Page 55 of Samhain

“That’s cruel.” Miri furrowed her eyebrows and scowled.

“Siobhan led us out into the woods,” I said. “Does anyone remember crossing through a portal into a different world?”

“That Midsummer festival was off from the beginning.” Miri flipped another page in her book. “But the wine was what did me in.”

“All the lore says to stay away from the food of the fae,” Ivy added.

“Noted.” Three pairs of eyes shot to me. “For next time.”

“Next time?” Lex narrowed his gaze and furrowed his brows, letting out an exhale of smoke.

No one said anything, and I shrugged. “They always go back.”

“What do you mean?” Miri cut in.

Ivy cleared her throat and touched her neck, hiding the X that currently snaked up her windpipe.

“In the lore,” I explained, pointing down to the book in front of me, “any human that escapes Faerie usually goes back.”

“Why the fuck would they do that?” Lex inhaled his cigarette before stabbing it out in the ashtray on the coffee table.

I shrugged. “The realm has a hold on them forever.”

Lex looked from me to Miri and eventually up to Ivy. “You think that’s what’s happening here?”

Ivy pursed her lips. “I don’t know, but it makes sense.”

“In the end, you have to go back to the beginning,” Miri said, pulling one side of her mouth into a grimace. “I really don’t want to see those woods again.”

“I don’t know if we’ll have another choice.” Ivy sat back in her seat, her features softening as the weight of the situation landed on all of us.

“I hope we do,” Miri added.

Yeah, me too.

Nothing in me wanted to return to Killwater, especially now that we suspected the fairies had done something terrible to us. What if they made this worse? What if we went back and we could never leave again? There were stories about that shit, too. I’d just read one about some entitled fairy falling in love with a human, only to keep them as a consort until everyone that human knew had died. I didn’t want to end up like that poor dude.

When our brains turned to mush, we moved to the kitchen where we made dinner together like a family. Lex and Ivy debated politics while Miri antagonized both of them and I tried to play peacemaker. We cuddled on their oversized couch and watched movies until we couldn’t keep our eyes open. Then we dragged ourselves back to Ivy’s massive bed where we’d take our fill of each other. We’d pass out in a heap of hormones only to wake up and do it all over again the next day.

It was perfect. But like all perfect things, it couldn’t last. About a week and a half into our staycation, Ivy came home with news.

“Kit found Siobhan,” she said.

Miri and I sat on the couch, watching a popular show about meth dealers in Albuquerque, when Ivy and Lex came through the front door following brunch with their parents.

“Where is she?” Miri said, pushing to her feet.

“She’s back in Ireland,” Lex said.

“She showed up three days after the lust took us.” Ivy looked between us. “She bounced around Dublin until yesterday, when she stopped two kilometers outside Killwater.” She showed us a grainy black-and-white photo of someone I sort of recognized at a cash register.

“Are you sure it’s her?” Miri asked.

“Kit is,” Ivy said. “Her computers are smarter than everyone in this room.”

“Computers are still programmed by humans,” Lex said.

Fair point.

---