Release(21)

“With all that snow.” Frome got heavy snowfall maybe once every six years and never as early as Halloween, but when they’d been in seventh grade – right at the outer barrier of trick or treating age – the snow had started and not stopped until there was a foot of it. Adam and Angela, dressed as Sookie Stackhouse and Bill Compton, not respectively, had to bury their costumes under a couple tons of heavy jackets, coats and scarves. “We got so much candy,” he said.

“Because no little kids were out in the snow.”

“And when we got back to your farm, my parents couldn’t even get the car out to pick me up so I had to stay over.”

Angela laughed, remembering the next bit. “And my mother–”

“Your mother–”

“Who makes two twelve-year-olds share a foot bath?”

“And all the eucalyptus she put in it.”

“I still can’t smell cough drops without thinking of the foot bath.”

“I love your mom. That was when she told us about that racist Dutch Christmas thing.”

“Zwarte Piet! Oh, my God! Even my hippie mother didn’t think that was racist until she moved here.”

“Yeah, I love your mom,” he said again, which they both understood, maybe not even consciously, was another way of saying he loved Angela.

Speaking of which–

“There’s something up, isn’t there?” Adam asked. “Something you wanted to talk about?”

“Nothing like your day.”

“That doesn’t matter. Not even a little.”

“In the face of Wade? I think you win.” She stood and stretched, sniffing and then wincing at the front of her uniform. “I smell like onions.”

“You always smell like onions after here. And it’s not about winning. Quit changing the subject. What are you trying to avoid telling me?”

She gave him a side-eye, but thoughtfully. He could see her squinch her nose the way she never believed she did when she’d reached a decision.

“You know my aunt Johanna?”

“The one in Rotterdam? The professor?”

Angela nodded. “She wants me to go over there and be in that programme she set up at her university.”

Adam creased his forehead. “Instead of college?”

“Instead of senior year.”

Adam just stared while Angela crossed her arms and waited for it to sink in. This day showed no sign of stopping.





The faun does not see the incantation in time. He had not known she could do it in this form. Perhaps she did not know either, but away from the wreckage of the cabin – which he would not have time to repair, leaving a mystery this world would ponder and solve wrongly, as it always did – she begins patting a slow circle in the grass with her hand, the other held up towards the early afternoon sun.

Though worried, he has kept his distance, only intervening when the cabin nearly collapsed from the fire he also did not know she would be able to start. But he cannot approach too closely. He cannot enter her space or come within the reach of her arm.

She is the Queen. She must stand alone.

She turns faster now, and he can hear her saying something, though he cannot catch the words.

“My lady?” he asks, though he knows she won’t hear him.

This form is cumbersome to him, all forms of the earth are. It is an ancient one, the best he could find in the short time he had. It is too big for this world, too alien, too earthy.

But it is powerful.

She spins faster now, the knee-deep grass around her starting to bend as if under a whirlpool.

Though is she still the Queen? The soul that clings so blindly to her is surprisingly strong, and he knows she will be lost come sundown if he cannot find a way to–

And then he sees it.

And he is running.

Shouting, fruitlessly, “My lady, no!”

But the whirlpool of air rises from the earth, surrounding her in a funnel of dust and grass and the timothy hay that grows wild in these fields–

He is too late. The funnel collapses as he arrives, and she is gone.

She is gone.

She will not have gone far, but in this wilderness, both of trees and houses, even near by is far enough. How will he find her? How will he find her in time?

There is nothing for it, no time to even berate himself for his stupidity. The Queen must be found and, somehow, saved before the sun sets or she will die.

And if she dies, then so does the faun, for she is the boundary, the wall between these worlds.

If she dies, so do they all.

He begins to run towards the forest of houses. He hopes all he will have to do is listen for the screams.





Angela Darlington. The girl born in Seoul with an adoptive mother from the Netherlands and a father with a completely English name. Who all lived on a farm in Frome, Washington, an actual farm, with actual animals, actual sheep that got sold to slaughter – a topic Angela kept quiet about as it wouldn’t have gone down well with the vegetarians at school. They were, in short, about as American as you could be.

But not, of course, the kind of Americans certain other kinds of Americans thought were American.

“She’s Dutch, you say?” Big Brian Thorn would ask occasionally about Angela’s mother, even though he couldn’t possibly have forgotten in the previous decade. “They’re a funny people, the Dutch.” He’d give the newspaper he was reading a disapproving shake. “Liberal about everything. Marijuana. Prostitution.”