CHAPTER32
“Mom! Mom!” Kevin burst into the bedchamber, Noodle at his side. “Look what I found!”
Cathy turned from making the bed to discover him thrusting a book at her. She took the leather-bound volume, turning to the first page.
“Interesting Spells for the Inexperienced and Intrepid,” she read aloud. Her heart sank. “Oh dear. I’m not sure this is appropriate for your age, Kevin.”
“Sure it is. It was in the beginner section.” He bounced on his toes, beaming from ear to ear. “Did you know there’s a whole level of books on elementary magic? Shelves and shelves and shelves! The tree showed me.”
Cathy cast a look at the trunk. “Did it now.”
It shouldn’t have been possible for bark to look guilty, but the oak managed it anyway.
With a sigh, Cathy tucked the book under her arm. “I’ll take this back. Promise me you won’t touch any more books, okay?”
Kevin eyed the crammed shelves and teetering stacks of paperbacks crowding every wall. “I think that’s gonna be hard, Mom. Unless you want me to just stand very still in this exact spot.”
“Don’t touch the magic books,” Cathy clarified. And then, because it was Kevin and she knew her son, she added, “Or take them down with your shirt pulled over your hands, or get someone else to turn the pages for you, or look at any that just happen to somehow mysteriously fall open in your presence. I didn’t rescue you from the seelie just to have you promptly blow yourself up. No reading spells, practicing spells, or doing spells of any kind. Is that clear?”
From Kevin’s expression, this was the most unreasonable restriction ever placed on a twelve-year-old boy. He opened his mouth, and Cathy braced herself for some cunning argument to come out of it—but then he shut it again. He looked down at his feet, his hair falling to shadow his eyes.
“Okay,” he muttered. And then, even lower: “Sorry.”
Cathy had a feeling he wasn’t apologizing for taking the spell book. “What for?”
He shrugged, shoulders hunching. “Having to be rescued. Putting you in danger. Making you come all this way.”
“Oh, my love.” She wanted to hug him, but something about his wary, defensive posture warned her to stay back. “I would have gone a lot further to find you.”
“It’s all my fault,” he mumbled at his toes. “I shouldn’t have listened. I shouldn’t have gone to Fair Hill in the first place.”
“Don’t feel guilty about that. I thought the old stories about the stones were just silly village legends too. You couldn’t have known there was any real danger.”
“I did, though.” His voice was just a whisper, barely audible. “The man told me.”
“What man?”
“Just… the man.” He lifted his head at last, his face pale and set. It reminded her of how he’d looked as a toddler, crawling into her bed in the middle of the night to escape from some nightmare. “I kept seeing him up Fair Hill, when I was cycling home from school. He was always up there, by the stones. Sometimes I saw him talking to a woman, a strange looking woman in a long red dress.”
Cathy sucked in her breath. “Maeve?”
Kevin nodded. “I didn’t know at the time what she was, but even from a distance I could tell there was something weird about her. I got curious, so one day I went up the hill to ask the man what he was doing.”
Cathy gave him a look. “I thought I taught you better than to talk to strangers. Especially weird ones.”
“I stayed on my bike, at a distance,” Kevin said, sounding a little defensive. “Anyway, he sneered and told me to run home to my mother like I was just a little kid. That made me mad, so I yelled that no one was supposed to go near the stones, and that my mom’s friend Betty was a police officer and that I bet she’d sure be interested to hear that he and his weird girlfriend were creeping around a protected historic site.”
Cathy stared at him, mind racing. “You specifically mentioned Betty? You’re certain?”
“Uh huh.” Kevin frowned at her. “Why?”
“She’s Wild Hunt. They’re like a secret society that protects—”
“I know about the Wild Hunt, Mom.” From Kevin’s eye-roll, she might as well have attempted to tell him about gravity. “Everyone who spends any time in this realm learns about them. I remember all that stuff now.”
“Well, excuse me, Mr. Expert,” Cathy said tartly. “So what happened next? How did the man react?”
“Suddenly he was all smiles, like he wanted to be my best friend.” Kevin’s frown deepened. “I thought it was weird at the time. But it makes sense now, if your friend is Wild Hunt. No wonder he got scared when I mentioned her.”