Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond(129)
Author: Kim Harrison

Meg tilted her head, tongue reaching to get the threatening drop of blue. "She made me promise not to tell, but it’s okay. She knows Penny is a liar."

Damn it. Damn it all to hell. Lilly took a slow breath, feeling the heavy air settle deep into her lungs, making her thoughts scattered and her muscles unwilling to react. "How long ago was that, sweetheart?" she asked, trying to hide her anger.

Meg shrugged, tilting her head to bite off one side of the last inch of blue ice.

"Meghan Ann!" she snapped, and the little girl blinked, her cheeks bunched out against the spot of cold in her mouth. "How long!"

Eyes wide, she crunched through the Popsicle. "The sun wasn’t over the trees yet," she volunteered, her gaze never leaving her mom’s face as she ate the last chunk of sweet ice.

Agitation drew her to her feet, the swing bumping the back of her legs and settling as she looked at the woods. "Less than half an hour," she muttered, headed for the kitchen. Enough was enough. She was going to go find her, and then they were going to have a talk about fantasy and reality. Her mother was not crazy, and she was not losing touch with reality. But if she couldn’t be trusted to not run off to the woods chasing a fairy tale, then maybe things were worse than Lilly wanted to admit.

A new fear joined her old ones as she grabbed her cell phone from her purse by the front door. She snatched her work boots from beside the back door, and her sun hat from the pegs. Em’s and Meg’s hats were hanging there beside hers, but her mother’s was gone.

"Meg, watch Em for me, okay?" she said as she came out and sat on the rocker to kick her sneakers off. "I have to find Gram."

Her Popsicle gone, Meg slipped off the swing, the stick between her teeth. "Gram told me you were going to go after her. Can I watch TV?"

Head down, Lilly shoved her feet into her boots. "Yes, but let Em pick the channel when she wakes up."

"She always picks baby shows," Meg complained, leaning heavily on the armrest of the rocking chair as she bent in far enough to lift her toes from the old wood floor.

"Make her a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, okay?" Lilly said, fighting to keep her impatience in check. "And don’t leave the house. Lock the door when I leave, and don’t open it except for Mrs. Elliot. She’ll be here in an hour to pick up the bread for the church social. I should be back before then."

"Okay. She smells funny, though."

She smells like stale whisky, Lilly thought, then froze in the idea that she was making a mistake, like the mother in the fairy tales who leaves her children to go to town, telling them not to let the wolf in only to return to find them gone. Oh, for God’s sake, Lilly, it’s the twenty-first century. "Pick up the phone if it’s me." She looked up from tying her boots, seeing Meg not listening to her. "Meg?"

"Okay." With a worrisome confidence, the girl leaned back to set her feet on the porch.

Lilly stood, motions slowing as she put on her hat. A glance back at the kitchen tightened her anger. She was not going to take a jar of honey with her. She gave Meg a quick hug, then stomped determinedly down the four stairs, angry with her mom for making her do this.

Heat rose like a wave from the dormant, burnt grass, her steps all but silent on the puffs of fine dirt as she took the path to the barn. Ticked, she powered up her cell phone, scrolling until she found Kevin’s number.

But then she hesitated, pace slowing as the shade of the barn took her. The snap of her phone closing was loud, and she looked up as she tucked it away, the call unplaced as she remembered their last conversation. There was no need to get him involved. She knew where her mother was.

Squinting, Lilly slowed to a stop at the edge of the woods, her shadow running long behind her. The sharp dividing line between farm and woods was kept true by the yearly mowers, and seeing the understory laid bare and clean in the morning sun was eerie. The cooler air wafted out, shifting her hair like a lover, and she tucked a stray strand under her hat.

The image of a beautiful, devious boy she’d never actually seen rose up unbidden. It was followed by the memory of countless hot summer nights when she would kneel at her bedroom window, arms on the sill as she gazed into the black woods, heart hammering as she imagined the fireflies were winking for her, telling her to come dance with them in a magical glen.

Staring at the woods, Lilly’s breath came and went in a slow sound. She turned back once to reassure herself that Meg had gone inside with Pepper. The porch was empty. Woods lay on one side, the grassland and cultivated field on the other, the house that three generations of women shared in between-and the sun rose over it all like an angry god bent on restitution. "It’s just a story," she whispered, but a niggling doubt tingled down to her clenched hands as she strode forward into the coolness.

A single strand of spider silk brushed her, and she waved her hand, having forgotten that particular hazard of walking in the woods. There was no path, but she knew where she was going. It would be a simple task to walk a straight line until she found the creek and then following it upstream to the thicket-enclosed glen where her mother had told her never to go but of course she had.

Almost without realizing it, she fell into a familiar rocking pace that both made good time and allowed for unexpected shifts of balance. The poem ran in her mind, her steps beating it deeper into her thoughts.

Sunder wraith from flesh ill-taken; And bind fey spirit to wood awakened, over and over it came, again and again. She’d loved the magic of it when she was a child, but now it only made her mother sound crazy, that much closer to an unwilling move to a sterile, cold home with her most precious things arranged on a stark white counter, mementoes whose only purpose was to give well-meaning visitors something to coo and reminisce over.

Sunder wraith from flesh ill-taken. What the hell did that mean? But there was no meaning to be found, and Lilly forced herself out of step, trying to get rid of it.

But slowly her pace slipped back as the peace of the woods crept into her bones. The memory of being here as a child suffocated her anger: looking for mushrooms with her mother, the excitement of finding the forest lilies that she was named for, the dark depths of moss-rimmed pools of water that might vanish unexpectedly when a hole opened up and drained the water away through the caverns that riddled the hills. The woods had been a playground, potentially threatening, but feeling safe.

From almost under her feet, a grouse exploded into flight, shrieking its fear and making Lilly stop short with a gasp. Barely she caught her cry. She wanted to laugh, but the sound never came. The sound of water running came from up ahead. And chanting.