“There now,”she said soothingly, but her brow furrowed. “Your mam’s smart as anything, and besides, she’s got that—that Miss McIntire with her. She’ll come back all right.”
Arthur’s blood ran cold. “Come back from where?”
Kitty didn’t answer.
“What if she doesn’t?” Jonas asked, picking at their lip. “What if Uncle Arthur never comes back, and she doesn’t either?”
“Jonas,” Arthur croaked. “I’m right here. Where’s Lottie? Jonas—”
None of them noticed him. A trick, that’s all it was. A trick of a silver basin and a knife and his own blood, and a man with antlers who’d told him he could see his family.
He reached for Sasha. His hand passed through her, as if he were a ghost—as if she were.
“I’m sure she will,” Kitty said. “With your uncle in tow, I shouldn’t wonder. If anyone can come out of that forest alive, she can. Come now, children, let’s have a story and I’m sure we’ll all feel much better for it.”
Arthur tore from the kitchen. The forest? Charlotte wouldn’t have gone into the forest—no, not even to look for him. It was foolishness, and Charlotte was not a fool. She was in the house. She had to be.
“Lottie!”
The sitting room was empty. Her bedroom, too, and her boots and cane were not in their habitual place beside her bed, nor her coat on its hook. Still Arthur searched, thundering up to the attic as if he might find her sorting through old clothes or broken furniture.
“Lottie!”
Into the washroom without even knocking. Through his workshop, out into the garden, as if she might’ve been hanging laundry by moonlight.
All deserted.
“Lottie,” he whispered.
The small stretch of heather between the fence and the forest’s edge was empty. Flattened by wheels the way it had been flattened by his father’s feet thirty years before, when Arthur had run outside this same way, too late.
He threw the gate open and sprinted into the trees, but no sooner had they closed around him than he was sitting in a chair at a tiny table in a funny wooden house. He gasped for breath, glancing around wildly in confusion.
“I did warn you,” Ira said quietly beside him.
Blood congealed at Arthur’s fingertip. He pictured the slump of Sasha’s shoulders, Jonas picking their lip, the missing boots and coat and cane, and the same empty yard he’d run outside to three decades ago.
“Arthur?”
Arthur shoved back from the table, bolted to his feet, and ran outside.
“Arthur—”
He didn’t make it far. Yards from the door, Ira caught his hand, tugged him to a stop. His eyes went over Arthur’s face in alarm.
“What’s wrong? What did you see?”
Arthur yanked his hand from Ira’s. His voice was high with panic. “It’s Lottie—she’s come after me—she’s in the forest—”
Snow soaked into his socks, but he didn’t care. Ira blocked his path.
“Let me pass,” Arthur said.
In the doorway, Calyx unraveled, clicking. Ira held his hands up, talking to Arthur as if he were a spooked horse.
“Come inside. I’m sure we can—”
“I have to find my sister!”
