Page 38 of Sherwood
Nothing but empty streets and the flapping of Marian’s red dress behind us.
“Make sure you’re taking the long way home,” Jovanna reminded me in my ear. “Just because they’re not following you directly from The Knot doesn’t mean they’re not still following you.”
Amen to that.
We sped south, quick, zipping onto 101 and flying as fast as we could away from town. To my right, the ocean was an endless black stretch beyond a thin screen of fir and pine. To my left, Sherwood Forest was a canopy of shadow, a playground of night, home. I couldn’t wait to get back.
But first, I had to make sure the wolf wasn’t on our tail.
We wound south for a long time, turning off onto smaller and smaller roads, until finally we were moving north again—albeit north in the most indirect way possible. The breeze as we rode was damp, cool, and Marian snuggled even closer, her chest to my back and her thighs framing mine. I imagined I could feel the heat of her bare cunt behind me. I wanted to taste it again so much that it was like a physical ache in my bones and in my belly.
You can once we get to the hideout,I bartered with myself. We’d have all the time in the world there, and no more secrets between us.
It took us more than an hour to get to the abandoned farm that marked the starting point for the path home. There was no road beyond the edge of the forest, not even a gravel one, but the narrow trail that wound through the woods was perfectly clear and firm once you got beyond the deadfall disguising its entrance. Soon the farm was no longer visible behind us, and we were deep in the heart of the forest, ribboning through cedars and hemlocks and dodging the moss-covered fingers of the wood as we went.
And then we were there.
I slowed the bike to a crawl and tapped my earpiece once. “We’re home,” I told Jovanna. “No one followed us.”
“Copy that, fearless leader,” Jovanna said cheerfully.
“Why have we stopped?” asked Marian, her voice muffled by her helmet. She hadn’t relinquished the death grip she had on my waist, and I found I didn’t want her to. Ever. “There’s nothing here.”
To the untrained eye, therewasabsolutely nothing here. Nothing other than a fast-rushing stream that had carved itself a steep cleft in the soil and rock and then the rustling ghosts of the trees around it all. It looked like any other patch of Sherwood Forest, untouched and utterly uninhabited.
“Watch,” I told Marian, and then a narrow moss-covered door slid back to reveal a concrete ramp lined with dim red lights.
She let out a long exhale behind me. I smiled.
And together we rode into the Castle of the North Wind.
* * *
“So your father built this place?”Marian asked after emerging from the bathroom in a pair of my briefs and a T-shirt. As much as I enjoyed the red dress, I didn’t think she’d want to meet everyone in the clothes she’d just gotten publicly railed in.
I handed her a pair of sweatpants, shamelessly watching the plump curves of her ass as she pulled them on. “When I was a child. He was—he had these phases, you know. These moods. Times when he’d spend every waking hour restoring an old boat, other times when he’d go to Mass twice a day, and then other times that were packed full of too many obsessions to keep track of. He had enough money to indulge in any whim he wanted, no matter how ridiculous, and so here we are. In an underground bunker built to be invisible to the outside world so it can withstand the collapse of society from climate change or a solar flare or whatever. It sat empty for years.”
“Until you ran,” Marian finished for me.
“Until I ran. It was perfect for us, you see, because it was built for hiding. And it was more than large enough for all my rigs. All I needed to do was fortify the HVAC to accommodate my machines, make sure that thermal output was well-masked, and I was ready to go. Oh, and get secure internet, but building secure communication systems in risky places was literally my job for the NSA, so it wasn’t too much trouble.”
Marian wandered around my bedroom, trailing her fingers over the concrete walls and built-in bookshelves—stocked almost entirely with paperbacks from fifteen years ago. Relics from my father’s vision for this place as some kind of oasis away from society.
“I was still a kid when he passed, and so I hadn’t realized he was so…” She stopped, obviously looking for a polite word.
I gave her one, although I privately had lots of better words. “Eccentric? Intense? Yeah.” I looked at the room, at the physical manifestation of millions of dollars poured into a single person’s temporary obsession. “It was hard on my mom, I think.”
“Was it hard on you?” she asked, turning to face me. “That kind of intensity?”
It would be easy to say yes, I thought, easy to translate my father into some sort of symbol for capriciousness or neglect, but thatyeswouldn’t capture so much of what Robert Loxley had been. Ready to act, ready to leap. Like the fool from the tarot deck, already stepping off the ledge with his face to the sky.
Land or sea?Dad asked me once, when I was twelve, standing on the beach by our house.If you had to pick.
Both, I’d said immediately, not even stopping to think about it.
He’d laughed.That’s not the point. You have to choose.
Well, that had just been stupid. Who said I had to choose? The rules of some choosing game he’d literally just made up? Why did I have to agree to play at all? And anyway, I couldn’t have picked between the two if I’d wanted to. The sea was a vast cold salt full of cruelty and life; the land behind me was a nest of tree and stone and moss, all of it draped in fog like the tattered veils of dead brides.
