She cracked an eye open and grinned.
“Got one.” She pulled out a long purple-black earthworm.
“A plump little fella,” Stephen said, nodding his approval.
“George is my father,” she told him, standing and wringing her hands to flick the mud off.
Stephen’s mouth fell open.
“Your father? But I thought your father died.”
“My brothers’ father is dead. Everyone believed he was my father too. The timing was close enough, and people never asked questions.” Liv told Stephen the secret as if she did it all the time. In truth, she’d never told another living soul. Her mother and George were the only two in the world who knew of her true parentage.
“So, your mom had an affair?” he asked.
Liv shook her head.
“Never. She loved Mark, her first husband, but he went away and got killed. She says that George seduced her. It happened only days after she discovered my dad had died. She met George in the Stoneroot Forest. She was crying, hiding from her young sons. He took her back to his cabin, and three months later she found out she was pregnant.”
“Your mom told you all that?”
Liv nodded.
“She feels guilty. She thinks she ruined my life. Everyone in town believed I was Mark’s child, and she never intended to tell George I existed, but a few months before my birth, he arrived at my mother’s house. George knew she’d conceived a child. He knew when he found her in the forest that day that she would be the mother of his child. He didn’t care what my mother told people, so long as he could see me and spend time with me. In the beginning she fought him, but he… he has a way with people.”
“And how do you feel about George?” Stephen asked, reaching his hand into the mud she’d pulled the worm from.
Liv smiled and imagined the man who’d given her half of who she was.
“I don’t know a world without him. He’s not like most fathers.”
Stephen nodded, drew his hand out empty and frowned.
“I gathered as much.”
“He’s more like a teacher,” Liv continued. “He tells me stories of the old ways. His people came from Scandinavia. He says there’s magic in our blood.”
“And that’s why you can do the drum thing?”
“I think so.” Liv thought of the other things, countless things she’d experienced with George.
She held up the hag stone.
“I see things when I look through this that other people can’t see. I also dream. Sometimes I dream the future. Other times, I dream as if I’m inside an animal. Though that usually comes after I eat a heart.”
“After you eat a heart?” Stephen asked, eyebrow cocked.
Liv expected him to look disgusted. Instead, he appeared intrigued.
“Yeah, George kills his own meat. In his clan, they believed if you ate the heart of the animal, you absorbed its strength. After I’ve eaten the heart of a deer, I will dream that I am a deer moving through the forest. My ears and nose are so powerful. It’s strange.”
“You’ve dreamed the future? Things that haven’t happened yet?”
Liv nodded.
“Dreams aren’t always easy to decipher, though. Before my mother said we were moving to Gaylord from Kalkaska, I dreamed I was running to catch up with a train. My mother, my stepfather and Arlene were on it. They were surrounded by boxes and suitcases. George was standing behind me, waving goodbye. Three days after the dream, my mom said we were moving here to Gaylord.”
Liv held the worm near her face.
“Did you just talk to that worm?” Stephen asked, wrinkling his nose.
Liv winked at him, threaded the worm on the hook and string she’d set aside, and then cast it into the water.
“Can you do other witch things?”
“I guess,” she murmured, biting her lip as she made little patterns in the water with the worm. After a few seconds, a dark shadow appeared near the dock.
“What was that?” Stephen asked, jumping from his rock and running closer to the water’s edge.
“A dog fish,” she told him.
The line grew taut and Liv pulled, jerking the string and the dogfish from the lake.
Stephen jumped back, and then stepped closer, watching as Liv put a foot on the fish’s wriggling body.
“What are you doing?” he asked, as she took the stick she’d sharpened to a point and plunged it through the fish’s eye. It flopped once and lay still.
“It’s the fastest death,” she murmured.
“Now what? You’ll eat it?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But that’s not why I caught him. He’s a gift for you.”
Stephen stuck his hands in his pockets, as if he expected Liv to hoist the slimy fish into his arms.
“What do you mean? I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
Liv smiled.
“You don’t have to. Meet me back here tomorrow.”
Liv cleaned the fish, careful not to damage his spine.
Arlene jumped up and down at the smell of fish in the frying pan, and Liv’s mother kissed her head before retiring to her room for a nap.
Her stepfather would work a double shift, not returning until the morning, which suited Liv just fine. Roy was nice enough, but no bond existed between he and Liv, and Liv knew that Roy longed for the day in the near-future when Liv would leave their little house and he could have her mother and his true daughter to himself.
She carried the spine to her room after dinner and wrapped it in a swath of fabric. She carved a dream stave on a piece of brown coal. The symbol consisted of a circle within a series of forked arms. The dream stave granted the sleeper dreams of the future. She added the coal to the fabric and closed it tightly, sliding the package beneath her bed.
George worked with many spells, but the dream stave with the dogfish spine had been one of the more common throughout her childhood. Each season, George place a stave and spine under his and Liv’s pillows, so they could determine what the next season would bring.
She lay back on her bed and stared at the cracked ceiling, imagining Stephen’s delight at the gift.
Chapter 17
Liv
Three days passed without a sighting of Stephen. She didn’t see him at the pond, and on the third day, she turned brusquely away from the woods and instead walked into town. She didn’t want to go to town, but sitting at the shack mending clothes or reading her worn copies of Nancy Drew for the fiftieth time made her want to jump off the roof.
There were other young people who lived in the seedy little houses at the edge of town. Boys and girls with dirty knees and elbows, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin with their fathers. Sometimes the boys watched her with sharp, wolfish faces, but Liv steered clear of the lot.
The forest was her respite from the squalor of her home life, and she never complained — not to her mother and not even to George. Her mother worked too hard to carry her daughter’s shame as well.
In town, Liv was merely a spectator. She didn’t have money to spend and had grown weary of the shopkeepers who watched her with suspicious or pitying eyes.
Rather than look at people, she watched the sidewalk. Every few feet a weed poked from the hard surface, or much to her delight, a flower.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, Arlene liked to sing as she skipped down the sidewalk after school.
Superstitiously, Liv found herself avoiding the hairline cracks in the pale cement.
“Psst…” a voice whispered just behind her.
Liv looked up, startled, and spun to find Stephen.