Eden Riverwallow's Arc

Chapter 4 of 18

Eden salted the sill the way Kane told her to. She poured the line thick along the wood, then did the back door, then the two windows that faced the trees. The cottage stayed quiet while she worked. It did not say her name. It had not said her name since Maleficit crossed the moss line, and she was starting to think it was holding its breath along with her. Willow followed her from room to room. The cat came too, stopping wherever Eden stopped, sitting on the salt bag when she set it down. "He said not to open the door," Willow said. "For anyone." "I heard him." "So don't." "I'm not going to open the door." Eden set the salt on the counter. "I'm going to make him come back to it." Willow's face did not change. "How." "I don't know yet." She had no way to call him. No phone number, no name he'd answer to twice, no fence he watched from anymore. He had walked into the trees and taken the shape of whatever he really was with him. She stood at the window and watched the dark press against the glass. The moss line was a pale seam at the edge of the yard. Past it, nothing moved. She went to the drawer under the stove where she kept the things she had found in the cottage before she owned it. A cracked amulet lay at the back, a full moon under glass, split down the middle. Strands of white hair were caught in the crack. She had pulled it out of a floorboard her first week and left it in the drawer because it felt like it belonged to someone. She had known, the way she always knew, that whoever left it had died in that room. White hair. Heavy tired eyes at her fence. "Willow." "I see it." Eden held the amulet up to the lamp. The hair was his. She was certain in the same flat way she was certain about deaths. The cottage had kept a piece of him for her before she ever moved in. She carried it to the porch. She did not open the door. She pressed the amulet to the glass of the window facing the trees and held it there with her palm flat over it. She said his name once, low, into the wood of the frame. The cat's ears turned first. Then Willow's head. Something moved at the treeline. Not stepping out. Stepping closer. A shape the size of a man, low to the ground and wrong at the shoulders, stopped just inside the trees and stayed there. Two points of yellow held on her window. Eden lowered her hand. The amulet stayed stuck to the glass where her palm had been, as if the house had taken it from her. He did not cross the moss line. He did not leave, either. He lay down in the dark at the edge of her yard and watched the door. She had called him. He had come as far as he would come. Now she had to decide what she was willing to walk out to.