THE TENTH TIME I kissed Leaf, he kissed me back. We were in the meadow behind the Bell farm and his thin lips were tender and arrogant, exactly, exactly how I thought they would be, exactly how I wanted them to be, he pulled away and groaned against my cheek and that dark, empty part in my chest where my heart had never been, it started beating, beating, beating and I felt joy, red and dripping. He picked me up and turned me over so my back pressed into the grass and the bright little wildflowers, and my fresh new heart faced the sky.
Leaf had a low, growly kind of voice. I saw him singing once. Back before the Blue Twist River flooding, back before DeeDee, he must have been fourteen or fifteen, but not younger, because his voice had changed, and gotten deep. I saw him singing in the forest, I was out there by myself because being better than everyone at everything is really fucking tiresome, and sometimes I have to run off into the woods for a while and pretend no one else exists.
He was standing alone in a little clearing, snow-covered ground and crisp blue winter sky. His chest was puffed out and his head was thrown back and he was singing, just singing at the top of his lungs, some melancholy tune I’d never heard before. It sounded ancient, sung in his gravelly voice, old stone mountains and ice-cold lakes. His breath fogged up in the air and I’d never heard or seen anything half so fucking beautiful. He didn’t see me, or pretended he didn’t. He just kept singing.
I wasn’t built for missing things, I was built for winning and getting what I wanted and not for trying to be better, not for trying to be the best version of myself, it wasn’t working anyway, god, it wasn’t working at all.
I had Midnight eating out of the palm of my hand, it was all so easy, so ridiculously easy. I was barely trying. He thought he was going to betray me, as if I’d let him, as if he had the cunning, what a notion, as if, as if.
This is how far I’ll go, this is how far I’m willing to go.
WINK AND I walked through black trees to the Roman Luck house. It was ten thirty, maybe a quarter to eleven. I told Poppy I would show up at eleven thirty, and Wink and I needed to beat her there.
I shined the flashlight on the sagging porch.
I didn’t like going in the Roman Luck house in the broad summer daylight. No one did. And now, in the dark . . .
The trees seemed to be watching us, watching me and Wink, all their rustling leaves like little eyes, blinking.
Maybe this was a bad idea.
Maybe this wasn’t what Thief would do.
But then, Thief had a sword.
All I had was an abandoned house.
Wink’s fingers crawled into mine. She squeezed. “You’re the hero, Midnight.”
We walked up the worn wooden steps together.
I turned the cold glass doorknob, and shoved.
The floor creaked as I stepped on it, just like the floors did in my own house. And it made me feel better. We walked down the narrow hallway, framed photographs still on the walls, fuzzy in the dim light, the faces of strangers, the faces of the people Roman Luck had run away from.
We ignored the dining room on our right, dusty table and chairs and a dirty plate that sat alone on one end, still untouched by everyone somehow, cops and kids alike.
The music room was next, on the left.
There were scurrying sounds coming from the corners. I ran my hand down the wall, and felt the velvet flowered wallpaper pucker under my palm. The faded red curtains were pushed back, floor to ceiling, framing the jagged edges of the broken bay window.
A cloud moved, and a sliver of moonlight flickered in. Chunks of plaster on the floor, a cushion on the piano stool, a heavy Rachmaninoff book of sheet music on the stand.
“Roman Luck must have played this piano sometimes.” I nodded at the music. “Can’t you just see him, sitting in this big house all by himself, playing dark Russian songs?”
“I can,” she said. “I really can.”
I set my backpack down on the floor. It held the rope, and another flashlight. I looked up at Wink, but she still hadn’t moved. She was staring at the spot right between the piano and the ratty green sofa.
“It was right there,” Wink whispered. “That’s right where I saw him.”
I DIDN’T DUST my skin with sugar this time. I needed something more powerful. I was wearing my acorn skirt, the one with the sand from the bottom of the Blue Twist sewn into the hem for protection.
I filled one of the pockets with dried, dusky green lentils, and the other with cinnamon sticks from a jar in Mim’s charm cupboard. I hung a key around my neck on a silver chain, the long skeleton one that the tiny lady in the black dress gave me when I stumbled upon her in the woods that one day. She said the key opened a golden box that contained the heart of a girl she’d killed years ago.
I knew I’d have to tell Midnight about the unforgivables now. I needed to warn him about how they feed on you if you’re not careful, how they’ll turn your heart into red dust and make you go hatter-mad.
“I WAS LITTLE,” Wink said, voice soft, eyes staring down at the rotting Roman Luck floorboards. “As little as Bee Lee. Leaf was the same age as the twins. We were playing in the woods, a game that Leaf made up called Follow the Screams. I was hiding in a dead tree trunk and listening, and that’s when I heard them, real screams, not Leaf-screams, coming from the Roman Luck house.”
We had some time before Poppy showed up. She wasn’t a ten-minute-early kind of girl. I was sitting on the green velveteen sofa, and Wink was sitting next to me, our knees touching. She was wearing a skirt with little acorns all over it. I held the flashlight in my hand, the light toward our toes.
The wind picked up outside. Branches scraped the broken windows and it sounded like someone’s fingernails clawing at the glass.
I slid closer to Wink, until our thighs were touching.
“Mim told me that a woman named Autumn used to live here. This was a long time ago, before Roman Luck. Autumn wasn’t right in the head. She married the handsomest man in town, a man named Martin Lind, and they had four children, two boys, two girls. But as time went on Autumn became paranoid and suspicious, and she accused her husband of being in love with another woman. She thought he was going to leave her.”
Wink paused. She was rubbing the hem of her skirt between two fingers, and not looking at me.
“And then one day Autumn stabbed Martin in the stomach with a kitchen knife and left him in the music room to die.”
I looked at Wink, looked at her innocent green eyes and her earnest, heart-shaped face. “Is that really true, Wink?”
She smiled suddenly, soft lips, cute ears. “You keep asking me that. Of course it’s true. All the strangest things are true. Autumn hanged for it, hanged by the neck until dead, and her children grew up with strangers, orphaned and alone like in one of my hayloft stories. The house went up for sale, and Roman Luck bought it. But Autumn’s bad thing, her unforgivable thing, had soaked into the floorboards, and creeped into the walls.”
“You told me Roman didn’t leave because of a ghost.”
She shrugged. “Mim said he didn’t. She read his cards sometimes, so she would know. Sometimes people just . . . leave.”
An owl hooted somewhere out in the night. The hoo-hooing swept right through the broken glass, right into my ears, like a whisper from Poppy.
“I was hiding and I heard the screams and I went closer to see. There was a man in this room, Midnight, and he was screaming, and bleeding. He was dying. He was handsome, and beautiful, like a prince in a fairy tale. He didn’t see me, not at first. I was little, and had to stand on my tiptoes, and I could still barely reach the windowsill. He was all in shadow and kept clutching his side and saying something, over and over.”
Wink was using her Putting the Orphans to Sleep voice. But I wasn’t getting sleepy this time.
“What?” I asked, when she didn’t continue. “What did h
e say?”
“Tell my children I love them. That’s what he said, again and again. And oh, Midnight, his voice was so raw and sad.”
I looked around the room, and then slammed my eyes shut, thinking that the ghost of Martin Lind was going to appear in front of me, bleeding and clutching and crying out in the dark.
Had Wink really seen that as a girl? What would that do to a little kid’s head?
I didn’t even believe in ghosts, not really. But I did believe in Wink.
“I got scared then, and lost my footing,” she said, still using her soft, sleepy voice. “I stumbled, and when I stood up again he was gone and the music room was empty. There is a ghost here, Midnight. But he didn’t have anything to do with Roman.”
The owl hooted. The branches scratched. The sounds scurried. The room smelled like night and dirt and neglect.
Wink leaned over and put her mouth on mine. I dropped the flashlight, clunk, creak. Her red hair fell over my ears and neck and shoulders.
She smelled like cinnamon, and her lips tasted like dust.
I didn’t think about the man who had died in this room.
Or the unforgivable thing that Autumn had done.
Or what I was about to do to a girl I’d once loved.
I just thought about Wink.
She pulled away. Stood up, smoothed her acorn skirt. Her hair was tangled and beautiful and red, red, red in the flashlight’s beam. “You can do this,” she said. “You’re Thief. You’re the hero.”
I nodded.
I nodded even though this didn’t feel heroic.
It just felt wrong.
Wink left. Into the woods to wait.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Poppy arrived.
I WALKED OUT my front door at eleven, boldly, with a swagger, my parents were gone anyway, off to rub elbows in Chicago with other doctors at some boring convention, I could just picture them in a long carpeted room, expensive furnishings and chandeliers, looking smug and overly educated and really fucking proud of themselves.
I ran away once, after Grandpa died. I went to his cabin up on Three Death Jack Mountain and stayed there for two days, not giving a thought to my parents or anyone else. It was beautiful and quiet, so quiet. The cabin was kind of run-down by then, but I did what I could to fix it up and I was having the time of my life, catching fish and not talking to anyone, when Mom and Dad finally found me. They were panicked and angry, they just couldn’t understand why I’d run off, why I’d want to live in some rat-hole cabin instead of our nice house in town, they gave me everything I wanted, hadn’t they given me everything I’d ever wanted?
They burned Anton Harvey’s cabin to the ground. They said it was falling apart and dangerous, but I knew. I knew why they really did it.
I took the cobblestone street to the cemetery, then down the path, into the woods. I wasn’t scared of this part, I’d done it enough times. Owls hooting and things rustling around in dead leaves and the wind tickling my neck like the night was letting out its breath. But my sense of direction was far above average, and besides, what in the forest could possibly be scarier than me?
The Roman Luck house.
That was scarier, true, true, I hated that place, oh, how I hated it, but it was just one night, one quick night, close your eyes and think of England.
I HEARD THE Wolf before I saw her. She strolled into the clearing, kicking up dead leaves, chin up, back straight, vain as the Raven Queen.
I hid in the trees. I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I was only afraid of the Roman Luck house. I didn’t want to leave Midnight in there alone, even if he was the Hero.
I think he believed me, about the unforgivables.
POPPY STOOD IN the Roman Luck doorway, up on her tiptoes, trying to look over my shoulder.
“Wink isn’t here yet,” I said. “We still have ten or fifteen minutes.”
She put her hands on the waist of her black skirt, right where it met her tight black T-shirt. I stepped back to let her enter, but she didn’t move from the doorway.
“Are you still afraid of this place, Poppy?”
She was quiet. Poppy, without a comeback.
“Why did you choose it for the prank, then? Why here, if it scares you as much as Wink?”
Poppy shook herself, so quick I almost missed it. She cocked her head, eyes hooded, nose in air. “I chose this place because it’s isolated. I’m not afraid. This is just a stupid, dirty old house that smells like death. I don’t believe in ghosts and even if I did, I wouldn’t care if I saw one and I wouldn’t be afraid.”
She tossed her blond hair and took a step. Then another. She was in.
She laughed.
Poppy held out her arms in the Roman Luck hallway, wide. She twirled around in a circle, the floor creaking beneath her. “Come and haunt me, ghosts. I’m right here. Come on. Show me you’re real. Show me what you can do.”
She paused. Smiled at me. “See? Nothing.”
She looked so young, right there with her arms spread out between the two wood-paneled walls. She looked so brave and full of life amid the groaning floorboards and the dust and decay that I felt, just for a brief second, like she could make it all vanish, just with a wave of her hand, a blink of her eye, a flash of light. Poppy would twirl her arm above her head and the house would lift itself up and shake off its dirt and squeeze itself back together and be like new again. And then Roman Luck would come strolling back through the door, stroking a long beard because he’d tasted some Dutch ale and fallen asleep on the mountain for twenty years, and that’s all it was, that’s all that had happened, mystery solved.
We both heard the noise, and jumped. Clawing, scratching, scrape, scrape, scrape.
Poppy dropped her arms.
It was just the branches rubbing up against the windows, but Poppy didn’t know that.
I nodded down the hall. “Come on, let’s go to the music room. Lead the way.”
She didn’t say anything, no snappy retort. She just went.
Creak-creak went the floorboards.
Poppy stopped in the doorway. I gave her my flashlight, and she switched it on. She walked to the center of the room, and then spun around, the light going with her. It made a long, pale arc. Poppy shivered. Hard. Her limbs shook.
This wasn’t the Poppy I knew. It wasn’t even the Poppy from the hallway, arms in the air, daring the supernatural to come and get her.
She wasn’t being mean. She wasn’t hurting someone. She wasn’t ordering anyone around. She wasn’t getting naked and climbing on top of me.
She was just scared. She was genuinely scared.
I wanted to take her hand and lead her back outside. I wanted to walk her home, and tuck her into bed, and make her feel safe.
But I couldn’t.
I was the hero.
“You should put your hands on the keys,” I said. “It’s tradition. The first time you go in the Roman Luck house, you put your hands on the keys.”
Poppy walked to the piano. She set down the flashlight, put her fingers on the chipped ivory, and pressed, plunk, plunk, plunk. She rested them there for one breath, two. Then snatched her arms away, turned back to me, and smiled a cocky half smile.
“There, I did it.”
“You know,” I said, lazy and cool, like Alabama, “I think you should call out to the ghosts again, here in the music room. Dare them to haunt you. See what happens.”
“You first,” she said, but the words didn’t come out bossy and vain. They came out as a whisper.
Poppy hugged her arms across her chest and didn’t look me in the eye.
“Well, you should at least go upstairs and lie down on the bed. That’s the way it’s done. Piano keys. Bed.” I reached out my hand. She hesitated. I wiggled my fingers. “I’ll go with you.”
Out into the hall, up
the stairs, first door on the right. The master bedroom. Seven black suits in the wardrobe. Two wooden nightstands. White radiator. A dusty tie on a dusty walnut dresser. And the bed, sheets still tucked in, covers still pulled up, even after all of us kids had been on it through the years. The striped black-and-gold quilt was spitting out stuffing from where the rats had gotten into it, but you could still tell it was silk. Still see the Made in Paris, France, tag when you flipped over the bottom right corner.
“Lie down on it.” I’d never ordered Poppy to do anything before. Not once. Not ever. But she obeyed.
Her body slid across the silk, stretched out, hands and feet to the corners, blond hair spreading out beneath her head, like a girl about to be sacrificed, like the girl in one of Wink’s hayloft stories, like Norah in Sea and Burn, stripped and chained to the rock, blond hair blowing in the wind, feet bare in the cold, waiting for dawn, waiting for the scaly beast to come out of the cave, and burn her alive. . .
Wink was having an effect on me.
I never used to think like this.
And I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not.
I went over to Poppy.
I kissed the soft, translucent skin on the inside of her wrists.
My lips followed the blue veins as they ran toward her elbows.
Poppy sucked in her breath . . . held it . . .
And then burst out of my arms. She ran toward the door, and stood there, shivering, shoulders shaking and her chin trembling.
Her body slid down the doorframe until she was crouching, her bare knees popping out of her black skirt, her hands on her cheeks.
A knock on the door.
We both jerked.
She looked up at me.
“Go to the music room and hide,” I whispered. “At least until I’m done tying her up. All right?”
Poppy nodded and left, though she didn’t look happy about it.
It had been her idea to do this, to come here at night, to a place of ghosts and unforgivables. And so I wasn’t going to feel bad for her.
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