No distraction.
No fatigue.
Green couldn’t keep his mind on Catskill long without losing his footing and veering off the path. Being in the wolf’s thoughts for even a second left him feeling disconnected from his own limbs, and when he returned to himself he felt small and slow, painfully slow.
He checked his phone again and again. Nothing and nothing.
They reached the hole near 10p.m.
“That’s not good,” Green said as firelight came into view, an orange glow fifty yards down the trail.
As they approached, they heard laughter and voices. A guitar strummed. The empty jangle of a tossed beer can tinkled through the trees.
“Mr. Green, you speak with the children. I will begin the work.”
Maybe it was the cold. Maybe the fawn’s influence grew after nightfall, but she looked like she’d aged twenty years on the walk. Her shuffle had become a limp. The firelight filtering through thetrees revealed the dark stains of frostbite clearly visible on her nose, chin, and cheekbones.
He failed to hide the shock on his face.
“I can imagine how I look. I am losing feeling. We need to hurry.”
Green walked forward into the firelight. He cleared his throat as he went, hoping to avoid scaring the people sitting around the campfire. It was no good. The guitar had drowned out their footfalls and the ring of light made the night beyond into a blank black wall.
Jerome fell off his log with a full body flinch that brought a discordant yelp from his guitar. Alf stood and stumbled backward. A young woman swimming in an oversized purple hoodie let out a cry and flicked out a folding knife.
Jerome groaned on the ground, the first real sound Green had ever heard him utter.
“Man, Green, you gotta warn somebody before you lurk outta the woods like that,” Alf said.
Jerome set his guitar aside in the leaves and began gathering up the playing cards that had spilled from his coat pocket when he fell.
“Sorry. I tried,” Green said.
“I didn’t think you’d got my text. Where’s my six-pack?”
“I did, I just couldn’t answer. Zero service. No beer today, Alf. We’re here to work on that…business I mentioned earlier.”
“We?”
Valentina walked directly toward the Hole in Nothing.
Alf flinched back again when he saw her.
“Shit, bro. Anybody else with you?”
Green shook his head and waved to Jerome and the stranger.
“Hi, I’m Green,” he said.
The girl in the hoodie stowed her knife, wrapped an arm around her knees, and half hid behind a curtain of hair dyed gunmetal gray.
“Casper,” she said, raising a finger in greeting. Tattoos of wildflowers peeked out from the cuff of her sleeve.
“Oh, thanks for your work on my car.”
She dipped her head.
Jerome held up his deck of cards, tilting his arm back and forth like a metronome. Green nodded to him.
