Chapter 1
Marisol had seen deer before. That much was a no-brainer, an occupational hazard of living somewhere surrounded by forest. She had seen deer before. She knew what they looked like, and the very basics of their anatomical structure.
The thing she saw lurking at the edge of the woods, in that liminal space where tall-grass shifted abruptly into large, thick canopies, was not a deer.
It had the make-up of one: large antlers, splaying out in intricate patterns like gnarled, reaching limbs. It was four-legged and lithe, skittish and thin. It was barely a slip of a shadow in the half-light, the sun blotted out by the mountains in the horizon.
Marisol was physically exhausted, having just finished up soccer practice, ready to rest her abused ankles. She was also mentally exhausted, having just dealt with lawful, neutral, and chaotic idiots in equal measure. She was more than ready to dismiss the deer as just that: a wild animal, a Disney-movie extra.
But when she glanced again, it was . . . not. It was too large, the anatomy of it was off. Its neck was thick and corded with muscle. The more she looked, the more she thought that it had too many joints; bending in ways it should not logically be able to bend.
Now that she was actually looking, it was impossible to imagine why she would’ve ever thought it was a deer.
It stood, then, on its two back legs, and walked slowly into the woods.
She blinked after it, very slowly, and whispered to no one in particular, “What the fuck?”
“I swear I saw something.”
“Of course you did.” Taliana—Tally—was in a state of glorious disdain, which wasn’t too out of the ordinary for her.
“If you’d help look,” Marisol insisted, still picking through the ruffage and leaf-litter at the edge of the forest, “then maybe this would be faster.”
“Yeah,” Kite said, though his tone was teasing. “Come help investigate for clues.”
Tally and Kite were Marisol’s only two friends, not for a lack of ability to get along with other people—she would take ‘fake it till you make it’ to the grave—but rather because they were the only two people in the entirety of the town that had understood immediately when she’d made an ill-timed Beetlejuice reference.
Sighing, Tally trudged over, each slow step making it abundantly clear she was reluctant. She would do most anything if Marisol did it first, though, and coming from a long family of hikers and mountain-climbers gave her a certain immunity to the more undesirable side of nature. “Fine. What did you see?” She wasn’t dressed for traipsing through the woods: neither her leather pants nor her stilettos were morally ready for even the suggestion of uneven terrain. She stopped a safe enough distance away to give the impression that she cared while not putting in the effort.
“A deer, but—not.” Marisol was not the best with descriptions in the first place, and the shock of seeing it still weighed on her, even the next day. “It was weird. Then it just, like, stood up, and walked away.”
“Stood? Walked?” Kite repeated, poking dubiously at a pile of animal crap with a stick. “Like, two legs?”
“Yeah!”
Tally was not impressed, picking disinterestedly at stubborn cat hair attached to her sleeve. She had abandoned what little good faith she had left. “I thought only bears could do that.”
Kite, though, was peering at her with wide, intrigued eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah!” she repeated. She gestured largely with her hands to encompass just how big the thing had been, miming how it had stood up. “And it was weird. It had weird legs.”
“You need a thesaurus,” she commented, not unkindly. “Can we go now?”
Marisol glanced again to the woods, then back to Tally. Her pleading look was met with stony indifference. Kite just shrugged.
“Fine,” she relented, stepping between young trees and vaguely threatening bushes until she was in the manicured lawn beside Tally.
“Maybe you were tired?” Kite suggested, but his eyes were still on the woods. Even in broad daylight, the shadows between the thick trunks of the trees were impossibly dark.
“I was not,” she snapped, pointing to him with a threatening finger. “I saw something.”
“Yeah,” Tally said, already turning to walk back to the car, tugging her keys from her purse. “You saw a deer.”
Marisol rolled her eyes. Kite caught her gaze, but he just gave her a meaningful look before following. She looked again to the woods, but there remained nothing to see.
The first thing Marisol heard when she stepped through her front door was a stern, “Where were you?”
She glanced up to her mother. She was not a particularly tall person, but she was imposing when she wanted to be.
“Hi, Misses Flewellen,” Tally and Kite chorussed in practiced unison.
Millie Flewellen paused in her scrutiny of her daughter to give them a single eyebrow raised, expression wry. “Hi, kids.”
They both walked past Millie, unaccosted, and Marisol stared at their traitor backs. They did not seem particularly concerned with her plight. “We were . . . ” Her mother’s hatred for the forest was legendary, and maybe unjustified, though she refused to divulge the source of her mistrust.
Sure, they hadn’t actually gone all the way in the forest, but she would surely have at least a mild aneurysm at even that much.
“Yes?” Millie prompted, smile twisted in a way that did not truly expect an answer. Sure, she cared, but she had long outgrown micromanaging her childrens’ every movement.
“Joyriding in Tally’s car,” Marisol finished finally. Her tone neither asked Millie to believe her nor invited suspicion. Her smile was bulletproof. Toeing her shoes off, she slipped past her mother to follow the others into the kitchen, the shush of her mother’s slippers following just behind.
“We were at the soccer field,” Tally filled in. Either she didn’t realize the secret was supposed to be a secret—or at least not said so blatantly—or if she was just trying to get Marisol in some form of trouble, it was unclear.
While Marisol was generally sure that Tally liked her, she was severely doubting it now. She gave Tally an offended look and a discreet middle finger—both of which were subsequently ignored.
Millie snorted. “Doing soccer, perchance?”
“Looking for deer-things,” Kite called through a mouthful of something or other—no doubt unlawfully acquired. He was half-inside the fridge, digging around for yet more things to steal.
“At a soccer field?”
Tally, voice resonating from the pantry—also a thief, though more graceful than Kite was—said, “In the forest.”
“The forest?” She rounded on Marisol immediately, who cringed yet more away from the glare leveled on her. Her voice suggested she was either regretting having children in the first place or simply disgusted that her spawn would engage in such activities.
She was not, by nature or nurture, a master of words. “We were . . . ”
“Hunting cryptids,” Kite suggested, the glee on his face confirming that, yes, he was, in fact, doing it for the sole purpose of tormenting her.
“The Jersey Devil,” Tally added mildly, the corner of her lip twitching up.
“Cryptids?” Millie frowned in what might’ve been confusion, but her canny gaze, fixed on Marisol, was suspicious. “Cryptids?”
Marisol startled. She had thought her mother of all people would know what a cryptid was—her mother, whose bright eyes made townsfolk anxious, made townsfolk think she knew more than they did; her mother, whose hands smelled like sage from smudging, or rosemary or thyme or lavender still clung to her clothes and hair after making charm bags.
She started explaining, “They’re—”
“I know what a cryptid is, Jessica.”
Marisol’s name was not Jessica: that was the joke. The word made it clear she was being sarcastic, but the tightness around her eyes and the darkness in her voice made Marisol pause for a second, examining her face more closely. Whatever oddity was in her expression was gone before she could place it.
The pattering of footsteps rang out from the direction of the stairwell, and it broke whatever mood had overtaken the two. Glancing over, they saw her brother rounding the corner.
“Hello, problem child,” Monty called joyously as soon as he caught sight of Marisol.
“Hello, dumpster child,” she returned. She glanced once more to her mother, but she was as she always was.
She had given both of her children a grab-bag of recognizable traits, making both Monty and Marisol distorted copies of her.
They were dark-haired and dark-eyed; pale with long, sharp faces and long, hooked noses. They were heavy-set by nature, and the running gag shifted between “That means we have more protection in the winter,” and “We’re just better to cuddle with.”
It was opposite Tally—bleach-blonde with dark, dark skin—and opposite Kite—surfer-boy tousled hair and surfer-boy tan.
As Monty came more fully into the room, he caught sight of Kite and Tally, and his eyes went gradually wider. “I didn’t know you’d be here!”
Marisol snickered softly.
Tally smirked over at him, saying, “I’m always here.”
This was also a joke, as they both knew he was talking to Kite.
Monty’s narrow eyes shot to Marisol, lips flatlining, but she stuck her tongue out at him and—while he was watching—passed a mint cookie from his personal stash to Tally to hold hostage.
“I’m also always here,” Kite said, which at least was more true than Tally’s claim. Checking his watch, though, he sucked his teeth and declared, “Except now. G-two-G, as the kids say.”
Millie stepped out of his way as he exited the house, the three remaining residents staring at Monty staring at Kite.
“Woods,” Millie reminded them sharply. “Why?”
“Woods?” Monty asked, perking up at the mention. Normally averse to anything that even hinted at rule-breaking, he was all too happy when Marisol was the one breaking rules—or, more accurate, when she was the one getting scolded for breaking rules.
“Just for shits and giggles,” Marisol said with a shrug, looking to Tally for backup.
Tally was too busy trying to open a box of Hello Pandas with her acrylics to provide any assistance.
She added firmly, “It’ll never happen again, capt’n.”
Millie rolled her eyes and turned away, but Marisol wasn’t stupid enough to believe the issue was dropped.
