It's tragic—he's beautiful there in my small copse of trees wearing spring greens and golds…petting my treacherous dog. His hair is longer than I remember and falls in a wild curtain about his face and shoulders. Here and there I can spot a braid, a bead. The pointed tips of his ears are visible as well, the one nearest me sports a cuff. He is so much more than I remember—a Celtic god in the flesh.
"Finally, she is speechless," his eyes glance up to meet mine as Faust jogs back off into the woods, leaving me alone, the useless mutt.
I want to die. Or run, but dying seems like the more dignified alternative.
A thousand things. I could say a thousand things but nothing will surface, nothing can break through the terror and excitement lacing my blood. If he were a vampire, I'd be done for. But, I have to say something. Standing here gawking at him for all eternity is simply not an option.
"I wasn't expecting you," I say. It's true, but not witty, not charming. I've waited so long to see those kohl rimmed eyes once more, lived in expectation of the day he'd come out of the shadows to challenge me again.
"Obviously," his grin is sharp, his eyes full of laughter as he pushes off the tree he's been leaning on. "Do you ever? I never tire of surprising you."
"You set those damned little biting fairies loose in my garden didn't you?" I feel my courage rise the closer he comes to me.
"All fairies bite, my girl, not just the little ones, or don't you know that?" His grin grows wider as if to drive home his point while he answers my question with another. My stomach does a somersault as I fight the urge to back away from him.
"Is that a threat?" I feel the fifteen-year-old Sarah rise. If she was audacious enough to stand up to him why can't I?
"Do I have a habit of making threats, Sarah?" He's close enough now that I could reach out and touch him if I dared. "Or, haven't I always been willing to give you a warning? Not, that you've ever heeded any of them." He shifts his trajectory and circles behind me like a wolf in the woods. Jareth may deny handing out threats, but his very prescence is a peril.
"Go to the girl, figure out what she's not telling you, before it's too late," his breath whispers against the back of my neck, sending a shiver up my spine that I hope he can't see. He smells like the oncoming night.
The instinct to turn and face him is too strong, but when I spin around, he's gone, just a hint of laughter caught away in the breeze.
The short walk back to the cottage is not a pleasant one. The Goblin King has stolen my peace, my aplomb, and worse, my dog. I searched for Faust high and low only to come to the conclusion that the dog made a deal with the devil.
It takes a few deep breathes before I can enter the house with any sense of composure. The girls are talking among themselves in the living room as music plays softly in the background.
Their conversation drops the moment I enter the room. My face is an open book, it always has been.
"What's wrong," Emma asks, her dark eyes widening with worry.
I don't answer right away. Instead, I take a seat by the dormant fireplace and motion for someone to give me a cup of whatever it is they are drinking.
Rachel places a glass of chocolate milk in my hand and scurrys back to her usual chair.
It isn't likely that the milk with be fortifying enough, but I'll take what I can get. Chocolate does, on occasion, do wonders with chasing away those things that scare us.
"Where's Faust?" Rachel whispers.
"Gone," I reply and sit the glass down on the table.
"What do you mean?" Emma asks from her place on the sofa next to Asher. Faust is everyone's best friend in this house. He checks on us all before finding his bed at night. He wakes us up in the morning with his doggy excitement. Life as we know it has been altered for the worst.
"I had a visitor while out on my walk. He came with a warning and left with our dog," my eyes find Asher's. "Do any of you have any idea why?"
Emma and Rachel wear mirrored frowns.
"Who met you in the woods?" Asher's voice has lost its youthful bravado. There is fear in her ice blue eyes. Good.
"Is there someone who comes to mind?" I ask her. "Who should I be worried about?"
Relief floods her face as she realizes my guest was not whoever she fears it could've been.
"Who was it, Sarah?" Emma is sitting on the edge of her seat. "Did they hurt Faust? Will he be ok? Will they bring him back?"
It had never occurred to me to worry about Faust's safety.
"Jareth won't hurt Faust," I say knowing that it's true. "He's a rat, but his type of cruelty tends to be nuanced. Dog torture is beneath him."
"Your Goblin King was in the wood?" Rachel's voice is so quiet I can hardly hear her.
"He's not mine!" I protest automatically. "But, yes. He gleefully claims that trouble is on our horizon."
I turn to face Asher. "Now, I'm all about letting people work through their own supernatural issues at their own sweet pace—gods know I'm still hammering away at mine—but if there's a threat, we need to know just what it is. These kind of problems aren't solved by themselves, they aren't fixed by one person alone. We have to face them together. That's the only way. And, I know that it's that kind of problem because I've not spoken to my old friend in thirteen years. Something has caught his attention."
Asher won't meet my eyes. She's staring into her glass of milk as she starts to speak. "I made a mistake," she says. "He was handsome and charming."
This was not going to be good.
"I didn't know that he was the master of the wild hunt! Honest, I just thought he was a cute guy. A cute guy who wanted to talk to me," Asher finally looks in my direction, her eyes pleading for understanding. Oh, I understand but this news is worse than I could've imagined. No wonder Jareth looked so damn joyful.
"Are you saying that Gwyn ap Nudd struck you as nothing more than another teenage dude with the hots for you?" I ask with a mouth gone dry. This was going to be a very big problem indeed. Just what I needed—a Welsh warrior king of the fey knocking at my door looking for his lost love interest.
I'm not the most comforting of people. It's a problem when you run a house for girls with supernatural problems. "The same Gwyn who hunts down human souls and drags them to the welsh underworld? The current king of the Autumn court?"
This was going to be harder than keeping Jack Frost away from Rachel or checking to making sure that Emma never left the house without holy water and a crucifix. And, now I didn't even have our emotional support dog to turn to for advice. It was going to be a long night.
Thanks for reading! And, dealing with my messing author's notes. I try to proofread the actual story...but I'm a little sloppy in the notes. Also, I like to play with mythology and folktales, I like to mix things up, I don't do a whole lot of research, I just run with ideas, so if you are a mythology master, please forgive me.