And though she’d been so guarded with her secret ever since, five years ago, it had almost happened again. She told the truth, and someone who said he loved her—who said he trusted her—looked her in the eyes and told her she was crazy.
But Matthew… Matthew believed what his own eyes couldn’t see. As if there was nothing to it. As if it was no big deal. Because they’re his sisters.
“All right, it’s official,” Emma blurted over the phone. “If you don’t marry him, I want him.”
Cass shook her head, clearing away the mist of her reverie. “That’s not funny, Emma.”
“What’s the matter with you? He’s hot, he’s obviously interested in you, and he knows about the fae. You couldn’t ask for someone more perfect!”
“You know I can’t get serious about him,” Cass said. “Or anyone. It’s too dangerous. You remember what happened last time.” It wasn’t just about being able to see fae. If that’s all it was, there would be no problem. It was what went with that. Emma of all people should have known that. She should have remembered.
“Cass, what happened to Jeremy wasn’t your fault.”
“He sure blamed me for it,” Cass replied darkly.
Emma’s voice rose in protest. “Yeah, but Matthew is different—”
“I’m not going through this again, Emma!” Cass snapped. “I already made a promise to myself. I swore up and down that I was not going to get serious about another guy. I’m not going through that again.”
The line was quiet so long that Cass almost wondered if Emma had hung up on her. Then Em said, softly, “All you’re doing is punishing yourself. Do you think you deserve that? And do you seriously think Jeremy was worth doing this to yourself?”
Cass sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. “This isn’t about Jeremy, okay?”
“It sure as heck sounds like it is.”
“Look, forget it. Just forget it, okay? I’m not staying in Riddle, Oregon for the rest of my life. I’m not getting tied down just because some schoolteacher happens to believe in faeries. I know who I am. I’m not going to let myself forget it.”
“I think you’re making a mistake, Cass,” Emma said quietly. “But it’s your mistake to make. Good night.”
And with a soft click, the phone went silent. Cass lowered it from her ear and looked up at the pendant lamp over her head, the way the colors from the Tiffany shade bounced off the ceiling. The house was quiet. Even Onyx hadn’t made an appearance since she’d come in the front door. She was all alone.
She slumped over sideways on the staircase and cried until there was nothing left to cry.
“Oh good, you’re here,” Darcy said as Cass came through the door of the library on Wednesday morning. This was possibly the first time Darcy had made it to work before her since Cass had started her job at the library. The truth was, Cass had seriously considered calling out today. It wasn’t just that she was completely fatigued from the combination of the last month’s events and weeks of sleeping poorly (especially over the last three days). It was also that today was Matthew’s scheduled day for homework hour, and she wasn’t sure she could face him again.
But even as her finger had hovered over Randy’s phone number to call in sick, she hadn’t been able to go through with it. There was something more important she needed to do today, and that was to—hopefully—finally get some answers about what this recurring dream meant. She’d had it again, every night since Saturday, and every time, to her utter humiliation, it included the first part of the dream that had come with it all those weeks ago, before she’d even known Matthew’s name. If anything, it was even worse now, because now she did know him. And as time passed, it was getting harder to convince herself that this wasn’t a future she wanted, that she didn’t secretly hope that this dream was a premonition and not just a fantasy of her own making. Every day while she was awake, she found herself thinking about him, wanting to know more about his sisters and the fae of Foreston. He’d only texted her once after the Fall Fest, to say he’d had a good time and that he hoped they could do it again sometime soon. He probably didn’t want to be pushy, but Cass had found her emotions careening wildly between relief that he hadn’t texted again and longing that he would, reaching for her phone to text him herself only to delete the text and push the phone away. Her mind knew that she couldn’t do this, that she had to keep Matthew firmly in the friend zone. If only she could get her heart to cooperate.
Regardless, she needed answers. She had to find out what the warren was. And her best bet was the documents that Darcy and her father had dug up. If nothing else, Cass needed to get those at least. If worse came to worst, she could always feign a headache and use it as an excuse to go home early, before Matthew showed up for homework hour.
“Sorry,” Cass said, removing her jacket and stowing it and her purse in the cubby behind the front desk. “I had trouble getting going this morning.”
“I’ve got you covered,” Darcy said, sliding a cup marked with the Pony Espresso logo across the countertop to her.
Cass breathed out a grateful sigh. “You’re the best.”
“I figured you’d need it when you read this,” Darcy said, holding up a manila folder full of papers.
“Is that the stuff about my aunt’s property?” Cass asked, surprised at how thick the folder was.
“Yup. And I’ll tell you what, you’re in for a treat,” said Darcy. “Growing up we always used to say the Russo house was haunted, but once I got to be an adult, I figured that’s just what any kid would say about a big old Victorian house, you know what I mean? But after reading that, I can see how the rumors got their start. The original owners of the house were a little… how should I put this… eccentric?”
“Oh?” Cass said, flipping open the folder and lifting the first stapled packet of papers from the stack.
“Yeah. Mrs. Porter was widowed young, and she got big into the nineteenth-century spiritualist fad. She had all sorts of weird ideas about her property. It kind of reminded me of—what’s it called? You know, you lived in San Jose.”
“The Winchester Mystery House?” Cass supplied, only half paying attention as she flipped through the papers. The first two packets were photocopies of newspaper articles from around the 1940s; the rest of the folder was filled with handwritten pages, yellowed and faded. They appeared to be notes from an in-person interview with Hannah Porter, the original owner of Aunt Alexandra’s house. The handwriting looked familiar to Cass, but she couldn’t quite place it.
“Yeah, that one. Only instead of thinking that she needed to keep building her house until she died, Mrs. Porter’s beliefs were more about the woods the house was built in.”
Cass’s head jerked up. “Seriously? What did she think about the woods?”
“Do you know anything about Victorian spiritualism?” Darcy asked.
“Not much,” Cass admitted.
“Basically there’s a lot of references to a veil that separates this world from a spiritual world. Mrs. Porter seemed to think that the woods were kind of… right in the middle of that veil, if that makes sense. Almost like the woods were the veil, maybe,” Darcy said. “She called her property ‘The Wood Between the Worlds.’ And she believed that there was a direct portal to the other world somewhere in the woods. She believed it was her job to protect that portal. She called herself the Chatelaine. Essentially she saw herself as the caretaker of the woods. She believed she had to safeguard the woods, or else the veil would break down and the world would be overrun with evil spirits.”
Cass felt her skin ripple with gooseflesh. This was it, she knew it. The portal that her house’s original owner was talking about—that had to be the mysterious warren. “Did she say anything about faeries or anything like that?” She regretted the words as soon as she asked them, but they seemed to burst out of her mouth unbidden.
Darcy gave her an odd look, and Cass’s face flushed. “Yeah, she did. How did you know?” Darcy asked.
Cass shrug
ged, quickly glancing back down at the papers to avoid looking Darcy in the eye. “My aunt used to tell me that story. That there were faeries in the woods. I wondered if she might have heard it from someone who knew Mrs. Porter.”
“Your aunt knew Mrs. Porter, actually,” Darcy said.
Cass looked up in surprise. “What?”
“Yeah, look at the last page of that interview.”
Cass flipped to the back of the packet. It was signed Alexandra Russo, 1953. That would have been when Aunt Alexandra was twenty-eight, two years younger than Cass was now. This interview with Mrs. Porter had been conducted by Alexandra herself.
“From what I gathered, your aunt befriended Mrs. Porter when she was a child. She mentions that they encountered each other at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and kept in touch.”
Another chill ran over Cass’s skin. Aunt Alexandra would have been thirteen or fourteen at that Fair. Cass didn’t know how they met, but she had a suspicion she knew how they’d befriended one another. If Mrs. Porter had the Sight—and it sure as heck sounded like she had—then it almost certainly had something to do with that. Had Mrs. Porter seen Alexandra reacting to something that anyone else might think wasn’t there? Or had it been the other way around? Either way, they must have connected over their shared Sight, and kept in touch for that reason, most likely through letters until Aunt Alexandra was old enough to travel to Riddle on her own. Had Mrs. Porter been a guide to Aunt Alexandra the way Alexandra had been to Cass, and then to Lily?
“All I know is that when Mrs. Porter died in 1955, she left her house and all her possessions to Alexandra,” Darcy said. “That’s the last thing in the folder, a copy of Mrs. Porter’s will.”
Cass’s breath caught in her throat. She’d never thought about how her great-aunt had acquired her house—she’d just always had it. She’d had it for decades before Cass’s own birth, and it had never occurred to Cass to ask the story behind it. That was just the way it had always been. She was the same age as you when Mrs. Porter left her the house, she realized.
And now Cass knew the reason why Aunt Alexandra had never moved away from Riddle, had never followed through with her dream of retiring to Greece or some other sunny clime. Mrs. Porter had believed she was meant to be the caretaker of the house and the woods, and had clearly left the position of Chatelaine to Aunt Alexandra. And Alexandra had taken it seriously enough to forgo her own dreams and stay here. But had her great-aunt actually expected Cass to take up the same mantle when she left the house to Cass in her own will? She knew that Cass wanted to have nothing to do with the fae. And she’d never mentioned a word of this to Cass in advance. Never given her a hint of the responsibility she planned to lay on her grandniece’s shoulders.
Probably because she knew I’d never go for it if she had told me, Cass thought. For the first time, she felt annoyed with her great-aunt. She’d loved her grandpa’s sister more than her own grandmother, but the woman had been keeping secrets from Cass her whole life. The more time she spent in Riddle, the more things she learned that Alexandra had been hiding from her. Now what was Cass supposed to do?
“Thanks, Darcy,” Cass finally said. “Wow. This is a lot to unpack.”
“Yeah, pretty crazy, huh?” Darcy replied with a laugh. This information clearly hadn’t affected her the way it affected Cass. Well, why should it? To anyone else, it would just sound like a kooky legend, something local kids would whisper about and rational adults would shrug off as some eccentric woman’s delusion from some bygone century. They couldn’t know how real it was to someone like Cass.
“Yeah, crazy,” Cass agreed with a shaky laugh, putting the papers back in the manila folder and shoving it into the cubby with her jacket and purse.
* * *
By afternoon, Cass had made a decision. As much as her rational mind had been urging her to avoid Matthew, after thumbing through the papers Darcy had given her more thoroughly during her lunch break, she realized that she wouldn’t be able to untangle this riddle on her own. If she wanted to find out what the warren was—and what her premonitory dream was trying to warn her about—she needed help from an expert. And with two sisters with the Sight, Matthew was the closest thing to an expert Cass had.
She was going to have to ask for his help.
She was in the stacks shelving books when Matthew came in for homework hour that afternoon. He gave her a little wave as he passed that made Cass’s stomach flip-flop, then went to join Lily at the table in the kid’s corner. No kids besides Lily had shown up at all so far this school year, but Darcy was still nonplussed. She was convinced they’d start pouring in around report card time, in early November.
Cass waited to approach the table until Darcy had left for her fifteen-minute break. There were no other patrons in the library; just Lily quietly working on solving math problems out of a worn textbook, and Matthew reading another mass market paperback—it looked like Ursula K. Le Guin today—and waiting for Lily to ask him a question or for some other kid to come in.
Now or never, Cass thought as she approached the table with the papers Darcy had given her.
“Hey,” she said, holding the manila folder awkwardly behind her back.
Matthew looked up from his book. “Oh, good,” he said with a grin. “I was worried you were avoiding me. I didn’t want to push you or anything… I mean, I know I dropped a bombshell on you on Saturday.”
Cass felt her face grow red. She tried not to dwell on the fact that, were it not for these papers Darcy had given her, she would be avoiding him. “Yeah, no. It’s fine,” she said. “I just… needed some time to process it.”
“I can imagine. I could tell it was a surprise. Do you not know many other people”—he paused, glancing at Lily, who was diligently working on her math homework and pointedly pretending to ignore their conversation—“uh, you know.”
“I didn’t until recently.” Cass sighed and said to Lily, “I know you’re listening. Yes, we’re talking about your friends.”
“Really?” Lily eagerly shoved the binder paper and pencil away from herself and leaned against her elbows. “Does Mr. McCarthy see them, too? I thought I… uh, heard some stuff.”
Cass rolled her eyes and gave Lily a glare. “I thought we were going to be working on not listening in.”
“I am!” Lily protested. “It’s hard!”
“Wait,” Matthew said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Lily has the Sight as well?”
“Yup. This town seems to be just crawling with people who do.”
Matthew hmm-ed. “That’s interesting,” he said thoughtfully. Then, to Lily, he explained, “I can’t see them. But I know about them from my family. My sisters can see them.”
“Cool!” Lily replied eagerly. “There are more people like us than we thought.”
“You still have to be careful,” Cass admonished.
“I know,” Lily grumbled.
“Anyway,” Cass said, turning back to Matthew. “I had a question for you. Have you ever heard of a thing called a warren?”
“I have!” Lily interrupted.
Cass looked at her in surprise. “You have?”
Lily nodded. “Yes. Mr. Green said I have to stay away from it.”
Cass arched an eyebrow. “Well, that’s…” Ominous. Her mind automatically went back to the warning dream, which Lily and Green were both a part of. “So, what is it?”
“I don’t know. He just told me to stay away from it.”
“Very helpful, Lily.”
Matthew laughed. “I do know what a warren is, yes.” When Cass whirled on him in surprise, he clarified, “Well, I don’t know specifically what the definition is. But I know that there’s one in Foreston.”
Cass blinked, her mouth partially open. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. It’s a hollow tree that grows on the Paine Estate. That’s a big Victorian house museum in town. My sisters say that the fae seem to hang out there. Sort of like… they come from there, m
aybe.”
Cass’s skin prickled. She believed that there was a direct portal to the other world somewhere in the woods. That’s what Darcy had said about Mrs. Porter. Could it be…?
“Like a door, maybe?” Cass suggested.
Matthew considered. “Yeah, maybe. You’re thinking a door to wherever it is they come from?”
“Right. A door to the other world.”
Matthew nodded. “Could be.”
Cass inhaled. This was it, she could feel it. This had to be the warren that the dream was talking about. Mrs. Porter’s hole in the veil. “So you’re saying it’s a tree?”
“The one in Foreston is. I don’t know if they’re all the same.” He looked at Cass as she gnawed on her lip. “What’s this about?”
She sat down at the table across from Matthew, Lily between them on the table’s end. She slid the manila folder across the table to him. In confusion, he opened the folder and started pulling papers out.
“I… I think there’s a warren on my aunt’s property,” she said, unsure of how to explain. She didn’t know whether Matthew knew or believed in so-called faery blessings—just because his sisters had the Sight didn’t mean they had any abilities beyond that. And she didn’t want to go into full details about her dream in front of Lily. There was always the chance Lily may have already heard her thoughts about the dream, but if she hadn’t, Cass didn’t want to alarm her.
“There is,” Lily said, leaning forward in her chair to try to look at the papers Matthew was riffling through now. “Remember? Mr. Green told me to stay away from it.”
“Why is that?” Cass asked, trying to sound casual. “Did he say it was dangerous?”
“He said it could be for me.”
Cass narrowed her eyebrows, but before she could say anything, Matthew spoke.
“Look at this, Cass,” he said, sliding the paper across the table and pointing to a line of Alexandra’s faded handwriting. Cass read the words, “The Wood Between the Worlds.”
Alexandra's Riddle (Northwest Magic Book 1) Page 11