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 alittle. 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 pressesstop, 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 ofThe 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. Ayes, 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.
Anelephant.
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 ishappening? 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’llbe your tent, my queen.”
