The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (76 page)

PART I

First Contact

From
The Book of Fairies

There is no such thing as an accident. There’s no luck or chance or coincidence.

Imagine an enormous and intricate spiderweb connecting everything and everyone.

We can teach you to see that web.

We can teach you to be the spider and not the fly.

You’ll understand how closely our worlds are linked and that it is we fairies who shape your destiny.

You’ll soon see that you are never alone.

CHAPTER 1

Phoebe

JUNE 4, PRESENT DAY

“A
re you sure this is right?” Phoebe asked, doing her best to sound like a chipper, adventure-loving girl.

Sam glanced down at the map and directions. “Positive,” he said, sounding a little huffy. He was tired of having to tell her again and again that yes, they were going the right way. And no, they weren’t lost.

It had been miles since they’d even passed a house. They’d gone by overgrown fields, cow pastures, a stagnant pond, and then into thick, conifer-filled woods. No sign of civilization for miles. Phoebe knew she should be used to it after living in Vermont for fifteen years, but she still got twitchy when she didn’t know where the nearest McDonald’s was.

“There’s an old-growth forest out here somewhere,” Sam said, glancing from the road back down to the map open on the seat between them. “Maybe we can hike out to it tomorrow.”

“Oh joy,” Phoebe said. Sam had taken her to an old-growth forest before—a bunch of big old trees with a plaque in front of them. Sam took pictures, jotted down notes in his little black hiking journal. Some guys took their girls out to dinner and the movies. A hot date with Sam involved topographical maps and trail mix.

“Or you could stay behind and play solitaire or something,” Sam suggested.

Phoebe reached over and squeezed his arm. “If you’re going hiking, then so am I. Old trees, here were come!” She gave an enthusiastic cowgirl
Yippee-i-o!
and Sam laughed.

Spending a weekend in an isolated cabin in the woods was not Phoebe’s idea of a relaxing getaway. When Sam first told her about it, she briefly considered saying she had to work. But she realized she needed to go. Sam hadn’t seen his cousin Evie since they were kids, since the summer Lisa disappeared. Last week, Evie called out of the blue and said she had news about Lisa—something she insisted on telling Sam only in person. And of course Sam told Evie about finding Lisa’s old fairy book, and it was agreed that they needed to meet as soon as possible. Evie rented a cabin in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom for the weekend and called Sam back with directions. It was about an hour and a half north of where Sam and Phoebe lived.

“We’ll come to you,” Evie said. “I haven’t been to Vermont in ages.”

The cabin itself was tucked deep in the woods and could be reached only by an old logging road.

“I’m told the trail is in pretty rough shape,” Evie said. When Phoebe heard this, she complained. “Why couldn’t we just all meet at a Holiday Inn? Or a nice bed-and-breakfast?”

“Because,” said Sam, “with Evie, everything has to be an adventure. She was always just like Lisa that way. You couldn’t just ride your bike to the store to get some gum. It got turned into this life-and-death quest, a battle of good versus evil over Doublemint gum, which was really a secret antidote to some witch’s deadly poison.”

Evie had instructed Sam to park on a dirt pull-off on the edge of Route 12, half a mile past a
WATCH FOR MOOSE
sign. Evie and her husband, Elliot, would pick them up in their Jeep at five o’clock on Friday.

“Don’t forget the fairy book,” Evie had instructed, “and anything else you may have saved from that summer.”

So here was the reason Phoebe had for joining Sam on his trip to the cabin: to learn what she could about Lisa (a subject Sam had rarely spoken of before this past week) and to perhaps finally get to see what was inside the famous
Book of Fairies.

LEARN ALL I CAN ABOUT LISA because Sam sure as shit isn’t going to tell me a thing
was at the top of her to-do list in the little spiral memo pad she carried. Phoebe was a list maker. Nothing seemed to make sense until she’d written it out on paper, and nothing seemed accomplished unless she crossed it off. She was also a great one for making lists of pros and cons. She didn’t have any fear of Sam discovering her memo pad and reading her secret thoughts because he (and everyone else) found her handwriting indecipherable. Hieroglyphics, he called it. It was a system she’d developed as a kid when she caught her mom reading her diary—abbreviations, writing some letters and words backward, throwing in random numbers and punctuation marks, and making all of it very, very small. When she wanted, like at work or when leaving Sam a note, she could make her handwriting legible—big block letters no one had trouble figuring out.

Sam, of course, had beautiful writing. Neat cursive almost identical to his mother’s—she had taught both Lisa and him perfect Palmer-method penmanship.

T
hey found the pull-off easily enough, but Evie and Elliot were late picking them up. Phoebe flipped the visor down, inspected herself in the mirror. She wasn’t in bad shape for thirty-five, but she could already see the beginnings of tiny lines around her hazel eyes. And so far, she’d only found two or three coarse white hairs mixed in with her long, nearly black curls—she pulled them out without Sam ever noticing. Phoebe knew Sam would claim not to care, but
she
cared. Sam was only twenty-five. Phoebe was, all their friends teased, robbing the cradle. “A regular cougar,” Sam joked, and she’d go along with it, giving him a throaty cat growl and clawing at the air in his direction.

She pulled her lipstick from her bag and carefully applied it. She’d toned down the makeup a lot since being with Sam—he called it war paint and swore she looked sexiest first thing in the morning before she’d done her hair or face. Even now he rolled his eyes while she touched up her lips.

“I don’t know who you’re trying to impress,” he said. “Evie was always a tomboy.”

Phoebe shrugged.

An hour and a half in the car—with its mingled bouquet of burning oil, ancient spilled coffee, and Sam’s too-sweet organic herbal aftershave—was more than Phoebe could stand. Her stomach was churning in an unfriendly way. The lipstick had a greasy taste that was pushing her over the edge.

“I think I’ll go stretch my legs,” she said, mouth watering in the way it did that warned she might throw up any second.

Sam reached over and took her hand, stroking her knuckles with his index finger. “You okay, Bee? You’re looking kind of pale.” He felt her forehead to see if she might have a fever. It was a sweet gesture. She took his hand in hers and kissed his fingers. His hands were calloused from all his work in the woods, and he had deep stains in the creases that never seemed to come clean: pine pitch, chain-saw grease. Now his fingers smelled vaguely of gasoline and Lava soap.

“I’m fine,” she said, gently guiding his hand away from her face. “I’ve just been in the car too long. A little fresh air and I’ll be good as new.”

Sam nodded, checked his watch. “Don’t go too far. They should be here any minute.”

She gave him a teasing sort of salute and stumbled from the car, pretending to check her own invisible watch (she couldn’t stand the feel of anything tight around her wrist). “Watches synchronized, Captain,” she said. “Back in ten minutes.”

“And try not to get lost!” he called after her. “Leave a trail of bread crumbs or something.”

Taking deep breaths to fight the nausea, Phoebe reached down to tie her green Doc Martens boots. They’d been a thrift store find and now were standard footwear on all of her wilderness adventures.

Boots double knotted, Phoebe headed down the start of the logging road while Sam stayed in the driver’s seat studying the map to make sure they were in the right place. Sam was a map and compass kind of guy, which Phoebe found comforting. She had the sense of direction of a moth banging uselessly against a light fixture.

S
am and Phoebe had been together for three years, a fact that Phoebe still couldn’t quite believe. They met at the veterinary clinic where Phoebe worked as a receptionist. Sam brought in an injured barred owl he found when he was out hiking.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said, out of breath, his arms bleeding from where the owl had fought him with its talons. “I just found her like this.” The owl was wrapped in a red-checked flannel shirt, its face pale, its eyes a deep brown.

Sam had similar eyes—they were the color of chocolate with the most amazing eyelashes she’d ever seen on a man. Phoebe was instantly charmed by his sensitivity—unusual for Phoebe, who was ordinarily attracted to the insensitive bad-boy type. She was a pro at dead-end relationships with the type of guy whose big idea of commitment was actually showing up for a Friday night date at the Great Wall of China all-you-can-eat buffet. She had been okay with that—at least it was familiar, safe. But something happened to her when she saw Sam cradling that owl—as if a door opened up and she got a peek at what she’d been missing.

“Buckshot,” Dr. Ostrum said once she had the owl on the examining table. All the fight was out of it now and the owl lay limp, breathing fast and jerky, a mass of mottled gray-brown bloody feathers.

“Can you save her?” Sam asked, his eyes red and wet, his voice soft and boyish.

Dr. O. shook her head. “The best thing we can do for this owl is euthanasia.”

Sam’s body crumpled, and he leaned forward, arms on the table. “Who would do this?” he asked, voice cracking. “Who would shoot an owl?”

And Phoebe did something so uncharacteristic, she felt as if it wasn’t even her doing it. She reached out and put a hand on Sam’s clawed-up arm, which twitched slightly at contact. She felt as if she were touching something wild and wounded, as Sam must have felt with that owl in his arms.

“Sometimes,” she told him, “bad things happen and we’re never meant to know why.” They both stayed in the room while Dr. O., quickly and gently, gave the owl an injection. The rise and fall of its feathered breast slowed, then stopped. Phoebe helped Sam wash and bandage his arms.

“Her heartbeat was so fast,” Sam said. “And those eyes . . . It was like they had a thousand things to say.”

Phoebe nodded and ripped off another piece of medical tape, having no idea then that the kind guy with the bloody arms and killer eyelashes was
the
Sam, the brother of the girl who went off to see the fairies and was never seen again. The little boy in the Superman shirt she’d once glimpsed through a window.

He invited her to go hiking the following weekend, and she agreed, showing up in a miniskirt and flip-flops. “Not exactly a nature girl, huh?” Sam had said. At her insistence, they’d gone on the hike. She came out of the woods that afternoon sunburned, blisters between her big and second toes, and with a god-awful case of poison ivy. But it had been worth it. For the first time in her life, she truly understood the old saying
Opposites attract
. They were all wrong for each other and he wasn’t her type at all (a college graduate and member of the Green Party?), but somehow this made the attraction stronger, more daring.

When Phoebe later asked what it was Sam saw in her, he smiled. “It’s just because you’re you, Bee. I never know what’s going to come out of your mouth or what crazy adventure you’ll have me on next. You’re raw. Uncensored. You don’t give a shit what other people think. And the sex is great,” he said with a wink.

Sam grounded her, made her feel safe. And she taught him what it was like to be a little less grounded, a little less safe. Since they’d been together, she’d convinced him to try shoplifting (he stole a cheap plastic lighter with a
NASCAR
logo), sex in the back of a Greyhound bus, and horror movies (which he pretended not to like, though he was always quick to point out when a new movie was opening).

It seemed to Phoebe, back at the beginning and now, that they were exactly what the other needed; the missing piece that made everything else magically click into place.

And still, even when she was first falling in love with him, she didn’t know about Lisa.

It would be months (and by then she was head over heels) before she realized who Sam really was. The man who made her feel safe, who’d driven her nightmares away, was carrying his own set of secrets, his own dark history that—if she were to be honest with herself—she ached for glimpses of.

After navigating washouts and ruts for five minutes or so, Phoebe stopped to pick up a small, smooth, orange kidney-shaped stone that caught her eye. When she emptied her pockets at the end of the day, Sam would often tease her, say she was named after the wrong sort of bird. “You’re my magpie,” he joked.

Their house was full of the little treasures Phoebe had gathered over the years: birds’ nests, snakeskins, corroded coins, old railroad ties. The skull of a squirrel. Sam said her ever-growing collection made their house seem like the den of a voodoo priestess. When she met him, the only thing decorating his house were topographical maps tacked to his walls. Phoebe had them framed and put them up in the living room and office, where they went perfectly with Phoebe’s trinkets. She bought some throw pillows and dragged Sam’s Mexican blankets from the closet and used them to cover the secondhand furniture. She felt downright domestic and began to wonder what had happened to the old Phoebe who would never have imagined living with a guy, much less playing the Martha Stewart of Vermont. Still, she had to admit that part of her was waiting for the bottom to fall out—that this was too good to be true and wouldn’t last. And deep down, she felt like maybe she didn’t deserve it—that she belonged with the petty thieves and guys who drank Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast.

But the dream life continued. They soon added some framed snapshots of the two of them camping and canoeing, looking like a couple in an L.L.Bean catalog. Slowly, Phoebe’s wardrobe changed from the sexy to the practical—hot pants and vintage camisoles were replaced by fleece and long johns. She let her hair grow out like a wild woman hippie chick. For Sam’s birthday that first year, Phoebe bought him an Audubon print of a barred owl in tribute to the bird that had brought them together. The print hung above their bed, the owl’s large eyes watching over them, casting a wise bird spell that bound them together each night.

Phoebe felt safe with Sam. For the first time in her life, there were no nightmares, no glimpses of figures watching her from the shadows or slithering out from under her bed. The foolish fears of her childhood and early adulthood vanished and came to feel far away, like something dreamed up by some other girl.