Lips Touch: Three Times(2)
Author: Laini Taylor

"Thank you. I accept your offer of weaponry," Cactus said formally. "I doubt I could kill a swan, though. Even a big bastard one. I just don’t have your rage, Kiz."

"Believe me, if you had my family, you’d have my rage. You know what my dad did last night? He was cleaning an elk carcass in the yard and he came in and stuck his big bloody hand right in my popcorn bowl!"

Evie and Cactus both shrieked in disgust. "Okay, I take it back," Cactus said with a grimace. "You can keep your family."

"What, over a little bloody popcorn?" asked Kizzy. Shaking her head, she muttered, "Wuss."

The girls parted ways at the edge of the normal houses and Kizzy kept walking into the straggling edge of the countryside, past a cemetery, a water tower, and a Christmas tree farm with a little trailer near the road, where a fat dog lying on the porch picked up his head and belched as she passed. A gutsy little bird chased a crow out of a tree, and a squirrel miscalculated his leap and fell stunned into a pile of rotting leaves. It was autumn. The sky was white and the trees black. Kizzy saw herself in a puddle and looked away.

The goblins didn’t look away. Their mouths filled up with saliva as they watched her. There was scant cover for them in the leafless hawthorns along the main road, and Kizzy should have seen them. Of all the girls in this unremarkable town, she should have been the one they couldn’t get, the one who knew better. She had Old World blood, after all. Her family believed in things: in vampires and the evil eye, in witch soldiers and curses and even talking foxes. They believed that black roosters are the devil in costume and that fruit grown out of season should never be trusted or tasted. And of course they believed in goblins.

They’d have said there was no "believing" involved. They knew, because Kizzy’s grandmother had saved her sister from them once in the Old Country and lived to tell. She’d never tired of telling the story, how the goblins had tried to force her mouth open and cram in. their unnatural fruit, how she’d kept her jaw clamped tight against them.

How swollen her lips had been after.

"As bruised as windfall plums! I could smell that sweet nectar all over my skin but I never tasted it," she had told Kizzy many times. "You never want to taste their fruit, Sunshine."

"It’s not like there are goblins here, Nana," Kizzy had replied one time, bored of the story, and bored of this town with its soulless mall and soccer fields, its houses all alike as cookies in a bakery box. "Goblins probably get to live in Prague and Barcelona where they have, like, coffeehouses and absinthe and …" She trailed off, groping through her daydreams for the many coveted things to be had in other cities, in other people’s better lives. "Blind street musicians" was what she came up with. "And mean little nuns carrying long bread under their arms. And cathedrals with gargoyles. And catacombs."

"You know so much?" her grandmother had chuffed at her. "Goblins living in Prague? Silly girl! Goblins live in Hell! I need to tell you that? They only come here to hunt."

If Kizzy’s grandmother were alive, she would have seen the goblins crouched behind the trees. She would have heard the smack and gluck of their juicy mouths and kept Kizzy safe. But she wasn’t alive. She had gone into the unknowable last summer. Besides the swan’s wing, they’d buried her with other things she’d need: her pockets full of almonds to eat, a compass for finding her path, and coins for bribes along the way — silver coins, minted in one of the sheds and inscribed with runes. And of course, the dainty stiletto blade she’d always carried in her pocket — that went into her coffin too.

When Kizzy was a little girl, she had asked once if she could have that knife when her grandmother died, and her grandmother had answered, "Sunshine, I’ll need it where I’m going. Get your own damn knife."

Kizzy knew other families didn’t bury their grandmothers with knives and dried-out swan wings, and she suspected other grandmothers didn’t slip out of their graves to dance deasil round the living either — that meant circling clockwise and it was powerful magic, especially when the dead did it. Kizzy had felt her grandmother’s ghost go thrice around her at the graveside as her father and uncles shoveled dirt clods onto her coffin. She’d been glad to know her soul wasn’t down there where the rain of dirt must have sounded like thunder. The knife was, though; she’d seen her father put it in and she’d mourned it. She had never stopped coveting it with its sweet mother-of-pearl handle, and her grandmother must have known because on her deathbed she’d motioned Kizzy close and whispered, "Remember my knife, Sunshine?"

Kizzy had thought she was going to give it to her and she’d nodded, smiling. But the old lady had whispered, "Don’t you dare steal it out of my coffin," and then she’d died.

Sometimes Kizzy imagined her grandmother knife-fighting her way down the long tunnel of death, but mostly her daydreams were of a very different nature. She daydreamed of slow-dancing with Mick Crespain and of sitting on his lap at lunch while he hugged her around the waist instead of Sarah Ferris, his knuckles resting lightly against the underside of her br**sts instead of Sarah’s. She daydreamed about having slim ankles like Jenny Glass instead of peasant ankles like the fetlocks of a draft horse. About smooth hair instead of coarse hair, sleek h*ps instead of belly dancer’s hips. About a tinkling laugh, and a butterfly tattoo, and a boy who would tuck his hand into her back jeans pocket while they walked, and press her up against a fence to suck her lower lip like a globe of fruit.

Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging out there like an untucked shirt. No amount of grandmother-ghosts dancing deasil would keep them from trying for so raw a soul. They just wanted her that bad. She’d probably have been flattered to learn someone wanted her so much, even if that someone was a goblin.

"Some of the goblins have tails and whiskers," went her grandmother’s story. "Antlers and snail shells and gills. Hooves, claws, beaks! Creatures, they are, each as different from the next as God’s creatures in a zoo — but they aren’t God’s! They work for Old Scratch and catch his souls for him, and they almost had my sister’s. She was ready to give it for just one more taste of their fruit.

"She was a lot like you, Sunshine. Mairenni was always fierce with wanting something, a new scarf or our brother’s guitar or a wink from the handsome blacksmith. And when the goblin men came through the glen, calling out soft like doves cooing, ‘Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy!’ she wanted that too and she had it, handfuls and mouthfuls of that witched fruit. Pears, pomegranates, dates, figs. And the pineapples! We’d never seen pineapples before. Mairenni was a fool to trust their fruit — where in our mountains did she think such things grew?