by Molly Ringle
Everyone watched Skye, who only closed her eyes a moment, cringing. No nod, no head-shake.
“What else did they force you to do?” Livy’s voice shook. “Did they—they didn’t—was there anything sexual?”
Grady slipped his arm around Skye, gaze fixed on her, hardly seeming to breathe.
Skye straightened up and shook her head, just a little. She met Livy’s gaze.
Grady breathed again, and touched his lips to her shoulder.
“They better not have.” Livy clenched her hands in fury, on either side of her mug. “This is just…oh my God.”
Kit felt sick. He wished he could assure them the goblins never molested anyone sexually. But the past liaisons had heard of them doing exactly that. As with most of their crimes, it was nothing anyone could prove; more like hearsay and bragging from long after the deed was done. They mugged, ensorcelled, and assaulted people, and sometimes left them to die, so why would they draw the line at groping or raping someone?
From the little that Redring had said about Skye’s spell and the “mate” status she had conferred upon Grady by choosing him, they probably had played a slightly different game than usual with Skye. He got the impression they wanted to keep her rather than abandon her like they did with the fisherman a few years back, so they had cast some sort of mating magic on her with the idea of making her choose one of them as a mate. Instead she’d chosen Grady, which was a clever loophole find on her part. Then the goblins had outfoxed her by claiming Grady for their side too.
Grady cleared his throat. “The gold. The stealing. How do you do it?”
Kit glanced around uneasily. No one in the diner seemed to be eavesdropping; only a few other groups of people sat in the place, all talking to their companions, several booths away. “I hate it. It sounds like this awesome opportunity, like you get to be Robin Hood, right? But it isn’t. It sucks.”
“There must be people who deserve to be stolen from,” Livy said. “Or who have so much they wouldn’t miss it.”
“Yeah, and sometimes I do go to rich people’s houses, or ostentatious boats at marinas. But still, say you find gold, what’s it likely to be? Jewelry, right? These days it’s hardly ever coins or anything. And jewelry’s got sentimental value, and I don’t know the story behind it. Maybe this rich guy is a dick, but what if this necklace was his mother’s and he’s saving it for his daughter, who’s a perfectly nice person? How can I know?”
“Hmm.” Livy tapped her fingers on the table. “Fair point.”
“So for the most part I don’t even try to get gold, not during the thefts. I just look for cash. Cash is impersonal. Then I use that to go buy gold, somewhere or other.”
“Pawn shops?” Grady suggested.
“I go to those too. With them, I don’t mind lifting gold quite so much, at least in the ones where the owner seems shady. Still, the stuff might’ve been stolen in order to end up in the pawn shop, and someone out there might miss it.”
“What about big chain stores?” Livy said. “They can afford it. Or those overpriced jewelry stores in downtown Seattle. Or banks! Can you rob banks?”
“Would you keep your voice down? And yeah, I can. Sometimes I hit all those. Even then, it sucks for someone. If a couple thousand dollars goes missing from the till, a bank or a store can absorb the loss, but what’s going to happen? They’re probably going to fire whoever was on duty. So then I’m responsible for some innocent teller or cashier losing their job.”
“Oh. Huh.” She frowned at her coffee mug.
Skye and Grady abstractly gazed at the table too, maybe trying to imagine how they’d go about stealing if they had to.
Livy squinted at him. “How does it work, though? You just walk into some store or house, with some magic word…?”
He smiled bitterly. “I say, ‘For the tribe,’ before I walk in. That makes the magic kick in, and then, yep, they just don’t even notice me. Made me sick to my stomach the first few times I tried it. Thought for sure I was going to get arrested.”
She lifted the coffee mug to her lips, but didn’t drink. “Every month for the last seven years,” she mused, speaking against the mug’s rim.
“Yeah. I spread it around, a lot of different stores, houses, towns.” Kit tensed his shoulders. “But it’s a pain in the ass, and I still end up feeling like a thug. Which I am. I’m completely a criminal, there’s no way around it.”
“No.” Livy set down her mug. “You’ve got no choice. We’d all do it, if it were that or have people get assaulted. Not that it seems to stop them assaulting people.”
He shut his eyes a moment. “Well, that’s the rest of it. Sometimes…I come up short for the month. I can’t stand to go out and steal, or I don’t have time, or whatever. And then…well, there’s no way I can be sure, but those seem to be the times they act out against people. Like it gives them the right, if I don’t hold up my end. My ancestors’ records suggest that’s how the magic works.”
“So before they got Skye…” Livy was clearly putting the clues together.
“I came up short that month.” He stared at the salt crystals. “They were pissed. The timing matches up. I brought them more stuff a week later, but in that time…” He trailed off, and looked at Skye.
She met his glance for a second, then looked forlornly out the window.
Everyone was silent for a stretch.
“Where did Redring even come from, anyway?” Livy said in despair. “Why is she like this?”
Kit pulled Élodie’s letter from inside his jacket, and leafed through to find the right part. “That’s in here. Or at least, as much as we’ll ever find out.” He handed the relevant page to Livy.
She frowned at it and read aloud Élodie’s words:
“I asked her once, ‘Who are you? Were you once human as well?’ And she got angry and sneered, ‘What does it matter? What could you want to know? Once upon a time there was a girl whose whole family was slaughtered by Vikings, and she swore revenge and called upon the fae, and one answered her. He made her a goblin like himself, and she became his mate, and though he was but one lone creature when she met him, together they became powerful and amassed a mighty tribe, who drove out any humans who tried to live in their forest. When he overstepped his magical bounds, the nasty neighboring fae stole him and transformed him into a river-nix who cared nothing for her anymore, only for the water and its creatures, but the tough goblin girl kept on. She has survived and her tribe is one of the mightiest in the world, and everyone knows you cross her at your peril.’ ”
Livy let the page sink.
“Vikings?” Grady echoed.
“Yeah,” Kit said. “We’re talking a long, long time she’s been doing this.”
“We’ve got to end it,” Livy said. “Whatever it takes. This is absolutely unfair, to everyone involved. Including her.”
They paid for their food and went back outside. Kit needed to return to the garage, and Livy had an afternoon of work to do.
Grady and Skye wandered into the sculpture garden, arms around each other’s waists.
Livy watched them. “If this doesn’t work, I guess I have to stay on good terms with you,” she said to Kit. “How else will I find out how she’s doing?” Her voice cracked on the last words. Tears pooled in her green eyes.
Kit’s heart squeezed. “Listen.” He grasped her wrist, at his side. “This will work. We will do this.”
She tried to smile, a twitch of an expression that soon slipped away.
What he didn’t tell her, because he didn’t want her talking him out of it, was that he’d had enough. He planned to offer the goblins whatever the hell it took to let Skye and Grady go. Twice the monthly gold, ten times, he’d do it. Even his life, if they wanted it.
It would be worth it. He was done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
KIT SUMMONED THE GOBLINS THAT NIGHT.
They were cackling extra hard, as if they’d never finished laughing about his beating last night. He
did his stoic best to ignore the laughter, and focused on Redring. “I want to talk about adjusting our deal.”
“We do not adjust deals. Deals are sacred. If you wish to make a new deal, we could talk about that.”
“Fine, a new deal. What do you want in exchange for letting Skye and Grady go?”
“Oh, but we have invested so much time in them, and grown so fond of them. We could not let them go.”
Kit clenched his fists, reminded himself not to attack. “We’re fond of them too. We’re their tribe. What do you want for them? More gold? I’ll do it.”
“Really?” Redring skittered closer. She didn’t quite move like a person; more like a two-legged lizard. Kit tried to hide a shudder. “How much more would you give us? Twenty times the weight of my ring?” She picked up the ring from against her chest and swung it by its chain.
“Twenty? Are you seri—okay, look.” Get the rules straight. Look for the loopholes. There was sure as shit going to be loopholes. “Say I did. Say I got you that much every month from now on.”
“For the next thousand years.”
“Oh, no no. I’m not falling for that.” That made the rest of the goblin tribe scream with laughter, like tricking Élodie had been one of their best jokes ever. “Just for my lifetime.”
Redring sighed in disappointment. “Fine. Twenty times as much, every month, for your lifetime.”
“Then you’d release them from the spell?” Even with this onerous new obligation about to fall on him, his heart sped up with hope.
“I would, much as it would hurt me.”
He scanned the deal, and found the loophole. “Immediately? You’d let them go right away, effective today, and never bother them again?”
The tribe cracked up anew, and Redring said, “Oh, I cannot promise that. After all, we are entitled to some time enjoying them.”
“Wait. I thought after they became one of you, they couldn’t go back.”
“Well.” She shrugged, as if it didn’t really matter. “We can return them, but we almost never do.”
“And do they come back…” He thought of Stephen King stories and other creepy tales. “…the same as they were?”
“Who does time and experience ever leave unchanged?”
He expelled a breath through his nose. “Nice. And just how long were you thinking you were ‘owed’ with them?”
“What do you think is fair?” she asked over her shoulder to her minions, who shouted all sorts of nonsense numbers from “five thousand” to “three-eighths.” She turned to Kit again. “Seven years.”
“No. The fuck? All right, what if…” His tongue felt dry; he swallowed to moisten it. “What if I offered my life? Myself. What if you could have me instead? Then would you let them go?”
“Why would we want you? We’ve already chosen such a delicious one, and she hooked us another. Two lovely, juicy, young ones.”
“But couldn’t I exchange myself for them?”
The goblins catcalled him; he heard at least one, “I’ll take him!”, but most of the remarks were along the lines of “Ewww” and “Never.” Like Kit was the repulsive one in this assembly.
“Oh, Sylvain.” Redring sounded pitying. “You are worth far more as our liaison than you’d ever be as our tribemate.”
His body sagged in defeat. “And you’d just latch onto a new liaison if you did take me. Grady or some other poor relative of mine.”
“But of course. That is the deal.”
“What about taking my life? Just killing me. Is that worth anything, any magic, anything that would erase all these deals?”
She snorted. “No. No use.”
“Are you kidding me?” He spread his arms. “I’m offering complete self-sacrifice here. That ought to be worth loads of magic.”
“Not to us. We prefer the deals the way they are. But this idea of extra gold, I am liking that.”
“Forget it.” He turned away.
“Are you sure?” She was cackling now too. He was apparently pretty damn hilarious. “But it is such fun to make new deals.”
“No new deal. Forget I stopped by.”
There was no way he’d come out the winner in any arrangement with them. A banker’s box full of written records back in his cabin had already told him as much. He was a slave, a procurer of gold; even his life or death counted for nothing. Evidently all he could do was wander around Earth trailing destruction after him.
The clouds blew away and a clear freeze crystallized western Washington. The sky became bright again, a blue Grady hadn’t seen since autumn, arching over a frigid, dry land. As he walked through the woods with Skye, the ground resisted, hard and brittle under their boots, without the usual sliding give of mud and moss. The fallen leaves had been transformed from a carpet of mundane brown into a mosaic of individual shapes, every leaf standing out individually, veins and serrated edges highlighted in frost. The twenty-degree air iced his lungs with every inhalation, and Skye’s hands were cold in her fingerless gloves. He wrapped his hand around one and pulled it into his coat pocket.
They investigated a row of icicles hanging off a branch like clear jagged teeth. Below the icicles, a puddle in the path had frozen over. Skye crunched her boot heel against it to crack it. She picked up a shard, looked at the sun through its milky clarity, then shivered, let it drop to shatter on the ground, and stuffed her hand back into Grady’s pocket.
With his free hand, Grady grasped the needles of a Douglas fir, drawing them through his fingers. They were still green and supple. “Why don’t these freeze?” he murmured aloud.
He looked at Skye, and she shrugged. Her gaze traveled up the trunks to the evergreen canopy, and his followed.
She shrank closer to him. He slipped both arms around her, although through their coats and scarves and other layers, the amount of heat from the embrace was minimal. He knew they were both thinking the same thing: how somber, how dismal, to live outside on a day like this.
Or, perhaps, how glorious, for probably they’d become as impervious as the evergreens, as tough and eternal as the stones.
It merely came at the cost of your life as a human.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
IT BECAME A PATTERN OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS: LIVY FINISHED WORK EARLY, BEFORE DARK, AND WENT home. Then she and Skye went to the Sylvain cabin on the island, where they collectively put together dinner (they didn’t make Grady do it all anymore) and researched goblin magic. They read the journals and notes from previous liaisons, and Kit and Livy searched the internet for new ideas. Skye and Grady put on hopeless expressions when Livy suggested they run searches too. Apparently the spell wouldn’t even let them type queries related to goblin curses. Of course not. Why would it?
Not that it would have helped. What Livy found was that the internet supplied a million theories, anecdotes, and legends, but nothing that seemed to change the actual existing spells.
She insisted Grady and Skye turn their clothes inside out. No luck. She found beach stones with holes in them, and made them wear the stones on strings around their necks, along with packets of sea salt. Didn’t change a thing. She lit a black candle and wrote down the details of the spell on a slip of paper, and burned the slip in the candle flame. Spell remained unbroken.
Kit watched with his chin in his hand. “My ancestors have tried all that, you know. I’ve tried all that. We’re dealing with a stronger kind of magic here.”
“Damn it.” Livy chucked the pack of matches across his kitchen island. “Who do we know that has magic? Other than the locals? Aren’t there human witches or sorcerers or…”
“Tried them too.” Kit didn’t move from his perch on one of the madrone stools. “People have sage-smoked the place, hung bundles of sticks over the doors, incanted all kinds of interesting words while ladling spring water over my head. Didn’t make a difference.”
“Spring water,” Grady said dubiously, from where he lolled on the sofa-bed with Skye.
“Yup.”
“Uh-huh.” Kit scratched at a drop of black wax on the countertop. “Closest I got to success was one dude who claimed he could see faeries. Like, everywhere he went, not just here. I found him on the internet and convinced him to come meet me. He looked at me, looked around the woods, and said, ‘Oh yeah, they’ve got hold of you, all right.’ Then when he learned it was goblins in particular, he got terrified, and scrambled back into his car, telling me he wished me all the best, but goblin curses were the kind of thing no sane person ever got involved with. Then he was out of here at top speed.”
“Great,” Livy said. “So we’re back to what the locals told me. They’re our only shot. I’m our only shot, with their help.”
“The only shot we know about.”
“Which is insane.”
“Yup.” Kit caught her glare, and added, “I believe in you.”
“Good, because I don’t.” Livy scooped up the ashes from the burned slip of paper and dumped them into the trash. When she glanced across the room again, she got an eyeful of Grady and Skye tangling tongues, still sitting upright on the sofa-bed but looking likely to slide into a prone position any second now.
Kit had glanced at them as well, and when he met her gaze, his mouth twitched up into a dry smile.
She cleared her throat. “Hey, um, it’s still light,” she said to him. “Want to go outside for some fresh air?”
“Sure.” He hopped off the stool. “Nice day to hit the beach.”
It was nowhere near a nice day to hit the beach. Bundled in scarves, hats, and coats, they picked their way down the pebbles to the ebbing water. The temperature hadn’t risen above freezing all day, and a frigid wind blew from the north.
“Did they not have enough sex this morning when I left them alone together?” Livy said.
Kit chuckled. “I am not going to ask. You can if you want.”
“Should we even let that happen? If the spell is making them do this, or at least altering their minds so they’d do things they wouldn’t normally…well, shouldn’t we discourage it?”