Northwoods Magic (Northwoods Fairy Tales Book 1) Read online

  “Ok, Boy,” he said. “The rest is up to you. I can point you in the way you need to go, but I cannot go with you. The familiar is not gone, only dispersed and run away. I cannot let a parasite like that loose in this territory. There is more at stake here than the life of one human girl. Do you understand?” The boy nodded impatiently and made as if to leave with his precious cargo, but the green man stopped him.

  “Boy, we need to do something else before you go or else you are going to find yourself in a jail cell faster than you can make hand signs saying you didn’t hurt her.” The green man rubbed his hands together, blew into them and then quickly rubbed his hands over the boy’s own face and hair. He touched his ears and his lips, and lastly, laid both hands on the boy's chest, right over his heart. “I might not be able to do more for you or this girl, but I can get you to where you need to go. I have given you the power of your voice and knowledge of the language to speak. I have given you direction to know where to go and the gift of speed to get you there quickly. I have given you a story, so make sure to tell it as I have you. Take her to Miss Benny and tell her these things. She will know what to do after that. This is as much as I am able to do for you. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded his head, but understanding that the green man needed some audible form of agreement, he cleared his throat, and in a surprisingly deep and even tone for a body seemingly so young, he replied, “Yes, Father.”

  The green man’s lip curled up in disgust, his irritation at such a moniker apparent in the rumble of the earth beneath him. The energy in the air cracked, and the wind slapped at the boys exposed skin as punishment for his cheekiness. “I am NOT your Father, Boy,” the green man angrily whispered, “Now go! She still bleeds!”

  Without another word, the boy clutched his cargo closer to his chest, her long brown hair trailing over his arms from where he cradled her head carefully. He turned away from the green man towards the direction of Happ House, the only vacation lodge for miles. He turned, and, so fast that he didn’t even disturb the leaves on the forest floor, he ran.

  Ten Years Later

  Quinn Reynolds tapped her hands on the cracked and pitted vinyl of her steering wheel to the rhythm of the song on the radio and belted the words out at the top of her lungs. The dusty road climbing up the side of the mountain was long and winding, and the car’s navigation kept repeatedly chirped “Keep to the left!” like a CD with a skip.

  Well, Nat-a-lie the Navigator, as Quinn referred to the little black box on her dashboard, could spout off about keeping left all she wanted, but there was nowhere to go but up on this eerily long mountain road. Quinn was pretty sure if she went too far to the right, she would end up in a ravine somewhere far down below in the trees. Minnesota may have been considered “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” but the state also had a ton of trees, and they blocked the view on all sides, save where the road slithered through, cutting a serpentine swath through the thick vegetation.

  Quinn couldn’t be mad at her overly enthusiastic navigator though; she was too busy buzzing with anxiety at the prospect of being at the lodge again after ten long years. The Happ House - Happ meaning “luck” in old Norse; Quinn knew because she had looked it up - had been the place where her foster parents had rented a cabin the summer of her sixteenth year. Quinn had been staying with the couple for a little over a year, and they thought it would be an incredible bonding experience to summer at the cabins. From what she could remember about that time, it had been wonderful - before the accident. After the accident, there were no real memories, just snatches of thoughts that came to her in dreams that had no bearing in reality, or so the doctors had told her. Excitement swirled with a bit of fear as there was more than one reason Quinn was coming to the northernmost part of Minnesota, to a place she hadn’t been in a decade, but she would think about that later after she got to the cabin and unpacked her suitcase.

  Pure avoidance had prevented Quinn's return for all of these years after the mishap when she was sixteen. She suffered an almost fatal accident in the very place she was returning to, and Quinn’s foster parents had split up. Quinn’s recovery and subsequent “side effects” from her injury were just a little too much for their marriage to handle, and the shaky relationship they had just kind of crumbled under the pressure of caring for a medically special needs teenager. There was no more talk of adoption after that, and Quinn thought the only reason that she wasn’t sent back into the system was that her foster mom felt too much guilt.

  Pink’s “Just Like a Pill” tapered off into silence and, after a slight pause, the solid thump of bass came through the speakers of the tiny Escort. The speed at which the twenty-six-year-old poet changed from a rock and roll warbler into a hardcore gangsta rapper spitting rhymes was truly amazing. Quinn was so caught up in hitting her sick beat that she didn’t even see the deer on the road until she was almost on top of it.

  Luckily for Quinn, she had only been going about 30 miles an hour in an effort to stay straight on the death trap of a road, and there wasn’t any other traffic on this particular stretch. She cranked the wheel and stomped on the brake in a panic, her 360 degree spin managed to miss the deer entirely but instead, shot her straight off the side of the road and into the trees.

  She screamed bloody murder as she barreled into certain doom, her right hand shooting out like a railroad barrier to make sure her laptop bag stayed upright in its seat belted position in the passenger seat. Her scream quickly died down to a breathy squeal when she realized the steep “drop off” was really a gentle slope with tall grass that slowed her down to a mild rocking stop, without much effort or fanfare. The little blue Ford ended up about ten feet from the road in some very sturdy looking grass, and as she peered out her driver side window at the deer still standing in the middle of the road, she pried her shaking hand off the steering wheel and slowly raised her middle finger at the uninterested animal. She mouthed a quick “screw you,” which was the most violent language Quinn could ever remember using out loud, and the deer gave her what could only be described as a look of disgust, or so it seemed to Quinn before she bounded back the way she came. It wasn’t fair that the animal had come through and scared the spirit right out of her, and it couldn’t even cross the road completely? What a complete kick in the crotch.

  Satisfied that there were no issues with the interior of the vehicle, her laptop bag was still belted into the front seat and her luggage still secure in the back, she opened the driver side door to go out and check for external damage. Quinn did a close walk around the car, the tall grass pricking her legs through the denim of her pants, and satisfied there was nothing major, stood back with her arms crossed across her chest. “Well, that just happened,” she huffed to herself crossly.

  “Certainly was interesting from my point of view,” came a gruff voice from directly behind her, and for the second time in the span of five minutes, Quinn screamed her brains out.

  The bearded old man looked to be made entirely out of camouflage, as he sat on the long part of a partially felled tree. He wore dark green work coveralls, and the front of his torso was covered by a long, wiry gray beard streaked with black. Dark, heavy eyebrows loomed over even darker eyes, and a full mustache hid most of his lips, except what was clamped over a home rolled a cigarette that as yet remained unlit. He looked satisfied that he had scared the life right out of her if the slight quirk of his mouth was any indication, but the older man held his hands out, palms up in front of him as if to show her that he was unarmed and meant no harm.

  Quinn had taken all the excitement she could handle at this point, and her heart was beating a drum line in her chest. Who the heck was this grizzled old hermit, and what was he doing creeping on her from a tree stump in the middle of the forest? She had just almost destroyed her car by not hitting a deer, and now she was going to be murdered in the woods a handful of miles away from her destination by a grumpy mountain man, she just knew it. Consumed with nerves, Quinn swatted at the itchy, knee h
igh grass that was using its best effort to poke through her jeans, and after two tries getting her voice to work again, finally croaked out, “Where did you come from? You scared the Jesus out of me!” It sounded like an accusation even to Quinn, so she wasn’t surprised when he raised a belligerent bushy eyebrow and grunted in reply.

  “Girl, I was fishing up until about ten minutes ago,” he gestured to the fishing pole, tackle box, and basket leaning on the ground next to the log he was resting on. “I stopped here to have a rest and smoke.”

  He paused to light said cigarette with a flip top lighter that he pulled from his coverall pocket and the acrid smell of freshly lit tobacco tinged the air. Quinn noticed there was no filter on that home roll and wondered idly about the state of the lungs of a person that could inhale and enjoy something like that. He continued, startling her from of her wayward thought, “I was minding my own business taking a rest when you came hurtling through like a harpy on fire and almost took my legs out from under me.”

  Embarrassment swirled with guilt in the pit of her stomach, and the sick feeling that combination gave her caused Quinn to become immediately apologetic. Being submissive by nature and having spent the last ten years in self-inflicted isolation made her terrible at conversation, so arguing was simply beyond her skill set. “I am really sorry,” she stuttered. “A deer jumped out in front of me, and I had to swerve and slam on my brakes at the same time. I just didn’t know what to do.” She sounded pitiful even to herself, but still couldn’t raise her eyes from the downcast position

  The old cuss started in on her again with his chiding, “It isn’t the deer’s fault you can’t control your vehicle, little girl. Just because the road cuts through it doesn’t make this any less Superior National Forest, and this is that animal’s home. Essentially, you drove your car through her front yard and then yelled at her for being in it.”

  Quinn had no response to give, she could only stand there shaking, and this was more face to face conversation than she had participated in with another person in years. She simply did not know how to do it.

  “I saw you flip a doe the bird,” the old man said, his voice low and grumbly. Then he slapped his hand on his knee suddenly and cracked up laughing, his loud guffaw booming through the trees and filling the air around her. Quinn knew she had well and truly lost the battle and looked sadly at her feet as she scratched absently at her legs and muttered sadly “I really feel like a jackass now.”

  “Well, recognizing you have a problem is the first step in recovery,” quipped the old fart with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye, and Quinn knew that this time he was making fun of her, but she chose not to be offended by it.

  “Do you know of anyone I can call to tow me back up on the road?” she asked hesitantly. Sure, the old man was curmudgeonly, but certainly, he wouldn’t leave a damsel to her own devices out here on the side of the road, in the middle of the forest, with just a few hours until dusk.

  “Girl, you don’t need to call anyone to help you,” he rasped out in his gravelly voice. “You can just drive it right back up onto the road as it is. Anyway, don’t you think you should worry more about what’s going on down there?” He asked, with his head tilted to the side and his questioning gaze on her legs. Quinn looked down, and her breath froze in her lungs. The tall, itchy grass that she had thought was just poking through her jeans was in actuality moving on its own, and each individual blade was petting her lovingly, wrapping around her legs like vines and hugging like a child grasping the leg of a parent.

  Embarrassed and ashamed, Quinn hurriedly waved her hands around, swishing the grass away from her legs. It backed off reluctantly, and she moaned a little under her breath. Crapsicles, it was happening again, one of the “other” reasons she had traveled so far from her small apartment in Toledo, Ohio. The issue with the grass had happened before. Well, actually it had happened a lot, but only over the last ten years and only after the accident. It was one of her unexplainable little side effects that confused and frightened people that witnessed it and made her foster parents sick with worry about her mental health.

  Whenever Quinn became upset, scared, or experienced any negative emotion, plants would act strangely around her. She didn’t know how it happened, she had zero control, and every time she tried to explain it to the doctors, they just upped her medication. Anti-psychotic medication had been quickly prescribed for the delusional young girl who ranted about touchy feely plants. Poor girl, the doctors all thought, she has hallucinations as a result of her accident. Head injuries are such tricky things.

  Those incidences when the plants ran amok were terrifying, and Quinn lived a life of solitude for that very reason. The strange old man hadn’t looked frightened, though. He just looked puzzled, like he was trying to figure her out.

  She raised her gaze and opened her mouth to say something, anything to explain herself, but the old man was gone. Not walking away, not halfway across the road, but actually poof- gone, like he had never been there to begin with. The only reason Quinn knew she hadn’t imagined him, and that was really debatable given the state of things, was the bitter smell of tobacco that still hung in the air.

  So that just happened, Quinn thought to herself as she extricated her legs once more from the aggressive stroking of the vegetation currently caressing her legs. She got back into her car, which added insult to injury by starting right up, and was able to drive along the side of the road a few feet before being able to pull smoothly back on it. The sun was going down, but there were only a few more miles to get up to the lodge, and Quinn wasn’t sticking around the side of a mountain road to see how much weirder the day could get. Flipping her headlights on and the volume on her navigation up, she crept further up the path towards Happ House.

  The rest of the drive only took a few minutes, but Quinn’s anxiety was riding high, and she was starting to freak out. She hadn’t even gotten to her destination yet, and she had already shown her most guarded secret to a complete stranger – who hadn’t even been that weirded out about it, to be honest. Quinn wasn’t sure that she was ready to examine the reason for that yet. She hadn’t eaten since this morning and was regretting not stopping for food when she had her last pee break several hours prior. Her encounter with the kamikaze deer and the strange man on the side of the road left her jittery and nervous, and if she was honest with herself, the closer that she got to Happ House, the more anxious she got.

  What the hell was she doing? Was a twenty-six-year-old woman with extremely limited memories of her past going to just show up on the doorstep and say “Hi, my name is Quinn? I was here ten years ago and got hurt, inherited a weird mutant power, and now can’t have healthy relationships because I scare people. Do you remember me?” It sounded too bizarre even to Quinn, and she was as weird as they came. She wouldn’t even be doing this now if it wasn’t for her friend Talia from her online support group. Of course she made her friends online; she couldn’t actually go out and meet people when, at any given moment, whatever greenery was available would start a worship service in her honor. And hold down a job? Yeah right, Quinn could just see herself sitting at a computer in an office while the ficus in the corner started inching across the room towards her. No, Quinn could not be out and about around ordinary people. She isolated herself in her apartment and wrote her poetry books and sketched her illustrations. She didn’t have to go to an office to do that, and she was good enough at writing her poetry that people paid her enough to live comfortably. Quinn didn’t need a lot of money or things. All she needed and wanted was some peace from the darkness of her thoughts and dreams, and maybe something or someone to fill the lonely void that existed in her heart. It had always felt to Quinn, at least since her accident, that not only was she missing pieces of her memory, but maybe she was missing someone else as well. Quinn didn’t know if it was possible to miss someone you couldn’t even remember, but that empty place in her chest ached just the same.

  She certainly couldn’t go out and
date; she had a horrible experience when she was seventeen and had not been able to recover from it. Instead of trying to help her integrate, her foster parents had crumbled under the pressure of having a daughter who was different. Not just different but suddenly different, and instead of being her parental support, fostering with the hopes of adoption, her family unit fell apart. Quinn knew it was her fault, no matter what anybody told her. Quinn didn’t get to keep nice things because she was broken, and you couldn’t use the broken pieces of one person to fix the broken pieces of another relationship. Life didn’t work that way. Quinn had wanted to be able to go to school like the other kids, hang out with friends on the weekend like the other kids, grow up and get married like girls her age were supposed to do, but she couldn’t. Not anymore.