"Not a dream job though?" I ask. "What did you do before you came here?"
She laughs, but it's humorless. "Actually, owning a business is my dream job. Before this, I owned one kind of like this. A gift-shop-type store."
There's a backstory hanging off the end of that sentence. I shouldn't push. It's not my concern, but I do it anyway.
"So, what happened?"
She looks down, then around, finding things to straighten on the shelves to keep her hands and eyes busy while she tells me this slice of her past she'd clearly just as well forget.
"I lost it," she offers vaguely.
I stare at her longer than I should.
"Losing an entire business sounds like a very hard thing to do. Did you check the cosmic lost and found or…" I mean for it to come off as teasing, but she winces and I instantly regret it. Her mouth is a tight line, her eyes downcast, shoulders high and stiff.
I realize I'm poking at an emotional wound. I feel like an ass.
"Sorry," I mutter.
"It's okay," she replies, and I can tell it's just a platitude.
"So why can't this be your new dream job? If it's similar to the kind of store you wanted anyway." I remind myself I'm just making small talk. Nothing more. That my hound is being a jerk about protecting her, likely because the spell went wrong.
She looks around the store. "It can be. I've been thinking about it. I just don't know if I have that in me again." I watch her. There's a lotof spirit in her. More than there should be for someone who's clearly lost here. I'd seen it in my observations of her. Not stalking. The way she took everything in with quiet steel instead of breaking. So why does running a simple store full of knick-knacks seem to be the thing wearing her down most?
I open my mouth to press, but the chime over the door rings and a short man with red hair and an overlarge nose comes in. Randy, one of the town counsel members. "Got any gold dust?" he asks in a high voice.
"Oh," Ivy says, shaking herself out of whatever memories I'd pulled her into. "Yes, I did see that over here."As she helps Randy, I slip out the front.
My hound snaps within me, growling and clawing at my insides.
"What the fuck?" I mutter, trying to shove him back into his corner of my mind. "What is your problem?"
He only growls louder.
Ivy
The sun sets over the water, and I’m almost back to the cottage when I hear something.
“Ivy.”
I freeze, my heart pounding. I look around. My cottage is dark, the lane is empty, and the woods to my right are lost in shadow. When I hear my name again in my ex-husband’s voice, I know it’s coming from the woods.
“Ivy.”
Mark is in Texas with his secretary and probably a bottle of bourbon. He’s not here. So what’s calling me from the woods using his voice?
Whatever it is, they picked the wrong person. I wouldn’t walk into a dark forest for anything, especially not to follow that voice. I push the gate open and rush up the drive, my keys rattling as my shaking hands search for the right one.
Panting starts behind me, layered over soft, four-beat footfalls like a dog or a horse. My heart climbs into my throat and every nerve sparks sharp and hot. I don’t want to look back but I can’t stop myself.
Something comes out of the trees, about the size of a man but hunched on all fours, racing toward me. Its face shouldn’t exist. It’s just teeth and eyes stretched too wide for its skull.
I scream, the sound ripping out of me.
The keys slip from my hand and slide off the stoop into the grass. Inside, I’m screaming at myself to run, to jump off the bluff—anything. But my legs won’t move. I stand frozen as the thing charges at me.
Just as the thing is about to leap over my low picket fence, something slams into it from the side.
