Page 45 of Silver Linings

“Sidney?” he said, disbelief vibrating in those two syllables.

“Yes,” I replied, then stepped forward. The light I’d glimpsed was from a big yellow flashlight propped against the trunk of an old, gnarled pine tree. A backpack lay near it, and as far as I could tell, he’d been staring at the trunk. “What’s so fascinating about that tree?”

“That,” he said, pointing.

An angular symbol of some kind had been carved into the trunk. “Is that…?”

“Yes, it’s an Ogham letter. The one that stands for ‘pine,’ I think, but I haven’t got them all memorized yet.”

I shook my head. “So…someone’s going all over the forest and carving these symbols into the trees?”

“It sure looks that way.” He stopped, running a hand through his hair, as though in confusion. Now it was utterly mussed and looked pretty adorable.

No, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about Ben Sanders like that. Not when I was supposed to be mad at him.

I stared at the pine tree. It wasn’t as if I’d made a practice of wandering around in the woods and inspecting every single tree it contained, but still, you’d have thought I should have noticed a bunch of odd symbols popping up all over the place.

Or maybe not. As my mother liked to say, people often saw what they wanted to see and nothing more.

“But…what’s the point?” I asked, deciding to leave my anger aside for now. If nothing else, I needed to play nice so he would help me get back to civilization. I knew these woods well enough, but even I would have had a hard time finding my way home without some kind of light source.

His shoulders lifted. “I have no idea.” He paused there, as though deciding what he should say, and shook his head. “After I got back to the B&B, I started thinking that maybe I should check to see if the Ogham letters could be found anywhere else. So I headed out here to take a look.”

“Why this particular spot?”

A rueful smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “No real reason. But I had to start somewhere, right?”

I supposed he had a point there. “And you couldn’t wait until morning?”

Again, he shrugged. “I didn’t feel like going to sleep. Also, I hate it when I’m dealing with a mystery that feels like it doesn’t want to get solved. Maybe there was a risk coming out here after dark, but I’ve spent enough time in these woods now that I don’t think I was in any danger.”

He probably wasn’t. Yes, Sam and the other forest rangers liked to warn people about the black bears and the mountain lions, and yet I had only heard of a single animal attack the entire time I’d lived in Silver Hollow, which meant the odds of such a thing happening were very low.

So…why had the unicorn led me here? Simply so I could find Ben?

Was the creature trying to play otherworldly matchmaker or something?

If that was the case, the unicorn was going to be sorely disappointed.

“You probably weren’t,” I said.

Now it was Ben’s turn to give me a questioning look. “And you…what? Decided to take a nighttime walk in the woods without even a flashlight?”

On the surface, I supposed the situation did look pretty strange. Problem was, I couldn’t tell him about the unicorn.

“I know this forest really well,” I said. “I don’t need a flashlight.”

His expression was dubious in the extreme, and I couldn’t blame him. If our positions had been reversed, I would have thought he was handing me a load of serious bull.

Before he could comment, however, an odd grinding sound carried through the cool night air, one very different from the soft soughing of the pine trees in the damp ocean wind.

No, that sounded suspiciously like some kind of machinery.

Ben immediately went on the alert, chin lifted as he looked around us, obviously searching for the source of the sound. “Did you hear that?”

“I did,” I replied.

Now came the annoying beep-beep-beep of some kind of vehicle backing up.

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