little girl getting a push from her dad. She screamed madly, but as soon as the swing made its return—from a mere two-foot lift into the air—she giggled.
Striding beyond the semiformal 4H gardens in which she’d spent her high school summers volunteering—clipping, trimming, getting the hornbeam and roses ready for fall—she leaped over the final box hedge. In her peripheral view, she sighted a man walking to her left. No kids in tow. If he had any appreciation for shadows and light, he should be taking in the glimmer of sun setting just beyond the jagged silhouette of forest. He looked a bit older than her, but beyond that she didn’t linger on his appearance.
Though she was twenty-nine, having kids was not on Kizzy’s radar. She’d not once heard her biological clock tick and wasn’t worried about that, either. A husband might add a new angle to this adventure called life but wasn’t necessary to her happiness. As long as he didn’t mind her wanderlust and constant need to move, a man would fit into her life nicely. As a partner in adventure, but never as someone she needed to take care of and expect the same from in return.
And he should never laugh at her beliefs.
Kizzy had been off the market, as her mother liked to call it, for eight months. Call it a bad relationship. Call it dying on the operating-room table and having to have her heart massaged back to life. She hadn’t been in the mood for dating. Sex? Always. But she wasn’t sure she could trust a man beyond a one-night bootie call.
Unless of course they happened to look like Jared Padalecki or Jensen Ackles.
She’d once thought a man could complete her. Probably all women had that thought at some point in their lives. But thankfully her mother, merely by example, had proven to Kizzy that the best relationships are not needy or demanding but rather a shared experience that thrives thanks to the independence of one another. And never balks at the partner’s need to explore anything meaningful.
In Kizzy’s case, what felt meaningful to her was to travel. This trip to Minnesota had been a gift from her parents. Really, though, she much preferred traveling Europe. And who knew? Maybe she’d grow richer in a few more years and could afford a trek to China or Australia.
It didn’t matter where she landed on the map. Wanderlust had officially settled into Kizzy’s soul.
“Ma’am?”
She was pulled from her musings fifty feet from the forest’s edge by the man walking toward her. He wore one of those panama hats tilted jauntily over one eye. Canvas pants tucked into high-laced combat boots, and a plain short-sleeved T-shirt stretched over remarkable pecs. Though he’d called out to her, his attention was riveted to something he held in his hand.
He looked mid-thirties. Dark hair swished to his shoulders. A beard and mustache framed his jaw and mouth. Whatever held his attention, he seemed to be using a guide for which direction to walk in. Perhaps doing a geocache, as her father loved to do. The city had a geocaching club.
He was probably harmless. Yet she wielded her camera as a shield before her chest. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.” He stopped ten feet from her and looked around, stretching his searching gaze for a long time across the playground area. Whatever he held in hand glinted with a beam of sunlight. She had probably guessed right about the geocaching. Could be tracking it with GPS on his phone.
Overhead, a dark shadow skimmed the sky, and she glanced above him. Those were some big birds.
“Ah, shit,” the man said. He tucked what he was holding into his pants pocket and turned to her. Panic brightened his blue eyes.
And Kizzy squinted to better sight the birds. They were bigger than vultures, which she rarely saw here in Minnesota. They looked...the size of dogs. Big dogs.
Seriously? “What the hell are those?”
“Harpies,” he said quickly and grabbed her by the arm. “Into the woods. We can lose them there.”
“What?” She struggled against his grasp, but he’d managed to seize her wrist and tugged her across the mown lawn toward the line of pine trees. “I’m not going with you!”
“And how will you get away from them?”
“Away from them?” She glanced up to the sky. Harpies? No way. Those were...mythical beings. And much as she believed—
One of them dove toward her.
Suddenly lifted from the ground, Kizzy was tossed over the man’s shoulder as he ran toward the woods.
She couldn’t scream. She should but did not. A curious fascination overwhelmed fear. She reached for her camera, banging against the man’s back, and tried to get a shot even as she was carried off by a stranger into the dark forest.
“What are they, really?” Kizzy asked as the man set her down but wouldn’t let go of her wrist. He tugged her into the thick brush and trees. Cockleburs brushed her ankles, and she wished she wore longer pants than the capri jeans. She put up a hand to block her face from stray branches that whipped into her face.
“Harpies,” he said. “Come on!”
Yes, that’s what she thought he’d said.
A harpie was a mythological creature. Half bird, half man or woman, or some such. She had read about them. Had even written a blog post about them, accompanied by a photo she had taken of a blurred raven high in the sky. Gray cloud streaks had remarkably thickened its body, granting her a photograph with just enough about which to speculate.
A half man, half bird? It didn’t get much cooler than that.
Yet behind her, something screeched like her worst movie nightmare. So Kizzy forced herself to follow as her mysterious rescuer tugged her farther into the woods. The camera hung around her neck. Taking pictures could wait. Right now she needed to steer her guide out of the sticky, thorned stuff.
Dodging the bramble and brush the best she could, she called, “There is a path to the left!”
“I see that. They are taking it.”
“Oh. Then go right!”
“Doesn’t that lead back toward the park?”
It did. And it would give her an opportunity to break from this guy and run for freedom. Because if it was a choice between harpies and some weirdo intent on luring her deeper into the forest, she wasn’t sure which was better. She wasn’t stupid. Nor would she allow fear to cloud her judgment. He looked safe enough, but what defined safe?
On the other hand. If they lured the creatures back toward the park, the children and their parents could be in danger. Had they seen the harpies? Had someone called the police? What could the police do but stare in wonder as she had?
The whisk of wings brushing overhead tree leaves set her heart to a thunderous pace. Her breaths gasped, not so much because she was exerting herself—picking through the brush did slow their escape—but, okay, she was a little scared. The flying creatures were bigger than dogs. And there were three of them.
Their pace had slowed. She needed to pause and get
