had sensed my warm human flesh and had descended like a swarm of vampires, ruthlessly feasting on my blood.
Also, flip-flops? What had I been thinking taking the so-called shortcut in those? Please. I did not want to imagine what lay in wait to lunge at my bare feet—timber rattlesnakes. Spiders. Ticks galore.
I brushed off my legs. We’d spent a week in AP bio studying the life cycle of the common deer tick and how you could be bitten and infected with Lyme disease and not know it until a giant bull’s-eye bite swelled up on your leg and all your joints started hurting.
I really regretted remembering that.
If I’d chosen the path instead of the shortcut, I’d probably be in bed by now, I thought while scrabbling up a mossy incline, my stupid flip-flops sliding over dead leaves and sticks. I got to the top and almost fainted with relief. A light shone dimly through the trees. Or was it a star? No, it was definitely a light. A porch light.
There was a crash to my right, deep in the dark part of the forest. A deer, I told myself. New Jersey was lousy with them. Still, I wasn’t exactly eager to stick around and make sure, so I started running, flip-flops and all. Running toward that light.
“Every breath you . . .”
My heart practically exploded from my chest. Honestly. I had to change that ringtone. I grabbed the phone from my back pocket and slid it to On.
“Zoe!” the Queen trilled. “Where are you?”
“I’m on my way!” I started running again, accidentally stubbing my toe on an exposed tree root. Unspeakable pain rippled up my foot and calf, rendering me speechless.
“Well, hurry up, because there’s a scratching sound outside my window that’s annoying me. I was almost asleep when it woke me up. Make it stop.”
I quit rubbing my aching foot. Hold on. Hold on just a minute.
She was almost asleep?
“Zoe, are you there? I can’t see you!”
I held the phone to my face, hoping it adequately reflected the misery she was inflicting. “Can you describe this sound, ma’am? Was it an owl? A dog? A bird?”
“I don’t know what kind of animal it was! I’m not a blubbering Boy Scout!”
Oddly enough, that’s when I did hear a weird sound—and not the innocent rustling of leaves by some rodent. It was more like a thwack-thwack-thwack of footsteps coming through the undergrowth.
“I’ll go check it out,” I said, turning off the phone before she heard it, too.
I stood quietly listening, my pulse racing, my mind spinning out of control as I imagined every bizarre form of attacker—a wandering loner, a member of a Newark street gang with a poor sense of direction, the legendary New Jersey Devil!
And then logic prevailed. This park was in the middle of the New Jersey Pinelands, a million acres of protected nothingness. Chances were the sounds came from that tick-infected deer or perhaps my prince, in which case I needed to warn him that he was about to be caught in a trap.
“Hello?” I called.
The footsteps stopped, and after what seemed like an eternity, someone responded in that surreal princely voice. “Who’s there?”
It was him!
“Don’t come any closer,” I said. “If I see you and know who you are, I’ll have no choice but to report you to the Queen.”
There was a pause. “So I guess saving your life was, what, chump change?”
“Please. I’ve put my ass on the line by not telling her what happened. I promised you I wouldn’t tell, and I haven’t.”
“Thanks. I’d hate to have to explain the whole story.”
Not that again. “Really, whoever you are, your puns are pun-ishment enough.”
“What are you doing out here, anyway, Zoe? Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I said, trying to get a bead on how tall he was. Impossible to tell in this darkness. “But we really shouldn’t stick around. The Queen’s set a trap for you with cameras, one for sure by the hole in the fence.”
He said, “Not all of the park is still fenced. They just want you to think it is. One hundred and forty acres is a lot to enclose, and with all the cost-cutting to raise profits, they’ve let the part no one sees rot into the ground.”
I’d been worried about that. “So you mean—”
“You’re officially in the Forbidden Zone.”
Which officially made me a treasonous criminal, the ultimate poster girl of Fairyland disloyalty. I took a deep breath as my nerves, already rattled,