7. Rowan #2
But I don’t. Because as I look at her, I realize that she isn’t just disbelieving me.
She’s protecting me. In her head, she has decided that I am an eccentric, lonely man who has built a life around a myth, and she is giving me the space to keep that myth alive. She thinks we’re playing the same game.
“Look, Rowan,” she says, her voice low and serious now.
“I appreciate the bit. Truly. It makes this whole disaster feel a little less like a sinking ship and more like... a performance. But you don’t have to keep it up with me.
I know you’re just a guy who cares about the mountain.
A very tall, very grumpy guy, but just a guy. ”
She pats my arm. It’s a brief contact, the palm of her hand landing on the bicep I usually keep hidden under heavy flannel.
It’s warm. Impossibly warm. I can feel the pulse of her blood through her skin, a fast, frantic human rhythm that makes my own heart feel sluggish and heavy by comparison.
I should pull away. I should correct her.
I should be offended by the “just a guy” comment.
Instead, I find myself looking at her hand.
It’s small, her skin pale against the dark blue of the shirt.
She has a tiny scar on her index finger, probably from a kitchen knife or a slip of a pen.
She is a collection of fragile, temporary details, and she’s standing there trying to make me feel better about my “commitment to the bit.”
“You are a very stubborn woman,” I say.
“Comes with the name,” she says, pulling her hand back and looking at me with that same frustratingly kind expression.
She doesn’t seem to notice that she just touched a legend.
“Now, if you’re done being the Forest King for the night, Marge left some cobbler in the kitchen.
I think it’s peach. You should get some before the ‘investigators’ find it and start testing it for paranormal activity. ”
She sits back down at the desk, the blue light reclaiming her face, and starts typing again.
She’s already moved on. The truth has been delivered, inspected, and filed under performance art.
I have never failed so spectacularly at being honest, but it’s exactly what I expected.
I told the truth, and she chose not to believe it.
I walk out of the office and through the hallway.
The lodge is quiet now, smelling of woodsmoke and Marge’s baking.
I find the cobbler in the kitchen, a heavy stoneware dish sitting on the counter.
I’m not hungry, but I take a piece anyway, because I don’t know what else to do with my hands.
The peach is sweet, the crust buttery. It’s a human comfort, a small thing designed to make the dark feel less vast.
I walk back out the pantry door and into the night. I don’t head for my house immediately. I walk to the edge of the clearing, where the gravel ends and the forest begins. I stand there for a long time, eating peach cobbler in the dark, watching the light in the office window.
I am a Guardian. My purpose is to maintain the borders.
To keep the world of humans from bleeding too far into the world of the high timber.
I have spent three centuries being an absence, a ghost, a shadow in the corner of a hiker’s eye.
I have been feared, I have been hunted, and I have been ignored.
I look down at the HIDE & SEEK WORLD CHAMPION shirt.
It’s a caricature of a life I have lived in silence and service.
Wren thinks it’s a joke. She thinks I’m a man wearing a costume of myself.
And the worst part is, I found her laugh...
pleasant. I liked the sound of it in the small room.
I liked the way it filled the space where the silence usually sits.
This is a dangerous development. A Guardian who cares about the opinion of the weather is a Guardian who is going to get struck by lightning.
I should be thinking about the documentary crew Barnaby mentioned.
I should be thinking about the drones and the infrared cameras.
I should be thinking about how to move the hives further up the ridge where the tourists won’t find them.
But as I finish the cobbler and set the dish on a stump to be collected in the morning, I find myself thinking about the smudge of ink on her thumb and how she leaned toward me, her eyes bright with an intelligence she doesn’t even realize she’s using.
Wren is trying to save this lodge, this failing, creaking legacy, and she’s doing it with a ferocity that is entirely out of proportion to her lifespan.
She’s a smart woman, but a blind one. She sees the marketing and the debt. She sees the bit. She doesn’t see me at all. And for some reason, as I turn toward the deep woods, that realization stings more than the ring lights ever did.
I move into the trees, the influence taking hold, the world sliding around me until I am nothing but a shift in the wind.
I will have to find another way if I want her to turn off the hotline.
Perhaps if I tell her the details of the arrangement between me and her family…
But no. If she didn’t believe me about what I was, she would have no reason to believe me about a centuries-old arrangement.
I will have to show her the truth.
The thought makes my skin itch, a deep, restless sensation beneath the human surface. To show her is to be seen. To be seen is to be known. And for my kind, to be known is the end of everything.
I reach the creek, the water rushing over the stones with a cold, insistent music.
I stop and look back one last time. The lodge is a tiny spark of light in the vast, black sea of the Cascades.
It looks fragile. Temporary. It looks like something I should be protecting, even if the person inside it thinks I’m just a very tall man with a hobby.
I don’t want to care. I tell myself this as I climb the ridge toward the high timber. I don’t want to care about her marketing, or her ink-smudged thumbs, or the way she looks when she’s exhausted. She is a Cassidy. She is a steward of the arrangement. That is all she is.
But the lie doesn’t stick. It slides off me like rain on a waxed coat. I do care. And as the wind picks up, carrying the scent of snow and cedar, I realize that the hotline is no longer the biggest threat to my peace.
She is.
I disappear into the shadows of the North Ridge, the dark swallowing me whole. Tomorrow, the red dots will return, along with the tourists and their cameras. Tomorrow, Wren Cassidy will be behind that desk, fighting a war she doesn’t understand.
I will be watching. I have always been watching. But for the first time in a hundred years, I am not just watching the forest. I am watching her.
And that is the most dangerous thing of all.