun and took five more to the bridge. She had to stop him. She had to save her daughter. Meg would run with him. She would go with a sun-brown boy who smiled and dared her to climb to the top of a tree to see the butterflies beyond. She would give him everything he asked to keep him with her. She would believe. And she would be tossed aside when he got what he wanted.

  All but crying in her frustration, Lilly stopped at the foot of the bridge, her arms wrapped around her middle, not knowing what to do.

  Perhaps it was time for her to believe as well.

  FOUR

  The sun wasn’t up yet, but the air had grown transparently gray, hinting at it. Lilly lay in her bed, listening for the bedsprings in the room next to her. The palest blue slipped in around her curtains, and only the crickets marred the silence. Soft and easy, her breath slipped in and out of her as she waited, her mind calm and at peace. Her mother had risked her life for her. Once was enough. She would not allow her to do so again. If Penn was real, then she’d trap him. It wouldn’t be with a dead chicken and a fairy-tale poem, either. There was dynamite in the barn, and caves in the hills. But first she had to slip her mother’s apron strings.

  The click of Pepper’s nails on the hardwood floor jolted through her, and Lilly jerked at her mother’s soft admonishment in the hall downstairs. Cursing, she flung the covers aside and rolled out of bed. Somehow her mother had gotten up without shifting the bedsprings, and as she flung on her clothes, she watched out the window for her mother’s hunched shadow headed for the barn.

  Rugged pants, thick socks, and a short-sleeve button-down shirt would keep her safe from the cave’s jagged edges, and if all went well, she’d be back before it got hot. Opening her door, she listened, hearing nothing from downstairs. Lilly felt like a teenager as she snuck to the top of the stairway, touching her daughters’ door in passing. They would be safe after today, one way or the other. Lilly eased down the stairway, avoiding the creaky steps and freezing when the squeak of the front porch’s screen door split the silence. Pepper’s soft whine followed.

  Moving faster, Lilly paced into the kitchen, giving the golden lab a pat as she looked out over the sink, through the window and to the barn. He mother was striding to the barn, another big knife in her hand and a canvas sack. “Either she’s crazy, or I am,” Lilly whispered, but the memory of Penn reclining on the bridge, staring up at the stars was too real, the breath of his words on her cheek too
heavy, and the scent of his wild spirit too thick in her. How could any girl see his snare?

  Lilly snatched up a biscuit from last night’s dinner, and taking her floppy hat at the last moment, she gave Pepper a pat, telling her to stay. Then she dropped another biscuit into the dog’s bowl to distract her as she eased the porch door open and slipped outside.

  The sky was a perfect pale blue, shading to orange and pink at the horizon over the fields and the unrisen sun. Cool and humid, the morning breeze brushed against her as Lilly crept down the porch steps. Her mother was almost to the barn. Heart pounding, Lilly waited until her mother tugged the tall door open, then she jogged after her, breaking a spiderweb as she ran under the apple trees.

  Her pace slowed as she got closer and heard her mother inside. Breath held, she halted at the door, ear to it as her mother muttered over which hen hadn’t been laying properly. Fingers trembling, Lilly eased the barn door open and went in.

  The darker gray of the barn smelled like hay, familiar and welcoming. Looking up at the cupola as her eyes adjusted, Lilly squinted at the soft cooing. Her mother was already in the converted chicken coop, and Lilly pushed herself into motion. The door to it was a thick heavy pine, the latch old iron.

  The snick of the simple lock sliding into place was hardly audible, and Lilly backed up at the sudden sliding sound behind the door.

  “Lilly?”

  Mouth dry, Lilly clasped her hands before her like a scolded child. “I’ll be back in an hour to let you out, Mom.”

  “Lilly!” It was stronger this time, and Lilly edged to the big barn door and the scrap of gray morning showing. “Lilly, let me out of here right now! I am not crazy. The girls are in danger!”

  Lilly’s breath caught as her mother rattled the door. She might get out by crawling through the chicken door, but it wasn’t likely. “I believe you.” Her mother swore, and Lilly backed up even farther. “Mom, I don’t want you to be hurt anymore. I’ll take care of Penn. It’s my turn. You protected me, and I’m going to protect Meg and Em. Take care of the girls if I don’t make it back.” Oh God, she was going to blow up the mountain.

  “Lilly, let me out of here!” her mother cried, pounding on the door to make the latch rattle. “You don’t know how evil he is. I don’t want you to have to pay that cost! Lilly? Lilly!”

  But she was walking away as if in a dream. The two sticks of dynamite were right where she’d seen her grandpa leave them, wrapped in a cloth and tucked up in a hole in the barn. They’d been left over from when her great-grandpa had shifted the stream that now ran around Rock Island to bring water closer to the house and dry out a neighbor’s field.

  “Lilly!”

  The banging on the door was almost unheard as she left the barn. In the yard, chickens darted out of the coop with a flustered agitation. She wasn’t going to take a chicken, and she wasn’t going to take a knife. She was going to lure Penn into a cave and blow up the opening. Her mother said he couldn’t move through solid rock, so it should hold him. What if it didn’t?

  Thoughts of her daughters alone in the house kept returning again and again as she trudged into the woods, following a path she’d often taken to meet Kevin. Bitter memories of Kevin mixed with worry for her children, pounding up through her in time with her feet on the earth. How could she have just left them? Wraith by moonlight, hunter by day, the singsong went. He could lure them away from their beds, or attack them as a wolf. What was she doing out here?

  Fear pushed her into a faster pace until she was almost running, weaving through the woods as if she were a deer, taking small fallen trees with a jump and using her momentum to swing around trees. The explosives bumped her with each step, smelling of barn dust and reminding her of her risk. The wind of her passage whispered in her, tugging her hair and caressing her cheek. Angry, she pushed aside her thoughts of Penn. He was a lie, like all the rest.

  The sky was bright with a false dawn as she found the steep climb to the opening of the cave that she and Paul had found while marking out the lines of the farm. It was a dry cave. Even the bats didn’t use it.

  Squinting at the top, Lilly shifted the sticks of explosive and started up the rude path. There were poles rammed into the earth to provide handholds, remnants of her innocent, trusting past. She and Paul might have found the caves, but it had been she and Kevin who had used them as a romantic hideaway.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lilly muttered, her anger giving her the strength to reach the top. Her heart pounded as she found the last step and turned on the narrow ledge to face the valley below.

  Trees obscured her near view, but fields rolled in the distance. The freshening breeze lifted through her hair, cooling her. She could see the barn and house, a glint of light in the kitchen strengthening her resolve. Her mother had gotten out of the coop. By the time she realized where she’d gone, it would be over.

  Her arms ached as she turned to the cliff face and lifted the vine curtain to reveal the opening. Cool air sifted out, the smell of dry dirt barely discernible. Numb, Lilly went inside, finding the lighter where she had left it, using it to ignite the lantern. Two bottles of unopened wine, a corkscrew, two glasses, and a wool horse blanket was all that was left of a broken romance, and flushing, Lilly looked away.

  Moving quickly, Lilly wedged a stick of dynamite where it would bring the roof down about ten feet into the cave. Men were not all pigs. She knew this. And she wasn’t looking for Mr. Perfect. Just a nice guy who wouldn’t hit her kids or have sex with the town’s hairdresser.

  Pissed, Lilly jammed the last stick right by the opening. Her hand slipped, and a sharp pain lanced through the fleshy part of her thumb. Biting back a cry, Lilly clutched her hand, giving the half-hidden stick a glance before moving to the opening to see what she’d done. It wasn’t bad, and she sucked at the small cut.

  Blood is binding, Blood is lure. . . .

  Lilly slowly took her hand from her mouth. Feeling daring, she wiped the blood on the edge of the opening with an abrupt defiance. The air was fresher at the opening, and she lingered, standing in the hole in the mountain, watching the air become clear as the sun neared rising. Inside, the lantern hissed.

  Frowning, she stepped out onto the ledge, letting the vines fall to hide the opening. Her mother had tricked him once. She could do the same. “Penn?” she called, feeling foolish, then louder, “I was thinking all night about what you said. Can we talk?”

  She listened, leaning to the edge. Three birds flew up from the forest below, but there was no whisper in her mind, no breath of wind on her cheek. No honey-eyed spirit to lie and lure her. Nothing.

  “Lilly . . .”

  The maybe-whisper came from behind her, and she spun, heart pounding. But there was nothing there, just the stark stone face with its trailing vines.

  A crack of rock from below jerked through her, and she leaned over the edge. “Penn?”

  The tops of a bush shook, and her breath came faster as she saw a masculine silhouette working its way up the switchback path. One hand on her hat, the other on the rock face, she leaned, her expression going sour as Kevin looked up at her, unmistakable in heavy denim pants, plaid shirt, work boots, and a hat and sunglasses.

  Kevin? Damn it, what is he doing here? Frustrated, Lilly leaned back into the rock, jerking forward when it felt as if something gave behind her. “I told you to stay off my land!”

  “Leave? But I heard you call me,” Kevin said, the cadence of his words having the sound of the wind.

  Lilly started, her expression going slack as she turned back to the drop-off. It wasn’t Kevin, it was Penn. Even his stance was different, poised to move effortlessly, graceful as he took the last switchback, the new sun shining on his stubbled cheeks. He looked even better in the sun than the moonlight. “Y-you,” she stammered, backing up almost into the cave as he lifted himself up the last bit and rolled gracefully to a stand.

  Penn held his hands out to the rising sun, fingers spread and smiling. “It feels different
up here. Sharp. It almost hurts, the sun rises so fast.” Head tilting, he eyed her. “I had almost forgotten how stunning sunrises can be—with the right woman beside you.”

  “But . . .”

  He took a step toward her, and she recoiled, holding a hand out in warning. “Don’t touch me.”

  Penn stopped short, his gaze going to her hand. “You’re bleeding.”

  Lilly froze. His hand slipped into hers, both familiar and new, sending a shiver through her. Was this Kevin, or was it Penn? Maybe she was going crazy after all. “You can touch me,” she said in awe, feeling a cool sensation that seeped under her skin to cool the heat of the day.

  His smile dove deep into her, kindling a spark. “I can touch you. Thank you, Lilly, for believing me.”

  Her eyes closed as he gently took her in his arms, and they slid backward into the dark, the vines rustling until they were surrounded by the earth. She let him move her, praying that he wouldn’t look up and see the stick of dynamite. His lips touched her neck under her ear, and she exhaled softly. It felt so good to be desired. His touch was gentle, reverent, and she wished it wasn’t a lie.

  “I thought about you all night,” he said, and she remembered his eyes, glowing in the dark on her bridge like a wild thing come to seduce her with the promise of life. “Did you think of me?”

  She couldn’t stop her shiver as his hand dropped to the small of her back and gently pulled her closer. “I thought about what you said,” she murmured, turning her head to draw away from his lips, but he only traced a line of sensation down her neck.

  “You are amazing,” he breathed.

  She looked up at him, knowing she was playing with the devil. “I want to believe,” she lied. This was for her children. This was for her mother. She would not allow her mother’s pain to be for nothing.

  Still, he smiled, the faint light coming past the vines tinged with red as it struck them. “Believing is the easiest thing in the world. Just ask any child singing in the dusk at the edge of the forest. You, Lilly, will be my everything. I promise. It will be different this time.”