Songs_of_the_Satyrs by Aaron J. French Read Free Book Online Page B

arching her back like a cat.
    He raised an eyebrow. “See who?”
    The full brown lips twisted into a knowing smile. “Herne.”
    Sophie raised her fingers to her temples and wiggled them. Ryan’s gaze flickered among the shadows, but Sophie shook her tangled locks.
    “He’s gone now. He’s got what he wanted.”
    “What’s that?”
    Ryan took a step back as Sophie dropped from the overhanging branch like a panther.
    “You’re here, of course.”
    They both turned as a gunshot cracked, its report echoing back off the mountain. Sophie stepped closer to Ryan and slipped a trembling arm around him, her thumb hooked into his belt loop. She nodded at the question in his eyes.
    “Falls are back that way.”
    Ryan leaned down to hear the words fall from her lips.
    “Can’t shoot him no more. Herne’s done all the dyin’ he’s gonna do.”
    “What is it?”
    Sophie glanced up at Ryan.
    “Things just got weird.”
     
    ***
     
    “Wait.”
    Sophie slapped the back of her hand on Ryan’s chest, and he paused. She’d led him back across Hunger Hollow Brook and through the trees, but she had shunned the trail. Ryan followed her outstretched finger to the spot where the trail entered the wood.
    Tom’s Red Sox cap flashed blue and red in the undergrowth as he tromped out of the trailhead. Ryan’s eyes narrowed as he spotted the fly rod in Tom’s left hand, then they widened at the shotgun he carried in his right.
    What the—
    Sophie grabbed his arm and tugged. He turned, his mind racing. The brown hand gripped his bicep like a vise.
    “You can’t go out there,” she said.
    “What am I supposed to do, stay in the woods all day?”
    He winced as she dug her fingers into his arm.
    “Who do you think that shotgun was for? Why do you think he went to the falls?”
    Ryan looked into the hazel eyes and sighed. For a moment, in the wood, he had thought maybe Rebecca had exaggerated. But no. The paranoid look in her eyes, the crazy talk of Herne—
    Except you saw it, too.
    “Don’t you go out there, Ryan Stockbridge. I’m tellin’ you, Tom wouldn’t need a gun this time of year for ’else.”
    Ryan pulled her hand off his arm.
    “Why would Tom be after me?”
    Sophie looked past Ryan and blew a deep breath. “He’s gone. Out into the field. I hear the tractor startin’. Must be why Becca changed the combination, why she took Olivia’s books out of her room and put ’em in the safe. They don’t want you to know.”
    Ryan looked back toward the barn. The sputtering of the tractor had faded over the top of a knoll.
    “Know what?”
    “’Bout Herne, of course.”
     
    ***
     
    Ryan chirped the lock on his Audi and popped the trunk. As he pulled out the tire iron, his ears strained to hear the puttering of the tractor. Satisfied that Tom was still busy, he grabbed Sophie’s hand and dragged her into the house.
    The safe was probably decent enough for Greenfield, but Ryan figured it’d been ordered out of an office supply catalog. He made quick work of the hinges and the steel door thudded on the floor. Sophie reached in and grabbed a leather bound journal.
    “Your grandmother’s. Before that Stockbridge fella took her away to Hartford.”
    As she handed Ryan the journal, a sepia-toned photo fell out of the yellowed pages, landing facedown. Ryan swiped the photo off the floor and flipped it over.
    “This can’t be real.”
     
    ***
     
    He stared at the large brown eyes of the shirtless boy gazing at him out of the photograph. He was drawn to the twin prongs jutting up from the thick patch of black hair on the boy’s head, just above his temples. The photograph had been taken from the waist up. Ryan was beginning to think he knew why. The back porch of the old Victorian filled the background, and there was the giant maple, only a sapling.
    Sophie tapped the portrait. “Bernard. Your gramma Catherine’s father and my great-great-grandfather. Herne’s son.”
    Ryan squinted at the faded handwriting on