Page 45 of Enchanted to Meet You

“Look,” I said to Gabby, relief flooding over me as I hurried to unlock the door. “There they are, just like I told you.”

Weirdly, it wasn’t only Esther I was happy to see. Obviously I was glad to see Esther. She was my mentee, and even more than that, she was a sixteen-year-old girl. Who wouldn’t be relieved at seeing a sixteen-year-old girl alive and well and unharmed by some random escaped wolf in Connecticut?

But I was glad to see Derrick, too, a man I’d known only for a few days—and whose presence in my life had turned it completely upside down.

What was up with that?

“Gabs,” Esther cried as soon as she got into the shop. “You completely missed it!”

“Missed it?” Gabby, exasperated, put her dog down on the floor just in time—Pye had been about to take a swipe at him from the sales counter. “It was awolf. A wolf, Estie. Where even were you? I was scared to death for you!”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.” The two girls hugged tightly—a pleasing sight to see, at least to me, since Esther was so tall and thin, and Gabby so small and round, and yet they seemed to fit so perfectly together somehow. “But it wassocool. This guy here chased it up onto the railroad tracks. It disappeared into the bushes.”

“Wait.” Dina was leaning against the sales counter, one hand curled around Pye to keep him from launching himself at Willa. “There really was a wolf?”

“Hard to say.” Derrick wasn’t meeting anyone’s gaze. “It’s pretty dark out.”

“It was a wolf,” Esther said firmly. “A great big gray wolf.”

“It was following us,” Gabby said. “It followed us all the way from the Harvest Princess meeting at the Yacht Club down the jogging trail to the back of Enchantments. I think it was after Willa.”

“I did a report on wolves once in the sixth grade,” Esther said, “and while deer are their preferred source of food, they’ll prey on small mammals, as well.”

Gabby squealed and buried her head in the much taller Esther’s neck.

“Well, it’s gone now,” Derrick said in a voice that was unusually cheerful. “Everyone is safe.”

“Yeah,” Esther said, and gave Gabby one last squeeze before letting her go. “We’re good now, right?”

Gabby nodded uncertainly. “I guess so.”

Derrick gave me a penetrating look. He seemed to think telepathy was one of my gifts.

And if I could have read his mind, it would have been great because I would have been more prepared for what he said next, which was, “But I think to be on the safe side, Jessica and I should take you girls home.”

Wait.What?

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Esther said, at the same time that her best friend beamed and said, “Oh, thanks. That would be great.”

Apparently being chosen meant I was also part of a rideshare service for the Bringer of Light.

Which was fine, except that because Gabby was in the car with us, we couldn’t actually use the time to discuss the real reason I’d contacted Esther earlier that day—or why it was that wolves had begun appearing in downtown West Harbor lately.

Instead, I found myself in the front seat of Derrick’s rentalcar, an indignant Pye in a cardboard box on my lap, listening to Esther—in the back seat with Gabby—explain why they’d been at a meeting for Harvest Princess volunteers in the first place.

“I only went along to support Gabby,” she said. “She really needs the extracurriculars for her college apps. She doesn’t have any, except band. And also because the meetings are at the Yacht Club, and they give out those cookies—”

“Oh my God, yeah.” Gabby sounded wistful. “Those chocolate chip cookies are thebest.”

“Right?” Esther opened her backpack. “Do you guys want one? I stole, like, twenty of them.”

“No, thank you.” I really wanted one of the cookies, but one glance at Derrick’s stern profile told me that I needed to keep the conversation on track. “So you don’t want to be a Harvest Princess, Esther?”

“No.” Esther leaned back, munching. I respected how her devotion to veganism was dependent on the level of chocolate in the available snacks. “I don’t care about princesses. Gabby’s the one who looooooves them—”

“I do not!” Gabby cried, faux-outraged. “I mean, okay, I do. But actually, the Harvest Princess thing is pretty cool. If you get picked—”

“Bigif,” Esther interrupted.