She smiled. “They do. But it is an epic undertaking, is it not? To rescue a stolen prince.” She glanced over at Ryan. “My condolences for your loss.”
“I haven’t lost anything,” he said. “Just temporarily misplaced. We’ll get him back soon enough.”
“Will you?” she asked, and I knew now why Gary was uneasy. “That’s good to hear.” She looked back at me. Her eyes were big and blue. “I was telling your companions how honored we were to have you come to our little village. We don’t often get visitors of your caliber all the way out here. You must let us house you for the night before you continue on down the road.”
“Sounds good,” I said before anyone else could speak. “It will be nice to have a warm bed for a change.”
She nodded before her eyes flicked over my shoulder. I looked back and saw black smoke rising above the tree line. Fucking fire geckos.
And redirected lightning that I had no idea how I did. Aside from the fact that I somehow willed it so.
“Uh,” I said. “Yeah. About that. Fire geckos, man. Just… a bunch of fire geckos. Nothing else.”
“Yes,” she said, all calm and level and so fucking tranquil. “We do have a bit of a problem with them out here. Nasty creatures, those. I’ll have some people from the village watch the fire to make sure it doesn’t jump the road. It’s the absolute worst thing to have any sort of flame near the corn. Why, only a madman would think otherwise.”
“Ha,” Tiggy said. “Firework corn. Poor Sam. Ideas all broken and sad.”
I glared at him.
Eloise turned back toward Tarker Mills, and Ryan and Tiggy followed. Gary and I purposely fell behind.
“She’s weird, right?” he whispered to me. “Gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
“Maybe it’s just that she seems so nice,” I whispered back. “We don’t know many nice people. We don’t know any nice people.”
“I’m nice.”
“You’re bitchy.”
“Close enough.”
“Look, just keep your eyes open, okay? No separating. Keep any questions and answers as vague as possible. Don’t let anyone approach you from behind without you knowing it.”
“You should let Ryan approach you from behind.”
“Gary. Now is not the time.”
He snorted. It came out periwinkle and mint. “It’s always the time for you getting sexed up in the butt.”
“I’m going to feed you to Eloise because I bet they turn out to be cannibals.”
“Nah, they’ll be witches in disguise that need your fingernails for a potion.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. That sounds about right.”
TARKER MILLS was a small hamlet set against the backdrop of the Northern Mountains miles in distance. The buildings and house were built of wood and mud and brick. There were men and women in the fields working with the corn. People smiled at us as we entered the village, waving and saying hello and making us feel more welcome than any other place we’d been before.
It was all bullshit.
No one could ever be that nice.
It was eerie and off-putting.
Vaguely, I wondered if maybe I was just too cynical, but I pushed that away because no, I had a healthy amount of cynicism and Tarker Mills was creepy.
So I gave them my own creepy smile back, wide and welcoming.