Thorn Jack (33 page)

“Yes, Black Apple, is she here?” Jack lounged malevolently against the door frame.

The boy blinked. There was a lotus on his black T-shirt, and his jeans were spattered with paint. “Her apartment's upstairs. Jack, don't tell Reik—”

“I won't.” Jack surged forward, and the boy skittered back.

Finn followed Jack up another flight of stairs, into a hall that smelled like incense and mice. The door to Mary Booke's apartment was painted fairy-tale blue and opened at his touch.

They stepped into a tiny apartment with paintings hung on red walls. A lamp glowed against the night-darkened windows. An old-fashioned sofa stood before a wall of shelves crammed with books. Finn said, “You people do like to read.”

“We've enough time.” The floorboards creaked beneath Jack's boots as he investigated the galley kitchen, the bathroom. Finn wandered to a vanity near the sofa and gazed at a half-eaten apple, a handful of glossy red leaves, a shabby doll with half its face missing. She touched an empty perfume bottle. From the apartment below, she heard opera music. Her attention returned to the half-eaten apple as Jack sauntered toward her and said, “She's not here.”

Finn glanced at the nightstand near the bed and saw something that didn't seem to belong in a Fata place. She walked over, crouched down, and pulled a battered laptop from beneath the bed. She opened it.

The screen flickered onto a poem:
The Black Scissors came to me, and a cold dark man was he. My soul he stole and swallowed whole, and took a faery doctor's fee.
Beneath that were the words
Gazebo 1029. Dusk. Her Enemy. Her Enemy. Her Ene—

The computer blinked off as Jack's shadow fell over her—Fatas had that effect on batteries. He frowned at the laptop. “That's an unusual thing to find here.”

“Mary Booke isn't a Fata.” Finn rose, walked to the table, and lifted the bitten apple. “She eats.”

He said quietly, “She's a changeling.”

“Are changelings what I think they are?”

“Humans stolen as infants and replaced with a dead child.”

“That's what I thought. Then”—she pushed her hands into her coat pockets—“how can she save Nathan?”

“If she is his true love, she can sever his promise to the Fatas. She can claim him—that has power. She is a changeling, and mortal, so it would trump
their
claim on him. No wonder they went ballistic when they found out about Nate and her.” He sat on the windowsill, his lovely scent of Emory and roses drifting toward her. “You've read
Tam Lin
.”

“And it can only be done on Halloween?”

“The victim would have all the elements in his favor.”

The glass doors to the balcony creaked, and a gauzy scarf snaked across the floor. Finn stared at the doors, her insides twisting. “Jack . . .”

He moved past her and pulled the doors wide. Finn saw what lay on the small terrace before he crouched beside the figure, obscuring it.

They had found Mary Booke.

JACK LED HER BACK TO
his car. They didn't speak until the warehouse district had vanished behind them. He kept his eyes on the road as he said, “I'm getting you home. I should never have brought you.”

“She's dead. She wasn't one of you.” Finn covered her face with her hands and felt a nightmarish despair. “She was someone they stole away. And now she's dead, like Angyll Weaver. They're
murdering
people—Jack, pull over.”

He swerved the sedan to the side of the road. She opened the door and was burningly sick in the grass. As he slid to her, touching a cool hand to her face, she closed her eyes and relaxed against him. He gently said, “Angyll Weaver was killed to warn Anna, who can see us, and who may know things she shouldn't. Reiko seems intrigued by her. And Booke—Booke could have taken their Teind from them.”

“You said Anna's protected. By who?” She pushed away images of Angyll Weaver's ghost and what she had seen of Mary Booke, the curled hand streaked with blood.

Shadows crossed his face. “I honestly don't know. But I can sense it.”

“Do you think Anna really knows what they are?”

“I hope not.”

“Did you ever love Reiko?”

“Once.”

“Was she ever kind to you? Did it ever seem like she might change for you? Grow a heart like she did for the tailor-highwayman?”

He turned his head and his eyes were filled with anguish. “You believe I might change for you?”

She looked away from him, out the window. “Yes.”

“I'm a selfish, dark thing without a heart.”

“No. You're not. Now, please drive me home.”

JACK HAD TWISTED UP HIS
life for a fragile, warm thing, a girl with cinnamon hair, a crooked smile, and haunted eyes. It pricked at him that Reiko's gambit to strike him from Finn's memory had so easily failed—it was like a chess move Reiko had made to distract, to keep an opponent's attention on the other pieces while she went after the queen.

As he pulled into the parking lot of his abandoned theater, he saw the red Mercedes parked in front, with Phouka leaning against it. When he got out and walked toward her, she said, “There's been an incident—we no longer have a Teind.”

NATHAN CLARE HAD ATTEMPTED TO
kill himself with a goblet of nightshade wine. He was recovering only because of Lazuli's druidic abilities.

Jack, hunched on a divan in Reiko's parlor with Phouka beside him, could hear Reiko and David Ryder arguing in the next room. How had Nathan known his girl was dead?

“You know what this means.” Phouka's body was taut. “Suicide is attempted murder of oneself, an act of cowardice. We're done for. The sacrifice isn't pure.”

Nathan had lived for one hundred years, carefully guarded, taught to believe his life would mean one hundred years of immortality for his foster family, and it had all gone to ruin when he'd fallen in love with a girl named Mary Booke. “Were there other candidates?”

“Seven, as tradition warrants.”

“Let me guess—the other six are no longer candidates.”

“Well, David Ryder's girl offed herself and is now a Jill—she was Reiko's second choice.”

“And what struck the others down?”

“What do you think? They were all human, Jack. They all had hearts. And you. You might act badass, but you've got a noble wolf complex when it comes to little lost lambs. You saw your schoolgirl, all wounded and solitary, and that was the beginning of the end for you.”

He was about to rudely reply when the doors crashed open and Nathan Clare was flung across the floor. He struck a wall and curled there, arms over his head.

Jack rose as Caliban entered, his silver eyes glinting, his coat streaked with blood. He placed himself in Caliban's path. “Leave him alone.”

Caliban gently said, “They gave him to me.”

Phouka glanced at Nathan, who remained kneeling.

Jack didn't look away from the
crom cu
. He knew what Caliban had been and was now. Once a youth in a Celtic tribe, a warrior in a kilt and whorls of blue paint, Caliban had traveled to a faraway land where he had tried to save a girl. And far from the Emerald Isle, in a desert place, Caliban had been turned into the crooked dog. Jack stepped close, murmured one word, and Caliban's eyes went wide and black.

Then the red doors opened and David Ryder emerged, his gaze cutting across all of them. Dressed in a tawny suit, his hair knotted back, he still looked savage. As Caliban slid to one knee, head bowed, and Phouka curtsied gracefully, Jack did nothing.

David Ryder walked past Nathan, out of the room.

Then Reiko called Jack's name. Jack said, “Phouka.”

Phouka placed her slender body between Nathan and Caliban as Jack sauntered into the other parlor, where Reiko was seated, barefoot in a red velvet babydoll dress. It was the first time he'd seen her since she'd made the bargain with Finn and Finn had broken it.

She gazed at him and didn't bother to conceal the ancient thing that moved behind her eyes like a shark in a swimming pool. She never changed. She still smelled of apples and young skin and acted as if she loved him. He had used to wonder if she truly
did
feel love. He had learned, over the battlefield of years, that it was an alien love, webbed with blood and shadows and the dust of stars. Gently, she said, “We are not ruined.”

“We're not? Nathan is.”

She moved to her feet and walked to him, cupped his face in her hands. She kissed him and he didn't flinch when her teeth sank into his bottom lip. As she stepped back, she smiled. “Does she know, Jack, what you are? A husk? A revenant?”

His body tensed as if every muscle had been strung on the bones. “No.”

“Selfish Jack. Selfish as a kelpie. With her, you are not a dead man. You are flesh and blood. Brave. Self-sacrificing.” She slid one hand into his shirt. “I can feel your heart, Jack. Would you die for her?”

He had only one answer. “Yes.”

 

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

The seers and faith-healers who combat their malign influence do so by being, in some sense, in league with them, and able to steal their charms.

—
V
ISIONS A
ND
B
ELIEFS IN THE
W
EST OF
I
RELAND,
L
ADY
G
REGORY

The Black Scissors came to the house on a stallion the color of lung blood, and a cold, dark man was he. He knew their ways, for he'd been taken by the children of the dragon.

—
F
RO
M THE JOURNAL OF
L
ILY
R
OSE

F
inn woke to the sound of Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit” thrumming on the stereo downstairs and raised her head to drowsily regard the rainy morning. “White Rabbit” had been one of her mother's favorite songs. It made Finn feel an aching sense of loss. Then she remembered Mary Booke the changeling and buried her face in the pillow, pushing a fist against her stomach. There would be no mother to mourn Nathan's true love, who had been stolen away and murdered. What would they do with her body—

Don't think about it. Don't think—

She curled up and thought of the Fatas, how they wore masks over their true forms of darkness and desire, how Halloween was only two days away, and how, in two days, Nathan Clare was going to die.

Eventually, Finn dragged herself from bed, because putting a pillow over her head and remaining in a nautilus position all day wasn't going to accomplish anything.

In the hallway hung with some of her mother's watercolors, she paused. The haunting subject matter of those paintings had been so familiar to her growing up she'd scarcely noticed the surreal patterns of boys with peacock wings arching from their brows and mermaid girls in powdered wigs. Each figure seemed to be accompanied by a shadow anchoring and sharpening its softness.

Lily might not have been the only one to have known about them. How would her mom have explained the Fatas? She'd been a genetic biologist. Daisy Sullivan would not have been fascinated by them—she would have been horrified—and finding out about the Fatas might make someone with a set worldview question her sanity.

When Finn entered the kitchen, her da was making strawberry waffles and he eyed her as she slouched to the refrigerator to take out a carton of orange juice. In the bright kitchen, where the strangeness of Jack's world didn't seem possible, she carefully approached the subject of her mother. “Was Mom's accident really an accident?”

He looked startled. “What would make you ask—”

“Well, I was just looking at her paintings and they got me thinking . . . She saw things, didn't she?” Finn remembered her mom's smile, her hands smudged with paint, the sunlight in her hair, how she'd been as moody as Lily. After leaving her career in genetics to paint whimsical, eerie images, Daisy had spent hours in her painting studio, sometimes neglecting her daughters. “Why did she give up her career?”

“People change, Finn.”

“Then Lily Rose began to act the same.”

“Finn . . . it won't
happen
to you. You're not—”

“Was it here? When she came here, to go to college—did you notice it? Mom acting funny?”

He frowned as if he'd never considered it. “I don't remember . . .”

“Do you remember anything weird? From when you were a kid?”

“This
conversation
is weird.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “I'm getting old, Finn. My kid memories are full of holes.”

“You're not old.” Her stomach sank into a cold pit. At any time in his life here, those creatures could have spoken to her father, manipulated him, made him forget. And what had they done to Daisy Sullivan, to make her want to leave Fair Hollow for Vermont and eventually die on a winter road?

“They've always been here,” Finn whispered to herself, “and everywhere else.”

The smell of burning filled the kitchen, and her father swore, flipping open the wafflemaker. “Ah, you're right. This thing is defective.” He looked sharply at her. “Why all these questions about your mom?”

“I just needed to know some things.” She wanted to tell him that her mother and her sister had seen another world, but he wouldn't believe her, would think she was falling victim to whatever had possessed her mother and her sister.

Lily had been led to her death. Were the Fatas doing the same to her, while she relied on Jack to keep her safe? And he might be the biggest trick of all . . .

Something thumped in the living room. Her da looked up. “What—”

“I'll see.” She hurried out of the kitchen.

A book had fallen from one of the shelves. She walked slowly toward it, then crouched down to look at it. It was a picture book of
Snow White,
opened to an illustration of the wicked stepmother pointing to the huntsman. The caption read “
Bring me her heart.
”

A shudder rattled through her. She thought of Mary Booke, a corpse now, and closed her eyes, but that only made the dizzy spell worse. She opened her eyes and whispered, “Lily, what are you trying to tell me?”

Bring me her heart.

Heart.

Jack had lost
his
heart, horrifyingly and literally—Reiko had taken it. Finn flinched when she remembered that vision of the living organ being taken from him, the pain and the anguish and the blood of it . . .

She rose with the book. Jack had grown a heart because of
her
. And he'd told her Reiko had managed to form a heart, which had made her vulnerable, with a mortal man, a tailor who had become a highwayman—

“A tailor . . .” She remembered the poem on Mary Booke's computer . . .
The Black Scissors . . . a cold, dark man was he . . . Her Enemy.

She dashed up the stairs, into her room, and grabbed Lily's journal, tore through it until she found the entry:
The Black Scissors . . . highwayman . . . wanderer . . . her true love . . .
Dubh Deamhais . . .

She sank down onto the window seat and thought of a hidden heart and vulnerability. She closed her eyes and pictured the words on Booke's laptop. What had followed the poem?
Gazebo 1029 Dusk
. The numbers, she realized, were a date. “October twenty-ninth.”

She breathed out. She'd only seen one gazebo in town, and that was in the park. Could Mary Booke have somehow arranged a meeting with Reiko's infamous tailor-turned-highwayman? And why?

FINN WAS SCHEDULED AT THE
bookstore that night, but not until seven. She had time.

She didn't call Sylvie or Christie—this was
her
fight now; besides, they still hadn't remembered all the things that had happened; she hadn't explained to them, either, about her recent contact with Jack. She geared up in her red coat with the hood, and iron and silver charms. She didn't know if the iron and silver would be any kind of defense against a person who was an anomaly even to the Fatas, but she had to take the chance. She had to keep Booke's appointment with the Black Scissors, Reiko's enemy, the one who had made her grow a heart, the one she had led into a curse.

Finn crossed the deserted park and approached the gazebo in its cluster of sad-looking trees. The roof had half caved in from the weight of fallen leaves. Someone had wreathed tiny lights around the gables, but they were rusted and broken.

She hugged herself and trudged up the steps. The floor of the gazebo beneath the debris was made of wood. Finn stomped on it, lifting her gaze to the treetops and the final pumpkin smolder of the sun. She could smell wood smoke and damp earth, and those fragrances made her feel alive and real.

As she waited, she paced. She checked the time on her cell phone. When the screen went blank as if the battery had just gone dead, she jerked her head up.

Nothing moved in the park. A car drove past, its headlights swerving comfortingly past her. She said, to the shadows, “Mary Booke wanted to help someone named Nathan Clare. You were human once, before
she
took you. Reiko's going to murder Nathan and send his soul to whatever they've made a deal with. I need to stop it.”

Instantly, everything in the park went still. Even the rain stopped. Out of the corner of one eye, Finn saw something dark and swift moving across the grass. She stared, stepped back, and inhaled as a cloud of black moths swept over the gazebo, one of them fluttering on the railing near her so that she could see the skull pattern on its body.

She slowly turned her head.

Beneath a birch a few feet away stood a figure in a sweeping coat and wide-brimmed hat. The upper half of the face was in shadow. A voice, young, masculine, velvety with power, drifted toward her. “Serafina Sullivan. You'd best name me, for your own safety—I am still theirs.”

He knew her name, the
Dubh Deamhais,
the Black Scissors who walked between but wasn't one of
them
. With a calm that frightened her because it meant she was accepting all of this like an insane person, she said, “
Dubh Deamhais.
”

An icy shiver slid across the back of her neck.

When she turned, the Black Scissors stood before her. He smiled gently. “I did not expect
you, alainn cailin
.”

Despite the archaic greatcoat with its ribboned sleeves, he wore jeans, a T-shirt, and biker boots. Beneath the hat, his face was young, a Slavic mask of slanting bones with an ivory scar crossing his brow, golden hair streaked with black spilling to his shoulders. His eyes, an otherworldly green, were rimmed with blue designs.

“But you know my name.” She looked at a moth fluttering nearby. “You.
You
left that moth key under my window.”

“You came to ask me a question. Would that be it?”

“No. How do I”—she hesitated—“destroy Reiko Fata?”

“There is a price for such a precious secret.” He unfolded one hand and he didn't look young as he did it. “A kiss.”

“
Oh
no. I read that poem about you.” She stepped back and wondered why these people always wanted a kiss. Or blood.

“It's only to get a bit of warmth,” he murmured. “And that poem was written by another ex-lover. I don't steal souls. I steal hearts.”

She couldn't believe she was standing here, with someone even the
Fatas
didn't trust.
Deal with it,
she told herself. “Okay.” She closed her eyes, every muscle pulling taut as she felt him come close, his scent like old stone and fires. She steeled herself as his mouth touched hers.

The kiss was as cool as a minor medical procedure. She felt something drawn out of her, a bit of warmth that left her slightly colder than she had been. When he stepped away, she opened her eyes, grimacing at the metallic taste in her mouth.

The
Dubh Deamhais
stood now in a slant of shadow. He bowed, golden hair swaying, the moths whirling around him. “For the kiss, Finn Sullivan named for angels and an Irish hero—a key.”

Disappointment made her voice faint. “Another key?”

“The key to her heart.” She realized how young he must have been when his life had been frozen by Fata malice. He watched her, his unnerving eyes almost luminous. “Finn Sullivan, it is the world of the dead you have been dealing with. If I didn't have such a selfish motive, my advice to you would be: ‘Have nothing more to do with them.' ”

“You hate her . . . Reiko.”

“More,” he said with deadly tenderness, “than you can ever imagine.”

“So why don't
you
do something?”

“They can sense me a mile away. Keeping hidden from them
now
is costing me.”

“They have, like, a magical restraining order against you?”

“Exactly. The key I'll give you is to the spell box that contains her heart, the heart that should never have grown, because of me.”

“I'm sorry about—what happened to you.” Gazing at his otherworldliness that was more like a beautiful mutation than a blessing, she meant it. “The key . . .”

“It must be made from the bone of the one who caused that heart to grow. That's her twisted magic, to open the box containing her heart. It took me a long time to figure
that
out.”

“Bone . . . ?”

He raised one hand to display a missing pinkie finger. Finn couldn't say anything to that.

“She'll give the heart to your Jack, if you're clever enough. You must destroy it on All Hallows' Eve.” His eyes glinted, and she thought she glimpsed a flicker of malice

“How? How will Jack get the heart from her?”

“I'll leave that up to you. Good evening, Finn Sullivan.” He turned and began walking away, the moths trailing after him.

“But you didn't give me the k—”

He called back, “I did,” and vanished into the night.

She choked as air solidified in her throat. She hunched over and spat out an object that had materialized from the bitter taste in her mouth. Trembling, she stared down at what had come from her mouth like gruesome ectoplasm—an ivory key carved into a serpent. She remembered the Black Scissors' missing finger and sank to her knees, staring at the key that would undo Reiko, not wanting to touch it.

CALIBAN ARIEL'PAN'S ASSIGNMENT HAD BEEN
to watch over Nathan Clare, to make certain he remained with his heart intact, that it was not given away in love, or broken by it. Somehow, the cloistered boy had managed to make Caliban look like a fool. But Caliban couldn't rip him apart, because that would upset Reiko's precious Jack, who had a bit of a history with the pretty idiot. So Jack naturally became the focus of Caliban's frustrated malevolence. And Jack had a weakness.