Fiction | Short Story

Seven Questions in Exchange

She follows the signs deeper as a weight in her gut grows colder with every step. It’s almost been long enough that she’s forgotten the finer details. Almost.

Lynn’s apartment door is unlocked.

She realizes this as she slides her key out of the lock as quietly as she can and eases the door open. She knows she locked it this morning. The door isn’t damaged, and there isn’t any other sign that anything’s wrong. Almost everything is where she left it. Her marking sits on the kitchen counter, the pile of essays a little closer to the edge than she remembers. Her mug is next to this morning’s paper, instead of on top of it. A trace of mud or rain hangs in the air, even though the window’s closed and the sun is out.

Her bedroom door is very slightly ajar. Lynn sets her messenger bag down on the couch before easing open the door.

A stranger stands in Lynn’s bedroom. She turns to face Lynn fully, blinking a set of golden eyes with false surprise. Red hair, brown skin, unassuming black coat and jeans over soft curves. She looks like any other grad student Lynn could’ve walked by today, or at least until she smiles. For the briefest second, Lynn swears that the stranger’s teeth are sharp.

“Oh,” she laughs a little, self-deprecating, disarming. “I— This is embarrassing. I’m so sorry, I locked myself out, so I was trying to break into my own place to get in, but I must’ve counted wrong and your window was open too . . .”

It wasn’t. Lynn’s grip tightens on the doorknob. She takes a breath.

“Okay.”

“What?”

“I believe you. Okay.” She steps to one side, opening the door wider. “Please leave.”

A pause that’s just a breath too long. “Right! Yes, sorry again. I’ll be . . . going, now.”

After she’s gone, Lynn locks the door and opens her windows to let out the mud-rain smell.

*

Lynn tries not to think about it again. She doesn’t change her locks for the same reason she didn’t call the police: She knows what this is. She wants to ignore it. She decides to ignore it, until the park.

She walks past the same park every day after work. She’s never been inside. It might have nice benches or pretty bridges, but hiking trails aren’t her idea of a good time, and she’s not interested in getting lost wandering through ceaseless trees.

She doesn’t change her locks for the same reason she didn’t call the police: She knows what this is.

It’s summer, and all that had been in the air was the scent of grass and dry dust, but between one inhale and the next it suddenly smells like the earth just after a storm. Lynn looks before she can stop herself, to the right and over her shoulder. Movement: red, gold, that too-big black coat.

The person who isn’t a neighbor or a burglar freezes and darts off. Lynn’s had enough of running after people, but something she thought she’d buried stirs inside her and tells her to give chase.

She listens.

She runs after, stepping over roots and ducking under branches. Her quarry weaves through the trees, only a flash of color here, a sharp snapping twig there.

She knows the park isn’t this big. She doesn’t even run for more than a few minutes, but the noise from the main road fades out and the hiking paths intersect less and less often with Lynn’s trajectory, until signs of human life cease entirely.

The sun is still harsh overhead, and when Lynn finally breaks through into a clearing to find the stranger sitting on a branch above her, she’s forced to squint into the glare. The sunlight that drifts through the leaves makes the red hair look like it’s changing; shades of fresh blood, fallen leaves, berries in autumn.

“You run fast!” The not-burglar comments, lightly. “I’m surprised you caught me.”

“You let me.” Lynn is sure of very few things, but she knows when she’s being toyed with. “If you really wanted to, you could’ve shaken me.”

“Maybe so.” She pauses, then sighs when Lynn doesn’t continue. “You must want something from me?”

“I have questions.” Lynn’s neck is starting to ache from looking up.

The not-burglar swings her legs as they dangle from the branch.

“I’ll answer one if you give me your name.”

“Lynn Tam. And you are?”

“Aspen.” Her expression changes, confused delight shifting to wary respect. “You certainly know your manners. If you know that much, you should know better than to chase me too far in.”

This creature who calls herself Aspen shouldn’t care how far Lynn goes. But then, Lynn shouldn’t be here.

“Why were you watching me?”

“You weren’t scared.” Aspen tips her head, staring unblinking down. “You knew someone was there, but you weren’t scared. You acted more like, There’s a spider but I still have to live here, so I can’t just leave and ignore the problem, than if you really thought there was a break-in.”

Lynn knows she isn’t getting a straight answer, not like this. She changes tack.

“What were you after? You didn’t take anything. I don’t have information you’d be interested in.” She lifts her chin to meet Aspen’s gaze. “Hiding from something, then?”

Aspen flinches.

“What’s after you?”

Aspen looks away, and the smile drops so easily that Lynn wonders how she’d ever thought it was real.

“I only offered you one answer. Don’t push your luck.”

“You’re still sitting here talking to me.” She crosses her arms and leans back against a tree, pretending that it doesn’t bother her to stand so close to the border.

“I shouldn’t be. Your guesses are close enough that you’re either bluffing or stupidly reckless. If you know—” Aspen gestures, vaguely. She talks around it, clarifying the subject more than any euphemism would have. “You’d leave before you get any deeper in.”

“It’s a little late to not involve me.” Lynn is exhausted, suddenly, and not just from the chase. “But I’ll take your advice.”

With no further answers forthcoming, only a steady stare from up a tree, Lynn turns to leave.

“I’ll see you again,” Aspen agrees, and it sounds like a promise and a warning.

*

It takes a few days, but Aspen keeps her word. Lynn comes home again to an unlocked door and a person-shaped creature sitting on the arm of her battered couch.

“You’re back.”

She closes the door, deliberately, locks it and kicks her shoes off. Making a show of the lack of urgency.

“I’m back.” She spreads her hands, spreads out a grin, but there’s no warmth in it. “You were right! I need your help.”

Lynn sighs. She stays where she is, behind the kitchen counter, and rests an elbow on her piles of unmarked student papers.

“A deal, then?”

“I seek refuge,” Aspen says, solemn and formal in the binding way. “For seven nights, until the summer solstice.”

“And in exchange?” Lynn knows the answer, this old dance, but she asks anyway.

“Your heart’s desire?” It’s a joke, but the effort is weak. Aspen shrugs. “Whatever is in my power to offer.”

“Answers.” It was always going to be this. “Seven questions for seven nights.”

Aspen nods, fingers curling into the holes in her jeans.

“Seven answers for seven nights.” She’s sitting up straighter, dropping the facade of carelessness for genuine relief.

Lynn goes to bed early.

*

The next morning is a Saturday, and Lynn makes some eggs for herself that Aspen turns down politely. She catches Aspen eyeing the newspaper that she hasn’t figured out how to cancel the subscription to, and she offers that too. Offers, despite knowing that things like Aspen shy away from gifts.

Lynn turns her back to put her dishes in the sink, and Aspen is gone. Lynn sets her marking down on the kitchen table and leaves the door unlocked.

*

The first question comes at dusk, when Aspen comes back for the night. It isn’t what she meant to ask, but she’s curious, and none of this is what she meant to do.

“Why nights only?” Lynn sets down her pen when she hears the door click shut.

Aspen shudders walking through the new protections that Lynn set up in her absence—iron horseshoes, chalk on the doorframe, branches and herbs woven into braids.

“It’s in the deal,” she answers absently, still looking around like she hadn’t expected this attention to detail.

Lynn would be offended at the underestimation, but it’s not like she makes an effort to advertise her expertise.

“You could’ve negotiated full days, then, from the beginning. Surely that’s safer.”

Aspen draws her finger back from the chalk that burned her, shaking her head.

“Not for me. Not for my . . . nature.” She says the word like it’s an inadequate stand-in for a different word in her native language, like it doesn’t convey enough. “It would be safer for something not-me, yes. But not for me.”

Lynn notes the tear in Aspen’s black coat. Before she goes to bed, she leaves one of her older brown jackets on the back of the kitchen chair without comment.

*

Sunday morning, on a whim, Lynn reads the newspaper out loud. Aspen stays through all of breakfast, pretending not to listen, and lingers even after Lynn is done.

The question that night is a follow-up.

“What are you, then? If not something that stays.”

Aspen grins, a shade of her first impression returning underneath the anxious-houseguest, the look of the hunted.

“A historian. A wanderer. A keeper of stories. An . . . anthropologist, someone said once.”

“Human stories, then?”

“Human stories.”

The black coat is tattered, but the brown one is gone from the chair.

*

Monday, Aspen comes back wearing the brown jacket. It fits her better, and Lynn refuses to examine her own feelings beyond that.

“What do they want with you? Whoever you’re hiding from?”

She keeps her eyes on her book, pretending she isn’t invested in the answer. There’s a pause.

“Maybe not a keeper of stories. A collection of stories.” Aspen taps her chest, over the shirt with a kitten on it that she might’ve stolen. “I keep the words inside me.”

“And?” Lynn prompts, when it’s unclear whether her question is going to get answered.

“And they want to harvest.”

*

At some point, Lynn starts reading everything out loud after dusk. The papers she’s grading, the textbooks she needs to read. Crossword puzzles, memorably, because after a few times Aspen doesn’t even pretend to wait until Lynn’s not looking to steal them.

The question she’d been meaning to ask from the start, the second one that she thought of when she asked for answers: “Why me?”

Aspen chews on her borrowed pencil, stealing Lynn’s trick of staring down at a page to avoid eye contact.

“Your place smelled like magic. It was old. I wanted to know.”

“It shouldn’t, still.”

*

On the fifth evening, Aspen comes home bleeding.

Lynn asks her question without thinking, between the essays she knocked over initially and the first-aid kit strewn across her kitchen floor: “Is this enough?”

Aspen, fingers loose over where Lynn is smoothing down the medical tape over her skinned knees, only stares. Her knuckles are bruised.

Lynn chews her lip and doesn’t pull her hand away.

“I mean. To keep you safe.”

“No.”

Aspen looks like she regrets the answer, would have preferred a meaningless reassurance, but answers were part of the deal too. Despite both their best efforts, the blood still stains the kitchen tile.

*

On the sixth night, the second-to-last night, Lynn is at a loss for words. She knows what she meant to ask at the very beginning. She knows Aspen’s waiting, that she’s always asked as soon as Aspen returned. It takes two hours to think of the right one.

“What are you going to do after?”

Aspen stares at her, caught moving between the table and the couch, baffled like after is not a concept she’s considered. Like the possibility of surviving the solstice, even now, isn’t something she’s thought about.

“I, ah. Move on? Hide.”

“And come the winter solstice?”

Aspen doesn’t have an answer for that.

*

On the seventh night, Aspen doesn’t come back at dusk.

Lynn sighs. She’s so, so tired of running after people, of not knowing if they’re coming home again—but this isn’t Aspen’s home, not really. And she can’t afford to even pretend to wait, a few hours for certainty’s sake.

She goes.

The park is different at night, streetlamps and moonlight deepening the shadows, feathering their edges. It rained as recently as noon that day, and the earth is damp and forgiving. Lynn packs as much cold iron as she thinks the forest will let her get away with, and she retraces her steps to the clearing she’d made her second impressions in.

She follows the signs deeper; distant, slow hooves over soft muddy ground, a rustling murmur that isn’t quite just the trees, a weight in her gut that grows colder with every step. It’s almost been long enough that she’s forgotten the finer details. Almost.

She gets turned around once, as is the nature of the thing, but she closes her eyes and thinks about her brown jacket. She thinks about crossword puzzles and bruised knuckles. She keeps her eyes closed the rest of the way.

Aspen shuffles along in a line of figures, all of them with heads hanging and shoulders slumped. Lynn waits, her back against a tree, until she’s close enough to reach Aspen’s hand. She pulls, and the colorless light around Aspen’s neck stretches and breaks, and Aspen collapses against her with a little shocked sound.

Lynn runs. Brambles that weren’t there in the daytime catch at her ankles, and lights make the shadows strange and fuzzy, throwing the ankle-twisting bumps and valleys of the trail into doubt. She doesn’t look back, and she keeps hold of Aspen’s wrist, gaze fixed on the ground immediately in front of her feet.

Once they pass the tree that Aspen had sat in, seven days ago, Aspen jerks and tries to pull away. Lynn pulls her on a little further and lets them both fall into a soft hollow at the base of a safer tree.

Shadows dance in the whites of Aspen’s eyes, up along her neck from her collarbone, shifting under her skin like spilled ink or bruises. Lynn keeps hold, but this is the part that she doesn’t know. The after, the once-you’re-safe. The getting back out.

“Hey. Hey, look at me.” Lynn reaches for Aspen’s face, trying to look at her eyes, but Aspen shakes her head and snaps at Lynn’s fingers with teeth that are sharper than Lynn remembers. “Hey. You owe me one more.”

That gets her attention. Sometimes Lynn thinks the rules for dealing with them, the sworn oaths and loophole tricks, are burned deeper in their bones than any physical constraints.

“That’s right. Seven nights. Seven answers.”

She lets her grip on Aspen’s wrist relax a little, but she doesn’t let go.

“Answers . . .” Aspen’s gaze skitters, settles, and she swallows. “I didn’t ask for a rescue.”

She’s so, so tired of running after people, of not knowing if they’re coming home again.

The shadows melt away, gradual and reluctant.

“You broke into my home and asked for my help.” Lynn can’t quite make it sound as bitter as she’d meant it, but maybe that’s for the best.

“The question, then.” The night air bites a little sharp, despite the fact that it’s the middle of summer, and the place where Lynn’s still touching Aspen’s wrist nearly burns.

“You said human stories. Just human, or . . . ?” Lynn shakes her head. She’s distracting herself from the point. “What do you know about the name Molly Hazel?”

Aspen hesitates. Lynn follows the pattern of bark down to the twisting roots, focuses on a fallen leaf, looks anywhere but at her.

“It’s a common name.”

She repeats it. “What do you know?”

Another pause, shorter this time. “Fifteen years ago, there was a changeling child. She grew up with humans. She had a friend. We came to take her back, and she did not want to go. The friend, the human child—” Aspen’s staring at her. “The human child came after her and tried to take her back.”

“And then?”

“She failed. She kept trying after that, for seven years. She was cursed and cast out every time.”

“And Molly?”

“She’s dead.” Aspen is sitting perfectly still when Lynn drags her gaze back up to meet hers. “She never adapted.”

“Right.”

“Back to old habits? Trying to steal what isn’t yours.” Aspen grins, crooked, her teeth more like fangs and her nails more like claws. Her hands shake, barely perceptible.

“I don’t think anyone should be able to steal people.”

Aspen finally pulls away. “The deal is complete. You . . . you saved me, and I didn’t ask for that. What else in exchange?”

“One last question. A what-if.”

“Go on.”

Lynn’s head is still a little light from the answer she got. She blames that.

“What if I could work out more specific protections? Things that you could take with you, as you wandered. Maybe,” she adds, suddenly more unsure than she’s been through this entire ordeal. It could be presumptuous of her to think Aspen didn’t just come to her for protection; it might be projecting to think that she cared for the company. “Maybe I want more from you still.”

Aspen leans in, the movement making her eyes catch the moonlight.

“Then maybe, if you can do that, you can have anything that I can give.”