Page 24 of Beyond the Cottage (After the Fairytale #1)

Chapter 24

C rickets chirped outside the open window. They paused when a bullfrog croaked. An alligator answered with a groan, which silenced the frog and set an owl hooting.

Gretta tied knots in her hair with one hand.

She scratched a mosquito bite until it bled.

She picked at a tear in her camisole and scolded herself for making the hole bigger.

The bottle of dandelion wine kept calling to her, and she’d almost caved before deciding she ought to keep her wits about her. Sneaking the wine would also make it harder to stay awake.

Heaving a sigh, she read her pocket watch by moonlight—six minutes had passed since she'd last checked it. Her wine buzz had completely faded, allowing the night’s absurdity to fully settle in.

Gretta Fairleaf, professional witch hunter and all-around curmudgeon, not only camped on a witch’s sofa, she’d fraternized with the woman. While drinking her booze. And cheating at her card game. Philip would laugh his ass off.

Thinking of Philip only made Gretta feel worse. While she’d been kicking her heels up with villains, he and Brand had probably been out looking for her. Hopefully their search hadn’t gone too far-flung. She wanted to leave for the capital as soon as her boots landed in Antrelle, and if she and Ansel left early enough, they might make the afternoon train. That was, if he quit being stubborn and got on board with her plan.

Ansel shifted on the floor.

“Are you awake?” he asked, voice raspy.

“Out like a light.”

“I can’t sleep either.” His clothes rustled as he turned to his side. “Tell me something about your life.”

Gretta drummed her fingers on her abdomen. She should have known joining his card hustle would make him chummy. Then again, she’d had more than her fill of silent pondering.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Tell me about living in the capital. How did you end up there?”

She considered lying, but why bother? “I moved out west first, when I was seventeen. That’s where I met Nat. I followed him to the capital when he got elected.”

“Do you like it there?”

“I guess?” She liked the city itself. The people, however…

Ansel propped his head on his hand. “How did you and the senator become acquainted? A politician and a witch hunter strike me as unlikely friends.”

“I wasn’t a hunter back then, and he wasn’t a senator. We were both active in a somewhat…fringe political movement.”

“Fringe how?”

“Nat used to be a pretty radical anti-witchcraft activist. Before he went mainstream, anyway.” She didn’t try to hide the bitterness in her voice.

“I take it you disapprove of the transition?”

“Politics makes people soft. He spends more time campaigning than fighting witches.”

“Do you dislike working for him?”

Gretta hesitated. “The job is fine. Great, actually. It’s what I was meant to do.”

“Killing witches.”

“ Yes .”

Tension rolled off him, but he was smart enough not to comment further. “So you struck out on your own when you were seventeen. That’s rather young, especially for a pixie.”

“Yeah, well. You know how my parents were. It only got worse after the cottage.”

“What happened?”

Gretta watched a gauzy curtain flutter in the swamp breeze.

She didn’t like talking about her family. As the only child of two socialites, she’d been little more than a prop before the cottage. After, when she developed behavioral problems and couldn’t stand to be confined indoors, her parents had had no idea what to do with her. They’d tried locking her in her bedroom, which only escalated her hysteria, then they’d shipped her off to a boarding school that specialized in corporal punishment. Gretta ran away in her final term. She hadn’t been home since.

“They didn’t know how to handle me,” she said. “To be fair, I was a little shit.”

“So was I. My father kicked me out when I was sixteen, after I got too big for him to…well. To deal with.”

She frowned as she remembered the belt scars on his back and the old cigarette burns on his arms. His mother had died when he was a baby, so he never had anyone to protect him from the old bastard. Neglectful as her parents were, they’d never personally doled out violence.

She tilted her face toward him. “What happened to your dad?”

“He died a few years ago.”

“Good riddance.”

“I heard the booze caught up to him. To this day, the occasional glass or two of wine is all I’ll drink.”

“I bet that goes over well at your clandestine evildoer get-togethers.”

“It gives me an edge,” he said with a half-smile. “While my colleagues are passed out beside a bottle, I’m quietly taking over the world.”

Gretta snorted and recalled their conversation on the boat. “This afternoon you said you were even shadier back in the day. What did you get into before slinging dust?”

Ansel rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. Gretta quietly waited for him to answer.

“I started out by running bootleg moonshine up and down the bayou,” he finally said. “When my employer discovered my aptitude for chemistry, he promoted me to cooking paradisium. I took over the business after he died.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded once.

“Damn,” she said. “You won’t drink three glasses of wine, but you were a drug dealer?”

His body went rigid. “I’m not proud of it, Gretta. And I quit after Isobel rescued me from the swamp.”

“When did you begin your life of crime? As a kid, you were so…”

“What? Passive? Weak?”

“No. Nice.”

He looked away. “I didn’t jump right into that life, it took time. I was distracted for a while.”

“By what?”

“Looking for you.”

Gretta’s breath caught. She propped on an elbow and stared at his profile. “You looked for me?”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “For about three years. After, I had no choice but to grow up and get a job. Ditch digging wouldn’t provide the income I needed to research spellcraft, so a life of crime it was.”

He’d looked for her for three years ? Why did that make her feel…

Guilty?

Maybe because she hadn’t looked for him once. It had been easier to bury everything that happened, and she got good at it. Eventually, she stopped thinking about him every five minutes. Then a time came when she hardly thought about him at all. When she’d closely studied faces in the crowd at anti-witchcraft rallies, she told herself it was in sympathy for other victims.

He’d actively looked for her. Her parents hadn’t done that.

Pressure built in Gretta’s chest, which meant it was time to change the subject. “Speaking of funding your research, have you given any more thought to my proposal?”

“Not really.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s no point.”

“The point , Ansel, is I’m offering you everything you’ve been working for on a silver platter. A solid gold platter, actually.”

“Exactly. I’ve learned when things seem too good to be true, they usually are.”

He still didn’t believe her?

She supposed she couldn’t blame him. Like Seven and Jonas, he probably expected she’d have him tossed in the clink when they reached Antrelle.

“Alright,” she said. “You’re a logical thinker, so let’s run through this. You believe I hate witchcraft, don’t you?”

“That’s been made reasonably clear.”

“And it’s obvious I’ve dedicated my life to fighting it, right?”

“…I suppose.”

“So the repellent will be a powerful weapon in that fight. You’re the only one who knows how it works and what Nat will need to produce it. One plus one equals two. Can’t you trust that?”

His eyes remained fixed on the ceiling, but they grew thoughtful. When it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything else, Gretta rolled to her back and let the seed she’d planted grow.

As the silence lengthened, she dangled her watch like a pendulum, following it with her eyes. Just when she thought Ansel had nodded off, he sat.

“I’ve wanted to ask you something,” he said. “What happened to Crumb?”

Crumb.

She hadn’t thought about him in so long. They’d found the baby rat gnawing on breadcrumbs in the Eater’s pantry and had made a pet of him. After their escape, Gretta had smuggled him home in her apron pocket.

“I hid him in my bedroom,” she said, throat tight. “He lived for another year.”

“I’m glad you kept him. I used to imagine him curled on your pillow while you slept.”

“I think he missed you, actually. I know he was just a rat, but he was never the same after I brought him home.”

Silence returned, and she resumed spinning the watch.

“Gretta…” He wrapped his arms around his knees and settled his head on the couch’s armrest. “Can I buy another hug?”

The watch dropped to her chest. She fumbled it into her pocket. “What’s with you and hugs? It’s getting weird.”

“I’m not sure. I never used to mind going so long without affection. Now I guess I realize how much I’ve missed it.”

“That isn’t my problem. Besides, you don’t have anything to sell.”

He tilted his hip off the floor and dug in his pocket. Something came out draped over his open palm.

Gretta sat. “What is that?”

He brought it closer, displaying it in the moonlight.

When she realized what he had, she gasped.