Page 46 of Faun Over Me

“Leather?”

The inhuman twisted her face around to stare blankly at Avery. “Would you like me to tell you what they actually are?”

“Um…” Avery could imagine, even if she didn’t want to. “No, thank you.” The Hidebehind snorted in what was unmistakably a laugh. “Only,” she continued, “the monster that chased me and Cricket—it didn’t have any antlers.”

“Fascinating.” Sanoya and the Hidebehind wrestled the mattress onto the bed, the bear-like, or so Avery assumed, inhuman dropping under the bed to avoid notice. Boxes and shoes were shoved out from under the frame, and Sanoya gathered them all, setting items near the door and frowning at Avery when she tried to help.

“Go on.” She shooed her out of the cabin, grabbing an old broom from the porch and waving it at Avery. “You’re part of the family now,” Sanoya said. She popped onto her tiptoes and set the broom back onto its hooks above the door. “We look out for one another.”

19

Cricket

“If you had let her leave, she probably would not have felt the need to run away!” Ramble shouted from the other room, their voice carrying through the thin woven wall. They had been arguing for hours now, ever since Cricket mentioned going back to the camp in a few days when Ramble left. Her mother, Thistle, had cried out, and her father, Bosk, burst to his hooves, antlers scraping the thatched roof as he bellowed.

It hadn’t taken long for Cricket to throw up her hands and storm away, but what was the point? She’d been making the same arguments her entire life—that they should integrate, if not with the entire world, then at least with Green Bank. That they didn’t have to live in huts, that they could get jobs, buy clothes, and go to school.

She tried to tell them about the wolven and the sasquatch marching in a band together. Tried to get them to imagine a naga and a gnome sitting at a table, eating side by side instead of tearing through the woods as predator and prey.She had even told them about the assessor hiking through their woods with his surveyor's maps, but they didn’t listen. They wouldn’t listen, not even when Ramble confirmed everything she said.

In their minds, Cricket was still their youngest daughter, the only child who had fallen with them into this new world. They refused to see that she was grown and that she wanted a life beyond the woods of Green Bank. They were going to keep her here and Avery was going to leave in a few weeks, and that would be it. The end of her adventure and attempts to escape the tiny life her parents had planned for her.

So she stormed to her room, flopped down in the nest of blanket-covered pine straw, and that’s when she saw it—the parcels and bundles stacked against the door. Her belongings. Her life packed and ready to go.

And that was when the real yelling began.

“So you’re just giving up and moving? Again?” She stormed into the main room, not caring if she startled her parents and Ramble.

“Only deeper in the woods, honeybee,” Thistle said. “Near the hollow, at Deer Creek.”

“Only deeper.” She scoffed and stomped in an angry, limping circle. “Only deeper? They’re pushing us out, why can’t you see it? They’re going to keep buying up land; they’re going to keep bribing or bullying the people of Green Bank until we have nowhere left to go. Is that what you want? To force all of us to live the way you want?”

“Crick …” Bosk warned.

“Don’t Crick me, dad. I don’t want this! I want to go back to the camp; I want to be part of this world we live in.”

“We have a responsibility to—”

“To who, dad? To what?” She stormed up to her father, craning her neck to glare him in the eye. “Are you going to tell me? Or claim I’m too young? Too rash? Too emotional?”

“Uncle Bosk,” Ramble condemned, “you did not.”

“I would not expect you to understand, Bramblethorn,” he replied. They stiffened at their full name, nostrils flaring, but before they could retort, Bosk continued, “And yes, Cricket, you are too rash to be brought into the family’s reasons for staying where we do.”

“But we aren’t staying, are we?” she sniffed, her eyes stinging. “We’re moving—again and again and again, deeper into the woods—and you won’t do anything about it!”

“Cricket, dear, this cannot continue forever,” Thistle cut in, approaching Cricket the way a mouse approaches a seeping lynx. “There is only so much privately owned land the Georgia Men can purchase; after that, they will have to buy it from the government, which, I am told, is a far more difficult process.”

“It’s not the Georgia Men.” Cricket swiped the back of her hand across her nose. Ramble twitched their gaze her way, eyes widening as Cricket’s words landed. “It’s not the Georgia Men at all.”

She limped from the dwelling, trying not to cry when no one followed her. There were more important things than crying—like getting to Marlinton and the County Assessor’s Office. Getting copies of the records bearing Avery’s name, if they even existed, and getting someone, anyone in the family, to listen to her. Ramble would help. That’s why they hadn’t followed her out the door, because in that look, she knew Ramble had understood what Cricket did—once the government got involved, there would be no stopping the purchase of land. Because the Georgia Men represented Payne Properties, which was run by Nathan Payne, a man with enough political clout and connections to get Mackenzie Murray to interview his daughter.

There couldn’t be two more diametrically opposed people than Nathan Payne, the anti-inhuman trashbag, and Mackenize Murray, the wife of a faun and director of the first fully integrated camp in the nation.

The sun was high in the sky by the time she reached Marlinton. One upside of living in Green Bank—there was always someone looking to escape the pressure that clamped around their skulls if they spent too much time near the telescopes at the heart of the NRQZ. Always someone willing to give you a ride out of the National Radio Quiet Zone and enjoy amenities like a microwave. Today, it came in the form of a trio of teens headed to Lewisburg for a movie. Normally, Cricket would have covered the distance on hoof, grateful for the chance to stretch her legs at full speed. But her ankle still pinched, her hoof ached, and a car would be faster than she was now.

The teens dropped her in the heart of Marlinton, waving out the window as she limped into the assessor’s office. To her surprise, the county assessor, a sallow-faced older man named Charlie, was all too willing to help out a curious inhuman taking an interest in his job.

He set her up at a small table tucked in a narrow hallway, the chair facing the door and front desk, adding file after file to her pile. “The bulk of ‘em are from this last year,” he explained. “Oldest dates about four years back. You one of them faun out of Green Bank?”

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