I needed fire, and some sort of herb to burn. I glanced around the sparse restroom. Toilet paper came from plants, but I doubted that would be very effective.
My eyes fell on a little cardboard box poking out from behind the eternal out-of-order sign on the tampon dispenser. Of course. Everyone knew someone hid a pack of cigarettes in here, but nobody knew who. I pulled it out, and eureka! A little plastic lighter to boot. I fished one of the cigarettes out of the box and, after a few flicks, got a flame going in the lighter. I took a deep breath and let the new guy’s face swim to the front of my mind.
“Show me the truth of the boy. Show me his face. Show me the truth of the boy. Show me his face,” I chanted as I lit the cigarette. The paper caught easily, turning the tobacco and chemicals inside into bright embers. The acrid stench burned my nose. I angled it away and stared into the smoke, praying that whatever laws of magic or physics governed these spells decided I was doing it right.
“Show the truth, dammit!”
For just a hair of a second, something shifted in the smoke. Something that looked like it might be a face. Was I just imagining it, or was it working?
Creeeeak!
I whirled around, the cigarette still perched between my fingers. Brooke Tanneman stood in the doorway, holding up her cell phone. Before I could drop the cigarette, I heard the click! Her eyes sparkled with wicked glee.
“Busted, freak.”
Five
I rolled my pencil across the desk in front of me, mentally counting each tick of the clock, my leg bouncing five times faster than the second hand.
At the front of the classroom, Mrs. Dinophre—who had to be around 200 years old—nibbled at a tuna sandwich that smelled almost as old as she was.
“You know, Bryn,” she said around a mouthful of tuna, “when you stay out of trouble, we both get to go home on time.”
“Or you could just let me go,” I pointed out. “This early in the year, it’s just the two of us. Nobody has to know.”
The bell finally rang, piercing the silence loudly enough to make my eardrums ache. Mrs. Dinophre clicked her lunch box closed and gestured to the door. “Go.”
I jumped out of my seat, slinging my backpack over my shoulder before taking off. Gwen would be waiting for me. I whipped out my phone, shooting off a group text to the family.
Bryn: Popping out to study group tonight. Will pick you up a little late.
Bryn: Jake’s turn to make dinner. No casserole.
The hallway was empty as a ghost town. Only the newly posted flyers for basketball tryouts and the Halloween Haunt town dance suggested anyone had been here all day. Well, those and the lewd little hot dogs Dennis Holtzmann had drawn on the corners of the flyers. Judging from the citrusy scent of cleaner, even the janitor had come and gone. I was like the lone hero in a horror film, but that didn’t mean I was alone. Now that I’d seen him, I could picture Fae around every corner. It made my skin crawl.
“Bryn?” a voice said.
“Gah!” I whirled around, my hand already closed around the nail hanging from my neck. Jasika Witters started back, hands raised.
“Easy, girl. I come in peace.”
“Dammit.” I let go of the nail and heaved a sigh. Jasika bit her lip, a warm, sunny smile spreading across her face. Everything about her radiated warmth. This close, I could see the little sunflower clips in her hair and the gentle brush of gold glitter over her eyelids. My pulse raced, but it wasn’t so unpleasant this time. Compared to a Fae, Jasika was a nice surprise.
“How is it that you aren’t scared of things that’ll actually kill you but little old me gets under your skin?”
Big talk from someone whose family had needed rescue from a pack of redcaps not so long ago. Or maybe that’s why she could talk big. She’d come into close contact with those things and she was still so remarkably normal. She was the kind of normal I liked to dream about when I showed up at home in the middle of the night covered in some kind of fairy goo. Except she was real.
“I am scared of those things.” I ran my fingers through my hair and breathed, willing my heart to slow down. “What are you doing here? You weren’t in detention.” As if detention ever had or ever would be possible for her.
“Tutoring.” Jasika shrugged. “And … I sort of wanted to talk to you.”
That sentence seldom ended with anything good. My stomach clenched.
“To me?”
“Yeah. I mean. You know about, well, all the stuff.” She raised her brows at stuff. “And nobody else in town does.”
“That’s because Father Gooding and I do our jobs well.”
“I know.” Jasika fiddled with the hem of her shirt. “And now I know, I kind of get it. But everything I know, I’ve had to figure out myself. Alone. For a long time.”
Everything she knew? The idea of Jasika anywhere near any of that made my skin crawl.
“You’re not looking into this too much, are you?”
“Of course I am.” Her brows twitched. “Look, I’ve always known there was a … thing going on. And now I know what it is. So what’s the point of us doing this separately? I figure if I were to join you and Father—”
“No.” The word was out before I even realized it. Sort of a knee-jerk response after years with the twins.
Jasika’s sunny smile faded. “No?”
“It’s dangerous.”
Her brows twitched with something between hurt and anger. “So you get to decide who does and doesn’t get to do anything about all of this?”
“Come on. Isn’t it better to just pretend it never happened? Go back to your life and pretend you never saw them.”
Jasika drew in a sharp breath. For a long moment, she glared down at the floor until, at last, she looked up at me. The sharp glint in those eyes hit me like a sucker punch.
“Look, I don’t need your permission. I just figured you might welcome a little help.”
I could. I really could. It was tempting. But the thought of Jasika coming close to that sort of danger made my ears ring. No. This was my battle, and she was staying out of it whether she liked it or not.
“You don’t want to get any closer to this than you are,” I warned, but my gut began to squirm with something that might have been an emotion similar to but not necessarily guilt. “I appreciate it. I do. It’s good that you want to help but it’s also really dangerous. The best thing you can do is keep your eyes open and call us if anything else happens on Postoak.”
“So you want me to be your watchdog.” She shook her head. “You know, when you bench people, they feel it. And it doesn’t feel great.”
Jasika got this look on her face, one that looked like she’d swallowed a lemon. I probably should have been glad she didn’t say whatever she wanted to say out loud. This was enough to make me feel like an asshole. Time to shift focus.
“Who was the guy sitting next to you at the assembly?”
“Who? Wait, you mean Dom?” Jasika knitted her brows. “This has nothing to do with—”
“Humor me.” I crossed my arms. “Who is he? Where’d he come from?”
Jasika crossed her own arms, mirroring me. “He just moved in with Ms. Helen down the road. Foster kid. He’s nice.”
“So he moved in on Postoak.”
Jasika frowned, searching me for a few long seconds before her eyes widened. One hand flew to her mouth.
“No, Bryn. You can’t mean … Bryn, he’s a sweet guy. He’s not one of, you know … them.”
Nice to know she was squeamish about saying fairies in public.
“I’m going to find out,” I told her. “Listen, there’s been more happening around Postoak lately. Some new guy happens to move into Fairy Central right when everything’s getting crazy?”
She shook her head. “You’re paranoid.”
“I have a right to be.” I took a breath and forced myself to straighten. “You could stand to be a little more paranoid yourself. If you see bad guys everywhere, you catch the on
es that really are there. Just promise me you’ll keep away from him until I figure out what his deal is.”
Jasika sighed like I’d asked her to carry an anvil up Mount Everest. “Fine. But when you determine he’s not one of them, you let me in on your next job with Father Gooding. Deal?”
Well, it wasn’t exactly like I was bringing her in on the fairy hunting. I was just going to teach her to protect herself. And, in return, she would … protect herself. So why did thinking about that make my stomach all squirmy and fluttery? Somehow, it felt like I was getting the raw end of this deal.
“Fine. Meet me during study hall tomorrow.”
“Deal.” Jasika grinned and winked. “And don’t worry, the boy’s all yours. You could have just said you liked him.”
Hilarious.
Six
The walk home with the boys was a long one, largely because they’d had to stay in the after-school program while I served out my detention sentence.
“Do you know what it’s like there?” Ash demanded. “I’m pretty sure Mrs. Horton thinks we’re all, like, six or something.”
“No, she treats you like you’re six because she knows you lied about getting your homework done in class.”
“Yeah, well, she’s not my math teacher. It’s none of her business!”
I checked my phone for the time as we crunched our way up the gravel path to the house. For all the griping and dramatizing from Ash, I was still going to be on time to meet Gwen. She didn’t like coming out if I showed up after dusk.
“Hey, did you pick up more soap?” Ash demanded.
I rolled my eyes and pocketed the phone. “Why, get bored of using shampoo?”
He shot a glare at Jake and kicked the iron gate hard. It swung so hard it clanged against the fence and bounced back, smacking him right in the foot.
Jake burst into loud peals of laughter while Ash fell back, spewing profanity. Dad would have had a cow if he’d heard.
I dropped to my knees and checked his ankle.
“You’re fine,” I announced, and rose, holding open the gate. “Okay, both of you inside. I’ve got to get to my study group.”
“Since when do you socialize with actual people, Miss Priss?” Ash climbed to his feet, not even bothering to dust himself off as he traipsed inside with Jake on his heels.
Once I made sure the boys were home and sufficiently occupied, I pulled the half-full bag of bread out of the pantry.
“Behave,” I called over my shoulder, both to the boys and the shadelings. The shadelings, thank goodness, stayed hidden. The boys, on the other hand, lounged in the living room. Ash doodled in the corner of his geometry book while Jake played some sort of game on his phone.
“Fine, but if you’re home too late it’s tuna fish casserole.”
I glowered at him. “Nobody likes tuna fish casserole.”
“Yeah, but nobody hates it more than you,” Ash pointed out. “That’s what you get for making us wait in the after-school program.”
Jerks. It might have sincerely irritated me more if it wasn’t so familiar. Familiar was good right now. I glanced at them one last time, just to make sure all was well before I headed out the door. There was still a nasty, dark stain on the ground just outside the gate. The sight filled my mouth with a sour taste. I looked away, focusing on the cool iron beneath my fingers, the creak of the gate as it opened and closed. This would be over soon. I’d take care of it.
Nine years in this town and countless trips through the trees, and the woods still sent shivers down my spine. The cloying scent of pine clogged my senses. My steel-toed boots crunched the underbrush so loudly I could barely think. Every creature in the woods knew I was there. The wild, courtless fairies tended to give me a wide berth, but every flicker of movement in the corner of my eye, every snap or rustle in the distance made my hand tighten around the bag of bread. I just had to count the number of steps between here and the safety of the pond.
When at last I broke free of the treeline, I sucked in a long, deep breath of freshwater air: all mud and wet plants and the faint odor of fish. Gwen’s pond stretched out in front of me, the water glimmering like diamonds in the evening sun. I let myself relax, first my head, then my shoulders, then the rest of me as I knelt at the edge of the water, the moist earth squishing under my knees as I knelt.
At first glance, it looked like any other pond. Then, among the brown river stones and the intermittent flicker of movement from minnows, tiny houses shimmered to life, swaying in the gently windblown current. Feminine laughter drifted in on the breeze, accompanied by a smell like honey. The village of the Gwragedd Annwn. The water wives. Probably the only fairies besides the shadelings whom I could honestly claim to like.
“Gwen,” I called, dangling the bag of bread over the water’s surface. “Brought your favorite.”
“Bryn, you know half a dozen of us are named Gwen,” a sweet voice said from behind me. “You’re only lucky they know it’s me you call for.”
For just a second, my heart skipped a beat, but only for the one second. At this point, it was just a physiological reaction my body seemed to have to her, one I doubted I’d ever really outgrow, no matter how long we stayed split up. There would always be the lingering sensation of fireworks inside of me where the smoke hadn’t quite cleared. My lips curled up in an automatic smile. The whole world could be burning around me, and somehow Gwen’s presence would always make it better. “That’s the second time someone managed to sneak up on me today,” I pointed out. “I must be losing my edge.”
Gwen looked like a figure in a classic painting who’d had all her color washed out. Milk-white hands poked out from the full, gauzy sleeves of her pale shift. Ash-blond curls tumbled down to her waist like a blank canvas. The only real specks of color on her were her lily pad–green eyes that sparkled with delight.
Of course, the fireworks were always chased with the throb of a little shard of glass that had embedded itself in my heart the day I downgraded us back to “just friends.” Once junior year had ended and the summer began, it had hit me. I’d be going off to college in a year. I’d be chasing that normal, human kind of life, but I couldn’t really accomplish that if I was still dating a water fairy. So, I’d ended it like one of those old, nostalgic rock songs. I’ll love you forever, babe, but I’ve got to be moving on. Maybe it had been cowardly. Maybe it had been the wrong choice and I was just impulsive. But, right or wrong, I was back here begging for her help. Like an asshole.
Maybe Jasika was on to something about my personality.
Gwen, at least, was too good to act smug about me being back here. Maybe it wasn’t even an emotion she was capable of feeling. She held out her dainty hands for the bread. As soon as I handed it over, she bit gleefully into a slice and sank down to the ground, her shift ballooning around her.
“Gwen,” I said. “Something’s happened.”
Gwen froze, those lily-pad eyes locking onto me. In one graceful motion, she set the bread down and moved to my side, her hands on my back, right on top of my bruises. I bit back a hiss of pain, but Gwen already knew. This wasn’t exactly the first time she’d had to patch me up. It was how the thing between us had started in the first place.
Warmth trickled across my shoulders and down my back, pooling in every scrape the Fae had left. I couldn’t help the little sigh of relief.
“Thanks.”
Gwen pulled back, her delicate features set in a frown. “It is no wild one who did this to you,” she murmured. “There was a touch of the court in them.”
Well, she cut right to the chase, huh? “Yeah, looks like a Fae wandered over here by accident.”
Gwen arched a brow. “We are all Fae, Bryn.”
Semantics. I shrugged. “It’s easier to think of courts as Fae and the rest of you as fairies.” Because deep down, the thought that Gwen and the shadelings were in any way related to that thing made my skin itch.
Gwen pursed her lips. “We are what we are, Bryn. The Unseelie are
the dark. The winter. The Seelie are the warmth. The summer. Even we in the wild align with them or between them. It is a balance.”
“Wouldn’t mind throwing that balance off a little,” I muttered. But trying to argue about balance and nature with a water wife was like trying to convince a river to flow backward. “Anyway, it said its queen had a message, but I was a little busy trying to stay alive. Have you or your sisters heard anything?”
Gwen tilted her head and gazed out over the water. Her words came out slowly, like ice melting. “This is Unseelie doing. Mischief-makers and death lovers. Stirring things up in the woods. The Seelie would never resort to such violence. Not without a call for war.”
I figured as much. In all my short life, I’d never actually dealt with the Seelie court. Pity. Apparently that court was all midsummer dances and sunshine, about as far from the Unseelie as Gwen was from the Postoak changeling. I picked at a blade of grass and worried it between my fingers.
“Dad said … well, implied his hallucinations were getting worse.”
Gwen nodded. “It was an Unseelie courtier who cursed him,” she said. “His visions will be tied to them, if it is their will that he should suffer.”
A band tightened around my chest. “But the doctors will still be able to help, right? I mean, this curse acts like a real disease.”
“An amethyst and a quartz may resemble each other, but one shatters more easily than the other.”
“And which one does my dad have?”
Gwen ran her fingers through her pale hair, brows furrowed. “It is hard to say. But if the Unseelie retreat, I believe his condition will ease to something he can manage again.”
“So I just need to push them out of my territory.”
Gwen touched my cheek. Her fingers felt like still water. “You broke with me because you wished to leave this place. Now it seems you intend to root yourself here.”
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