“Then I shall take the Path of Pins,” he told me, brushing his lips across my hand before I knew he’d held it. Lightning bugs burned into the edges of my eyes, dusk painted darkness between shadows. “You don’t need this,” he told me, and I believed him, so I removed my heavy coat. The breeze tickled my bare arms, his breath on my neck the reminder of my position, how in only moments he could take my very life. “You don’t need this either,” he said, fingers or perhaps claws, dark obsidian claws cut through the laces of my bodice, opened me as a split pig. And when my shirt and my bodice and even my smallclothes lay before him on the forest floor, and I stood bare as the day I’d been born, open to air but sheltered somewhat by the oncoming evening, his eyes drank up the whole of me, every goose pimple, every secretive crease. I wanted to be more than myself. I wanted to be more than Morgan, too.
He took me by the shoulders, kissed the tiny jumping points of my neck, breathing in the scent of me. Giddily I thought he must be able to smell me very well, and with every searing touch on my uninitiated skin I became more daring. Surely it was alright to feel this alive, ferocious. If I focused on this feeling, like the tiniest mote in the eye it might slip away when I moved to name it, see it. God help me I’d get that damn cloak back if I had to claw it off her corpse! And I could almost feel it’s velvet lining settling over my shoulders once again, the smooth buttery red against my skin, the weight of the hood on my back so long yearned for, and I could feel his fingers trying neatly the silken cord at my throat.
Or I could feel it, it was my cloak! He was tying it round my neck with satisfaction, his eyes half-moon closing. I looked to the ends of the cord, the satin ribbons now mottled darker, rusted reds, life-vital reds, someone else’s reds entirely. And so the cloak had been retrieved already. I was paralyzed with what he might have done. And what he might have done before that, even.
“And now you take the Path of Needles, my dear.”
I thought I must know this path now. Just as Caroline knew. Just as Morgan, and Gary, and the whole goddamn town probably knew. Why had no one told me? And why no warning from Mother, suddenly quiet and complacent and unconcerned? And why the hummle drump thudding of my heart in my throat in my chest in my eyes, the promise of opium lessons, our own wicker baskets, the witch’s cauldron gold, the baby fist, why so lonely in woods so full of wonders?
When he took me I lay quietly, my mother’s voice and brutal slick in my ears. Lesson three, she told me amid his huff puffing, never stray from the path.