I struggled to sit up, trapped by yards of petticoats. Lucas groaned as he tried to free his knee, which was jammed under an end table. Mom just stood there, lips trembling. I launched myself at her, and she came to her senses just in time to catch me. We staggered clumsily, but she didn’t let go. “I’m murdering that rat bastard Strahan and you’re grounded forever.” She pulled away, surveying me closely. “Did he hurt you?” She looked into my eyes like a doctor, ran her hands over my shoulders and down my arms. “Oh, look at your wrists. I will kill him.”
Lucas took a step back. Mom could be scary at the best of times with her tattoos and tight jeans, but she was really, really scary when she was angry.
“It’s nothing. Antonia came and sent us home somehow.” I hugged her again. “Where is she?”
Mom frowned, wiping tea off her face. “I don’t know. I still can’t reach her. I was just about to call one of her weird friends. They always know more than they should.”
“You mean, she’s not here?” I spun around to Lucas, agitated as a wet cat. “She’s not here!”
He tugged his coat back into place. “Strahan has her.”
Mom paled. “What do you mean, Strahan has her?” She sank weakly into a chair. “This is not good.”
“So she’s stuck there?” I asked Lucas. “We have to get her back.”
Mom gave me the evil eye before she went to put the kettle on. I knew she was making rose hip tea. Crises of any kind were tamed with rose hip tea. “You aren’t going anywhere, young lady.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think you can really effectively ground a girl who was just chained to a wall.”
The kettle nearly toppled out of her hand. “What?”
Oops. Probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. Parents had such a habit of overreacting. Lucas was poking around the apartment, looking at our books and art and family photos.
“You are so like her,” he whispered, staring at Mom. “Like the queen. I never even knew she had a twin,” he added. “Until recently.”
“She made a bargain, a long time ago, so no one would know and use me in her place. And when Eloise was born, she set a glamour on her so she would be invisible to the Fae. But glamours only last so long before the magic runs out.”
“And it started to fade just this past week,” I said softly, remembering what Strahan had said. “And I started remembering things.”
“Yes,” Lucas agreed. “We looked for ages before I saw you eating ice cream. We’ve been searching for you since we unexpectedly caught scent of your bloodline. We thought you might be Antonia’s.”
“She’s mine,” Mom said fiercely. “So you can all back off. Now.”
“It’s a little late for that.” I hugged a cow-shaped cushion to my chest just because it was soft and familiar. It was the one I used as a pillow when I wasn’t feeling well. “And you have so been keeping secrets. I might be really mad at you for that later.” Right now I was too glad to be out of Strahan’s Hall.
Mom measured dried tea into the pot, added boiling water. Her hands were shaking, even though she was trying to look so calm. “And who are you, by the way?” she asked Lucas, trying to change the subject.
“Oh, I forgot,” I said. “Lucas Richelieu, this is my mom, Jasmine Hart. Lucas went to Strahan’s rath to rescue me.”
She looked at him steadily. “You get chocolate cake.”
I nudged him, smiling. “That means she likes you. She doesn’t make it for just anyone. Even on my birthday, I have to beg.”
He bowed, polite as the out-of-time gentleman he appeared to be. Never mind that there was blood on his hands and his collar was torn.
“Richelieu?” Mom said. “Sounds familiar. What are you? Deer? Dog? Badger?”
“We are from the Hawk clan, distant cousin to your own Deer people.”
“They’re not my people.”
“You’d be surprised.”
I sat up straighter. “Hey. A hawk chased away my bully in the park.”
Mom frowned. “You have a bully?”
I waved that away. “So not a big deal right now.”
“I wish you weren’t so afraid of yourself,” she said quietly. “Anger’s not a bad thing, El. It has energy; it can give you the power to change things.”
“Or break things.” I looked at her faded scar. “You’re the one who says physical violence isn’t about being angry, it’s about feeling out of control.” After Mom got away from Dad, she read every book in the self-help section of the library. “I don’t want to be like Dad.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, smiling a little. “You’re nothing like that. He’s not even like that anymore. You have your own voice. You need to use it. Too soft isn’t any better than too hard.”
“Even without a voice, the hound-people would have smelled you, even though they wouldn’t have known what precisely it was they were scenting because of your glamours. We couldn’t be sure until the magic faded, and hawks have keen instincts. But Antonia would have wanted you to be safe. It’s likely her doing.” He looked away, his ears red. Come to think of it, the hawk had feathers the same color as Lucas’s hair: like dark tea.
I was so relieved to be home again it barely fazed me that Lucas might possibly turn into a hawk sometimes. I just circled the living room, touching the crowded paintings, the DVD towers, the computer on a table made out of an old door and two sawhorses covered in silk flowers. I noticed details I’d never noticed before. The pattern on my shirt, which Strahan had pointed out, was everywhere; stitched on a pillow, painted on a river rock on the windowsill, even hanging from the ceiling cleverly disguised in a wind chime made of driftwood and red berries. Even the ivy plants in clay pots meant something more—the plant in the stag’s antlers on the medallion was ivy, and so was my tattoo. And I knew it had to mean something. I was nearly as disoriented as I’d been landing under a hill full of the Fae.
“Why ivy?” I asked quietly.
“Ivy can break glamours,” Lucas replied.
“So is that why mine broke?”
“No, ivy used that way would have broken others’ glamours against you. It’s why you recognized those crow-brothers.”
“Oh.” I shivered. Lucas pulled off the jacket he wore over his tunic and settled it over my shoulders. I blushed. It was a dumb reaction. Probably posttraumatic stress or something.
“Come and sit down,” Mom said quietly.
“Mom, what about Antonia?”
“We’ll get her out,” she promised me fiercely. “But you’re not going back there. I’ll figure something out.”
“Mom.”
“End of discussion, Eloise Hart.”
Lucas wouldn’t sit down until we were both seated, so I curled back up on the couch and pulled the afghan over me. Elvis had apparently forgiven our entrance enough to come back and hop up on top of the television to watch me with sleepy eyes.
“So what’s the plan, Mom?” I asked after she’d added extra honey to my cup.
She wiped honey off her thumb. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected to keep this from you forever.” She sighed. “You know your aunt. Her taste in men has never been good, even when we were your age—especially when we were your age. She met this guy, and for months before our sixteenth birthday, he was all she talked about. She stopped going to class, stopped dance classes and doing homework. All she wanted to do was write these really awful poems about him.” She grimaced and I nearly smiled. Bad art of any kind was an affront to her, always had been.
“So, she had a crush,” I said. “Jo has crushes all the time. It’s like her superpower.”
“Not like this. She didn’t even bother showing up to our birthday party, and didn’t come back for three whole days. And then she wouldn’t talk about what had happened, not even to me. I could tell something was wrong though, something bad.” She stared at the geode collection in the cabinet, not seeing them. “That’s when it really started. She’d disappear every spring, come back every autum
n. No amount of arguing would get her to tell me where she went or why. She’d only say it was safer that way, for her and for me, for the whole family. When you were born, she told me a little more, but not much. We were both so young.”
The apartment was too quiet—no music, no television, just Mom’s haunted voice. I flicked on the fan to help move the stifling air.
“I didn’t believe her at first, of course. But then I saw things, impossible things. Out of the corner of my eye mostly, never clearly or for long enough to really figure out what I was looking at.” She seemed older and more tired than I’d ever seen her, even when she spent weeks working on an art show. “He’s been searching for her all these years, and every summer she hides out because that’s when he has the most power. She can hold her own again come fall, but not before. I’m still not sure how it all works, only that he’s cruel and not to be crossed.”
“He’s causing this drought,” Lucas said quietly. “We knew it would come to this.”
“She promised me you’d be safe,” Mom said to me, choking back a sob.
I felt like I should defend Antonia. “She did get me back here, even knowing it would trap her there.”
Lucas leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “You know that my people and I will do all we can to safeguard Antonia and the entire Hart line.”
“Yeah,” I said, tired. “What’s with that anyway?”
“It is our bond.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s not really an answer.”
“It has always been so. The Deer people and the Hounds and the Hawks have ever been as one in this matter.”
I lifted the medallion. “Deer people.”
He nodded. “Long ago your people knew how to shapeshift into the deer. Fae don’t forget, only humans do.”
Mom’s foot tapped. “Antonia said a Richelieu helped her escape once.”
He nodded modestly. “We did, yes. It’s how I had the token to give to Eloise, how I knew to find her and warn her.”
“Yeah, thanks for that by the way. Guess I should have listened.” I yawned, the soft couch and blanket exerting their power over me. “I thought you were crazy that night in the parking lot.”
Mom stroked my hair, fussed with the blanket. “Why don’t you sleep a little?”
I smothered another yawn.
“Can’t. Too much . . . to . . . do . . .”
I was asleep before I’d even finished protesting.
• • •
I shouldn’t be asleep in Strahan’s Hall. Someone would hurt me. It wasn’t safe. My wrists hurt. I was bruised and scared and I didn’t know what else they’d do to me. He was laughing. The Grey Ladies were there too. My teeth chattered in the cold.
“Shhh,” someone whispered to me.
A hand touched my hair. I jerked awake, blinking blearily. I didn’t know where I was and my heart was going too fast.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you,” Lucas said.
I was stretched out with my head on his knee. I didn’t think I’d been asleep for very long, at least not long enough to drool on myself. The afternoon light streaming through the window made his hair the color of honey. He looked tired.
“You should sleep too,” I whispered.
“I have to stand guard,” he replied. He was still stroking my hair. It felt nice, and I suddenly wanted to stretch like a lazy cat. Fatigue smeared the lines of the room, making them soft and hazy.
“Thank you for coming to get me.”
His fingertips brushed my cheek. “You’re welcome. I’ve been looking for you for months, even before the glamour wore off, only I didn’t know it. I caught a glimpse of you somehow. I couldn’t let Strahan have you,” he whispered. “Even if there wasn’t war on the horizon.”
I smiled shyly. “Do you miss home?”
He tipped his head back, resting it on the cushion. “Yes.”
“Tell me about it,” I asked. “I’d like to think that if there are worlds under the hills, they’re not all like Strahan’s. Because that’s just creepy.”
“He wasn’t always as he is now,” Lucas admitted reluctantly. “When he first wed your aunt, he was a good king. Selfish and arrogant perhaps, but that’s nothing new, nothing that can’t be got around.” He sighed, stretching one arm along the back of the couch. “He’s a brother of sorts to us. Bird-brother, if you will.”
My eyebrows rose. “The crows too?”
He nodded. “Not all crows are like the ones you saw. They’re uncanny because they have the wisdom of death, but they don’t usually bring it themselves.”
“So you can’t tell good Fae from bad?”
“Not any more than you can tell good humans from evil, at a glance.”
His hand stilled in my hair, fingers warm on my skin. I could see his scars. “And your rath?”
“We have a rath, but we much prefer the treetops.” His mouth quirked in a bright smile that made me catch my breath. In this light, when he wasn’t covered in iron-blisters and blood, I could see the Fae beauty of him. It wasn’t unearthly or darkly seductive like Strahan’s. Lucas’s shadows didn’t conceal cruelty or secrets; they were only there because he shone so brightly. “And our house is built on a hilltop, where we can see the sky for miles.”
“I thought raths were under hills?” I asked, confused.
“They are, but Faery is much more than hill-hidden raths. It’s an entire world to itself. The raths are doorways and crossroads, where we can be in both worlds at once.”
I rubbed my forehead. “You know, this is getting more and more confusing.”
“Parents used to teach mortal children,” he said. “I can’t think why they’ve stopped.”
I mock glared at him. “You’re not going to call me uneducated again, are you?”
He flashed a grin. “No.”
He leaned down again, looking at me the way he had in the grove with the stag. He was going to kiss me. This time I wasn’t going to run away. I met his pale eyes, licked my lips. Soon there was only a breath between us.
And then before our mouths could meet, there was a scratching at the window. Elvis grumbled, annoyed with yet another interruption. I frowned at Lucas, who jerked his head up, alert. “What is that?” I asked.
He was on his feet, reaching for his sword. “I don’t know.”
Chapter 10
Jo
When we finally got the window open, I pulled myself in on my hands and knees. I think Devin might have been hooked onto my foot. I felt like lead all over, so it was hard to tell. My vision was blurry but not so blurry that I couldn’t make out Eloise’s worried face.
“El!” I slurred. “You’re back!” I blinked. “Are you wearing vanilla frosting?”
She made a face at her petticoats. “Don’t ask.” She frowned when I just lay there. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked Lucas.
He crouched down next to her and peered at me. He plucked a needle out of my butt.
“Hey! Ouch!”
“Elf-shot,” he answered grimly. “The boy too.”
“Who are you calling ‘boy’?” Devin muttered, drooling on his chin.
“This kind of poison works quickly.”
“Poison!” Eloise grabbed me, as if that would help. I squeaked. She didn’t let go. She reached out and squeezed Devin’s hand. He rolled his head toward her, eyes too bright.
“They could be disoriented for days if we don’t do something right away,” Lucas continued. “Some never really lose the ability to see the Fae afterward and it can make them mad. If they survive.”
I wasn’t fully listening to his uplifting speech. I was too busy trying to figure out what it was I was forgetting to remember. And my mouth tasted like a combination of soap and burned coriander. I rubbed my tongue sluggishly on my sleeve.
“We need salt,” he said. “As much as you’ve got.”
That’s what I was trying to remember. Eldric said we needed salt.
Eldric.
I think I
whimpered.
Lucas was standing up to follow Jaz when I kicked him in the shin. It was feeble but unexpected. Lucas tripped and fell right over.
“Lucas!”
I frowned at Eloise when she fussed over him. “He did this to you.”
“He tried to rescue me.”
“Oh. I still don’t like him.” There were three of him now, all wavering. “You either,” I told the others.
Devin lay very still beside me. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep for about a hundred years except that Eloise’s mom came back with a box of table salt and suddenly I was on fire. They threw handfuls at us, packing it into our pinprick wounds, even making us gargle with it. It was like being rubbed with hot coals.
“Bollocks!” I squirmed. “Get off!”
Eloise’s eyes were suspiciously moist. “She’s back!” Her voice cracked.
“Don’t you dare cry.” I brushed salt out of my nose. She hugged me so hard her corset dug into my ribs. She helped me sit up, propped me against the leg of the kitchen table, and then did the same with Devin. I felt like a rag doll.
Lucas bowed to me warily. “Josephine.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Call me that again and I’ll wallop you.” I spat a length of hair out of my mouth. The rest hung bedraggled down my back. “I feel like shite. Hi, Jaz.”
She shook her head, but she was smiling. “You might be grounded too, young lady. I distinctly recall telling you to go home and do nothing.” She handed Devin and me cups of tea.
Devin grimaced but drank it. “Why do girls have to drink boiled flowers all the time?”
I snickered, meeting Eloise’s grin with my own. I felt utterly knackered and giddy with relief that neither of us was dead. “Nice outfit.”
“Shut up.” She grabbed the afghan and wrapped it around herself, blushing. There was salt all over the floor, down my shirt, in my bra, and possibly even in my underwear.
“Thanks,” I said to Lucas. “You saved us,” I admitted. And now I was conscious enough to feel the hole Eldric had left in my chest.