keep them distracted.
“Is this the tree you picked out for us?”
He nodded, his eyes serious. When I didn’t say anything right away, he shifted his enormous feet and his smile wavered.
He wanted me to love it. I pushed aside my concerns that a tree that size wouldn’t make it through my door or stand upright in my living room. I ignored my worry about bugs, snakes, mice, and other woodland creatures the tree might be harboring.
I squeezed Iris’s hand—which was to say, I flexed my hand that was buried inside of his huge one. “It’s really lovely, Iris. Thank you.” I swallowed thoughts of how much real estate the branches would take up in my living room and smiled. “You did a wonderful job picking it out.”
He grunted, and pride puffed from him in a cloud, settling over us both in a soft mantel. Iris let go of my hand and grabbed his axe to get me the biggest, nicest Christmas tree I would probably ever have.
I watched a moment as he swung for the first cut. The axe looked so small in his grip. I shook my head and resumed my walk.
At the edge of my property, before reaching the path down to the beach, I passed the hip-high mushroom that housed my friend Molly and her kids. The brownie family fit comfortably inside, with several rooms carved from the mushroom and tiny wooden furniture to make them comfortable. Lights burned in the window cutouts, and little Abby sang louder than her older brothers, with no concern for the actual words.
“Bells on Bob’s tail ring! Making cherries bright! What fun it is to ride and sing a spraying song tonight! Oh!”
I stifled a giggle and walked past. I didn’t want to interrupt.
My boots crunched on the gravelly sand of the winding path to the beach, and my skirt snagged twice on the overgrown branches of the bushes guiding the way.
I wasn’t a Grinch about the whole Christmas thing. My heart didn’t need to grow three sizes before I could join the Who feast and be the one to carve the roast beast. I wasn’t a Scrooge who needed a lesson in my past in order to preserve my future.
I was well acquainted with my past. At eight, my mom disappeared. I now knew the Board of Hidden Affairs had tampered with our memories so we wouldn’t know where she went, but it didn’t keep us from feeling the hole she left, especially around the holidays.
Dad had tried his best, but he was too confused, too hurt. He never fully recovered from Mom’s loss, and Christmas after that was a low-key event. We put up a few decorations from my childhood—paper snowflakes Dad had cut from construction paper leftover from a school project I’d done on Nefertiti. A pair of cups and saucers Mom and I had painted in red, gold, and green at a ceramics shop. A blobby nativity scene I’d made out of homemade clay when I was four. The tree got smaller each year until I hit high school. By then, it was a sad, tabletop affair as pitiful and limp as Charlie Brown’s tree before Linus and the gang showed it some love.
The idea of Iris’s ginormous tree in my living room made me a little claustrophobic.
After Dad died and I moved back home, I didn’t do much more than put out the sad little artificial tree with a few ribbons and gold balls on it. I liked Christmas. I even liked big gaudy trees. But I liked them at the mall or in the ski lodge where Sara and I usually spent the entire week of Christmas and New Year’s. It was tidier that way.
I plopped onto my favorite rock and let out a tired sigh. This year I had a lot more than myself and Sara to worry about. I wouldn’t be running off to hide at a ski resort.
Not that I skied much. Mostly I sat inside by the fire drinking hot chocolate laced with Irish cream. Heavily laced.
This year, Sara would be going without me. She might as well. Skiing was more her thing anyway. I’d miss her, though. It would be our first Christmas apart in ten years.
I stretched my legs and dug my heels in the sand, wishing it were warm enough to take my boots off and bury my toes. Tilting my head back, I let the wind blow away my grumpy mood and inhaled the intoxicating scents of the salt water, pine, and eucalyptus.
Gulls squawked. Waves crashed. A foghorn groaned. Someone sniffled and sobbed.
I snapped my head around to look. Not far away, a scrawny teenaged boy huddled against a large rock, gazing across the water and crying. Also, as was often the case with people I came across lately, he was naked.
My life is so weird.
The kid was curled in a ball, arms wrapped around his legs. He rocked in time with the movement of the waves. He didn’t react as I approached, but he paused his rocking to rub his forearm across his face in an attempt to clear it of snot and tears.
Thick, dark hair curled around his ears and trailed a few inches over his shoulders. The wind tossed it away from his face, giving me a clear view of his profile. From a few feet away, I could see the moisture clinging to his impossibly long eyelashes. The kid probably would break a lot of teenaged hearts once he filled out.
“Hey.” I kept my voice soft, trying not to startle him.
He jerked his head toward me, and his dark brown eyes grew wide.
“I’m sorry!” His voice was rough, and the words were more like a bark than any human sound. He moved to stand, bracing his palm on the rock behind him.
“No, sit. You’re fine.” I held out my hands and smiled to reassure him. “I won’t hurt you.”
The tops of his feet were covered in a down of dark fuzz, and his toes were webbed. Hobbit? No. For one thing, hobbits didn’t like water. And for another—as far as I knew—hobbits were fiction.
Like skunk-apes and closet monsters and brownies.
To show the kid I wasn’t a threat, I folded my legs and sank into a sitting position. Cold, damp sand soaked through the back of my skirt within seconds. I tried not to wiggle and make it worse.
The kid resumed his seat but kept his muscles bunched as if ready to flee at a second’s notice. “I have to watch, in case they come back.” He glanced at me from the corner of his eye, then went back to gazing out at the water.
I watched with him for a few minutes, though I had no idea who we were waiting for. The sun completed its descent, and the last sliver blinked out.
“Did you hear it?” I asked.
He tilted his head toward me. “Hear what?”
“The sun. It sizzles when the last bit drops into the water.”
Human or not, teenagers have a universal language of facial expressions reserved for adults they think are complete idiots. I’d never been the recipient of such a look before now, but I didn’t hate it. It meant I had his attention at least.
He snorted at me and returned to whale watching—or whatever it was he was doing. He shivered and clutched his arms tighter around his legs.
“It’s kind of cold to be sitting out here naked. Do you want to borrow my coat?”
He swiveled his head toward me, and his big eyes filled with liquid. “I have my own coat.” A sob caught in his throat, and he swiped at his face to dry a stray tear. He swallowed hard. “I used to, anyway.”
I took off my coat and tossed it toward him. “Take mine until yours turns up. At least I have clothes on.”
Not a lot of clothes, but more than Naked Boy.
I didn’t think he’d take my offering at first, but he shivered again and snatched up the wool coat, draping it around his shoulders. “Thanks.”
I scooted closer, as casual as I could be with a wet-sand wedgie creeping up my backside. “I’m Zoey.”
He nodded. “I know.” His fingers clutched the fabric tighter around his thin frame. “I’m Owen.” He paused, and the muscle along his jaw tightened. “We were coming to look at you.”
I frowned. “Look at me? Who’s ‘we’? And why were you coming to see me?”
I hoped by “look at you” he meant they were coming for a cup of hot cocoa and some of Maurice’s delicious Christmas cookies.
I glanced at the kid’s weird feet. So, not human. And he and someone else had been on their way to see me when some unnamed tragedy struck and left him naked and a
lone half a mile from my house, afraid to move a muscle.
Out in the bay, a splash caught Owen’s attention. He sat up straighter and froze.
“Owen.” I touched his shoulder. “Who are we waiting for?”
“Brynn and Rhys, my sister and brother. They got scared and swam away.”
I squinted at the darkening waves. “What do they look like?”
“Seals, of course. They wouldn’t be swimming in their human forms, not with that undercurrent.”
“Oh.” I’d only been part of the Hidden world for less than six months. In that time, I’d come across quite a few types of mythological creatures and urban legends. I didn’t always know what the hell they were, but I’d read about selkies—seal people who shed their pelts and became human for short periods. Granted, I’d always been under the impression that selkies were all female, but at least I was able to follow his conversation. Not all the Hidden were that familiar to me.
My skin, already cold from volunteering my coat, felt like ice. “You lost your coat.”
He nodded, miserable. “We came ashore and shed our pelts.” He bit his lip. “Today is the Feast of Llyr, so we danced on the beach in celebration. When we were tired, we were going to climb the path to your house to look at the new Aegis. We went to get our pelts to wrap around ourselves and…” He stopped and bowed his head.
Waves of sadness rolled off his skin and choked me with its intensity. “Oh, Owen.” I squeezed his hand. “Your pelt was missing?”
He nodded, head still hanging over his knees. “The