Pretty Peg

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Pretty Peg Page 12

by Skye Allen


  Mom didn’t know that Margaret had clued in Laura and me long before then. I’d hated Mom then for calling him Bobby. He wasn’t a child. He was old enough to fuck everything up! That was what I’d yelled at Mom that day.

  Now I wondered what had changed in Afghanistan for Margaret, that she actually wanted to see him. Did she know that her life was about to end? If she was all tangled up in this fey thing, she might have. What would she have wanted to say to Robert? Why would she ever want to see our brother again?

  I wondered what I would do in that situation. What I was going to do, now that I was pretty much in it. After all, I only had until Sunday. Me and Laura both.

  Margaret had known her life was going to end, and what she’d picked was reconciliation. She’d reached out to Robert as one of her last acts. I wondered if I’d be that brave. Or that generous. I doubted it.

  I hurried to the car, shading my eyes from the harsh light that glanced off all the shiny surfaces in the parking lot. As soon as we were buckled in, Neil said, “Shit. We came all this way, and what do we have?” There was already a skinny brown cigarette in his mouth. He wouldn’t light it in the car, but he liked to have one handy as a prop.

  “Nada.” I felt withered, like the adrenaline of the morning had scoured out my insides and left nothing but empty skin. Drained.

  “He fixed my hand. Like it was, I don’t know, blowing out a birthday candle.” He traced the place below his knuckles where the deep red mark had been.

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Nothing. Like my blood all rushed to that one spot, you know? But I really didn’t feel anything. I wouldn’t have believed—I mean, he can just do that?”

  I nodded and chipped with my thumbnail at a banana sticker that was stuck to the glove box. My mind was too full to speak.

  “So we know it wasn’t him,” Neil said in a brisk, new voice.

  “He says.” I laid my head back and watched the glass-fronted clinic recede as Neil reversed out of the parking lot and pulled back onto the street.

  “Don’t be paranoid. I’m the one who’s paranoid,” he said. I felt a deep wave of love for Neil then. He had come all the way to Kern County with me. Risked disappointing his mother, which was so much worse than making her angry. Gotten his hand broken. He could have been killed if we’d actually met the Woodcutter today, and he took it all in stride. I didn’t deserve him.

  He went on, “There’s a conspiracy among Doctors Without Borders people everywhere.” Neil did a good deadpan, but his tell was the way he compressed his lips. I punched him lightly, then gasped out a “Sorry!” when I remembered his hand.

  “Ow, ow! I need an emergency transfusion from In-N-Out!” He waved the unlit cigarette around, and I tried to remember if that was the hand that had been broken just minutes ago. “Kidding. But serious. And fries and onion rings.”

  “She saw Robert,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “I wondered what you thought about that. God. She was a brave one,” he said. Neil and I had been friends since sixth grade. He knew all about the Grant family skeletons.

  “A better person than me, anyway.” I thought about my oldest sister, who had never let me and Laura make fun of Mom for being the way she was and who wanted to be a doctor so she could help people in a country like Afghanistan. I can’t fix it all, but I don’t have to be part of the problem, she’d told us.

  “It’s easy to let dead people be all good,” Neil said. We’d had this conversation before too. “But we’re alive. We might not have a plan anymore, but….”

  “I didn’t even really know what I would have done today, if Jerome had been the Woodcutter. What the hell do we do now?” I was frustrated, and now that the adrenaline of the morning was draining out of me, I felt the weight of my exhaustion.

  “We get breakfast. No more scheming until In-N-Out,” he said, and the old car chugged up the on-ramp to Highway 5.

  Chapter 7

  NEIL DROPPED me off at home late that afternoon. I sat down on the bed to take off my shoes and woke up hours later in the dark to the tinkly sound of Laura playing the harpsichord. No. That couldn’t be right. The sound was too close to my ear, and we didn’t have a harpsichord, did we? I scrubbed my eyes with my palms to wake up. There was a fresh smell in my closed bedroom, like the smell of cold forest. Fairies, my body said.

  Blue light glowed in one corner of the room. I had two layers of curtains on my window. I could never sleep unless it was completely dark in my room. My stuffed leopard protected me from the lights on my alarm clock. So there shouldn’t be anything flickering blue like that in here.

  The light was coming from the puppet theater. I crept toward it, blinking from the brightness. Mirror ball shadows were leaping up the walls of the little box. And the sound was coming from there too, tinny music-box notes that sounded demented, like the melodies from two different songs.

  My vision cleared, and I could see the source: a glass sphere that held a tiny carousel. Thimble-sized animals rose and fell on slender poles, mounted on a track that made them chase each other in a circle. A snarling wolf with curved fangs, a dense coil of snake whose chiseled eyes glinted, an insect whose arched carapace was pierced by the pole. When the jagged poles moved up and down, pale lights drifted to the floor. It was like an impossibly detailed snow globe. The twisted little song played as the mechanism spun by itself.

  And in the center, in a glass pillar no bigger around than a pencil, was a girl with long hair. Trapped. I couldn’t see her expression.

  I picked the thing up. It was slightly bigger than my palm and heavier than it looked. The bottom was smooth metal.

  It could be run on batteries, but this was the puppet theater, the place where the fey world seemed to send me messages. I wondered exactly how that was happening. I tried not to think about a real person coming into my room while I was sleeping. I would like it better if it was some kind of remote-control magic, not that I liked that idea very much either. The next time I saw a fairy, I was going to get to the bottom of this.

  I set the heavy object down and watched, mesmerized, as the tiny snake seemed to hiss at a winged thing that was not a bird and not a woman, with its face fixed in a shriek. And it dawned on me that I recognized the tune it was playing. It wasn’t two different melodies. It was one of Laura’s pieces: Ives’s Concord Sonata. She had played it in a competition last winter.

  Snow globe. Winter. And a girl in a cage. Could this be a message from the Winter Court? My skin prickled as I thought about that. All I’d ever seen in the puppet theater was the Grant family puppets. This was new. The toy theater, Nicky had called it. If the Summer Folk knew about it, then the Winter Folk must too.

  And it was up to me to figure out what the message was.

  The Winter Court’s next victim was Laura. I went from barely awake to fully alert, with my head full of one thought: They have her.

  I was still dressed in the same jeans and tank top I’d worn to Shelton. I crept to Laura’s bedroom door, dark and ajar. The room was empty.

  I ran to the front window: the car was in the driveway. I tried to recall if it had been there when Neil dropped me off today, but I couldn’t.

  So she had come home, but she wasn’t here now.

  I looked around for my sneakers and found one under the dresser where the puppet theater sat. I poked the little globe and willed the creepy circus music to stop before it drove me crazy.

  I switched on my bedside lamp and fumbled in the drawer for my phone. I called Laura and got her voice mail. The panic in my belly started up my throat. I had to go look for her.

  I wanted Neil to come with me. I felt like a coward, but I didn’t want to be alone. I typed a text—can you talk?—and when I pressed Send I noticed the time: 8:27 p.m. I’d thought it was the middle of the night. Today was—I actually had to count the nights on my fingers—Thursday.

  nope. grounded, Neil’s text shot back. And a second later: and babysitting.

 
Crap. Now I do have to go alone. I called him anyway, not sure what I was thinking, since I couldn’t tell him where I was going or he’d try to come. “Grounded means no talking on the phone” was his hello.

  “Ariela won’t rat you out. And your mom’s not home, right?”

  “She has a church thing.” There was hesitation in his voice.

  “You mean she’s chairing another PFLAG meeting because she’s so proud of her big gay son.” I was picking up my bag to get ready to leave the house, and I leaned past the little mirror on my dresser. My reflection looked bitchy when I said that. Bitchy and with a tassel from my quilt stamped into one puffy white cheek. I was a blowfish.

  “Don’t be like that. She’s still mad I took the car. You’re not gonna go back out and do something stupid, right?” Neil said.

  “Nah.” I bit back the feeling under my light tone, the jealousy about moms who baked brownies for the It Gets Better bake sale instead of pinching their faces in and demanding to know if I’d already had sex with a girl or if this whole gay thing was still at the theory stage.

  And the other jealousy, the one I couldn’t talk to Neil about at all. His mom was around to ground him. When my mom was here, I could have hosted raves in this house seven nights a week once the Percocet-Valium-Percocet sandwich took effect. She’d sleep right through the splashiest noise Laura could bang out of the keyboard. Sometimes it was the silence that woke her up. She’d struggle up out of her nest of afghans, and once I heard her say “That was pretty, honey” to an empty living room, long after Laura had gone to bed.

  I swallowed those poisonous thoughts. They weren’t doing me any good. And I had to get to the Winter Court now, tonight, or Mom would never get another chance to fall asleep listening to Laura play the piano. “So… your hand is okay?” I headed for the kitchen to leave a note for Laura on the fridge, in case I was wrong and she was out with her friends. But she wasn’t. My gut knew she wasn’t.

  “Yeah, it’s weird, there’s not even a bruise. Seriously. She will call just to make sure I’m not on the phone. So, lunch tomorrow? Can we schemey-scheme then?” he said.

  “What, you mean at school? We’re way too important for school now. We have big jobs rescuing damsels.”

  “You know how Mom makes tamales when she feels guilty for punishing me.”

  “I get tamales? With the little corn kernels and the tomatillo stuff?”

  “Yeah, but only if I—shit, the landline. I’ll message you. Stay home tonight.”

  “Go!” I said and hung up so he wouldn’t get caught.

  “I’m going to go to the Winter Court,” I said to the silent red phone in my hand. “And I’m going to get Laura back. Somehow.” I stopped. That was it, my whole plan. I had no clue what came next. How to get there. What to do when I got there. How to get Laura out.

  I looked around for provisions for my trip to the underworld. A banana would just get mushy. I took a sleek red-and-green Braeburn out of the fruit bowl Mom had filled up on Saturday. She’d left on Sunday. Now it was Thursday, and if I didn’t do something, another one of her daughters was going to get killed. Did they have apples and bananas in India? I ran my knuckle along the stiff spines of a pineapple and let myself wish for one hard moment that none of this was happening, that Mom was home, that the only danger Laura faced was losing the first-year San Francisco Conservatory concerto competition. Oh, Mom. I’m sorry you couldn’t trust me to keep the household together.

  I speed-walked across the living room, hearing the unfamiliar electronic hum and tick of an empty house with no piano being played. Don’t get used to it, house. She’s going to be making that awful racket for years around here. I thought that, but I still texted Laura: where r u? I wanted her to bark back that she was at rehearsal, dummy. But my phone stayed dark.

  I pulled on my yellow high-tops and the green hoodie I’d shrugged off sometime during my nap. I slung my messenger bag across my chest and dove a hand in to make sure my keys were in the inside pocket as I headed to the front door.

  They weren’t there. Shit. I ducked back into my room and tripped over Dad’s coat, lying where I’d dropped it on the floor earlier. The keys weren’t in the coat pockets. I felt along the lining on the ripped-pocket side. I came home, I fell into bed, I got up because the freaky snow globe was going around and around… but it might have been the noise that woke me up, that spooky burlesque music. My room was silent now. I picked up the fey ornament again and turned it around and around, looking for a power switch. The globe felt the way I imagined a gun would, cold and too heavy for its size.

  Go on, weird music, I thought at the thing, and the music swung up into life like a cartoon Victrola as the leaden menagerie started to slowly rotate again around the center pole that was now flickering blue.

  Holy crap. Go off. And the sound and light and movement died.

  It was responding to my thoughts. It couldn’t be. But it was.

  I turned toward the bedside lamp and directed a thought at it: On. Nothing happened. What about the puppets? Move, I told them silently. The four-inch paper Margaret and the blue horse were motionless. The cluster of planets and charms strung across the top on fishing wire didn’t sway.

  Then what was happening? I set the globe back down on the cracked surface of the puppet theater stage floor where I’d found it. Go on. This time it remained inert. Did I have to be touching it for the magic to work? I thought about the Summer Queen, remembered the pressure of her mouth on mine and the feeling that something in me was awake now, like a whole new sense I’d never heard of was tendriling out from my spine. Was that magic?

  I picked up the globe again. On. It came on. So I did have to be touching it. Off. I found my iPod buttoned into the side pocket of the corduroy jacket I’d worn to school last and cupped it in my hands and thought On, but the little screen stayed black. Did it only work on fey things?

  Neil’s not going to believe this. My hand hovered over my phone, but I couldn’t get him into trouble again.

  I thought back over everything that had happened since that sunset at Tilden Park yesterday. Had I wished anything on or off in the past twenty-four hours? What if I accidentally caused a power outage or something? But no, whatever this was, it didn’t work on electronics. I touched my phone again to be sure and concentrated on the thought Off. The Swedish Chef picture Neil had loaded onto the screen didn’t even flicker.

  Fey power. That’s what this is. It must only work on fey things. I kept my hands out from my sides like I’d just painted my nails. I didn’t want to brush against anything. The Queen of Faerie kissed me, and now I have magic power. That thought would have thrilled me when I was eight or nine, but now, knowing what the fey world was really like, I just felt frightened.

  My keys turned out to be on the floor under Dad’s coat. The night felt haunted when I stepped out the front door. Not cold, but breezy and wild. There was a smell on the air that wasn’t quite woodsmoke, but something spicier and wetter. I didn’t know where I was going, but I figured if I headed in the direction of Flea, I’d get a better idea of my bearings along the way. For the millionth time this week, I wished for a fey search engine. Google Maps for the fairy underworld. Or just a GPS chip in my sister.

  Maybe Flea was the wrong guess. I’d been there with fairies, Nicky and Timothy and the Summer Queen, but was it in the Realm at all? Should I walk up toward Indian Rock again? From what I knew about the fey, they liked wild places: the woods, the meadow Nicky led me to from under the school.

  I stepped on the rough ground of a vacant lot, just one step onto a patch where the pavement was eaten by tough flowering weeds.

  And the world went out like a switch had been thrown.

  It took me several seconds to realize I wasn’t unconscious—I just couldn’t see. Okay, okay, do not freak. I tried to fight off the panic by breathing out on an ffff slowly, top teeth on my bottom lip like Laura taught me, her trick for stage fright. It didn’t help. But when I inhaled I felt som
ething surrounding me, not touching my face but near enough to almost hear and almost feel. Something like fabric or—and it brushed my neck with a cold breath, and I knew it was metal. Chain mail, I thought irrationally. It didn’t feel any heavier than cheesecloth.

  “Hey!” My voice came out like a sleep scream, barely audible. I sucked in air to yell louder and tasted aluminum. The metal fabric feathered against my bottom lip, and then I felt it everywhere on my face, like fine hairs. It must be some kind of hood. My head felt huge, a hot-air balloon. I forced myself to remember the rest of my body and swung my hips to get myself to move. Self-defense class taught you to move instead of freezing. Shout—it didn’t matter what words. Don’t be a target.

  I tried to jerk my arms out from my sides. They wouldn’t move.

  “Ssshh,” breathed a male voice at my temple. I felt hot breath in my hair. Something gripped my upper arms and lifted my body off the ground. I still couldn’t see. The hands dropped my arms, but I couldn’t move them.

  I tried again to yell and managed a feeble “Hey.” I cleared my throat. Breathe in. Breathe out. My belly felt like it was full of gravel. My mind raced through the worst that could happen and landed on Margaret’s body, curled around the unnatural empty space where her heart should have been.

  A sharp whimper escaped my mouth. This could have been how she was kidnapped too. How her last hour started. This guy could be the Woodcutter. Oh my God, it’s all going to be over tonight. Did he already get Laura? Where is she now?

  My hair was yanked back, and I felt the chain-mail hood slide up off my face. I was blind again, this time with brightness. A different voice spoke. “Josephine Grant. You received my message.”

  The voice sounded farther away than whoever had whispered in my ear, and like it belonged to a woman. I swiveled my head toward the sound and felt my eyes start to adjust to the light: it was from candles set at uneven heights in a rough rectangle the size of a large room, with flames that were an unnatural powder white. Everything behind them was black and empty. A breeze on my face told me there must be an open door somewhere.

 

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