The Goblins of Bellwater

by Molly Ringle

  Kit turned with his plate, and forked up a pasta shell. “These local fae better have meaner moves than I do. Otherwise I am not liking the idea of you taking them on, Liv.”

  “I don’t like it either!” She shouted it at Kit, since shouting at Grady and Skye wasn’t going to accomplish anything. “I don’t like any of this! I don’t like finding out that there are Teeny-tinies in the woods only to learn that they’re fucking stealing people. But, fine. The locals tell me this is how we get out of it and there is no other way. You’re the goblin liaison and therefore the locals can’t come to you. These two are…magically compromised.” She flung a hand toward Skye and Grady. “So it’s down to me. Do I want it like this? No. But that’s how it is.”

  They all stared at her. She expected Kit to tell her she was crazy, argue with her, maybe tell her she was being a bitch. But in Grady’s face she found gratitude; in Kit’s, admiration; and in Skye’s, a fierce, loving approval.

  “In that case,” Kit said soberly, “I’m glad we’ve got a knight in shining armor, because it looks like there’s three of us in this tower to rescue.”

  Livy and Kit stood by the VW in the sodden, cold night, trying not to watch while Grady and Skye kissed goodnight for two or three minutes among the sculptures outside Kit’s cabin.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t know they were together,” Kit said. “Or that I didn’t realize he was under a spell. Or that I tried to attack the goblins, again. God, how am I so clueless?”

  “I didn’t know any of that stuff till tonight either.” She glanced at her sister, who was still drinking in Grady’s kiss like they couldn’t breathe unless they were connected at the mouth. “Guess that explains how they’ve been spending the past couple weeks.”

  “Yeah, I wondered, but…” Kit shook his head. “This is awful. I mean, we have to wait? Till they give in, and walk into the woods alone some night? We just stand by and watch, then act?” He sounded anguished.

  “I hate it. But that’s what the locals said.”

  “They better give you one hell of a magic sword to take with you, that’s all.”

  “I’m hoping it’s more like a magic shovel. I don’t know how to use a sword.”

  Kit snorted.

  She met his gaze. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “For not believing you. For all the things I said.”

  “Hey, it’s a sign of your intelligence that you didn’t believe me.”

  “Living with this, all these years…” She exhaled, puffing out her cheeks. “I can’t even imagine what it’s been like for you.”

  He scraped a mud fleck off her side mirror with his fingernail. “I hate that it’s involved all of you. But at the same time, I’ve got to admit, it feels really good to tell someone.”

  “I bet. I’m going to have more questions for you tomorrow.” She nodded toward her sister, who was finally disentangling from Grady. “But we should call it a night.”

  “Yeah.” Kit turned to Skye as she approached the car. “I’m sorry,” he told her gravely.

  She nodded, and squeezed his upper arm through his jacket, a gesture of solidarity, or forgiveness. Probably both.

  Kit opened the car door for Skye, and she slid in.

  Grady shambled up too, hands stuffed in his hoodie pockets, and when Livy looked at him, he said, “I’ll still come tomorrow, but don’t pay me anymore. Please. You shouldn’t.”

  “I should. I insist.”

  “I’m barely even cooking lately.” He sounded wretched.

  “You’re still better at it than me,” Livy said. “Besides, you’re bringing us groceries. I at least owe you for that.”

  Unconvinced, he bowed his head and looked away, his sigh becoming a cloud of fog.

  Kit shut Skye’s door, and he and Livy locked eyes again. “Well. Goodnight,” she said.

  “We’ll talk soon.”

  “Yeah.” She hovered, tempted to kiss him, thinking it was the least she could do. In the end she turned away instead, and slogged around to the other side of the car, alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WHEN SKYE AND LIVY HAD DRIVEN AWAY, GRADY STAYED IN THE YARD BEHIND THE CABIN, HUGGING HIMSELF, GAZING up at the treetops.

  Kit’s step crunched the gravel off to his left. “They live up there,” he said. “Up in the trees. Not here on the island really, but in the national forest on the mainland. I guess you know that, though.”

  Grady had begun to guess as much, but he couldn’t nod or otherwise answer. He looked at Kit a second to show he was listening, then let his glance get pulled back up into the woods.

  “They have these weird houses up there, like a treehouse village, like Skye drew. You can’t see it unless they invite you in and you take their path. Which you’ve never done, I guess. That’s what I made them promise they wouldn’t do to you. Lot of good it did.”

  Right. Instead Skye had invited him—Help me—and he’d taken her path, stepping off the main trail and through the underbrush to reach her, to taste the enchanted fruit of her mouth. Grady forced his gaze down instead, to the solidity of the ground.

  “They’re getting too damn bold.” Kit sounded bitter. “There’s no precedent for this, for them taking someone close to the liaison. Not that I’ve found in the records, anyhow. They usually just pick on random people.” Kit sighed. “Not that that’s any better. And I guess liaisons before me were better at protecting the people they ought to protect.”

  Grady shook his head at Kit, with a slow blink to signal Not your fault, no hard feelings. Really, not Kit’s fault. Just rotten luck.

  “Sucks for you too,” Grady said. The curse let him say that, at least.

  “Oh yeah. That it does.”

  Though it was cold out and starting to drizzle again, Grady wanted to linger out here a while, absorbing the air alone. But Kit hovered a few feet behind him, and finally said, “Will you come in? You’re making me nervous. I don’t want you to wander off into the woods this very night if it’s all the same to you.”

  Grady could tell he was trying to sound ironic, throw a pinch of humor into the situation.

  Grady nodded, and resisted the forest’s pull, following Kit back inside.

  He tucked himself into a chair by the dark front window, his computer open on his lap. “How to write a will” was a Google search he’d never run before, never thought about nor wanted to think about; but now he ran it, and with cold fingertips copied and pasted a legal-looking template into a document file. He filled in the blank spaces with his name and the date, and read over the boilerplate.

  I, Grady Michael Sylvain, being of sound mind…

  Was he of sound mind? Probably couldn’t claim that anymore. But a lawyer wasn’t going to take a goblin hex into consideration, so he kept on filling in blanks. Pushing down the whirlwind of grief and terror, he typed his intention to divide his modest goods and bank account among his parents and siblings if he died—or at least, if he went permanently missing and was presumed dead. Probably it would be better for his family if they thought he was dead, so they wouldn’t have to wait and hope endlessly for him to return.

  Then, if they found this document, they’d likely think he had killed himself, even if Kit—who would probably be the last to see him “alive”— swore up and down that Grady wouldn’t do such a thing. For what other reason than suicide would a healthy twenty-one-year-old in a seemingly safe lifestyle write a will?

  He shut his eyes a moment, feeling so sad and nauseated he couldn’t even look at the screen. The thought of his family regarding him as a suicide hurt just as much as the thought of them waiting forever for him to come home. Screw Kit’s reservations on the issue. Grady opened his eyes, made room for a new paragraph after the preliminary boilerplate, and typed:

  I am not dead. But I cannot come home. It is my wish that my cousin, Kit Sylvain, tell the truth about what happened to me, just as he told it to me shortly before my disappearance. He isn’t to blame in any way, but he has the expl
anation.

  He was tempted to add Livy’s name, call her in as a witness as well. But he supposed it best to let the Darwen clan write their own letters and explanations in the ways they saw fit. After all, if they couldn’t break this spell, Skye would be leaving her family in the same bereft condition.

  Grady rested his head back against the wall, looking at the ceiling’s log beams. He wondered if he should text Skye, ask her if she’d written a will. Maybe she didn’t need to. Her family was smaller than his. Everything she owned would surely go to Livy, who would know what to do with it. Livy seemed to know what to do about most stuff in life.

  He grimaced at his makeshift will, which struck him as useless, and he closed it without saving it.

  God, how he hoped Livy would know what to do here, and soon, before he and Skye gave up their human skins and crawled into the treetops.

  “So I know you’ll have to go out into the woods alone eventually, one of these nights,” Livy said when they got home.

  Skye shivered, feeling the tug of the tribe, tasting the increasingly appealing syrupy fruits, hearing the frolicking songs…

  “But,” Livy went on, “if you could please stay inside tonight? Just— can it not be today? Please give me one more day with you…” She held her hands clasped before her chest, her eyes pleading.

  Skye nodded. She was so tired anyway, she probably could just fall asleep in her bed and not be too tormented by the thought of the fresh air and starlight and glee she was missing.

  Those thoughts had plagued her every night since the goblins captured her. She felt like a teenager grounded by her parents, exiled to solitary confinement while all the people she wanted to see were partying without her. Also, Grady wasn’t with her at night, and she pined even harder for him than she did for the forest. It should have been enough to know she’d see him the next day, in a matter of hours. Like anyone addicted to something, she had trouble seeing past her cravings, her current lack of the desired thing.

  Even tonight, though she obeyed Livy’s request and stayed indoors, she stood by her bedroom window a long while after turning off the lights, and stared out into the forest. It had become a habit for her, a behavior she indulged anytime she couldn’t sleep, and one she performed every night before she went to bed. Livy didn’t know; Skye always shut her door, and moved quietly around her room.

  Tonight drizzle spattered the windowpane, hitting harder in erratic gusts of wind, and all she could see of the forest was a vaguely shifting wall of black. Would it be cold and wet, living up in the treetops on a night like this? Would the gusting wind make the houses sway? Did the weather bother the goblins, or did they swing through the bending branches like squirrels, and splash into the rain like frogs, always in gleeful communion with nature?

  She guessed it was the latter. That didn’t sound so bad. It had to be better than feeling torn in half like this.

  Skye was well aware of what the others hadn’t realized until tonight: that Grady had become increasingly quiet and unsmiling ever since being enchanted by her. He’d grown less interested in cooking, in his job hunt, in any life outside of Skye and the forest. Even when alone together lately, they didn’t talk much anymore, not the way they had those first few days. They replaced most of their conversation with touch, and with gazes in which they seemed to be trying to read each other’s minds (unsuccessfully, but she still felt comforted by the attempt). It was almost enough. It felt intimate, and was intimate in most definitions of the word.

  Being able to speak freely had become one of her strongest cravings, and he undoubtedly felt the same. Who wouldn’t? Turning into a goblin would restore that to them, though presumably they wouldn’t speak the way they used to, exactly. None of the goblins seemed to think like humans did, even if that’s who they used to be.

  Still, what could she do? She was supposed to join them before Livy had any hope of shattering this spell. Much as they all dreaded it, that was the only instruction they’d gotten from the other fae.

  Strange that she was so safe from her fate during daylight hours. Livy could leave her and go to work as usual, in the knowledge that Skye couldn’t be taken. Skye considered going out in the woods during the day and holing up there, waiting for night, letting it happen already. But that last sliver of humanity left to her was strong. It wouldn’t let her. When she did go out, she returned home before sunset, every time.

  Grady came over today as usual. She felt an extra flutter of nervousness before his arrival. He’d been quiet in text—ordinarily they kept in touch every few hours—and she dreaded seeing the sadness or accusation in his face, now that he knew everything with clarity and had had all night to mull it over. Indeed, now she herself knew much more than she had before.

  When he arrived, an hour after Livy had left for work, he set down the grocery bag and just held her, in the front entry, their chests rising and falling against one another. The scent of him, through the soft flannel of his shirt, made her tear up. Surely he wouldn’t smell quite like this anymore after their transformation. But I won’t care; I’ll be happy then, she reminded herself.

  A glance downward into the grocery bag, gaping open by her feet, proved how far his interests had tumbled: pre-wrapped deli sandwiches. Canned soup. Boxed crackers. The real Grady would have thrown this Grady out of the house in outrage.

  The human world would lose two artists when the tribe took them. Would she and Grady still use their skills in the goblin village? Would she be designing their next treetop houses? Clumping together glowing mushrooms to make light fixtures? Or—a shudder shook her at the thought—would Grady be mixing up next month’s batch of jinxed fruit pastries?

  She lifted her face to him, hardly able to breathe in her panic. He read her expression, and leaned down to soothe her with a kiss. She closed her eyes, felt his heat melt her sharp edges away, and sank into it. This magic brought all sorts of cruelty, but being with him eased the pain. Almost.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “SO WHEN DID YOU FIND OUT?” LIVY ASKED. “DID YOU GROW UP KNOWING ABOUT THIS?”

  They were sitting in Carol’s Diner again, this time with Grady and Skye. Each of them had a cup of coffee. A shared plate of hash browns sat in the middle of the table—mostly untouched, Kit noticed. Not a lot of appetite among the four of them today.

  He glanced at Livy, beside him. “Nah. My dad told me during his final illness, seven years ago. I thought he was off his head with pain meds, of course. He told me where to find the ancestral records, and I read them, but I still thought it was just a hoax, my ancestors keeping up some weird story for fun, or maybe they were all honestly crazy. I put the box away. I didn’t know what to think. Then one night after he died, these voices started calling to me from the trees. I followed them and…met them. And realized all those obligations Dad told me about were true.”

  “Did your mom know?” Grady asked.

  Kit nodded. “He says she did. But she’d forgotten by then, what with her own illness.” He dragged his fingertip around in some spilled salt on the table. “Explains why they seemed so stressed a lot of the time when I was growing up.”

  “So when you said you moved to Idaho and Wyoming, but your problems moved along with you,” Livy said, “does that mean they followed you?”

  “Yeah. They showed up wherever I tried to go. I’d think I had escaped them, then within a month they’d be chirping at me again. Calling down from trees to tell me they were going to start stealing people if I didn’t fall in line.” Kit formed the salt into a square, boxing it in on each side with the edge of his finger. “Same thing happened to our great-grandma. When she and her family emigrated to America, she hoped the gob—” He cut off the word, glanced around, and continued, “She hoped they would get left behind in France. But no. They followed her across the ocean, then across the continent. Then all the way out here.”

  “How?” Livy asked. “In a boat, or…”

  “They can shape-shift. They probably became
fish or dolphins or something. Then birds, on the continent. Who knows. But it’s definitely the same group. Riding us to keep getting their gold.”

  “That’s why the locals called them weeds.” Livy sounded glum. “They actually are an invasive species.”

  “Yet another way Europeans have fucked up America.”

  “Gold,” Grady echoed. “Why?”

  Kit’s gaze moved to Skye, at Grady’s side. She watched Kit, dark brown eyes pinned to him like a student who knew the answer and wanted to be called on, but who couldn’t talk if he did call on her. “It’s their magic material of choice,” Kit said. “They can make just about anything out of it. Anything inanimate, at least. Maybe living stuff too, I don’t know.”

  “What do they make?” Livy asked.

  “Everything. Their houses, their furniture, whatever they want. The other month they wanted an espresso machine and a milk steamer.”

  Grady’s eyebrows lifted in disbelief.

  “They did not,” Livy said.

  “They did. They’re into food. Not only because they like it, but because it’s one of the ways they tempt people. If they can get you to eat or drink something of theirs, you’re under their spell right away.”

  “I thought you just had to follow their path,” Livy said.

  “That’s how you see them. You might be okay if you follow the path and don’t eat anything. But…” He looked at Skye again, feeling guilty for bringing it up. She lowered her face. “It doesn’t mean anyone’s gullible or anything, if they get enchanted. The tribe probably does whatever they can to cast that spell. They basically assault people, so I wouldn’t doubt if they…forced food on someone.” He said the last few words softly, since, to judge from Skye’s traumatized face, that was exactly what they’d done.

  “Did they?” Livy demanded of her sister. “Did they force you to eat?”