But she couldn’t keep turning them down. Pa had almost nothing in the way of savings, and the little he did have was paying for his care at Heath Manor. The only way to keep him there was to sell the house and farm.
One of these days, she was going to have to accept an offer.
Summoning her courage, she marched past the For Sale sign and up to the front door, then punched the passcode into the lockbox where the real estate agent kept the keys. Unlocking the door, she stepped inside.
It smelled like him.
Likehome.
No, she told herself.Not home. Not anymore.
Once, dirt-encrusted shoes lay piled to the right. In their place now sat an empty rubber mat. Emeline toed off her boots. The tiled floor chilled her feet as she walked from the mudroom to the living room, where the ticking of the grandfather clock broke the silence.
No fire burned in the fireplace. No delicious aroma wafted from the kitchen. This house—the one harboring her most cherished memories—felt utterly lifeless and cold. Like its soul had fled and only a shell remained.
Emeline called for Pa, desperately wanting to hear him answer. There was a spare key under the flowerpot in the garage. If he’d managed to walk the eight miles from Heath Manor, he could have used the key to get in.
Emeline checked room after room, coming at last to his bedroom.
On the dresser, old picture frames stood in a wobbly row. Which was odd. Emeline was pretty sure she’d packed all of them away.
The photos within the frames all bore her image—chubby and rosy cheeked at two, gangly and awkward at ten, lithe and tall at sixteen while she strummed a guitar up onstage.
They filled her with a longing for the past. When everything had been so simple.
Those days are gone, she told herself.They’re never coming back.
Emeline hugged herself. She was here to find Pa, not reminisce on the past. Her grandfather had to be close by. Old men with bad hips didn’t just disappear.
I’m so sorry, baby girl. But your grandfather’s been tithed.
Before she could reject Maisie’s absurd explanation, the words snuck past her defenses.
The room shifted.
Suddenly, Emeline no longer saw through the lens of a girl from the city; she saw through the eyes of a girl who’d grown up in Edgewood.
Her gaze fixed over the door, where gnarled branches hung above the lintel, tied together with twine. Judging by the fresh, sweet smell, they’d been recently cut.
In Edgewood, people hung hawthorn branches over their lintels to ward off things from the woods.
Things likeshadow skins.
Emeline frowned. Had Tom put them there?
She started crossing the room to take them down when her gaze snagged on the empty copper bowl sitting on Pa’s bedside table.
I definitely packedthataway.
Circling back, Emeline picked it up. The bowl’s cold, heavy curve—twice the size of her cupped hands—sparked memoriesof Pa leaving it on their doorstep at every season’s turn, full of his quarterly tithe for the Wood King.
Emeline ran her fingers over the copper, feeling the rough marks from Poor Mad Tom’s hammer. Tom cold-forged all of Edgewood’s tithing bowls. She touched the inscription around the rim. Words she’d traced over and over with much tinier fingers, a long time ago.
The steepest sacrifices make the strongest tithes.
Tithes to the Wood King, it meant.
According to Edgewood lore, the Wood King was an ancient creature who resided deep in the woods. He demanded quarterly sacrifices from those living on the border of his eldritch forest: tithes that kept the people of Edgewood safe from him and his bloodthirsty monsters. Four times a year, the Wood King sent his tithe collector to take offerings from the residents of Edgewood—or so the stories went.
