Sweetly (10 page)
I
’m not scared.
Maybe I should be, but after I’m nearly killed by a witch, a man with a gun doesn’t scare me.
“I’m Gretchen? Gretchen Kassel?” I say raspily—my throat is dry and my lungs ache. The stranger walks forward, sure-footed, confident steps that make me feel queasy. As he nears, the shadows on his face lessen and I make out his features. He’s young and wearing a stained blue T-shirt and jeans. He slings the gun over his shoulder from a strap as his feet thud against the pavement in heavy leather work boots. Recognition hits me—the guy from the diner our first day in Live Oak, the green-eyed boy who hates Sophia.
“Are you okay?” he snaps, seemingly irritated.
“I’m fine,” I answer, coughing. I rub my throat, touch the cut on my head, and wince.
He gives a curt nod and then, without stopping, breezes past me.
“Who are you?” I ask.
He turns to face me, and I take a step backward. His eyes pierce me, judging, perhaps, evaluating, darkening more each moment they stay on mine. I look down, trying to escape the glare.
“Samuel Reynolds,” he answers. His voice is gruff, carries the weight and sorrow of a much older man. “Come on, you need to get out of here. There could be more of them.”
“More?”
Samuel takes forceful strides, daring something to leap from the woods and take him. I run after him.
“There are more?”
“Of course there are more,” he hisses. He suddenly ducks off the road, toward the tree line, and pulls a motorcycle from its hiding spot in the grasses. He pushes it along the road, dusting bits of dead leaves off as he walks.
“What are they?”
My voice stops him, though I’m not sure if it’s the question or the fact that it sounds so much smaller than normal. But he has the answers. He clearly knows about them. He knows what they are, and after all this time I’ll finally know what it was that stole my other half. I hold my breath in anticipation.
He turns, gaze shooting through the night and startling me once again. “They’re monsters. Werewolves. And there are more out there, but I’m going to guess you want to be behind locked doors at that candy store before they show up and I start shooting. So if you could not attract them by shouting stupid questions, it’d be great. Doesn’t do a lot of good to keep the bike quiet if you’re going to shout like an idiot.”
He turns back around and continues to walk. My feet won’t move.
Maybe I should be afraid. Maybe I should be angry, or I should cry, or I should scream because this means that my sister didn’t vanish—she was slaughtered. The same teeth the monster snapped at me were in her skin—skin that looked and felt just like mine.
But instead, all I feel is warm, flooding relief. Because my sister didn’t really just vanish.
And now I know what the witch is.
“Are you stupid or something? I said,
come on,
” Samuel mutters, eyes glancing off the trees that frame the road.
“I thought they were witches.”
Samuel freezes midstride. He turns toward me and raises his eyebrows. The act changes his entire face—the hard lines vanish, the deep-set eyes become interested instead of foreboding. It lasts only a moment, and then the intensity returns full force. “The
Fenris?
You’ve seen them before?”
“Yes,” I answer, touching my forehead. “When I was little. It—
one
of them—took my sister.” How many are there? How many yellow eyes waiting in the forest?
Enough to take eight Live Oak girls,
I realize, and I grimace as their faces run through my mind, trailed by my sister’s face, the last terrified expression I saw in her eyes.
“Your sister…” He shakes his head, and I’m afraid he’s going to yell again, but then it seems as though he can’t remember what he was going to say. The chocolatier appears in the distance, an oasis of light beside the road.
It’s another moment before I answer. “I thought they were witches,” I repeat, defeated. I feel as if the fear is draining from me now that I know the face of the monster, and it leaves me raw and unfinished—it turns out I’m not sure who I am without the fear. “But werewolves—I don’t…” I look up at the moon. There were werewolves in the book my sister had used to help us find the witch, in other fairy tales. Full moons, silver bullets, red capes—
“They have nothing to do with the moon,” Samuel says, rolling his eyes at me. “They’re monsters. Don’t overthink it.” He turns and continues walking, facing away from me; I can barely hear his words over the sound of locusts crying. “Besides, Sophia Kelly is the only witch in Live Oak. I’ve been trying to convince everyone in Live Oak the Fenris exist for the past two years. All it’s gotten me is a reputation for being a lunatic.”
“Sophia isn’t a witch,” I argue, though I’m not sure why that’s the point that struck me.
“Whatever,” Samuel says, waving a hand at me. “Just remember that I warned you to stay away from her.”
“What does Sophia have to do with the… Fenris?” I ask. I don’t like the term. It makes them seem like an animal, a dog or a cat or a bird, instead of something that might devour me, instead of a werewolf. I can’t believe the witch is another monster entirely. We stop in front of the chocolatier, and I fold my arms, unsure what to say.
“You’re here. Go inside and stay out of the woods.”
“Obviously,” I mumble, brushing my hair back over my head. I hesitate, glancing at Samuel. I feel as if I should say something. Thank him, maybe, but he doesn’t seem like the type you thank—he seems like the type I should run from. I shuffle my feet until Samuel gives me an impatient glare.
“I’ll… um… see you later. Thanks,” I add, just for good measure. Samuel shakes his head, turns the bike, and walks back down the street.
I climb the steps to the chocolatier silently. Luxe waits for me on the porch, a tired look on his face.
“Some protection you are,” I tell him. I look over my shoulder to see Samuel still walking away. He strides as though he’s protesting something, storming the street to tell it off for existing. He eventually fades into darkness. I wait until I hear the distant grind of the motorcycle before ducking inside.
I keep my eyes off the forest and lock the chocolatier’s front door.
As if a dead bolt could possibly keep the witches—no, the
wolves—
at bay.
M
y dreams are mostly nightmares—the witch charging, transforming into a hundred thousand werewolves. Then Samuel, stepping out of the darkness, followed by my father. But neither raises a hand to help me as the werewolves close in, and Ansel is nowhere to be found. At the very last moment my sister arrives with a rifle in hand, a shadow of a girl who steps out of my body and looks just like me; the werewolf turns and runs when it sees her. The dream repeats itself—I wake up at the end, then drift back to uneasy sleep only to dream it again.
Maybe Ansel’s lack of presence in the dream is why I don’t tell him about the witch the following morning—or maybe it’s because claiming to be chased by a werewolf is as unbelievable as claiming to be chased by a witch. My brother is in the storefront messing around with some of the shelving; our eyes meet very briefly.
I should tell him.
No. He survived. He moved on long ago. Don’t send him backward, don’t make it like you’re kids again.
I feel guilty—Ansel has spent so much of his life trying to keep me safe, and here I am, keeping it a secret that danger is right outside.
But I still can’t do it. I can’t watch his face when I try to explain to him that the witches are werewolves and they’re real. I can’t handle what he’ll say if he believes me or, worse, what he’ll say if he doesn’t. I love my brother too much to tell him.
So I nod at my brother, an understated “good morning,” and make my way into the kitchen with my secrets intact. For now.
“What happened to your head?” Sophia asks in alarm, slamming a mortar and pestle down on the counter and hurrying toward me. I cringe—I thought I’d swept my hair far enough over my forehead to cover the mark left by falling in the forest, but apparently no such luck.
Think, think fast.
Sophia pulls my multicolored hair away from my face, eyeing the wound with a look of dismay. “It was stupid,” I say quickly. “I was playing with Luxe last night in the yard and fell off the front steps.” Ansel, who’d been coming in to see what the problem was, returns to the storefront through the saloon doors when he hears my explanation, shaking his head teasingly at my apparent clumsiness.
“Why didn’t you come get us?” Sophia asks, looking almost hurt. “I bet that’ll leave a scar! Hang on, I have some Neosporin, I think…”
“It’s not that big a deal—”
“Are you crazy? You’re way too pretty to have a big scar right on your head,” Sophia says, rolling her eyes. She dives into a drawer and pulls out a basket of medicines. Before I can stop her, she’s slathering ointment on the mark. “Seriously. You should have come and gotten me.”
I laugh nervously and go to the refrigerator. “I was told not to interrupt the hot date.” Sophia blushes a little and turns to the stove, where she stirs a double boiler filled with slowly bubbling chocolate.
“Want to help?” Sophia motions to the chocolate and rows of empty molds. “It’s not as boring as regular mold filling. I’m making shells for the truffles I serve at the chocolate festival, since a lot of the Fourth of July stuff is already made—except those toffee bars. Don’t let me forget those. Anyway, the truffle ingredients should come in today, so I thought I’d get a head start on the shells. That way things aren’t
too
frantic. Just…
mostly
frantic.”
“Sure,” I say, happy to see the way my answer makes her smile. “What do I do?”
“Take these,” Sophia says, digging through another drawer until she emerges with what look like two small paintbrushes, “and just paint along the insides of the molds using what’s in the boiler.”
“I can do that,” I say, nodding. She’s right—it isn’t as boring as filling. It’s satisfying, covering the inside of the molds with milk chocolate. Sophia pulls out a mixing bowl and stirs crushed almonds in with some of the chocolate. She’s making something similar to her specialty, the gingerbread chocolate that made me feel so safe.
I think back to last night, the lemon candy, how they were supposed to give me courage.
No more,
I decide firmly.
If there are witches here, and the candy is what made me brave, I can’t keep eating it. I have to be focused.
“You okay?” Sophia interrupts my thoughts, and I realize I’ve been staring at a truffle mold for several long moments.
“Yeah,” I say quickly. “I’m fine. Sorry. Spaced out.”
“It’s the thing about me dating your brother, isn’t it?” Sophia says with a grimace. “I knew it would bother you. I’m sorry—”
“No, no, not that. Seriously, Sophia, I just blanked. Besides, if I’m bothered about anything, it’s worrying that you’ll decide you’re done with my lame brother and kick us out,” I tease, loud enough so that Ansel can hear. He sighs in response from the next room.
Sophia grins and shakes her head. “Tell you what—if I decide I’m done with your lame brother, I’ll just kick him out. You
have
to stay. There hasn’t been another girl in this house for a long time. I have to confess I’ve missed it.”
I laugh as I put the double boiler back onto the burner for a moment to soften the chocolate a bit more. Sophia nods approvingly. “Who was the last girl that was here?” I ask, leaning against the counter.
Sophia studies one of the molds intensely and pauses before answering. “Just my mom. That’s all. She had cancer, died a long time ago.”
I move another finished tray over, think about our mother dying. It was the grief—the doctors said it was a myriad of things, but I know it was the grief. She watched the forest like I did, waiting for the missing half of her daughters to stumble from the trees, until she faded away.
But I didn’t die. Not in the forest, not after, even though I was afraid. Terrified that the witch would come for me, terrified of vanishing. Terrified the exact thing that happened last night would happen.
And it did. But I didn’t die.
Images flash back to me: Samuel shooting, Samuel taking down the wolf with a bullet. He didn’t run from the monster—
he walked up to it
. And shot it. That’s all it took to destroy everything I’ve been afraid of for twelve years, everything that could make me disappear.
I’ve never fired a gun before—never even considered it—but what if I could? I lean over to look with awe at the gun mounted over the fireplace mantel. I wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore. I wouldn’t have to be afraid of anything ever again. I swallow guilt that has strangely bubbled up in my throat—guilt over wanting to defend myself when my sister had no choice. I feel as if I’m cheating somehow, figuring out yet another way to survive when she’s gone. Now that there’s a potential solution to my fear, being afraid feels like the only thing that connects me to my sister. The moment in the woods so long ago, when we were both running for our lives, scared.
