Page 27

Chapter Thirteen

H ow typical that Ben had bumped into my father in a bar. Those last couple of years before he left, my dad had never been entirely sober.

For some reason — probably because I was too angry to think straight right then — my brain wanted to fixate on that single aspect of the whole sorry mess. Not that Ben had known much more about Silver Hollow than he’d let on, or that he’d realized who I was all along.

No, just that my father apparently had continued to rot his brain with Scotch this whole time rather than try to get himself straightened out.

The half-eaten pizza and half-drunk bottle of wine still sat on the dining room table. While one part of me wanted to throw them both out, I knew I hadn’t been raised to waste food like that.

So I closed the pizza box and put it in the fridge, and went back to the table and stuffed the cork into the bottle as best I could before taking it into the kitchen as well so I could set it on the counter.

Beneath the anger, though, was a sort of puzzled hurt.

Who had sent that picture to my father? My mom? My grandmother?

Probably Grandma, I thought then. She was always about keeping the peace, and I know she hated that my parents were so estranged that they couldn’t bear to talk to each other even when it came to important stuff about their daughter.

And I’d always thought my father was happy to have walked away.

Certainly, I never received even a card after the first couple of years he was gone.

In my mind, I’d seen him moving on, maybe getting married again, having a nice, normal family with not a single whiff of otherworldly creatures about them.

The reality sounded a little more complicated than that.

As for Ben’s motivations, well, that didn’t take nearly as much work to figure out. I’d already looked him up and saw that he had a YouTube channel, one with almost a hundred thousand followers. I doubted he made millions from it, but I had a feeling he earned enough to get by.

The thing about being a social media personality, though, was that you had to keep feeding the algorithm.

And what better to feed it than a real live unicorn sighting?

Angry as I was, at least I halfway understood what he’d been up to. Whether I’d be able to forgive him for his lies was debatable at that point, but everyone had to eat.

Besides, like it or not, I also saw that Ben had been following his passion. Because I knew these mythical creatures were real and somehow managed to slip into our dimension from time to time, I couldn’t dismiss outright his claims of having seen a chupacabra.

Once that sort of strangeness had entered your life, it changed you forever. I knew that sad truth all too well.

Would he leave town after this? Or would he redouble his efforts to find the truth of the unicorn now that he no longer had to tiptoe around me?

Again, I couldn’t know for sure. As angry as I was with him, I also had to acknowledge that I liked him…probably more than I should…and the thought of him disappearing forever without even saying goodbye bothered me a lot.

Which was kind of stupid, considering I’d just kicked him out of the house.

I heaved a sigh that would have done my angsty high school self justice, then got busy with rinsing the plates and wine glasses and putting everything in the dishwasher.

There wasn’t much cleanup, and nothing I couldn’t have left until morning, but I wasn’t about to sully my grandmother’s kitchen by leaving dirty dishes out all night.

By the time I was done, I was feeling slightly less roiled in spirit.

Not completely calm, because hearing that my father carried a picture of me apparently everywhere he went even though we hadn’t spoken in years had ripped the Band-Aid off a not entirely healed wound, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that.

Well, except make myself a cup of chamomile tea, just as my grandmother would have if she’d still been here.

Filling the kettle and puttering around the kitchen while I waited for it to boil helped calm my mind a little.

Not even close to all the way, but I thought by the time I finished drinking the tea, I should have calmed down sufficiently to go to sleep and put this day behind me.

Sure, I’d had one small victory when I faced down the mayor over my anti-Northwest Pacific campaign — and I was pretty sure I’d impressed Ben with the story, if the surprised admiration on his face as I’d related the tale had been any indication — but I had a whole bushel of other things I needed to worry about.

Chiefly, that it shouldn’t matter whether I’d impressed Ben or not, since I doubted he’d want to have anything to do with me after the way I’d treated him tonight.

The logical part of my mind told me I shouldn’t want to have anything to do with him, either, but unfortunately, feelings tended to be not entirely logical a good deal of the time.

A whistle began to escape the kettle, telling me the water was hot enough to make some tea.

I turned off the gas and poured hot water into my waiting cup, then hung around another few minutes or so to let it steep.

When preparing herbal tea, I often just left the bag in the cup because it was hard to make that kind of thing too strong, but this time, I extracted it and dumped it in the trash before I headed out into the living room.

We had drapes on all the windows, but because the house sat alone on three acres and there weren’t any immediate neighbors, we often left them open.

Tonight, though, I didn’t like that feeling of being exposed, so I went to the big picture window and reached for the curtains, planning to pull them shut.

Before I could do so, however, a flash of white in the darkness caught my eye.

What the hell? Was someone walking around out there with a flashlight?

An improbable hope flooded through me.

Maybe it was Ben, coming back to try to apologize. He’d been wearing a white button-down shirt when he came over for dinner, and that could have been what I’d spotted on the periphery of my vision.

But then I saw the glint again and realized that was no human being out there in the night-dark yard.

No, it was the unicorn.

I’d already set my tea down on the coffee table, so I was able to bolt out the front door immediately, although I paused just long enough to throw a jacket over my long-sleeved shirt.

Yes, it was the getting toward the end of May, but the nights here could still be pretty damn cold, thanks to the ever-present damp sea breezes.

The unicorn was waiting for me near the small clump of trees that marked the eastern edge of the property. I couldn’t begin to think what it was doing here, since I’d never heard of it — or any of the other strange beasts who sometimes appeared in the woods — venturing past the edges of the forest.

“What is it?” I asked in a low voice as I approached. No, I wasn’t afraid of being overheard, but I also didn’t want to spook the creature.

He shook his silvery white mane. This close, I realized what I’d seen from the living room window was the starlight glow emanating from his long, spiraled horn, shimmering and lovely as a cluster of fireflies.

And then he turned and began to move away at a fast walk, not quite a trot, just barely slow enough that I thought I should be able to keep up.

Thank God for practical shoes.

The unicorn moved with practiced care, as if he had come this way before. Odd, because I knew I’d never seen him anywhere near the house before. Then again, it wasn’t as if I sat watchful all night, so I supposed he could have come and gone without me ever noticing.

Or, more likely, something urgent had compelled him to leave the forest and enter a populated area despite the obvious risks.

That thought lent additional urgency to my journey, even though I had no idea where the unicorn was leading me.

Back into the forest, sure, since we’d already reached the outer, thinner edges of the woods.

Almost at once, though, the trees gradually began to grow taller and become more closely clustered together, until we were in the thick of it.

I thought I recognized the trail, although I couldn’t tell for sure, not with the only real light coming from the unicorn’s glowing horn.

Maybe there would be a moon later, but for now, I had to hope the creature wouldn’t suddenly abandon me out there, since I’d have a hell of a time finding my way back.

Up ahead, though, I thought I saw another light, this one pale and manmade, like a flashlight propped up against a tree trunk. Its faint glow illuminated the outline of a man standing there, seeming to stare up into the forest canopy.

At once, the unicorn zigged to the left and disappeared among the trees.

Well, that was just great.

However, I didn’t appear to be alone out here, and I had to hope that whoever the man was whom I’d just spied, he’d be someone helpful and not a serial killer who intended to chop me into pieces and bury the various bits out here in the forest where no one would find them.

As I approached, though, I realized I knew him.

Ben Sanders.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” I demanded.

At once, he whirled around, his expression as shocked as I knew mine probably was.

“Sidney?” he said, disbelief vibrating in those two syllables.

“Yes,” I replied, then stepped forward. The light I’d glimpsed was from a big yellow flashlight propped against the trunk of an old, gnarled pine tree. A backpack lay near it, and as far as I could tell, he’d been staring at the trunk. “What’s so fascinating about that tree?”

“That,” he said, pointing.

An angular symbol of some kind had been carved into the trunk. “Is that…?”

“Yes, it’s an Ogham letter. The one that stands for ‘pine,’ I think, but I haven’t got them all memorized yet.”

I shook my head. “So…someone’s going all over the forest and carving these symbols into the trees?”

“It sure looks that way.” He stopped, running a hand through his hair, as though in confusion. Now it was utterly mussed and looked pretty adorable.

No, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about Ben Sanders like that. Not when I was supposed to be mad at him.

I stared at the pine tree. It wasn’t as if I’d made a practice of wandering around in the woods and inspecting every single tree it contained, but still, you’d have thought I should have noticed a bunch of odd symbols popping up all over the place.

Or maybe not. As my mother liked to say, people often saw what they wanted to see and nothing more.

“But…what’s the point?” I asked, deciding to leave my anger aside for now. If nothing else, I needed to play nice so he would help me get back to civilization. I knew these woods well enough, but even I would have had a hard time finding my way home without some kind of light source.

His shoulders lifted. “I have no idea.” He paused there, as though deciding what he should say, and shook his head. “After I got back to the B&B, I started thinking that maybe I should check to see if the Ogham letters could be found anywhere else. So I headed out here to take a look.”

“Why this particular spot?”

A rueful smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “No real reason. But I had to start somewhere, right?”

I supposed he had a point there. “And you couldn’t wait until morning?”

Again, he shrugged. “I didn’t feel like going to sleep. Also, I hate it when I’m dealing with a mystery that feels like it doesn’t want to get solved. Maybe there was a risk coming out here after dark, but I’ve spent enough time in these woods now that I don’t think I was in any danger.”

He probably wasn’t. Yes, Sam and the other forest rangers liked to warn people about the black bears and the mountain lions, and yet I had only heard of a single animal attack the entire time I’d lived in Silver Hollow, which meant the odds of such a thing happening were very low.

So…why had the unicorn led me here? Simply so I could find Ben?

Was the creature trying to play otherworldly matchmaker or something?

If that was the case, the unicorn was going to be sorely disappointed.

“You probably weren’t,” I said.

Now it was Ben’s turn to give me a questioning look. “And you…what? Decided to take a nighttime walk in the woods without even a flashlight?”

On the surface, I supposed the situation did look pretty strange. Problem was, I couldn’t tell him about the unicorn.

“I know this forest really well,” I said. “I don’t need a flashlight.”

His expression was dubious in the extreme, and I couldn’t blame him. If our positions had been reversed, I would have thought he was handing me a load of serious bull.

Before he could comment, however, an odd grinding sound carried through the cool night air, one very different from the soft soughing of the pine trees in the damp ocean wind.

No, that sounded suspiciously like some kind of machinery.

Ben immediately went on the alert, chin lifted as he looked around us, obviously searching for the source of the sound. “Did you hear that?”

“I did,” I replied.

Now came the annoying beep-beep-beep of some kind of vehicle backing up.

“What the hell?”

Cold grew in the pit of my stomach. Those sounds seemed to be coming roughly from the southwest, where Welling Glen was located.

Oh, no.

“They’ve already started,” I said.

Ben stared back at me. “Who’s started what?”

“Northwest Pacific,” I told him, hoping he could hear the urgency in my words. “They came out here and started clearing under the cover of darkness. They probably thought if they could present us with a done deal, then we’d give up on trying to stop them.”

“Bastards.”

I heartily agreed with that sentiment. However, calling them names wasn’t going to fix anything.

No, we needed to get over there and stop them before they could cause any more damage.

“We have to go,” I said.

No arguments from Ben, who’d already bent to pick up his flashlight and backpack. “What are we going to do?” he asked as we began to move through the woods toward the source of all those ominous sounds.

“Whatever we have to,” I replied grimly.