Green tried to continue reading Clara’s journal, the image of the living person fusing with the image he had conjured from the written word. It was no good. His teacher’s every breath, every creak of her chair, felt like sand slipping through the hourglass. He took to wandering the room and pretending to read the spines of books.
He was back in Mr. Reynard’s hospice room, except this time Green’s friend wasn’t resting peacefully, soothed by sedatives. He was fighting for his life against an enemy Green couldn’t see or touch. He was fighting alone.
“Go rest,” Valentina said without looking up from her reading.
Even shivering, even dying, she found it easier to shoo Green out of the way while she engineered stratagems for escaping the deep winter that was stealing her life away.
He didn’t have the heart to argue. He retreated to his shed where his spiraling worries could wear patterns in the walls of his skull without disturbing his teacher.
His phone buzzed against his hip, a rare spark of cell service bringing a text notification. He kept it in his pocket out of pure habit, but he was beginning to forget it was there. When was the last time he’d charged it?
No doubt an exciting new MLM or real estate scam.
He’d check it later.
He sat on his cot watching serpent tongues of flame flickering in the stove as the pallid afternoon lost ground to evening. The footsteps of coming night were a funeral march. Night brought the cold, it brought the glass fawn, it brought one of Valentina’s last chances to banish the creature that was killing her.
Is this her last chance?
How many chances did the old cryptonaturalist have already over the last five centuries?
How many do-overs does one person get?
His fingers found the acorn and he jerked his hand away. Just then, he hated the small brown everything that thrummed in his pocket like a second heartbeat.
What is it?
The moment of my death?
A payment for a meal?
A practical joke from an inscrutable crow?
He had spent just over a week as a new immigrant in the mirror world of cryptonature. What did that experience buy him? What plan could he offer to someone who counted lifetimes like seasons of a half-remembered childhood?
A tap on the door.
“Come in.”
Dancer ducked inside like a parent stooping into their child’s blanket fort.
“Well, look at you,” she said. “Snug as a bug in the sort of place a bug would consider snug.”
“Hey, Dancer. Good timing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I was feeling a little too sorry for myself. Good time for a visitor.”
“Sorry for yourself? Doesn’t seem like the sorta night for that, fella. Beautiful autumn evening in the mountains and all. And heck, if greeting cards were scratch ’n’ sniff, half of them would smell like this room. Pine and woodsmoke. Plus, this.”
She pulled out her customary lumberjack-plaid thermos of sassafras tea and offered Green a cup from her pocket.
“Maybe I could start a scratch ’n’ sniff greeting card company,” she said. “Happy quinceañera. Enjoy some Mountain Smells.”
Green’s traditions were young in this new life, but one of them wasthat he didn’t refuse Dancer’s tea. He took it and breathed the steam. Not quite root beer. Not quite lemon. Something earthy with notes of oak and autumn.
“You sure you aren’t a cryptid, Dancer? You make life out here seem a little too easy sometimes.”
