by Laura Ruby
But he breathed softly against her thigh, his long eyelashes tickling her skin, the warm soapy tang of him wafting up like steam from a cup of herbal tea. She let her hands drop. He gave a little sigh as her palms slid down the curve of his back, as she outlined the broad wings of his shoulders, as she traced his spine from his neck to the dimples peeking out from the band of his jeans.
His arms loosened, and he looked up at her, a lock of dark hair falling over his brow.
“I saw him,” he said.
Again, she was surprised. “Saw who?”
“The man who took Roza.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing.
“Last night. After I saw you and your mom. He was at Charlie Valentine’s house, sneaking around the yard,” Finn continued. “I chased him, but he got in a black car and disappeared.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“But,” she said, “if he has Roza, why would he come back here?”
“I don’t know!”
“Are you sure that it was—”
“I’m positive. He moved just the same way. I told Jonas Apple and he didn’t . . . and then I tried to tell Sean, but . . .” Dark eyes, wounded eyes, searched her face. “I saw him, Petey. I swear I did.”
“Okay, okay. Maybe you should go to a sketch artist or something?”
“A sketch artist can’t draw the way he moves!” Finn burst out. “That’s how I knew it was him. The way he moves. Not because of his coat or his hair or whatever.”
“What about his face?”
He clutched at her, fingers digging into her hips. “He has a regular face! How do you describe a regular face?”
“Okay.”
She knew the stories told by the people of Bone Gap, how those stories had metamorphosed from Finn being too strange and too scared to help Roza when she needed it to Roza being just another girl desperate to leave a small town and Finn a boy so infatuated with her that he covered her tracks, hiding her even from his own heartsick brother.
Yet no one knew the truth about Petey herself; they had gotten her story all wrong, and from all the wrong people. A voice echoed in her mind, Sean’s voice: You should be more careful. But how can you be careful with a boy who comes riding on a magical horse?
Being careful hadn’t helped her anyway. Hadn’t protected her.
“I believe you,” she said.
His breath came short and clenched, as if he’d been running a great distance. He fell back to her lap, wrapping his arms around her even more tightly than before. She took her time with every bone, every strap of muscle and thread of sinew her fingers could find, mapping the landscape of him. The twitch of her nerves was like the beating of a billion tiny wings, as if messages passed from his breath and his hands through her skin and back again, the way bees stroke one another’s antennae, feeding one another by touch. Maybe this was what a new queen felt like before she launched herself into the air, the drones closing fast.
Her knees fell open, drawing him in. She buried her hands in his hair and bent to whisper in his ear, “What am I going to do with you?”
But she already knew the answer to that.
Roza
NO ONE IS FINE
ROZA HID THE HEAVY KNIFE UNDER A LOOSE STONE IN the floor. At night, before she interred herself in the enormous canopy bed, she hefted the knife in her palm, ran her finger along the blade until she felt the bite.
But when she slept, she dreamed of bees.
She knew she was dreaming—a dream within a dream, or rather, a dream within a nightmare—but, like everything at the castle, the sounds and smells felt real. She walked the creaking drawbridge, over the teeming, monster-filled moat, past the stone-faced falconers, under the soaring raptors, and into the woods beyond. The trees were dense, braceleted with mushrooms. Twigs snapped underfoot, birds flitted in the leaves. A red fox perched on a stump, two dusky kits peeking around the vixen’s back. All around, the scent deep and rich as the darkest chocolate.
After some time, Roza broke through the wall of trees into a grassy meadow. Three girls sat in the grass.
“What are you doing here?” Roza asked.
Karolina said, “We were waiting for you.”
“You took long enough. This place is so boring,” said Honorata, yanking a flower from the ground and tossing it.
Priscilla Willis held up her finger, where a bee rested, baskets packed with yellow pollen. “At least there are bees.”
Honorata sniffed. “Not big enough to do any damage.”
“You’re not big enough to do any damage,” said Priscilla. She released the bee and pulled a jar from her pocket. “Have some of this.”
She passed a honey jar to Honorata. Honorata twisted the lid, inhaled. “Smells like oranges.”
“I’m starving,” said Karolina. “I haven’t had lunch.”
“Honeybees have a better sense of smell than other insects,” said Priscilla, “but a worse sense of taste.”
“Too bad for them,” said Honorata, tipping back the jar. She poured so much honey into her mouth that it ran down her cheek and neck.
“Don’t drink it all!” Karolina said. She took the jar and sipped, then handed it to Priscilla. Priscilla drank.
“Look!” said Roza. Amber Hass ran through the grass chasing a blue butterfly.
Priscilla said, “Butterflies are pretty, but they’re solitary, and they don’t live long. Bees are better. They’ll do anything to protect the hive.” She held up the honey jar to Roza. “Here. You need this more than we do.”
“Says who?” Honorata said.
Roza flopped to the grass. The bees danced from blossom to blossom and then darted away. Karolina plucked a flower, tucked it behind Roza’s ear. Roza took a sip of the honey, tangy and sweet.
“So,” said Honorata, picking the flower from Roza’s hair and flinging it back over her shoulder. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?” said Roza.
“What she means is,” Priscilla said, “when are you going to do something with that knife?”
Roza woke in the dark chill of her castle prison, the taste of honey on her lips.
She practiced wielding the knife as a weapon rather than a tool. She sliced and stabbed at the air, prancing like a fencer. She dragged a chair away from the fire and flipped it around. She threw the knife into the back of the chair again and again, hiding the rips under a fur throw, the resulting cuts and abrasions on her hands under gloves.
“Look at me, Rus,” she said, holding up the gloves. “I’m a warrior now.”
Though he’d had no luck with knives either, Sean had looked like a warrior, or the closest thing she’d ever seen up close. Strange, then, that she never dreamed of Sean, but of woods and bees and honey. Strange that she would dream of Honorata of all people, because Honorata would have been furious to hear Roza call herself a warrior, even as a joke. Roza was nothing special, Roza was no better than anyone else, Roza was no one’s mama, Roza was neither pretty nor lucky, Honorata said. Honorata kept inviting Balthazar—“Bob”—back to the room no matter how badly he treated her, no matter how many other girls he dated. Sometimes Roza was locked out all night, and she was forced to camp out on the lumpy lounge couches, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska beating in her head: Four a.m., no one feels fine. Her schoolwork suffered, her professors wanted to know if anything was wrong, and Roza said no, everything was great, except her roommate was sleeping with a boy who hated girls, which only made her hate herself, and Roza even more.
And then Roza’s money started to run out. Karolina offered to hook her up with the cousin who worked in the meat plant. Honorata said that Roza should be placed on the killing floor, or maybe given a job wrapping packages of sausage. Instead, the visiting professor, the teacher who talked about willow bark and licorice, absinthe and baneberry, gave Roza a job cleaning up the greenhouse in the evenings and on weekends, told her she wo
uld be paid under the table. Honorata said the world was an unfair place, that certain girls would always get special treatment for no good reason, as if sweeping and stacking fertilizer were something glamorous.
“You’re doing a very good job, Roza,” the professor told her.
“Thank you.”
“It doesn’t bother you, working here?”
“Work doesn’t bother me,” Roza said, not sure what he was getting at.
“I meant the type of work we do here.”
“Type? I type,” she said.
The professor gazed down at her. “Getting dirty. Some of the young ladies don’t care for the dirt.”
“Things grow in dirt,” Roza said.
“They die there, too,” said the professor. “You’re not squeamish, either. I’ve seen you handling the worms and the insects. Fearless, some might say.”
Roza gathered the collar of her sweatshirt in her fist. “I don’t like the dark,” she offered.
“Hmmm,” he said. “The dark is something one gets used to.”
After she had worked for the professor for a month, he started bringing Roza little gifts. A pop. Candy. A tiny dog carved of wood. She didn’t want gifts from men, no matter how harmless the men seemed. She tried to give back the dog.
“Please keep it. My son carved it. He’s eight.”
“Oh!” she said.
“My wife tells me that I have to be as nice to people as I am to my plants. But between you and me, people aren’t nearly as interesting.” He smiled blandly and walked away. She tucked the little dog in her pocket, relieved.
On the last day of the summer session, he came to the classroom where she was changing from her work shoes to her flip-flops, zipping up her sweatshirt and gathering the rest of her things. “May I give you a ride to the train?”
Roza hesitated. He was nice, but he was still a stranger. And yet, she was so happy, so relieved to be going back to Poland, that she decided she was being stupid. He was an older man, a teacher, with a wife and a child. He wouldn’t do anything. And there was no way she was taking a ride from Bob, not even to go back to the dorm to pack.
She followed the professor to his car. It was a very fancy car, a black SUV so shiny that it seemed to be streaked with silver. She imagined how she would describe it to Babcia, the silvery black paint, the cream leather interior, the dashboard that looked like the cockpit of a spaceship. He offered her a bottle of water for the road and then turned the car out of the lot.
They had driven for about fifteen minutes when he said, “This is not the way I planned it.”
“Hmmm?” said Roza. She was looking out the window at the lights of Chicago. Sparkling, brilliant. Funny how you notice how beautiful things are just when you’re about to leave them, she thought.
“I wanted to do things differently. Take more care.”
“Um-hmm,” Roza said. Next to the car, a cabbie laid his hand on his horn, then gestured wildly to the driver in front of him. Even his gestures looked beautiful to Roza, like an exotic dance.
“I assumed we had more time,” he said, turning the car onto the highway. “I never thought you’d want to leave here and go there.”
Roza turned away from the window to look at him. “What?”
“You are the loveliest creature I’ve ever seen.”
Creature?
“What is this road?” Her tongue caught on the stiff English words. “Where we go?”
“It’s a bit out of the way, but I think you’ll like it well enough.”
“What I like?”
He didn’t answer. The cars sped by, blurs of red, blue, gold. Her hands curled into fists. He whistled as he maneuvered easily through the rush-hour traffic, as if the vehicles parted just for him. The car gained speed, and Roza had to grip the door handle to keep from sliding in her seat. Golobki, golobki, her brain yapped, as she cataloged the gifts he had given her, the cryptic compliments, the number of exits passing by.
“Stop the car, let me out,” she said, not realizing until the sentence left her mouth that she spoke in Polish.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said, also in Polish. His eyes cut to her. “I speak many tongues, but I like the taste of yours.”
Her stomach lurched, and she pressed her face against the glass. They were moving too fast now, too fast for any kind of car on any kind of highway, and she started to believe she was dreaming, or that he had slipped absinthe into her water, because there was no other way this was happening. She remembered her cell phone in her purse, but then also remembered he had put all her things in the trunk, and she hadn’t said a word, so focused on where she was going that she didn’t spend a minute thinking about where she actually was.
At last, the car slowed as they reached an exit far outside the city limits. The landscape was dark and vast and empty, with few cars and even fewer houses, and she tried to swallow the guts that had climbed their way into her throat.
He turned the car onto an endless stretch of country road, cornfields along either side. “You have nothing to be scared of.”
Weeks before, he’d said she was fearless, and now she wished so hard that it was true that some strange iron infused her bones, some steely calm clamped down upon the panicked chattering of her brain. Without waiting for the right moment—for when would a better moment come?—she scrabbled at the door latch. She shoved open the door and threw herself into the night, hoping that the cornfields would be kind even if the world was not.
The corn had hidden her for as long as it could, and then Sean and Finn had hidden her for a time, even if they hadn’t known it. But the man found her again. They were destined, he said. It had been written, he said.
She had tucked the blade in the folds of her skirt. She pushed her food around her plate, nibbled on a slice of bread. Wine gleamed red in her goblet, blood gleamed red in her eyes. But she had no talent for knife throwing. He would have to get close.
He ate his food in tiny, fastidious bites, hideous bites, napkin pressed to carved lips after each forkful. She thought of Ludo, delicate Ludo: what he’d done when she wanted to leave him, what she’d done so he would let her go.
“Do you love me yet?”
She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand.
He laid his fork across his plate. “Is something bothering you?”
She choked back a laugh. She didn’t even know if he could be wounded. “I’ve been having strange dreams. Nightmares.”
“Ah. And were you frightened?”
“Yes.”
Icy eyes seared her skin. “Still?”
“Yes.”
“The beast doesn’t comfort you?”
Rus’s growl rose from his place underneath the table. Roza’s throat went tight. She couldn’t do it, she couldn’t offer herself, she couldn’t.
But she did.
She said, “The beast isn’t enough.”
He was at her side in a fraction of a second, hands on her shoulders, lifting her from the chair, pulling her into his stony embrace. His breath was cold and musty as a mausoleum, but she endured it until he finally, finally closed his eyes, his lips an inch from her face. She pulled the knife from the folds of her brocade gown and plunged it into the white flesh under his jaw, where it sank all the way to the hilt.
Finn
SIDETRACKED
FINN JABBED THE SHOVEL INTO THE EARTH, STAMPED ON the footrest, tossed the dirt over his shoulder, jabbed, stamped, tossed, jabbed, stamped, tossed. Sean had not believed him, Jonas had not believed him, but Petey had believed him, had shown him how much. He’d fallen asleep with his nose in her hair, breathing her scent, holding on to her as if she were the only sure thing, the only real thing he’d ever known.
It had been this way for the last four nights. He could dig postholes for the rest of his life. He could dig his way through the planet and come out the other side. Maybe he could even find Roza. Maybe—
“Dude, we’re not drilling for oil,” said Migu
el.
“What? Oh, sorry.”
Roza liked Miguel. The first time Miguel had come over to the house after Roza arrived, she had broken out in a grin so wide that Finn and Sean thought she knew Miguel from somewhere. But Miguel said no, he’d never seen her before, because there was no way he could have forgotten a girl who looked like that. “Like what?” Finn wanted to know. “There’s no hope for you,” said Miguel.
They wrestled another gnawed and splintered post from the ground. They heaved a new one into place, set it in concrete. Then they sat in the yellowing grass to rest for a minute.
Miguel inspected the old post. “Looks like a bull went after this one.”
“Don’t the Rudes have a bull?”
“The Rudes are bulls. Maybe they’re the ones who have been charging the fence.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” said Finn. “Where’s Mustard?”
“Went down by the road to herd the girls again.”
Finn tented a hand over his eyes. “Amber with them?”
Miguel shrugged.
“You don’t want to talk to her?”
Miguel plucked up a handful of grass, sifted through it as if looking for something he’d dropped. “You don’t want to talk to me?”
“Huh? We talk every day.”
Miguel threw the grass, brushed off his hands. “When you think about it, building this fence is crazy. Animals will keep climbing over it, or under it, or chewing their way through it. All kinds of animals. Maybe even ones we didn’t know existed.”
“Okay,” said Finn.
“So, you’re really not going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“That you saw him. The guy who took Roza.”
Finn opened his mouth, shut it. Said, “How did you know?”
“This is Bone Gap. Everybody knows.”
“Do you believe me?”
“You’re a dumbshit.” Miguel hauled himself to his feet, brushed the dirt off the seat of his jeans. He moved to the next post and attacked the earth with his shovel. Finn remembered a day in the third grade when one of the Rude boys had accused Finn of stealing his Swamp Thing action figure, and the boys had jumped Finn during recess. Miguel charged the boys, pinwheeling his ridiculously long arms, taking out at least three Rudes before a teacher could put a stop to it. Miguel said no way Finn would steal. Finn wasn’t a stealer.