I’d never experienced a house invasion outside of my dreams. But the possibility lurked in the recesses of my subconscious. And now that Rae was here, my nightmare felt real again. Shadows took shape, crawling around me while I slept. And I made a list on how to cope with what was front on me. What was real and what was being exaggerated thanks to my heightened anxiety.
“There was dirt in your bed,” Wilson had insisted whenI’d woken with an ache in my neck and the goal to do anything but talk about the night before.
“Our whole front yard is dirt. I brought plenty of it inside.” Yes, the nightmare had been so plausible while it was happening. But much like every time I resurfaced from house invasion panic, my senses returned. My bedroom floor had never been the cleanest. And I hadn’t been as focused on indoor chores versus outdoor ones. I’d be better about cleaning days.
“Hey.” Rae was a few paces ahead of me. Kat took advantage of her lack of experience and my proneness to daydreaming.
“Yeah?” I blinked myself into the here and now with the woman I’d paid an exorbitant amount of money to read me a bedtime story.
“When did you start riding?” Rae tried to look over her shoulder but got spooked when Kat picked up her pace a couple of notches.
I squeezed my knees gently on Frog’s side, urging him to catch up. “My mom got a job doing finances at a stable one year. We got a discounted rate on lessons.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It was my version of heaven.” I smiled, remembering how thoughtful my mom could be when she wanted.
My parents weren’t neglectful, per se, but they weren’t there to pick me up when I fell either. From the moment I learned to tie my shoes and make a sandwich, I was expected to take things from there. Self-soothe and self-congratulate.
“She kept finding me outside the pens after school. Since we moved around a lot, I was the worst at making friends. I never really learned how to communicate in timeto form relationships. You want to know the best thing about horses?”
“They don’t care if you can string together a coherent sentence?”
“Exactly.” I patted the side of Frog’s neck. “And according to the stable hand, they were excellent judges of character. They always came up to me for pets or treats. Thus making my head swell to almost the size of yours.”
Rae tilted her head back as she laughed. Her hair brushed back and forth in the wind, a mesmerizing wave. My palm still burned from when I caught her before falling. Rae’s long strands had kissed my skin like a gentle whisper. Because her body had briefly pressed against mine, I wondered if I smelled like her. I wondered if it was strange to want to and quickly decided it was.
“They sensed you were kind.”
I smiled. “Something like that. They accepted me. And I felt like I was worthy of friendship for the first time…I cried myself to sleep for a month when my dad decided he wanted to spend the next year working at a national park. Once we moved, I lived for any excuse to ride again.”
“I’m guessing those didn’t come around too often.” Rae’s smile faded when I shook my head. “Why did they move so much?”
“They were roamers.” I nudged Frog left at the fork in the road. We still had about twenty minutes until we got to town. “Staying still made them anxious. They wanted to see everything. Dreamed about being city people and country people. Living in the mountains and near the sea. They said life was far too short to just live it one kind of way.”
Rae looked down for a second, mouth pulled into a tight line as she thought. “We have something in common,finally. My parents didn’t like to stay still either. Can’t help everyone on this planet like that.”
If she wasn’t smiling, I’d say there was some bite in her tone when she said,everyone. Resentment. But her eyes remained clear, brow unbothered. Rae ran her fingers through Kat’s mane without a care.
“How’d they get into hunting?” I’d searched for hours online about her parents, but information on them was scarce. They barely got more than a paragraph in their bio on the Guild’s official website. The picture of them had been old, too, a shot of a wiry man with thick curls, light brown skin, and skin tags sprinkled across his cheeks. He had an arm wrapped around a dark-skinned woman who wore circle-shaped glasses. Her hair was buzzed short, and she had a slightly gap-toothed smile. They couldn’t have been over thirty in the photo.
“My grandpa,” Rae said. “He grew up in an old town where, when people died, they would often linger in alleyways and attics. Everyone kept quiet about it, too religious to want to study over prayer. But Grandpa studied. And he learned how to help some of them move on. He taught my dad, and when my dad met Mom in college, she told him about her cousin who’d been showing up long after a drowning accident. He went back home with her to help, and the rest is history.”
Kat slowed down for a moment, getting distracted by a patch of grass on the side of the road. She munched as I asked Rae, “Do they still hunt now? With your sisters?”
“No, they’re retired. They occasionally consult on jobs. They live right outside the Guild headquarters, so they’re just a walk away from all the action.”
“Are they proud of you going out on your own? Starting something like they did?”
Rae smiled to herself. “I think they think I’m silly trying to build something new next to a system that already works. Dad said it seemed like a waste of time considering the number of resources the Guild’s hoarded. Not his exact words.”
She continued to mindlessly comb through Kat’s hair. Her smile faded as she got lost in a thought.
“It’s commendable,” I said. “Wanting to do something different. You told me you wanted everyone to feel like they could defeat their monsters. And you’re giving them tools to do so. That’s not a waste of time.”
Rae met my gaze; the small smile on her lips made her eyes brighter than an early morning sun. “See, that’s why I wasn’t sure if I could believe you. You sound so honest when you’re lying.”
“I’m not lying.” I held up two fingers. “Swear.”
