14. Avery

“You didn’t have to walk me back.” Avery tightened her arm around Cricket’s waist, the pair leaning on each other to limp to her cabin. Once the adrenaline had left her body, and she’d come down from Cricket’s mind-blowing fingers, her leg had begun to sting. Blood from the scratch was sticky against her calf, and her sock squelched with every step.

“Are you kidding?” Cricket shot her a look. “You were just chased by a Gods-know-what. Of course, I’m not letting you walk home alone.”

“But then you’ll have to walk all the way back to Director Murray’s cabin,” she argued. “Alone.”

“I grew up in these woods, Avery.” Though her tone was dry, Avery loved how the faun almost swallowed her name. Her voice dropped low, and a husk entered the rasp as though she savored the taste. The sound of it was sensual and suggestive, bringing heat to Avery’s cheeks.

Cricket slowed their walk, glancing at Avery with an indecipherable expression.

“What?”

“It’s so easy to make you blush,” she answered, smiling so broadly the tiny slit in her upper lip split, her flat teeth on display. Facing Avery, she cupped the back of her neck. “Like a game.” Her gaze heated, eyes dropping to Avery’s mouth. “I like playing.”

“I—” Her skin went from flushed to burning. Thoughts began and frittered away; words wouldn’t form. All she could focus on was the soft brush of Cricket’s thumb along her jaw. How close they stood. Just as close as they had when she—

This is insane.

It was one thing to touch herself to thoughts of the faun but another thing entirely to act on those whims where anyone could have seen them. She was the assistant director, for goodness’ sake. What was she doing messing around with a … a monster.

And just as quickly as that nasty thought formed, her brain and body rejected the idea. Yes, Cricket was a monster. She was inhuman. She was real and warm and kind and she challenged Avery, pushing her beliefs and nudging her in the direction she was too afraid to travel on her own.

And she’d made her feel.

Anger, frustration, worry, arousal.

She flinched back as all of those thoughts pounded that initial bias to a fast, thorough death.

“It’s alright.” Cricket’s hand fell away. She stepped back, putting space between them.

“No, wait, I—”

“You were scared, I get it.” She limped away, hands fisted at her sides. “High emotional state, or whatever. I’m still walking you home.”

Avery followed for a few steps, her mind churning through explanation after explanation. The simplest was best, of course, but did anyone ever believe, “It’s not you, it’s me?” And then she realized she was following the faun to her cabin, not leading, and the horror at her own flinch faded beneath curiosity. “How do you know which cabin is mine?”

“You wake up early.” She shrugged. “I saw you leaving the other day.”

Oh, thank goodness—an opening.

“So you have been spying on me.” She kept her tone light and teasing, wanting to reclaim that soft moment before she flinched for all the wrong reasons. Cricket kept silent, so she tried again. “What were you doing awake?”

“Faun are crepuscular,” she answered, gripping the stair rail to Avery’s cabin.

“That’s the dawn and dusk thing, right?” she asked. Sanoya had mentioned it weeks ago, in one of the rare instances she was in their shared cabin. Avery had been complaining about a student falling asleep in her mid-morning composition class, and the Life Sciences Instructor had rattled off the word.

“You cannot expect a kitsune to stay awake in a class that starts at ten thirty,” Sanoya explained. “They are crepuscular, like my companion. You have never seen a hidebehind out and about in full daylight, have you?”

Avery hadn’t had the heart to tell Sanoya she’d never seen a hidebehind at all, much less knew what one was. Still, the lesson had stuck: crepuscular animals and inhumans were active in the twilight hours.

“No wonder you’re always in a bad mood when I see you,” she teased again. Cricket scrunched her nose, ears twitching in annoyance.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you are cranky and moody, and now I know why,” she hummed, striding up the steps and to the door. Floorboards creaked at her back as she sauntered inside, the faun following close behind. The cabin was empty, Sanoya’s half neat, tidy, and untouched. Avery sat on her bed, sighing as she took the weight off her injured leg. Cricket came to a standstill before her, settling her weight on one leg, lean arms crossed over her front.

Avery tugged off her shoe and peeled the blood-stained sock from her foot, frowning at it before leaning over the edge of the bed to toss it into the trashcan. Cricket watched her do so, her arms slowly dropping to her sides. She glanced around the room, spotting the white crate with a red cross Avery kept on a table near the door. Without being asked, she limped over, grabbed the first aid kit, and set it on the bed next to Avery.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not cranky,” Cricket snapped in reply.

“See? That right there. You go from friendly”—Avery’s belly flipped at the thought of just how friendly—“to off-putting with the flip of a switch. And I only see you at meal times, when you’ve only just woken up or are about to go to sleep. Cranky.”

“You make me sound like a child.”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

Cricket’s ears flicked, bouncing the curls that kept them hidden. She exhaled loudly through her nose, rolled her eyes, and dropped to the floor. Though the motion was smooth, it was startling. One moment, the faun was towering over Avery, and then her knees—or were they ankles?—bent backward, and she collapsed to a long-legged sit on the wooden planks. Bending at the waist, she hauled the first aid kit off the bed and flipped the locks.

“I’m not a child,” she said. “Haven’t been for a long while.” The topmost tray was set on the floor, her ears shook her curls, her nose twitched, and she selected a bottle of saline and a bottle of peroxide, talking as she pulled off her muscle tank and held it under Avery’s calf. “I’ve been in the woods since I was five. I think. Time is different here, but my mom always says I was five summers when we fell through.”

“That must have been frightening,” Avery said. It took every bit of concentration to keep her eyes on Cricket’s face and not let them drop to the slight swell of her breasts hidden by a bandeau bra. Or the nipples lining the front of her torso, the nubs just visible through the thin dusting of fur. Cricket frowned, opened the bottle of saline, and poured it over the cut on Avery’s calf.

“I’m not scared.”

“I didn’t say you were.” Cricket kept silent, intent on cleaning Avery’s wound with the cotton balls. Once done, she glanced around the cabin at a loss. “Under the bed.” Avery wiggled her toes in an attempt at a point. “There’s a Tupperware of towels.”

“Ah.” She grabbed the bin and a towel and gently, carefully patted Avery’s leg dry. Next, she grabbed the hydrogen peroxide, glancing from her work to warn, “This will sting.”

And it did. Avery hissed, gripping the edge of the mattress as white foam bubbled up. Cricket cleaned it away with more saline, patted her leg dry with another towel, and grabbed gauze from the kit, applying it over the wound before wrapping it with a bandage.

Avery watched it all with a sense of awe. The care of the faun, the gentleness of her touch. She bit the corner of her lower lip, wide eyes narrowed in concentration, and when she was done, Cricket set Avery’s leg down, resting the heel on her knee. Again, Avery wiggled her toes. “We match, now.”

“What?” Cricket glanced up, blinking at Avery as if coming out of a daze. “Oh, right. Sorry. I was … lost in thought.”

“About what?”

“The place before.” She cupped Avery’s heel, fingers resting lightly on the outside of her foot. “I don’t even remember it. Not really. It’s more like images? Dawn in the woods, a bonfire, sunlight through the trees, my mom and dad dancing. They say we used to have magic.”

“Magic?”

Cricket nodded, her expression turning wistful. “Healing magic in our music and our hands, but we lost it when we fell through.”

“That’s awful.”

Another shrug. “I suppose. I mean, we kept some of it.” She gestured to her own ankle. “We heal pretty fast, just can’t help other people or inhumans. But, like I said, I don’t really remember. My cousin probably does. They were fifteen when it happened. Used to say they had just begun to feel the magic, and the closest they’ve ever come to feeling it here was when they heard this place for the first time. ‘The music of the wood.’”

She shrugged it off as if it were nothing, but Avery could hear it in her voice—the loss of something she’d never known and never would. How did you account for that? How did you live day to day with the injustice of knowing something so wonderful, like actual, honest-to-goodness magic, was taken from you and not sink into the righteous anger that must be frothing just beneath the surface?

So much of Cricket made sense now. The snappish tone, how quick she was to anger, to push people away and assume the worst. And why wouldn’t she? She’d had something wonderful stolen from her through no fault of her own, and she had no way of getting it back.

“I never said you were scared,” Avery whispered, unable to give strength to the words as she repeated them. “I said that it must have been frightening. I’ve lived in the same place my whole life. I commuted to college from home. This is the first time I’ve ever lived apart from my family, and it’s terrifying.”

Cricket’s fingers tightened around her heel, the wide gaze slowly rising to meet her eyes. The warm glow of a table lamp reflected in those eyes like a candle flickering in the dark, and Avery couldn’t escape the feeling that if she just leaned closer, she would fall right into those deep, dark pools.

“And I’m an adult or something. I can’t imagine how hard it was to be ripped from your home and dropped into a strange place as a kid.”

“It was,” Cricket murmured, blinking in surprise as if she hadn’t expected to speak. Her tongue darted out, moistening her lower lip, and she dropped her hand away. The walls came up in an instant, faster than Avery could process. “Why do you care?”

“We’re sharing this earth,” she tried to explain, but how could she? Her fascination with inhumans was over a decade old. Her desire to be among them, befriend them, know them, almost as old as the time they had spent on this earth. Now, she had this chance, this one glorious summer, and no matter what she tried, it was always the wrong choice, the wrong words, the wrong action. “I just want to be a good neighbor.”

“Well.” Cricket hoisted herself to her feet, standing with her injured hoof hitched. “When I need a cup of sugar, I know where to go.”

“Crick—”

“Good night, Avery.”

“Cricket, please.”

“I said good ni—” A howl shattered the night, tearing through the trees and bouncing off the hills. Cricket’s ears shot straight, her head twitching in the direction of the sound, and she froze. Not a flinch, not a shiver, not a blink. The next howl came from further away. Still, it had Avery crossing the cabin, grabbing the faun’s arm, and drawing circles on her bicep with her thumb.

“It’s alright.” She tugged gently, frowning when Cricket didn’t budge, her taut figure giving new meaning to the term statue still. “Cricket, come away from the door. It’s alright. We’re inside, see?” She reached across the faun and turned the lock. “Locked in, the windows are latched. Nothing can get in.” Cupping her elbow, Avery again tried to guide her to the bed. “Please, stay. I don’t want you out there while that thing is anywhere near the camp.”

Finally, she cupped the faun’s cheek. “Please?”

Cricket’s wide-eyed stare twitched down to Avery’s face. She blinked, her shoulders relaxing, and then nodded. “Alright.”