Thorn Jack (24 page)

—and stared into the present-day Jack's wide, dark eyes. Her voice sounded crumbled. “What did they do to you?”

“It's done, Finn. What they did happened a long time ago.”

They had butchered him. She reached out and parted his shirt, gazed at the jagged white scar across the smoothly muscled planes of his chest. She pressed one hand over a new wound, raw and red, and stitched with scarlet. She laid her head against his chest and listened to the steady, faint beat of his heart. She whispered, “Is that mine?”

“The second one,” he murmured into her hair. “I didn't want you to see that. How did you see that?”

She lifted her head and gravely met his gaze as his own eyes silvered.

He kissed her as if he were drinking her, dragging her against him until she was in his lap and stars exploded in her brain. His cool skin warmed beneath her hands as he tangled his fingers in her hair while his other arm curved around her back. She kept one hand curled over his pounding heart.

“Finn . . .” His mouth slid from hers so that she could breathe. He pressed her back against the marble bench, his body sliding over hers with predatory grace. “Stop.”

She pulled him against her, closing her eyes as his fingertips slid over her thigh and his narrow hips pinned hers. She curled her hands beneath his coat, against the muscled warmth of his back. His mouth brushed beneath her ear and he whispered, “Finn Sullivan,
remember what I am.
”

She refused to picture his gory second birth as his mouth opened over hers again, taking her breath, and her own heartbeat began to fill her ears. She moved her hands to his hips beneath the shirt, felt more scars, and, with every kiss, fiercely knew that she was breaking a link in the chain that bound him to Reiko Fata. Finn scarcely noticed when the heat between them began to cool and her skin iced and her heart stuttered and her own breath became as faint as her thoughts—

She realized he was killing her. She began clawing at him, struggling.

He tore back, sliding to his feet, away from her.

“Jack . . .” She scrambled up.

He raised his head, his face shadowed, eyes dark. “You see now?”

She reached up and laid her hand against his chest. “But your heart—Jack—it's beating again—”

“I should never have smiled at you.” Then he was gone.

Cold and dazed, she lay back on the bench that was like tombstone marble, her arms over her face. Why had this happened to her?

She had to find Christie and Sylvie. She slid to her feet and ran swiftly down the garden path, back toward the party.

She halted when she saw a slight figure with blond hair in the shadows near a fountain—Bottle. Seated on the rim, the Rook was swinging his feet and singing softly, “He kissed the girls and stole their breath, kissed them 'til there was nothing left . . .”

Finn tried the name she suspected he'd been born with, that of the youngest of the Tirnagoth children, “Eammon.”

He looked up like an abused child, his eyes smudged with black.

A shadow scythed from the night and gripped his shoulder as it bent and whispered to the boy. Light glistened on silvery hair and a barrow king's ransom of rings.

Bottle rose, watching Finn. Then he loped away.

Caliban turned to face Finn, who wore no iron, no silver against him. He smiled, his teeth very white. “Why it's Greensleeves, alone in the garden. I don't smell any iron on you, darling. And I don't see any silver.”

“Jack—”

“He's with Reiko. They're planning a celebration of their own. I'm sure they won't mind if you join them, though Reiko thinks of you more like a sister.”

She didn't believe him. A cold knot formed in her stomach. Jack
wouldn't . . .

He began to move toward her, his boots crunching frost-laced leaves. “Ah, don't weep. I'll comfort you.”

If she ran, he would catch her. As he drew closer, she smelled frost and old metal. His eyes flickered ghostly silver as his fingers curled around her wrist, the tarnished rings he wore biting into her skin. “Come. Dance with me.”

“No, thank you.” Her voice had a ragged edge.

“You don't have a choice, darling.”

There was a brief struggle, until she relented, her mouth tight, her eyes downcast. He began to glide with her as if they were at a prom. He said, “A dance like this. There's only one way it can end.”

“I was
invited
.”

“I'm not one of Reiko's. I'm from a different
family
. Haven't I told you? The rules don't apply to me. I am
sluagh
and you will never see me in sunlight.”

She tried to pull free, but he was horribly strong. As he backed her up against a tree, panic sheared through her.

Poetry is a weapon against them,
Jack had once told her. So she recited the only poem she knew by heart, “
Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware—
”

He tore back from her, releasing her as if he'd just touched iron. He snarled, “What are you spitting at me? You think pretending to be crazy is going to save you—”

She reached for the only weapon she had, more words. “Who were you before they got you?”

He stepped back from her, his eyes wide.

“Caliban.”

The voice that came from the woods was deep, masculine, a voice that ruled blood-fed oaks, bones beneath roots, nights before electricity tried to keep away the dark.

“
Damh Ridire.
” Caliban bowed his head. Then he turned quickly and strode away. The tall shadow in the dark, which looked as if it had antlers, also vanished, taking with it the otherworldly chill.

Finn slid down against the tree, her arms over her head, dead leaves crackling around her.

She heard whispers in the nest of trees nearby and looked up, squinting into the dark. She spied Nathan's bronze hair glinting and his shadowy profile as he bent his head to kiss a slim shadow with dandelion-puff hair. She watched as Nathan and his girl kissed and felt a wistful, anxious sadness.

Christie and Sylvie, looking as if they'd fought battles of their own, eventually found her.

IT WAS CALIBAN WHO CAUGHT
Nathan and Mary Booke together. It was Jack who was ordered to watch Nathan Clare in Tirnagoth's ballroom, and who now sat with legs apart, arms on the back of the divan as he tried not to think of Finn and what Reiko had attempted with her and her friends.

Nathan, who sat huddled in a chair, looked up, his eyes red. “Jack, you know how I feel . . . I can't live like a
dead thing
.”

“And what am I supposed to do about that, Nate?” Jack kept any thoughts of Finn from his eyes.

“I
love
her.” Nathan's voice broke. “Reiko told me it was all right. Because Booke's a changeling—”

“Reiko tricked you.” Jack unfolded himself from the divan and leaned forward. “Do you realize what you've done? Aside from endangering your girl? Their bloody
Teind—
”

Nathan rubbed his hands across his face. “Booke is different. She isn't going to interfere—”

Remembering how the Fatas had converged on Nathan and the girl called Booke, Jack settled back on the divan, shoving his hands over his face.

“Jack.
Please
help her.”

A sudden flare of anger made Jack lean forward again. “And how do I do that, Nate?”

Caliban entered as a swift, icy shadow, hauled Nathan up, and slammed him against a pillar. Nathan choked, but he didn't fight back.

“If you've mucked us with that pale girl, pretty boy, I'll claw your guts out and make
her
eat them—”

Jack said, “Leave him alone.”

Caliban whispered into Nathan's ear, then released him and strolled from the room. Nathan, sliding down against the pillar, his hands over his face, didn't see Reiko enter, her crimson kimono dripping against the black and white tiles.

She moved to him and crouched before him, holding his face in her hands. “Sweet Nathan. Haven't we made you a prince? Don't you still love us?”

He closed his eyes. “Just don't hurt her and I'll do what you want.”

“Of course you will, Nathan. You will die for us.”

Jack rose and stalked from the room.

He found Caliban seated on a windowsill in the hall. The bastard smiled. “How are you, jackal?”

“Fine. And you, hyena?”

Caliban stretched lithely. “I've had a talk with Nate's girl. You know she's one of us? I've never noticed her. Her name is Mary Booke.”

Jack's hand slid to his breastbone, to the painful growth there—the heart.

“You know, your schoolgirl has caught Seth Lot's eye. He likes 'em skinny and virginal and he can't have leggy Nathan.” Those silver eyes flashed, malevolent.

“Go near her again and I'll pull your teeth.”

Caliban bared those teeth, because he didn't like to be reminded of what he'd been before becoming a Jack. Jack smiled as if his teeth were in Caliban's throat and sauntered down the hall as the sun began to rise, revealing the ugly decay around him.

 

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

At ordinary times they do not see us or know we are near, but when we speak to them, we are in danger of their deceits.

—
V
ISIONS AND
B
ELIEFS IN THE
W
EST O
F
I
RELAND,
L
ADY
G
REG
ORY

Her name was Annie Briar and she was sixteen and she was a hedgewitch. She had learned her craft from an elegant young man who called himself Lacroix. Then she met a boy beneath the hawthorn tree. And Lacroix, who was not, after all, young, or a man, became jealous . . .

—
F
ROM THE JOUR
NAL OF
L
ILY
R
OSE

F
inn didn't see Jack all weekend, and the separation was like an amputation, because he'd left her as if he never intended to return. It wasn't as if she could call or text him . . . and she was too afraid of what he'd say to her if she went to his apartment.

She felt as abandoned as she had after Lily had left her.

PROFESSOR JANE EMORY'S BOTANY EXPEDITION
was scheduled for early Monday morning, so Sylvie spent the night. Finn discovered her friend wasn't a six-in-the-morning sort of person and had to be supplied with coffee and pancakes before she could even open her eyes all the way. Seated at the kitchen table with her black hair in her face and a plaid shawl wrapped around her shoulders, Sylvie looked like a waif. “Everything feels upside down.”

“That's because it is.”

“That garden party—Nathan's birthday?—was so bizarre.” Sylvie shuddered and Finn frowned at her, because it seemed like Sylvie wanted to tell her something. Sylvie murmured, “
What
are they?”

Finn didn't want to talk about
them
in the sensible world of daylight. “Not like us.”

AS THE REST OF THE
class trudged ahead with Jane Emory leading, Sylvie pulled Finn along the sunlit path. Nathan Clare, who seemed to be genuinely interested in botany, was with them, his bronze curls tucked beneath a newsboy's cap—he looked pale. There was a bruise on his cheekbone.

As Jane Emory—who preferred to be called Jane or Miss Emory—pointed out a ring of red toadstools speckled white—“Fly agaric. Pretty but poisonous.”—Finn stared at the toadstools and thought of Reiko Fata in her crimson dress.

Sylvie murmured, “I once read a book that gave a mushroom recipe for a wine that would allow you to see spirits. I think one of the mushrooms was poisonous though.”

“What kind of mushroom keeps spirits
away
?” Finn watched Nathan Clare moving among the trees.

“None. Fairies like mushrooms.”

“Please don't say the ‘f' word. Do you suppose
Jane Emory
knows about them?” She watched their botany instructor clamber over a fallen tree and felt a whirly panic at the idea of her secret world being known to an older generation.

Sylvie trudged beside her, in silence for a while, then said, “Let's not talk about them anymore, okay? I don't want to think about it.”

Jane Emory's short, yellow curls glowed as she halted in a beam of sunlight. “Watch out for the hawthorn. It's infamous.”

Finn glanced at the tree, a hawthorn like the Queen's tree Christie had shown her, only this one was bare of ornaments. It had tiny thorns and small, reddish-orange fruit.

“It's the resting place of two lovers.” Jane Emory shifted her basket to her other arm. “He hung himself from the branches, and she poisoned herself beneath it. Love,” she continued, her gaze passing over Finn, “causes all sorts of problems.”

Finn scowled as someone—she thought it might have been Aubrey Drake—said, “That's not a very nice life lesson, Miss Emory.”

“Look at
those
.” Sylvie moved toward a ring of pale green toadstools.

“Sylv—never mind.” Finn, leaving the hawthorn, picked her way to Nathan's side. When no one was paying attention to them, she said, “Tell me about the Teind.”

“It has nothing to do with—”

“Tell me.”

He rubbed at the bruise on his face and looked at her with such a bleak expression, she wanted to shake the truth from him. She whispered, “I saw what they did to Jack.”

He nodded. “Follow me.”

Nathan walked away from the noisy, distracted group, and Finn moved after, through trees sheathed in emerald moss, with crimson leaves falling silently around them. As they clambered over roots and rocks, she soon couldn't hear birds or insects, only an eerie hush. Then he was leading her into a cavern of green shadow.

A mammoth oak towered before them, a prehistoric thing, its gnarled branches so heavy with leaves the air beneath had become subterranean. Its immense roots snaked into the forest on one side, through a pool of dark water on the other. The trunk was a tower carved with strange symbols, some of which had been overgrown by bark. The resulting atmosphere around the oak was one of stillness and immense age.

Finn moved toward it and reached to touch the bark as ridged as an ancient warrior's skin, gazing into the branches, a cathedral-ceiling pattern of red and gold and green leaves. Something inhuman and millennial, an
awareness
breathed over her—hostile, secretive, and alien.

She stepped back, awed. “
What is it?
”

Nathan said, “They see it as a symbol of their family, a reservoir of their power—an old god. It's dying.” He looked at her. “The Teind will renew it—and their pact with what lies beyond it.”

“And what lies beyond it?”

He seemed wary as he said, “The tree, the god, is a guardian . . . to the land of the dead.”

Finn regarded the tree as if it were an enemy. There was stillness around them, as if something was listening. She began to back away. “How old are you, Nathan?”

“Seventeen.” He kept his lashes lowered.

She turned on him. “What are they going to do on Halloween?”

“There'll be a sacrifice. To save something so old, there's always a sacrifice.” He turned and trudged away.

She whispered after him, “What kind of sacrifice, Nathan?”

He didn't reply, and Finn, looking over her shoulder at the oak as she strode after him, began to suspect a terrible answer.

THAT EVENING, COMPLETING AN ENGLISH
Comp assignment on her laptop, she typed “Teind” into the search engine. The results, at first, were benign. The definition she was familiar with:
an offering; an exchange of Celtic origin
. The searches became darker, the illustrations sinister . . . “
A price paid
” captioned the picture of a hanging man; “
An offering
” titled the illustration of a girl, drowning; “
Sacrifice
” labeled the painting of a burning figure.

As she gazed at the last horrific illustration, she got a panicked text from Sylvie:

Someone's here to see you. Get to the shop.

A THUNDERSTORM GLOWERED ABOVE THE
Blackbird Mountains as Finn hurried the three blocks to Whiskey and Pearls, the salvage shop owned by Sylvie's dad. When the mermaid figurehead in the shop window appeared through a sudden torrent of rain, Finn ran toward it and pushed through the door.

Sylvie, in a black dress with ribboned sleeves, sat beneath a wooden angel. Draped against the mermaid figurehead, his wrists laced with pearls, was a slender youth in a tangerine raincoat and striped trousers. His black T-shirt was scrawled with the letters
WYSIWYG
in Gothic crimson. His hair was like sunset.

“Absalom Askew.” Finn sank down onto a voyage trunk. Since she knew what he was, she took the advice from her sister's journal and spoke politely. “I'll listen to what you have to say.”

“Good. Miss Whitethorn and I have just been having a bit of a talk, haven't we?”

Finn glanced frantically at Sylvie. “Are you okay?”

“Peachy.” Sylvie raised her eyebrows.

Absalom looked at Sylvie. “Miss Whitethorn, might Miss Sullivan and I have some privacy?”

“I'll be close by.” Sylvie walked toward the back, glancing over one shoulder.

Absalom sat on the mermaid's curved tail. “Our Jack is suffering because of you. You have been hurt because of him. So, on his behalf, I ask that you pretend you never met him. Can you do that?”

“No. How are you his friend?”

“That”—he lifted an index finger and pointed it at her—“is a very good question and a long story with which I won't bore you. Jack doesn't remember anyway . . . A century or so will do that to you.”

Finn clenched her hands and breathed deeply so that she wouldn't scream at him. This wasn't a human boy sitting with her, and if she thought about it too long, she'd be too petrified to play pretend. She said, “I'm not forgetting Jack. I will never forget him. I'll leave myself notes to remind myself of him if something happens.
Are
you his friend?”

“Yes. And I also happen to dislike bullies.”

She pictured Reiko Fata's arrogant assurance. “And by bullies, you mean the Fatas?”

He sighed as if his heart was breaking. “I am a neutral party, Finn Sullivan. Well, for now. I sort of root for the underdog. Now, if the situation was reversed and
they
were in danger, well”—he winked—“then you wouldn't like me.”

“And Jack?”

“Jack.” Absalom looked at her with ancient eyes in a boy's face. “He died some time ago. But you already knew that.”

The tips of Finn's fingers and toes went numb, and her eyes felt hot. Her vision blurred. Absalom gently said, “Even now, you won't admit to yourself what they are—
don't fall asleep
. You mustn't do that anymore.”

Her voice was ragged. “What do I do?”

He leaned toward her. “You can walk away. And she'll forget you—she
does
forget, you know. And they'll call off Caliban. You'll never hear from us again . . . We'll be strangers to you, nothing more.”

Forget Jack.
She thought of Caliban, who was something that could kill her. “His name really is Caliban. Like Shakespeare's monster.”

“It's the name he chose—let's give him credit for being somewhat literary.
I
can help you forget.” There was something like kindness in his gaze.

She didn't doubt he
could
make her forget . . . what else was enchantment, bewitchment, but a sort of mind control? “Has Jack done something to me—”

“Bewitched you? That's his purpose. He
is
a Jack. But it isn't glamour, unfortunately, that has you all knotted in thorns,
leanabh
.”

She pictured Jack, his head bowed, ragged hair brushing his neck as the drowsy look in his eyes was replaced with anguish. “He isn't one of you.”

“He is now. If you refuse my offer to make you forget, you should remember this—Fair Hollow is a between place. If it ever gets to the point where you need to fight back, confront Reiko in territory that is not solely hers—the Dead Kings, for instance,
not
Tirnagoth—and she'll have no choice but to answer your questions. Those are the rules. You'll be allowed a limited number of questions—make them relevant. And don't bring any weapons.”

“Was it you who left that key beneath my window? The key shaped into a moth?”

Absalom said darkly, “Moths are treacherous creatures.”

“They're bugs.”

“But they begin as larvae, they incinerate themselves for no reason, and they generally serve no purpose.”

She wondered irritably how old Absalom really was and if his kind could become senile. “Never mind.”

“Are we done then?”

“The Teind, Absalom. And
you
called
me
here.”

“I will not speak of the Teind. That's a question you'll need to save for Reiko.” He rose and sauntered toward the door. As it swayed shut behind him, she heard him say, “And if you want to keep Jack, follow the rules—rules are what keep us in shape.”

When he'd gone, Sylvie stomped defiantly from the back. “Are you okay?”

Finn gazed out at the rain. “I need to get into the Dead Kings.”

Sylvie panicked and called Christie, who arrived fifteen minutes later.

IT HAD STOPPED RAINING BY
then, so they sat on the courtyard fountain behind the salvage shop. Like the building, the courtyard was old, tangled with crabapple trees and blackberry bushes and twisty little trees in stone urns that had cracked with age. Surrounded by buildings, with a church in the back, it was a good place for a secret huddle.

Sylvie still couldn't believe what Finn wanted to do. “Absalom said to
confront
Reiko?”

Christie scrubbed a hand through his hair. “That is
such
a bad idea . . .”

Finn looked around as a wind tainted with the scents of rust and candle smoke drifted over them. She said, “Absalom said if we confront Reiko in a place that isn't just hers, we can ask questions. About Jack, and Nathan.”

Christie looked exasperated. “Finn, one of those . . . whatever they are . . . got
inside
of me. I still puke whenever I think about it. And you want to walk into their lair? After that party? For
him
? A thing without a heart?”

“They did something to Jack,” she said, keeping her voice level. “They tricked him a long time ago. They did . . . terrible things. And, because of them,
my sister is dead
.”

“What?”