by Skye Allen
I bit down on my cheeks and waited for that news to sink in. Margaret was murdered. I already knew that. Did it really matter how, or who did the killing? Did it matter that whoever killed her was a fairy, or whatever, that it was something not human? I wasn’t sure. “Okay. Okay. That’s extremely creepy, but okay. But why Margaret? Weren’t there other, um, humans like her?”
“There have been, sometimes. Not often. You don’t know how special your sister was,” Nicky said. That didn’t help me. I didn’t like the feeling that she and Blossom knew more about Margaret than I did.
Blossom was peering into my face like I was an apple she was checking for spots. Her soft eyes squinted, and her expression made her look like an old woman.
“What?” I said. Both Nicky and Blossom were acting like they expected me to say something.
“The mortal harvest is not complete,” Blossom said, as if the words were on a string in her stomach and someone else was pulling them up out of her throat. “The Woodcutter has to kill three mortals. If he succeeds, so does the Winter Queen. The Summer territory she seeks will be forfeit. We will all, all the fey realm and all the mortals in our protection, be her subjects.”
“So two more people are in trouble? What’s the deal with that? Can’t you guys cast a spell or something to make sure they don’t get killed?”
“The Winter Queen would have ordered the Woodcutter to target someone he loved as a test of his loyalty. Whoever he chose first, the next victims will be tied to that person,” Blossom said.
I must have looked stupid because she added, “The Fair Folk are more faded than we thought, if mortal children don’t know the old stories. Three girls who wish to marry the same handsome prince…?”
“Sure, like Cinderella and her… stepsisters. Her sisters. Oh.” I twisted my Margaret bracelet. “So Laura and I are next.” Goddammit, my life was already hard enough. I let that thought drift through me for a second with a promise that I would slide into self-pity later. “Um. What’s he—what’s going to happen to us?” I thought about Laura, home alone right now and making so much noise she wouldn’t hear a truck if it crashed into the house. Please, for once, don’t be an idiot. Please have locked the door.
“The first thing that’s going to happen is that the Summer Court is going to protect you,” Nicky said, and her voice was hard. Her hand whitened into a fist at her side where it had been resting loose on the damp skin of the log.
“The Lady is good for her word.” Blossom spoke to Nicky, not to me, and her tone said this was an old argument between them.
A high trumpet note rang out, stopped, rang again. Blossom brushed grass from her dress and said, “That’s me. Sweet thing, we will talk later.” She kissed my cheek—a puff of that sharp cooking herb brushed my skin again—and was gone.
“What was that sound?” I asked Nicky.
“It means the Court has arrived. Come on, we all have to be there.”
“Even me?” I looked down at the grass stains on my high-tops, my chipped black nail polish, the sagging place in my hem where I’d sewn in two ecstasy tabs before going to a party last spring.
“The Lady wants to meet you,” she said. I took her outstretched hand, and a warm sensation melted down through me.
Chapter 3
A GROUP of fey was gathered beside the stand of bushy trees. A gnome stood hip height to a slim creature with veiny black wings, offering it a pipe. A cluster of little girls played ring-around-the-rosy around a maple sapling. When we got closer, I saw their eyes, completely silver with no whites at all. I looked around for the trumpet player and finally saw a man with an enormous belly and a tiny silver cornet grasped in his fists. His eyes were squeezed shut as he blew another fanfare, and when he opened them I saw they were round, dark, with whites. Human eyes. “Is he a—one of them?” I whispered to Nicky.
“He’s a musician.” As if that explained anything. I thought about Laura, back home under the spell of the complete works of Chopin. She’d fit right in here. I was the one who didn’t belong. What do these people want with me? Why didn’t they bring Laura here?
And then a hush fell. Everything near me inhaled at once. I looked up to where they were all looking.
Three figures stood on a rise of ground near the trees. In the middle, taller than the others, was a full-figured woman wearing a shimmery dress the color of a ripe persimmon. She could belong to any continent, with brown skin over high cheekbones and a fall of glossy black hair. But nothing about her felt human. Her dark eyes swept the crowd, and her lips curved in a distant smile as she lifted one hand. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I felt a craving that was beyond hunger or sex, a buzzing in my skin to be near her, breathe her breath. As she turned her face in my direction, I saw a puckered scar in the hollow of her cheek.
“The Summer Queen,” Nicky whispered.
“What happened to her face?” I asked. Nicky shushed me and covered my wrist with her hand to restrain me. I didn’t move my arm. Her fingers stayed where they were, barely touching my skin, and I felt each individual fingertip like a hot coin.
The Queen’s attendants were Blossom and a boy who was shaking curly hair out of a motorcycle helmet held in one green-gloved hand. When I saw his face, with its wide-set eyes and heavy brows, I thought I know that guy, but I couldn’t remember from where.
The Queen spoke to the crowd then, in a voice that tasted like ripe berries and settled on my skin like sunlight. I tried to focus on her words, but my mind slipped out from under me. Then her glittering eyes rested on me. “But we have a guest among us,” she said, and I realized she had not been speaking English until then. “I am pleased you have come, Josephine Grant.” She beckoned, and I stepped forward through the parted bodies. Don’t stumble.
“You have taken refreshment?” she asked when I was closer. She sank down onto a bench under the waving willow branches, and I smelled almond as she moved. She drew me down beside her.
“Nicky gave me a peach.” I was conscious of my greasy home-dyed hair and the hole in the ankle of my tights, held closed with a Hello Kitty Band-Aid.
She laughed, a flock of nightingales. “That is well. Be welcome always to our bounty, charming mortal.” As she said it, she brushed my cheek with the blade of her hand, and I felt a sensation like the cells there had rearranged themselves. I touched the place she had touched when her hand was gone. It felt like satin, not the normal unevenness of skin.
She spoke again: “My people owe a debt to your kin. Your sister, whom we loved as one of our own, was taken from all of us. The burden of your grief is mine.”
People had been saying things like that to me for almost six months, and I still didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t say anything.
“Lovely child, it would please me if you were bound to this Realm,” she said.
Bound? “I don’t understand,” I said. My restless fingers found a frayed place on my jacket hem.
“You fear for your sister. The blood of the Fair Folk will protect you and your kin from harm,” she went on, and I was nodding before I understood. She made a beckoning gesture with one smooth hand, and Motorcycle Boy stepped forward. Balanced on one hand was a painted tray that held a two-handled silver cup. With his other hand he offered the Lady the gleaming handle of a knife. “In exchange, your fate will be our fate.”
My stomach roller-coastered toward my knees. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I didn’t like being so close to that knife. The silver blade was not quite as long as my hand, and from here I could see the edge go hair-thin and disappear. In the Lady’s dark fingers, the curved handle was the color of old piano keys. It’s bone, I thought, and a deep shudder started in my belly and rippled out to my hair.
The Lady pressed the edge of the blade to her thin lips and sliced downward. A sharp look darted across her features.
Then she took the cup from Motorcycle Boy and drank, veined eyelids closed. A long breath escaped her glistening mouth before she opened her eyes.
She held the cup out to me, with her eyes first on her hands, then on my face.
Drink, she was urging wordlessly. The clear liquid in the shallow bowl was threaded with red.
I didn’t touch the cup. Acid shot up my throat, and I swallowed dryness as my hands went damp. This was a nightmare. “Oh. No,” I stammered. “No, I thought—can’t I—do I have to drink that? No. I can’t.”
“Three times refused.” The Lady’s voice was glass. For a second her face no longer resembled anything human at all. Her features were hardened, all personality burned out by fury. Then she brought the cup down onto the tray, much too fast, and a chiming clatter rang out. All around us, fey creatures sucked in their breath and stepped back. I heard the sliding clink of metal, and when I looked away from the Lady, I saw a gnome gripping a long blade.
I’m all alone here. And there’s no way out.
“You choose not to receive my favor and become one of my company. Very well,” she said, and I felt more than heard the collective exhale as the crowd stepped back. So that’s it? She’s just going to let me go? I was confused.
The Lady’s face was a calm lake now. She gestured with a creamy arm, and then Nicky was there. She stood in her linen shirt with her fingers full of silver rings, holding out a hand for me to step down, and for that one second I knew what it felt like to be the prom queen. “Stay and be diverted by our entertainments,” the Lady said over her bare shoulder as she turned away. It was a dismissal. Blossom and Motorcycle Boy closed ranks behind her.
“What was that about?” I asked Nicky. She led me to the edge of the circle that had formed, where the trumpet player was trading solos with a squat gnome who stood on a stool to reach the frets on his stand-up bass. A girl with pin-straight white hair perched on an invisible chair to play a tiny accordion.
Nicky didn’t answer until we were settled on the grass. “The binding—if you’d drunk from the cup—it would have protected you and your sister. Made you one of us, for a while, so you could call on the Lady’s forces for help.”
“But they already don’t want this Woodcutter guy to get us. So why even try to get me to drink that if you would have protected us anyway for your own good? That was the whole point of bringing me here, right?” I should feel more resentful than I did. I was curious now. And I still needed to know more about the Woodcutter.
She threw her dark head back. “The rumors are true. You are swift.” When I stared at her, she sighed and went on, “All right. You remember how the Lady said your fate would be our fate?”
“Yeah.”
“You are remarkable,” she said to herself. Then to me: “If you were bound to the Realm—because you’re a mortal—that could change the balance between Summer and Winter. Shift the fight in our favor.”
“Really not getting this.”
“I don’t know if there’s a way to explain it that will make us seem anything other than conniving. What’s special about mortals?”
“Uh, opposable thumbs? The Internet?”
“It’s mortality. The Fair Folk don’t die, not naturally, not of old age or sickness. And it is notoriously difficult to kill us.” She spoke like she was thinking about an old hurt. I wondered what it was.
“So you live forever.” I let that staggering thought unspool. How old was this girl?
“It is one of the differences between us and mortals, yes.”
“So you guys do fight battles or whatever, but it’s hard to kill you.”
“Yes.”
“So if you have a pet mortal and my fate is your fate, that makes it easier to kill you?”
“Got it in one,” she said softly, poking me in the knee with a knuckle.
“But why does that give you guys an edge?”
“There’s more to it than I can explain easily. But it means, essentially, that we are serious. It’s a statement to our enemy that we mean business. And—we are one people, the Winter Folk and the Summer Folk. So the same rules apply to both sides.” She watched my face, trying to see if I understood.
“So this time, for whatever reason, you’re ready to die. You and the bad guys. And for that you need me.”
She nodded. “There is another part to it. The Lady needs a mortal who is willing to be bound to the Faerie Realm for the binding to work. And you, for all your advantages, were not.”
“She sure seemed to think it wouldn’t be a problem. Does she get a lot of humans to just drink her blood whenever it strikes her fancy?” I sounded angry. I knew it. But I was confused, and I felt trapped here, and the more I found out about this place, the scarier it got. “And what do you mean, advantages?”
“Aside from your obvious charms”—and she swept me with her eyes from collar to high-tops and flashed a wicked grin—“you’re the youngest sister of Pretty Peg.”
I had more questions, but I still hadn’t gotten the real answer I came for. “So—now there’s no help for me and Laura? We’re on our own?”
She brushed dirt off her pants. They were peat brown, not black like I’d thought back at the theater. The thorny vine tattoo stood out sharp black on the light brown of her wrist. “It may not be the worst thing in the world to have a servant of the Summer Court and its interests on hand.” She looked up, and her face was serious, eyes steady on mine. “You see, the Lady could tell I would find a reason to be where you are, whether you are bound to us or not.”
Oh. Was she making fun of me? What I’d said to Neil had been the truth: a girl like her was way out of my league.
But her bottom lip was trapped by her teeth, and her head was cocked to one side. Like she’d just asked me to dance, and she was waiting for an answer.
“What about Laura?” I said while I could still think clearly.
Nicky nodded once and said, “That’s the best part. Your sister is a musician, a student, right?”
That question came out of nowhere. “She just started at the conservatory, yeah. She has a new teacher she keeps on raving about.”
“Smallish guy, always wears a hat?” Her mouth quirked up, and tiny parentheses framed it. I touched the corner of my own mouth to feel if mine did the same thing.
“She does say he—what?”
“Dwarf. One fierce in his loyalty to the Lady, and for a dwarf that is saying a lot. He’s one of her own guard. Like the Secret Service for the Summer Court.”
I tried to picture one of the mushroom men I’d seen earlier as a teacher at the most exclusive music school on the West Coast. “No way.”
“Musicians have natural ties to our world. We hardly need to do anything for them to… be suggestible. Laura would hardly ever be very far from her teacher, would that be true?”
“Two lessons a week, and she’s at school every day, even the weekends most of the time. She said he actually came over the other day. I was at school.”
“Then everything that can be done for her is done. Hill would have put a protective spell on your house. And I imagine she has something of his that she carries with her…?”
“Ha. That stupid Julliard tote bag. I have a feeling she even sleeps with it.”
“Then she is as safe as the Lady’s guard can make her.” She said it with such conviction that I felt my ribcage going slack with relief.
“Are those fireflies?” I asked, pointing at the winking lights that seemed to go out when I looked directly at them. I heard the violin from before, scraping out a slow tune that ached with anticipation.
She twisted to look up from where she was lying on her stomach with her chin on her folded-up coat. “Will-o-the-wisps. They’ll lead travelers into swamps, drown them.”
“Some of these Folk seem dangerous.” The bass player entered the tune with notes plucked so low I could feel rather than hear them.
“You have no idea.” She held my gaze as she drew herself up to her knees. Her face was so close I could make out faint freckles barely darker than her skin. My own skin suddenly felt too tight, as if my lungs were actually going to break out of
my chest.
She leaned in so that our shirts touched, then our bellies, then just like that her mouth was on mine, and I felt the whole area between my legs melt. I don’t kiss girls I’ve just met. I’d hardly ever kissed anyone, and only one girl. This was different, natural, urgent. I shifted my legs for better balance as her hand slid up under my jacket. Her fingertips pressed individual vertebrae.
A faint voice in my mind told me people were watching. I didn’t care. My clothes felt incidental, like tissue-paper barriers. She tasted like cinnamon and cigarette smoke. Her tongue was soft, and with every touch stars shot down through my body. This could go beyond kissing. Tonight. Do I want this?
I opened my eyes and saw over her shoulder that other couples were also kissing. The twig boy was sitting on the ground under a peach tree entwined with a plump girl, both swaying to the music. She pulled back from his thin arms, and I saw white cat-scratch welts reddening across her cleavage. She laughed an openmouthed laugh that showed a double row of pointed teeth, then pushed the boy’s head down to her chest to lick the scratches. Something’s going on, the tiny voice in my head said, but it was too late. My body was rushing ahead. Nicky’s hands were burning through my tights where she was slowly pushing up my skirt. An urgent sound escaped my throat before I could stop it.
The music slowed to a glittering ritard and lifted into silence, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the Queen’s motorcycle boy step into the center of the circle. Nicky’s hand slid down my forearm and rested on her thigh. She was still almost close enough to brush against, but we’d stopped kissing. I took stock of myself and realized that the fever had broken. I adjusted my skirt and looked down to hide my embarrassment.
I just made out with a girl I barely knew. Where did that come from? Does she think I do that all the time?
