A History of Wild Places(75)

Maggie stitched me up, but a desperation is building inside me. I have to get out of these woods. I need to hide my notebook and these pages—evidence that I was here. Maybe Ben will come looking for me, or the St. Jameses. But I doubt it. They likely think I’ve abandoned the case. I haven’t been reliable enough for anyone to worry if I don’t return.

And there’s something else. Things are more complicated with Maggie now. I can’t just leave her behind… I care about her in a way I never should have allowed myself to.

We will leave together, or not at all.



Theo walks to the window and peers out at the evening light.

“Levi knew they were here?” I ask, breathless.

Theo nods. “He knows a lot more than he’s saying.”

A headache forms quick and blunt behind my eyes, and I walk to my husband at the window, staring out at the meadow, each of us looking for answers in the tall summer grass made pale and sorrowful by the drowsy moonlight.

“Was he talking about the window in the sunroom?” I ask. “It was broken by a tree branch during that storm two winters ago, not by a fight.”

Theo’s face has gone cold, muted, like he’s not sure of anything anymore. “We thought it was a storm when we found the broken window the next morning, but maybe we were wrong.”

“And we just slept through it? Two men fighting, breaking a window?”

“Maybe we didn’t hear it over the storm.”

I shake my head, but keep my eyes out at the distance, beyond the meadow grass, to the line of border trees. “It doesn’t make sense. If two outsiders came to Pastoral, why would Levi try to hide it? Why keep it a secret? Even if they were sick, he would perform the ritual like he did with Ash and Turk.” It feels as if we’re tiptoeing toward the truth, but not moving fast enough, and it’s quickly slipping away.

“I don’t know,” Theo answers. “But Levi’s been lying about all of it.”

“We need to confront him—ask him about Travis, about the broken window, ask if he was here in our house that night.”

Theo scrapes a hand across the nape of his neck. “No,” he says flatly. “Levi tried to destroy the necklace and the page; he doesn’t want us to know Maggie and Travis were here. He’s trying to hide whatever happened to them.” For the briefest moment, my husband looks scared, frightened in a way I’ve never seen in him before. “Maybe none of this is what we think it is.”

“Then what is it?” I ask, knowing my husband doesn’t have the answer. But wanting him to tell me something all the same, anything that will slow the desperate rattle of my heart.

Perhaps just like Eloise and the fox, we have feared the wrong thing—when we should have feared what’s right here, within our own borders, within our own walls. The beast is already inside the castle, tearing people apart, yet we stare into the woods waiting for it to appear.

Something bad happened here.

Something that screams inside me, begging me to see.





FOXES AND MUSEUMS


Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series Power felt good to Eloise.

It surged through her veins like electricity down a tree trunk during a lightning storm. She took to it quickly, as if she was meant for darkness, for the vile thoughts that now rattled through her.

The fox who she had followed into the woods now feared her—it knew what she was. What she had become. Yet, it had no choice but to obey her words, to trail her through the trees, to hunt for rabbits when she was hungry, to sleep beside her and keep her warm when she was cold and tired. For Eloise would never return to her strawberry-pink room in her house at the edge of the forest.

Eloise would become a missing child, believed to have vanished straight from her bed while she slept one cool, autumn night—taken or wandered off, her parents would never know for sure. Flyers posted to streetlamps and search dogs sent into the forest would never recover the missing girl.

Eloise belonged to the woods now.

She was a shadow. She was the cruel, howling thing that could be heard during a full moon. She was the monster who crept into other children’s dreams.

But this is how monsters are made: from innocent things.





BEE


The scent of rot is everywhere. In my nostrils, behind my ears.

I wake, knees to chin, my face pressed into the cold dirt, my dress torn at the hemline—threads snagged on a rock a few feet away. But I don’t know how I got here.

I was in Levi’s bed, his hands were in my hair, fingers tracing long, lazy lines along my sun-freckled flesh. But now I’m lying against the hard ground… a knife in my left hand.

The smooth wood handle is held tightly beneath my gripped fingers, and when I open my palm, the muscles of my hand ache, cramping down the center to my thumb. I let the knife fall to the dirt and I push myself up, ears ringing, the sounds around me swimming in and out of focus.

I can hear the creek some distance away, and the cold wind blowing through the trees at my back.

And I know: I’m beyond the boundary.

I don’t remember leaving Levi’s house, slinking down the hall away from his bedroom before his wife returned. I don’t remember wandering into the trees, carrying a knife. Why do I have a knife?

My mind feels frayed, little webs of pain peeling away from my bones, memories I can’t seem to pluck from the dark. I push myself up, sitting with legs tucked beneath me, and brush away the dead leaves sticking to my skin. I must have stumbled through the woods, the hem of my skirt catching on thorns and jagged rocks until I collapsed in the dirt and fell into a strange sort of sleep.