Into the Woods (65 page)

Oh God. Insanity runs in families
. “I’m crazy, just like my mother.”

In a motion of grace, Penn stood. She froze as he moved to her, his feet placed on the hard wood toe first, silent. The wind gusted, and he sat before her, close enough to touch. “Crazy?” he whispered, and she could feel the cool of the woods in his breath. “Lilly, you are too old to believe without knowing first. You are too wise, too beaten by ugly-minded men to draw me to your innocence long lost. But you ache like a newborn woman wanting the perfection she deserves. I heard you. I came.”

His hand rose, and she backed away, her feet numb in the cold. “Don’t touch me.”

“Too scared to run in the field, too timid to swim in the river.”

“Shut up!”

“Too old to learn how to love a man beyond his faults.” Unbothered, Penn did slow handsprings to the end of the bridge, eyes sparkling as he met her gaze. “And men are all flawed, aren’t they? I warn them. I warn all young women, but they never believe. I don’t need to warn you. You know it twice over. I see it in you. Betrayed. I’d never have done that to you. I’d never betray Meg.”

Oh God. Meg. Em.
Why hadn’t she listened? But it had sounded . . . delusional. “Leave my girls alone.”

Penn lay down on the bridge, his arms behind his head as he stared at the sky. “Then you
do
believe in me.” His smile was chilling. His build had changed, his shoulders widening and his jaw carrying the first hints of maturity, and a hint of a gold stubble glinted in the moonlight. “Your mother was beautiful. I can see echoes of it in you, and waves of it in Meg.”

His voice was deeper. Fear moved Lilly, and she splashed closer. “You will not touch my daughters!” Penn said nothing, and flustered, she added, “Why are you here?”

Penn sat up, his clothes catching the moonlight like still water as he spread his arms wide as if to take in the world. “Everyone has to be somewhere.” Stretching out again on his side, he leveled his amber eyes with hers, glinting with challenge. “Run with me. I know a tree where fireflies gather every year. They’ll shine like stars for you. I can show you. You will run without tiring, Lilly, if you run with me. Remember running without tiring? The moonlight a river in your lungs, your bare feet hardly touching the ground as the darkness opens and closes behind you? Run with me.” He reached to touch her face, and she pulled back.

Oh God. A young girl could never resist this. “You are cruel.”

Penn smiled all the wider, his teeth white and catching the light. “I am life at its strongest, and life is cruel.” Shifting his body, he leaned in as if to tell her a secret. “It is exhilarating—if you live it right. It’s not too late. You are beautiful, Lilly, your scars becoming. Exciting. I like them. You’re not like anyone else who can see me. You . . . might understand.”

The masculine scent of him was rising between them, familiar but promising something new. A shiver ran though her, and Penn’s smile widened upon seeing it.

“Oh, you long to find out. It glows from you like an ache. Come with me. Live.”

She shook her head but didn’t pull away. She felt so young with him. It was a false feeling, the only one that was keeping her sane. “What do you want?” she asked, and he blinked.

Slowly he sat up, and moonlight fell between them. “I live as a spirit, though I feel the ache of having had flesh once,” he said, and Lilly levered herself up onto the bridge. “The gods took my soul from me when I disobeyed them, giving me the power to feel the world only when I existed within a tree, hoping that I’d stay in one. It’s a sad thing, to feel only what comes your way. I want to be whole again, not just for a night, but forever. I need a soul.”

“That’s why you like women, not men,” she guessed, and Penn blinked, clearly surprised.

“Oh, I like you best,” he said, his voice deepening even more as he looked her up and down in an entirely new way. “Yes. Women have the power of creation; they are lesser goddesses, though they know it not, believing the lies that men tell. A soul is pure creation energy, and only a woman, even one just born, can divide a million times and never be less, only more. I want a soul, Lilly. I want freedom. Is that wrong?”

She drew back into herself as he put a hand between them and leaned in, the heat of him giving her goose bumps. His copper hair was a thick wave and his muscles had taken on the weight of maturity, of strength. He was becoming what she wanted, and she couldn’t help her fascination.

“I want the freedom to go anywhere, do anything,” he whispered. “You have everything, and you do nothing with it! My penance is to be without a soul until a woman gives me one anew. But only the young ever see me.
Until you
.”

“What would you do?” she asked, and his artless guile fell from him.

Putting a finger to his lips, he drew away, pulling himself up to crouch on the balls of his feet before her. “Such a question. Let’s run to the middle of the field and stop for a time. There are ways to make the moon move slowly. I will share them with you.”

Fear slid through her as he extended a hand for her to rise. She had sacrificed so much, and for what?
It would be so easy . . .
This was no angel, but a demon. “Did you kill the man my mother found?” she asked, and Penn slowly stood, his hand dropping to his side.

“No.” He looked older, thirty perhaps, but a lean, confident thirty, and her lips parted when she recognized Kevin’s youth in him. “The boy with her did.”

Stunned, Lilly blinked up at him.
Kevin’s dad?

Penn shrugged, moving with a dancer’s grace and looking more and more like Kevin with every step. “He thought it was me talking to Em, and the boy killed the man as your mother watched.” Lean and slim, he turned sideways, the light catching the glint in his eye. “He meant to save her, but the guilt pinned her to the earth to die. She grew old, just as I warned her. But it’s not too late for you.”

Horrified, Lilly touched her mouth, turning where she stood to look at the silent farmhouse behind her. She jumped, startled when Penn sat down beside her, the scent of a frog-rimmed pool flowing over her.

“Why do you sully yourselves with unfaithful men? This is why you mourn, Lilly—no man can be true to a goddess. But I’m not a man. I know the patience of the winter, the glory of the spring. I will be true where mere mortals cannot. You ask too much of them, then weep when they fail you.”

His breath on her cheek made her close her eyes. The unsaid promise was there, and something in her responded, wanted it even as she knew it was a lie.

“Run with me,” he whispered. “That’s all I ask tonight. No more than that. It will bring you alive. Remember being alive? Aching for something you know is there and willing to give all to have it?”

Frightened, she pulled from him, shivering as his hand hung a breath from her jawline, almost touching. Eyes widening, she rose, backing up until she found the earth again. Penn stood in the middle of the bridge, waiting for her.

“Run with me,” he asked again, a hand outstretched.

“No.” It was a harsh croak of denial, and her breath came fast as he looked past her to Meg’s dark window. “No!” Lilly cried out again, this time in fear for her daughter, and from inside, Pepper began to bark.

When Lilly looked back, the bridge was empty.

Parental instinct turned her back to the house. Within three steps, she spun and took five more to the bridge. She had to stop him. She had to save her daughter. Meg would run with him. She would go with a sun-brown boy who smiled and dared her to climb to the top of a tree to see the butterflies beyond. She would give him everything he asked to keep him with her. She would believe. And she would be tossed aside when he got what he wanted.

All but crying in her frustration, Lilly stopped at the foot of the bridge, her arms wrapped around her middle, not knowing what to do.

Perhaps it was time for her to believe as well.

FOUR

T
he sun wasn’t up yet, but the air had grown transparently gray, hinting at it. Lilly lay in her bed, listening for the bedsprings in the room next to her. The palest blue slipped in around her curtains, and only the crickets marred the silence. Soft and easy, her breath slipped in and out of her as she waited, her mind calm and at peace. Her mother had risked her life for her. Once was enough. She would not allow her to do so again. If Penn was real, then she’d trap him. It wouldn’t be with a dead chicken and a fairy-tale poem, either. There was dynamite in the barn, and caves in the hills. But first she had to slip her mother’s apron strings.

The click of Pepper’s nails on the hardwood floor jolted through her, and Lilly jerked at her mother’s soft admonishment in the hall downstairs. Cursing, she flung the covers aside and rolled out of bed. Somehow her mother had gotten up without shifting the bedsprings, and as she flung on her clothes, she watched out the window for her mother’s hunched shadow headed for the barn.

Rugged pants, thick socks, and a short-sleeve button-down shirt would keep her safe from the cave’s jagged edges, and if all went well, she’d be back before it got hot. Opening her door, she listened, hearing nothing from downstairs. Lilly felt like a teenager as she snuck to the top of the stairway, touching her daughters’ door in passing. They would be safe after today, one way or the other. Lilly eased down the stairway, avoiding the creaky steps and freezing when the squeak of the front porch’s screen door split the silence. Pepper’s soft whine followed.

Moving faster, Lilly paced into the kitchen, giving the golden lab a pat as she looked out over the sink, through the window and to the barn. He mother was striding to the barn, another big knife in her hand and a canvas sack. “Either she’s crazy, or I am,” Lilly whispered, but the memory of Penn reclining on the bridge, staring up at the stars was too real, the breath of his words on her cheek too heavy, and the scent of his wild spirit too thick in her.
How could any girl see his snare?

Lilly snatched up a biscuit from last night’s dinner, and taking her floppy hat at the last moment, she gave Pepper a pat, telling her to stay. Then she dropped another biscuit into the dog’s bowl to distract her as she eased the porch door open and slipped outside.

The sky was a perfect pale blue, shading to orange and pink at the horizon over the fields and the unrisen sun. Cool and humid, the morning breeze brushed against her as Lilly crept down the porch steps. Her mother was almost to the barn. Heart pounding, Lilly waited until her mother tugged the tall door open, then she jogged after her, breaking a spiderweb as she ran under the apple trees.

Her pace slowed as she got closer and heard her mother inside. Breath held, she halted at the door, ear to it as her mother muttered over which hen hadn’t been laying properly. Fingers trembling, Lilly eased the barn door open and went in.

The darker gray of the barn smelled like hay, familiar and welcoming. Looking up at the cupola as her eyes adjusted, Lilly squinted at the soft cooing. Her mother was already in the converted chicken coop, and Lilly pushed herself into motion. The door to it was a thick heavy pine, the latch old iron.

The snick of the simple lock sliding into place was hardly audible, and Lilly backed up at the sudden sliding sound behind the door.

“Lilly?”

Mouth dry, Lilly clasped her hands before her like a scolded child. “I’ll be back in an hour to let you out, Mom.”

“Lilly!” It was stronger this time, and Lilly edged to the big barn door and the scrap of gray morning showing. “Lilly, let me out of here right now! I am not crazy. The girls are in danger!”

Lilly’s breath caught as her mother rattled the door. She might get out by crawling through the chicken door, but it wasn’t likely. “I believe you.” Her mother swore, and Lilly backed up even farther. “Mom, I don’t want you to be hurt anymore. I’ll take care of Penn. It’s my turn. You protected me, and I’m going to protect Meg and Em. Take care of the girls if I don’t make it back.” Oh God, she was going to blow up the mountain.

“Lilly, let me out of here!” her mother cried, pounding on the door to make the latch rattle. “You don’t know how evil he is. I don’t want you to have to pay that cost! Lilly? Lilly!”

But she was walking away as if in a dream. The two sticks of dynamite were right where she’d seen her grandpa leave them, wrapped in a cloth and tucked up in a hole in the barn. They’d been left over from when her great-grandpa had shifted the stream that now ran around Rock Island to bring water closer to the house and dry out a neighbor’s field.

“Lilly!”

The banging on the door was almost unheard as she left the barn. In the yard, chickens darted out of the coop with a flustered agitation. She wasn’t going to take a chicken, and she wasn’t going to take a knife. She was going to lure Penn into a cave and blow up the opening. Her mother said he couldn’t move through solid rock, so it should hold him.
What if it didn’t?

Thoughts of her daughters alone in the house kept returning again and again as she trudged into the woods, following a path she’d often taken to meet Kevin. Bitter memories of Kevin mixed with worry for her children, pounding up through her in time with her feet on the earth. How could she have just left them? Wraith by moonlight, hunter by day, the singsong went. He could lure them away from their beds, or attack them as a wolf. What was she doing out here?

Fear pushed her into a faster pace until she was almost running, weaving through the woods as if she were a deer, taking small fallen trees with a jump and using her momentum to swing around trees. The explosives bumped her with each step, smelling of barn dust and reminding her of her risk. The wind of her passage whispered in her, tugging her hair and caressing her cheek. Angry, she pushed aside her thoughts of Penn. He was a lie, like all the rest.

The sky was bright with a false dawn as she found the steep climb to the opening of the cave that she and Paul had found while marking out the lines of the farm. It was a dry cave. Even the bats didn’t use it.

Squinting at the top, Lilly shifted the sticks of explosive and started up the rude path. There were poles rammed into the earth to provide handholds, remnants of her innocent, trusting past. She and Paul might have found the caves, but it had been she and Kevin who had used them as a romantic hideaway.