they weren’t going to give up what was theirs. I shivered and shifted a little closer to Sam as we walked, creating a tripping hazard. James stole a glance at the tree line and moved closer to me in turn.
“You feel it, too, huh?” I asked. I had never been comfortable in the Buckley woods, but they had never felt this oppressively hostile before.
“The trees are watching me,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
Grandma looked over her shoulder at us, and said, “Your grandfather was the same way about my woods. I think it’s a sorcerer thing. They don’t like you. I don’t know why. Maybe a sorcerer hurt them once. They like me just fine.”
“Of course the terrifying murder wood likes you,” I called. “You’re a terrifying murder lady.”
She smiled. “Now Annie, don’t be jealous. I’m sure there’s a nice deciduous forest out there somewhere, just waiting to fall head over heels in love with you.”
I snorted, but to be fair, her description wasn’t far off. I’d read all the diaries documenting her teen years in Buckley, and her courtship with my grandfather. The trees here genuinely seemed to love her and had saved her life in their immovable way more times than was strictly realistic. She’d had two true loves in her lifetime: my grandfather, and the Buckley woods.
“I’ll stick with my monkey, thanks,” I said.
Sam preened.
“She just said she’d pick you over a literal forest,” said James. “I wouldn’t look so smug if I were you.”
“Why not? Forests are great. Lots of trees to climb, lots of interesting toads and beetles and stuff to look at. I’m pretty sure that was the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.”
The boys fell to squabbling gently over my head as we walked. I smiled to myself, tuning out their words in favor of listening to their tones. They sounded perfectly relaxed, trusting me and Grandma to keep them safe in this familiar-to-us place. It was comforting, knowing they could trust me that much.
Up ahead of us, Cylia caught Fern’s arm as the latter started to fall, having tripped over a rock in the path while her density was dialed down too far to let her recover on her own. I grinned. This was my family now, as much and as concretely as my biological family. We’d been through too much together to be anything else. We might not be together forever—probably wouldn’t be, since Fern eventually wanted to meet a nice sylph boy and have babies of her own, and the sylph creche structure didn’t really allow for her hanging out with humans and other cryptids while she was trying to reproduce—but we would always be a family, and that was remarkably reassuring.
Something had to be. We followed Grandma around a bend in the road, and a house appeared up ahead of us, tall and narrow and remarkably imposing, painted in an almost gangrenous shade of brownish-green. The shutters on half the windows were actively askew, creating the odd impression that the house was watching us approach. The architecture was somehow subtly wrong, like if we took a level and a protractor to the walls and angles, we’d find that they didn’t line up and the structure didn’t technically exist in this plane of reality.
The tension went out of Grandma’s shoulders, and for the first time since I was a child, I actually believed the age she appeared to be. She looked like a teenage girl as she gazed at the house she’d shared with her husband, where my father had been born, where she’d either lost or given up everything she had. Her history wasn’t a love story; it was a tragedy still in process. She sped up, heading for the porch. Cylia and Fern hung back. We caught up to them quickly.
“You’re sure this place isn’t haunted?” asked Cylia, voice low.
“According to the ghosts, it’s not, and I usually listen to them,” I said. “We could call one of them, if you’d like.”
“I think it’s looking at me,” said Fern.
“A bunch of people got murdered here before the house belonged to my family,” I said. “Something about a swamp god convincing the last owner that chopping his family into hamburger meat would win him its favor. Never go courting the favor of unspeakable gods of the swamp. They don’t have a good track record when it comes to leaving their worshippers alive. Anyway, the ghosts don’t like the house because of the whole ‘swamp god was here’