His expression is tight, and I can’t tell if he’s looking at me, or at the necklace in my hand. “In Levi’s house.”
“Where in his house?” I press.
“The fireplace. He was trying to burn it.”
I squeeze the chain in my palm. “Why would he do that?”
My husband’s eyes flick to the window like he’s heard something, but then his gaze falls back on me. “I don’t know. But Maggie St. James was here and Levi lied about it. They were both here—Travis and Maggie—and he knew.”
“Levi knew about Travis?”
Theo slides his hand into his pants pocket and pulls something out. A piece of paper. “I found this with the necklace. He was trying to burn them both.”
I take it from him.
Things have changed.
Levi asked me to stay in Pastoral, he thinks my ability to see the past in the things I touch will help the community.
But I refused his offer. I told him I would leave as soon as the snow thaws.
He said it wasn’t safe beyond the border, that I couldn’t leave. He tried to stop me… and I pushed him. We struggled, breaking one of the old windows—a piece of the glass cut my scalp above my ear.
Maggie stitched me up, but a desperation is building inside me. I have to get out of these woods. I need to hide my notebook and these pages—evidence that I was here. Maybe Ben will come looking for me, or the St. Jameses. But I doubt it. They likely think I’ve abandoned the case. I haven’t been reliable enough for anyone to worry if I don’t return.
And there’s something else. Things are more complicated with Maggie now. I can’t just leave her behind… I care about her in a way I never should have allowed myself to.
We will leave together, or not at all.
Theo walks to the window and peers out at the evening light.
“Levi knew they were here?” I ask, breathless.
Theo nods. “He knows a lot more than he’s saying.”
A headache forms quick and blunt behind my eyes, and I walk to my husband at the window, staring out at the meadow, each of us looking for answers in the tall summer grass made pale and sorrowful by the drowsy moonlight.
“Was he talking about the window in the sunroom?” I ask. “It was broken by a tree branch during that storm two winters ago, not by a fight.”
Theo’s face has gone cold, muted, like he’s not sure of anything anymore. “We thought it was a storm when we found the broken window the next morning, but maybe we were wrong.”
“And we just slept through it? Two men fighting, breaking a window?”
“Maybe we didn’t hear it over the storm.”
I shake my head, but keep my eyes out at the distance, beyond the meadow grass, to the line of border trees. “It doesn’t make sense. If two outsiders came to Pastoral, why would Levi try to hide it? Why keep it a secret? Even if they were sick, he would perform the ritual like he did with Ash and Turk.” It feels as if we’re tiptoeing toward the truth, but not moving fast enough, and it’s quickly slipping away.
“I don’t know,” Theo answers. “But Levi’s been lying about all of it.”
“We need to confront him—ask him about Travis, about the broken window, ask if he was here in our house that night.”
Theo scrapes a hand across the nape of his neck. “No,” he says flatly. “Levi tried to destroy the necklace and the page; he doesn’t want us to know Maggie and Travis were here. He’s trying to hide whatever happened to them.” For the briefest moment, my husband looks scared, frightened in a way I’ve never seen in him before. “Maybe none of this is what we think it is.”
“Then what is it?” I ask, knowing my husband doesn’t have the answer. But wanting him to tell me something all the same, anything that will slow the desperate rattle of my heart.
Perhaps just like Eloise and the fox, we have feared the wrong thing—when we should have feared what’s right here, within our own borders, within our own walls. The beast is already inside the castle, tearing people apart, yet we stare into the woods waiting for it to appear.
Something bad happened here.
Something that screams inside me, begging me to see.
FOXES AND MUSEUMS
Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series Power felt good to Eloise.
It surged through her veins like electricity down a tree trunk during a lightning storm. She took to it quickly, as if she was meant for darkness, for the vile thoughts that now rattled through her.