A skeleton.
A dead man pierced with swords.
A cloaked figure, five gold goblets.
Two dogs howling at the moon.
A heart with three daggers, sunk to the hilt.
“Yes,” Mim said quietly.
I didn’t know what the cards meant, or what Mim saw in them, but there was sadness blazing in her Wink-green eyes.
“The cards could be wrong,” I said.
“Maybe.” Mim swept up the cards with one hand and put them back in her pocket. She turned to the glass jars and the dream balm, paused, and then looked at me over her shoulder. “Right or wrong, Wink believes them. And that changes everything.”
I FOUND WINK in the hayloft. The Orphans were put to bed at midnight and then it was just the two of us and a blanket on the hay and the moon shining in. We talked for hours. All truth, no fairy tales.
I was almost asleep when she kissed me. She kissed my neck and my chin and my ears and everything in between. She unbuttoned my shirt and I unbuttoned her strawberry overalls. She wrapped her bare arms around me and gripped my back, hard, and I swear I could feel her freckles pressing into my skin, every last one of them.
She didn’t arch her spine or flip her hair.
I pulled away. I looked at her, and she smiled. She smiled right into me—I felt it echo in my ribs, like a shout, like a deep, deep sigh.
Her body curved into mine, chest to chest, my face in her hair.
“Wink,” I whispered, sometime close to dawn, everything quiet but the sky still black. “Wink.”
I put my palm against her heart and waited for it to beat. And beat. And beat.
She squirmed and looked up at me. And I could see it in her eyes. She knew.
“Mim read my cards for you.”
I nodded.
I felt her shrug, her skin moving against mine.
“My heart might have two billion beats left in it, or two hundred.” She sighed. “But it doesn’t matter that much. It doesn’t. I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That’s how I would conquer it, conquer death.”
She sighed again, and nestled closer into me. “All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee’s hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.”
I SAW THE white stag on the way home. He was standing by the apple trees, gleaming like he was made of starlight. He took one long look at me and then bounded off into the dark.
I closed my eyes and made a wish.
THE END OF the summer.
The end of this story.
I kept my promise to Poppy.
I sent for Leaf.
I mailed a letter west, to California, to a cabin in the Red Woods.
Leaf followed his own beat and listened to no one. I didn’t know if my letter would work. Part of me wished I could ask the birds to fetch him, snatch him in their claws and carry him through the sky like Andrew in The Raven War. But part of me also hoped that Leaf would just come back on his own, because I asked him to.
The coyote knew he’d returned before I did. I saw him at the edge of the forest, watching the Roman Luck path. Leaf smiled when he saw the both of us waiting for him, the coyote and me.
Later, after he’d hugged Mim and Bee Lee and let Felix introduce his girlfriend and played Follow the Screams with the twins and Peach . . . he went to her. I left them alone for a while, but in the end I had to see. I snuck over to the Gold Apple Mine, hiding in the shadows like I used to. They were there, sitting by the creek, watching the setting sun, shoulder to shoulder, blond and red.
LEAF.
“So this is how you live now?” he asked.
I felt his eyes on me, on my back, cutting through my clothes, scorching my skin.
I looked at him over my shoulder. He was leaning against the doorframe of the old Gold Apple Mine, red hair and freckles and bony limbs, watching me start a fire. I smiled, a real Poppy smile, not any of those fake smiles I’d been using for so many years.
“Yes,” I said. “I figured it out. I figured myself out.”
Leaf laughed. He laughed, deep and bright, like he’d never done before, not with me anyway.
“Prove it,” he said.
And I did.
I WAS READING by the apple trees, bare feet in the green grass, when I heard the rumble. I looked up. Black clouds rolling in.
The hayloft was the place for thunderstorms. Wink and I liked to listen to the rain beat on the roof, watch lightning buzz across the sky.
I took my time, walking over to the barn, stopping to watch the clouds, letting the thunder boom straight into my heart.
I climbed up the ladder, stuck my head through the opening, and there she was, sitting on the hay, eating strawberries from a green bowl with one hand, and turning the pages of a book with the other. She was alone. The Orphans must have been off in the woods, playing one of their Orphan games.
I opened my mouth to call out to her—
And I saw the cover of the book.
A boy with a sword at his side. Standing on a hill. Facing a dark, stone castle. Grim-looking mountains in the background.
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
I climbed back down the ladder, quiet.
I walked home.
I went straight up to the attic.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I want to fly to France to see Mom and Alabama.”
He looked up. He didn’t smile, but his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Okay,” he said.
“And I want you to come with.”
“Okay,” he said again, just like that.
FRANCE.
I drank café au laits. I climbed castles. I walked in French moonlight along French riverbanks. I spent long afternoons with Mom and Alabama, sunshine and lavender-scented breezes and distant church bells and talking about Mom’s book.
I hadn’t said good-bye to Wink. Hadn’t written her a letter. Hadn’t called.
Silence.
I told Alabama. I told him everything. All of it. I wasn’t looking for his advice. I just wanted to share, like brothers do.
We sat in the courtyard behind our ancient stone house at the edge of Lourmarin. Mom was inside writing and Dad was at a book auction in Avignon. They went their separate ways during the day, but later . . . later we would all have a lazy al fresco dinner in the town square, and then a long walk together come twilight.
Alabama reached his brown arms up and tied his straight hair back, away from his face.
I thought about how little I looked like him. But I didn’t mind this time.
I told Alabama about my summer, about the Roman Luck house, the unforgivables, the tarot cards, The Thing in the Deep, and Wink. Wink, Wink, Wink. He didn’t say a word. Not until the very end.
His black eyes met mine. “You should have said good-bye.”
“I know.”
He didn’t say anything else for a while. We listened to the birds singing in the four nearby lemon trees, and drank espresso from two small, fat brown cups.
Eventually my brother gave a long, low whistle and shook his head. “Right now? That red-haired girl needs her fairy tales. You just gotta let her be, Midnight.”
I let that sink in. “Like how you’re just letting Talley Jasper be, you mean?”
Alabama grinned, slow and easy. “Exactly. We’ve got time, brother. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
I SAW A girl who looked like Wink that night. She was small, and her
long hair was straight, but red. Red, red, red. She was reading a book while walking two little black dogs in the trees near the chateau, at the edge of Lourmarin. It was dusk.
I pictured Wink in the girl’s black boots and saffron-yellow dress. I pictured Wink in the woods, blue shadows, gray fog, dark sky. The two dogs became the Witch Wolves, following at her heels, snarling and snapping at the air.
I closed my eyes . . .
And I was there suddenly, back in the Roman Luck woods.
Wink.
I wove my hands into her hair, and felt the thick curls tugging my fingers apart. The wolves growled, but I ignored them.
Wink kissed the inside of my wrists, right, then left.
I sighed.
She put her hand on my heart.
The wolves began to howl.
She looked up at me, green, green eyes.
“Good-bye, Midnight,” she said. “Good-bye for now.”
And then she and her wolves disappeared into the fog, going, going, gone.
I opened my eyes.
The French girl was watching me, watching as I just stood there in the trees with my eyes shut, dreaming about a red-haired girl a million miles away.
She smiled at me.
I smiled back.
EVERY STORY NEEDS a Hero.
The Hero of this story sat in a hayloft, surrounded by books. She pointed her pointy chin at the rafters and shouted out into the night. Her freckles danced across her cheeks like the stars danced across the sky.
The Hero found the boy in the woods. He had dark hair and two different-colored eyes. One blue, one green.
The Hero thought the boy might be the Villain.
Every story needs a Villain.
But . . .
But the boy was sitting by a small fire, and there was a lost look in his blue and green eyes.
The boy reminded the Hero of Thief . . . Thief, who used to sit beside his small fire and sing the old songs to keep his loneliness at bay.
The Hero sat down beside the boy. He started talking about his true love, the golden-haired girl he’d lost to a valiant warrior named the Red Knight.
The Hero had lost her true love too. He ran off in the night. He crossed an ocean and went to live in a place with trickster cats and enchanted princes and wives hung on walls by blue-bearded men.
The Hero talked to the boy all night long. They shared a crisp red apple and a mug of golden milk and a piece of gingerbread. And then, when dawn came, the boy packed up his tent, gave the Hero a smile—a solid, true one—and went home.
The Hero stood alone in the forest, red hair flowing down her back.
She held out her arms and felt the plump, sunrise breeze blow across her skin.
The Hero suddenly knew that this story wouldn’t be like all the other stories. There wouldn’t be swords, or monsters, or trials. There wouldn’t be riddles, or revenge, or resurrections.
But there would be redemption.
And love.
And life.
And ever after.
Acknowledgments
Jessica Garrison. Editor, friend.
Everyone at Dial and Penguin, especially Bri Lockhart, Kristin Smith, and Colleen Conway.
My inimitable agent, Joanna Volpe. Thanks for the tarot in New Orleans, and for liking the gypsy romp.
Klindt’s Booksellers.
Katharine Mary Briggs, queen of the fairy tales.
Mandy Buehrlen.
Kenny Brechner.
Nova Ren Suma.
Victoria Scott, for the circle of fire.
Megan Shepherd—what would I do without you?
Kendare Blake, for calling me the kitchen witch.
Alistair Cairns and Kelly Cannon-Miller, for skull-watching.
The Hicks kids.
Dad.
Nate.
About the Author
APRIL GENEVIEVE TUCHOLKE is the critically acclaimed author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Between the Spark and the Burn and curated the horror/thriller anthology Slasher Girls & Monster Boys. April has lived in many places around the world. She currently resides in Oregon with her husband.
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