Roses and Rot (36 page)

We walked though the booths, the sky still light enough that the fairy lights hung in the trees were dim against it. Time and again, I was ignored. Shoved aside, my foot stepped on by someone trying very hard to pretend I didn’t exist. The Fae knew. Somehow, they knew that I would try to keep Marin from them, from the tithe, and even if they couldn’t stand directly against me, they were under no obligation to make my life pleasant.

No gifts, no offered food or drink. Just lines of turned backs and deaf ears. Of accidental elbows and feet catching my heels. It got worse the longer we were there.

“This is kind of weird, right?” Ariel asked, after I got jolted hard enough to spill iced chocolate down the front of my shirt.

“It is. I think I’m going back home.”

“Do you mind if I stay? One of my friends is singing later, and I want to hear her.”

“Of course. Not like I can’t find my way home. And it will probably be better for you once I’m gone.”

Holding the hem of my shirt away from my body, I walked back through the people, the booths. The attention was a buzz in the back of my head, their eyes static electricity on my skin.

The same eyes, the same booths, the same people, even as I walked around and through. Even as I could see my way out. Could see it, but couldn’t walk to it. I couldn’t tell if the path was shifting under my feet, or if my feet couldn’t find their way. Either way, I was trapped.

Trapped in a sea of faces increasingly feral, increasingly Fae.

I sat on my heels, head in my hands.

“Imogen?”

Evan’s voice. Fabulous.

“What’s the matter?”

“They’re fucking with me, and I can’t leave.” I stood up, watched his eyes take in my ruined shirt, the rest of me, frazzled and worn.

“You’re going to break the tithe.”

I nodded.

“They can’t interfere with me. I can get you safely home.” He held out his hand.

So familiar. The warmth of it, the calluses and scars. It might almost have been a comfort, but for all that had passed between us. Still, I held on and we walked through the lights of the Market, now bright against the unrelieved darkness of the sky.

“Better?” he said, and it was, my brain no longer buzzing, my skin no longer feeling like it was crawling with ants.

“Thanks,” I said, pulling my hand out of his.

“You should check your library, when you get inside.”

“For what?”

“Fairy tales.”

“Seriously?” I stopped walking. “I’m not new here, Evan.”

“These will be more autobiographical in nature than the Grimms’.”

“Why are you helping me?”

“Because when I’m in Faerie now, I don’t see Tania anymore. I don’t feel grief over her. I see you. I feel the grief over what I did, the guilt, the regret. Because I want to make it up to you, or at least to show you I can be a better man than I was.”

For the first time since he had started apologizing, I believed him. “All right,” I said. “I’ll look.”

I went into the library even before changing out of my disgusting shirt. I didn’t even need to look for fairy tales—they were all piled up in a stack, where Ariel had left them in her hunt for some way that someone might have written about the Fae, the tithe, without making clear what they were saying.

I sorted through them, skimmed titles, and everything was familiar. Most of these I could have retold without looking. Knowing fairy tales hadn’t helped me before, and it probably wouldn’t now. But maybe it was Ariel who was right, not Evan—someone might have tried talking about what happened the last time the tithe was broken.

Not caring about the lateness of the hour, I made coffee, and went upstairs to work.

“You were right,” I told Ariel over breakfast the next morning.

“I usually am,” she said. “About what?”

“That people would try to talk about what happened here. The roommate of the woman who broke the tithe last time—she was pregnant, apparently, and not keen on her baby’s father being stolen away—she wrote a book.”

“And we had it in the library?”

“No, but I downloaded the ebook.
Seven Years Broken
, by Ellen Sherman. It’s full of symbolic language and metaphor, so I know I’m still missing things, but there’s enough there that with her connection to Melete, I know that’s what she’s talking about.”

“Does it tell you how to break the tithe?”

“The only thing I can figure out for sure is that I have to keep Marin from crossing the bridge that day. Which I’d pretty much gathered already from Thomas and Beth, but it’s nice to have the confirmation. But after—she talks about a land that sickens and almost dies. Magic fades from the world, and the shadow world that’s left behind makes lesser art. There’s a plague. Disaster after disaster, until someone offers themselves up as sacrifice to restore the balance.”

“Well, hell, Imogen, I’d spill chocolate on your shirt, too.”

“Two years after Ellen Sherman’s roommate rescued her boyfriend, the boyfriend’s mentor went missing. From here. He was never found.”

She shivered. “Do you think he went voluntarily, or . . . ?”

“I have no idea.”

“Does any of this change your mind? I mean, that is a lot of bad shit that could possibly happen.”

“No,” I said. “It’s Marin.”

It’s one of my oldest memories, still utterly clear. The night I got lost, and Marin rescued me. It should have been the other way around,
I know. I was the older sister—I was seven, Marin was five—so I should have been the one who was responsible, the one who did the rescuing.

But I wandered off from the family reunion, desperate to get away from the rowdiness of the drunk uncles, the shrieks of the cousins I saw too rarely to be friends with. I was never a child who could find my balance upon being thrown into a group. Too many new people made me feel small and awkward, as if I had been dressed up in all my flaws and strangenesses.

I didn’t want to play baseball, or whatever other team sport the kids, too young to drink and gossip, were being made to play. I wanted to read. So I took my book and walked into the park until it was quiet, until I could no longer hear the raised voices of people I didn’t want to be with, and then I sat under a tree and I read.

I read for hours, blissfully undisturbed, until the sun set and it got dark enough that I couldn’t make out the words on the page, even with the book pressed so close to my face that I could smell the slight bitterness of the ink.

Even when it was dark, it didn’t occur to me that I was lost. I don’t know if I could have found my way back to the area of the park I had wandered away from, but I hadn’t tried, so there was none of the panic of disorientation. It was a warm summer evening, and while I was slightly hungry, I was also used to missing meals if I lost myself in a book. There were rules, and there were consequences for breaking them.

But the dark was moonlit and comfortable, and I wasn’t thinking of rules. I was thinking about the book I had been reading, replaying scenes in my head until they felt solid and real, until I could see myself in them as they unfolded. So I stayed where I was, back pressed against the bark of the tree, watching the neon blinks
of fireflies, until I heard Marin’s voice. “Imogen! You have to come back right now. Mom says you’re lost, and she’s so mad at you.”

Her voice snapped me back to reality, and the obvious passage of time. My skin went cold and my stomach hot and acid as I realized how mad my mom probably was. So, so mad. The combination made me so dizzy I nearly fell, standing up from the tree. “Do you know the way back?”

“It’s not far. Come on. Once you’re not lost, it’ll be okay.” Marin smiled, the dimple in her right cheek flashing, and held out her hand.

I was still young enough to think that was the way it worked. That if I could undo whatever it was I had done wrong, that would be enough. Things would be put back, magically restored. I had been lost, and if I came back, everything would be fine. No harm done. “Okay,” I said, and followed my sister out of the woods.

That wasn’t, of course, the way things worked.

When I said that Marin rescued me, I didn’t mean from the darkness in the woods.

My mom grabbed me and shook me so hard that there were bruises on my arms when I changed for bed that night. Five on each, the shape of gripping fingers. My book went flying into the forest, lost.

She yelled as she rattled me back and forth, about how I was being a drama queen, the way I always was, and hiding so I could be the center of attention, and I was a selfish brat to be that way. My behavior had ruined her day, and she wouldn’t stand for that. If I couldn’t behave, I needed to be punished. It was for my own good.

She slapped me, her hand cracking across my face. My tooth cut through my bottom lip, and blood filled my mouth, bitter as salt. I swallowed hard, trying not to choke. I had already learned not to cry, unless I wanted to be given something to really cry about.

But when she raised her hand to slap me again, Marin screamed, “It was my fault!”

Mom’s hand held still.

“I wanted to play hide-and-seek, and I was supposed to find Imogen. She was still hiding. I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

It was enough. Marin, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, was the pretty one, the one everyone looked at, the one everyone made a fuss over, and the attention they gave her transferred seamlessly to my mother—all praise hers, for having such a lovely child. She would have never raised a hand to Marin and risked marking that beauty.

Instead of getting slapped again, I got shoved into the car along with the lawn chairs and the leftover potato salad, now rancid-smelling grease. It was my fault, of course, that I’d been yelled at and hit—I should have said something earlier, and I shouldn’t have let Marin play a game like that in the dark—but I was used to things being my fault.

Marin held my hand all through the dark and silent drive home. Tight, so I’d know she was there.

That was the first time she saved me. The one constant through the first sixteen years of my life, the years I lived at home, while my mother made my life a misery, was Marin. She saved me every time. Always.

And so even if she hated me for it, I would save her.

The next evening, I chased the setting sun as I ran toward the bridge that led into Faerie. That was where they would cross, and I would need to pull Marin from her horse before then, or she would be gone.

“It will likely be more than that,” Beth had said. “You know how they are.”

I did, now.

The sun dipped lower, and the shadows stretched toward me from the trees, reaching out, grasping.

Cold hands under my skin, tearing at me from the inside, catching and pulling. I ran faster, away from the bridge, away from the river, away from Faerie. Even as I ran, it got worse. The coldness, the terror. Feeling myself being pulled apart from the inside as I ran, those strangers’ hands inside me making my footsteps falter, my heart skip.

Out of the shadows and into the dying light of the sun. Free of the hooks inside my skin, the hands in places that should have been impossible.

I didn’t stop until I was home, the wind of my passage drying the tears to salt on my skin. The water in the shower ran from steaming to lukewarm before I stopped shaking, before I felt almost warm, almost safe.

The tithe would not take kindly to being opposed. That was fine. I didn’t need kindness. I needed my sister.

I shifted my weight against the cushions of Beth’s couch, my fingers plucking at the threads of the throw heaped on the end of it. So tired I couldn’t focus, and anxiety licked at my nerves like electricity through wires.

“Are you all right?” Beth asked, her raised brows indicating that she already knew the answer.

“Just a lot on my mind.” It was mid-April. I had seventeen days.

“Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?” Beth asked.

“There is, actually. I’m going to give you a copy of the file for my book, sometime before the night of the tithe. If I don’t . . . if things don’t go well for me, would you take a look at it?”

Expressions chased themselves across her face. Then she smiled and said, “No request for a blurb, or that I pass it to my agent?”