Coming Home

Ashleigh knew the bird was going to follow her home.

She didn't know how she knew. She simply did.

The little brown bird had appeared several minutes ago, flitting from one telephone wire to the next as Ashleigh drove along the narrow road toward the old farmhouse. Every time she glanced through the windshield, it seemed to be there—keeping pace with her car as if it had somewhere important to be.

"Don't do it," she muttered, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. "I have enough mouths to feed."

The bird landed on a fence post as she passed.

Ashleigh sighed.

"You're coming home with me, aren't you?"

As if answering her, the bird took flight again.

Of course it was.

Animals had been following Ashleigh home for as long as she could remember, although lately the situation had gotten slightly ridiculous.

At last count, there were fifteen dogs, twelve cats, four turtles, six cows, two sheep, four goats, eight ducks, and enough birds that she'd finally stopped trying to count them.

None of the animals seemed to belong to anyone.

She had checked.

She'd asked neighbors, called around town, watched community bulletin boards, and even checked with the local animal shelter when an especially friendly dog or cat appeared. No one ever seemed to be looking for them.

The livestock made even less sense.

People generally noticed when a cow went missing.

Yet somehow animals continued arriving at the old family property as if someone had planted an invisible sign at the end of the driveway.

ASHLEIGH'S HOME FOR WAYWARD CREATURES. EVERYONE WELCOME.

She smiled at the thought.

It wasn't entirely inaccurate.

Ashleigh had never been able to watch an animal go hungry. She couldn't ignore something that needed care simply because caring for it was inconvenient.

So they stayed.

Every single one of them.

Thankfully, she worked part-time at the local feed store and received an employee discount. Otherwise, she probably would have been sleeping in the pasture because she'd sold the house to pay for animal feed.

The farmhouse appeared ahead, partially hidden behind the trees lining the road.

Ashleigh slowed.

No matter how many times she came around that bend, seeing the house still did something strange to her chest.

Home.

She wasn't entirely sure when she'd started calling it that again.

The two-story house had belonged to her family for longer than Ashleigh knew. It sat on five acres surrounded by cattle fencing, with several outbuildings scattered across the property and woods stretching behind it.

Those woods had once seemed endless.

When Ashleigh was a child, she had believed the entire world could fit inside them.

She turned into the gravel driveway.

Before she'd gone twenty feet, three dogs came racing toward the car.

"Move!"

They didn't.

Ashleigh slowed to a crawl.

A black-and-white dog trotted directly in front of the bumper as though appointed to guide her safely to the house. Two others ran beside the car, tails wagging furiously.

The new bird swooped overhead.

"Traitor," Ashleigh told it. "You haven't even been here five minutes and you're already joining them."

She parked near the house and climbed out.

Instantly, she was surrounded.

Dogs pressed against her legs. A cat appeared from beneath the porch. Another stretched lazily on the railing as if Ashleigh's arrival barely warranted acknowledgment.

"Yes, hello. I missed you too."

She scratched ears and rubbed heads as she made her way toward the back of the property.

The animals followed.

That was normal.

At least, normal for Ashleigh.

She had stopped trying to explain the strange relationships among the animals years ago. A cow sleeping beside a goat wouldn't have surprised her anymore. Neither would finding a duck curled beside one of the turtles or a cat stretched across the back of a sleeping dog.

Animals that should have tolerated one another at best behaved like family here.

Maybe they understood something people didn't.

Ashleigh had always gotten along better with animals anyway.

People were complicated.

Animals weren't.

Animals didn't pretend to like you and then laugh when you walked away.

They didn't decide you were too strange, too quiet, too big, too awkward, too much of one thing and not enough of another.

They didn't tell you that you would be prettier if you tried harder.

They didn't call you stupid because you preferred fantasy novels to football games.

Animals simply decided whether they trusted you.

And animals had always trusted Ashleigh.

Sometimes she thought they understood her better than most people ever had.

When she was younger, she'd believed that wasn't limited to ordinary animals.

Because the woods behind the house hadn't always been empty.

Ashleigh stopped near the fence and looked toward the tree line.

For just a second, she could almost hear laughter.

Tiny, musical laughter.

She swallowed.

"Don't."

One of the dogs beside her tilted its head.

"I'm talking to myself."

The dog's tail thumped against the ground.

"That's apparently something I do now."

She looked back toward the woods.

When Ashleigh was little, she had played with faeries there.

Not imaginary friends who happened to have wings.

Actual faeries.

At least, she'd believed they were actual faeries.

They had darted among the trees like living sparks of light, hiding beneath leaves and sitting on branches while Ashleigh told them stories. Sometimes they whispered secrets to her. Sometimes they led her farther into the woods than she was supposed to go.

No one else had ever seen them.

Her parents had dismissed the stories as the imagination of a lonely child.

Eventually, everyone stopped correcting her and simply let Ashleigh have her fun.

But Ashleigh remembered.

She remembered their faces.

Their laughter.

The delicate sound of their wings.

She remembered how real they had felt.

When she reached middle school and childhood games were no longer considered acceptable, the faeries weren't the only ones she talked to.

There were nymphs among the flowers.

Ashleigh would sit in the grass after particularly miserable days at school and tell them everything.

About the girls who whispered when she passed.

About the cruel jokes.

About being called fat and ugly.

About pretending she didn't care when she cared so much that sometimes it physically hurt.

The nymphs never laughed at her.

They never told her she needed to change.

They simply sat on flower petals and listened.

In high school, Ashleigh wandered deeper into the woods.

That was where she'd found the centaurs.

She remembered sitting beneath the trees and telling them about boys who didn't know she existed, teachers who acted like she wasn't sitting in their classrooms, and friends who only seemed to want her around when they needed something.

The centaurs listened too.

They didn't ignore her.

They didn't treat her as though she wasn't intelligent enough to understand the world around her.

In those woods, Ashleigh had belonged.

She hadn't needed to become someone else.

She could simply be Ashleigh.

Then she'd grown up.

Or at least she'd gotten older.

Growing up implied she'd figured something out along the way.

Ashleigh wasn't convinced she had.

She glanced toward the woods again.

Nothing moved.

No shimmering wings.

No tiny faces peeking from behind leaves.

No distant movement of something much larger between the trees.

Only woods.

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans and headed toward the house.

Maybe that was all they'd ever been.

Stories created by a lonely little girl who needed friends badly enough to invent them.

There was one problem with that explanation.

The ordinary animals had always behaved strangely around her too.

Dogs obeyed commands without training.

Birds landed when she snapped her fingers.

Cattle followed her around the pasture.

Animals she'd never met approached her without fear.

People noticed that.

They simply couldn't explain it.

Neither could Ashleigh.

She reached the porch and sat on the steps.

A golden-haired dog immediately dropped beside her feet. One of the cats jumped onto the step and rubbed against her hip.

Ashleigh ran her fingers through the dog's fur.

"You don't think I'm weird, do you?"

The dog rolled onto its back.

Ashleigh laughed.

"Your standards are incredibly low."

She rubbed its belly anyway.

For a few minutes, sitting there surrounded by animals, she almost felt like the girl she'd once been.

Almost.

Then she looked at the house.

The feeling disappeared.

Her parents should have been inside.

Her mother's car was still parked exactly where she always left it.

Her father's vehicle hadn't moved either.

Their clothes were inside.

Their phones were inside.

Their belongings were inside.

But her parents weren't.

They had simply vanished.

Ashleigh hadn't even known they were missing until Ms. Romney, the neighbor down the road, tracked her down at college.

She could still hear the woman's voice.

Ashleigh, honey, I don't want to worry you, but I haven't seen your parents in a while.

A while had turned out to mean weeks.

Ashleigh had packed the few belongings she cared about and returned to Birch Lake almost immediately.

Leaving college hadn't exactly broken her heart.

Her parents had been far more interested in the idea of college than Ashleigh had ever been. They'd been tired of her books, daydreaming, animals, and general inability to become the daughter they'd apparently imagined having.

So they'd sent her away.

Ashleigh hated nearly everything about it.

The campus.

The classes.

The people.

She'd made decent grades because poor ones meant lectures from her parents, and she'd learned years ago that sometimes doing what was expected was easier than explaining why she didn't want to.

She'd stayed.

Until there was no one left to lecture her.

That thought should have hurt more than it did.

Ashleigh hated herself a little for that.

She loved her parents.

At least, she thought she did.

But loving someone didn't erase everything that happened between you.

They'd spent years making it clear that Ashleigh was different from the daughter they wanted.

Too dreamy.

Too strange.

Too interested in animals and fantasy.

Not interested enough in the things other girls liked.

She had never managed to make them proud.

Eventually, she'd stopped trying.

That didn't mean she wanted them gone.

She wanted answers.

She wanted to know where they were.

She wanted to understand how two people could disappear from their own home without taking their cars, phones, wallets, or apparently anything else.

The police wanted those answers too.

So far, no one had found them.

Ashleigh stood.

"Come on."

The dogs immediately followed.

She went inside.

The farmhouse hadn't changed much while she'd been away. It still smelled faintly of wood, old furniture, and whatever candle her mother had last burned in the living room.

Sometimes that bothered Ashleigh more than an empty house should.

Everything looked as if her parents might walk through the door at any moment.

A mug remained beside the coffee maker.

Her father's jacket hung near the back door.

Family photographs lined the hallway.

Life had stopped without bothering to clean up after itself.

Ashleigh climbed the stairs.

She had been back for several weeks now, and her old bedroom was once again hers.

Not that it had ever stopped being hers.

Her twin bed still occupied the same wall. The white nightstand she'd had since childhood stood beside it. Her desk remained in front of the bay window overlooking the property.

Her parents had barely touched the room after sending her to college.

At one time, Ashleigh would have considered that proof they expected her home.

Now she wondered whether they simply hadn't known what else to do with it.

She walked to the window.

From there, she could see part of the pasture and the beginning of the woods.

Those woods had called to her almost every day since she returned.

She'd walked portions of the old trails, searching without admitting to herself what she was searching for.

Nothing.

No faeries.

No nymphs.

No centaurs.

No impossible creatures hiding among the trees.

She didn't hear the tinkling laughter she'd associated with faeries as a child.

She didn't hear the heavy rhythm of hooves moving through places horses couldn't possibly have reached.

There were only ordinary sounds.

Birdsong.

Dogs barking.

Cattle calling from the pasture.

Leaves rustling in the breeze.

Ashleigh rested her forehead against the cool glass.

"Where did everybody go?"

She wasn't sure whether she meant her parents or her childhood friends.

Maybe both.

A flutter of wings sounded outside.

Ashleigh lifted her head.

The little brown bird from the road landed on the narrow ledge outside her window.

She stared at it.

The bird stared back.

"You seriously followed me all the way here."

It chirped.

Ashleigh smiled despite herself.

"Fine. You can stay."

The bird chirped again and flew toward the trees.

Ashleigh watched it go.

For the briefest moment, something glimmered between two trunks at the edge of the woods.

She straightened.

A tiny flash of light.

There.

Then gone.

Ashleigh pressed closer to the window.

Nothing.

Her heart beat a little faster.

"Come on, Ashleigh."

She stepped away.

She was tired.

Stressed.

Her parents were missing, she'd abandoned college, she'd moved back into the house where she'd grown up, and she was apparently operating an unofficial animal sanctuary without meaning to.

Seeing things wasn't entirely outside the realm of possibility.

She turned away from the window.

Behind her, the woods remained still.

Ashleigh didn't see the faint golden light appear again.

She didn't see it drift between the trees.

And she didn't see the tiny figure watching from beneath the leaves before disappearing deeper into the forest.