Northwoods Magic (Northwoods Fairy Tales Book 1) Read online

  But oh, this time it did hurt, and the pain was excruciating! Even with her eyes closed, it felt like she had been hit in the face with a rubber mallet. Agony bloomed behind her eyes, and she could feel the blood erupt from her nose and stream rivers down her neck. There were dirt and splinters in her mouth, but she couldn’t move any part of her body. The force of the limb hitting her across her face spun her forwards and lifted her backward from her seated position. She turned around in the air as if in slow motion and got a fleeting glimpse of a thick black cloud speeding down towards her as she was slammed face first into the ground. The intensity of the pain knocked the breath from her chest just as surely as it had knocked her body from its perch on the rock, and for the first time in a dream, Quinn felt real terror. She couldn’t remember ever having had this dream before, although maybe she had and her multitudes of medication had just erased it. She couldn’t move speak or breathe, she couldn’t even cry. All she could do was lay in the mind-numbing fires of hell as the blood ran down her face and spilled onto the ground around her.

  There was scraping in the dirt nearby, and Quinn heard the sound sharp over the dull ringing in her ears. The noise was so loud and so close, but she couldn't open her eyes to see anything. After a moment of head pounding agony, Quinn was able to isolate some of the din and realized the loud grating noise in her ears was cawing. A raven cawing right next to her face.

  Through her pain, Quinn’s heart leaped in her chest. Maybe she was dying right now, but that incessant croaking meant that her boy was alive. Her dear friend was ok, he hadn’t been hit, and even though Quinn’s skull was cracked in multiple places and bleeding and she couldn’t breathe, the noise he was making hopping back and forth in front of her face made her heart glad. She tried so hard to get one last look at him, but only one eye would cooperate, and even then, it opened like a rusty gate, unable to focus. She got a glimpse of blood covered bird feet and blood on the tips of matte black finger wings, but she knew it wasn’t his. He was stepping in the red that was soaking into the ground around her head, and he was so close to her that the dirt was kicking up into her face and she had to close her one open eye to avoid getting bits of the forest floor embedded in it. The cawing was so loud and coming so fast that Quinn thought her head was going to explode from it until, in a blink, the sound stopped and there was silence.

  She thought maybe she had blacked out, which presented its own irony because how does one pass out when they are already unconscious? The next thing she knew the ground was no longer under her. Instead, she was swaying back and forth, suspended in the air except for the rocking motion and a bit of pressure on her back and side. Her face was swollen like she had a shot of Novocain at the dentist office. She tried to reach up and touch what would surely be a sticky mess, but she still couldn’t move her arms. Her ears tried to pick out sounds, but all she could hear was a ragged gasping, and all she could feel was the swaying back and forth and the uneven thumping of something beneath her.

  Realization dawned and she figured out what the swaying was; she was being carried. And the thump was the sound of feet slamming into the forest floor. The gasping noises were coming from above the warm chest she was currently pressed against, and as disoriented as she was, Quinn really wanted to open her eyes to see who was cradling her so gently. Who would have even been around to see her bleeding out in the middle of the forest floor? Even though it was taking all of her efforts just to keep breathing, Quinn struggled like hell to crack her eyes open, and when she did, she thought she had died, for surely that was the only explanation for the sight before her.

  She was being carried by a man. A young man, maybe in his late teens with long, silky black hair that fell just to his shoulders. His jaw was clenched tight, and tears were coursing down his cheeks and dripping down his neck. His mouth was open, and his breath hitched out raggedly as he ran, stumbling across the forest floor like he wasn’t sure how to make his legs move in tandem. The most amazing thing to Quinn, though, was his eyes. Even though they were clouded with grief, and even in her sorry state, she could tell he was in distress, they were the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen. Two onyx pools overflowing, so dark brown as to almost be black, with a shining ring of copper around the outside.

  Her brain's electrical impulses finally reconnected with the rest of her body and Quinn was able to lift one trembling arm, her hand gently touching a cheek that was soaking wet with tears. “Hello, boy,” she whispered, the words barely audible as they escaped her ruined throat, and then the darkness took her again for the last time.

  Quinn opened her eyes against the morning sun shining in through the filmy white curtains covering her cabin windows. She felt like she had a terrible hangover, but Quinn hadn’t had a drink in years, considering it dampened her sensibilities, and if she couldn’t control her powers under normal circumstance, it got even worse with booze.

  She remembered when she published her first poetry book and her agent wanted to take her out for a drink to celebrate. Quinn was already housebound at that point, but it had been so long since there had been an incident, and she really, REALLY had wanted to do something that ordinary people did, so she said yes. Quinn had two shots of fireball and something called a “Smurf Fart,” and the next thing she knew, a stranger was dry humping her on the dance floor. Quinn was trying to figure out how to extricate herself from the octopus on the dance floor when the ivy that had been growing lazily up the side of the old brick building decided to push through the front window and shatter it, scaring the hell out of everyone in the bar. The cops had to be called, and they chalked the breakage up to someone throwing a projectile through the window. The “projectile” was never found, and Quinn didn’t go out drinking again. Her agent didn’t ask her out again either.

  The pounding in her head this morning was the same as then, and it took Quinn a few moments after waking to figure out where she was. She had an inkling, but after reading the note on the table, she was certain. This was her cabin, not just the cabin that she had rented for the two weeks that she would be there, but the cabin that Quinn had stayed in when she was younger. Her memories weren’t quite syncing yet, but there was something nostalgic about the gently worn yet sturdy furniture, and even the woodsy artwork on the walls called to something in the recesses of her mind.

  If she had any doubts as to where she was or how she had gotten there, they were eliminated by her luggage sitting next to the foot of the bed and the handwritten note on the small wooden table in the kitchen.

  Quinn,

  You are just as lovely now as you were then, I would know your face anywhere. Rest and then eat. We can talk later.

  You are safe here.

  It was signed only,

  Miss Benny

  There was another note scrawled under the first, in much less neat handwriting. It read:

  I think you are awesome, I wish I had your superpower! Come see me at the lodge office when you wake up - don’t be afraid, I won’t make it weird!

  There was a hastily drawn cartoon heart, and it was signed Rose, nothing else. Quinn wondered if Rose was the other young woman who had been with Miss Benny last night and wondered how in this world she was supposed to not feel weird about everything. The entire thing was strange; essentially she had blacked out in front of strangers after rambling like a lunatic. Part of her was still trying to figure out how one elderly lady and one young woman had gotten her to the cabin and into bed without dragging her across the ground to do it. She was still wearing all of her clothes from the night before, so at least no one had gone so far as to undress her. She didn’t think she would be able to live down that embarrassment; one trauma at a time was enough to deal with.

  With the dream/nightmare combo from the night before fresh in her mind, Quinn headed into the small yet warmly decorated bathroom to take a shower and dress for the day. As water coursed over her body, as hot as she could stand it, she reread the note over and over in her mind.

  You ar
e safe here.

  Such simple words, so heavy with meaning. They hadn’t said as much, but Quinn could tell that Miss Benny remembered her. She knew her. Miss Benny wasn’t afraid of what had happened with the vines and the fainting. She hadn’t called the police to come take away the lunatic transient that had been wandering the grounds and rambling about memories and craziness. No, she had made sure that Quinn had a warm place to sleep, that she wasn’t afraid when she awoke, and that she knew that she was in a safe place. Quinn bet Miss Benny knew more than that even. Maybe Miss Benny knew about her raven. Her raven - or her boy? Quinn wasn’t sure anymore.

  Ten years of being told that her dreams were nonsense and that she was living in a fantasy were enough to make anyone question what was real and what wasn’t. She had even succeeded in keeping the dreams at bay for a while when her doctor had prescribed her anti-psychotic medications, but they made Quinn feel even more disconnected from reality. It wasn’t until she had completely weaned off of them in the last year that the dreams had started coming back and she had begun sketching in her book again. Not her commercial drawings though. Quinn had a special book, a book that had been with her since she was a teenager. This was the notebook that she kept all of her dream drawings in. Sometimes she would add words to the sketches and sometimes she wouldn’t. There were hundreds of pictures in this book, some the size of a quarter, and some - after a particularly bad night of dreaming - took up an entire page of hard, angry charcoal strokes.

  That book was private, and Quinn kept it to herself. That was just for her. For so long, she hadn’t been able to tell what was real and what was fantasy, thinking maybe she was just a figment of someone else's imagination. Her sketchbook was Quinn’s way of knowing she was real. Maybe she had imagined seeing the things she saw or knowing the things that she had forgotten, but she hadn’t fabricated drawing the pictures or writing the words. The pictures and words would always be there, permanently tattooed into the book. If she opened the pages and saw those things, then she would know that at that very moment, she was present. She existed. She was.

  Even though she had dreamed the night again before, Quinn didn’t feel like adding to her already overflowing book this time. Instead, she wanted to go talk to Miss Benny and Rose. She wanted to know all the things that they knew and see if Miss Benny could fill in the gaping blank spots in her memory. For once, instead of anxiety and fear, she was filled with excitement and anticipation. Instead of telling Quinn there was something wrong with her, at least two people had reached out to let her know that she was welcome and safe. That was more than her foster parents had done, and certainly more than the myriad of doctors she had seen over the course of her adult life had done. No, their answer had been to suppress and medicate.

  Talking about birds that turn into boys and scary magical powers? Medicate.

  Rambling about being afraid of trees because you fear that the plants are always trying to touch you? Therapy.

  The dreams are too vivid, and you are afraid to go to sleep at night? More treatment, different medication.

  Kill the fear, dull the mind, sleep sleep sleep.

  Not Benny and Rose though, they didn’t ask questions. They took a sick woman and wrapped her up in a blanket of security and made sure that she knew that she was cared for. A stranger. Her. Quinn wanted to hug them both and never let them go. She wanted to make them presents and be their best friend. Quinn wanted to text Talia on the phone and tell her all about it. Her only friend would be so happy, she knew it.

  It was Talia that had helped her wean off her extensive list of medications. It was Talia that stayed up late at night with her, talking on the phone when she was trying to wean off the sleeping pills but afraid to lie down in case the dreams came back. It was Talia's idea for her to start drawing in her book again.

  “Maybe,” Talia had told her, “maybe you aren’t supposed to be afraid, but to learn. Maybe instead of drugging yourself out of the dream, you could record what you saw so that you can put the pieces of your puzzle together. Maybe your dreams aren't fantasized at all, but parts of your memory fighting for their rightful place in your mind.” Quinn had thought at the time that it was one of the nicest, most supportive things anyone had said to her. Finding that note from Miss Benny and Rose was probably the second.

  Her hands fumbled with the buttons for a bit, but she texted her friend and waited a moment. Talia answered in less than thirty seconds.

  You made it all by yourself! I knew you could. I’m so glad!

  Quinn rushed to respond and, in her excitement, had to go back and fix her typos. I am really nervous still, but everyone here is nice. I think. I haven’t actually met them yet because a thing happened.

  A green thing? Her friend asked. That was what they had taken to calling her sporadic incidents during their web chats. Talia was the only person that knew everything about Quinn’s secret, and maybe it had been easier to tell her because she was behind a computer and not face to face, but Talia hadn’t judged. Talia had her own secrets, so it was ok. Calling Quinn’s issue a “green thing” was a way to keep it more reasonable, less of a stigma, especially when texting.

  Yeah, a green thing, Quinn replied. It’s ok though because they know me. At least one person knows me here, and I am going to stay until I get to the bottom of it. I’m going to dig for my answers. I’m going to find out.

  There was a pregnant pause before the green light started blinking on Quinn’s phone again.

  Ok girl, my phone is going to die here in a minute, but I just want to tell you one last thing. You are amazing, you are smart, and you are strong. You ask your questions and get your answers. I know you don’t need anyone to hold your hand, but if you need me - you call me. Right away. As a matter of fact, check in with me later. Don’t leave me hanging. Love you, Boo!

  Quinn smiled at the last message. She almost texted back her standard Love you Boobette, but changed her mind and decided not to send it. When Talia said her phone was going to die, she meant it was literally going gray right at that moment and would turn off at any second. She perpetually forgot to plug her phone in, and it died on her all the time. That was just Talia; she had a thousand things on her mind at any given time, so remembering to charge her phone was low man on the pole.

  Feeling hopeful for the first time in forever, Quinn went back to getting ready. She brushed her long dark hair and debated for a moment pulling it back into a low ponytail, but decided to let it hang free instead. She grabbed her softest, most comfortable green t-shirt, the one with the fire breathing kitten on the front, and paired it with an equally comfortable pair of slim denim capris. As she slipped a pair of sparkly rhinestone covered black flip flops onto her feet, she thought about her blessings. She had a friend, she had people to talk to - actually talk to - and she was close to getting some answers. Today was going to be a good day.

  Today was going to be an absolutely shit day.

  After staying up until God knows when with the old man, Corbin had returned to his little cabin on the employee housing side of the lodge and managed to get about three hours of sleep before he had to be up and taking care of things. It was still early in the summer season, and only one of the cabins was currently rented, but there was still a lot of day duties to attend to when running a lodge, and they had a small crew. Miss Benny owned the Happ House and ran a tight ship. She was the captain of the vessel, but instead of having a crew under her, it was more of a family. A family that got shit done.

  Rose, Benny’s granddaughter, helped with reservations, running the front desk, and assisted with all of the financials. William was relatively new, only hired in the last year or so, but he was a great maintenance guy, and he took care of all the mechanical things around the lodge and the grounds. William was a giant of a man and a mute. It was an odd combination to be sure, but it didn’t seem to bother William. He couldn’t speak, but he could hear just fine. He didn’t use sign language but found it easier to communicate by sending a tex
t if he couldn’t get his point across. William was a man of few words, even if he was writing them down or typing them. Working on the grounds kept him from being around too many people, so he just went about his business and got work done, silently.

  Corbin was the last of the crew. He handled the kitchen, and when there weren’t any dinners scheduled or trail lunches to pack, he helped out wherever he was needed. Sometimes that meant filling in at the front desk, sometimes it meant running into town for supplies or taking care of anything William needed him to do, and sometimes, like this morning, it meant doing cabin checks and making sure that all the water and lights were working as they should and all the linens stocked on shelves. They had a housekeeping crew that they contracted from town that came on a weekly basis or on call, but the busy season hadn’t started yet, so Corbin was making the rounds in his dusty old brown Blazer.

  Man, he had a lot on his mind. Still trying to piece together the information that he got from the old man about Quinn and the dead ravens. He couldn’t wrap his mind around what kind of magic would feed on an animal and leave only their outer shell intact. The old man had thought it was a message. He had thought that the dead ravens were a baiting tactic, and Corbin didn’t necessarily disagree. That oily energy-sucking vapor from ten years ago was still his clearest and most terrifying memory. Quinn had almost died that day and now that she was back, so was the familiar. What did that even mean?

  It was clear that back then, the familiar had been trying to siphon Quinn’s magic from her, but that wasn’t something it was going to use for itself. Familiars were mindless beings; they only did the bidding of a stronger master. So if the familiar was back and leaving “presents” in the forest, did that mean the master was here now as well? There was no need to hide if he was specifically looking for Corbin, but the dead ravens seem like a trail of taunts. Maybe it wasn’t just Corbin being called out; after all, he had always been right here. Maybe it was here for Quinn, too.