Wink Poppy Midnight (10 page)

W
E WERE LIKE
the three Fates, weaving the story together, threads of gold, red, and midnight blue.

There would be wolves and tricks and lies and cunning and vengeance in our story. I would make sure of it.

Long, long ago there lived a German storyteller who wove dark tales in a cottage hidden in the Black Forest. Pa told me about him. He said his books were burned in the Great War, and only a few survived, and someday he would let me read one.

Pa said this German storyteller had a recurring theme in all his tales, and he used to sing it to me in a low, sad voice, like it was a lullaby, over and over:

When you look into the darkness,

the darkness looks into you.

I mentioned my father to the Hero. I didn't mean to. I'd wanted to talk about the Huntsman, about how he cut out Sweet Ruby's heart, and put it in a box and gave it to the queen . . . but Pa slipped out instead, slipped right out of my mouth like the Crawly Eels, slipping in and out of the people's windows in
The City Beneath.

I'd been thinking about Heroes, and Midnight, and how Leaf
used to say the best Heroes had a bit of evil in them, to make the good shine all the more for being next to it . . . and then the next thing I knew I was talking about
him,
and his water witching, and the Gold Apple Mine, like the little girl in
Winter Earnest
who had her wits knocked out of her all in one go.

I'd be more careful from now on.

T
HE TENTH TIME
I kissed Leaf, he kissed me back. We were in the meadow behind the Bell farm and his thin lips were tender and arrogant, exactly, exactly how I thought they would be, exactly how I wanted them to be, he pulled away and groaned against my cheek and that dark, empty part in my chest where my heart had never been, it started beating, beating, beating and I felt joy, red and dripping. He picked me up and turned me over so my back pressed into the grass and the bright little wildflowers, and my fresh new heart faced the sky.

Leaf had a low, growly kind of voice. I saw him singing once. Back before the Blue Twist River flooding, back before DeeDee, he must have been fourteen or fifteen, but not younger, because his voice had changed, and gotten deep. I saw
him singing in the forest, I was out there by myself because being better than everyone at everything is really fucking tiresome, and sometimes I have to run off into the woods for a while and pretend no one else exists.

He was standing alone in a little clearing, snow-covered ground and crisp blue winter sky. His chest was puffed out and his head was thrown back and he was singing, just singing at the top of his lungs, some melancholy tune I'd never heard before. It sounded ancient, sung in his gravelly voice, old stone mountains and ice-cold lakes. His breath fogged up in the air and I'd never heard or seen anything half so fucking beautiful. He didn't see me, or pretended he didn't. He just kept singing.

I wasn't built for missing things, I was built for winning and getting what I wanted and not for trying to be better, not for trying to be the best version of myself, it wasn't working anyway,
god,
it wasn't working at all.

I had Midnight eating out of the palm of my hand, it was all so easy, so ridiculously easy. I was barely trying. He thought he was going to betray me, as if I'd let him, as if he had the cunning, what a notion, as if, as if.

This is how far I'll go, this is how far I'm willing to go.

W
INK AND
I walked through black trees to the Roman Luck house. It was ten thirty, maybe a quarter to eleven. I told Poppy I would show up at eleven thirty, and Wink and I needed to beat her there.

I shined the flashlight on the sagging porch.

I didn't like going in the Roman Luck house in the broad summer daylight. No one did. And now, in the dark . . .

The trees seemed to be watching us, watching me and Wink, all their rustling leaves like little eyes, blinking.

Maybe this was a bad idea.

Maybe this wasn't what Thief would do.

But then, Thief had a sword.

All I had was an abandoned house.

Wink's fingers crawled into mine. She squeezed. “You're the hero, Midnight.”

We walked up the worn wooden steps together.

I turned the cold glass doorknob, and shoved.

The floor creaked as I stepped on it, just like the floors did in my own house. And it made me feel better. We walked down the narrow hallway, framed photographs still on the
walls, fuzzy in the dim light, the faces of strangers, the faces of the people Roman Luck had run away from.

We ignored the dining room on our right, dusty table and chairs and a dirty plate that sat alone on one end, still untouched by everyone somehow, cops and kids alike.

The music room was next, on the left.

There were scurrying sounds coming from the corners. I ran my hand down the wall, and felt the velvet flowered wallpaper pucker under my palm. The faded red curtains were pushed back, floor to ceiling, framing the jagged edges of the broken bay window.

A cloud moved, and a sliver of moonlight flickered in. Chunks of plaster on the floor, a cushion on the piano stool, a heavy Rachmaninoff book of sheet music on the stand.

“Roman Luck must have played this piano sometimes.” I nodded at the music. “Can't you just see him, sitting in this big house all by himself, playing dark Russian songs?”

“I can,” she said. “I really can.”

I set my backpack down on the floor. It held the rope, and another flashlight. I looked up at Wink, but she still hadn't moved. She was staring at the spot right between the piano and the ratty green sofa.

“It was right there,” Wink whispered. “That's right where I saw him.”

I
DIDN'T DUST
my skin with sugar this time. I needed something more powerful. I was wearing my acorn skirt, the one with the sand from the bottom of the Blue Twist sewn into the hem for protection.

I filled one of the pockets with dried, dusky green lentils, and the other with cinnamon sticks from a jar in Mim's charm cupboard. I hung a key around my neck on a silver chain, the long skeleton one that the tiny lady in the black dress gave me when I stumbled upon her in the woods that one day. She said the key opened a golden box that contained the heart of a girl she'd killed years ago.

I knew I'd have to tell Midnight about the unforgivables now. I needed to warn him about how they feed on you if you're not careful, how they'll turn your heart into red dust and make you go hatter-mad.

“
I
WAS LITTLE,”
Wink said, voice soft, eyes staring down at the rotting Roman Luck floorboards. “As little as Bee Lee. Leaf was the same age as the twins. We were playing in the woods, a game that Leaf made up called Follow the Screams. I was hiding in a dead tree trunk and listening, and that's when I heard them, real screams, not Leaf-screams, coming from the Roman Luck house.”

We had some time before Poppy showed up. She wasn't a ten-minute-early kind of girl. I was sitting on the green velveteen sofa, and Wink was sitting next to me, our knees touching. She was wearing a skirt with little acorns all over it. I held the flashlight in my hand, the light toward our toes.

The wind picked up outside. Branches scraped the broken windows and it sounded like someone's fingernails clawing at the glass.

I slid closer to Wink, until our thighs were touching.

“Mim told me that a woman named Autumn used to live here. This was a long time ago, before Roman Luck. Autumn wasn't right in the head. She married the handsomest man in town, a man named Martin Lind, and they had four children,
two boys, two girls. But as time went on Autumn became paranoid and suspicious, and she accused her husband of being in love with another woman. She thought he was going to leave her.”

Wink paused. She was rubbing the hem of her skirt between two fingers, and not looking at me.

“And then one day Autumn stabbed Martin in the stomach with a kitchen knife and left him in the music room to die.”

I looked at Wink, looked at her innocent green eyes and her earnest, heart-shaped face. “Is that really true, Wink?”

She smiled suddenly, soft lips, cute ears. “You keep asking me that. Of course it's true. All the strangest things are true. Autumn hanged for it,
hanged by the neck until dead,
and her children grew up with strangers, orphaned and alone like in one of my hayloft stories. The house went up for sale, and Roman Luck bought it. But Autumn's bad thing, her unforgivable thing, had soaked into the floorboards, and creeped into the walls.”

“You told me Roman didn't leave because of a ghost.”

She shrugged. “Mim said he didn't. She read his cards sometimes, so she would know. Sometimes people just . . . leave.”

An owl hooted somewhere out in the night. The hoo-hooing swept right through the broken glass, right into my ears, like a whisper from Poppy.

“I was hiding and I heard the screams and I went closer to see. There was a man in this room, Midnight, and he was screaming, and bleeding. He was dying. He was handsome, and beautiful, like a prince in a fairy tale. He didn't see me, not at first. I was little, and had to stand on my tiptoes, and I could still barely reach the windowsill. He was all in shadow and kept clutching his side and saying something, over and over.”

Wink was using her Putting the Orphans to Sleep voice. But I wasn't getting sleepy this time.

“What?” I asked, when she didn't continue. “What did he say?”

“
Tell my children I love them.
That's what he said, again and again. And oh, Midnight, his voice was so raw and sad.”

I looked around the room, and then slammed my eyes shut, thinking that the ghost of Martin Lind was going to appear in front of me, bleeding and clutching and crying out in the dark.

Had Wink really seen that as a girl? What would that do to a little kid's head?

I didn't even believe in ghosts, not really. But I did believe in Wink.

“I got scared then, and lost my footing,” she said, still using her soft, sleepy voice. “I stumbled, and when I stood up again he was gone and the music room was empty. There is a ghost
here, Midnight. But he didn't have anything to do with Roman.”

The owl hooted. The branches scratched. The sounds scurried. The room smelled like night and dirt and neglect.

Wink leaned over and put her mouth on mine. I dropped the flashlight, clunk, creak. Her red hair fell over my ears and neck and shoulders.

She smelled like cinnamon, and her lips tasted like dust.

I didn't think about the man who had died in this room.

Or the unforgivable thing that Autumn had done.

Or what I was about to do to a girl I'd once loved.

I just thought about Wink.

She pulled away. Stood up, smoothed her acorn skirt. Her hair was tangled and beautiful and red, red, red in the flashlight's beam. “You can do this,” she said. “You're Thief. You're the hero.”

I nodded.

I nodded even though this didn't feel heroic.

It just felt wrong.

Wink left. Into the woods to wait.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

Poppy arrived.