The stark office looked just as it had in Cass’s vision. Hardwood floor stained a dull gray against off-white walls, black or dark gray accents everywhere giving it an austere, modern look. Not a splash of color to be seen except through the picture window and through a slightly-ajar set of French doors on the wall to Cass’s right.
And, of course, around Kowalski’s neck.
“Stop!” Cass cried, rushing across the room. Kowalski was no longer struggling the way he’d been in her vision. He was slumped over in his black leather office chair. He looked to be unconscious. She prayed that that was all he was.
The fae were cackling to themselves until Cass reached them. She grabbed the two imps, clutching one in each fist, and ripped them off his chest, where they’d been dancing a victory jig. Her hands burned from their magic, but she didn’t loosen her grip. As they screamed in protest, she marched over to the open French door and hurled them out. “And don’t come back!” she shouted, slamming the door in their faces. Then she whirled back to Kowalski and quickly checked his vital signs. He wasn’t breathing.
“What’s wrong with him?” his wife screeched from the doorway. She’d followed behind Cass, but at a much more dignified pace, so Cass was relatively certain that she hadn’t witnessed the faery removal. She hoped not, at least. If Mrs. Kowalski didn’t have the Sight—and everything Lily had ever said had indicated that neither of her parents did—then Cass definitely would have looked like a lunatic.
“Call 9-1-1,” Cass barked at her over her shoulder. She rolled his chair away from his desk, catching Kowalski’s body against her shoulder as he slumped forward. She eased him down onto the floor, laying him flat on his back and unbuttoning the top button of his shirt to loosen his collar. She’d had her last public employee CPR recertification less than a year ago, but would she remember all the steps?
“What’s wrong with him?” Mrs. Kowalski repeated.
“He’s not breathing!” Cass snapped back. “Call 9-1-1!”
She took a deep breath, pinched his nostrils shut with her fingers, and leaned forward.
* * *
The paramedics arrived quickly. They loaded Mr. Kowalski onto a gurney and rushed him out of the house. One of them asked Cass what happened, and she told them the closest version of the truth that she could offer: that she’d come over, angry, to confront him about his workers encroaching on her property line, and found him unconscious at his desk. The paramedics and Mrs. Kowalski seemed to accept this, though she wouldn’t be surprised if she had to answer to the police later. That would be fine, she tried to assure herself. She certainly hadn’t been alone in the room with him long enough to have choked him out herself. Mrs. Kowalski had arrived just seconds after her and found Cass already preparing to administer rescue breathing.
“Could this day get any worse?” Mrs. Kowalski wailed as she watched the paramedics loading her husband into the ambulance. “First Lily and now Tom?”
Cass felt like her blood had turned to ice water. The chill that washed over her was instantaneous, making her shiver. “What about Lily?”
“She’s run away!” Mrs. Kowalski cried, wiping her nose with the cuff of her sweater.
Cass was too stunned by her words to wince at that. “What do you mean, she’s run away?”
“Her school called just before you got here to say she was absent today. I thought she may have played hooky, gone off with that little homeschooled friend of hers, but I just got off the phone with her parents and they said they hadn’t seen her since Saturday.” She narrowed her eyes at Cass. “Wait. You’re the one who owns Alexandra’s property now, aren’t you? She hasn’t been at your house today, has she?”
Cass shook her head. She felt sick. Absolutely sick. Like if she didn’t sit down right now, she was going to throw up or pass out. Possibly both. “I haven’t seen her since Saturday, either,” she said, her voice rough.
“I don’t know what to do,” Mrs. Kowalski whimpered. “I don’t want Tom to be alone at the hospital, but what if Lily comes home and no one is here?”
Cass didn’t think she would, not based on the crawling sensation she was feeling across her skin. She had a strong suspicion she knew where Lily had gone, and it wasn’t somewhere that Mrs. Kowalski could follow.
“You go with your husband,” she said. “I’ll look for Lily.”
Mrs. Kowalski easily agreed—the cynical side of Cass wondered if this was small-town trust of neighbors or simply silly, young Mrs. Kowalski eager to pass her responsibility on to anyone else—and gave Cass her cell phone number to call if Lily returned or if Cass heard anything. Cass watched mutely as she ran to the garage at the end of the brick driveway and drove out a moment later in a shiny black BMW X model.
As the car disappeared down the drive, Cass heard movement in the hedges behind her. She turned to see Green watching her from between the thick, scaly leaves of the arborvitaes. Before Cass could react, he murmured, “I tried to warn you.”
Cass stared at him. “What?”
“Time and time again I tried to warn you. But you wouldn’t listen. And now it may be too late.”
“Do you know where Lily is?” Cass asked frantically. But in the blink of an eye, Green had disappeared.
She’d been spirited away. That was the only possible explanation. The fae were taking their revenge on Kowalski.
But not just him. Cass knew that. The fae were punishing her, too. It was supposed to be her job to protect the woods. To be the Chatelaine. And she’d turned her back on them. She’d told herself that what happened to Riddle wasn’t her problem. She had no ties holding her here, no reason to stay. No reason to give up her dreams just to appease some ancient agreement that she hadn’t been a part of and didn’t need to be beholden to.
The fae had shown her just how wrong she was.
Now the meaning of her dream was so agonizingly clear, and it was too late to stop it. “We’ll all die.” The fae had almost killed Tom Kowalski—would have, if Cass hadn’t been there to stop them. And now they had Lily. Would the fae be satisfied with a sacrifice of the entire Kowalski family? Or would their wrath spread to the whole of Riddle? Would they go after Darcy next? Would they go after Matthew?
Cass had caused this, and it was only now in sickening retrospect that she could see what a selfish monster she’d been. Just like Lily had said. After Jeremy’s accident, she’d been so hurt that she let the hurt change her, all the while denying it to the moon. And what had been the point? Had she been trying to protect others, as she’d convinced herself? Or just trying to protect herself?
Regardless, it had backfired miserably. She’d told herself that she didn’t care what happened to Riddle, but now that she was here, she realized that she did care, very much. There were people here that she cared about, more than she’d cared about anyone in years. She’d made friends in this small town, found people who cared about her for who she was. People she didn’t have to keep secrets with. And now one of those people was in danger.
There still had to be time to stop this. Maybe it wasn’t too late to save Lily.
And everyone else in the process.
Cass raced back up the street to her house. She knew she could get onto her property from the Kowalskis’ side, but she didn’t know her way around the woods well enough to trust she wouldn’t get lost, and she didn’t have time for that right now. This was an emergency and every second counted.
As she passed the place where the construction crew had been working, she saw that they’d left, but the excavator still stood near where she’d seen it last, its yellow arm crooked in the sky like a giant bent tree. It was a stark reminder of the real trees that had stood in that very spot hours before, but now lay piled in an unceremonious heap yards away. The workers must have been given the order to stop for the day—they’d probably figured they should get going while the going was good when they’d noticed the flashing lights of the ambulance and fire engine on their boss’s driveway—but the machine’
s lingering presence showed they obviously thought they’d be back, possibly as soon as tomorrow.
Not if Cass had anything to say about it.
She raced down the sidewalk-less shoulder of the road but careened to a stop when she turned onto her driveway and saw a silver pickup parked there.
She struggled to catch her breath. “Matthew,” she said.
He’d been leaning against the open bed of the truck, but he straightened when he saw her. An indescribable tumult of emotions washed over Cass at the sight of him. She wanted to run, but she couldn’t say whether she wanted to run away from him… or toward him.
“Hey,” Matthew said. When she didn’t respond—her mouth was moving, but no sound would come—he quickly added, “Look, I know I’m probably not real welcome here. I realize from your reaction on Saturday that I obviously misunderstood—”
“No, no,” Cass blurted. Hearing him say that was like a knife jabbing her heart. He hadn’t misunderstood. Not by a long shot.
He waved her off. “That’s not important. I wouldn’t ordinarily come harassing a girl who made her feelings clear like that. But Lily wasn’t in class today, and then I just…” He shrugged helplessly. “I had a feeling. You know, like the ones I told you about. I had a feeling that I needed to be here.”
He took a step closer, his expression so vulnerable that Cass’s heart ached all over again. “Was I wrong?” he asked.
“You weren’t wrong.” She swallowed and shook her head. “About that, anyway. We do need to talk, Matthew. I need to apologize. But later. Right now, we have to save Lily.”
Matthew nodded grimly. “So, I was right, then? She’s here? And in danger?”
“I think so. Matthew, I think… I think the fae have her. And it’s all my fault.”
He sucked in a breath. “Do you know where she’s at?” he asked.
“I think she must be at the warren.”
“So we have to find it, then,” Matthew said.
She nodded, and without hesitation she and Matthew ran to the place where the garden paths converged.
“It could be down either of these trails,” Matthew said, looking around at the forked crossroads before them. “We didn’t check either of these on Saturday. You said you already tried this one, right?” He gestured to the path Cass had taken her first evening in Riddle.
“Right,” she started to say, but then she froze. Had she seen it just now? A glimmer of light and color. A flash of green.
“You need to watch yourself.”
She remembered the sound of music and the ring of light. She’d been pixy-led that night, been so embarrassed that the fae had been able to trick her like that when they never had before. She’d been annoyed with herself for letting her guard down, but what if the reason they’d been able to take hold of her like that was because the fae were stronger there? Like they would be if, for example, they were close to a power source?
Such as a portal through the veil…
“I’m an idiot,” she muttered.
“What?” said Matthew.
“It’s down there,” Cass said, pointing down the trail with certainty. “The warren is down this path. I’m an idiot for not seeing it before. They were misleading me.” They were probably angry that I kicked that brownie out, she thought. My first act of thumbing my nose at the role of Chatelaine. Her behavior since arriving in Riddle had done nothing but disrupt the balance of the wood, a balance that had been in place for over a century, since Mrs. Porter had taken on her role as caretaker. No wonder Cass’s premonitory senses had been so overloaded as long as she’d been here. The balance was disrupted—and she was the one who had done it.
There has to still be time to restore the balance, she thought.
“Let’s go,” she said to Matthew. He nodded, and the two of them raced down the trail.
It felt like they ran and ran, but the end of the trail was nowhere in sight. The light between the trees seemed to change, becoming more golden, glowing orange. Or was it an optical illusion, caused by the changing leaves above their heads? As her legs pumped and her breath came out raggedly, Cass found herself continually reminded of how much time she’d lost when last she came down this path. Two hours gone looking at the moon. If the warren was a portal between worlds, what would it do to time and space around it? What if they really were running for eternity, time passing around them while they didn’t move, the trees around them staying stationary?
Then, suddenly, the trees parted and they burst into a clearing. The sky above was the purple of twilight. It couldn’t have been later than four o’clock when Cass found Matthew on the driveway. Had they really been running for three hours? Or was it another faery illusion, like the glowing ring of the moon? Cass’s skin rippled with gooseflesh and her stomach twisted into knots.
In the center of the clearing was an enormous oak tree, the largest one Cass had ever seen. Its branches formed a canopy that encased almost the whole clearing, and they seemed to stretch high enough to touch the sky. As Cass looked at it, she realized this wasn’t just one tree, but two oaks who’d grown side-by-side until their trunks became so massive that they grew into each other, forming a massive entity that was cloven down the middle where they collided.
Then, as her eyes traveled down the tree, she noticed two things at once:
The clearing was crawling with fae, more than she’d ever seen in one place. They climbed up and down the body of the tree, making its bark seem to shimmer. They dangled from the branches, perched on the knobbly roots that protruded from the ground. Dozens of fae—hundreds—uncountable shades of gray and brown, bronze and gold, short and squat, long and narrow, round faces with bulbous noses and pointed faces with craggy features. They glared at Cass as one, angry eyes flashing in the gloom.
And in the center of them, in the place where the two trunks met, was Lily.
She looked like a sleeping princess in a fairy tale, her eyes closed, her expression peaceful. But she wasn’t lying on a bed covered in rose petals—the bark of the tree was absorbing her, like one of those pictures of nature reclaiming objects left outside too long. All that was visible was her head and shoulders, her hands and wrists, and her feet in their anachronistic saddle shoes.
“Lily,” Cass said, stepping forward, but she stopped in her tracks as the fae tensed, many of them hissing at her and crouching in decidedly antagonistic positions. They were willing to fight for their prize, it would seem.
“What can you see?” Cass whispered to Matthew.
“I see Lily,” he whispered back. “Caught in the tree. I assume this is the warren?”
Cass nodded. “You can’t see the fae?”
“No. Are there a lot of them?”
Cass nodded. “An army of them.”
Matthew looked at her in alarm. “That doesn’t sound good. Do you think they’re going to try to fight you?”
The air around her was charged with energy. None of the fae moved, but they were tensed, ready to jump at a second’s notice. “Probably,” she said.
Matthew let out a hiss of breath. “This is nothing like Foreston. What got these fae so riled up?”
Cass swallowed. “Me.”
The tree moved. Like a living creature, like a snake gradually swallowing its prey, the bark shifted and more of Lily disappeared into it. Now all that was visible was her face and the tips of her fingers on her right hand.
“Lily!” Cass screamed, darting forward without thinking. As she collided with the tree, the fae collided with her. They swarmed over her, nipping and biting her skin like rodents. She heard Matthew shout behind her. “Stay back!” she called to him. “You can’t see them, so you can’t fight them! They could kill you!”
She clawed at the bark, trying to find some way to break Lily out of her magical prison. The fae pulled at her hair, tore at her clothes. She could feel their hands around her throat the way they’d wrapped around Tom Kowalski’s just hours before. One of them grabbed at her necklace, and then Ca
ss heard a little squeak of pain as it dropped the chain.
The key! she thought, desperately grasping it between her fingers. Is it iron? She pulled it from around her neck and swung wildly at the fae nearest her. The creature screeched as the metal connected with its skin, burning it.
For a moment, Cass thought she might have the upper hand, as the fae nearest to her skittered away, eager to avoid the touch of the iron; but above her head, more fae let out angry war cries like the shrieks of eagles and dove down on her, biting at her ankles and grasping at her shirttail.
Frantically, she tried to press the iron against the bark of the tree to see if that might force it to release Lily, but it did no good. Then something bit down hard on the tender flesh of her upper arm just above her elbow. She cried out in pain, her muscles spasming, her fingers losing their grip on the key. It slipped out of her grasp to the ground. At her feet, fae skittered away from the key, but they just swarmed up her body, climbing all over her, pinning her against the tree so that she couldn’t move, couldn’t bend to pick the necklace up again. They had her trapped. She felt the tree convulse against her, and suddenly realized that they were planning to trap her here forever, just like Lily.
Distantly, she heard Matthew’s voice behind her again, shouting her name. “Don’t!” she yelled back. “Get out of here, Matthew! You have to stay safe!”
But her words did no good. She felt his hand on her shoulders, felt more fae crawl over her and onto him, an invisible force that would surely kill Matthew the way it had almost killed Mr. Kowalski, and there was nothing Cass could do to stop it.
“You can still stop it,” a voice shouted over the cacophony of shrieking fae. She recognized it—high and reedy, like a birdsong. “You know how!”
“I don’t know how,” she protested. Her voice sounded far away to her own ears. Everything was getting dark—was it night falling, or her own vision failing?
Alexandra's Riddle (Northwest Magic Book 1) Page 16