‘Tam,’ I say.
He folds his arms against his chest. The pose is all Tam and even though he’s wearing Finn’s face – Finn’s whole body – he’s nothing like Finn at all.
I’m so stupid. How could I forget that Emily changed Tam? Every day the mask will wear off a little further until you wear your own face again, she said to him. I was there. It was only a few hours ago!
Matilda told me not to let my fairy boyfriend into the house. She told me.
Well, I guess I haven’t. Technically.
Oh God, he’s going to kill me.
‘Where is she?’ he says again.
‘Tam,’ I say, ‘how about you sit down? I was just making some tea. I’ll bring you some. We can sit, and we can talk, and –’
‘Where is she?’
‘Okay, fine, I guess we’re doing this here.’ I curl the fingers of my left hand into a fist and dig my fingernails into the palm of my hand, trying to use the edge of pain to drive away the fog in my mind. ‘I understand that you’re upset about Emily, but I’m not going to tell you where she is.’
‘Yes, you will,’ he snarls. ‘You are going to tell me what you have done with the Silver Lady, or –’
‘Or what, Tam? Or you’ll kill me? You’ll torture me? You’ll shout at me some more? Because if you’re going to do any of those things, you might as well get started. People have tried all of them on me about forty-five times tonight. You’re not very original.’
‘Pearl,’ he says, his voice low and dangerous, ‘you will tell me where she is. Right now.’
‘Or, you know, I won’t. Because I don’t know where she is. Maybe you were a bit distracted, but I wasn’t the one on Emily-hiding duty.’
‘Don’t insult me. If there was a plan, I know you were the one behind it. Where did Holly-Anne take her?’
‘Look, I’ve got two options here,’ I say, mimicking his position and folding my arms as best as I can. I lean back against the door jamb, trying to communicate that I’m tough and nonchalant although really I’m trying to get something else to carry as much of my weight as possible. ‘I tell you where Emily is, you go and free her, she’s like, “Oh, Tam, my beautiful darling boy, I knew you would save me”, and then you turn into the human version of the heart eyes emoji while she murders me and Cardy and Holly for taking her down, and probably half the town as well for good measure. Or I don’t tell you where Emily is, and you kill me now, and hey, maybe you kill Cardy and Holly and a few other people as well, but I still have the satisfaction of knowing that you never found where we hid her.’
‘Where’s the Valentine?’
I blink. ‘What?’
‘Maybe you think you have nothing left to lose, but I doubt he would see it the same way. Where is he?’
‘Not here.’
‘Where?’
That’s the moment when, at long last, I faint.
I’m dressed in gold.
It should be scratchy against my skin, but it’s liquid, fluid, like it’s been poured onto me.
I feel naked. I feel exposed.
‘Eat, Valentine,’ the girl urges.
‘No.’
I push the plate away. It’s gold too. Everything is gold. It should look tacky, but it doesn’t.
‘I am sure this is difficult,’ she says, her voice smooth, honeyed. ‘It is always so, for those who have been changelings. But know that that world will fade in time. You have come home, sweet prince. You have come home to us.’
‘Sweet prince?’ I demand. ‘Seriously?’
‘For almost eighteen years, every one of us in the Summerland has dreamt of you, Valentine,’ she says. ‘We have craved your return like we crave the sun and the moon. And now you have returned to us.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I say. ‘I haven’t returned. I was stolen. I –’
I stop. The thunder crashes outside.
‘Where are they?’
‘Where are who?’
‘I’m not the only one who was stolen,’ I say. ‘Eighteen years ago, when the Seelie king –’
‘Your father.’
‘– when he ditched me in Haylesford, he stole Tam, and he stole three other kids too,’ I say, talking over the top of her. ‘Kids for Cardy and Marie – and Pearl’s twin. He stole all of them.’
‘To keep you safe, Valentine,’ she says, a mollifying note in her voice. ‘So that none would know who you were.’
‘He stole them!’ I exclaim. ‘Right out of their homes, right away from their parents, he stole them. Where are they?’
‘Valentine,’ she says. ‘You must eat.’
‘No!’ I explode. ‘I’m not eating. I’m not drinking. I’m not doing anything until you tell me where they are.’
‘Your brother will be offended if you do not eat.’
‘I don’t care about my brother!’
‘You will not be the one who pays the price.’
I look at her. There are leaves growing in her hair, the ripple of bark in her skin, and fear in her eyes, dark amber as sap.
‘I want to see them,’ I say. ‘I want to see the rest of the kids my father stole on Valentine’s Day.’
She shakes her head. ‘I cannot.’
‘Tell me where to find them,’ I say, ‘and I’ll –’
The thread jerking tight through my skin rips me awake. I instinctively try and curl around the pain, but something heavy is holding me down.
‘Stay still,’ Tam says, and shifts his weight so more of it is pressing me into the ground.
I’m on the living room floor, and he’s kneeling – no, almost lying over me, his fingers dancing like spiders’ legs over my shoulder, his face so close to mine that I can feel his breath. ‘Get off.’
He draws back, looks at me coolly with Finn’s eyes. ‘You need stitches. You needed stitches in the wound hours ago, because you’ve made what was quite a simple stab wound –’
‘Oh yes, your basic run of the mill stabbing, I get one every Tuesday.’
‘– into something worse. You could lose the use of this arm if you’re not careful. And I’m almost finished in any case.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ he repeats, pinching the edges of the wound in my shoulder together and pulling another stitch through. The feeling of the thread being yanked through my skin makes my gorge rise, and I have to keep from gagging.
‘You were threatening to kill me ten minutes ago and now you’re all, “Keep still while I heal you, little lady”. Why?’
‘I never threatened to kill you.’ Another stitch, yanked tight.
‘I don’t have the time or the energy for your mind games, Tam.’
‘Why I am doing this –’ pinch, stab, pull, yank, ‘is not important.’
If a) I had even the slightest amount of energy and b) he wasn’t trained in eighty-seven ways to kill me with his toes alone and c) he wasn’t on top of me right now, I would roll my eyes. ‘Maybe some girls are into the whole “Oooh, I’m so mysterious and tormented, spend your life worrying about my secret pain” thing, but not me.’
Surprisingly, he laughs. A short, sharp bark of a laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him laugh before.
Of course he laughs at the idea that he might be trying to impress me. Because he’s not trying to impress me. The only person he’s ever been interested in impressing is …
‘I’m still not going to tell you where Emily is. You can be as nice to me as you want, and stitch me up as many times as you like, and you could rip open the universe and get Finn back and deliver him to me with a giant gift bow stuck to his head, and I still wouldn’t tell you where she was.’
He deploys the #1 play from the Tam playbook and says nothing.
‘Even if I knew where she was,’ I add. ‘Which I don’t.’
He pulls another stitch through my skin, a white-hot scrape of thread that makes it feel like someone’s taken a cello bow to my brain. ‘We do not need to be enemies, Pearl.’
‘I’ll start plaiting the friendship bracelet.’
‘The Seelie were always going to reclaim the Valentine.’
I turn my head away, just in time to see the front door swing slowly open.
‘They do not leave changelings in the human world that They do not intend to one day reclaim,’ he goes on, because suddenly, after all these months of silence, he’s decided it’s time to be chatty. ‘Even the lowliest one of them who is changed will one day be reclaimed, and the Valentine is a prince. The Seelie have mourned his loss for almost eighteen years. You knew that They were always going to come for him.’
‘I knew no such thing, Tam,’ I say, making sure I enunciate his name loud and clear.
‘Then you are not as clever as I have given you credit for,’ he says. ‘The Valentine was always one of Them. They were always going to find him. They were always going to take him back.’
Another stitch. The sound the thread makes pulling through my skin is almost as bad as the sensation.
I dig my nails into the flesh of my left hand again. I have to keep him talking. I can’t give him an excuse to turn around. ‘I’m going to get him back.’
‘The Valentine is where he was always supposed to be.’
Is that a soothing note in his voice? Is he trying to soothe me?
‘You and I can work together, Pearl. All we need to do is –’
‘– get Emily back to fairyland,’ I say, catching his train of thought. ‘Then Finn’s there, and she’s there, and you’re here, and all the humans and all the fairies are wrapped up neat in their little boxes, never to meet again.’
‘Those are not the words I would have chosen,’ Tam says, ‘but yes.’
‘So let me get this straight,’ I say, as he bends even closer to tie off the last of the stitches. ‘You’ve been kind of nice to me, so I’m feeling generous, and I’m like, “You know what, Tam? You can have Emily after all,” so I take you to her, and she’s so happy when she sees your face that she’s like, “I’ll do you a favour, schnoogie-woogie, and not kill everyone in a twenty k vicinity,” and then she goes back to fairyland and you sidestep neatly into Finn’s life and we all live happily ever after?’
‘Take me to her, and I will give you my word that she will not harm you.’
‘Or us?’ Cardy asks. ‘Will you give your word that she won’t hurt us?’
Tam turns, but the knife Holly has at his throat makes him stop. ‘Get off her,’ Holly snarls. ‘Slowly.’
‘You won’t hurt me,’ he says quietly.
‘Want to bet?’ She presses harder, and I see a droplet of blood bead on his neck.
On Finn’s neck.
I swallow.
Slowly, Tam levers his body weight off me. I scramble out from under him, and Cardy helps me to my feet. ‘Are you all right?’ he says.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re shaking.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Here’s what’s going to happen, Tam,’ Holly says. ‘You are going to sit down in that chair. I’m going to stand right here so you don’t get any ideas. And Cardy is going to tie your hands and feet.’
‘What have you done with her?’
Holly laughs, a dark humourless laugh. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘What have you done with her?’
‘You’re pathetic,’ she spits. ‘You’re free, idiot. For once in your life you’re free of her, and you want her back?’
Tam’s hand is like a cobra, striking so fast that I barely see it happen. The knife clatters into the wall. Then he has Holly pressed up against the curtains of the front window, his forearm at her throat, pushing her chin high so that it’s almost level with his. Cardy lunges toward him, but Tam kicks him away, catching him right under the ribs, sending him toppling backwards over Shad’s favourite armchair.
‘I will not kill you,’ Tam says to Holly, his voice quiet and menacing, ‘because I know what she did to you. But you will give the Silver Lady back to me.’
Then he’s gone.
Holly bends over, coughing. Cardy’s heaving in massive gulps of air on the ground.
I bend down and pick up the knife. It’s a Stanley knife with a yellow plastic handle and Holly’s initials written on it in black texta.
Something about this strikes me as the funniest thing in the world. Fairies everywhere with mind-control powers and swords and daggers made out of ice and Tam running around with who knows how much ninja training, and Holly-Anne Sullivan strides into the fight armed with a Stanley knife.
The front door is banging gently against the wall in the breeze. I hobble over and close it. My muscles must have cooled down or something while I was unconscious and Tam was stitching me up, because every step hurts. ‘Are you both okay?’
‘I will be,’ Cardy says, wheezing. ‘Just give – me – a second.’
‘Yeah,’ Holly says. ‘What happened? Where’s Finn?’
I close my eyes.
‘Pearl,’ Holly says, ‘where’s Finn?’
I don’t cry. I sit there in Disey’s chair in the lounge room with a cup of tea in my hands, the first rays of the sun starting to filter in the window, and I’m really proud that I don’t cry.
I tell them what happened after they left. The Riders coming. Throwing Phil through the Summer Door to stop them from making her their ironheart. Finn taking five of them on at once while I cut open Mr Hunter’s chest and put his heart back in place. Finn healing him. Everything stopping, as the Riders realised that they were no longer bound by what the fairies wanted them to do, and disappearing into the night to find where their hearts were hidden, maybe never to be seen again.
I don’t tell them about those few euphoric moments where Finn and I sat on the ground together, covered with blood, and the world around us took on the pristine, crystalline quality of a diamond, perfect and glittering, because we had won.
But I tell them how Finn went through the Summer Door to save Phil. How he didn’t come back, and so I went after him.
How the Crown Prince of the Seelie made me choose between them: boyfriend, best friend, long-lost twin.
‘They took kids for all four of us?’ Cardy exclaims, at the same time as Holly asks, an incredulous note in her voice, ‘So you just left him there?’
‘No, I took on an entire army of fairies singlehanded, won, brought Finn back with me, concocted this whole story to mess with you, and hid him in a cupboard. Oh look, here he is now.’
‘Calm your farm, Pearl, I didn’t mean it like that,’ Holly says. ‘I mean … they just let you leave?’
‘The prince said …’
I am in a mood to be generous. His voice had curled over me like a flame, licking at my skin. You have rid me of the Riders, after all, and now I may ride through mortal lands all I please. And so you may take one of them with you.
My hands are shaking again, liquid sloshing over the rim of my teacup.
‘He thought it was funny,’ I say. ‘The prince thought it was the most hilarious thing he’d ever seen to make me choose between the three of them, and to leave two of them behind.’
This is the last time you will ever see her, he had told Finn.
Liar, I had said to him, to a fairy prince who cannot lie.
And he’d laughed in my face.
‘You have a twin,’ Cardy says.
It’s the kind of statement that might be a question. He’s staring at the floor, fingers looped so loosely around his tea that it looks like it might slip from his grasp at any moment. ‘You have a twin,’ he repeats.
‘Apparently.’
‘Maybe not, though,’ Holly says. ‘Maybe it’s just some random other person that they made look like you. That would be exactly the kind of dick move they’d pull, right? Like, what if you’d picked her instead of Phil, and you got home and it turned out it was some fairy who tried to eat you or something?’
I shake my head. ‘The prince flat-out said she was my sister. They can’t lie.’
‘Does that mean you have a secret twin too?’ Holly asks Cardy.
He doesn’t answer.
‘Surely not,’ I say. ‘I mean … the odds would be ridiculous, right? It was already ridiculous that four kids were born on the same day in a town this tiny.’
‘Five kids. If she really is your twin.’
‘But surely there weren’t also a bunch of spares lying around, handy for the taking,’ I say. ‘Maybe Finn’s dad got lucky with me having a double all good to go, but there’s no way Cardy and Marie also had secret twins.’
‘Perhaps he just took Finn and your sister, then,’ Holly says. ‘As – I don’t know, an insurance policy.’
‘No,’ Cardy says. ‘It makes sense. If they didn’t want anyone to know who the Valentine was, they had to take kids for all of us.’
He stands up suddenly and starts pacing. ‘If the fairies didn’t take kids for all four of us, then it would have been a fifty/fifty equation,’ he says. ‘Is the Valentine Pearl, or is it Finn? But it wasn’t, or Jenny would never have bothered with me, and Marie would still be alive. They had no idea which one of us it was, because they stole a kid for each of us. Plausible fucking deniability.’
I try to remember the last time I heard Cardy swear, and fail.
‘I have to work out who they took for me,’ Cardy says. ‘I have to work it out, and I have to get him back.’
‘If it makes it any better, I don’t think it’d be anyone you know,’ I say. ‘Finn’s dad was a fairy king. He could have stolen fake-you and fake-Marie from anywhere.’
‘Of course it doesn’t make it better!’ Cardy explodes. ‘It doesn’t matter that I don’t know him! They stole a kid. From his family. From his home. From his land. And they did it just because they needed some fake-out fairies!’
I’ve never seen Cardy angry before, I realise. I’ve seen him annoyed, and upset, but even when he was in the hospital after Miller’s Creek, when he was demanding that I tell him what happened and I wouldn’t, he wasn’t like this.
Once, when an Unseelie fairy was possessing him, it used his body, his mouth, his voice to tell me that maybe Cardy should be their ironheart. He smiles and simpers on the surface but there is a fury in him that burns, it said.
Fairies can’t lie.
‘We have to get him back,’ Cardy says. ‘We have to get all of them back. I’m not going to stand here and let them do this, and I’m not going to let them steal any more kids ever again.’
My phone rings. I don’t know how it’s still functional after all it’s been through tonight. I’ve been swiping at it too much with bloody fingers, because the spider web of cracks on the screen is dark.
‘It’s my sister,’ I say. ‘Disey, I mean, not the long-lost –’
‘Just answer it,’ Holly cuts me off.
I look at the microwave clock. 5:30 a.m.
‘Dise?’ I don’t have to work to put on a groggy tone. ‘What’s up? Is something wrong?’
‘Pearlie, where are you?’
‘Home. Why?’
‘Do you know where Phil is?’
‘She’s here with me,’ I say. I should be getting a sinking feeling in my stomach, but all I get is another wave of weariness washing over me. ‘We made up. She’s asleep.’
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, Pearlie,’ Disey says, ‘or how we’re going to tell Phil, but I just got a call from the news desk, who heard it from the police. There’s been a murder. It’s Phil’s mother.’
I make Cardy and Holly leave before the cops get here. Holly isn’t keen on the idea – understandably, given that Tam is on the rampage – but I string together a few words about how knowing Emily’s location is leverage. It seems to make sense to her, and they go.
I have to wake up Phil. I tap first at my bedroom door, calling her name, but there’s no response, so I go in.
At first, I think she’s disappeared – that the Crown Prince was joking when he let me take her back – until I see her foot, poking out from under my desk. She’s curled into a ball under there, fast asleep.
‘Phil?’ I say, touching her gently.
No response.
I shake her harder. ‘Phil?’
She doesn’t wake up. I want to shake her even harder but if I wake her up too violently she’ll shove me again, and I might actually die if anyone touches my shoulder again.
But she won’t wake up.
Oh God, what if she’s catatonic again? What if she’s like she was after that night at Miller’s Creek, when Jenny and Kel kidnapped her? What if –
She blinks blearily at me. ‘Pearl?’
‘Phil,’ I say, the relief hot in my veins. ‘I need you to listen to me, okay?’
The realisation breaks over her face like a tsunami.
‘Focus,’ I tell her. ‘I need you to focus and listen to me. The cops are on their way now to officially inform you that your mum is dead. We need to keep our story straight.’
I vomit a bunch of words at her – ‘we were here all night, we stayed up late talking, we’ve been fighting recently but we made up’ – but she just looks at me, and I have no idea how much of it she’s taking in.
What if they insist on taking us down to the station or something? On taking DNA evidence? What if – what if –
There have been rumours swirling for months now that I’m actually a murderer, that I helped Jenny and Kel kill Marie. Sure, they’re mostly online conspiracy theories that no one except Julian reeeeeeally takes seriously (I think), but they’re out there.
But with this? Now?
I could be arrested. We could both be arrested.
The knock comes just as I’ve almost decided that our best option is to run, to go back to the Summer Door and pray it’s still open and fling ourselves through and beg the Crown Prince to have mercy on us.
‘Pearl Linford?’ the cop says when I open it.
‘Yes,’ I reply numbly.
You are under arrest for the murder of –
‘I’ve had a call from your sister, Paradise. I understand that Philippa Kostakidis is here with you.’
And we have a warrant for her arrest, and also yours, so –
‘Yes.’
‘Your sister also told us that you’ve heard what happened to Philippa’s mother. Can we come in?’
I stand aside to let him and his partner in. They sit down in the living room. At their request, I bring Phil in to speak to them.
‘Philippa, first of all, we need to apologise to you,’ the cop says.
Oh God, they’re going to take her in. Sorry, we know your mother’s dead, but we have to take you down to the station now. And they’ll fingerprint her and – I don’t know, take skin scrapings or something like they do on Law & Order and all those shows, and it will all add up to Phil Kostakidis murdered her own mother and then they’ll wonder if she had an accomplice and they’ll test me too, and no way did I manage to clean off all that blood in the shower, and –
‘We understand that you heard about what happened to your mother third-hand after a journalist at the Independent caught wind of it, and that’s not how that should have happened.’
Phil doesn’t say anything.
‘Can you tell us the last time you saw her?’
‘Last night,’ Phil mumbles. ‘Before I came over here.’
‘About what time?’
‘I don’t know, seven-ish, maybe?’
There’re more questions. Details they want to know. A lot of questions. I try and focus and help but my shoulder has started to throb, and what if it starts bleeding again and seeps through my shirt in front of all these cops?
‘We found your mother’s body washed up near Derrigong Beach this morning,’ I hear one of the cops say.
‘Washed up?’ Phil says faintly. ‘Someone threw her in the ocean?’
‘Miller’s Creek, we think. That’s where it meets the sea.’
‘Is there anyone you can think of that would have a vendetta against your mother?’ the other cop asks.
‘They threw her in the creek?’ I say. ‘It has to be Jenny and Kel, then.’
‘They’re certainly subjects of investigation, but –’
‘What do you mean, but?’ I say. ‘They’re still on the loose, and you know they like throwing body parts in the creek when they’re done with them, and they tried to kill Phil once before, remember? They must have come back to try to finish the job. And when they couldn’t get Phil –’
‘We need to make sure we pursue all avenues of investigation,’ one of the cops says, cutting me off. ‘So, Miss Kostakidis, is there anyone you can think of that would want to hurt your mother?’
Phil shakes her head, looking at the ground.
‘We understand your parents are divorced.’
‘My dad lives in Melbourne with his wife and my half-brother,’ Phil says quietly, not looking up. ‘And they’re in Greece on holiday. He wasn’t here. And anyway, it was – they didn’t – they still like each other. Liked each other.’
‘And you recently broke up with your boyfriend Julian Bishop, is that right?’
Phil nods.
How on earth did they get all this gossip between discovering Mrs Kostakidis’s body and coming here? Haylesford might be a small town, but it’s not so small that everyone knows who is dating who at the local high school.
The cops have been keeping tabs on us, haven’t they? They’ve got dossiers on all of us. This gentle, compassionate questioning is all a big fake-out, and a team of supercops with assault rifles wearing body armour are going to bust down the door any second now, and –
‘Do you think he’d want revenge for you breaking up with him?’ one of the cops asks. ‘Especially after what he did to your friend?’
What he did – oh. The it-would-have-been-revenge-porn-if-the-camera-angle-had-been-slightly-different incident, when Julian took a photo of me and Finn going at it on top of a piano in the music room at school and posted it on Facebook.
He somehow thought that doing that would prove Finn and I were murderers. Guess that one backfired pretty spectacularly on him.
‘I don’t know,’ Phil says. ‘I just – I don’t –’
Her chin droops even further towards her chest.
‘Look, she’s exhausted,’ I say. ‘I’m sure you can imagine that this is quite a shock. Can we do this some other time?’
‘The quicker we can get the information we need –’
‘The quicker you can find out who did this, I know, but – look at her.’ I make the mistake of gesturing with my bad arm, and the sick throbbing feeling is so intense for a moment I’m amazed I don’t black out. ‘She’ll – we’ll – answer all your questions, I promise. But she’s a mess.’
I wish I had Disey’s gift for staring people down. She’d have been able to get these cops out of the way in two seconds.
But it turns out that cops aren’t big on leaving minors alone in houses (even if they’re going to be legal adults in a few months) when there’s a murderer on the loose. They agree to let me put Phil to bed, and they agree to let me sit with her, and they even agree to let me close my bedroom door behind us, but they won’t agree to leave the house until Disey or Shad gets home.
Phil curls herself into a ball under the desk again. ‘Phil?’ I say, but she doesn’t answer me, and I don’t have the energy to keep trying.
I have no energy at all, not even a little. All that’s keeping me conscious is pain and panic. What if the cops not leaving the house isn’t about protection or supervision? What if they’re lulling us into a false sense of security while they wait for the supercops with the guns and the body armour to arrive?
How am I going to get Finn back if I’m in jail? How am I going to make the Crown Prince a liar if the supercops have me in handcuffs?
I can still hear him laughing.
My mind is a mess, every thought like a new patch of quicksand sucking me down, the agony of the stab wound in my shoulder like a red-hot poker shoved directly through my brain, but even through all of it, I can hear the prince laughing as he made me choose. My sister. Phil. Finn.
I left him there.
I left him there.
I have to choke the sound that wants to explode out of me so the cops don’t hear, and it gets caught in my throat, so painful it feels like it might burst and blow my head right off my body.
Oh God, Finn Finn Finn Finn.
This is the last time you will ever see her, the prince said to him, and when I called him a liar, he laughed.
I sit on the floor with the back of my head against my bed, and all I can hear is that laugh, dragging me down and down and down into the dark.
I float. I drift.
The darkness is entire, close and crushing, and the only thing that is not the darkness is the laughter, and so I cling to it, closing my fingers around the tail of a comet, dragged along by a shooting star. It burns me, my blood turning to liquid metal in my veins, eating me from the inside out. But if I let go, there will be nothing left of me, alone in a vast universe of nothing and no one.
I’m clinging to the star, but I’m somehow looking at it as well, my fingers curled around the rail of a balcony which seems to have grown rather than been built.
The rain sheets down, and the thunder rolls, but it cannot hide the sounds of laughter and music in the distance. The lost prince has returned to them, and the summer sky is celebrating.
I close my eyes. I trace the lines of her face in my mind, the wild spikes of her hair, the way she lifted her chin, the curve of her lips as she snarled the word liar.
I can see her there in front of me as clearly as if she were there. I reach out to her, and –
‘Linford?’
I crash back into my own body. I lose my grip on the tail of the comet but he catches me, his fingers long and strong and sure as they wrap around my right wrist.
My shoulder explodes with pain, and I detonate like a supernova, screaming and screaming and screaming –
‘Linford, Linford, I’ve got you, it’s all right!’
He puts his arms around me, his magical arms, and he holds me together.
‘… Finn?’ I say.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, his fingers cool as he trails them over my right shoulder. ‘I forgot you got stabbed.’
‘You’re here,’ I say. ‘You’re here.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, pressing his face into my hair. ‘I’m here.’
We stay like that for a second, or maybe a century.
‘Are we …?’
‘We’re in your dreams,’ he says.
I take a few moments to breathe. The air is cool and clear and crisp, but perfectly still. We’re alone in a dark universe, him and me, suspended in nothingness.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says after a moment. ‘I know you told me never to come into your dreams again.’
I wrap my arms around him tightly in response. My face presses into the crook of his neck and I tangle my fingers in the blackness of his hair and even the constant throbbing burning of my shoulder doesn’t matter, because he’s here with me.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Are you?’
‘No.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I’m crying, my salty tears leaving faint red tracks on his skin, because I haven’t hurt him enough already. ‘I’m so sorry, Finn.’
He only holds me closer. ‘I love you,’ he says, again and again and again. ‘I love you so much.’
‘I’m coming to get you,’ I say, pulling back a little so I can look him in the eye. ‘I promise, Finn.’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s too dangerous. But I’m going to find your sister, and the other kids they took, and –’
‘Finn,’ I say, pressing my finger to his mouth. ‘I’m coming to get you.’
I swap my finger for my lips before he can protest.
He breaks away from the kiss far too soon. ‘Someone’s coming.’
‘Here?’
‘No, not into your dream – where I am.’
I clutch at his hands. ‘Don’t go.’
‘I don’t know if they know I can do this, and I don’t want them to find out.’ He leans down and kisses me again, hard and hot and way too briefly. ‘But I found you once, Pearl. I can find you again.’
‘I love you,’ I tell him.
When I wake up, my shoulder is completely healed.