He pulled me toward him, only letting go when both our shoulders were against a tree trunk, angled so that we could see the glade below.
“Look,” he said.
It took me a second, all my senses hopped up and running through disaster scenarios. Kidnapping, murder, torture, all equal possibilities in my mind.
And behind all those thoughts:Don’t let Ryder get hurt. Don’t let him be taken away from me yet. Please, not yet.
But the sight that greeted me was not a murder scene. Or at least not like any I’d ever seen before.
The clearing was filled with lights, and all of those lights were moving.
My brain simply couldn’t make any sense of what was happening.
“What… is that?” I gasped, swallowing hard because gulping down that much frozen air during our run had done a job on my throat and lungs. “What’s going on with those people?”
Ryder was breathing hard next to me. I heard the dry click of his throat before he said. “I don’t think they’re people.”
“What do you…?” Then my brain snapped it together.
The clearing was a circular grove. A wide stream cracked through it, water reflecting the lights moving along both banks, lights which were attached to people.
Or, yeah, maybe not humans, but human-like creatures.
One of them warbled, another screeched like an owl, and then there was a song, made of growls and grunts and whistles and hums, a wild, deep, fluid thing that turned the sounds of nature into a symphony.
Like no song I’d ever heard before.
“Bigfoots,” Ryder breathed. “Is this… Flip was going to a reunion, right?”
I nodded.
“Is this it? The Bigfoots’ family reunion, or gathering of the clans, or…?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never asked him where it was exactly. I didn’t think he’d want to say. They’re very private, the ’Foots.”
“So we should go back to the cabin?” Ryder hadn’t moved. He loved being an eyewitness to all the supernaturals in Ordinary who made up the stories and myths he’d been reading since he was a kid.
From the tone of his voice, he really, really wanted to watch the Bigfoots at least a moment more before we left them to their privacy.
“Yes. But not yet.”
He threw me a glance.
“We need to make sure that screaming was celebratory and no one is hurt.” I turned off my flashlight because it wasn’t doing any good, and I didn’t want to distract the creatures below.
Ryder switched his off too.
“Right,” he said, nodding quickly. “Right. Come here.” He tugged on me. I didn’t fight it. I liked him pulling me to him, as if he had to have more contact, as if his heart was still racing with some of the fear I’d felt.
I was soon smooshed up against him, my back to his front, his arms locked tightly around me as we leaned shoulders into the tree.
The celebration below seemed to be just getting started. As we counted the moments with our breaths, our heartbeats aligning to the rhythm of this ancient song, we saw more Bigfoots enter the glade from the opposite side of the grove.
“Ten bucks that stuff is stolen,” Ryder said, and I had to muffle a laugh, because, yeah, I thought it might be.
These Bigfoots were each lit up in various manners. One seemed to have tied hundreds of glow sticks into its hair, so its entire body was dripping with a curtain of glowing orange, pink, and green. Another was covered in round, battery-operated touch lights that it was touching and tapping to the rhythm of the beat.
Another wore what I could only assume was a miner’s helmet with band upon band of lights strapped on the helmet, on wrists, arms, and on a very clever crisscross harness that wobbled and shook as the Bigfoots walked.
