He laughed without humor, but his voice was relaxed. “No need to sound so careful,” he told me, his gaze on the strange sky. “It was a very long time ago, even by my reckoning. There were five or six of us humans left behind when the fae were banished. At first, we were overjoyed. We played all day long and ate the food in the larder—and there was always food in the larder. Last time I went back there, a very long time later, there was still food there—but there are other things living in the Emerald Court now, things that feed on those weaker than they. Like me and like you.

“Evander died first,” Aiden said. He was walking faster as he talked, and he kept looking behind us. “He was the youngest of us—you learned caution very quickly in that court, or you died. I don’t think Evander would have survived long even if we hadn’t been abandoned in Underhill. Evander first, then Lily and Rose—I don’t remember what their human names had been. Lily just disappeared from her bed one day, and Rose quit eating. Then it was just Willy and me. For a long time, it was Willy and me. Then we found this pretty little girl crying next to a stream. We took care of her and told her stories.”

There was nothing behind us that I could see or smell. I touched Adam lightly on his head and looked at Aiden. Adam watched him a moment, then broke free to run down the hill half a dozen yards before circling back.

There was nothing following us. Aiden didn’t seem to take note of Adam’s useless search. He looked up at the sky again, and as he did so, I realized that warm feeling on the back of my shoulders was gone. Above us, dark gray clouds roiled, and as soon as I saw them, a chill wind picked up.

“Willy figured it out first,” Aiden said, picking up the pace again. We weren’t running, but it was a swinging walk that would take us places fast. “He said it was because she always knew where to find berries and which path we should take. But Willy always had a bit of the gift—he could see things that others didn’t.”

He paused, this time looking down at the path we were on. He turned a little to the left, a steeper climb. “Never follow a path while you’re in Underhill,” he told me. “The only things here that make a path are things you don’t want to meet.”

The hill was steeper than it had been, steeper than it looked.