Thorn Jack (31 page)

There was a rustling in the bushes knotted around the old tombstones, and a red fox slinked out and sat nearby, its eyes familiar, madness skittering in them. The nightmarish, unreal beauty of the moment made Finn cold. She was in a between place.

She tossed the second charm over the fox's ear and spoke the chant Reiko had scrawled on a piece of parchment. The words stung her throat.

And the world went black, because her mind was unable to accept what happened next.

“FINN. FINN.”

Someone was shaking her. She opened her eyes, saw the night sky twinkling with stars, and smelled loamy earth. She blinked and said hoarsely, “Sylv?”

Sylvie was huddled beside her, naked and shivering, her eyes shadowy. Christie lay in the leaves nearby, unconscious and also naked.

Finn scrambled back, her hands over her mouth.

Sylvie whispered, “Where are we?”

Finn drew the basket toward her. With shaking hands, she pulled out a gown of black silk and handed it to Sylvie, who slid it over her head. “We're at the old church on Elder Street.”

“How?”

Finn was mightily fighting the urge to be sick. She wanted to throw herself on the two of them and hug them to make sure they were solid, and not a tree and a fox. “You don't remember?”

Sylvie looked around and shivered. “No.”

Christie moaned, sat up, looked down at himself. “Oh, sh—”

When he saw Finn and Sylvie, he blushed. They politely looked away as Finn handed him the basket and he took out the jeans Reiko had given her and slid into them. He said, “Will someone please tell me what happened? Did I black out?”

“The Fatas happened.” Finn pushed her hair from her face as she rose, her legs like jelly. “Once we walk through the gate, we'll forget. We'll be safe.”

Christie looked around, his face white. “Why do I smell like an animal?”

Sylvie looked at Finn, her eyes wide, pleading:
Don't tell us
. Then she whispered, “What about Jack?”

“Jack belongs to her.” Finn tugged up the hood of her red coat, refusing to let them see her anguish. “Let's go. I want it done with.”

Christie and Sylvie clasped Finn's hands and, flanking her, they walked with her through the gate.

Jack's memory slid from them like a shadow.

FINN DIDN'T REMEMBER HOW SHE
came to be walking down a street with two barefoot friends on either side. She had an awful headache, and she felt hollow and sick.

“Sylvie? Christie?” She let go of their hands. “What happened?”

They looked as bewildered as she was.

HER DA CALLED SYLVIE'S FATHER
and Christie's parents, and their parlor became the scene of a confused reunion. There'd been no explanations, because Sylvie's father didn't ask any questions, just looked carefully at his daughter before breathing a sigh and hugging her and whispering, “
En ymmarra
.” Her stepmom stood back, looking troubled and relieved. Christie tried to field his parents' inquiries, but he looked confused and exhausted.

Christie, Sylvie, and Finn could only remember falling asleep—Christie in the psych ward, Sylvie in her hospital bed, Finn in her room—before waking up in the churchyard.

When everyone had gone and the house was silent, her da made tea and brought it to Finn where she huddled on the sofa, wrapped in the butterfly quilt from her bed. He sat beside her and pushed his hands through his hair. He looked more rumpled than ever. “Will you tell me what happened?”

“I can't, Da.” She raised a pleading gaze. “Because I don't remember.”

He looked away, and it seemed as if he wanted to ask her something else, but didn't. He nodded once. “Well. We'll find out.”

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS, FINN INSISTED
on returning to her classes because she wanted things normal again and she had a paper due in her Women in Surrealism class. Christie and Sylvie wouldn't be returning until next Monday, as they were enduring a series of doctors' visits. Finn's da had taken her to the emergency room to have her checked for a head injury, but none had been found. But there were holes in her memory. Certain sights would trigger an irrational fear: a student's hand glimmering with rings; a deep shadow; leaves rustling in a sudden wind.

As Finn sat alone at the picnic table in Origen's courtyard, numb to the apple-biting chill and wondering again what had happened, she saw Angyll Weaver stalking toward her. She was shocked—Angyll was pale, gaunt, her blond hair tangled, her lips chapped.

“I see you're not hanging with the Fatas anymore.” Angyll leaned over the table. “Did you find out they're
monsters
?”

“Pardon?” Finn, afraid the other girl might be mental, drew back.

Angyll bared her teeth, clutching a small, silver cross on a chain around her neck. “You and your friends? The Fatas are
playing
you.”

Finn's stomach was twisting. “I don't know what you're talking about, Angyll. Who are the Fatas?”

Angyll went white. She backed up a step.

She twisted around and ran.

WHEN SYLVIE CAME TO VISIT
Finn, they conspired in the yellow parlor Finn had hung with family photographs. Looking fragile with a bruise along one side of her face, Sylvie curled around a pillow as Finn told her about Angyll's freak-out. “. . . and she said something about the Fatas.”

“The Fatas? They don't even attend HallowHeart. They're rich kids from a weird family.”

“Why would she call them monsters?”

“Angyll Weaver is a moron.”

“Christie used to see something in her.”

“Christie sees something in nearly every girl he meets. The Fatas don't mingle with anyone except at festivals. Christie thinks we were abducted by aliens—or roofied.”

“We were
not
abducted by aliens. And who would drug us all together? And I'm glad our parents didn't think that or we'd be talking to the police.”

“Finn. I fell off my bike and bashed my head. Christie had a mental breakdown. We were in the
hospital
and we woke up, without anything wrong with us, in a
churchyard,
with
you
. We can't remember whole spots in our recent lives—ever since the day we met
you
.”

Finn felt defensive and wanted to say she felt like Fair Hollow was destroying her sanity because she was constantly apprehensive and anxious and never had been before. She was also forgetting things. She felt the same way she had after Lily's suicide, when she would come home or wake up and expect her sister to be there . . . but there had only been a void, and the strangling grief.

“It was something bad,” Sylvie whispered, “that happened to us, wasn't it? The hospital staff never even saw me and Christie leave.”

“Maybe we shouldn't try to remember, Sylv. There must be a reason we don't.”

“You don't believe that. You know what else? I don't dream anymore. I asked Christie—he doesn't either. Do you?”

I don't
sleep
anymore
. Finn folded her hands in her lap. “No. Let's talk about regular stuff. So, I hate soccer. What other phys ed course can I switch to?”

Sylvie stayed the night, and they watched a movie about a teenage Red Riding Hood and eighteenth-century werewolves until Sylvie fell asleep on the sofa. Finn looked up as her father peered in and whispered, “It's midnight.”

“I'll sleep here.”

“How is she?” He glanced at Sylvie.

“Not catatonic. Da . . . I'm sorry I had an attitude about you and Jane Emory.”

He looked as if he'd say something, then murmured, “G'night,” before vanishing from the doorway.

Finn shut off the TV and sat in the dark room, careful not to disturb Sylvie, who was snoring softly. She gazed at a photo on the wall, of her mom, with her dark hair and its one blond streak, sitting in their Vermont garden and looking so young and happy.

Then she looked out the window, into the yard, and saw the figure on the swing.

Its hands, glittering with rings, clutched the chains. Something tapped at her brain, like fingers against a window.

She slid from the parlor, walked through the kitchen, and pushed out the back door, emerging into the yard.

The swing, abandoned, creaked back and forth. She moved across the frosty grass and touched the chains. The metal was still warm.

SYLVIE EVENTUALLY WHEEDLED HER FATHER
and stepmother into letting her return to school. As she and Finn arrived, striding toward Armitrage Hall wreathed with granite fairies and leafy masks spitting Emory, she noticed that the faces of some of the students were grim and pale. On the stairs, one girl was crying softly into her hands.

In the corridor, they met a shadowy-eyed Professor Fairchild, who said, “Miss Sullivan. Miss Whitethorn. You knew her. I'm sorry.”

ANGYLL WEAVER HAD RAZORED HER
wrists to the bone. She had bled out at the feet of an angel statue in Soldiers' Gate Cemetery.

 

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Perhaps a fairy's most potent power derives from human fear of what might ensue if we don't obey fairy rules. Rather than the showy three wishes, incantations, or magic hats, human imagination and anticipation is the essence of their power over us.

—
T
HE
U
LTIMATE
F
AIRIES
H
ANDBOOK,
S
USANNAH
M
ARRIO
TT

There are Lily Girls and Jills. The Lily Girls, the ghosts of murdered girls, are usually harmless. The Jills are female versions of the Jacks, cold bodies stuffed with flowers, without hearts, without blood. And, like the Jacks, they are the Fatas' assassins.

—
F
ROM THE JOURN
AL OF
L
ILY
R
OSE

W
hen Christie returned from Angyll Weaver's funeral, Sylvie and Finn were waiting for him on his front porch. He let his bike fall into the leaves and, somber in a black suit, a black wool hat pulled down on his hair, walked toward them. They folded their arms around him and stood silently for a while in the sunlight, mourning a girl only Christie had truly known.

Finn thought about Anna Weaver, who, like her, had lost a sister.

The wind gusted. When she raised her head, she saw a lily-white Rolls-Royce parked across the street. Beside it stood a girl in a pale coat, auburn hair rippling around her face.

“Phouka Fata,” Sylvie murmured. “What's
she
doing here?”

Christie looked over one shoulder, frowning. “She was at the funeral. Some of the Fatas were.”

Finn gazed at Phouka Fata and remembered what Angyll Weaver had said about the Fatas being monsters.

A LITTLE PAST SUNSET, FINN
walked home from Sylvie's, cutting across the park as it began to rain. The unpleasant day had grown worse, and she wanted nothing more than sweet hot tea and a bubble bath.

When she glimpsed something fluttering against the darkness beneath the trees, she halted.

A whisper so cold, so otherworldly it made her skin crawl, came from the girl standing there. Gently silvered by the moonlight misting through the clouds, her feet bare, her blond hair woven with thorny vines, she was statue still, her sleeveless gown of black silk rippling like liquid night.

Finn's backpack slid from her shoulder and fell to her feet. She wanted to believe she'd fallen asleep, that this malevolent apparition of Angyll Weaver was only a nightmare. But she was awake and the world had become a stranger.

Angyll's lips moved. Finn clearly heard her words, as if just tuning into a certain frequency, “
. . . what . . . they have done to me.
”

Finn backed away and felt gut-wrenching terror.

“. . . want to know what he did, the crooked dog? He sliced my wrists with his teeth. They call us things with teeth, but he had so many . . .”

Finn whispered, “Go away. Go away. I can't help you. Please—”

The dead girl screamed.

Finn put her arms over her head and almost screamed herself.

“Angyll.” A calm, girlish voice drew her gaze to a small figure in a white coat, sheltered by an umbrella as she moved toward the dead girl, one hand outstretched. “Come to me.”

Angyll clasped her little sister's hand. There was a soft sigh.

Then Finn and Anna Weaver were alone. Finn whispered, “Were you
looking for her
?”

Anna wiped the back of one hand across her face, which glistened with more than rain. “I've got something to give back to you. Come with me?”

“Anna . . .” Finn grabbed her backpack and followed her through the park, across a bridge that arched over a pond clogged with dead leaves. She felt her world going completely off its axis. “Anna . . . stop . . .
tell
me where we're going . . . and your
sister . . .”
She pushed a cluster of branches out of her way as Anna slid past a broken gate of black metal. Hurrying after the girl, down a path through someone's neglected garden, Finn saw a house rising at the end, an old place tangled with oak trees and elms. She halted. “LeafStruck.”

“Come on.” Anna walked back to her and took her hand. “This is where I hid it. The owl lady doesn't mind.”

“The owl lady . . .” Something struggled in Finn's mind.

Anna led her up the stairs to the door and pushed into a gloomy interior scattered with leaves and insects and graffiti. Spiderwebs glistened on the cracked glass of the windows. Anna moved toward a cavernous fireplace.

Finn slumped against the wall and tried not to think of a luminous, dead, and malicious Angyll Weaver.

She spotted a rusting metal box beneath a pile of leaves and pushed at it with her foot. The lid fell off, revealing a dusty picture. She crouched down and peered at the photograph of a man and woman in old-fashioned clothes. She didn't recognize them, but the boy who stood between them looked like someone she knew at HallowHeart—Nathan Clare. She turned the picture over. Scrawled on the back were the words
Home, 1907.
Finn thought of Angyll Weaver's ghost, shivered, and dropped the picture. What was happening to her?

Anna returned and handed her a small lockbox. “The crooked dog took my sister, and the serpent doesn't want you to remember. You gave these to me, because you told me they were taking something from you.”

Thinking of the story of Pandora, Finn slowly opened the metal box; she saw a journal of black velvet bound with silver ribbons, a key of tarnished pewter shaped into a moth. And a letter.

“So,” Anna said, calmly, “remember.”

Finn unfolded the letter with unsteady hands. It was her handwriting, and it told her which file to open on her laptop. She had the laptop with her. She pulled it from her backpack, flipped open the lid covered with peace stickers, and tapped the file labeled
Moth.

REIKO FATA. CALIBAN. PHOUKA. DEAD
Bird. Absalom Askew. A tall, shadowy man with a crown of antlers.

And Jack, Jack,
Jack
.

“Jack.” Finn remembered all of it, as if her brain had just switched on. It actually hurt. She felt her nose bleeding a little.

“See?” Huddled beside Finn, Anna looked at her intently. She seemed almost awed. “
You
tricked
them
.”

“What are you doing here?” The new voice made them twist around.

Nathan Clare stood in the doorway, and he looked angry. It was strange, seeing him that way, with his angelic face and curls. Finn couldn't think of anything to say as her gaze fell to the picture of his family. Her memories were beginning to settle, but she still felt strange, as if she were in someone else's body.

She remembered what the Fatas were planning for him on Halloween.

“I said what are you doing here?” He wore a shirt and tie and gray trousers and looked as if he'd just stepped from
The Great Gatsby.

Finn lifted the old photograph. “When did they take
you,
Nathan?”

“I don't know what you mean. That's not me.”

“It's not your fault,” Anna told him. “They tricked you. Like they tricked Tom Luneht and my sister and those girls.”

“Girls?” Finn repeated as Nathan sagged against the door frame and crouched down, hands loose between his knees.

He whispered, “I was sick. They promised me one hundred years. My parents died in a hotel fire in Paris and I was the only child. I was seven and all this”—he waved, meaning LeafStruck and its grounds—“was mine. My governess, Colleen Olive, she saw an opportunity.”

“What do you mean?”

His hands knotted together. “She was a Fata. We were one of the oldest families, and all this property?
They
wanted it. Someone came to rent our carriage house, someone who was working for a family called the Fatas.”

“Jack,” Finn whispered.

“One hundred years, Finn.” He circled his arms around his bent knees. “They gave me that.”

“And after one hundred years?”

He said, dreamily, “Every one hundred years, there must be an offering—a mortal, because we are real, flesh and blood, a payment to the king of the dead in exchange for not harvesting among the Fatas. The sacrifice must always be willing.”

Finn's voice shook as she said, “You can't
let
them.”

“Can't let them?” His voice was raw. “I can't stop them.”

“What will they do to you?”

“Does it matter? It will be done. And I've lived one hundred years like a king.”

“They murdered Angyll Weaver. I saw her
ghost
. . .”

“Caliban did that.” Nathan rose, brushing leaves from his expensive trousers. He looked sad as he said, “Go home. Both of you. I'm sorry, Anna.”

Finn watched helplessly as he walked from the house. Then she looked at Anna.

It was Lily's journal that had told her
Even the dark ones won't harm young children, who are more spirit than flesh
. But they had harmed a child's sister . . . and perhaps her own as well. And now they were going to murder a boy they had deceived into dying for them.

Something woke inside of her, ferocious and roaring. She lifted her head. “Anna. Thank you. Now let's go home.”

AS FINN STEPPED ONTO HER
terrace, she whispered into the night that was his dawn. “Jack.”

Silence.

She knew he was there, that her forgetting hadn't made him cease to exist. “
Jack!
”

Leaves rustled like immense wings. She pictured his eyes darkening with the desperation to be human again, remembered his strength, how he had protected her at such great cost to himself . . .

There was a whisper of fabric behind her. She turned and remained very still, scarcely believing he was here, solid and dashing and . . . menacing.

Jack was crouched on the terrace railing. He didn't look human doing it. His ragged hair was threaded with leaves and Emory, and moonlight painted his cheekbones, glinting in one dark eye and across the rings on his fingers. His coat billowed. He'd gone feral again. “You've been a busy girl.” The hateful mockery had returned to his voice.

She wanted to throw herself against him. She whispered, “
How long have I forgotten you?
”

“Oh, it's been ages.”

“It hasn't. It's been a week since I made that computer file, and don't talk like that. I hate it when you talk like that, as if you don't care . . .”

He slid down and took a swaggering step toward her. “You think you tricked her, the Queen of the bloody Faeries—I didn't even suspect your conspiracy with little Anna Weaver—but you can be sure
Reiko
did, and Angyll Weaver's death was the result.” His voice tore. “
I told you to forget about me
.”

She backed into her room and was almost sick at the thought of having caused Angyll Weaver's death. She said brokenly, “I saw . . . Angyll . . .”

“I'm sorry I said it that way.” He looked away from her. “It wasn't your fault. Angyll Weaver knew things and couldn't handle them. She killed herself.”

He
is lying,
Finn thought, watching as he straightened and pulled an antique board game from the shelf. Snakes and Ladders. He shook the game. “I remember this.”

“I saw her
ghost,
Jack. Angyll's—”

“Ghosts get confused.” He looked directly at her. “They can be as malicious in death as in life. And she was certainly malicious toward you when she was alive.” He shook the game again and pieces rattled. “Where did you get this?”

“You said it was my fault.”

“I shouldn't have. I was angry.”

“Could
you
make me forget you . . . if you wanted to?”

He looked at her and something like anguish flickered in his eyes, but it was quickly vanquished by the dark lie of coldness. “I could.”

She pointed to the game. “It was my gran's. She also gave me a rocking rabbit.”

“A rocking rabbit.” He sat on the floor in the pool of his black velvet coat and unfolded the board, traced its patterns.

“Like a rocking horse, only it was a rabbit. I named it Surreal.” She sat opposite him. He wore all those damn rings again, but hers was among them.

He gazed at her as he shook the game pieces from the pouch. “What an interesting child you must have been.”

“Didn't I just tell you not to speak to me like that?”

“Like what?” He sorted out the pieces and twirled the dice between his fingers.

“Like you're from another century.”

He looked at her. “I am. You know, all that iron and silver you're wearing makes me want to sneeze. Shall I toss first?”

“Go on.” She watched him and tried not to think of Angyll dying, alone and bleeding, in a cemetery, or of Nathan walking away, knowing that Halloween was his last night on earth.

Jack flung the dice, moved. “Rabbits aren't a reliable totem animal. They're tricksters and shape-shifters.”

“I know that, Jack. I've seen Bugs Bunny cartoons. You need to tell me, exactly, what Reiko is. And try speaking in a straight line, please.” She wanted to touch his hair, which glistened with rain and leaves. Reiko had taken him away from her, only for a few days, but it was a terrifying display of her power. “Is Anna Weaver in danger?”

“No.” He slid the dice toward her and sat back, drawing his knees to his chin, gazing down at the board. “Anna Weaver is protected. Shall I tell you a story?”

“Is it about you?”

“It is.”