Charlie Morrison's Arc

Chapter 11 of 14

Charlie went back inside the cabin and locked the teal door behind her. The map lay on the kitchen table where she had left it. The mark in the corner watched her like an eye. David would be back at dusk to name the hand that drew it. She could not wait that long, and she could not let him tell her first. If he lied, she would have no way to catch the lie. She needed her own answer before he stepped out of the trees again. She thought of the butterfly journal upstairs, the one full of fae etiquette and pressed leaves. Her grandmother wrote everything down. If she kept a book for the fae, she might have kept another for the rest of the woods. Charlie climbed to the loft and knelt at the low bookshelf under the window. She pulled every book off the shelf. Behind a row of gardening manuals, pushed flat against the wall, was a worn caramel leather journal she had never seen. She carried it to the table and opened it. Her grandmother's handwriting filled the pages. It was not about fairies. It was a ledger of others. Shifters. Wolf-men. Names, debts, favors owed. Charlie turned pages until she saw the name David. There were three entries. The first was forty years old. Her grandmother had pulled a shifter boy out of an iron trap and paid the trapper to forget. The second, twenty years later, a winter loan of the cabin's back room. The third entry was dated the summer before her grandmother died. Charlie read it twice. "I have asked David to watch over Charlie when she returns. He is a good man in both his shapes. I have told him her route through the woods and the days she will come home. My hope is small and old. Two worlds have kept themselves apart too long. If Charlie and David find each other, the door between will open through them. I will not tell her. She must choose it, or it is not a door." Charlie set the journal down. Her grandmother had placed David in her path. Not as a guard. As a match. The mark on the map, the debt, the wolf that walked out of the pines — her grandmother had shaped the road years before Charlie walked it. She turned the map over and looked at the mark again. David had not lied about knowing the hand. He might not have lied about anything. But he had not told her this, and her grandmother had not meant him to. Charlie closed the caramel journal and slid it into the drawer under the table. When David came at dusk, she would let him speak first. She would listen for what he left out. Then she would decide what door, if any, she wanted to open.