Lily (Chapter Six)

Eli followed Keeper through the night.

The woods seemed to shift around them. He had lived in these hills his whole life, but he didn't recognize this forest. The trees were older here, their trunks thick as cars. The air smelled of loam and rot and something floral, impossibly sweet.

Keeper moved without hesitation, gray body weaving through darkness. Sometimes Eli lost sight of him entirely and followed by smell alone—dog musk mixed with that strange sweetness.

Dawn came slowly. His legs burned. His feet bled. But he didn't stop.

Around midday, they came to a road. Narrow, poorly maintained, winding through the hills. A mile down, half hidden by dying pines—a farmhouse. Gray and peeling. Sagging porch. Windows like empty eyes.

And in the yard, catching the weak autumn light: a white van with a half-peeled magnetic sign.

Eli's heart stopped. For one terrible moment he couldn't breathe. The Miller farm. The idling engine. The weight between his daughter's shoulder blades, her heart seemed to pulse inside of his.

Something told him: She was here.

Then he dropped to his knees beside Keeper and buried his face in the dog's rough fur.

"Good boy."

*

He waited until dark.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done. His daughter was in that house. Every instinct screamed at him to run down that road and tear the door off its hinges.

But he waited. Watched.

The man left twice during the day. Once to feed chickens. Once to work in a garden behind the barn—row after row of lilies that shouldn't have been blooming in late October, their heads all turned toward the house.

The smell reached him from the treeline. Motor oil and rotting fruit and something older.

When the sun went down, Eli moved.

He circled through the woods. Found an iron pipe in the barn, heavy and rusted. The back door of the farmhouse was unlocked.

He stepped into a kitchen that smelled of grease and something sweeter. Through the doorway: living room, plastic-covered couch, television flickering static, and the man sitting with his back to the kitchen.

Eli moved through the kitchen on silent feet. Raised the pipe.

"I've been waiting for you," the man said.

He didn't turn around.

"The garden told me you were coming."

Eli swung.

The man moved faster than seemed possible, twisting out of the chair, catching the pipe. They grappled in the flickering light. Empty eyes. Pale skin. A smile that held nothing.

"You can't have her," Eli gasped. "She's not yours."

"She's already changing. The garden chose her."

Something crashed through the back door.

Gray and fast and old, moving with a fury that had lain dormant for years. Eighty pounds of shepherd and wolf hit the man from behind, and they went down together in a tangle of teeth and screaming.

The pipe clattered away. Eli lunged for the door that led down, took the stairs two at a time.

"Wren! Wren!"

And from below, through the darkness:

"Daddy?"