by Skye Allen
“I told you, I’m at Professor Hill’s. You need something?” she said. I felt my shoulders go back down from where they’d been up around my ears. She’s fine.
“And you’re not—you’re alone?”
“Well, Saori is here, and some other guy from chamber. We’re playing duets. Can I go now, Mom?”
“Just—keep your—never mind. Just be safe, okay?” But she had hung up.
I crossed back to the card table with the coffee. I hadn’t picked mine up after paying for it. The red-moustached guy pointed at me in recognition and said, “It’s worth the wait. Single drip is the way to go.” He handed me a paper cup two-thirds full of coffee. I buried my face in the bitter steam and felt my arteries expand in anticipation.
Laura was all right, for tonight. That freed my mind up to sort out what I’d just learned. Jerome wasn’t human. It pinballed in my mind, hitting all my other thoughts wide-awake. Jerome was an elf or something, and Laura is going to get killed by the same psycho who got Margaret, and I’m standing here drinking three-dollar coffee because I don’t know what to do now.
I felt a nudge on my upper arm: Nicky. Sunlight spread out through my stomach. We sat on the ground against the green-striped hurricane fence, facing the tiny plywood stage. The guy from the sound table was plugging cables into microphones, and a woman in a Mexican wrestling mask hunched over an instrument case.
“So, today,” she began. She clinked her beer bottle to my coffee cup, as if we were celebrating.
“Nicky…,” I said, and the fireflies moved under my ribs. I breathed in the smell of her hair close to my face. “I think I just met the other side.”
“What?” In a swift move she was half standing, one hand on her belt. I wondered if she was armed. I wondered how it would change things if she was.
I told her about my visit from the tall fey woman and her friends. “A selkie,” she murmured when I got to the wrestler boy and the way he emerged from the fountain. “They have a seal’s skin. Or a seal’s and a human’s, I should say. Water is their medium. I never thought I’d see a selkie on the Winter side, but since the Ice Lady started gathering forces against us in earnest, any fey can follow her.” She sounded sad.
“So it’s not just like—some types of fey are automatically bad guys?”
“There are some personalities who might be inclined to the Winter side because of what the Winter Queen can offer: just a license to be cruel without any kind of consequences, for the most part. But no. We are all the Folk, just like you’re all human. Mortals take sides over the same piece of earth, don’t they?”
“Civil war.” It seemed simple now that I thought of it in those terms. Simple and awful.
“They threatened you?” she said, adjusting her legs so they were touching mine. The roller coaster in my belly swooped.
“More like they threatened Laura. And I’m really—” My voice shook as the sight of Laura being pushed into that car came back to me. I told Nicky what the Winter Folk had shown me. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, I thought—Professor Hill was supposed to protect her. And she’s all—glamoured? What is that exactly? When’s she going to be back to normal? Or is she always going to be like this whenever I talk about—”
“Anything fey? Not always, but Hill was smart to take that precaution. Laura is not like you. You, you have something that… it’s hard to explain. Honestly, she’s fine. Think of it as a mild medicine that only treats one symptom. And protects her. Hill is of the Lady’s own guard. The baddest-ass warriors in the Realm, either side. The Winters may be bluffing, if they want us to believe they can just overpower someone like Hill.”
I have something that what? But I didn’t ask. I had more urgent questions. I said, “It wasn’t them, though—it was that man in gray, from the puppet show. The guy who got Margaret. The same guy. It had to be.”
“The Woodcutter.” Her shoulders bunched.
“Who is he? It’s not one of them, the guys back there. In the bushes. I asked, and no. There must be a way to stop him.”
“You asked. Oak and ash. Josy,” Nicky began and turned to face me. She took one of my hands in both of hers, and the roller coaster rattled and soared. “It would be better if you were not so reckless. You don’t know what they could have done to you, and I was not there….” She rubbed her face and started again: “No one knows who the Woodcutter is.”
“It still could be one of them back there.”
“You asked directly? And they said no? Then it’s not. The Folk can do a great many things, but we cannot tell a flat-out lie.” She stared into the distance then, like she was remembering something with regret.
“Okay. But he must be an enemy of yours. He works for the Winter people, right? And if this has been going on for as long as you say—”
“That’s it, the very thing. No one ever saw the Woodcutter before spring of this year. The Lady’s servants have searched the Realm for his name and his weaknesses, but so far nothing useful has turned up. If we could find him, we could stop this before it does any more damage.”
“So we don’t know who the bad guy is. Or where to find him. All we know is that he’s going to take Laura out. And that he may be able to overpower this Hill guy. Okay. Then we have to do something else to make sure she’s okay.” And me. Make sure we’re okay.
Her laugh startled me. “This Hill guy. Reed of the Hills is one of the Lady’s own guard. This Hill guy,” she repeated to herself. It made me angry, until her face fell back into somberness the next second. “But to bolster your sister’s safety—that, I should be able to arrange.”
“Anything.” I just wanted the Grant family’s lives to go back to normal. Laura didn’t deserve to be stalked. All she was trying to do was go to college. What did any of us do to deserve all this trouble? I thought about Mom, sodden with grief, sleeping or staring into space all day long. She’d never survive it if something happened to one of us too.
Neither would I. The movie started again, Laura being stabbed. Laura, and then me. I swallowed my terror, but it didn’t go away.
“If a mortal is bound to Faerie, all her kin will be treated with favor.” She said it like she was reciting something.
“What does that mean?”
“It means, sweet mortal, that if you drink from the cup the Lady offered you, for the rest of that season your own blood will be safe from harm. Your sister, and anyone else in your family. Safer than they were.”
The image flashed of that cup and the red strands twisting in it. No was what my body said. “Isn’t there some other way to—and what do you mean, safer? Not totally safe?” I asked.
“Laura would be protected from the worst of what the Fair Folk could do. If lightning hit her or the brakes failed on a bus or a disease….”
“Okay. So that would save her from you guys but not from any normal kind of danger.”
She sighed and ran a silver-ringed hand over her dark eyebrows. My hand felt cold with only one of hers holding it. “Much as I despise the thought that Winter thugs like the four you came across tonight are my kin, yes. The binding would give you more protection from us guys.”
I had no choice. I put that out of my mind for now, but the knowledge was there. Maybe when the time came, I’d be able to stomach that gory cup. Why couldn’t it be Laura who was supposed to drink it? She was so checked out most of the time, she probably wouldn’t even notice what was in it. Especially now. I wondered again what the fey food did to her exactly and why the same state hadn’t come over me. Had Margaret been swayed by it too?
That was the other thing I wanted to talk to Nicky about. “I have a question about Margaret.”
“I will answer any fair question.” She was flirting now, wide mouth turned up at one corner. I wanted to touch her pillowy bottom lip.
“She was engaged to a guy, Jerome. He was the brother of the—that guy with you tonight, in the green?”
“Timothy. Yes. Their family has always served the Lady.”
Timothy. So that’s his name. Timothy and Jerome. “How did they end up together?”
“Pretty Peg and Jerome were—well, Jerome was different from most elves. He wanted to help mortals, make the mortal world a better place. I think they had that in common.”
They did. “They were in Afghanistan together. Doctors Without Borders took Margaret even though she wasn’t technically in medical school yet because they needed volunteers. But Jerome was a doctor. How did he get to be a… a doctor for humans?”
“The Lady never liked it. He was always a healer, but she never exactly relished the thought of him treating mortals. Slowing down the inevitable. Stopping the pain or the bleeding when they’re just going to die anyway.” She sounded distant, angry, like she was talking about something personal that I didn’t know anything about.
“Huh?”
She loosened her fingers where they were entwined with mine to gesture with a hand. “I told you that the Folk are immortal.”
She looked at me, and I felt naked in my confusion. I did know that. I swallowed my feelings, mostly of stupidity that she was probably so much older than me and knew so much. I must seem like a clumsy infant to her. A clumsy, homely infant. She could have her pick of anyone in history to get sexy with. She probably had.
She went on, “The times we need a doctor, the way we tend to get illnesses or injuries, it’s different from what mortals need. Jerome was gifted, no question. And the Lady loved your sister hugely. It was just that she was afraid for them, that Pretty Peg could eventually be—”
“Dead?” Confusion and hurt made me defensive. I wanted to be home all of a sudden, or at Neil’s house, drinking hot chocolate with his little sisters. Somewhere comforting and normal, where I knew who I was.
“I was going to say hurt. We have a saying: Never give your heart to the fey. It can go badly for the mortal. Things can happen that they don’t expect.”
“You mean, like, something bad always happens in fairy tales?”
“Exactly like that. Imagine if you fell in love with one of the fey, and you grew old, but they never did. That’s the best-case scenario. Then there’s the racist snobs who think mortals will contaminate the gene pool. There have been battles—oh, it’s all too much. None of it’s good. It was not going to last, Peg and Jerome. It couldn’t. And he couldn’t face the Lady, after. He’s been gone from the Court since… ever since.”
“Since Margaret died.” It’s not going to last, Josy and Nicky. Goddammit. Why do I even like her?
“Yeah.”
Maybe we’re an exception. Or maybe she’s just saying we can’t go out. Because she doesn’t actually like me? I picked up an acorn-sized chunk of gravel and closed my fist around it to feel the dart of pain in my palm. Right there. That’s what the real world feels like.
Nicky reached across my body to take my hand. She pried my fingers open and took the rock away. “A lot of people loved her. You’re not alone, you know.” Her face was close to mine. I let myself sink into the thought that had been dancing at the back of my mind since she invited me here: were we going to kiss again?
The band had all cleared off in the direction of the drinks. Only the keyboard player stayed, white trousers gleaming in the almost total darkness at the edge of the stage. She poked her fedora further back on her forehead and plinked out a creepy minor-key song that I recognized after a few seconds as a demented version of “Hush Little Baby.”
“Hey, c’mere,” Nicky said, and took hold of a button on my jacket. Her face was close, so close I could feel heat from her skin on mine. I felt dizzy.
She turned her head suddenly. “Hey!”
Timothy was toeing her stretched-out thigh with a polished boot. “Hey, chica.” Nope. No kissing. I sat back and tried to think cold thoughts to calm down my pulse.
Timothy sat heavily and kicked a groove in the gravel. Little-boy motions. I could tell he was drunk even before he tugged the flask out of his jeans pocket and tipped it toward his mouth. He wheeled his head to each of us in turn. “Oop, manners. You want some?”
“I’m all set.” I toasted the air with my coffee.
“Josephine Grant. The new favorite.” His eyes protruded like frog’s eyes under his overgrown curly hair, but I could see how he was used to people saying he was beautiful.
Nicky paused with an unlit cigarette in her mouth, match flaring near her face, and glared at Timothy. “What?” he protested. “S’true.”
She hissed something to him in an undertone. The band was back on the stage, the drummer slashing out a faint tsk-tsk-tsk on one cymbal while the guitar player blew into his microphone, so I couldn’t hear Nicky at all.
His head reared back like a horse’s. “No she won’t!” burst out of him in a harsh voice. He turned to me and pointed with a bony hand. “So how do you like fucking an immortal elf with all the sense of a pile of dung?”
I rolled out of his reach. “Hey, take it easy,” I said.
“You know she just brought you in for the reward, right?” He pronounced it RE-ward, like a cowboy, and shot a finger-gun from his imaginary hat brim. “Dominica loves her some pretty girls with meat on their bones. It’s just too bad about that, what you call her, ‘friend’ she got back home.”
“It’s not—don’t listen!” Nicky shouted to me, and she launched herself at Timothy.
Friend as in girlfriend. Sick realization broke over me like a raw egg. It was too good to be true. She fooled you. She fooled you because that’s what you are: a big fat fool. Like someone like her would give the time of day to someone like you.
Too fast, there was a furious animal-fight blur of elbows and boots and a sickening thwack when something fleshy hit something solid. It must have been Nicky hitting Timothy, and it was over in seconds. Timothy held her off easily, crouching over her with her shoulder pinned to the fence. Her heels scrabbled in the gravel. He cradled his jaw with his free hand and muttered curses I couldn’t make out.
She lied. All that sweet talk, and I just believed her. Stupid. She was so cocky, and I just fell for it. Because why wouldn’t a loser like me fall for an act like that? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I stood up. My legs felt dead after all that time sitting on the cold ground, but I could walk. I didn’t care how wobbly I looked.
“Josy! Don’t leave! You can’t listen to him!” Nicky called.
I ignored her. I should have known her whole thing, the whole setup of a hot girl being interested in a girl like me, was too good to be true. Why did I have to fall for that? I shoved my thoughts about Laura out of my mind, and Margaret and the fey and the whole blur of the last day. I was humiliated, tired, bruised inside and out. I needed to be home.
Nicky called my name again. I shook my head. I tugged my hood over my hair and retreated toward the entrance without looking back as the band slid into a brassy version of “Mighty Quinn.” Never give your heart to the fey. Oh, believe me, I’m not.
Chapter 5
I WAS so angry that when I stomped past the card table, I collided with the bouncer who’d let me in. “Hey, sister, don’t go,” she said, but I pushed through the crowd and didn’t stop when I knocked over the folding chair at the entrance.
I fumbled with the lock on the front door when I got to the house, lit only by the streetlights. The car was in the driveway, which meant Laura was home. There’s a protection on the house, I told myself, but I was still scared.
Laura had probably gone to bed without remembering I wasn’t home yet. I palmed the wall until I found the switch, and my eyes went to the faded orange couch out of reflex. It was empty of Mom. She’d always lain there under that plaid blanket with her bottomless mug of muddy tea when she wasn’t in bed. This was the first time I could remember ever coming home at night and not seeing her there. I wondered where she was right now: lying on a hotel bed in Delhi?
I heel-toed to Laura’s bedroom door and lay my throbbing head against the thin wood until I was sure I heard her faint snoring.
Do you dream about the fey when you’ve been glamoured? “Be careful,” I whispered to my sister’s door.
I turned toward the kitchen and made it all the way to the stove before the crying started. I filled the teakettle and stood over the gas burner, listening to it click through my fast breathing, thinking the whole time you should have known. I felt for the cocoa tin, and when I pried it open, chocolate dust flew up and made me sneeze. I’m a mess. Thank God nobody’s up.
I carried my Snoopy mug into my room, where I huddled in my pillow nest against the headboard to text Neil: gossip. you up? Ever since his sister Ariela was born three years ago, I’d been careful about calling too late. Mrs. Hernandez always told me not to worry about it, all three of her kids slept like boulders, but I didn’t want to do anything that could mess up my open invitation and make her angry. Maybe my extreme caution had something to do with being the child of a drunk and a prescription drug addict, but I liked to think I was being polite.
He didn’t text back right away. I inhaled sugary steam with both hands around the hot mug and tried to squash the self-pity. I was impersonating a normal seventeen-year-old girl, calling my friends about my disaster of a date and pouring chocolate over my stupid bruised heart. Except the date was a girl, and the girl wasn’t human. Could I even talk to Neil about that? Cynical, worldly, lost-his-virginity-at-thirteen Neil? Maybe I’d just tell him Nicky was a liar. A lying girl who used me. That much was definitely true.
Margaret had given her heart to a fey boy, and it killed her. I trapped the thought that had been buzzing in circles around my head all night: it’s usually the boyfriend. The boyfriend or the husband. When a woman is murdered, that’s who it turns out to be. That’s what they told us in that domestic violence assembly at school, and on CSI, and in the news. It was always the lover.
And the Woodcutter—was it Jerome?—he’d cut out her heart. I traced the skin of my heart with a nail where the bone caged it. I wanted to know exactly how Margaret died, if it was strangulation like Dad claimed, or if—horrifying—the heart was first, before the throat. Were there long minutes of bleeding while she was still conscious? What did she see, before her eyes stopped seeing? I wondered if the sky above that supposedly safe street in Kabul was orange with city lights or black with leaves or if rain fell on her face for the last time.