about any of them. They were army brats and proud of it.
You’ll never get anywhere by looking backward. The major’s voice suddenly came so clear he might have been standing right behind her. Which he wasn’t; he was overseas. It was just that the words were such a familiar refrain: eyes up and ahead; one foot in front of the other; look ahead, not back. Words to live by.
“You’re right,” she said softly. “I know you’re right.” She should put the book back in its box and set it aside, maybe even lock it in the fireproof safe where she kept her unused passport. She should take comfort in knowing she had a cherished memory back, and then focus on more important things—like filling out those applications.
But she turned the page, anyway, unable not to glance at a picture of the young, innocent girl with her hamper. Then one of a huge wolf—her maman had called it a wolfyn—stalking her along the pathway and watching with too-human eyes as she entered her grandmother’s cabin, only to find it empty. The next few pages showed the wolfyn and girl together, the story relying on the text more than pictures. But then the huge beast morphed to a shaggy-haired man with hot, feral eyes, and the girl looked up at him, face bright and excited, like she was looking at a handsome prince, not a leering wolfyn. But now Reda saw something she hadn’t before: the girl looked disconnected, and she was almost smiling past the wolfyn, not at him.
Reda’s stomach dipped. She had seen that look on the faces of roofie victims.
She skimmed the next few panels, realizing that her maman must have skipped some pages. Or had she seen the pictures as a child and not really realized what they meant? Because now, looking at them with an adult’s perspective—and that of a cop who had worked rape cases, though mercifully far fewer than would be the norm in a larger, grittier city—the girl’s vacant, glassy expression and rag-doll compliance to the wolfyn’s G-rated yet highly suggestive demands smacked of drugs or brainwashing. Or both.
She hadn’t been seduced. She had been compelled.
Reda shuddered. “That’s not really the way I remembered this part.” But then again, most fairy tales had started out dark and bloody, rarely reaching mainstream puppies-and-kittens territory until Disney got hold of them.
Something buzzed in the back of her brain, like a trapped bumblebee of a thought that wouldn’t land long enough for her to catch its meaning.
“Poor girl,” she murmured, touching an image of the young woman lying heavy-lidded near the hearth of the cottage, where a fire burned low. The wolfyn was halfway between his two forms, looking out a window with the fur at his nape erect as if searching the shadows for danger. It was hard to tell if he was protecting her or holding her captive. Probably both, depending on who you asked.
Reda found herself getting far too caught up in feeling sick for a two-dimensional character who had suddenly become a stand-in for too many of the victims she had worked with. She was so wrapped up in that theme, in fact, that when she turned the next page and saw the woodsman looking up at her from the page, she simply stared for a few heartbeats.
Then she whispered, “There you are.” Which was ridiculous because, just like the girl, the woodsman wasn’t anything more than a picture in a storybook.
Only he was more than that. He was the hero.
Standing in the cabin doorway with a long-handled ax held across his body, he should have looked like a lumberjack stereotype. Instead, he looked strangely out of place, as if a knight errant had been dropped into this story from another. His forearms, bared by rolled-up sleeves, were corded with a tension that carried from his taut-knuckled grip on the ax handle throughout the rest of his big, rangy body and up to his face, which was etched with disgust and determination as he took in the scene within the cabin.
Reda’s perceptions tunneled down to the tousle of dark hair atop his noble brow and wide cheekbones, his narrow-bridged, aristocratic nose, full lips and square jaw, and his eyes … dear God, his eyes. They stared out of the page and cut right into her, seeming alive even though it was just an illustration, and a black-and-white one at that.
She knew those eyes, though. “Green,” she whispered, suddenly yearning in a way that made no sense, for a man who didn’t really exist. “His eyes are green.”
Help him. The thought came in a voice that sounded like her own breathing turned into words that weren’t hers.
A shudder coursed through her body.
“Great, now you’re imagining things while you’re wide awake,” she said aloud, trying to use the words to chase away the sudden crackle that laced the air.
It didn’t work. The air stayed heavy and thunder rumbled, hollowing the space beneath her diaphragm and stealing her breath.
This time it was the whistle of the rising wind outside that said, Help him. Save him.
Her heart stuttered when she looked out her apartment window and saw that the sky was as clear and bright as it had been when she left MacEvoy’s shop. Yet thunder rumbled again, vibrating through the soles of her boots and up through her body, making her feel suddenly empty and alone.
He is alone, too. Help him. It was the sound of wind, yet the neighborhood trees weren’t moving and the light, fluffy clouds hung motionless in the sky.
A whimper lodged itself in her throat, the weak noise unuttered, but the panic that spawned it remained, bringing a memory so deeply buried that she didn’t remember even having it until it was right there, full-blown in her mind.
“So what do you think—is she nuts?” her father asked the doctor. She could see them both from the waiting room through the partly open office door, could hear them clearly, though their voices were hushed.
“We don’t use labels like that,” the stern-faced doctor said, but that made her father nod as if he’d gotten the answer he expected. The doctor sighed. “Look. The mind has a sort of framework it uses to deal with trauma and loss, a way of rationalizing how it happened, why and what it means. In this case, Reda’s mind has chosen an atypical framework, one where she believes that her mother is not dead, but rather trapped in a land of magic beyond our own. Things like this can happen following the loss of a parent, especially in children her age. Usually it goes away on its own.”
“How long?”
“Months, sometimes longer. In the meantime, it’s basically harmless.”
“You call sleepwalking out the back door and into the woods ‘harmless’? What if she got lost? Or, worse, got found by the wrong sort of person?” The major’s voice gained volume at the end, but then he glanced out at her and lowered his voice once more to say, “Help me out here, Doc. I need this to stop. The boys need it to stop. We all need to move on.”
The doctor didn’t say anything, and Reda’s heart went bumpity-bump at the thought that he was going to tell the major that she was right, the kingdoms really did exist, and that sometimes visitors accidentally fell through the gates connecting the realms. Suddenly excited, she leaned forward in her chair.
“There are a few things we could try,” the doctor said finally. “The first thing I would recommend is getting rid of the book.”
The memory wavered and disintegrated, but the heartache remained, along with Reda’s dull surprise at remembering how it had happened. Not because the major had tried to pretend otherwise, but because the months of therapy that followed had trained her not to think about the book, magic or monsters.
Or, really, even her mother.
The police shrink had wanted to talk about her mother’s death, of course, but Reda had just shrugged and said, “It was a long time ago.” And it would have stayed that way … if she hadn’t found the book. Or rather, if it hadn’t found her.
Thunder rumbled, closer now, though the sun still shone. Unbidden, her eyes went to the picture