THE HERO ATE dinner with us, and afterward he asked to see my bedroom, but I shared it with Peach and Bee Lee, so I didn’t take him there. Mim had a late-night reading and the twins were camping in the woods. Felix had a girlfriend already, he was like Leaf in that way, and the two of them had claimed the hayloft. His girl was pretty and gentle, with rosy cheeks and bashful eyes, but Mim had given Felix the Bliss and Baby talk recently, so I wasn’t worried.
The Three Billy Goats Gruff boy had dark hair and two different-colored eyes. Blue and green.
Different-colored eyes meant a lot of things.
A curse.
Bad luck.
Madness.
A withered soul.
A pact with the devil.
A family secret.
A lie.
A changeling.
A promise, un-kept.
I brought Midnight to the garden, and he stretched out down in the dirt with his head in the strawberries while I spelled out my secrets on his naked back, my fingers drawing the letters up his spine.
He asked me about my father again.
And Leaf.
He tried to get me to talk about my kiss with the Wolf.
But I wouldn’t say a word.
“Midnight.”
Warm breath on my skin. The covers rustled, a body next to mine, side to side, spoons. Was I dreaming? Was there a Sandman in my bed, whispering in my ear, blowing on my neck? I kept my eyes closed, stretched out my fingers. I wanted to tangle them in her tangled red hair.
But they slipped right through, water, silk.
I smelled jasmine.
Poppy.
“I climbed the drainpipe.” She turned over, kissed my earlobe. Slow. “Two miles in the dark of night. I went through a forest and up a wall.” She wriggled. Slithered. Soft skin everywhere. “Do I seem like the kind of person who would let a red-haired hayloft girl in unicorn underwear take what’s mine? You are mine, Midnight. For as long as I want you.”
Her lips on my neck, chest, stomach . . .
“Poppy, stop.”
She didn’t.
“Poppy, stop.”
She did.
“Fine. Fine, Midnight. Will you just put your arms around me, then? Can I get that much, at least?”
I did. I tucked her head under my chin and laid my hand flat across her lower belly, spreading out my fingers until they touched her hip.
She never let me hold her.
She was that worried about me and Wink, I guess.
She was right to be worried.
Just as I was falling back to sleep, eyelids closing, Poppy wriggled out of my arms and woke me up again. She went over to the window and looked out, over at the Bell farm, the moonlight settling around her. A breeze came in and moved the hair across the curve of her shoulder blades, back and forth, just an inch or two.
“You know, Leaf told me something about his crazy sister once.” Poppy turned and grinned at me over her shoulder, the old foxy Poppy grin, the one from her gangly, knee-scraped days. “He said the Roman Luck house scared Wink out of her weird, addled little mind. He said it gave her nightmares as a kid, nightmares so bad she used to wet the bed.”
Poppy laughed, quiet and hard and mean. “Maybe we should start calling her Tinkle. Tinkle Bell.”
“Good one.” I said it lazy and cool, like my brother, so she knew I didn’t mean it.
“I think we should make Wink face her fear. What do you think, Midnight?”
Where was Poppy going with this? Wink hadn’t seemed scared of the Roman Luck house when we were at the party. I’d have known, if she were scared. Wouldn’t I?
Poppy snapped her fingers, one, two, three, and then glided back to the bed. She sat at the foot and crossed her naked legs, and looked so beautiful I wanted to throw myself out the window.
“I’ve got an idea, Midnight. A brilliant idea. Do you want to hear it?”
“No.”
She just laughed. “I’m going to tell Wink you want to meet her tomorrow at midnight in the Roman Luck house. I’m going to tell her that you want to be alone with her, really alone, no Bell brats, no hayloft. I’m going to tell her you’re too shy to ask her yourself.”
“She won’t believe you, Poppy.”
“Yes she will. I’m a fantastic actress. I’ll make her.” Poppy laughed again, quiet, so my dad wouldn’t hear. He was still awake, his footsteps making my ceiling creak. “It’s going to be so beautiful. So wicked.”
“No, it won’t. It really won’t.”
“Yes, it will. When she gets there, I’m going to tie her to the grand piano and then leave her there. Alone. She’ll have to spend the whole night sitting in the music room of the haunted Roman Luck house, with its ghosts. It’s going to be amazing.”
“Don’t, Poppy. Please.” I stopped trying to sound like Alabama. I just sounded like me again.
Poppy leaned forward and kissed the hollow of my throat. Slowly. “Will you help me do this? Will you go along with it?”
“No.”
“Do it, Midnight. Help me.”
“No. Never.”
Her kisses were languid. Soft. Perfect.
“If you don’t help me, Midnight, I’ll do something worse.”
Her lips, my skin . . .
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
“If you don’t help me I’ll set the hayloft on fire and burn the barn to the ground and say Wink did it. I’ll say she’s insane. I’ll say she’s dangerous. I’ll say she’s a liar. I’ll say she lured me into the woods and tried to kill me. I’ll say she pushed me in the river and tried to drown me. I’ll say she—”
“All right, all right.” I put my hand over her lips to stop her from kissing me again. “All right. I’ll do it.”
She raised her arms in the air and squealed. It was whispery and quiet, but still a squeal.
Even Poppy’s squeals were sexy.
“But Poppy, you have to promise that after this you’ll leave her alone. This is the last prank. The last one. Okay?”
Poppy crossed her arms over her bare chest, tossed her hair, and smiled. “I knew you’d come around.”
“Promise me it will stop, Poppy.”
Silence.
“Promise.”
“It will stop. After this one last prank.”
“And I don’t want any Yellows there either. They’ll make too much noise and she’ll suspect something.” I narrowed my eyes, back to imitating Alabama again. “Wink is smart. Smarter than you think. Just me and you on this, all right?”
“Wow. You’re being so alpha and demanding tonight. I’m impressed. And I’m never impressed, especially by you.”
She leaned in . . .
I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her back.
She let out a cute, childish groan. “Okay. No Yellows and no more pranks.”
She smiled again.
And then she slipped her left leg over me and sat her hips down on mine. “I wouldn’t miss doing this with you for the world. Not for the world. Wink, Roman Luck, you and me, it’s going to be so much fun, so much fun.”
She bent forward until we were touching, chest to chest, skin to skin.
Lips. Down, down, down.
And I wanted to hate it.
I wanted it to turn my stomach, make me sick, fill me with horror. But it didn’t.
I HID IT well, but climbing into Midnight’s bed gave me a comforting feeling, a nostalgic feeling, like staying at my grandfather’s cabin when I was little, back before he shoveled snow on a cold day seven years ago, had a heart attack, and died. His name was Anton Harvey and my parents used to leave me with him when they went away for their doctor conferences. My grandpa never once called me a sweet little angel baby. He hadn’t given a damn about my blond halo h
air or my big gray eyes or my cherub lips, and he never ever gave me pink presents with bows on them.
Anton Harvey was gruff and silent and he showed me how to gut fish after we caught them from the river, and he wasn’t upset that I liked it. I wore flannel shirts when I stayed at his cabin, and Wellingtons, and I wore my hair in braids, and sometimes we went whole hours at a time without talking, just fishing or following tracks in the snow or sitting on the plain, tiny porch, watching a storm come in.
And just about the time I started to think, Now here’s something, here’s someone I can actually look up to, he’s not dumb dumb dumb like the rest, here’s someone I can actually admire, someone I understand, someone I could probably even love, just give me half a chance, he had to up and die.
“POPPY IS PLANNING something, Wink.”
We were outside, cupped hands, drinking ice-cold water straight from the red water pump.
“I know.” Wink cutely slurped up the water from her palms. “She was here earlier this morning. She found me in the hayloft and said you wanted to meet me at the Roman Luck house at midnight.”
Poppy worked fast. Once she made up her mind about something she shot forward like a greyhound. She’d always been like this. The first time we’d slept together, she was already half-naked by the time she burst through my bedroom door.
“Poppy thinks I’m very, very stupid.” Wink’s eyes were extra green in the morning sunshine, and there were tiny drops of water on her lips.
The Orphans were all at the dentist. Wink said Mim didn’t trust dentists but she brought them anyway. I could hear Dad through the open attic windows, all the way across the road, talking on the phone to one of his clients. He used rare book words that were so foreign and frequent it was almost another language.
“She wants to tie you to that old piano and leave you in the house overnight.” I took my thumb and brushed the water droplets off her top lip, and she smiled at me when I did it. “Apparently Leaf told her you’re afraid of the place.”
Wink shook her head. “Leaf never told her that.”
“So you aren’t scared of the Roman Luck house?”
“Everyone should be scared of the Roman Luck house.” A goat wandered up and butted its head against her legs and she ran her hand down its furry back.
As I said, getting straight info out of Wink was harder than getting kindness out of Poppy.
Wink kept her hand on the goat, but put her eyes on mine. “You know how Thief has a vision about the path he must take through the Dark Woods? The path that leads him to the beautiful magician in the secret cottage with the melancholy blue eyes and silvery hair?”
I nodded.
“Remember how the magician tries to trick him but he tricks her instead?”
I nodded again. “And then he leaves her body in the woods, knowing the wolves will get it come nightfall.”
“Exactly.” And then Wink fluttered the ends of her fingers in that way I liked.
Poppy was planning to trick Wink, and Wink was planning to trick Poppy, and I was stuck right in the middle.
But the air was hot and there was a nice breeze, and I somehow felt kind of dreamy and peaceful, despite everything. Wink did that to me.
That afternoon we drank coffee from the blue cup, dirt from the garden between our toes. We sat under the apple trees in my orchard, wide sky, fat clouds, fingers tickling the cold water in the tiny curving creek, twelve inches wide at most. I asked Wink the name of the stream and she said it didn’t have one but that it came from the Blue Twist River and so she called it the Little Blue Twist.
“I’ve always wanted to have my very own creek,” I said. “I’m sorry it turns south before it gets to your farm—I feel like I’m hogging it.”
“It’s okay. I want you to have the creek.” She grinned at me. Her fingers looked pale and eerie white underneath the water. “Do you know what water witching is, Midnight? My pa could do it. I watched him once.”
I looked at her, surprised. She’d dodged every question I’d asked about her father so far. Every single one. And now here she was, offering him up freely.
“Some people are born with the ability to find water underground.” Wink leaned forward, and the tips of her hair dipped into the stream. “I once watched Pa find a buried spring in the pasture near the Gold Apple Mine, where we keep the horses. He held a forked stick and it started twitching really quick and fast. And that’s how he knew. Someday I plan to gather all the Orphans and dig in that spot until the water bubbles up. And then we’ll have a swimming pond.”
“Why don’t we do it today, Wink? I’d like to dig up a spring. I’d like to free it from deep underground.”
Wink shrugged. “It’s too hot. Not today, Midnight. Soon, though.”
We went inside to get out of the sun. I showed Wink around my house, the airy kitchen with the white, tiled walls, the sleeping porch with all the screens, the basement full of Mom and Alabama boxes, the cellar with the dirt walls and empty jars.
I showed her my bedroom, and she looked at all the books in my bookcases, all of them. Then she went over and sat on my bed. I flinched, worried that the pillows smelled like jasmine. She curled her legs underneath her, picked up the copy of Will and the Black Caravans I’d left open, and just set it in her lap. Wink had loaned the book to me—she said she hadn’t read it to the Orphans yet because she didn’t want them to get any ideas. She didn’t want it to stir their blood. And I understood. I was only half-done but Will and the red-haired boy-king Gabriel Stagg had already entered my dreams . . . the twisting, endless road, the knives in the dark, the feeling of restlessness.
“I’ve given it some thought and I think I know what happened to Roman Luck,” Wink said, out of the blue.
I sat down beside her and didn’t say anything, waiting for her to go on.
“I think Roman Luck decided that he’d done it all wrong, his whole life. He didn’t want to be a doctor anymore, and he didn’t want to live in a grand house. So he just walked out the door and left, and started over someplace else with nothing but the clothes on his back, determined to change his fate.”
I thought about this for a while. “I like the idea of it, but people don’t just leave their house and money and identity behind. They just don’t. Well, except for the old woman from Paris that you told me about.”
Wink folded her hands under her pointed little chin. “There was an heiress once named Guinevere Woolfe who disappeared without a trace one day, off into the foggy streets of London. She was finally found twenty years later, baking bread in a tiny French alpine town. She’d married a French pastry chef, and had grown fat and happy, and they’d had six lively children, all boys. No one in the town had the faintest idea that she was English, let alone that she was worth fifty million pounds.”
“So what did Roman Luck do, after he disappeared? Did he become a world-famous illusionist and spend his life traveling to exotic locations, only to die a sudden death on the Orient Express after drinking a poisoned cup of coffee in the dinner car with a jealous former lover?”
This was a fantasy I’d had about myself, once upon a time. The details varied from year to year, generally involving more and more beautiful women as I got older.
Wink smiled, quick and soft and eyes half-closed. “I think Roman Luck hopped a train to some faraway place, and started off a stranger and ended up a hero. I think he killed monsters and saved innocents, and rescued a sad, lonely girl and made her happy. That’s what I think happened to him.”
She stood up, and put her hands in her deep overall pockets, and let her curly hair fall across her freckled cheeks. “You could be a hero, Midnight. You could be a hero like Thief, and Roman Luck.”
“Alabama’s the hero, not me,” I said, open and honest because Wink made me feel like it was okay to be that way.
“I’ll help you. You can do it, you’ll see
.” Wink nodded. It was a very serious and grave kind of nod. Her eyes were looking up to me, full of stars.
I heard tires on gravel. Car doors slammed. And then screams, kid screams, half laughter, half squeal. I got up and went to my window. The Orphans were back from the dentist and full of energy from being cooped up all morning. Peach was standing on top of the rusty Bell station wagon, messy hair down her back, trying to sing opera in her little voice. Felix had Bee Lee on his shoulders and was tickling her feet while she laughed hysterically. The twins were just running in circles around everyone else, like they couldn’t make up their mind on what mischief to start first.
WE WERE LIKE the three Fates, weaving the story together, threads of gold, red, and midnight blue.
There would be wolves and tricks and lies and cunning and vengeance in our story. I would make sure of it.
Long, long ago there lived a German storyteller who wove dark tales in a cottage hidden in the Black Forest. Pa told me about him. He said his books were burned in the Great War, and only a few survived, and someday he would let me read one.
Pa said this German storyteller had a recurring theme in all his tales, and he used to sing it to me in a low, sad voice, like it was a lullaby, over and over:
When you look into the darkness,
the darkness looks into you.
I mentioned my father to the Hero. I didn’t mean to. I’d wanted to talk about the Huntsman, about how he cut out Sweet Ruby’s heart, and put it in a box and gave it to the queen . . . but Pa slipped out instead, slipped right out of my mouth like the Crawly Eels, slipping in and out of the people’s windows in The City Beneath.
I’d been thinking about Heroes, and Midnight, and how Leaf used to say the best Heroes had a bit of evil in them, to make the good shine all the more for being next to it . . . and then the next thing I knew I was talking about him, and his water witching, and the Gold Apple Mine, like the little girl in Winter Earnest who had her wits knocked out of her all in one go.
I’d be more careful from now on.
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