Because a tingle was exactly what she had been feeling.
Plus, she knew for a fact that desire was making it stronger. Even as she devoured the book, she could feel that need to make the potion for Seth. And that need was sharpening every idea and instinct in her head. It made them crystal clear and almost bright—until she stood, and went to the kitchen, and started rifling through her grandmother’s recipe journals again.
Then when she found the recipe for Feel Better Soup, she grabbed a blank journal. And she opened it to the first page, smoothed it out on her knee, and started writing. No rational thinking about it, no troubled doubts allowed in, just whatever came to mind. “Extra-Strength Soup,” she wrote at the top, underlining it firmly.
But god it was a shock, when everything just flowed.
The soup needed fewer garlic bulbs. But more chili. And beans had been a substitute for something stranger. Something that her mind hadn’t let her imagine. Something like a supernatural caterpillar, she felt, then flicked to the “Creature” heading in the glossary.
And there it was:
“Hogarth,” she read. “Often found in fairy hollows, commonly used by such creatures as a method of transportation. Skins may be obtained by leaving out a thimble of honey next to any tree of a good nature.” Then all she had to do was find a thimble in her Gram’s sewing kit, and grab an old, sticky jar of Goodwin’s, and head outside. And she did, without even thinking about things likeIt’s pitch-dark outside by now, orA second ago you were afraid of shadows.
All that mattered was seeing if her insect-attraction method worked.
Even though itwasactually scary outside.
She had the strangest feeling when she stepped out the door—like in the woods with Seth, when she’d thought something was watching her. Only this time, that feeling wasn’t just familiar. She knewwhyshe had it. She remembered how she and Seth had stopped using the stairs by the science wing in high school, where it was too easy for the Jerks to see them coming, but impossible for them to know the Jerks were there.
Ambush Alley, Seth had called it.
And that was what it had felt like earlier that day in the woods.
And what it felt like now. It made her stop and scan all around the house, straining her eyes to see if she could make out one of those assholes. Even though it wasn’t going to be any of them, of course it wasn’t. They were probably off having football careers, or busy fucking up Wall Street. They hadn’t stayed around to live in what they had always thought of as a loser town.
So she took a bracing breath. And plunged across the dew-dipped grass.
Only to discover that she’d been so rushed and so distracted that she hadn’t put on shoes. She was just in her goddamn socks. By the time she got to the tree line she was soaked all the way up to her ankles, and so cold her teeth were chattering. She could hear them going and going, as she assessed the trees for something as seemingly daft as a good-natured one.
Does it give you a hearty hello, the rational part of her brain tried to sneer, as she stood there in her soggy socks, shivering, staring dumbly at the four or five live oaks that stood between her garden and the woods beyond. Then just as she was starting to think her rational side had a point in mocking her, one of the trees groaned. Itgroaned.
And it seemed…
To almost…
Leantoward her. Like it really was greeting her somehow.
Then, even wilder, she felt something in her head. A sort of voice, a kind of word, something that seemed like speech but wasn’t, and had to be translated somehow before she could understand it.Same as you did automatically with the fairies, she thought.
And she knew all at once what she was hearing: the tree’s name.
A big, blank space of weird symbols, it sounded like, and the closest human-language approximation she could get wasIvor. So she said it aloud, in greeting, and watched the tree shimmy its remaining leaves in response. Before it reached a branch down, pointing to where she should put the thimble full of honey.
All of which was overwhelming enough.
But then she did it, and the creature actually appeared. And oh, she didn’t even know what to think of it. What to do with the sight of a caterpillar, with a fairy riding on its back. The former barely the size of a thumb, crawling slowly over tree roots and other rubble. The latter urging it on, proud and pleased as punch about it.
And very visibly one of the same fairies from earlier.
“Sorry about the intrusion,” she managed to squeak out, once she had gotten hold of her senses. But the fairy didn’t seem to care. It said something likewell, if we knew you were going to bring honey for our horses, we wouldn’t have chased you. Then it made the Hogarth drop something that looked very much like the skin she needed, and the fairy attached the thimble to the Hogarth’s saddle, and both of them disappeared.
Leaving Cassie completely buzzed about two things:
Fairy forgiveness, and the Hogarth skin she held in her hands.
Plus a third thing that made a little less sense.It had a tiny saddle, her brain kept gasping, for some unaccountable reason. But by the time she returned to the kitchen, it was cooperating again. It told her to grind the surprisingly substantial shells using a pestle and mortar, before she’d even taken off her soaked socks.
Though she barely noticed her wet feet anyway.
