TALE 14

ALCOTTS LAST DANCE

            On Saturday, just after a large breakfast at Mandy’s, Ethan Bartlett, Darcy Hamilton, Matt Merrick and Becky Masterson walked into the Engelstad.

            They entered a little east of the Orange River along an old trail as gray morning light shone through the branches and trunks. It was cloudy above, the world was shady and almost, but not quite, raining with the sky already clearing up westward revealing a bright blue hole within.

            Ethan was equipped with a new black vest with hard, protective plates over a black short-sleeved raglan shirt with orange sleeves, black cargo pants and his black jacket. Although he had been able to pull it off in Beechwood, he had discovered armor that covered all of his limbs, and most especially his arms, would cause soreness that could create serious trouble in casting spells, and he was seriously beginning to lament his inability to find any armor that could work better than a simple flak jacket.

            His new vest was also tactical with various pockets and holsters for both of his handguns and ammunition. He kept his boomerang in a custom holster on his right side with his longsword and dagger in their usual places. He carried his Mossberg 500 with a folding stock and had five extra shells and he slung it over his shoulder using a sling that contained fifteen additional shells. As always, he also carried his enchanted satchel over his shoulder and left it resting on his left side but that time he also had a backpack.

            Mickey, tired of flying for the moment, was resting on his shoulder and looking casually around the woods from his spot there.

            Darcy Hamilton was on Ethan’s left wearing a form-fitted vest under her white jacket, tall black boots and her eighteenth-century officer’s infantry blade on her left side. The vest much like Ethan’s with pockets and protective plates and a holster containing her revolver, form fit to her female form, and she had Ethan’s Kel Tec SU-16 over her shoulder with four additional magazines of thirty rounds on her belt as well as a white backpack. Her hair was tied behind her head in a ponytail and dyed with blond highlights she put in at some point over the last week.

            Becky Masterson was on Ethan’s right, dressed much like Ethan with the typical arms-free magician look but her black vest had dark red plates that were hard leather instead of metal. They matched her jacket, backpack and hair, which she kept in a ponytail behind her back with a pair of red sunglasses over her eyes. She had a dagger and Glock 17 at her side and a couple of magazines of ammunition on her belt.

            She didn’t know how to use any of those very well, having only recently started to train in anything combat-related, but when Ethan mentioned it, she stated she would most likely rely on her psychic powers, which she claimed to have far more training with.

            Ethan wasn’t so sure about that. He was never sure of anything when it came to psychics.

            At that very moment, Becky held out her hands and five rocks spun around within her palms in a stunningly perfect circle. It didn’t look particularly amazing to Ethan. It looked more like one of the tricks carnival psychics always did.

            It was anyone’s guess how far her powers really went. In Ethan’s experience, only very weak psychics or outright frauds bragged about their abilities. True psychics with truly great powers always tended to downplay their abilities and only very rarely showed them to non-psychics. If they showed them anything, it was something trivial like what she was doing.

            He didn’t know why exactly but if he had to guess, it was something to do with them being confused with “witches” with their reading minds, predicting futures and the like which often ended in being burning alive.

            The new member in their group, at least to Ethan, was Matthew Merrick, who was walking on Darcy’s left. He was a tall, muscular, very attractive black man their age with his afro hair cut short in military style, shorter on the sides on the back, with a model-level beautiful face. He was the same body type as Ethan, but much stronger and taller than Ethan by a couple of inches at least.

            He was also much better armored with armor that covered his arms, chest and legs with plates and he even had a helmet, then hanging from his backpack. His entire armored uniform was a tactical system of pockets and accessories that reached out from the vest to his legs and arms with a similar pocket style to Ethan’s containing God only knew what. Aside from the backpack, he looked very much like a soldier in black.

            He also had the addition of blades, a primary sword for his right hand, a short blade and an axe for his left hand, various throwing knives and smaller axes. He also had a Desert Eagle and a Remington 700 with a scope with a 10-round box magazine holstered on his back. A lot of his weapons and clothes were custom work, all black, the blades and axes enchanted by a magician Ethan didn’t know, covered in dark gray runes with effectively the same kind of enchantment Ethan used.
It must have weighed a lot but it didn’t seem to slow him down remotely.

            This one is a serious killer, Ethan thought the instant he saw him. A true monster hunter, Darcy claimed, and he believed her. Apparently, Matt and Darcy were childhood friends.

            The adventure began when Becky had come to Ethan on Thursday while he was in one of the four restaurant chains that got in his deal with the O’Briens. She claimed she found him through her psychic powers but she probably just asked around.

            Ethan owed The Happy Chicken, Burger Troll, Taco King and a mini golf course called Gilbert Gopher’s Golf Galaxy. The first three made decent money and were solid restaurants while the last, near the Bay City Mall, had been closed down since the 1990s. He had heard that it was haunted and it had something to do with the Chuck E Cheese-esque animatronics in the restaurant-arcade hybrid but he had yet to explore it at night.

            He was having some fried chicken tenders and fries and thinking that he might use the name El Pollo Feliz for The Happy Chicken, and possibly Taco Rey for Taco King if he branched out into California when Becky came up to him.

            “Hey Ethan,” she cooed. “Want to go on an adventure Saturday morning?”

            “Oh, this is an adventure,” he had replied half-jokingly. “With this chicken franchise, I can soon begin sending meth almost anywhere in America.”

            Becky burst out laughing. “No, a real adventure. I want to head out into the Engelstad.”

            “That is an adventure but it’s a little more George R.R. Martin than Tolkien,” he told her seriously.

            She frowned at him. “I’m not a child, Ethan. I’m actually a pretty dangerous psychic.”

            “Power alone isn’t enough to save you out there,” he replied in that same serious way. “That forest is not a joke.”

            “Uh-huh,” she replied and swished down into the seat across from him. “I’ve learned where blue roses are.”

            “You’re kidding,” he said excitedly. Blue roses weren’t natural, created by some kind of magic from pagan times supposedly, and were extremely valuable both as aesthetic plants for the rich but also as extremely useful spell ingredients for illusion magic. One had to be very careful when they planted them because if the magic in them wasn’t nurtured properly, the magic would vanish and the rose would grow out a natural, boring white, which was why it was so rare to see them.

            Despite the fact that Ethan had no recipe for anything that used that ingredient, he was eager for it and she could tell. It could be years before he needed it for anything, but even so, it was still something Ethan wanted for his future ingredient greenhouse.

            “It’s a day’s walk to the north in the Engelstad so bring a sleeping bag and a couple days’ worth of food since we’ll have to sleep there. You and me. Alone.”

            “Alright, I’m in,” he told her. He had nothing planned for the weekend anyway. When he asked, Jen Everson had no problems taking Andy and Paul the dog for a weekend and as he went to pick Becky up, he found “You and me” turned out to be Ethan, Becky, Darcy and Matt.

            Ethan didn’t mind. The forest was terrifying and after his first few jaunts within, he knew only a moron would argue against any extra help coming along.

            Within an hour of entering, they came to an old, abandoned camp alongside the Orange River. There were some old, wrecked white tents with red crosses on the front, all fallen over or swept mostly away and the ground was covered in garbage of the bag and bottle variety after a metal trashcan had blown over. Not far away to the north amidst the trees, there was an old outhouse with another red cross on it.

            “Savior’s Fold,” Darcy told them as they walked through the camp.

            All Ethan had encountered from them were white flyers with red crosses on the front proclaiming their group’s name and to “Join the Savior,” both written in red. He had heard rumors that they were half-crazy but he hadn’t met any to know if the rumors were exaggeration or not.

            “I think this around where my cousin died,” Ethan had said and they looked at him. “Peter was killed somewhere along that river and washed up around Nathaniel Bridge, I think.”

            “That sounds about right,” Darcy told him.

            “You’re such a good person that I sometimes forget you’re a Bartlett,” said Becky.

            “So do most Bartletts,” Ethan replied.

            Becky smiled at him and as she looked back at the camp, walking backward for a moment, she spun back around. “There’s something wrong with these people,” said Becky. “I’ve always thought so.”

            “They’re crazed fanatics,” said Matt coldly. “Some still think high melanin in the skin is a sign of Cain as in Cain’s mark of sin for murdering Abel.”

            “Let’s just get going,” Darcy told them.

            They saw no other sign of them after passing and by noon, after having eaten a quick meal of whatever each brought for lunch, Mickey choosing to catch something and eat it instead of what Ethan brought him, they reached another trail. It was a thick old trail, the kind horses and wagons went on, and it went straight north.

            “God, I love the woods!” Becky told them as she went skipping along, her arms swinging around and looking up at the canopy of branches above them. “I love trees and nature and everything!”

            “Give it time,” Darcy told her as she looked around. “There is something horrible about these woods. You can’t see it on the surface but it’s here.”

            “You know why you don’t know that, right?” Ethan told her. “It’s because you are a terrible psychic.”

            “That’s not how my powers work,” Becky replied irritably. “Not all psychics have the same abilities. My powers are mostly telekinetic. You know, moving things with my mind.”

            “I’ve always thought there was something unpleasant about this forest,” Darcy went on. “Even as Muire Lindsay, who spent her life in the woods, often alone at night, I was always certain there was something terrible out here.”

            Matt laughed half-cynically. “Is this more of that reincarnation bullshit you keep talking about?”

            “Yeah,” said Darcy. “It’s complicated.”

            “So you say,” Matt told her. They were close, Ethan noticed. Matt came off as guarded and or private against everyone but Darcy.

            “Don’t believe us, eh?” said Ethan.

            “Not even a little,” Matt replied.

            He looked at Ethan with an expression reflected on Ethan’s own face. It was as though they recognized each other but, for the life himself, Ethan could not pin down where he had seen Matt before. He was a fairly distinct-looking man and it seemed impossible that Ethan would have forgotten him had they ever met before, which they hadn’t. Matt Merrick had never been to California and was out of Bartlett Bay when Ethan arrived so there was no chance of having met him before.

            Yet, that morning on the first occasion Ethan ever saw him, he got an unshakable sense of “remembering” and it was really starting to annoy him.

            “There’s something funny about that blue jay,” said Mickey softly in his Ethan’s ear. “She’s been following us ever since we got in here.”

            Ethan followed his glance to a blue jay up in the tree branches looking down at them as they passed. It was looking at them but it didn’t seem particularly suspicious. “It’s a blue jay,” Ethan told him with a shrug.

            “It’s the same blue jay!” grumbled Mickey. “I’ve seen it like six times.”

            “You know, I’ve been trying to convince him of the reincarnation thing my whole life,” Darcy told Ethan. When Matt looked at her, she smiled and added, “Stubborn as a mule.”

            “Exactly what my grandmother tells me,” Matt replied.

            “It’s better if you don’t believe us,” Ethan told him. “It’s not as much fun as you might think.” He moved his hands out in front of him to begin casting.

            “What are you doing?” asked Matt.

            “Working on one of my new spells. I finally got myself a small book from the Irish Academy of Magic but my membership is still pending because they’re assholes and I have English blood in me.”

            The small, basic book he acquired only contained five spells. They were called ‘Firefluid,’ ‘Fix Object,’ ‘Absorbing Sphere,’ ‘See Through Walls,’ and ‘Create Seed.’ He only had time to actively practice one during the last three days so he had chosen Firefluid.

            Firefluid created a kind of magical napalm as a weapon, which he thought could be particularly useful. Fix Object fixed something magically, even conjuring small parts if needed, but since he wasn’t very good at it, he couldn’t fix much. See Through Walls created a magical hole that anyone on the caster’s side could see through, the distance through whatever material measured by the talent and skill of the caster. Absorbing Sphere created a ball that could absorb hostile magic thrown at the caster, which could be useful in concert with his Magical Shield spell. Create Seed simply created a seed out of any plant, which would be very useful for growing ingredients from plants whose seeds were harder to get than the plant itself. Although it didn’t seem so at a glance, that spell was, in fact, the most valuable of all that he had.

            With that spell, he would be able to plant as many blue roses as he could ever possibly need.

            “I also finished a couple of enchantments I’ve been working on for a while,” said Ethan. “This one is a scrying lens.” He reached into his satchel and pulled out what looked like a pair of old-timey, perfectly circular spectacles.

            “Does Harry Potter know you stole those?” asked Darcy in a passably British accent.

            “Without Hermione to save him, Harry Potter is no match for me,” Ethan replied in a much better accent and then added in his normal voice, “Want to see?”

            “Ooh, yes, definitely!” said Becky and she took them, pulled them on her head, and gasped. “Wow! It’s like binoculars but I can see all around even in my peripherals.”

            “Yeah, it’s pretty wild,” Ethan told her. “The bird just fucking hates it, though. With this, he feels like I no longer need him, which is, you know, obviously, true.” Mickey squeezed his shoulder tightly with his feet. “No can do, little buddy,” Ethan told him. “Doesn’t work with ar-don’t peck me, you little fucker!”

            Matt, Becky and Darcy both burst out laughing.

            “I didn’t peck you hard,” said Mickey.

            “Doesn’t particularly matter since your beak is a razor point on the end,” Ethan said, feeling his face.

            “Yeah, well, you deserved it.”

            “Kinda, yeah,” he said with a shrug. He reached down, pulled out a rope, and said, “This is my other one. It’s a magic rope.” What he had in his hand was a bundle of nylon black and orange rope. He easily unraveled it, threw it to the tree branch, and it wrapped around tightly in an instant.

            “Neat,” said Darcy.

            “Oh yeah, it’s great.” He cast the minor spell to unravel it magically, then another spell to roll it back up, and then put it back into the satchel. “Want to see my new fire spell everyone?”
“Sure,” said Darcy.

            Ethan moved his hands back out and cast Firefluid. It created a mostly transparent bubble-like ball floating between the palms of his hands, feeling to Ethan like a baseball. Within the swirling ball, one could see a bright, glowing orange liquid moving around like a lava lamp. Should he have thrown it somewhere, the bubble-like sphere would shatter on impact, and the napalm would go everywhere and burn anything that it touched. He described it proudly in detail as he uncast and then recast the spell several times.

            “How’s the farm going?” asked Darcy.

            “Not too shabby,” Ethan told her. “I’ve hired some guys and we’ve got all sorts of things growing in this year. I’m experimenting with some May crops but mostly I’m working with Coughlan. We are going to be doing canned vegetables and fruits as well. “I’ve got a huge greenhouse that I’m using for tomatoes and a bunch of places I’ve set up for fruit later in the season, places to rotate various vegetables and fruits. My farm is huge and I’m going to use every inch but at this moment, I’m mostly focused on syrup trees. There’s almost a whole forest of them on the old Gurney section which I’m using to sell a new brand of syrup.”

            “You have a syrup brand?” asked Becky.

            “No, but there’s been a guy who does who’s been tapping those trees for years. I’m working with him.”

            “Uncle Will,” said Matt with a smile.

            “Yeah. Uncle Will’s Syrup. It’s going to be great.” Ethan had found William Parsons tapping into a tree a couple of months back and the old man thought he was going to be arrested because he had been doing that to survive for like two decades. Ethan instantly discovered there was a more profitable path since he had no idea what to do with those trees anyway.

            Ethan asked around about him over the next week and he learned people genuinely loved the syrup Parsons made, so he went into business with him, hired some men Parsons knew, several of them his sons, and they got some new equipment and set them to work making syrup for mass production.

            “You know Uncle Will?” asked Ethan.

            “Everyone knows Uncle Will,” Matt replied.

            “That was just what he said,” Ethan said. “I’m also working with a guy opening a video game store.”

            “I heard. Damien Simms, right?”

            “Game Street, it’s called. I hooked him up in a spot on Fisher Street in a pretty sweet area. It’s going to be great. I feel like a lord back in England again.”

            “So you actually believe in any of this reincarnation stuff, Bartlett?” asked Matt.

            “Seeing is believing,” Ethan replied as he recast the spell without cooking. “I was a courtier named Walter Kent, Viscount Emingforde and then later Duke of Edmonton during the reign of Henry VIII and in another life I was Brevet General Thomas Bartlett during the American Civil War.”

            “You too,” he replied with a laugh. “And the American Civil War as well?”

            “Yeah. It’s a fucking nightmare and I’m not through it yet.”

            “I had an ancestor who fought there in a black regiment. John Merrick. Founder of my family. Served in the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Colored Regiment officially and was working with the army earlier unofficially, sometimes as a guerilla fighter although I don’t think that was sanctioned. Is this where you tell me you know me through him?” He sounded somewhere between teasing and mocking but it was clear he was just as annoyed by that recognition as Ethan was.

            “I don’t know. I haven’t met any black soldiers yet. The guy who runs that bar down on Fisher Street had an ancestor who was in the twenty-ninth as well.”

            “Blacks did serve in the war,” Matt told him sternly.

            “I know,” Ethan replied. “Just not in sixty-two. I think the beginnings were there and I remember hearing something about it behind the scenes and various black volunteers appeared here and there, but it was still a ‘white man’s’ war at that point. There were no black regiments in the Battle of Shiloh or Bull Run.”

            Ethan suddenly remembered something, uncast Firefluid and lowered his arms.

            “Hey Matt,” he said and Matt looked at him. “I heard that some of the Merricks were out of town on a hunting expedition in Africa. That true?”

            “Oh yeah,” he replied. “Mean fucking landscape of monsters but nowhere near as bad as our trip through Australia.”

            “Fuck me, Australia!” Ethan laughed. “Everything there is trying to kill you before you include monsters. Did you happen to see a bunyip when you were there?” He spoke in the same kind of tone in between teasing and mocking that Matt did.

            “No but we hunted for one.”

            Ethan looked at him as if he had grown an extra head. “You’re fucking with me.”

            “No.”

            “If you aren’t, you’re fucking insane,” Ethan said. “You don’t hunt bunyips. Bunyips hunt you.”

            “If they are as bad as they say, sure. We went after one because we wanted a challenge.”

            “Well, that sure would do it, wouldn’t it,” Ethan replied. It seemed like it was bluster but if Matt was telling the truth then it was pretty clear why the Merricks had a reputation for being insane.

            Darcy laughed aloud and, as though she reading his mind, she said, “You don’t know the Merricks, Bartlett. He’s totally serious.”
Becky said nothing, fascinated by the whole conversation and smiling to herself.

            There was a fallen tree in the center of the old trail and they stepped carefully over it. It wasn’t too large, the side with the branches lying off the trail to the left, and its placement wasn’t particularly suspicious to them, but Matt did a visual sweep as he approached as though he expected there might be an ambush there.

            If there had been, he was ready for it.

            “And I was only fourteen at the time we went into Australia,” Matt added.

            Darcy laughed at Ethan’s expression. “I’m totally being played,” Ethan said.

            “No but you’re right to think it was stupid,” Matt told him. “The outback guys were smarter, those Crocodile Dundee types. They told us we were going to screw up and get ourselves killed and they were half-right.

            “That clever motherfucker knew when someone was trying to kill it and it was always one step ahead of us and impossible to pinpoint in that splitting river we were following. It snuck into our camp half a dozen times at least, stole stuff and did things. We never caught sight of it once, even though we had watches everywhere. Eventually, it somehow got to our guide alone, an Aboriginal man who is pretty goddamn hardcore himself. He was helping us because it had killed his brother and he wanted revenge. It supposedly hypnotized him, drew him into the river and ate him without us knowing. We found what was left of his corpse in the morning face down in the water with no sign of the bunyip.

            “After that, we couldn’t find anyone crazy enough to guide us and we had to abandon the hunt.”

            “What did it look like?”

            “We never saw it. I think it might have been some kind of alligator-type thing but who knows.”

            “Better than it could have turned out,” Ethan concluded. “How was Africa?”

            “Mostly not much out of the typical scenario of creatures but we did run into a village of possessed locals at one point. We had to beat them half to death with clubs until a shaman could pull but whatever it was out of them.” He tilted his head around to look into the shade of a tree they were walking by, looking on instinct to see if something was hiding in the branches, and then looked back. “We had guns if we needed them but we were testing ourselves with bows and arrows.”

            “A real hunter, then,” Ethan replied. In Africa, that type of bravado seemed suicidal to Ethan, but then he again, he never really bought into that “prove oneself as a warrior” mentality. He might have if he ever hunted a normal animal but with monsters, one needed all the edge they could get.

            “There’s no glory in sniping a wolf from a helicopter,” Matt told him. “You ever try arrows?”

            “I can fire a bow and arrow well enough but the magician version of that shtick is to strictly use magic. That’s how we do it when we go hardcore and we need all the practice we can get anyway. A lion can dodge a fireball or lightning bolt as easily as an arrow so there are some serious balls involved in a magic-only fight.”

            “Merricks don’t use magic,” Matt replied. “Probably should have had someone with us who did, though. The only other interesting thing was at the end of our African tour where we ran into an inkanyamba, so it was a good thing we had those guns with us.”

            “Bullshit!” Ethan told him instantly. “Now I know you’re fucking with me! You’d all be dead if you ran into that!”

            “It was something of kin-race, actually. Smaller than the real one but big enough to eat our guide whole.”

            “What is an inkanyamba?” asked Becky.

            “It’s like a giant snake,” Ethan told her. “African dragon, maybe, and it is mean as hell. Supposedly, there is one super inkanyamba that no one can kill but smaller ones have been spotted and hunted.”

            “We got the bastard,” Matt told him, “And my father took the head as a trophy but, by then, we had lost our guide, again, and were pretty beaten down so we ended up heading home early. The fucker made it rain too and that made the fight especially hard.”
“They can make it rain?” asked Darcy dubiously.

            “Oh yeah, they’re way up there on the supernatural scale,” Matt told her.

            “Did you know Teddy Roosevelt nailed one of those?” asked Ethan.

            “Oh we know that alright and my father is absolutely convinced it was smaller than the one we got. He’s being super cocky about it too and one day, he’ll go to that museum, Sagamore Hill, where all of Roosevelt’s monster heads are and compare it.” Matt let out a tired sigh. “God, I needed this. I need something before I go soft.”

            “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen out here,” Ethan replied. “But you know that, though.”

            “Kinda, yeah.” Matt shrugged. “My mother would have a heart attack twice if she knew I was in here and even my father is terrified of this place, and he was the one always leading our expeditions.”

            “That’s a surprise,” said Becky.

            “No, it’s not,” said Darcy.

            “And there’s that damn blue jay again!” cried Mickey. “I’m telling you, there’s something weird about that stupid blue jay!”

            “What could possibly scare him about this place that an inkanyamba and bunyip doesn’t?” asked Ethan.

            “Fine, ignore me, I don’t care!” Mickey said and flew off his shoulder toward the blue jay. It flew off the instant he got near and he landed on the branch it was on and groaned irritably.

            “He thinks there’s a demon at the center of these woods,” Matt told him. “He’s never told me the whole story but I heard he and his friends went in here once as boys and ‘saw something.’ To hear him talk, you’d think these woods were the gateway to hell.”

            “Hell is not something found in the forests of the world,” Ethan said softly. He wasn’t sure why but he found himself thinking about his father, envisioning his sneering expression, and his mother, laughing in that weird, high-pitched way of hers. “Hell is a place where those who love you are also those who destroy you.”

            “You know, you never talk about your family,” Becky said strangely, her eyes locked on his with an odd expression that he could not quite identify. “I mean the ones that you come from in this life.”

            Ethan shrugged and said, “Someday, I will.”

            “So, back on the subject of reincarnation, you actually believe you were two different guys,” said Matt.

            “Oh, he believes, all right,” called down Mickey as they walked by him. “He won’t shut up about those stupid hogs.”

            “Hogs?” asked Becky.

            “What this about pigs?” asked Darcy.

            “It was during the battle of Shiloh,” Ethan said uncomfortably. “At a break in the battle during the night, the hogs that were around in the farms got loose and were eating the dead. I can’t get that sound out of my head.”

            “I remember Bunker Hill although technically it was Breed’s Hill,” said Darcy. “June seventeenth, seventeen-seventy-five. Lost four hundred men but took out a thousand.” She tried to say it casually but failed and emotion came out. “I had a very good friend there named Lester Winthrop. He was a joker, like you, Ethan.”

            “What happened to him?” asked Ethan.

            “He was killed. When they got over our defenses and Prescott, that is our commander Colonel William Prescott, ordered our retreat, he was bayoneted in the stomach by a redcoat on the way out. I stabbed and killed the man who did it and I helped him get away but he died later from an infection.” Her eyes were distant and sad. “I told him that I was a girl just before he died. That I wanted to marry him and I loved him.”

            “What did he say when you said that?” asked Becky with a dreamy, expression that girls who still believed in princes do. “Did he know already know or confess his love back or something?”
“Not exactly.” Darcy looked uncomfortably and scratched the back of her neck awkwardly.

            “I am deeply suspicious of that look,” said Ethan. “What did he say?”

            “Uh—I really don’t want to say.”

            “Tell us!” said Becky eagerly.

            “Do it!” Ethan told her.

            “It’s not real, so just say it,” said Matt with a shrug.

            Darcy sighed. “He did exactly the kind of thing Ethan would do which is probably why I like him so much.” When they stared at her over the next minute, she groaned, and said, “He looked at my chest for a moment, raised his eyes to mine, and just before he died, he uttered the words, ‘But your breasts are so small.’”

            They all laughed so hard that Ethan stumbled forward, Becky fell onto Ethan, Mickey almost fell out of the tree and only Matt, laughing just as hard, somehow remained in perfectly control of himself.

            “I knew I shouldn’t have told you that!” Darcy said bitterly. “I had a real thing for him! I really wanted to marry him and have his children and he died in my arms with a commentary about my breast size!”

            “That is how a real man goes down!” said Ethan.

            “That’s how you’d go down, you prick!” Darcy retorted.

            “You people are crazy,” said Matt.

            “It would be really cool to remember your past life,” said Becky.

            “It’s really not,” Ethan replied.

            “You really don’t believe a thing we’re saying,” said Darcy.

            “No, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what you’re angle is. You can’t possibly be telling the truth but I know you’re not a liar, so what’s your game, Darcy?”

            “Keep disbelieving,” Ethan told him. “You’re lucky you don’t believe this shit.”

            “The weirdest thing is that Christine Taylor believes it,” said Matt. “I trust her more than anyone and I cannot imagine why she would say such insane bullshit.”

            “Christine,” said Ethan. He hadn’t talked to her in a while but he would have if she hadn’t been married.

            “I know that look,” Matt told him sternly. “You stay away from her.”

            “Yeah, you don’t want memories from your past life,” Darcy said to no one in particular.

            “I totally do,” said Becky.

            “No, you really don’t,” Ethan told her.

            “Whatever,” Matt replied and then after that, they walked in silence for a while.

            The path they were on was incredibly overgrown at first but at some point within an hour or so from that conversation, it opened up to a bigger path, becoming an actual dirt road of sorts, and there it continued straight north along a long, gray, old stone wall on their right.

            As they moved along it, Ethan suddenly had the strangest feeling he had been there before. He heard a crack sound, looked up to his right above the wall, and saw a creepy, knotted tree on the other side of the wall. It consisted of almost no leaves on it except for the spot on the top of the trunk and there seemed to be only two, thick branches.

            “Did that tree just move?” asked Matt.

            “Don’t ask me to find out!” Mickey from a nearby, normal tree on the opposite side of the path. He had the voice of someone thoroughly disturbed. “I’m not going anywhere near that fucking thing!”

            “I got it!” Ethan said suddenly. “I do know-wait, move? Did you say ‘move?’” He looked up at the tree as they passed and then turned around to walk backward staring at it for a moment before he turned back around. “Okay, that’s scary and weird,” he added.

            He remembered everything then and something that had bothered him at the time.

            “I was tall, over six feet and I went under a branch—” Ethan looked up at a long, ugly, gray branch that stretched over the wall “—I think it was that tree, actually.” He took a deep breath. “I went under without bending over but then it hit Henry Norris, who was shorter, right in the head. It was as if it had moved. Just lowered its branch right down onto him.”

            He had thought at the time that maybe he ducked down without thinking and Norris had forgotten to do so but that wasn’t like him. He hadn’t thought too much about it of course because shortly after that, he saw the door and then he had something far crazier to occupy his thoughts.

            “What are you yammering about?” asked Matt.

            “We were hunting down a unicorn. Henry, that is, Henry VIII, had just lost his son. We followed this black stallion unicorn into these woods, what England called the Blackwood, in an attempt to cheer him up.”

            “This forest?” Matt replied with a scoff. “In England?”

            “It was such a weird experience,” said Ethan. “We lost the unicorn and we saw a black castle—”

            “Don’t!” hissed Becky suddenly and Ethan saw that she was terrified. “Whatever you do, don’t go in there!”

            “Yeah, I figured it was something like that,” Ethan replied awkwardly.

            “I saw the dark castle too,” Becky replied nervously and looked very uncomfortable. “Not with my eyes but I’ve seen it.” She opened her mouth to say more but then shut it gently and said nothing.

            “Uh-huh,” Matt said as he looked back at that tree suspiciously. When Ethan looked back a second time, it seemed as though it had turned around a bit and two knots that suddenly seemed so much like eyes seemed to be peering contemptuously over its shoulder. Thinking of knots like eyes made its leaves look like hair and its branches look like arms.

            There was a whole forest of them beyond that wall.

            “Careful over there!” called Darcy suddenly.

            Ethan turned around and saw Matt and Becky disappear around the perpendicular wall to the right. “Oh fuck!” he gasped as he suddenly remembered. “The door! Don’t look into the door!”

            Ethan and Darcy quickly rushed up ahead, a feeling nagging at Ethan as rushed up to the corner. As he moved around with Darcy, he was both surprised and unsurprised to see something that he could not explain for the second time.

            The doorframe was exactly what it had been before. A simple stone doorway covered in ivy in the middle of a small grassy field with a green door. It was open wide and beyond it was something beyond insanity.

            It was infinity: endless, terrible, monstrous, infinity! He saw visions of strange, terrible things, once more. Wolves riding giant cockroaches carrying spears, flying rabbits through the clouds and a sky that was a terrible, endless darkness that Walter could not have fully understood it for the eternal space that it was but Ethan did.

            He tried to turn from it but found it staring back at him in all directions. He suddenly imagined the Big Bang exploding all around him and he knew if he saw that, he really would lose his mind. He would end up spending the rest of his life gibbering in an asylum somewhere, drugged up to his eyeballs with drool leaking down his chin.

            The moon reappeared out of the darkness suddenly and grew a face once more. It was bleeding out from its crimson eyes, the blood on its cheeks stark red against the light gray, and suddenly it was like that ancient film with the moon with a face and a rocket in its eye but infinitely more evil. Its eyes focused on him, narrowed as they filled with recognition, and its lips curled up into something that was both his father’s sneer and his mother’s mad smile all at once.

            Its mouth spread apart and words that he did not understand filled his mind, gibbering at him like some ancient, Lovecraftian language, and he could not scream anymore. He was suddenly too frightened to scream.

            Ethan sensed what was coming next, remembering it clearly from last time, and there he then saw the black queen of shadow and darkness returned, her form larger than a countryside, standing above the hills and her shadow stretching across the world and strings to connecting to everyone and everything. Before he had recognized nothing but then he saw the town, Bartlett Bay, and the people, its citizens.

            Matt and Becky had already seen it, staring at it for a moment before Matt jerked toward the doorway.

            “Don’t touch it!” shrieked Darcy.

            Matt grabbed the green door and slammed it hard without touching what was beyond. It landed with a loud clang and he turned back to him with wide eyes. “What the fuck was that?” he cried.

            “Buckle up, buddy,” said Darcy with wide eyes. “You’re going for a ride.”

            “What the fuck does that mean?” he cried.

            “I’m pretty sure looking into that doorway was what allows us to remember our past lives,” said Darcy. “You’ll start to remember yours too but maybe you’ll be lucky. If this is your first life, nothing weird will happen.”

            “It hit me in my first life,” Ethan said. “I lived the blissful life of Walter Kent where I almost certainly died with the beautiful yet naive belief that I would never have to remember any of that again.”

            “Me as well,” Darcy said. “Muire Lindsay was my first life too.”

            “Oh fuck me that was terrible!” Matt blinked, shook his head, and took several steps toward them. “That motherfucking—” he stopped abruptly as he had turned back, the arm that he was pointing with lowering down in stunned, shock.

            The door was gone. The doorway was still there, an empty space within a stone monument to something that no longer existed, but the green door that had been there as clear as day moments before was as gone as if never having been.

            “The door—” Ethan suddenly remembered that the green door looked like the one to his parents’ house in Thousand Oaks, California. The door Walter Kent had seen was different. It had been a red door connected to his family’s ancestral estate back in Kent. “What color door did you see?” he asked.

            “White,” said Darcy. “Why?”

            “I’m not sure what that means but I saw green.”

            “I saw blue,” Becky said. “My grandmother’s house’s door.”

            “None of this makes any sense!” Matt snarled.

            “Sense is the last thing anything out here makes,” said Darcy.

            “I don’t understand,” said Becky with a gasp. “I don’t understand any of it.”

            “And that surprises you?” asked Ethan.

            “I started to try and read it with my powers—”

            “You should not have done that!” Darcy told her in a very serious voice.

            “Yes!” Becky agreed with wide, horrified eyes on the verge of trauma. “I didn’t go far! I didn’t even get close! It felt like—” she seemed to wrack her brain for an explanation “—it was like mercury, moving around, unconnected, and so, very, very, powerful! I’ve never felt anything like it!”

            “And now we can at long last reaffirm the knowledge that psychic powers still make no fucking sense,” Ethan replied as he walked up to the empty doorway.

            The vision of the dark queen seemed the strongest and somehow most important. He looked back at the others looking at nothing and thinking, None of us are talking about what we saw. Walter never did too.

            “Oh God, do you think it’ll do something more to us if we see it a second time?” asked Darcy suddenly.

            “I sure as hell hope not—” There was a creak sound and Ethan looked up at one of those creepy trees above the wall to the south connected to the earlier wall. One branch was sticking out over the wall like an arm reaching over a fence and the two knots that looked kind of like eyes seemed to peer over the wall at the wall in a sinister way “—ohhh-kay?”

            Ethan gasped and felt a headache coming on. He leaned onto the doorway with a groan and looked through it. He was tempted to stick his arm in to test it but he felt an extremely deep aversion at the very notion of it.

            He remembered that servant. His name was Thomas Samuels and something had happened to him. He touched what was inside and then… “What?” Ethan asked very softly. “What did it to do him?” It had changed Ethan and the others who merely looked upon it but all they had done was look. “What does touching eternity do to a man?”

            “What was that?” asked Darcy.

            “Nothing,” he replied.

            Darcy turned away and said, “I’m getting dizzy.”

            “Me too,” said Becky.

            Matt said nothing, walked over to the northern edge of the area, and looked down at a series of wildflowers. For the first time, Ethan noticed that he was in some kind of former courtyard surrounded by ruins. He thought he might have been too distracted before to notice.

            What Matt was looking down at might have been a garden at one point.

            “He’s tripping back into time already,” Darcy said. “Poor bastard.”

            Ethan looked at him and saw that he was staring into the beyond as though hypnotized. For the first time since Ethan met him, he seemed utterly unaware of his surroundings.

            Becky suddenly slumped down onto her bottom in the grass between two trees west of the garden, then lied down amidst the grass and roots, and stared up at the swinging branches above her. She seemed mesmerized instantly by the way the trees nearby moved or the light that slipped through their branches.

            “Is that what we look like when we go back?” Ethan asked offhandedly as he turned to look east beyond the stone doorway to see the ruins of something there that he only vaguely recalled seeing as Walter.

            It was a stone tower house of maybe three floors or so. It was crumbling, all the floors within having caved in and resting at the bottom. There was still a surrounding wall albeit mostly destroyed, save the southern section which was the same wall that guarded the forest. The door to the tower’s entrance was long gone with its opening left wide open to reveal the debris of the castle interior.

            Ethan approached for no particular reason, stepping through a gap in the western wall and noting the two small statues resting on waist-high pillars on either side of the entrance. They were of wolves the size of medium dogs, standing guard before the tower, and the one on the left was broken. Seeing that, he cast his Fix Object spell on it but he bungled it and while the head flew back up to its neck as intended, it only stayed connected for a moment before it fell off.

            As it clunked into the dirt, Ethan looked back up at the tower and emotions suddenly hit him like a hammer. He blinked hard, tears suddenly slipping down his eyes, and he fell to his knees before the tower.

            Mickey landed on a second-story western window, tilted his head toward Ethan and said cheerfully, “Oh boy, something’s coming! Win the war! Tell Lady Anne to not marry the king!”

            “Eat shit, bird!”

            He spread out his wings and cried, “Change the past, McFly! Save Queen Anne!”

            “You evil—little—fucker, you,” Ethan replied and then laughed even as he wept. He stared at that broken old tower, noting the greenness of it, and remembered the other green tower. The one of ribbons, wood, and stage dressing. The one that cost a fortune in outfits, props and more. The one that seemed to reverberate throughout history as the pageant of Henry VIII’s reign.

            “Oh God, it was wonderful!” he said aloud and he remembered—

 

*          *          *

 

            —how he thought about that pageant for months afterward.

            Walter had desperately wanted to perform but Henry wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t think him worthy, which hurt, but he had been allowed in the audience at least. There was something about pageants that had always filled him with wonder and the Château Vert was no exception.

            It had cost a fortune and it was worth it.

            A great wooden castle had been built inside the great hall of York Place featuring a large central tower illuminated in green tinfoil covering the battlements with banners hanging from each lesser tower. One showed three broken hearts, another a woman’s hand clutching a fourth heart, and a third a woman’s hand holding a fifth heart that was turned upside down.

            Dressed in cloth of gold caps and coats with blue satin cloaks and buskins, Henry and his companions laid siege upon the castle where there were imprisoned eight ladies dressed in gorgeous, white satin dresses.

            Those men whom Walter wished to be among represented masculine virtues: Amorous, Nobleness, Youth, Attendance, Loyalty, Pleasure, Gentleness, Liberty and Ardent Desire, who was the leader and Henry himself. They were being blocked by the feminine vices in the form of Danger, Disdain, Jealousy, Unkindness, Scorn, Malebouche, which was inappropriate speech, and Strangeness, all dressed as Indian women and were played by young chorister boys from the royal chapel.

            The maidens in the tower were named for feminine virtues: Perseverance, Kindness, Honor, Constancy, Bounty, Mercy, Pity and Beauty, played by Mary, the king’s sister. They stood up there like unattainable goddesses in their utter perfection.

            Everyone wore gold masks for the masquerade, a thing that usually did not mean much to Walter since it was impossible to miss the giant king who always pretended to be a stranger, but that time it seemed to add an ethereal wonder and beauty to the entire thing.

            God, it was a great day, the last day of the Shrovetide joust the year before, and Walter had truly enjoyed himself. He did well in the jousts too, getting better every time, and, far from the days he embarrassed himself at the tilt, some jousters were then starting to view him as a legitimate competitor.

            It was also where his cousin, recently returned from France, made her English debut as the personification as persistence.

            He thought about that day, that day of romance and love, feeling both nostalgic and yet lonely as well. His wives were both dead, his girls were growing up, almost seven by then, and they were already starting to think in that romantic way that young girls always did. Catherine was especially romantic, just like her late mother. Alice was more practical, like her late mother, but still growing up. Soon they would be married and gone forever and he would be left all alone.

            Love, Walter thought wistfully. Love was wonderful and though he never expected to find it himself, one member of his family actually had. He had been happy for her, truly, but now something had gone very wrong.

            It was when he had looked out of a window at the cloister green and saw a happy couple talking amongst each other, that he began to think back to the Château Vert and the dreams his cousin, as perseverance, once had.

            His cousin Anne Boleyn slipped up beside him.

            “He’s going to break my marriage contract!” she hissed. “I should have consummated it but I guess that would have made little difference to him!” She was dressed in a green gown with a French gable hood, trying to make a good impression. It was perfect with just a hint of sensuality, of which she was a master of the French style, who were themselves the masters of sensuality in general. She was utilizing the risqué French gable hood that showed off just a bit of her hair and that usually worked. She was not conventionally beautiful but men usually didn’t notice or care until long after she had them wrapped around her fingers.

            That was not the case with Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord High Chancellor of England. It had gone badly and very badly at that.

            “Anne—”

            “As a member of the priesthood, a prince of the church no less, it is his duty to protect a sacred marriage pact,” she said bitterly as she looked down at the happy couple. Her lips pressed tightly together. “He is a cardinal and yet he sold me as a whore for a pat on the head and a king’s favor he did not even need!”

            “Anne,” Walter began but then sighed. He didn’t know what to say to her.

            Anne had found her one love in a man named Henry Percy, the future Duke of Northumberland. In a thousand years, Walter could not have imagined those two falling in love but it was love, nevertheless. King Henry saw it too and he seemed to have grown the strange idea that she would be better suited as a temporary mistress for himself than the Duchess of Northumberland.

            Why he wanted Anne was a mystery. He had already had her sister Mary and was sick of her in something like a fortnight, but evidently, that was not enough.

            Walter had a good relationship with Cardinal Wolsey and so Anne enlisted him to help her in her dealing with him and her marriage contract. The problem was simple: for her to become Henry’s mistress, her love match with Henry Percy would need to be destroyed forever and she did not want that.

            The prospect utterly disgusted Walter, which was why he risked his position in court by getting involved. He also found it intolerable that after all the years of endless proclamations of “love,” Henry, without qualm, guilt, shame or hesitation, was perfectly willing to destroy a love match for a simple dalliance.

            Walter turned from the window and looked at her. He was surprised to see tears slipping down her cheeks. “Henry Percy is not the man you think he is,” he told her awkwardly.

            “He is exactly the man I think he is,” she told him bitterly. “My understanding of men happens to be somewhat superior to that of Anne Chapman, Walter.” He thought he would get mad at that comment but it just made him sad and when she saw that on his face, she looked sorry that she said it. “I know who he is,” she said with a sigh. “I know.”

            Anne’s face fell apart and she began to weep. When he faced her completely, she hugged him tightly and he held her there, feeling honestly surprised. She did not strike him as the crying type of girl. There were some people around but they weren’t close enough to hear, although their sneaky little eyes were watching them greedily as they sought for anything juicy to gossip about.

            “You really do love him,” Walter said softly.

            She stepped back and her deep, beautiful black eyes looking deeply into his. She had two truly beautiful features, her hair, which no one ever saw in its entirety because of proper etiquette and her eyes, which everyone saw because everyone was drawn to them like moths to a flame.

            “A man like Henry Percy needs a woman like me,” she told him. “He needs a strong wife and with a wife like me, he would have sons that would win in Agincourt and in any case, I would be a duchess. What will I be now, Walter? Mistress to a king like my sister Mary just to lose the man I love so I can be forgotten in a week and tossed off to some random courtier I probably don’t even know who would view me as a soiled whore?”

            She laughed bitterly.

            “If he even bothers. He certainly didn’t do that much for Mary.”

            “I suppose,” Walter replied uncomfortably.

            “Even if I give him a son like he so desires, after nine months of careful work and an agonizing afternoon of birth, it would only produce a bastard. He already has one of those so there is no guarantee he’ll even acknowledge mine.” With Lady Bessie Blount, Henry VIII had an illegitimate son he called Henry Fitzroy who he was quite fond of, although, point of fact, he never touched Bessie Blount again.

            “Let me see if I can change his mind,” Walter told her, even though knew it was a waste of time.

            “He won’t listen.”

            “If you marry Henry Percy, the king will leave—”

            “I am married to Henry Percy by contract according to Christian law but Wolsey is still breaking it,” she told him a little too loudly.

            She looked around, saw some people looking sidewise at them, and then sighed and pulled Walter away. She took him outside into the cloister green courtyard and among the shrubs arraigned so intricately, she stopped, turned, and faced him.

            “He was so high and mighty,” she told him with a sneer of hatred. “Even you complimenting him didn’t move him.”

            Walter hadn’t been lying about his compliment. He deeply admired Thomas Wolsey and told him so. The son of a butcher becoming the second most powerful man in England was no light feat. Most of Walter’s peers could only boast of their positions based on birth. Thomas Wolsey could boast that he among the very few had actually earned his place.

            But over the years, he had become rather arrogant and, though Walter could not see the future, it seemed that being the true enemy of every great lord in England could not possibly bode well for him. Being lowborn alone was enough to make them hate him but that arrogance on top was a disastrous combination. He sat there near the throne, a heavily overweight man in cardinal robes, hiding behind the crown with every move he made, and mocking the lords of the realm all around him. If that crown ever stopped protecting him, even for just a moment, the court would eagerly tear him apart.

            There was thunder and Walter looked up into the sky. The clouds had moved over Hampton Court and a thought came to him. “A storm is coming,” he said aloud.

            “You are a true gentleman, Walter Kent,” said Anne and looked back into her eyes. “God help you but you are.”

            That made him think of his erstwhile wife Anne Chapman who died from the Sweating Sickness all alone in a convent. “There are times I should have been less,” he said softly. Anne didn’t know what to say to that and said nothing. “Do you think I should have threatened him?”

            “No,” she said bitterly. “He would just turn him against you and change nothing. Did you see his face?”
“Yes.”

            “Did you see how he was smirking at me behind that solemn look?” she asked bitterly. “Oh how amusing it must be for the son of a butcher to prostitute the child of the treasurer of the king’s household. How very joyous that my maidenhood is not my father’s and certainly not my own, but his, the great Cardinal Wolsey’s, to be given away as he doth command.” Her face distorted with misery, hate and bitterness all in one. “To turn a highborn lady into nothing more than a common whore at the snap of his peasant butcher’s fingers!”

            “Anne—”

            “I’ll be whore to no man, Walter!” she hissed, and moved closer, her eyes looking up into his. “Not even the king of England! If he wants to ruin my life just to get me in his bed, he will have to earn it!”

            That sounded rather ominous. “And just how, exactly, can he do that?” asked Walter.

            “By making me his queen.”

            Walter laughed. It wasn’t a mocking laugh, which was why Anne didn’t get angry, and it was even half-sad, which maybe calmed her even more. “He already has a queen, Anne, and a rather good one at that.”

            Her face shifted to a sly, knowing expression that he did not much care for and then added, “A very good queen who has failed to give him a son.”

            Walter sighed. “Look, Anne, I don’t wish to insult you but—”

            “But you are, aren’t you?” she asked coldly.

            “Anne, you’re not the equal to the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabelle as brides go. You’re a subject, Anne. If Katherine were to die tomorrow and Henry were to remarry, it would never be to you or any woman of England. He would marry some foreign princess to bolster some alliance and besides, Henry already has an heir.”

            “Not a son and you know that’s what really counts. Mark my words, Walter, if he doesn’t get a legitimate son from someone, he’ll do more than simply acknowledge Fitzroy.”

            “Fitzroy is a bastard. He can’t inherit the throne or be legitimized. Either Katherine gives him a son or Mary inherits.”

            “Katherine cannot give him a son. The best method for the Tudor line to continue is for him to get a wife that can—” her eyes widened “—and he knows it.”

            Walter did not like where their conversation was going. He looked around for a moment and saw several women walking by, their eyes locked on them, but too far away to hear anything.

            “Is that what you’re going to do if your marriage with Henry Percy does get broken?” asked Walker. “Steal the king of England from Katherine of Aragorn?”

            “Oh my marriage is going to be broken and Mary Talbot is going to get Henry Percy whether she wants him or not while Henry Tudor seems to think I’ll be no more than a fortnight tryst and then he can discard and never think of me again. That was what my love-match was worth to the Great Cardinal Thomas Wolsey who could have fixed this at any time he wished and what any true man of God would have done!”

            She halted as another couple walked by. They looked at the pair curiously, said nothing, and then walked on.

            As soon as they had passed, Walter started to say, “Anne—”

            “I did not choose this path, Walter,” she told him and her black eyes narrowed, “but I will not walk the path of a whore for any reason. Henry VIII will marry me or he will never have me and that peasant son a butcher—” her face distorted in rage “—will suffer for what he has done to me.”

            “The cardinal is the king’s—”

            “He could have told the king my marriage couldn’t be dissolved! That was his job as a cardinal! To protect the laws of God and an official marriage contract! He could have let me have the only man I’ve ever truly wanted and loved and in less than a year I’d be pregnant and the king would have forgotten my name just as he had every other woman he ever had or will have!

            “That butcher-peasant has ruined my life—” she stepped closer “—and with God as my witness, I will ruin him back tenfold! I will hound him until the ends of the Earth until I see him shamed, broken and dead in the grave!”

            By God’s Blood, she actually means it, Walter thought. “Anne, Mary is Henry’s heir.”

            “A woman cannot rule.”

            “Isabelle of Castile just might have argued otherwise. Philip the Fair even used her daughter Juana as the rightful heir in a scheme against Ferdinand, if you recall. Daughters can be quite serious in matters of royal inheritance.”

            “This is not Spain, Walter, and the world is not what we wish it to be but what we make of it.” And then, without another word, she turned around and left him there.

            This is going to be bad, he thought but then he also thought, How bad really, though?

            Katherine was queen and was deeply loved by the people. She wasn’t going anywhere and she and Henry VIII had an unquestionably legitimate heir albeit a female one. While younger than Katherine, she was hardly likely to be old enough to breed when Katherine finally died of old age, and Anne could never pull off an assassination even if she was willing to do so, which Walter did not believe she was. There was only one method, assuming Henry even wanted to marry Anne, but with all the power Katherine had, it could never happen.

            Henry Tudor could never dissolve his marriage.

 

*          *          *

 

            “Jane Parker was Constancy!” cried Ethan from his knees. “That’s fucking hilarious!” He laughed hysterically and blinked away tears. Walter had yet to experience what Jane was going to do in the future but Ethan knew very well what was coming.

            “What did you see this time?” asked Mickey.

            “The beginning and end of many things. It was a major changing point in England but we didn’t know it yet. Wouldn’t have believed it if you could have predicted the future and told us.” He cracked his neck around. “That cardinal just fucked his own religion and destroyed himself but no one could have predicted that either.”

            “And that means, what, exactly?” Mickey asked in a more irritated tone.

            Ethan stood up and looked around the trees, at the bright, blue sky, and remembered Anne smiling with Henry Percy in the gardens. “Love is powerful,” he said softly.

            “What did you see exactly?” asked Darcy as she walked up to him.

            “Anne Boleyn,” said Ethan and something about his expression was making her look at him with deep curiosity. “And the great Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.” Oddly, he didn’t say the word “great” mockingly or ironically. He actually meant it. “Cardinal Wolsey just sent Anne down the path of marriage to the king.”

            He could still see Wolsey sitting there across from Anne, smirking behind his solemn expression. If the king wishes to have your companionship, you should be as honored as your sister once was, he told her. Thomas Boleyn was a bitter enemy of his and disgracing his daughter in such a degrading way must have really pleased him. It didn’t hurt that she was the niece of another enemy, the Duke of Norfolk.

            Cardinal Wolsey was definitely enjoying himself. However, from his perspective, it was getting revenge against the cruelties and slights Anne’s family had been heaping on him unjustly for years for no better reason than his birth. It also kept Anne, a likely ally of her father and Norfolk, away from the powerful Duchy of Northumberland. Henry Percy himself was almost certainly not perceived to be nearly the threat his highly intelligent, highly willful would-be wife would have been.

            It all made sense to Ethan but it wasn’t going to end well.

            “Anne Boleyn,” Darcy mused as she leaned against the stone wall around the tower house. “Was she as beautiful as they say?”

            “Not even close,” Ethan replied. “Natalie Dormer is so fucking unbelievably hotter than she was but the real Anne Boleyn had something less conventional yet far more potent than you would believe. Kind of like Kat Dennings. You look at her mathematically and she doesn’t fit the mold of the expected beauty yet somehow she was more beautiful and sexier than any conventionally beautiful woman you see around her. That was Anne Boleyn. A once-in-a-lifetime kind of girl.”

            “She must have been something,” Darcy replied softly, her eyes locked into his. “Five hundred years later and you’re still hooked on her.”

            “Hey there’s that damn blue jay again!” cried Mickey. “I’m telling you, she’s following us!”

            Ethan looked over, saw a blue jay, and then looked back at Mickey. “Seriously?” he replied with an exaggerated shrug. “It’s a fucking blue jay!”

            “I’m telling you again, there is something weird about that fucking bird!”

            Ethan was about to respond when Matt suddenly jerked back from the garden he had been looking at with eyes like two golf balls and spun around. “Son of a bitch!” he cried. “That cracker motherfucker!” He went over to the wall into the shade under the frightening tree, covered in sweat, then turned around, leaned back against it, and slipped down onto his bottom. He stared ahead, eyes wide with his hands resting on his knees, and said, “Jesus—fucking—Christ!”

            “I wonder if I was like that the first time,” said Ethan. He looked over at Becky who was still lying on the ground, staring up at the sky with that entranced look still on her face.

            “I think it hits hardest the first time,” Darcy told him.

            “It hit him pretty hard and pretty fast,” Ethan said. “I didn’t get a strong vision beyond vague dreams until I entered this forest.” Mickey flew over onto Ethan’s left shoulder and gave him a look that said he felt that he was annoyed at being left out of the conversation.

            “Maybe it’s because he’s been close to this place his whole life,” Darcy told him.

            “Makes sense, I guess,” Ethan replied with a shrug.

            “I had a vision of Muire Lindsay as an impoverished Scottish child for the first time when I was a little girl,” Darcy told them. “What did you see, Matt?”

            Matt laughed bitterly and shook his head. “I saw Massa—” he sucked in air angrily through his teeth for a second “—I saw Master Dixon. I, uh—” he looked uncharacteristically sheepish “—I was a slave on the Dixon Plantation in Alabama in the Antebellum South.” He shook his head. “It was a fucking nightmare.”

            He swallowed and shrugged.

            “And I’m my own ancestor. I’m John Merrick.”

            “He wasn’t the one who lost his arm in the war, was he?” asked Darcy.

            “Oh fuck!” he groaned miserably and leaned his head back onto the wall. “Oh Christ, that happened when he was in a Connecticut colored regiment!”

            “Yeah, that war was a goddamn nightmare,” Ethan told him.

            “Were you sold to another plantation later?” asked Darcy.

            “What?” He looked confused. “Why are you asking me that?”

            “Wouldn’t your last name be Dixon then?”

            “I wasn’t about to take that bitch-cracker’s name!” he replied irritably. “Merrick was the name of the slave who raised me as my father since I never knew my real one. I was sold to the Dixon Plantation as a baby. Family history states John Merrick took the slave Merrick’s first name as our surname instead and they were right. I was already thinking about it even as a boy. Billy Dixon, that is Dixon’s younger son, told me about how the name Johnson meant ‘John’s son,’ and so I figured I’d be Merrickson when I fled north to freedom but I think I just ended up shortening it to Merrick.”

            “So,” said Darcy with a smile, “Do you believe us now?”

            “You going to rub that in my face now?” he asked incredulously.

            “Sure am,” she said with a smile. Then she slipped down beside the wall and snuggled with him in a cute way Ethan had never seen her do before with anyone. “Eventually, it will stop.”

            “When John Merrick dies, right?” asked Matt bitterly.

            “That’s when it stopped for me,” she replied. “Can’t remember after death, I guess, but I still remember Muire’s whole life although not as well as when I lived it. Kind of like watching a movie or reading a very detailed book or something. You can’t learn any skills they had but you can remember doing them.”

            “Yeah, I’ve been trying to weasel out some spells away from Walter Kent’s and Thomas Bartlett’s mind and it’s not working,” Ethan said. “By the way, Darcy and I met each other in our last lives.”

            “When I was an old lady. It’s, uh—” she shrugged “—kind of awkward.”

            Matt laughed uncomfortably, wiggled his fingers past his knees, and said, “I’m going to need a minute.”

            Becky gasped, sat up and said, “Woooow! The island!” Becky smiled widely. “Oh God, it was so beautiful! It was like I just walked into Heaven!”

            “What did you see?” asked Ethan.

            “I saw Nassau!” she told him and something in her tone told him exactly when she was in Nassau.

            “Oh you are so fucking lucky!” Ethan told her.

            “I landed on Nassau in the golden age of piracy!” Becky told them as she stood up, eyes wide, and smiling. “I was also French! I was Cosette Dubois! I was a teenager and I had just met Anne Bonny!”

            “Niiiice!” Ethan replied. “I am so fucking jealous! I’m getting Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag in October and I am going to bug the living shit out of you about accuracy!”

            Becky laughed and sauntered a bit until she was in the center of all of them. “How did you make out, Matt?”

            “He got slave,” Ethan replied.

            “Bummer,” she replied.

            “Dixon Plantation. Antebellum South.” Matt’s eyes stared off into the distance. “It’s got history to it.”

            “Can you describe what you saw?” Darcy asked.

            He shut his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall, and then breathed softly for a few moments. Ethan was about to speak himself, believing Matt wouldn’t say anything and choose to keep his vision private when he started to tell a story.

            “Wilford Dixon, the plantation owner, got heavily drunk one night and passed out. When he awoke, some money was missing from a cashbox. Dixon was a miser and any money that went astray enraged him. He knew his son Martin really wanted to impress this girl in town, a pretty, white girl named Sarah Egbert on a neighboring plantation.

            “He wanted to impress upon her that he was going to inherit a plantation and someday be a gentleman but, as he sometimes described to his father, he looked like some ‘cracker laborer’ and he wanted to change that so he stole some money from a change box to show this girl a good time. A—” he winced “—house slave named Betty learned about it and she blabbed to her friend Marcy, who could never keep a secret, and suddenly we were all gossiping like hens about what would happen when his Dixon found out. At the time, it didn’t involve us, so it promised to be really entertaining.

            “When Dixon discovered the missing money, he predictably went berserk. Martin was cornered in the garden that morning—” Matt’s eyes tilted to the place that might have been a garden and then back “—and Martin panicked. I saw the whole thing because I had been talking to my brother, Merrick’s biological son, Pete, but I got nervous when I saw Dixon coming because I was supposed to be in the fields so I hid behind a tree. They were arguing not ten feet away from where my brother was working and I heard every word.”

            Matt’s face seemed very strange. Ethan couldn’t read the exact expression on it.

            “He blamed my brother and not very convincingly, either. Just said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, uh, think I saw Pete in there earlier.’” Matt imitated a Southern drawl when imitating him. “It was stupid because Pete was a gardener like my father and we all lived in a shack outside. We never went into the plantation house let alone Dixon’s private rooms. I think Martin was just trying to buy time to come up with a better lie while Dixon questioned him about how that was even possible.”

            Matt laughed bitterly.

            “Dixon walked past him and punched Pete in the face hard enough that I don’t think he could eat right for weeks. He fell into Mrs. Dixon’s roses, cutting himself up badly, and Dixon, who always carried his whip around, pulled him out of the roses by his leg, turned him onto his chest and began to violently whip him through his clothes. The fabric was thin and almost instantly ripped ripping open and blood started leaking down his sides from the first hit. I can vividly see the horrified, guilty look on Martin’s face even now.”

            He took a deep breath through his teeth.

            “Ever see that movie Rosewood directed by John Singleton?” Matt asked.

            “Fucking great film,” said Ethan. “Jon Voight, Ving Rhames and Esther Rolle were all totally underrated. Amazing performances all around.”

            “Are there any birds in it?” asked Mickey.

            “No.”

            “Then it’s not that great a movie,” Mickey retorted.

            “‘Nigger is just another word for guilty,’” quoted Matt and then he added, “I don’t think that’s quite right but Dixon knew Pete couldn’t have done it and even after he was done beating the shit out of him, he never asked Pete where the money went or was. He never asked any of us. It was so surreal. I’m eight years old, less than ten feet away, just watching this happen. I think he would have beaten Pete a lot harder, the kind of hard that leaves you in a hospital for a month if he wasn’t his property.”

            “I remember some of the plantations I visited when I was in the South with my friend Anderson Greenwood,” said Ethan. “He was a friend from West Point but he was a Southern gentleman as well and a magician like me. Most of the slaves I saw there seemed reasonably okay but I never bought into the bullshit that it was better to be a slave than free.”

            “Did white people actually say that?” asked Matt in a voice that stated that such a comment was the absolute stupidest thing he had ever heard.

            “Yeah and if you had ever seen the inside of a textile mill, you’d understand why.” Thomas Bartlett had been an abolitionist and he despised slavery and thought it a great wrong but slaves were called “lazy” for a reason. Not a really good reason but it was no lie to say that most of them never worked a tenth as hard as someone “free” in those factories had. No one in Tudor or modern times either. “It was like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It was—” Ethan swallowed as a memory filled his mind “—nightmarish.”

            Ten to twelve hours a day on average in sweltering heat only to be paid a pittance while risking serious injury with just one wrong bump or push. Children were there too, sometimes with their complete families, all just working to have nothing and barely survive, and the people who ran those things talking about them with utter disgusted contempt. Acting as though they should know better and be better, calling them lazy, self-righteous, and often un-Christian, and saying they were getting exactly what they deserved for not being a better class of human being.

            Some of those people were genuinely surprised when a labor union started to pop up and, with rage quivering their lips and shaking their hands, ordered thugs to beat the workers down as “the ungrateful little bastards they are.”

            Ethan supposed that was the reason a man would wander west for new land and life while risking a very violent death by Indian attack. Some Indians must have been utterly baffled why white men, who were obviously not military, just kept coming back year after year no matter what they did to them.

            Matt said nothing, thoughtful and disturbed.

            “Tell me when you get to the Civil War,” Ethan told him. “We’ll have some drinks and swap stories.”

            “Sure,” he said and half-grinned, half-scowled, neither directly at him, and then said, “I’ll need another minute.”

 

*          *          *

 

            Matt felt a hand touch his arm. He saw it coming but he let Darcy touch him because he didn’t mind. They had been friends since they were in kindergarten together and she, uncharacteristically for most people, seemed to really understand him.

            “Are you alright?” she asked honestly.

            “I’m fine.”

            “I’ve never seen you like this,” she told him. “And you don’t faze easily.”

            “I’m fine,” he said again. Then, after seeing her eyes turn annoyed, he sighed and said, “It’s complicated.”

            Darcy smiled but it was a strange smile and he then realized that being able to see into his past life, had grown them even closer. She snuggled against him some more and said, “Matt, I have met George Washington. I know it’s complicated.”

            “It’s not that kind of complicated,” he replied.

            It wasn’t something that he could explain to anyone. Maybe Bartlett would understand since he was there, but then he was white, so probably not.

            Wilford Dixon was a monster: a blond-haired, blue-eyed cracker-psychotic. He was the very picture of Simon Legree from Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Edwin Epps, the real-life planter who “owned” Solomon Northup who would later write of his experiences with Epps and others in Twelve Years a Slave. Dixon owned a plantation and thirty slaves in Alabama. He was a man who prided himself as a “nigger-breaker” and he wasn’t exaggerating.

            He was exactly what Matt expected from his modern understanding of history.

            He didn’t mention to the others how the overseer, Nate Calvin, had seen him hiding behind that tree, pulled him out and forced him to watch his brother being beaten. Matt had never felt as helpless as he did in that moment, not in either life so far, but at least Pete was no Uncle Tom to forgive his beater and love him until he was dead. Dixon walked away from Pete after a while, unsatisfied and rubbing his tired arm.

            Later that night, when his arm was better, Dixon beat both of his sons so badly that they probably couldn’t get out of the bed next day. It was no more illegal to beat your children or wife than it was your slave in those days. Getting flogged, beaten or sometimes worse was a common punishment in life and school and slaves were not surprised to see white people being beaten for some stupid thing here and there.

            In modern historical studies, it was an unwritten belief that only slaves were abused but it simply wasn’t true. That boy Matthew had once been both accepted and understood that violence was a part of life in those days and while slaves were often beaten, they weren’t always beaten unbelievably worse than whites had as he had been led to believe. Matt noted the example of the Dixon boys who were both beaten harder and more viciously than any of Dixon’s slaves had ever been. Matt understood why easily enough. Slaves were expensive and produced wealth while sons were cheap and produced nothing.

            What Matt couldn’t explain, and even was disturbed by, was that John “Dixon,” who deeply wished to be free, felt incredibly sorry for both Dixon boys, especially for Billy. The younger son was the same age but he didn’t have a father who loved him and even at eight years old and illiterate, John knew it was far worse to be beaten by one’s own father than it was by a mostly impersonal master.

            How the fuck does that happen? Matt wondered. How does a slave child feel sorry for a free one?

            Matt tilted his head around like a swivel, cracking his neck several times, and felt angry, depressed and confused all at once.

            “Let’s just go,” he said and got up.

 

*          *          *

 

            During the next hour of walking, Becky regaled them with how she fled New France to escape an abusive father, notably in the territory that would one day become the state of Louisiana.

            Her father had arrived in Louisiana himself after the Edict of Fontainebleau, which suspended the religious freedom act from nearly a century earlier known as the Edict of Nantes. That suspension meant Huguenots and other Protestants could be prosecuted and if his behavior toward his daughter was of any indication, he had a lot of enemies willing to do so.

            He fled France never to return. In the manner of escaping danger accustomed to his family, his daughter fled from him to another country. She got a ride from some sailors and landed in Nassau where she worked as a barmaid at barely thirteen, hoping to get on a boat and be part of a crew.

            Ethan could see her impulsive “let’s go wander off into the dangerous woods alone” personality taking hold in that earlier life.

            She skipped along, laughing, telling them about the weird pirates she meant and saying that, even as a thirteen-year-old girl, getting on a crew was “easier than you would think” and “it sure was fun.”

            Ethan felt an icy shiver go through his spine and stumbled. He regained his footing, blinking, and noticed Becky had stopped talking. “Go on,” Ethan said and then looked around with a baffled look on his face. “Oh—kay…”

            No one was around him anywhere. In fact, he was no longer even on the trail they had been walking on and was in the middle of a grove somewhere. “What the hell?” he cried, his voice seeming to echo into the trees all around him.

            “Damn it!” cried Mickey and Ethan looked up to see him awkwardly crawling out of the leaves of one of the nearby trees. “What just happened?”

            “I have no idea.” He looked over at a stream to his left, watching it head through the forest, and then through the various, thick trees with a confused expression on his face. “I really don’t.”

            Mickey flew down onto Ethan’s shoulders and shook off the brush of leaves. “I just blinked, literally just blinked, and then that damn tree appeared in front of out nowhere!”

            “Those damn trees,” Ethan replied. “They just jump out of nowhere.”

            “Bite me!” Mickey said and then started to walk around in a circle and flapped his wings at him. “Did I get it all?” Ethan plucked off the leaves still on him and tossed them away. “Seriously, what just happened?”

            “I think someone cast a spell on us. I felt something a second ago.” He looked up around them. “Do the trees seem different here?”

            “Sort of,” Mickey replied. “Same types with the same birds and animals. Not like that forest by that lake where we got stoned…” His voice trailed off as he looked straight ahead. He tilted his head to the left. “You see this?”

            Ethan saw it too, his head tilting to the right. “Yeah…”

            The trees ahead of them looked to be flickering. Ethan couldn’t explain it better than that. They were there, fully rooted into the ground, but then flickering to one spot, then another and or back. Staring at them was giving him a headache and when he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and then reopened them, he saw they were back to normal.

            “That was weird,” said Mickey.

            Ethan cast the spell Speak With Familiar to look through Mickey’s eyes. “Fly up and look for the others.”

            He was about to, stopped, and then said in an exasperated voice, “And there’s that goddamn blue jay again!”

            Ethan saw the blue jay out of both sets of eyes. “Okay, now I’m starting to feel like something’s off with that bird.” It flapped its wings and flew away. “Did that feel like a reaction to what I was saying?”

            “Maybe,” Mickey said, frowning up at the bird as it flew away. “I don’t like it.”

            “Let’s just go find the others first then figure out that blue jay afterward.” He raised his shoulder up a bit to indicate flight and Mickey flew up into the air and peered around through the incredibly thick tree line.

            Ethan cast the spell to communicate with him and an orange image of Mickey flying beside him appeared. “Nowhere,” said Mickey as he looked around. “They’re literally nowhere!”

            “You think you can find them?”

            “Yes,” he replied.

 

*          *          *

 

            “No!” cried Mickey. “No, no, no!” He landed on a branch as the dusk hit and the world turned yellow-orange. “Where the hell are they, goddamn it!” The shadows were growing long through the tall, pointed trees and not only had they failed to find even a sign of anyone else, they couldn’t see the end of the forest either. It was as if they had been teleported into an endless forested world somewhere.

            Mickey took great pride in his ability to hunt and find things and he had become extremely irritated by his failure.

            Ethan angrily threw his boomerang through the air straight ahead. He cast the part of the spell on its enchantment to pick up things and rocks from the ground flew up below it and stuck to the bottom. As he held out his hand, it spun around a tree and flew back to him.

            He caught it in his right hand, turned it upside and looked at the rocks sticking to the bottom.

            Mickey flew down onto his shoulder and asked, “Why would anyone enchant a boomerang to pick something up, anyway?”

            “The book is from ninety-eighty-eight so I’m guessing it had something to do with The Legend of Zelda,” Ethan replied. He turned it over, let go of the spell to keep a hold of whatever it had grabbed, and the rocks fell to the ground. “Fucking great game. One of if not the first open-world adventure.”

            “You got anything more useful than a magic boomerang?” asked Mickey unhappily.

            “Sure do.” Ethan holstered his boomerang, took out his cartographer’s map and much like on the first day he entered Bartlett Bay and that forest, it didn’t work. “Why, see this here. It says we’re somewhere deep in India.”

            “That map is garbage,” said Mickey as he looked over his shoulder.

            “It works fine literally anywhere else on Earth,” Ethan replied as he folded it back up and slipped it back into his knapsack. “It’s this goddamn forest.” He looked up through the trees and watched them swaying in a gentle wind. Where the remaining clouds of various oranges and red didn’t exist, the sky was an almost solid, singularly deep blue.

            It would be dark soon and he and Mickey would be alone in the deep, dark part of this forest. It brought up old fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, which he had more than enough of. There were many stories like that though and they all had one easily understood theme.

            There was something very unpleasant waiting in the depths of the deep, dark part of the woods.

            Ethan continued walking with a sense of direction that should have been leading him south and it wasn’t long before was getting dark. Strangely, it seemed that no matter what way he went, it always seemed as though he was going somewhere specific. It gave rise to an unpleasant feeling he couldn’t rid himself of.

            “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he said as he looked around at the growing, deeper darkness all around him.

            “What is it?” asked Mickey.

            “I can’t shake this creepy feeling we’re being led somewhere,” Ethan told him. “Like a steer on a conveyor belt toward a slaughterhouse.” He said nothing for several minutes and as they stepped into another grove, he blinked several times and looked around. “And this is not improving my feeling.”

            “Well—” Mickey shrugged “—damn.”

            In the middle of that new grove, there was a large, disheveled section of ground. It was at least ten feet horizontal and eight feet vertical and there were shards of broken wood. Looking at it, Ethan got a strong, and disturbing, sense of what it was. “No shovels, no tools, no piles,” said he simply and a horrible thought occurred to him. “It looks as though someone crawled out of a grave. Several someones.”

            “What’s with the wood?”

            “Crates, maybe.” Ethan swallowed. “Maybe makeshift coffins.” Ethan saw something flickering ahead of him two feet beyond the hole, looked at it with a squint, and soon it became clear enough so that he could see that was a crude wooden sign. It seemed odd that Ethan didn’t see it as he approached and odder still when he noticed that flickering between being seen and unseen. He knew what that flickering was the instant he saw it by why it was there was the bigger mystery.

            “What’s with the sign?” asked Mickey.

            “It’s a spell that’s fading,” Ethan said. “An invisibility spell on the sign, I presume, but God only knows why.” He walked around the hole, walked up to the sign, and slammed his fist against it. It made a loud clunk and was then visible for a solid moment where he could easily read the words.

            It said simply:

 

*          *          *

 

Do not dig up.

Monsters below.

• AC

 

*          *          *

 

            “AC?” whispered Ethan.

            “I don’t like these woods,” Mickey told him. “I should, as a bird I like all woodlands, but not these.” He looked around. “What should we do now?”

            Ethan looked down at the disheveled ground and then shrugged. “I don’t know.” He checked the time on his phone and saw that it was about 7:30 PM, making it almost truly dark. “We need to find the others. If we can’t, we need to find some cave or—”

            A feminine shriek suddenly filled the air.

            Ethan jerked his head toward the sound, listening to it for a full second before it shut off abruptly as though a hand, or possible fist, cut the scream off abruptly. He made a fly-up gesture and Mickey flew up into the air and, through his eyes, Ethan looked around the thick canopy all around them.

            At nighttime, Mickey’s eyes were much poorer, but he could still see glimpses of the little figures rushing through the trees. Ethan could tell they were carrying something in a full-sized sleeping bag in their arms, its color a bright green but covered in so much mud that most of it was hard to see. If it had been black, Mickey might not have seen it at all.

            Ethan cast his Speak with Familiar to communicate to his familiar, removing the image part of it so that it would just be each other talking through each other’s ears, and said, “Keep your eyes on them.”

            “This got weird fast,” Mickey told him.

            “Just be very quiet and don’t let them see you,” Ethan told him as he began to move through the trees after the creatures. They were not good at hiding their trail nor were they particularly good at avoiding being seen, and when there was an opening in a canopy they were moving through, he saw them for what they were.

            A group of goblins, five, maybe six, with one perfectly visible in the opening. He or she was a skinny, little green person about the proportions of a small child with spiky, black hair and wearing a purple t-shirt, blue shorts, mismatched red and blue tennis shoes without socks and a backward-placed blue UConn Huskies’ hat with a husky’s face on the front.

            They moved through the trees and over rocks and roots at stunning speed, somewhere between kids in an amusement park and experts in parkour. The thing they carried jostled and fought but it did not slow them down even slightly.

            Ethan’s hopes of being able to creep up on them were instantly proved impossible. They were so fast, and so strangely quiet, that if it were not for Mickey, he would have almost certainly lost them. They were moving away from the dirt and jumping on tree roots and rocks that, as opposed to before, left little to no trace of their passing.

            They increased their speed as well and Ethan had to nearly sprint to keep up with them. He hoped to God he didn’t screw up and end up stumbling into them if they stopped abruptly or turned around.

            They were more dangerous than they looked. He was heavily outnumbered and if he stumbled into them before he was ready, they would probably throw themselves at him at lightning speed before he was able to utilize his superior size or strength.

            Luckily, they were neither the smartest nor the most perspective bunch of monsters, and over the next two hours of running, they did not seem to sense him there in the slightest.

            Nor did they slow down or rest once.

            At no point did Ethan get them in his gunsights and while he soon grew exhausted, they seemed to go on tirelessly. He was deeply relieved when they finally got to a destination because he didn’t think he could keep that pace up much longer.

            It was a nearly treeless cone-shaped hillside where they rushed up the side. Ethan recognized it as a motte and bailey castle system, the ruins of a stone keep on the flat top of the cone and an empty moat around it at the bottom. He could see something of the ruins of the bailey below but it was mostly forest then and ninety percent or more had returned to nature. Unlike the keep, it had probably been made of wood.

            All that remained of the keep itself was mostly just its bottom floor and its courtyard. There was a single tower still standing, albeit ending jaggedly at about thirty feet or more in the air above the ruins.
            Torchlights and flashlights alike filled the ruins below along with live non-electric music.

            The goblins crept up the side of the motte sections of a snake with their human-sized bag above them. Ethan could see them easily on the hillside, eight goblins in fact, two or three more than he had thought. The entire top of the keep had stone walls taller than a full man’s height, but they too were in ruins, and the goblins slipped through an opening on the east side.

            Mickey flew up higher, above the ruins, and Ethan looked through his eyes down into the old courtyard to a small army of goblins all dancing to the music, some pointing huge Mag-lite flashlights up in the air as they did so like people in concerts used to hold up lit lighters and presently did cellphones.

            “Who built these places?” asked Mickey.

            “I don’t know,” Ethan replied. He had never known and probably never would.

            He cast his armor spell, which tinted orange any part of his clothing that could be tinted, and crept around the bottom of the motte in the old, dry moat filled with spikes that he could easily maneuver around. He passed the awkwardly blockaded southern entrance that was probably the original keep’s entrance well below sight and then moved up the west side. He moved to the absolute darkest part of the wall, leaned up over a break about shoulder height for him, and looked within.

            The music was mostly being sung and given a beat by their little feet but the goblins on some of the interior walls in the courtyard were playing instruments. They looked like they improvised them from non-instruments, guitars made with string strung from pans and the like, but they were surprisingly not so bad. They were all around and armed mostly with blades and clubs taken from kitchenware but a few had improvised guns made from pipes and wood, which made them out to be much cleverer than Ethan thought. Presently, they were dancing in their kiddy shirts, shorts, and dresses, sometimes with shoes, sometimes barefoot, all of them with pointed ears and green skin, all stomping, jumping, grooving and swinging. They moved in a surprisingly good rhythm to the words.

            Then suddenly, Ethan recognized the song.

            “‘We are, we are, we are, but your children! Finding our way around indecision!’” Their stomping went in perfect rhythm with beat of the song. “‘Rather helpless! Take us forever! A whisper to a scream!’”

            They spun around in a circle, boys with girls with one arm wrapped around the other, then stomped again, raised their weapons in their free hands revealing blades, clubs, torches and some, a very few, with improvised firearms made of pipes and wood.

            Then they half-sung, half-chanted, the words, “‘Whisper to a scream,’” five times.

            “Birds Fly” by The Icicle Works, thought Ethan and then whispered softly, “What… the… fuck…”

            They started over, the song’s first lyrics cried out by a single goblin with a red baseball cap holding a small kid’s guitar with “‘Love come down upon us till you flow like water,’” and the others began dancing again.

            Ethan looked for the woman who had screamed and saw she was being dragged up the remaining stairs of the keep’s tower. Raising his eyes up, he saw on the half-remaining floor thirty feet up, standing ahead of a pair of bright, burning torches was a female hobgoblin who hadn’t been there moments before, standing below a rope tied from the very top northern tip of the keep that reached down to a pole near the blockade in the south. It looked like a zip line made of hemp.

            He looked through Mickey’s eyes to get a better look at the creature standing there.

            Human-sized and proportioned but otherwise very similar to a goblin, the female hobgoblin’s round, black eyes were narrow with a hint of red, her black hair slightly curly and hanging down around her face and halfway to her waist. She was extremely sexy with large breasts shoved up in a tight, black corset under a white, low-cut shirt with short sleeves that revealed muscular arms and muscular legs wrapped in tight black pants tucked into knee-high black boots.

            She had a real rifle behind her back, a scoped Remington 700, holstered rather than strapped to keep her breasts unblocked. On her right side, he saw a black bullet holster, good for maybe twenty rounds or so and on the other, a longsword of unusual design, possibly designed by a hobgoblin blacksmith.

            As Ethan stared at her, shocked by how sexy she was, a second hobgoblin climbed over the wall behind her from what might have been a ladder and then moved up beside her.

            He was her male counterpart, attractive in a similar, masculine way, muscular in a lean kind of way, with short, black hair combed forward and hanging close to his eyes. He wore a sleeveless black shirt over a pair of dark jeans and heavy boots, armed with a sword, a dagger, and a Franchi Spas-12 shotgun with a bandolier of shells thrown over his shoulder.

            Ethan saw Mickey flying closer as the little goblins were dragging the female up the stairs toward that level.

            “Careful!” said Ethan in a hard voice. “If they see you, flee!”

            Mickey didn’t reply and he landed on a branch from a tree grown twenty-something feet tall from the side that extended just high enough so that he could look up and see the two hobgoblins next to each other and hear them speak over the sound of the singing below.

            Ethan, with some effort, could drown out the singing and hear the two of them talking through Mickey’s ears.

            “—and this is a fuck-stupid idea,” said the male hobgoblin. His voice sounded a little deep and guttural but in no other way sounded differentiated from that of a man’s.

            “You said you wanted Bartlett,” said the female. Her voice too was deep but in a feminine way. It reminded him a little bit of the way the actress Carrie Fisher spoke in Star Wars.

            The goblins dragged the sleeping bag to the hobgoblins and then dumped it at their feet.

            “Fuck off,” said the male. The goblins did without a word, eagerly rushing off down the stairs toward the others. “I don’t like this,” the male added to the female.

            “Victor,” said the female irritably. “He killed your brother and my husband. You want Bartlett or not?”

            The male frowned at her. “I’ll choose my time.”

            “And what time would that be exactly?” she asked as if deeply pondering a deep thought. “Is never a time?”

            He smiled in an ugly way. “His wedding day.”

            Joke’s on you, pal, thought Ethan. I’m never getting married in this fucking town. He wasn’t particularly surprised someone else wanted him dead. He had those Bellator women and now a hobgoblin. He would probably have more before it was all over. So, he added in his mind, The bastard by the tree had a brother.

            “I’d hurry, if I were you,” the female added with amusement.

            “Don’t tell me how to do my business, Deanne!” he snarled. “Arthur may been your breeder but I’m the warrior in the family! Death is my business!”

            The female sighed loudly and rolled her eyes. “I mean the wolf, you moron!” she retorted. “The wolf is coming for him!”

            “You don’t know that,” he told her.

            “Who else would it come for?” she retorted. “He killed Agatha Cane and now, suddenly, the werewolf is here? For the first time since, what, the nineteen-sixties. That can’t be a coincidence.”

            AC, Ethan thought and then thought about who Agatha Cane might be. It came to him quickly enough, the only woman who she could be. The only woman of seeming any importance that he had ever killed.

            The woman in the tower on his first day in Bartlett Bay.

            “I know about the nineteen-sixties wolf attacks,” said Victor. “My grandfather told me all about it.”

            Deanne shrugged at him as if to, “So what?”

            “Speaking of earlier generations,” Victor told her. “What the fuck are we doing with her?” He kicked the bag below and there was a feminine cry from within.

            “He’s been led toward her which means she’s important,” said Deanne and then her face darkened. “There’s a witch in these woods once more.”

            “There hasn’t been a witch in these woods since the old Tree Walker died and that was in, what, nineteen-sixty? Didn’t your grandmother spend her entire life trying to kill him only for him to die of old age before she could?”

            Deanne groaned in irritation. “All you do is complain!” she retorted. “If you want Bartlett dead so bad, why don’t walk out of the woods and fucking kill him! Just do it already! Live up to your manly bullshit, for goddamn once!”

            “Oh yeah, sure,” he replied bitterly. “I’ll just walk through a thriving human city right toward his house and murder him in broad daylight. Yeah, sure, I see no problems there.”

            “Try at night, dipshit,” she told him and then shrugged exaggeratedly. “Anyway, if he comes looking for this thing, we got him.”

            “We don’t got shit!” Victor retorted.

            “Oh no?” Deanne retorted.

            “This bitch is a fucking problem!” Victor told her. “What are you fucking thinking?” Deanne faced him with her hands on her hips. “Her friends are going to come for her.”

            “I’m keeping them lost in the woods. It’ll be fine.”

            Victor reached down and though Ethan couldn’t see it due to the angle Mickey was at, he could tell that Victor was tossing over the sleeping bag. He did something when the person inside was on her back and then stood up.

            “Look at her face, Deanne! We killed them! We killed all of them! We cut them to fucking pieces! If she’s back, so are they!”

            Deanne said nothing, her side profile looking bitter, and she made a gesture with her right hand above her. Above her, near where the zip line rope began, there was a cage made of wood and steel with bone spikes and a goblin standing near a crank hanging out above them.

            When she made that gesture, the little white-haired goblin, dressed in a small, black top hat, a black t-shirt advertising the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, and a pair of blue cutoff jeans, began turning the crank.

            As it did so, it lowered the cage down the rope and when it reached the platform, Deanne made a motion for him to stop turning the crank.

            Victor opened the cage while Deanne grabbed something from below, and then she lifted a woman out of the sleeping bag by her left arm. She then used her dagger to cut off her binds and then shoved her into the cage. Victor then closed and locked behind her.

            “Her face,” whispered Mickey in a gasp.

            “I missed it,” Ethan whispered back.

            The woman was slender, blond and wearing a short-sleeved, lavender-colored dress with long, lavender gloves. It had reached down to her ankles, beautiful and lovely, but it was alien and weird. Ethan needed Andrea Anderson to be sure, but the brief glance he got told him that she was not dressed at all like a normal girl.

            Deanne made another motion and the top-hatted goblin started cranking again. The cage then lowered down into the center of the courtyard where Deanne had the goblin stop cranking at about ten feet above the courtyard’s center above the dancing goblins who stopped everything.

            The silence was almost deafening as they all looked up at her.

            “Dance, bitch!” cried Deanne from above, her voice carrying easily to Ethan’s own ears in the silence. “Dance for the Goblin Kingdom!”
The girl stood up in the cage awkwardly but did not obey.

            Ethan stared at the much-closer woman in the cage with his own eyes and Mickey’s but for some unexplainable reason he could not see her face with either. He saw her long, blond hair and her dress perfectly, but her face was just a shadowy mask. It wasn’t natural and it was so glaringly obvious that it made him think of that episode of The Twilight Zone called “Eye of the Beholder.”

            Deanne took out her rifle, moved to the edge, and stared down at the woman in the cage. “Louise Marie Alcott!” she announced loudly. “The Woman without a Face!”

            Ethan blinked in surprise at the sound of that name. That could not possibly be correct.

            “Dance, Ms. Alcott!” Deanne called down. “Your audience awaits!”

            The goblins immediately began to look excited. “Dance!” they cried and then they began to chant, “Dance! Dance! Dance!” As they chanted, they stomped their feet in unison between each word, their mouths opening in huge grins revealing blackish-brown teeth that were sharpened to little points.

            Deanne pointed her gun down at her, one eye looking into the scope, and smiled. When she did, Mickey could see that her teeth were white and were more or less the same as a human being’s. “I said, ‘Dance.’”

            The woman in the cage turned to her, her hands holding onto the bars, and called out, “I can’t just—” The gun went off and Ethan distinctively saw a hole explode out of the woman’s left shoulder and blood behind her splattered the cage’s interior and several goblins below.

            The goblins the blood hit gagged as though it was filthy as feces while the others cheered. Ethan felt that gagging was odd since he didn’t think blood would bother goblins who were rumored to eat raw flesh.

            As for the woman that they called “Louise Marie Alcott,” she did not fall over, scream or anything. In fact, she hardly seemed to react at all and her hands didn’t even move off the cage bars.

            But she was deeply frightened. “Y-you shot me!” she whimpered. “You actually shot me—”

            “Want to get shot again, bitch?” asked Deanne, her rifle still pointing in Louise’s general direction. “If not, you had better dance and you had better dance well!”

            As the goblins began to boo and throw things at Louise, she awkwardly stood up and did an uncomfortable dance in the cage. Ethan knew the dance instantly, the Charleston, and despite being in the cage, it was clear that she was quite good.

            The real Louise Marie Alcott, who that woman could not possibly be, had been a trained dancer and would have been good at that particular dance.

            The goblins were certainly quite impressed. They stopped throwing things and the musicians played random musical sounds in connection to how she was dancing. It sounded surprisingly appropriate and the female goblins began to mimic her.

            Ethan’s name being said up near Mickey got his attention and he focused on that.

            “—Bartlett anywhere?” Victor gestured down to the cage below. “How do you know he’s even coming?”

            “The witch knows him and I saw him being used by her with the Frozen Man in my third eye. You remember that, right? When he killed your brother?”

            Victor frowned at her coldly.

            “She used him for the tree so why not with her?” Deanne replied.
“You and that fucking witch shit again!” Victor retorted. “I don’t want to get involved with any of that!”

            “Well, you fucking are!” hissed Deanne.

            “Why is this a problem?” he asked. “You said she was a teenage girl.”

            “It takes the females in my family decades to learn our power, Victor!” she replied. “The Tree Walker himself took decades! Everyone takes decades but her!” Deanne sneered at nothing. “This is my forest, Victor, and I’m not giving up my birthright to another so-called Guardian of the Woods!

            “She’s already cost us that fairy tree! Without the Frozen Man to distract those fairies, we’ll never again be able to get close to them!”

            Victor laughed. “Here you go again with your sad, sad tale of how you never got what you wanted.”

            “Fuck you!” Deanne hissed.

            “You told me she’s young,” he replied with a shrug. “What, you scared of a teenager?”

            “Bartlett is a teenager.”

            “I’m not scared of Bartlett,” he retorted simply.

            “Then why is he still alive?”

            “Because, as I told you, he’s in the middle of a human-infested city, you numb cunt!” He spoke as though she were an idiot. “That’s why my enemy is still alive, Deanne. Why is yours, who is out here in your woods all alone like every fucking weekend, somehow still among the living?”

            “Fucking idiot!” she replied. “Did I not tell you about how the Tree Walker left behind a lair full of spells and magical items for my kind? My grandmother and mother spent their lives trying to find it and now I know, just fucking know, that bitch got all of it on day fucking one and took every fucking bit of magic stolen from our kind as her own!

            “That is how she’s dodging me, Victor! With my magic! My fucking inheritance!”

            Ethan very much doubted the humans “stole” anything from goblins.

            “So who is she?”

            “I don’t know!” Deanne almost screamed. “I could see Bartlett perfectly but I can’t see her! I know she’s a woman! I know she’s young but she could be anyone!”

            “Is this just to thwart her?” asked Victor and Deanne looked at him. Mickey could see his face was deeply contemptuous. “You risking that gang of monsters on us just to annoy that human witch?”

            “Maybe, just maybe, since we’re all together and armed, this would be a good time to draw her out.” Deanne scoffed at him, walked over to the edge, and cried out the words, “Queen for a queen!”

            Louise and the goblins all stopped at once and then all the goblins began to stomp their feet in a beat. Ethan recognized it and his eyes grew wide. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he said very softly.

            It was the rock band Queen’s song, “We Will Rock You.”

            Louise didn’t seem to know how to dance to that and stopped uncomfortably, her shadowed head looking up at the tower above.

            Ethan felt that he should do something but he couldn’t imagine what it could possibly be. There were far too many goblins and for him to have even a chance, he would need to take out both hobgoblins and the regular goblins with guns. That would require perfection, several shots without missing anyone before they got to cover, and even if that did, it would only work if they scattered. If they rushed him instead, letting him unload whatever bullets and shells he had left, he would never be able to stop them or make it off that motte alive.

            Escaping was no option. If his journey behind them in the woods were any indication of their speed, he would never be able to outrun them.

            “What now?” whispered Mickey.

            “I need a minute to think. I need—” nothing came to mind “—something. I need, uh—”

            In the close distance, Ethan heard the sound of machine gun rounds. It hit the top of the tower and the goblin in the top hat screamed as a bullet hit him in the back and sent him falling over. He hit the platform the hobgoblins were on, bounced off, and fell to the ground below.

            That’s a Thompson! Ethan thought. A goddamn Tommy gun!

            “What did I fucking say?” roared Victor before Mickey flew off the branch and up into the air. He was already pulling out his gun and moving to the hole in the north where he came in.

            “She fucking did this?” shrieked Deanne. “I had them fucking lost but that fucking witch let them in!”

            The goblins with the guns rushed to the north side, the others looking nervous and half-panicked. Victor shoved off the shabby, wooden and leather ladder he had used earlier and pointed his rifle through it into the woods before.

            Ethan looked at the goblins, waiting for the sound of gunfire. He readied his pistol to shoot the rope the instant they started firing when there was a sudden, powerful, roar.

            It came from the side where the goblins had come in before. In the darkness, Ethan saw a gigantic, brown bear charging toward the wall. It leaped over the wall in the same spot the goblins came in before awkwardly, hit a wooden stage-like stand with several goblins on it so hard it exploded, the goblins flying away in several directions, and rushed across the courtyard.

            The goblins shrieked and scattered in every direction. They leaped through the openings on either side of Ethan, passing him by and never seeing him, their high-pitched voices crying out with, “Escape!”, “Run!”, “Bear!” and more as they sprinted down the hill.

            “You!” shrieked Deanne and pointed her rifle down at the bear.

            Ethan put his pistol through the opening in the wall and fired, his first shot slicing Deanne across her shoulder. She shrieked, jerked back, and then Victor appeared. He sensed right where Ethan was, raised his rifle, and pointed.

            Ethan fired three times, the first missing, the second taking the top part of Victor’s right ear, and the third scraping him across the side. It didn’t slow Victor down slightly and as Ethan jerked back, he fired his rifle.

            Part of the stone exploded near where Ethan’s head was and through Mickey’s eyes, looking down at the castle from above, he could see that both hobgoblins and were moving behind the cover of the tower’s partly still-formed wall near the torches.

            Down in the courtyard, the bear swung the claws on its right paw and broke the rope. When the cage fell to the ground, it shattered open in a burst of rust and wood. Louise, seemingly uninjured, scrambled out of the nearest opening to the south while the bear rushed to the nearest opening in the west.

            The hobgoblins jerked out of cover behind the tower wall but Ethan saw it coming through Mickey’s eyes. He unloaded his pistol at them as they did and they jerked back, a couple of shots maybe grazing them. North of Ethan, the bear jumped awkwardly over a break in the wall small enough for a goblin leap and then disappeared down into the forest below.

            As Ethan crept away down the wall toward the south, he dropped his magazine, caught it, replaced his pistol with another, and pulled back the chamber.

            “I know you’re out there, Bartlett!” Victor roared. “I’m coming for you and everyone you love!” Ethan said nothing. He moved quickly down the motte to the south in the direction of where Louise went. “Do you hear me, you bastard?”

            As soon as Ethan was down the hill, he charged toward the tree line.

            “Run away, human!” Victor’s voice called out. “Wherever you flee, I will find you!”

            Ethan disappeared through the trees, Louise possibly anywhere. “Where is she?” asked Mickey as he flew down near the branches near him.

            “Fucked if I know,” Ethan replied and he stopped. “She could be—” He turned his head and she was right there, rushing into the forest under a crescent moon. It wasn’t bright and her face was still pure black darkness. “Jesus!” he snarled. “How did you do that?”

            “Johnson,” she whispered softly. “We have to go.” There was more Thompson gunfire and some shotguns and handguns being fired off somewhere out there in the darkness.

            Ethan took her arm without a word and rushed through the woods.

            “Louise!” cried an unrecognized man’s voice. “You come back here, girl! I am not joshing on this! You come back here right fucking now!”

            He sounded stunningly close. Perhaps thirty feet away or less.

            Ethan moved as fast as he could, another awkward run through the woods, for a solid hour. As he ran, he saw the trees flickering again and wasn’t sure what to make of that.

            For the first thirty minutes of that hour, that man, and others, were keeping up. Ethan could not imagine how but he heard them in the woods and Mickey saw something moving through the trees behind them as he flew above the tree line.

            Gradually, they did get farther and farther away, but never far, exactly. Always, they seemed rather close and or gaining quickly.

            When he finally stopped, it was only because he could not sense or hear them. Of course, that could mean they had just stopped talking or were better hidden.

            Eventually, Ethan found himself in a grove covered in sweat, exhausted. Louise didn’t look tired to him at all and just stared at him.

            Ethan was in great shape but that adventure told him he clearly wasn’t in enough of a great shape. He was going to have to build some stamina to survive more nights like that one.

            “Thank you, Johnson,” said Louise.

            “What’s going on?”

            “I need your help to end my existence.”

            “That’s unexpected.” Ethan cast Sense Magic and saw the darkness on her face distort unnaturally. He stared at it for a moment and was about to cast his Torch spell to create a bauble of light in his left hand but before he did, she said something.

            “You don’t want to see my face, Johnny.”

            “Johnny? Who’s Johnny?”

            She shook her head and seemed to be smiling. “Johnson Benedict all grown up. I’m relieved it hasn’t been so long a time. You were around sixteen the last time we met.”

            A quick recall of Ethan’s family history reminded Ethan that Johnson was his great-grandfather. The one who had made the mistake of choosing Julian over his grandfather James and, according to some people, began the town’s downward spiral. “You’re joking.”

            “The fox told me someone would come and that this person would help me,” she said. “I never expected it to be you.”

            “Fox?”

            “He was an old man when we last spoke. It spoke in a different voice now. A young woman’s voice. Now she is the protector of the forest.”

            “I know who that is.” Ethan swallowed a lump down his throat. “But I don’t know who you are.”

            “It’s me, Ben,” she told him. “I really am Louise.” When he didn’t answer that, she added, “Louise Marie Alcott just as the troll said.”

            “Hobgoblin,” he corrected.

            “Do you not remember me? You had quite the crush on me.”

            Ethan swallowed. “Louise Marie Alcott died in nineteen-thirty-two,” he said softly.

            “How?” she asked strangely and, though he sensed she meant him no harm, there was something sinister in her tone. Something that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

            The Woman without a Face, Ethan’s mind recalled Deanne calling her. He swallowed a lump down his throat, looked at archaic clothing, and said nothing.

            The Hooper Gang consisted of six people when they came to Bartlett Bay. Raymond E. Hooper, their leader, Rod Carlyle, James Perkins, Bill Schroder, Nan Coop, and Louise Marie Alcott, who was the newest member and Hooper’s “girl.”

            There had been more but they were killed in late 1931 or early 1932 when a bank robbery in Minnesota went bad. Rod Carlyle, the reputedly most violent member of Hooper’s gang and a reputed psychopath, responded to a hostage trying to knock him out by shooting him in the chest. That caused a panic in the hostages and they ended up shooting half a dozen people.

            Somehow, the police had already been alerted and as they arrived on the scene, they heard the gunshots and either panicked or turned dark because they didn’t hesitate to start shooting. Three men, one of which was Arthur Coop, Nan Coop’s husband, were killed in that gunfight. So were several police officers and an elderly woman that Rod Carlyle used as a human shield when he rushed out.

            After escaping that, they needed to get out of Minnesota quickly. They were definitely on the run and of any number of random, unknown places that could have been picked they ended up in Bartlett Bay, CT.

            All that Ethan knew because he researched McDowell Gurney after the fairy tree incident and discovered that his personal disappearance in 1932 was directly connected to the Hooper Gang.

            The Hooper Gang had not been very good at keeping quiet. The incident that connected the affair to McDowell Gurney came when McDowell was caught flirting with Louise Alcott while she and Nan Coop were in a bar called the Green Lobster, which still existed down by the docks. Raymond Hooper had found out and there was an ugly fistfight down on the boardwalk, which McDowell won.

            Ethan could believe that. The man knew how to box, that was for sure.

            The Bartlett Town Library, which was apparently founded in the late 1700s and was just a few years short of beating the Franklin Public Library for oldest public library in America, had microfiche going back to the late eighteen hundreds. According to the Bay City Times, the town’s local newspaper, upon the later incident, Hooper had been overheard saying then, “I’m going to kill that bastard,” afterward. Therefore, when McDowell Gurney disappeared, and the gang’s identity as a murderous band of killers became known, it became quite plausible for the Gurneys to believe him to be responsible.

            The newspaper only briefly mentioned the second incident, Rod Carlyle’s attempted assault on Sally McCoy Simms. Ethan got the full story there from Sylvester a week after the fairy tree. She was his grandaunt and, evidently, a fun, plucky, flirty sort of girl, which Carlyle mistook for “easy.” When he made an aggressive move on her, grabbing her backside and pulling her close, she slapped him in the face and then her husband, Nate Simms, and Sylvester’s grandfather Bernard McCoy who happened to both be there at the Green Lobster that night, dragged the man outside and each took turns pummeling him into the ground.

            After that, Carlyle was out telling everyone he was going to burn out the Simms and notably the McCoys, the whole family, which was, historically speaking, a rather unwise move.

            At some point, someone put everything together and alerted the police to who the Hooper Gang was. Things were getting hot again and they would have probably left town but somebody, which the newspaper and Sylvester McCoy could not name, alerted the police to their whereabouts one day.

            By that point, McDowell Gurney had disappeared, believed then to have been murdered, and the Simms and McCoys, taking their threat seriously, had armed themselves accordingly.

            The Hooper Gang was going to see Red-Headed Woman, starring Jean Harlow, at the La Rapin Rouge theatre, called The Red Rabbit in modern times. Ethan had seen the new Evil Dead movie there and could easily picture what had happened.

            The gang was renting some place that no longer existed near the west end of Charlotte St. They went east along the road in three cars then turned right down Worthington Rd, moved along where the mall would one day be on their left, a wooden fence blocking a peach orchard then, but before they reached the theater, which was then at the southern end of that fence, the cops sprung their trap.

            Two trucks that had been parked along the side of the road, flew out, moved across the street vertically and parked themselves as blockades ahead and behind as the police and their deputies emerged from their hiding places with their guns drawn. A young police officer named Edmund Mallory had distinctively been heard to cry out, “You’re surrounded, Hooper! Give it up!”

            The police had been then a very small police force so they temporarily deputized a bunch of Gurneys, McCoys and Simms to bolster what was there. The Hooper Gang was well, and clearly, outgunned but Raymond Hooper had cried out an unexpected response.

            “I’m immortal, coppers! Do your worst!” He distinctively said that and it was repeated in verbatim according to the newspapers, Sylvester McCoy’s grandfather to his grandson and in a small entry about the incident in a book called, Gangsters of Prohibition by L. James Darrell, that Ethan ordered off Amazon when he found the library didn’t have it.

            Gunfire erupted everywhere, all parties agreeing that Hooper fired the first shot. It was a quick, brutal, violent bloodbath that had left a few policemen, two Gurneys and one Simms dead. Several were injured with Tom McCoy taking a shot to the leg and Nate Simms taking a bullet right through his left shoulder.

            Hooper and his men had emerged from the cars firing like madmen. They didn’t even try to escape or so Sylvester claimed. They just started firing off their weapons madly into the crowd of police and men that surrounded them on both sides.

            The newspaper claimed they were practically shot to pieces. As for the women, Nan Coop was shot in the car she was hiding in, likely on accident since the cars were practically turned to Swiss cheese as one of the men used it for cover, but Louise had gotten out earlier. She had rushed to a random police officer carrying a shotgun who was young, inexperienced and very nervous.

            When Louise rushed in his direction, he was one of the few who hadn’t started firing yet, which was likely why she ran toward him. When he saw her, he got nervous, stumbled backward, lost his footing and fell over. As he did, the shotgun rose high up into the air, and then, when it was pointed right at Louise Marie Alcott’s face, his elbow hit the ground and his finger pulled the trigger.

            “They unloaded enough bullets into Hooper’s gang and cars to make Bonnie and Clyde’s death look like a sniper kill,” said Ethan softly.

            “Who is Bonnie and Clyde?” she asked him.

            “It was you who contacted the police, wasn’t it?” Ethan said.

            “I want to be free of this!” she hissed at him and as she waved a hand over her face, the darkness faded and Ethan’s eyes grew wide once more. Even though he sensed he would deeply regret it, he cast his bauble spell at the light of a very weak candle and lifted it up to get a clear look at her face anyway.

            The left half of her face was normal, incredibly beautiful in fact, reminding Ethan almost uncannily of Scarlett Johannsson. The other half was a bloody, violent mess blown away right down to the bone. Her right eye was missing, he could see the remaining teeth on that side were shattered, and almost everything from her skull to her jaw was raw, bloody meat. The skull was blown open too and he could see that her brains had partly leaked out.

            Ethan’s eyes grew wide and then wider and then wider still. He no longer saw her, though, because something else just clicked home for him.

            The Charleston, the voice of his deceased mother said. Someday, you’ll see the dead do the Charleston. It was just one of the many weird and insane things his mother had told him in those later days before she died but she was a psychic and the coincidence of what he had just seen could not be ignored.

            Ethan quickly dropped his Torch spell and Mickey landed on a branch behind him. “Uh… how is she alive?” When Ethan didn’t answer, he asked, “Where is the rest of her face?”

            Ethan swallowed and replied with, “Last I heard, it was splattered across Worthington Road but that was eighty years ago.” Her one good eye, deep green, stared at him strangely, and then he saw the blond hair under her hat was curled in a way they only did in the 1930s.

            There was something about her appearance that was beyond imitation. No matter how accurate a movie presented itself to be in another time period, it never looked remotely as accurate as a film made in that same time period did. Even when that early film was trying to take place in a different period itself, it was still more of its own time than the film’s intended time. It was always missing that something that could not be imitated.

            Whatever that thing was, Louise Marie Alcott had it.

            “How are you walking around and talking?”

            “We’re running out of time,” she told him. “The fox told me you would destroy me if I gave you information on something you’re looking for.”

            Ethan’s back straightened. “And that is what?”

            “The source of my condition,” she replied. “A volume of the Book of the Damned.”

            It seemed as though the air got much colder. “I fucking knew Black Mary would not have the only one,” he said bitterly.

            Something about Mary Courtenay had always been private even as Walter Kent. Ethan knew in his heart that she would never share what was in her volume, maybe never even share its existence, and there were allegedly many volumes of that book, all written by men possessed by a demon, with most rumored to create Faustian-esque bargains for immortality as she had done.

            That man Sheldon, the one who kept Jessica Downs in a coffin for forty years, hadn’t aged. No doubt, he had access to such a thing. Ethan had thought at the time that maybe it had something to do with the magic he had seen by the tower but no. That was something else.

            There was definitely another volume of the Book of the Damned bouncing around Bartlett Bay somewhere.

            Ethan sighed. He just knew in his heart of hearts that he could not possibly have been so lucky as to have just stumbled into the one volume responsible for everything and be done with it already.

            “That book will bring you nothing but horror beyond your wildest comprehension,” said Louise with her one eye wide.

            “That’s why I’m going to destroy it.”

            “If I tell you where we found it, will you destroy me—” she stopped abruptly, her good eye moving from side to side. He opened his mouth to speak but then she held up one gloved finger toward his face and silenced him.

            After a moment, nothing happened, and she turned back at him.

            “You want to be destroyed but can’t do it yourself?” asked Ethan.

            “I’m connected to the others and I can’t commit suicide because he will not allow me to.”
“Ray Hooper.” Ethan swallowed a lump down his throat. “Are they all like you?”

            “Yes.”

            Ethan nodded soberly. Looking at her then, at her skin specifically, he remembered the Black Cats. If Hooper’s Gang got the book in the 1930s, maybe the Black Cats got it in the 1950s. They may have even cast the same spell although it seemed to have worked considerably better for them.

            “Ghoul,” he said and Louise’s back straightened. “Ever heard of a specific monster?” asked Ethan, thinking about what the Black Cats had spoken of. “Something a ghoul could contr—”

            “We are running out of time!” she hissed and her one eye grew wide. “They can sense me wherever I go and they are catching up!”

            “I need someplace for fire—” Alcott pointed to their left and there was a large, unlit bonfire set up there already, surrounded by stone and filled with wood “—Okay, that’s convenient.” He turned back to her and said, “Talk.”

            “A woman named Madge Michaeladis loaned it to us. She was living in that scary house called Beechwood at the time. I didn’t use the book, Ray did. He gave it back to her after he used it on us.”

            “I knew that old bastard was hiding something,” Ethan said bitterly. He never dreamed “something” would be a volume of the Book of the Damned, though. Clearly, he was smart enough not to use it.

            Ethan formed the ball of napalm in his hands and was about to throw it when she touched his arm. “We didn’t kill McDowell Gurney.”

            “Oh, I know that,” Ethan replied.

            “How do you know?”

            “Because I saw him die many years afterward and you would never believe me if I told you how.”

            She was still holding onto his arm, a tear filling up her remaining eye, and she said, “Did my mother believe I was his woman? I never wanted to go with him. She had to know that.” She sounded calm but there was a hint of desperation in her voice.

            “I read that the opinion on you was mixed but the newspaper in your hometown believed you had joined Hooper willingly as his hussy.” That was almost an exact quote according to L. James Darrell.

            “Please don’t tell me that.”

            “I’m sorry,” he told her and sighed. “Your mother never believed it, though. She felt you were kidnapped in Chicago by a murderer but she was unable to get your body returned to her and buried in the local graveyard. I read that she tried to convince your priest to relent and allow you to be buried with your father up until the nineteen-fifties but she never succeeded.” Her mother stopped in the 1950s because that was when she died but he didn’t tell Louise that.

            That made her cry and she hugged him tightly. He put his arm around her gently. She felt stiff, like a corpse, and when part of the right side of her face touched his, it felt very cold and gooey. “Tell my mother I wasn’t one of them! Can you do that for me?”

            “If I ever meet her, I will,” he told her honestly.

            “Thank you, Johnny,” she told him and kissed him awkwardly on the cheek, keeping her right side away from his. When she stepped back, she asked, “You do believe I wasn’t one of them, don’t you?”

            “I do,” he said honestly.

            He recreated the napalm ball in his hands and tossed it into the fire pit without looking. It lit her up completely and naturally, making the gore on her face look almost neon against his pasty white skin.

            “Are you sure about—”

            “You got what you need to know!” she whimpered suddenly. “I can’t tell you about the ritual! I can’t help you become immortal! Just do it! Do it now!”

            “Goodbye, Louise,” he told her. “May you find the happiness you rightly deserve in your next life.” He then grabbed her and tossed her into the fire before anything else happened. She held out her arms, falling into the flames readily and burning as easily as though she was made of wood.

            As she burned, he saw the relief fill her face and, when her one eye focused on him before it melted, it was filled with gratitude.

            It happened extremely fast, just as it had happened with the Black Cat, and she was ash mere moments later. Ethan thought that would be the end of it but then he saw something rising out of the fire. It was something like light but as Ethan looked upon it, he saw it was the image of what Louise had been. A blond, gorgeous, young woman who wanted to dance and sing and make a name for herself but had all her dreams stolen away by a psychotic who doomed her to die in Connecticut and then be cursed for eighty years.

            Thank you, a voice seemed to whisper in his mind and then, strangely, he sensed someone else. Mother… whispered Louise as she turned to face someone he couldn’t see but then she was gone forever, faded away like the smoke after a firework had been used.

            “Wow,” said Mickey. “She went fast.”

            “Did you just see that image above the fire?”

            “No,” said Mickey. “Was there one?”

            “I saw her and I think her mother was waiting for her. When I helped Grace, I had a dream where her father’s ghost thanked me. I dreamt he had been waiting for her and was deeply pleased I had given her, her life back. It was so real. It—”

            A man’s voice roared into the air not fifty feet away. It was of pure, unfathomable, berserk rage. Ethan said nothing then, backing away from the fire, and then moving through the trees away from that voice.

            A moment later, there was the sound of a machine gun being shot through the trees where he had just been, the screaming voice crying out, “LOOOOUIIIIIISE!” It began to repeat itself, each time more crazed, powerful, and enraged.

            Ethan and Mickey disappeared into the darkness and no one followed them.

 

*          *          *

 

            Becky heard the scream die off but not with her ears. It was out of range for those.

            When she used her powers to see its source all she got was the sight of a shadowy figure wearing a suit and hat like from the 1930s or in the woods somewhere, firing off a Tommy gun in all directions in some blind rage.

            There he is, she thought.

            While she was looking, the figure stopped suddenly. That made her very nervous because she suddenly had the unshakable feeling that the figure, and maybe the other shadow figures near him, could actually sense her. Nobody but another psychic could, or at least never had, but suddenly she was scared all the same.

            As the figure began to look over his shoulder, she fled.

            She took a deep breath and the others looked at her. “I’m good,” she told them and gave them an unconvincing smile.

            Becky, Matt and Darcy were all sitting around a small fire, talking about Ethan. Becky deeply regretted allowing herself to be talked into bringing Darcy and Matt. She wanted to be alone with Ethan, for one, and two, she wasn’t supposed to bring others into this thing.

            She just found it so hard to refuse Darcy anything, though. The girl was like a sister to her and one of the few friends she had growing up.

            “Ethan’s a trouble magnet, Becky,” Darcy had told her when she wormed out the fact that Becky was intending to go into the woods with him. “You’re not ready to play with him alone.”

            Fair enough, Becky supposed, but she had planned to try to seduce him on that trip, which she knew would be impossible with those two around.

            She heard a sound in the woods, looked over her shoulder, and saw a fox looking at her from the darkness. She made a “follow me” gesture with her head and then ran off.

            “I got to use the restroom,” Becky told them. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

            “Okay,” said Darcy and Becky turned around and wandered into the darkness for a bit, following the fox for about ten minutes until she came to the hut that she had been told would be there.

            As soon as the two of them went inside, the fox turned around and faced her.

            Its bones suddenly cracked and broke as it started to transform from a quadruped to a biped, its limbs and torso extending, its front legs turning arms and growing bigger. One paw turned into a hand and grabbed the old counter and its back made a crack sound as snapped upward. Its legs made multiple cracks as well and the creature stood up. Long, golden hair pushed out of its head as the fur within its body slipped into its skin and left it pale and smooth.

            It was fast, maybe a minute or less, before Judy stood there naked and covered in sweat. It looked to be far more fun than it was painful, possibly even orgasmic, and Becky felt certain it was the source of her incredible physique. All of her muscles were perfectly lean and visible everywhere to the point where she could pass for a professional athlete or fitness model. The sight of her naked made Becky instinctively jealous for a moment, as Becky’s own athletic regime had left her nowhere near as perfect.

            “That went so wrong!” Judy whimpered and looked for her clothes. “I told you to bring him alone!”

            “You don’t know, Darcy,” said Becky. “She’s like a big sister to me and she was worried about me. I have no real combat or woodland experience and she was certain I would die without her.”

            “Darcy despises me,” Judy replied unhappily as she grabbed her clothes.

            “She despises Lana,” Becky replied. After Judy put on her underwear and bra, she slipped on a white t-shirt and jeans and then sat down on the old bed there and began putting on her socks. “So what happened?” asked Becky.

            “I screwed up so badly,” Judy moaned. “I separated him from all of you but it took too much concentration and I kind of got him lost. I wasn’t paying strong enough attention to Louise and then a bunch of goblins found her in the hole she was hiding in.”

            “Goblins? That’s an unfortunate coincidence.”

            “It wasn’t a coincidence. The hobgoblin woman is a witch. Not like me but trained to be like me. She got some kind of sense of what I was up to and then beat Ethan to Louise while she slept.”

            Judy tied her shoes, ran her hands through her sweaty air and tied it in a ponytail behind her head.

            “They took her and put in her a cage in an old, ruined castle. All I know is that there were a lot of goblins and the only thing I could think to do was wait for her gang to distract the goblins and then turn into a bear and free Louise.”

            Becky wanted more details because she found everything very interesting but all she asked then was, “Did it work?”

            “Yeah, she got out, I saw Ethan do the job and he got what he needed to know. I’m going to rest for a little bit and then lead him back to your camp.” She looked around, found her cellphone, and looked at it. “It’s almost midnight, darn it.”

            “You should have just told him.”

            “With that werewolf out there, maybe you’re right. I think it might be hunting him.”

            “What’s with all the secrecy, Jude?” Becky sometimes called her “Jude” after the song by the Beatles song but Judy didn’t understand the “hey Jude” references she kept making.

            “I can’t have him prying into my magic,” Judy told Becky. “I swore to my predecessor who I thought of as a father and to the coven that I joined itself that no one but a witch, and member of my coven, could look upon those spells. He wants them badly, I know it, and if I asked him for this help, he might try and bargain with me in order to help Louise.” She sighed tiredly. “I’m basically all out of things I could actually give him but I needed him. I could never have killed Louise myself no matter how much it was necessary.” She sighed. “I could never kill anyone.”

            “If it’s such a big deal, why are you telling me all about those spells?”

            “You’re psychic. To you, they are less useful than a Chinese dictionary, and I’m only telling you. I’m not showing you anything.”

            “What happened out there exactly?”

            “Oh God, where do I begin?” Judy let out a breath of air and looked like she wanted to cry. “Oh God, I really should have just told him what I wanted—”

            “You should—”

            Both girls shrieked and Becky turned to see Ethan leaning on the window frame on the left end of the hut, his hawk resting next to where he was leaning.

            “—have,” Ethan finished.

            “Damn it, you’re startled me!” Becky hissed.

            Ethan laughed and said, “Some psychic, you are. You couldn’t predict a sunrise.” Mickey burst out laughing.

            “That’s not funny!”

            “It’s hilarious!” he replied and turned to Judy. “So, what’s the story, girlfriend?”

            “It’s complicated.”

            “Start with why you lead me to that hole,” he said.

            “I knew where it was because my master warned me about it so often and so did Louise because she was buried in there. It was easy to concentrate on.”

            “Cool,” he said and nodded soberly. “So, you know Louise?”

            “My master did. He swore he would help her but she was buried too close to the others and he was afraid of waking them all. He died before he could figure out a way around that. Once they were all out now, and she could be found alone, I was obligated to fulfill that oath.”

            “Ah, yeah, that makes sense, I guess.” Ethan looked at her with a sly look on his face. “So, I was wondering—”

            “No, you cannot see my book of witchcraft,” Judy told him sternly.

            “If it’s connected—”

            “It’s not connected to anything and you know it. My old master warned me about your kind. He used to be one of you.”

            “Men? Did he have a sex change?”

            Becky laughed but Judy just frowned at him. “Hedge mage,” she said slowly and then suddenly looked worried. “How long have you been watching?”

            “Long enough to know whatever exercises you’ve been doing have been paying off.”

            Judy whimpered miserably and covered her face.

            Becky looked at Ethan and didn’t need to be psychic to sense his eagerness underneath his calm exterior. Judy was right about him but it didn’t make him a bad person. It was just how magicians operated. Like a mountain climber enthusiast, they always wanted to find a new mountain to climb, and spells were his mountain.

            And Judy had one hell of a mountain as well. Transformation spells, controlling the forest, and God only knew what else. Becky had never heard of Ethan doing anything close to that level of magic.

            “How did you find me?” asked Judy awkwardly.

            “Suspicious bird,” Ethan replied.

            “I knew there was something about that bluebird.” He looked at her and then added strangely, “You should have been a hawk. Much cuter.”

            “You saw me in bird form and followed me,” Judy said tiredly.

            “Once I saw you turn into a fox, I had this crazy idea this was all going to lead me somewhere,” said Mickey.

            Becky smiled, held her left arm up, and Mickey flew on it. She started to pet him and his mouth opened in ecstasy.

            “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” said Mickey happily.

 

*          *          *

 

            “What do you see?” asked Darcy from her spot beside Matt, both lying on their fronts. They were between two trees in the dark staring at the open door of the hut that Becky had wandered into.

            Matt was looking through a pair of night vision goggles to watch whatever was going on. “Becky is having a conversation with Lana Creed and they look like friends.”

            “Not a fucking chance.”

            “Well, I’m pretty sure that’s Lana Creed she’s talking to, and Becky doesn’t look particularly mad. Also, Bartlett just snuck up and is talking to them from the left side of the hut.”

            Darcy took the goggles from him, looked through them, and scoffed at the sight of Becky there. She really didn’t seem as though she hated Lana. “You know, something’s been really off about that bitch since last Halloween.”

            “How off?”

            “Like seriously off,” said Darcy. “I heard she got amnesia or some shit but it’s more than that. She’s a totally different person and I mean totally. She is nice, gentle, sweet; basically the opposite of Lana.” Darcy handed him back the goggles.

            “You don’t think you’re overthinking that?”

            “She volunteered at the hospital.”

            “Well, that is pretty damn suspicious,” he admitted.

            “Fuck this spy shit,” Darcy said and stood up and started forward.

 

*          *          *

 

            “So why, exactly, can’t you show me your witch book?” asked Ethan. “We’re both magicians and those spells could be pretty fucking useful with everyone and everything, which some people think might include a werewolf that is trying to kill me.”

            “I knew you would get after me on this sooner or later. I saw it in your eyes when we were at the tree.”

            “I’m a European-style magician; you’re a European-style magician—”

            “Gosh darn it, this is never going to end!” Judy told him bitterly. “It’s for witchcraft and not the Christian kind. We are an ancient pagan race and we do not cast spells the way you do. It is a specialized magic past from mother to daughter and or protector to guard the forests and magical places. You couldn’t use that magic if you tried.”

            “That sounds a whole like something I’d have to learn the hard way,” he replied.

            Judy let a long, irritated groan. “It took my master twenty years to become a competent witch because, like you, he wasn’t born one. Twenty.”
“The hobgoblin said something about that,” Ethan replied. His face was calm but in truth, he was deeply eager to try those spells. He had nothing close to what she had. She could transform and control the forest in some odd way he couldn’t even understand and God only knew what else.

            Oh sure, it was technically “witchcraft” as she called it, but she was no witch doctor, whose spells were alien and involved complex African styles of casting. Her spells were as just European as his and he was deeply eager to see what he could do with them.

            “You will never be able to cast these spells right and I swore an oath to my coven!” she told him. “I’m never going to show my spells so drop it!” She tried to sound aggressive but it wasn’t in her nature and she turned gentle again. “Ethan, please, I—”

            “Stop,” said Mickey and when they looked at him, he gestured to his left with his wing toward the front door. They looked and saw Darcy stepping into the doorway. Matt moved up beside her a second later and that was a surprise.

            “Well, you’re pretty fucking good,” Ethan told Matt. “I should have heard you clinking and clanging a mile away.”

            “It’s a gift,” he said.

            “Had to go the bathroom, eh?” Darcy asked Becky.

            Becky rubbed the back of her neck uncomfortably. “Uh, hey Darcy—”

            “It’s fine,” Darcy said coldly. “Let’s go back to camp where there’s a fire.” She looked at Judy. “You too, Lana.”

            Judy swallowed and looked uncomfortable. Matt looked at her expression and Ethan saw his eyes narrow.

            “Let’s go,” Darcy said coldly. “And I’d like some answers, Ethan.”

            “And I would like a wild night with Salma Hayek,” Ethan replied.

            “Cute,” she told him and turned around.

 

*          *          *

 

            Judy sat down by the fire feeling very uncomfortable. Matt and Darcy were both staring at her in a scrutinizing way she found deeply unsettling.

            The others didn’t bother with the food that they brought that night because Matt could hunt and had hunted several rabbits, skinned them, and was presently cooking them over a spit he had made of wood over the fire.

            The act of killing animals was acceptable to Judy’s kind provided they were not for sport. The rule was to kill only for sustenance and never more than what was needed. Matt seemed to understand that instinctively when he hunted. A few careful questions indicated that the only animals he hunted for sport were the kind that had a habit of killing human beings.

            The Merricks really were crazy. She had heard about their exploits in her old life too, although, in that racist time, there had been more fear about their craziness than admiration.

            Gertrude Gurney was definitely frightened of them.

            Her father had assaulted a Merrick woman and according to various sources, he either raped or attempted to rape her after confusing her with a prostitute. Later that year, in 1940 something, she wasn’t sure of the exact year, he went on a hunting trip alone and disappeared. Gertrude was convinced the Merricks had something to do with it but no one could prove anything. Gertrude claimed the Merricks mocked them about his disappearance to their face.

            Judy had hunted herself earlier that month when she transformed into a wolf and joined a pack of wolves descended from the wolves that once roamed England. Although killing was impossible as a girl, it was stunningly easy as a wolf.

            The transformation was also a lot easier in her new body as well. In her old body, she was too overweight and the animal she transformed into shared an equivalence of her weight. It made swimming hard, running a chore and flying impossible. Her master, whose real name was Jefferson McCaffrey, claimed it would help her lose weight and though she tried it several times, it did not seem to work.

            He wasn’t wrong, though. In her new skinny body, everything was much easier and she could run, swim and fly with incredible ease, and it wasn’t too long before it showed. She looked like one of those athletic girls who danced around in bikinis on the internet, which was something she could never conceive of doing herself. Just thinking about it made her blush.

            She also deeply enjoyed the transformation. Roaming the woods as an animal was incredibly fun and it helped connect her to the forest she was tasked with guarding, which was very important for how her magic worked.

            She looked over at Ethan, bit her lower lip uncomfortably and felt incredibly guilty about using him. He was supposed to just find Louise waiting for her, talk to her, and burn her after getting the information but those goblins could have killed him. That made her feel as though she owed him something.

            Not her coven’s spell book, though. Never that.

            She hadn’t lied when she told him it wasn’t designed for him and it was old, centuries old, with spells added by other, older, wiser, witches over the years. She could never let any outsider see it, let alone have it. The failure to follow that rule was the reason jealous outside magicians, who had a taste of their power but no ability to grasp it, had begun to murder their race, typically using Church doctrine as their favorite pretext. That religious order that used to be part of it, what they called Unita Malefici Mundi or the Umm, had been pushing genocide on her people in hopes of getting that power.

            That book was their legacy and was most likely going to be given down to someone trained or with the gift, typically a daughter, who tended to have the gift more than males.

            Unlike McCaffrey, Judy had the option, and duty, of breeding natural witches, which made her deeply uncomfortable and even the thought of.

            Judy left her thoughts and listened to Ethan’s story. He was a very good speaker and he simply described the situation as though he stumbled on everything by accident, leaving her and the Book of the Damned out of it. He stated that he believed Louise might have summoned him somehow. It left a big blank on why Judy was there but for the moment, no one was talking about it.
Judy took the food given to her by Merrick on a stick, smiled pleasantly, and said, “Thank you very much.”

            He looked at her suspiciously when she said that but said nothing.

            Darcy stood up, walked over to Judy, and put her hand down on her shoulder. “Let’s talk out there in the dark all alone for a moment.”

            “Uh…” Judy swallowed. “I’m alright here—” She squeaked when Darcy lifted her up by her arm. “Uh, Ethan—” she squeaked in a scared, girly way as Darcy pulled her out into the trees. “Ethan!”

            “Darcy—” Ethan began.

            “I won’t hurt her, I promise,” said Darcy as she dragged her out through the trees but she didn’t sound like she meant it.

            Of course, Ethan didn’t stop her. Men never protected women from other women.

            Judy pointed back at the fire awkwardly with her free arm. “I, uh, really should go back!” she said a little too nervously. “I shouldn’t be out here!”

            Darcy said nothing and continued to pull her back toward the hut.

            “Why are we going there?”

            “It’s as good a place as any for something to end,” she said softly so that anyone by the fire listening could not have heard.

            “What does that mean?” Judy squeaked fearfully but Darcy didn’t reply.

 

*          *          *

 

            “So what did that look mean?” Ethan asked Matt as Matt tossed him Locust Reign brand beer from a six-pack he had brought.

            “Lana seems a little more polite than normal,” said Matt as he opened his own beer. “I’ve never seen her thank anyone and she’s pretty goddamn racist besides. My little sister nearly broke her jaw when Lana called her the N-word. Would have if it wasn’t for her bitch-lawyer mother.”

            “The N-word straight to her face? Ballsy.”

            “Understatement. You’ve never met my sister. She’s as hardcore as the rest of us.”

            “Is she cute?”

            “I’m not hooking you up with my sister, Bartlett,” he said coldly.

            “You know I’m a multi-millionaire, right?”

            Soberly, he added, “In that case, I’ll consider it.” Becky burst out laughing.

            Matt smiled a little but then, very quickly, his face hardened and he said in a hard voice, “I heard about Ronald and the witch and the gingerbread house.”

            “I was wondering when you were going to get that.”

            “What was she like?”

            “Invincible. I cut her head off and it came right back. I know you don’t believe me.”

            “So the twins came back to town afterward,” said Matt. When he said that, it seemed suddenly clear to Ethan that he knew more about what was going on with that witch than Ethan did.

            “What do you know about that?”

            Matt looked at him and seemed thoughtful for a moment as if he was deciding whether he could trust Ethan or not. “Ronald is my great-granduncle,” he said in a strange voice. “That witch murdered my cousin and left her brother fucked in the head.” Matt’s hands closed for a moment so tightly his knuckles cracked. “And I’m going to kill her for it.”

            “She’s not a witch,” said Becky and they both looked at her. “The creature you’re talking about. She’s not a witch.”

            “She’s a hag,” Ethan said.

            “Could you find her again?” asked Matt.
“I’m not sure. I saw the house somewhere else earlier so I think it might move.” Ethan shrugged. “I don’t know. They probably only sent me because you weren’t there.”

            “They would have probably sent us both since magic was involved,” Matt told him and then, in a cold voice, he added, “That hag wronged my family, Bartlett. Now that I know it’s still here, I’m going to find it.”

            “I don’t think it can die,” Ethan replied and then added, “Do you think it’s odd that the twins’ grandfather made her family move back to Bartlett Bay?”

            Matt’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. I do.”

            “Me too,” Ethan replied and the two, without a word, raised their beers and drank.

            Becky looked back over her shoulder and said, “I wonder what the girls are up to.”

 

*          *          *

 

            Darcy pushed Judy into the hut and stepped inside afterward.

            “Don’t hurt me, please,” said Judy. She felt awkward because she knew if even half the things she heard of Lana doing were real, Darcy would be completely justified in doing all sorts of cruelties upon her.

            Darcy looked right into her eyes and said one word. “Crackers.”

            “Uh… what?” Judy had no idea what to say to that. “You want crackers? Like the food? Like a parrot?”

            Darcy looked into her face again for a long time and then straightened her back. Then she stiffly held out her hand. “My name is Darcy Hamilton. Who the fuck are you?”

            Judy swallowed a lump down her throat and her eyes filled with tears. She wasn’t sure if it was because she was scared or because she was relieved. “It’s—complicated.”

            “So you don’t know the name of my pet rabbit you murdered on the day I brought him in for Show and Tell and now you cook for your father and sister and volunteer at the hospital. I heard about the pie.”

            “It was for his birthday and volunteering looks good on medical college applications,” she said uncomfortably.

            “Lana could lie well but she was very lazy. She never had the energy to pull off a lie this elaborate. Even if she did volunteer to try to fool people, she would screw it up somehow or wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long. You’ve been doing that for months and people there love you. Who are you?”

            “My name is—” she swallowed “—my name was Judy Aberdeen.”

            “Was?” Darcy raised one eyebrow.

            “I’m not Lana’s long-lost twin sister, if that’s what you think,” she said awkwardly and then she just told her almost everything including the Other she knew was coming for her one day. She wanted Darcy on her side and, because she respected and liked her, wanted her to be her friend as well. All she had in the world who knew her true identity was Ethan, Becky, and her new sister Sarah, but she wanted more. She found the way people looked at her when they thought she was Lana Creed made her feel deeply sad because they genuinely hated her and she just as genuinely didn’t blame them.

            She also knew Darcy would be very helpful in the fight that was coming. Ethan would be equally useful but for some inexplicable reason that Judy could not explain, she felt absolutely certain the Other would never appear when men were around. When that fight finally came, it was going to be between her and her female friends alone.

            Judy even told her about why she was talking to Ethan and that she was a witch, which she figured she would figure out soon enough anyway. When she was done talking, Darcy said nothing and just stared at her strangely.

            “I think I believe you,” Darcy told her after a moment.

            Judy burst into tears and wrapped her arms around her. After a moment, Darcy hugged her back.

            “So Ethan knows everything?”

            “Yeah. He can keep a secret.”

            “Oh that I believe,” she said and her voice had the tone of irritation to it.

 

*          *          *

 

            Judy sat back down and Becky gave her a “you told her” look the instant she saw her face. Judy shrugged in response and Becky sighed.

            She liked being the only one who knew my secret, thought Judy.

            Darcy slapped Ethan on the back of the head as she sat down and then gave him a dirty look. He looked confused and she mouthed the word, “Judy.”

            Ethan shrugged and Darcy rolled her eyes and looked back at the fire.

            “Something going on between you two?” asked Matt.

            “Girl stuff,” Darcy replied and she shot a thumb at Ethan. “This idiot’s involved.” She gave him a cocky smile. “He’s one of the girls.”

            “Until you need money, something fixed or someone to die first,” Ethan said with a similar smile. “Then I’m a man again.”

            That made her laugh and she leaned up against him. Judy thought Darcy really did like him but she was pretending she didn’t for some reason.

            Why do girls do that? Judy wondered. She never did but perhaps that was because no boy ever liked her before and so she suspected that she perhaps overvalued male attention. Such pretense was probably a luxury only pretty girls had.

            “Wait a minute,” said Darcy. “Where’s the bird?”

            “Right here,” said Mickey. He was standing on the ground next to Ethan. “Why?”

            “Did you follow us?”

            “Nope.”

            “Uh-huh,” she replied and then turned to Matt. “Was he here while we were gone?”

            “Nope.”

            “I was in a tree!” Mickey stated.

            “No, you weren’t,” Matt replied.

            “He’s good,” Ethan said with a nod. “Great situational awareness.”

            “It’s what keeps us Merricks alive in the most terrifying lands on Earth,” Matt replied.

            Mickey grumbled, flapped up onto Ethan’s shoulders, held the meat with his weird little arms and started eating.

            “He has arms?” asked Matt incredulously.

            “It’s a familiar thing,” said Ethan. “He’s still a bird, though, and he doesn’t usually use them. Mostly it’s for convenience.”

            “It’s weird as hell.”

            “Bite me,” said Mickey.

            Judy smiled at them and felt at peace. She felt happy and among friends and she leaned up against Becky who leaned back against her. She listened to them talk, joke and laugh, Becky drinking beer and giggling and flirting with Ethan, and it felt good to just be there and be among them.

            When it came time for sleep, Ethan used his dagger to carve ruins around his orange sleeping bag, stating that it was a ritual called “Protection,” that kept things like snakes and rats from getting close to him. Becky put her bag next to his and snuggled against him, smiling flirtatiously at him, but he wasn’t reacting to it. She couldn’t tell whether it was because he was uninterested or was just dense and neither could Becky.

            Judy smiled at that, snuggled into her own blue-colored sleeping bag, which she usually didn’t use because she could sleep in animal form, and drifted into sleep.

 

*          *          *

 

            The next morning, they found the blue roses they came for and picked a bunch of them. Ethan seemed more pleased by them than the others did and Judy watched him with a strange smile on her face.

            Becky’s lips tightened together when she saw her looking at him like that. “I know that look,” said Judy.

            “What look?”

            “That look,” she told her with a smile. It was jealousy but she had never seen it aimed at her before in all her life.

            Becky turned away and was shocked to find Ethan had walked up to her and was holding a rose under her nose. “A rose for my Lady Greensleeves?” Becky took it and blushed as she held it under her chin. She gave him a very cute, flirtatious smile he didn’t seem to regard as out of the ordinary.

            “Thank you,” she replied. “Who is Lady Greensleeves?”

            “She is the unresponsive desire of a love-struck courtier in a song called ‘Greensleeves.’ It goes all the way back to the Elizabethan period. Some think Henry VIII wrote it but they’re wrong. I would remember that song if I ever heard it.”

            Becky bit her lower lip and smiled at him.

            As they walked, the others talked casually and Judy listened to them. Mostly about normal life things. Politics, what they’re doing next week, etcetera, etcetera. “You want Mandy’s after this?” Ethan asked at one point.

            “Definitely,” Darcy told him.

            “They really like you there,” said Becky.

            “I saved the owner’s daughter last year,” he told her. “Also, I’m restarting the fisheries so the price of shrimp is going to drop exponentially for them and they’re going to put a bunch of old recipes back on. They’re really stoked. Remember that word? I’m bringing it back.”

            Becky clutched Ethan’s arm as he walked. “I want to go dancing!” she told him. “Take me dancing!”

            “Oh I would love to take you dancing but there is a problem,” Ethan replied.

            “And that is?” she asked, smiling up at him.

            “There are only two kinds of men who dance. Men like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly who are amazing dancers and those, like myself, who find dancing as physically painful as walking on broken glance.”

            “You jerk!” she told him. “Men danced all the time in Henry VIII’s court.”

            “Well, you got me there, but women were a lot more awesome back then.”

            “Take me dancing, jerk.”

            “Make me a sandwich and we’ll talk about it.”

            Everyone burst out laughing and Judy walked alongside them, listening to the playful back-and-forth banter between Ethan and Becky. Friends, Judy thought. I have friends for the first time in my life.

            She took a deep breath and for the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, she felt at peace.

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