o-60 was stitched into the right shoulder of each. Some, like Saul, thought it referenced the speed at which Neal moved, zero to sixty every day of his sixty years. But most of the others knew what it stood for.

The hunt was simple. The game had nowhere to go. And despite the favorable odds, the men experienced a thrill they’d never known while hunting before. The immediacy of multiple kills. One after another. Rapidly. Repeatedly.

Relief.

All but Neal himself, who participated mightily at the onset but lost interest early on, as he paused to study a particularly twisted tree in his yard. One that resembled the impenetrable trunks of the North Woods.

He thought of the Great Owls. And once he started thinking about them, he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

Endangered or not, protection be damned, Neal Nash would give anything to have one of Goblin’s sacred untouchable beasts in his hangar for show.

Nobody had ever hunted a Great Owl. Nobody had ever had the nerve. If the North Woods legend of the witch didn’t stop you, the Goblin Police most certainly would.

And yet, staring up at the winding branches, the uneven trunk that looked something like a question mark erupting from the grass, Neal imagined the beast, just one, under glass, here at home.

Even then, seven days before his sixtieth birthday party, as Barbara noted who was coming and the staff prepared the many feasts; as Harvey murdered movement and Saul shot snakes; as the voices of his inner circle rose to the Goblin sky in joyful unison, exclaiming the hysteria of the hunt; Neal thought of the one animal he was not allowed to have.

4

At ten seventeen p.m., the party well under way, a stoned man turned to a drunk woman and asked, “Does Nash turn sixty today? Or does he turn sixty tomorrow?”

The woman, leaning against the hall wall for support, squinting to see the man through the color wheel of lights, shouted over the music.“The party’s tonight! We’re at the party right now.”

“Yes but…does he turn sixty before or after midnight strikes?”

Then the woman laughed and accidentally knocked her nose on the wall.

Outside, nobody cared that it was raining. It was as if the Nashes had arranged that, too. Gobliners all, even a heavy rain was hardly something to run from. And the more the guests drank and smoked, the more pills they swallowed, the more righteous this particularly brutal rainfall became.

“A coronation,” someone called before pointing their gun-horn at their own head and honking.

“The sky is partying, too,” said another.

But there were some who worried.

“It’s too much,” one man said.

“Too debauched,” said another.

“The sky knows,” said a few more.