Read When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae for Free Online Page B

stove, pressed up against each other and looking down into a frying pan.
    Maisey glanced over. “Going for a walk?”
    “Yeah,” Libby answered , and then added, pointedly, “I won’t be gone long.” She didn’t want them to think they’d have time for a quickie while she was out.
    She stepped outdoors and turned uphill.
    It was ridiculous, after all, to think that this . . . episode . . . would recur. Whatever had triggered it, it was a fluke. A once-in-a-lifetime thing.
    She rounded the house to her front lawn, but the slice of sun had already swept off to the north. No rainbow. The rain fell light and steady, and beneath her feet the ice coating on the blades of grass crackled as she walked. She looked back and her footprints had made dark splotches in the pale iced lawn.
    She walked through the first hedgerow and came to the shallow ditch. Where she’d seen that . . . thing.
    There was nothing there.
    She breathed deeply, deliberately.
    It was going to be okay.
    But it wasn’t okay.
    He was waiting for her.
    She turned to follow a deer path along the edge of her property, near where the posted signs had been hung.
    And suddenly, there he was. Sitting on one of the rocks from the stone wall. Not five feet away.
    She whirled and began walking quickly back the way she’d come.
    “If I were you, I’d move my car, Libby,” she heard him call out.
    Crazy. Craziness. Feet crunching the ice, hard and fast, her stomach hurt like she’d been punched, her eyes suddenly tearing. And then she was approaching the little ditch where she’d seen him before and she felt her dread intensify—after all, hallucinations aren’t bound by the laws of space, right? But he wasn’t there—he wasn’t there—she broke into a trot and a moment later burst into the warmth of her house, and stood, trying to catch her breath, to calm her shaking hands.
    He’d said her name. He’d said it the other time, too. Which proved it was a hallucination. Living inside her head.
    She pulled off her jacket and draped it on the back of a kitchen chair.
    Maisey and Tyler descended the stairs with elaborate casualness. Perversely, she was glad they’d tried to pull a bit of mischief, it gave her a few seconds to compose herself. Or try to.
    They hustled past her to the kitchen and she mustered an elaborate I’m-keeping-an-eye-on-you look, not easy considering how she was shaking.
    A moment later she closed her office door behind her, sat on her work chair, and clamped her arms around herself. And sat there, shaking without making a sound.

8
     
    It was pitch black.
    Libby sat up in bed.
    What was that sound?
    CR-RACK.
    There it was again.
    Her heart pounded.
    CR-RACK.
    She forced herself to stand up and walk to her bedroom door, stepped out into the hall—and ran smack into Maisey.
    “Aunt Libby, do you hear that?”
    Libby flicked the light switch.
    Nothing happened.
    And then she knew what the noise was.
    Tree limbs breaking.
    “It’s the ice. It must still be freezing rain out there. The weight of the ice is breaking the trees.”
    “Tyler’s up, too,” Maisey said.
    “What time is it?”
    “A little after 3:00.”
    They went downstairs. Maisey and Tyler had lit the pillar candles on the fireplace mantel. Tyler was sitting up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. He opened it up, inviting Maisey to sit under it with him.
    Libby pressed her face to a windowpane but she couldn’t see much. She went to the kitchen and got a flashlight. Suddenly there was another, huge CRACK followed by the sound of breaking glass.
    “Oh no,” she groaned. “The cars.”
    The property had no garage. The two cars were parked on the driveway. Right under an ancient sugar maple.
    Libby stood on the stoop, Maisey and Tyler behind her. The air felt weird, a swirling mix of warm and cold and dampness and stinging rain. The sound of the trees snapping, now that they were outside, was vivid, sharp, like gunfire, sometimes close, sometimes distant, constant