Lies Like Poison

by Chelsea Pitcher

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” she said, her arms wrapping around his neck. She’d sworn she would be calm the first time she saw him. But sadness and elation were ricocheting inside her, sending shock waves through her body. Three years. How had she survived? Wearing his clothes had not been enough. Sitting in his bedroom had only served to widen the chasm inside her, but now he was here.

  The person she loved more than anyone in the world was standing in front of her, and he was just like she remembered. He was, and he wasn’t. He’d grown several inches over the past three years, and his hair was longer, stopping just above his ears. Those ears were pointed at the top, the tiniest bit. When Raven was a little boy, his mother had called him her elven prince, and she’d chased him around the kitchen with a wooden spoon, pretending it was a wand.

  Queen Arianna and Prince Raven. Back then Jack had thought they would always be around. But Raven’s mother had died in the snow, three drops of blood trailing away from her. Raven had disappeared over a year later, and Jack had feared he’d never come home.

  She pulled back to stare at his long dark lashes. She wanted to touch his lips. She’d done it before, once, and she wondered if they were as soft as she remembered, or if memory had made a fantasy out of him.

  “You’re home,” she whispered, willing herself not to grasp at him. Raven was her best friend. For years they’d lived as brothers, racing through the orchard, or dueling in the rose garden. She wanted to hug him. She did not want to push him onto the bed, rip off his shirt, and lick him from his throat to his stomach.

  She didn’t. And so she tore herself away from the boy with warm brown eyes, walking over to the window and looking down. The garden used to be filled with crimson roses. But after Raven and Lily went away, Evelyn Holloway had torn up the red blossoms and replaced them with white. “White roses are purer,” she’d sworn.

  Jack cringed at the sight of them. She missed the wild crimson roses that Raven’s mother had nestled in her son’s curls. He’d never been so beautiful as the evenings when he’d stood against the jewel-blue sky with red petals falling around him. The first time Jack had seen him that way, she’d wanted to kneel at his feet.

  She wanted to kneel now.

  Instead, she turned to look at him, with his plush lips and dark eyes, his careful hands toying with the hem of his shirt. Of course he’d be wearing black satin pajamas with velvet cuffs, because Raven Holloway had grown up in the lap of luxury. For all the good it had done him.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Jack said softly. “Are you okay? Was boarding school terrible?” Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you write? No, she thought, as he stepped toward her.

  Why did you only write to Belle?

  “The academy was okay. I liked my professors for the most part. Some of the guys were all right. Others, not so much.” He was looking at his hands. He only looked at his hands when he was keeping secrets. She remembered that about him, even now. “We need to prove Belle’s innocence, and then we can catch up on everything else. I know she didn’t do this. Belle pretends to be vicious, but underneath—”

  “I know you’ve been talking to her,” Jack blurted. “Lily told me, and I don’t understand…”

  “Of course I’ve been talking to her.” Raven stepped up close, and Jack’s breath caught in her throat. She was pressed against the window. He was almost pressed against her. “I’ve been talking to you both. You’re the one who never answered my letters.”

  “Your… what?” Only Raven could pull the breath from her lungs. Only Raven could make her tremble without a single touch.

  “I wasn’t allowed to make calls at the academy. I wasn’t allowed to email without being monitored, and I didn’t want to say anything too personal with someone reading over my shoulder. But I could write letters. I wrote to you for weeks, and when you didn’t respond, I thought—”

  “I didn’t get your letters,” Jack stammered, her thoughts racing. Had her mother hidden them? It seemed impossible. Her mother was rarely home. “I thought you had forgotten me, or you’d gone running back to Belle and never bothered to tell me.”

  “I couldn’t go back to her. I can never go back to her.”

  “But you loved her so much. You two were obsessed with each other.”

  “Obsession isn’t healthy, Jack. And in the months before I left town, Belle started to rant about my stepmother. She said she was going to come up with a plan, and then our problem would disappear.”

  “Did she give you any details?” Jack swallowed. “Did she say—”

  “I don’t think she was actually going to do anything. I think she was just trying to make me feel better, but it scared me to hear her talk like that. It made me think I didn’t know her. We were so young when we fell for each other. We thought we were going to be together forever, but how can you be with someone when you don’t really know them? How can you love them when they haven’t become who they’re going to be? People grow apart. My parents did, even before…”

  Jack sucked in a breath. His father’s file was in her backpack. She could take it out and show him what she’d discovered. But clearly, Raven knew that his parents had been having problems, and if Jack was honest with herself, she’d known it too.

  “Do you remember how we met?” she asked, glancing out the window. “I snuck into your orchard to steal apples for me and Flynn. My backpack was overflowing by the time I realized there was a boy hiding in the branches.”

  It had been after twilight. The trees looked black against the cerulean sky. Jack had made a point to stick to the edge of the orchard, far from the great stone house that rose up like a castle. Her stomach had growled as she plucked her first apple from the ground. She’d wanted to sit there and feast for hours.

  Instead, she unzipped her backpack, the same one she wore now, and began sliding apples inside. When the voice rang out, it came from above her. She thought, for a moment, that she’d been caught by God. How terrible must her luck have been, to sneak into an orchard one time, only to be caught by the Almighty himself. That sort of thing would only happen to Jack.

  She looked up, prepared to return the apples to the leaf-strewn ground. Or maybe she could bake them into a pie and give them to a homeless shelter. That would be all right, wouldn’t it?

  Even God would be okay with that.

  But God wasn’t sitting there, sprawled out like Huckleberry Finn with apple juice sliding down his arm. It was a boy. He looked close to Jack in age, no older than eight, and back then, his hair had been shorn close to his head. His lashes were long and thick. They fanned out over dark, curious eyes, as he peered down at her.

  “Hello,” he said, half-shy and half-shocked. Clearly, he had not expected anyone to find him out there.

  “Hi. Are you stealing too?” she asked, because he was dressed in tatters, just like she was. She didn’t know that he had clothes for climbing and clothes for going to school. Clothes for dinner. Clothes for church.

  “Not stealing. Hiding,” the boy said, glancing toward the house in the distance. It was a mass of gray, jagged stones, with a tower rising from the top. Smoke curled from its chimney, making the orchard smell of campfires in addition to apples.

  It was autumn, Jack’s favorite time of year. For the next few weeks, the ground would be littered with ripe, juicy apples, too bruised for most people to bother with. But for Jack and her five-year-old brother, Flynn, it would mean going to bed with full bellies for the first time in months. Dreaming of pies and turnovers and strudel.

  “You’re hiding? From what?” Jack furrowed her brow, searching for trespassers in the orchard. She saw no one, but she could hear the faint sound of voices coming from Holloway Manor.

  Shouting.

  “My house is under a spell,” Raven whispered, leaning down. “A witch cast it a hundred years ago, and it makes my parents forget they love each other. They shout and I hide in my room, but I can still hear them through the heating vent. Their
room is right next to mine, and they get so loud.…”

  “So you ran away.”

  He nodded, solemn. Solemnity was Raven’s natural state of being. But if you could make him smile, it was like finding the moon on the coldest, darkest night. Fierce and beautiful and bright. Jack learned that after she rounded the tree and lifted a fallen branch from the ground. “Let’s break the spell.”

  Raven looked down at her, his eyes narrowed in confusion. “How?”

  “We’ll have to find the witch. But we’ll need a magical sword if we’re going to defeat her, and a map to her lair.…”

  Raven’s lips swept into a grin. Carefully, he slid out of the tree, eager to begin their quest. “How do you know what to do? Have you battled a witch before?”

  “Not a witch. A giant,” Jack said, leading him through the shadowed orchard. One year earlier, her mother had brought home a quick-tempered man who liked to throw dishes at the wall to emphasize his points. Whenever he’d come around, Jack had led her little brother on a quest. As long as they were searching for the next clue, or uncovering the next artifact, they never had to think about what was going on in that house. If they laughed loudly enough, they could block out the screaming. If they went far enough away, they wouldn’t hear the shattering of glass.

  Raven surveyed the orchard floor, choosing a branch of his own. “I’ll fight with you,” he said, but he sounded unsure. He’d come out here to escape fighting. Screaming. Sharp words that couldn’t be taken back.

  “You’re the prince.” Jack plucked the branch from his hands, tossing it behind her. “I’m the knight, and I fight to defend your honor.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Um. Mostly you hide from the witch. And get caught by the witch. And then I have to free you.” She brandished her sword, left to right. Right to left. “But I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”

  And she hadn’t. Not then, and not for the next three years. From ages eight to eleven, Jack and Raven had lived like wild things, climbing trees in the orchard and battling foes in the garden. They’d feasted on apples and crowned each other with roses. He was her prince and she was his knight.

  Then, in sixth grade, Belladonna Drake had appeared. She came out of nowhere. According to rumors in Rose Hollow, Belle had been tossed about in the foster-care system for years. It wasn’t until she was eleven that she found a stable home. Edwin Drake had taken her into his elegant Tudor mansion, and he’d built her a library full of books. He’d planted a garden for her in the yard. He’d given her everything she could possibly want, except friends, and several months after enrolling in Rose Hollow Middle School, Belle finally chose her first friend.

  Raven. The boy with bright eyes and the softest smile. She’d found some boys harassing him under the bleachers of the football field, and she’d threatened to poison them with the flowers from her garden. Just like that, Raven knew they’d found their witch, and he introduced Belle to Jack.

  After that, the three of them became inseparable.

  “Belle snuck over here the day Evelyn died,” Jack said presently, her body curving into Raven’s window. “The police think she was casing the joint, but there’s no way she’d go in through the front door if she was planning to poison someone. Did she know you were coming home? Did you write to her?”

  “I called her, Jack. After I was cleared to go home, they allowed me to use the phone, so I rang up Belle. I told her exactly when I was coming home, and she offered to make sure Evelyn hadn’t hidden anything in my room. Anything that could scare me or—”

  “Hurt you.” Jack’s head snapped up. “Did she find anything?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to her. The police were here for hours, and the detention center has strict rules about when you can call people.” He winced. “I told her not to sneak into my room. I told her she didn’t need to worry about me anymore, that I was sorry for making her think I was her responsibility.”

  “Raven, no. You weren’t… she loved you. We all loved you, and we couldn’t stand to see anyone hurting you. Especially after what happened to your mom.” Jack hadn’t found him that day, lying in the snow. She hadn’t seen him clinging to his mother, refusing to let her go. But she’d seen him grow hollow cheeked and pale after Evelyn had moved into his house, incapable of keeping his eyes open during the day and terrified of closing them at night. “We thought you were going to die.”

  “I let you think that. I gave up, because a part of me wanted to believe my mom was calling to me at night, asking me to join her. If she was here, that meant she wasn’t gone. And I know it’s messed up. I know I put you through hell, both of you, thinking you were going to lose me, but…” He bit his lip, looking down at the black-carpeted floor. “I wanted to see her again so badly. I wanted to tell her that I loved her. And that I was sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “The day my mom died, I was supposed to meet her at the pharmacy after violin practice. Five o’clock on the dot. But I took the long way around, because it was snowing for the first time all year, and I wanted to walk through the gardens in the center of town. If I’d gotten to the pharmacy when I was supposed to, I would’ve been there when that man showed up.” Raven looked at Jack. “I would’ve been able to get the gun away from him.”

  “Or you would’ve been lying lifeless in the snow, just like she was. Raven.” Jack took his face in her hands. “What happened to your mom wasn’t your fault. It’s the fault of that masked man.”

  “A man the police never caught. I described his build to them, because I saw him running out of the pharmacy. I described his voice, because he told me he was sorry. But they hardly even tried to find him. I guess some victims are more important than others,” he muttered, tracing his pale brown fingers along the sill. “That man is still out there because the police don’t care about her, Jack. They don’t care.”

  “Come here.” She wrapped her arm around him, guiding him away from the window. “When was the last time you slept?”

  “I don’t know. Before I heard about my stepmom? Before I saw my dad’s face, and I tried to get him to look at me, and he wouldn’t? He’s gone, Jack.”

  “Worry about yourself right now, okay? You never do that.”

  “You’re one to talk,” he said, but he let her peel back his blankets and guide him into bed. Let her tuck him in. “Aren’t you staying with me?” he whispered, and that boy was back again. The one with the timid voice and bright eyes.

  Jack crawled onto the bed, staying outside the covers but curving her body around his. They’d never done this before. They’d never been able to lie in his bedroom, alone, because Belle had always been there. Watching. Now Belle was locked in a detention center on the edge of town. They didn’t have to worry about her walking in on them. Still, Jack felt a chill at the thought of what would happen once they’d proven her innocence. If Belle was exonerated, she could climb through Raven’s window whenever she wanted. Find them. Learn the secret they’d been keeping for all these years.

  “Raven,” Jack whispered, leaning over him. She trailed her fingers across his cheek. “Do you remember what you said the night before you left for boarding school? About what would happen if Belle ever found out what we—”

  “Yes,” Raven murmured, his voice heavy with sleep. He was already drifting. When she wrapped her arm around him, pressing her hand to his heart, he sighed softly, curling into her. “I said she’d kill us.”

  8

  Heartless

  Belladonna Drake was going to sleep with her boyfriend. This was what she decided, the night before he left town. She put on a lacy black slip and thigh-high boots, then pulled a black trench over it to complete the look.

  Sweet Raven didn’t stand a chance.

  Still, she checked her reflection in the mirror. Dark waves fell around her shoulders, and her black eyeliner was smudged just enough. Tonight, the witch was going to seduce the prince, which was not in any fairy tale she’d ev
er read, but so what?

  She’d rather write her own story.

  And so, she snuck out of her house for the hundredth time, after her adoptive father had gone to bed. She stopped by her garden and plucked a couple of belladonna blossoms, weaving them into her hair. She was poisonous and poised to strike. She was power, and though she hadn’t been able to save Raven from his wicked stepmother, she could give him something to live for.

  Love gave meaning to life. Belle was certain of this as she hurried down the block, turning left toward the nicest house in town. Belle’s house was fairly nice. Her father was a philanthropist, drowning in old money, but even he couldn’t compete with the grandeur of Holloway Manor.

  That elegant, haunted house.

  It hadn’t always been haunted. Less than two years earlier, Arianna Holloway had lived within those stone walls and tended to the roses in the garden. She’d been more alive than anyone Belle had ever met. More like a mother, too, than anyone else in Belle’s life. When Belle had first met Raven, she’d told herself stories about moving into that house and living as Arianna’s child.

  Now that had been a beautiful fiction.

  Still, she’d bonded with Arianna during school functions, and she’d snuck over to the orchard in the middle of the night more times than she could count. She’d come as close as she could to becoming a part of Raven’s family, and someday, when they were older, she and Raven would get married in that orchard.

  And Arianna would smile down at them from the heavens.

  Belle sighed as she slipped through the back gate of the Holloway estate. Maybe that night, she and Raven could sneak out to the orchard with a blanket, and they could lie down beneath the great, dark sky. The moonlight would reflect in his eyes, and she would trail her fingers over his chest, finding his heart. She’d never slept with anyone before, but she thought it should start that way. With a heartbeat pulsing softly against her skin.

  They could never lose sight of their love for each other. No matter how far away he went, the memory of her touch would stay with him, just as she’d always remember the feeling of his heart in her hand. She knew she was taking a risk. The two had only kissed before that night, and there were so many things they could’ve done before doing everything, but… she wanted to give this memory to him. She wanted to give it to herself, and if it broke her heart to be so close to him only to feel him wrenched away from her, well, she could handle it.