Page 35 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)

Thirty-Five

Sleep under the dog star and dream a wish to life.

Local Legends and Superstitions, Tempest Family Grimoire

Beast. Beast is worse.

“I see a tiger,” I whisper.

Strong hands grip my waist. “So do I.”

Whenever I think of the word panic , I conjure up lurid colors and high, pounding volume. Bodies running, shouting, pandemonium, confusion. A blur.

This panic is silent. Falling Rock is calm, my vision crystal-clear. I have absolutely no idea what to do, the reality unfolding around us so surreal that I cannot think beyond fear. We must be hallucinating. There cannot be a tiger in the woods.

Morgan slides his body in front of mine, shielding me. This is a terrible time to be distracted by the ram tattooed on his back, outlined in deep blue dots. He has got a truly magnificent back.

Out of all the ways we could die in this forest, being shredded by a tiger before I’ve gotten the chance to appreciate all that Morgan’s body has to offer has got to be the most unpleasant. “I feel like I’m underdressed for this.”

“Shhh,” he murmurs.

“I’m so sorry this is happening while we’re naked in a pond. It’s my fault.”

“Shhh.”

We’ve switched bodies. It’s the only explanation for why I cannot keep my mouth shut. “God, I love looking at you with your clothes off.”

“I appreciate that,” he whispers, “and I promise to give you as many opportunities as you want in the future, but please make like a tree and shut up.”

“That’s not the phrase.”

“Trees are very quiet.”

The tiger, listening to us hiss at each other, loses interest and prowls around the spring, nosing up to the tent. Morgan tenses, and I know he’s thinking of Forte curled up inside, snoozing in his salt circle. But the tiger keeps walking, eventually flopping down on a patch of leaves not far from where we stand.

And it doesn’t get back up.

I can’t calculate how much time passes before I finally venture: “Is it…asleep?”

“I think so.” Morgan brings his hands close to his face, and I can guess that he’s analyzing how wrinkled his fingers have become. “Staying in hot water for too long is bad for you.”

“Being eaten is also bad for you. I’m not getting out.”

He laces a hand through mine. “We have to.”

I take a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. Oh my god. Okay.”

“Here’s what we’re going to do. I will slowly climb out, get dressed, and then I’m gonna put your clothes over there.” He points to a bush on the edge of the spring that’s farthest away from the tiger. “Okay? Zelda, we are going to be all right.”

“You cannot possibly know that.”

He levels me with a fierce look. “If anything happens to me, I want you to run.”

A lump rises in my throat. “Don’t say that. I’d never leave you behind.”

“Remember me as a hero. Tell everyone of my sacrifice. For the statue, I’m thinking bronze, erected in the town square where the trolley is. Tell the statue artist that I want to be portrayed with my hands kind of prying the tiger’s jaws open, like this—” He begins to demonstrate his stance with an invisible foe, and while he’s busy doing that, I go ahead and roll out of the spring, onto dry land.

Without the buoyancy of the water holding me up, my muscles feel weak from being exposed to warm temperatures for too long. My first few strides are trembly.

The only positive to having my body feel so odd is that it distracts me from the tiger, who is difficult to monitor from this angle. I hurriedly cram myself into jeans and a sweater, tossing Morgan’s clothes to him.

“I didn’t look,” he assures me once he’s dressed, moving quickly to my side. He coaxes Forte into his sling and drapes it around his chest.

I’m jostling my backpack on. “Huh?”

“When you were getting out. I didn’t look. Okay, I looked a little . But I couldn’t see much.”

I check the tiger, who’s lifted its head. It isn’t facing us right now, but it’s definitely listening, ears pricked, tail thumping.

“Okay, I saw your ass,” Morgan confesses. “I saw your ass, and it was spectacular.”

“Is this the best time to have a conversation about my ass?”

“You’re right. I’ll need to set aside half an hour for that conversation, at minimum.”

I move to climb into the tent and grab my rolling suitcases, but my brain presses stop , shuts my eyes, and inwardly turns me around into another time and place.

I am here in this forest with Morgan, but I am also in Treasure Cove, Virginia, in my old camper van. I am facing my laptop, open to a nearly finished draft of The Bone Flute . I am about to paste in a pretty line I’ve had waiting in the wings since the beginning, saving it for the perfect moment. But when I do, the words don’t fit exactly right. The course of the story has changed, and that line doesn’t make sense anymore.

The scene dissolves, snapping me back into my body. Morgan is grasping my shoulder, repeating my name.

I tug us backward. Farther and farther, until my magic relaxes. I can feel it shuddering. A yes, that’s better .

“What are you doing?” Morgan asks. “What about the rest of our stuff?”

I scramble for a sensible explanation. How do I verbalize what I just experienced? “We need to move away,” I tell him. “I…I honestly don’t know why.”

Morgan shrugs. “Okay.” A smile of camaraderie touches the corners of his mouth. Just as our tent is trampled by a—

No, impossible.

Definitely not.

Except, yes.

An elephant .

The tiger bolts and the elephant (!!!!) screams and so do we, tearing out of there with nothing but our backpacks, Forte, and a lantern, leaving the rolling suitcases and tent behind.

“Elephant?” Morgan yells, checking behind him to see if we’re being pursued.

“Elephant!” I confirm.

“What is happening?” His arms shoot up in the air. “What is happening ? I love it! We’re probably going to die. But wow, having so much fun, though! Loving this! Brilliant!”

We run, breathing hard with the excess weight on our backs, still wobbly from the hot spring. It would be wisest to hide in the darker parts of the forest, probably, but it’s night and we can’t see a damned thing, so Morgan and I have no choice but to run along moonlit trails. There is no way we can outrun that tiger if it decides to give chase. If it does, our bodies will never be found, and when we return home Aisling will be the only one who can see us.

“Our stuff,” I lament. “What are we going to do without a tent?”

“Remember what I said about my willingness to cover you with my hands? I’ll be your tent, my queen.”

Laughing hurts. “Stop. My poor ribs.” I clutch at my side.

“But I also want to be your sleeping bag, so that I’m lying under you as well. The only solution is to clone myself.”

I laugh again, and my ribs protest some more. “You’re going to make me cry.”

Then I remember all the books I’ve packed, surely destroyed—some of them belonging to the library—and shed physical tears. The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine. The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul. Those poor pages! The staff at Moonville Library have already had it up to here with me—I’m going to get a ban.

On and on we run, in the direction of who knows what, propelled by adrenaline. “Are we going to discuss the fact that there’s a tiger and an elephant loose in Moonville?” I mention when we finally stop for breath, panting.

His eyes shine. “I knew it. All those stories! There had to be some truth to them.”

I’d honestly forgotten the stories. They say that a hundred years ago, a circus train crashed in these woods and a few exotic animals escaped. Now and then, hikers claim to have spotted a cheetah or a monkey, but nobody ever believes them because the photographic evidence is…shall we say, unconvincing. I certainly thought it was hogwash. You’re telling me that you carry a phone in your pocket programmed with the capabilities of an expensive camera, and all you managed to capture of a cheetah is a grainy colorless streak in the distance? Pah. If it was real, it could be proven!

“Nobody’s ever gonna believe us,” I say, incredulous and exhilarated.

“Not in a million years.”

We grin at each other, and I wonder why this feels like such a good thing—Morgan and I believing in something that others don’t. Is this how my sisters have felt all along, believing in magic while others scoff from the sidelines? It’s like buried treasure. The only ones who are able to appreciate it are those who’ve discovered it for themselves.

Our legs are tired of walking, but we have to find shelter. We have no cell reception, no tent, and not much food. “All right,” I declare, relaxing my muscles. “Show us where to go, magic.”

Morgan holds my hand as I’m guided by feelings, a supernatural version of the “you’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder” children’s game.

This way.

Magic shows me the effect of font—how the same sentence can settle differently when set in Garamond versus Times New Roman.

And now that way.

It stirs the smell of old books, organic compounds in the paper breaking down to release faint fragrances of vanilla, almond, and coffee.

Yes, you’re going in the right direction now.

Old English words that have fallen out of fashion, antiquated idioms that tickle my brain most pleasingly. Discovering a mysterious book at a flea market that I can’t find any information about on the Internet, as if it appeared from nowhere.

Favored words and phrases. Decanter, night fever, shiny laugh, patina, put the kettle on, quicksilver, tooth in the brain. I levitate my mental keyboard, typing a few of them out. Each letter floats into the air. I follow the ink so closely that my senses strengthen with each one, until I know intrinsically where to turn in order to continue collecting them.

Emulsion. Emollient. Austere. Alacrity.

Misreading a sentence while editing, and finding I like it better the way it wasn’t.

“Slow down,” Morgan says with a laugh. (A shiny laugh! Ah, there it is!) “What are you going so fast for?”

“I want to catch up.” I know that what I’ve said doesn’t make sense to anybody but me. I pull him along, our steps never faltering, never tripping over a root or a plant. Emotions fly swifter and swifter, whirling about me in a warm, wonderful wind, and I let it rush all over.

What do you love about writing? magic asks. Then it shows me the answers.

Popping down research rabbit holes. The aha moment when I find exactly the right term I’ve been hunting for. How joy can swell a paragraph bigger and bigger until your heart bursts, and tension cinches it tight like an emotional corset. I love rewriting, comparing material to older drafts to see how far it’s evolved. Grafting stronger prose over frail areas, stitching it all together with transitions. I love the immortality of storytelling, how my daydreams will outlast me, how in a way I’ll exist forever as long as my stories sit on somebody’s shelf or in a digital file.

I love how certain songs are irreversibly connected to scenes I’ve written. Figuring out, with my agent and editor, how to make a scene stronger. Rewriting, deleting, sacrificing to the pacing gods, then taking back my offering because no, I want that in there, I will be indulgent. What a miracle language is. Letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, chapter by chapter, all of it culminating in this stressful, exhausting, satisfying, rewarding outlet for all of the noise that collects in my head. It’s how I process my own philosophies, grief, desires. A hybrid of pure imagination and diary.

When I break down what writing truly is, it sounds almost magic. Minuscule, tedious squiggles of printer toner, lined up in soldier rows. You stare at the squiggles and forget where you are. They make you fall in love with people who don’t exist, they make you livid, they bring you to tears. They disappoint you, make your pulse sprint, make you swear you’ll never try that genre again. Change your life. Synchronize your emotions with those of hundreds of other readers spread across space and time, absorbing the very same words, but who will view them through the lenses of their own unique experiences—so that, in a way, nobody reads exactly the same book, and each variation is different still from the original, the one the author created.

Some stories you forget about as soon as you finish the last page, and some you carry in your soul forever, like an imaginary friend you understand so well, it doesn’t matter that others can’t see them. It doesn’t matter that they live only in you.

I think of every time a reader has reached out in a letter to say It feels like you wrote this specifically for me .

Something snaps beneath my footfalls, and I kneel to examine a chain of words. Once upon a time, nobody went into the forest and came out of it alive.

I feel like I’m awakening slowly, sunbathing in the fringes of a dream. Magic releases my nerve endings one by one, letting me drift fully back into my body. The vivid reminiscences fade to ghosts but don’t leave me. They linger.

“Where are we?” Morgan is marveling. There’s astonishment in his voice. More words break apart under my feet. They’re everywhere, fragments scattered among the trees like fallen leaves:

The Clock of

Old and New

was always talking

There’s a soft smile on my face. Tears in my eyes. I’ve been running with them closed, and now we’ve stopped.

“At the source,” I say, not fully understanding why until I open my eyes again.