CHAPTER 8   

The night the prince went missing from his coffin, Mom made spaghetti with jarred sauce for dinner, along with shake cheese from the green can, and frozen peas. It was a typical deadline dinner, so familiar that Hazel craved it when she was sick the way other kids craved chicken soup. Dad was already gone and was going to stay in New York through the week for meetings. Mom tried to get them to talk about their day, but Ben and Hazel just stared at their food and answered stiltedly, too distracted by everything that had happened to make much of an effort at conversation. According to their mother, the mayor had already reached out to a local sculptor—a friend of hers—to inquire whether it might be possible to create a fake version of the prince, so his absence wouldn’t affect tourism. The official story was that vandals had stolen him.

“When I was a girl, we all adored him,” Mom said. “I remember there was this one—oh, you know her, Leonie’s mom—anyway, she went out to that casket every Saturday with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex to keep the glass shiny. That’s how obsessed she was.”

Ben rolled his eyes.

Mom looked pleased with the reminiscence. “And Diana Collins—Diana Rojas now—tried to wake him up by reenacting that Whitesnake video, rolling around on his casket like it was the hood of a Trans Am, wearing only a string bikini and baby oil. Ah, the eighties, right?” Absently, she rose and crossed the room to pull out an old, beat-up sketchbook from the bottom-most bookshelf. “You want to see something?”

“Sure,” Hazel said, a little confused. The image of Megan’s mother and baby oil was stuck in her head.

Mom flipped through the pages, only slightly yellowed by time. There, rendered in No. 2 pencil, in BIC pen, in colored markers, was the prince, asleep. The drawings were okay, not great, and it took Hazel a moment to realize what she was looking at.

“You drew these,” she said, her voice coming out slightly accusatory.

Mom laughed. “Oh, I sure did. I used to go out to the woods after school, pretending that I was going to sketch trees and whatnot, but I always wound up drawing him. I did a big painting of him, too, in oils. It was one of the pieces that got me into college.”

“What happened to it?” Hazel asked.

Mom shrugged. “Someone bought it off me for a couple of bucks when I was living in Philly. Hung it up in a coffeehouse for a while, but I don’t know where it is now. Maybe I’ll paint another, since he’s gone. I’d hate to forget him.”

Hazel thought of the knife stuck in the wood of the old table and wondered how gone he truly was.

After dinner, Mom opened her laptop in front of the television and watched some cooking show while Hazel and Ben stayed in the kitchen, eating grapefruit marmalade on toast for dessert.

“So what now?” she asked her brother.

“We better find the prince before Jack’s warnings start coming true.” Then, with a frown, Ben nodded at her hands. “You fall or something?”

She looked down at them, no longer red, healed to scabbed lines. Something happened last night. The words sat on her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak them out loud.

After she’d nearly gotten killed by the redcaps all those years ago, after he’d seen the bruises and heard the story, he’d begged her never to hunt alone again. We’ll figure something out, he’d promised her, although they never did.

If he knew she’d made a bargain with the faeries, he’d be really upset. He’d feel bad. And it wasn’t like there was anything he could do about it now. “I must have got scraped out in the woods,” she said. “Sticker bush or something. Ah well, totally worth it.”

“Yeah,” he said faintly, getting up and putting his plate in the sink. “So you think he’s out there, somewhere, bedded down in our old sleeping bag? Eating our stale pretzels?”

“And drinking the drip coffee of our modern age? It’s a nice thought. I hope so,” Hazel said. “Even if he’s the villainous prince from your stories.”

Ben snorted. “You remember that?”

She turned her head, trying to summon up a smile. “Sure. I remember all of it.”

He laughed. “God, I haven’t thought about our telling each other all that stuff. It’s so crazy, the idea that we get him—that he woke up in our generation.”

“There’s got to be a reason,” Hazel said. “Something’s got to be happening out in the forest. Jack’s right about that.”

“Maybe it’s just time. Maybe his curse is up and he smashed the coffin himself.” Ben shook his head, his mouth lifting at one corner. “If our prince was smart and wanted to be safe from the Alderking, he’d come straight to the center of town. Go door-to-door. He’d be invited to more dinners than a preacher on a Sunday.”

“He’d be invited to more beds than a preacher on a Sunday,” Hazel put in, to make Ben laugh, because Pastor Kevin was much lusted over by the youth-group kids for belonging to some semifamous Christian rock band. The horned boy was a way bigger local celebrity, though. If he showed up in the middle of Main Street, the Fairfold Women’s Auxiliary would probably hold a very sexy bake sale in his honor. Ben was right: If the prince didn’t mind hiding from the Alderking in the bedrooms of Fairfold, he’d be set.

“All this rushing into danger isn’t like you,” Hazel said, finally, because she had to say something.

Ben nodded, giving her an odd look. “Finding our prince is different.”

She pushed herself up from the kitchen table. “Well, if you have any brilliant ideas, wake me. I’m heading to bed.”

“Night,” Ben said cheerfully—maybe a little too cheerfully—and started for the living room. “I’m going to check the local news. See if they’re sticking to the vandal story.”

Climbing the stairs, Hazel resolved to try to stay awake as long as she could, hoping to catch whatever had called her from her bed the night before. She’d heard stories of people so enchanted that they slipped out of their houses to dance with faerie Folk on full-moon nights, heard stories of people waking up at dawn with raw feet, lying in rings of mushrooms, with a yawning chasm of yearning for things they could no longer recall. If she was going to be used by the Folk, she wanted to know about it.

Of course, there was the possibility that, having used her for whatever service was needed, she wouldn’t be summoned back for a long while, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

In her room, she knelt down and slid an old wooden trunk from underneath her bed. The wood was cracked and warped in places. When she was very little, Ben would hide in it and pretend he was Dracula in his coffin, and then the prince in his. When she was even littler than that, Mom had put her toys and baby blankets inside. But now it was the place where her old sword rested, along with a bunch of mementos of her childhood. Rocks with shining mica she’d loved and pocketed on walks through the woods. The silver gum wrapper Jack had folded into the shape of a frog. Her old, makeshift green velvet cape, which was supposed to be part of a Robin Hood costume. A daisy chain so brittle from drying that she didn’t dare touch it or it would fall to pieces.

Those were the things she expected to find when she opened the box. She’d thought she could take out the black-painted sword and stuff it between the mattress and box spring.

It wasn’t there.

The wooden trunk was empty except for a book and a folded-up tunic and pants—ones made from a light silvery-gray material she’d never seen before—and beside them a note in the same eerily familiar hand that wrote the message inside the walnut: 241.

She took out the book. FOLKLORE OF ENGLAND, the spine read. She flipped to page 241.

It was the story of a farmer who bought a stretch of land that came with a big, hairy, troublesome boggart who’d claimed the land for himself. After some argument, they decided to split the land. The boggart demanded everything that grew above the ground and told the farmer he could have anything below. But the farmer got the better of the boggart by planting potatoes and carrots. At the harvest, the boggart got only the useless tops. He was furious. He raged and shouted and stamped his feet. But he’d made the bargain, and, like all faeries, he was bound to his word. The next year, the boggart demanded whatever was below ground, but again the farmer got the better of him. He planted corn, so that the boggart was left with only stringy roots. Again the boggart raged, more terrible and angrier than before, but again he was bound to his word. Finally, in the third year, the boggart demanded that the farmer should plant wheat, but they would each plow the field, keeping what they harvested. Since the farmer knew the boggart was much stronger, he lighted on the idea of planting iron rods in the ground on the boggart’s side of the field, so the boggart’s plow became blunted again and again, while the farmer plowed merrily away. After hours of that, the boggart gave up, saying that the farmer could have the field and good riddance to it!

The words carrots and iron rods had been circled by a muddy finger.

Hazel frowned at the book. The story didn’t mean anything to her.

Confused and frustrated, she busied herself by pulling the muddy linens from the bed and stuffing them into the hamper. Then she grabbed a clean, but wrinkled, bottom sheet and an old blanket from the hall closet. Finally, she changed into rocket ship–print pajamas, flung herself down, picked up a paperback off the side table at random, and opened it, trying to distract herself, trying to convince herself that she needed an old sword about as much as she needed a Robin Hood costume.

The book turned out to be one she’d read before, where zombies chased around a brother-and-sister reporting team. After a few pages and the wash of words, she put it down. She couldn’t concentrate. None of it seemed as real as her memory of a mossy stone house with an elf-wrought knife lying on a worn wood table. None of it seemed as real as her sore hands, muddy feet, and missing night.

None of it seemed as real as Jack’s having a double life. She knew you had to be careful around faeries, no matter how beautiful or clever or charming, but somehow Jack had always been the exception. Now, though, thoughts of his silvery eyes and the odd way he’d spoken wouldn’t leave her. Somehow that and the memory of their kiss became tangled, and she felt like a fool.

So she rested, eyes shut, pretending to sleep, until she heard the creak of floorboards. Someone coming up the stairs and down the hallway. Ben coming to bed? Or was Ben already asleep and something else was creeping toward her? Hazel sat up and reached for her cell to check the time: two in the morning.

As she slid out of bed, she heard someone bang back down the stairs.

Shoving her feet into her wellies, clutching her phone, she followed as stealthily as she could. If the Folk could have drawn her from her bed, it stood to reason that they could draw Ben, too. He might not owe them anything, might not have bargained with them, but that only meant they had no right to him. They took lots of things they had no right to.

She found Ben already outside by the time she got her coat and made it out the door. He walked toward his car purposefully. She started to panic, indecision halting her in the shadows underneath an oak tree. There was no way she was going to be able to follow him on foot. She considered racing to the passenger-side window and tapping on it. If he was bewitched, that might snap him out of it.

But what if he wasn’t? What if he was going out to look for the horned boy alone? It wasn’t as if he had to take his tagalong little sister everywhere he went.

Ben pulled his car out of the driveway slowly, without turning on his lights.

Coming abruptly to a decision, Hazel went to the shed and yanked her old bike out from among the cobwebby tools. With shaking hands, she ripped off the reflective discs attached to the spokes, hurling them into the dark. Then she hopped up onto the seat and pushed off, pedaling fast. By the time she made it to the street, his headlights were on and he was making the first turn.

She braked gently, trying to stay out of his line of sight without losing the Volkswagen. Speed limits on the back roads were cautious, which made things easier, but there was no way she could keep up if he disobeyed them and gunned the gas.

The wind whipped her hair behind her, and the moon was high in the sky, turning everything to silver. She felt like she was pedaling into a dream landscape, a hushed world in which everyone but her and her brother was asleep. The last of her tiredness burned away as her muscles worked and she got into such an efficient leg-pumping rhythm that for a moment she didn’t notice he was pulling over. She stopped short, the bottom of her boots scraping against the road. Then she eased the bike off into the trees, where she dropped it among vines and felled branches.

A cold sweat had broken out along her back. She’d guessed where he was going: to the remains of the glass casket.

She followed Ben on foot, creeping along as slowly as she could. She hoped the snap of twigs wouldn’t betray her. Whether she was still good at moving silently through a forest or Ben was just distracted, he didn’t so much as glance in her direction.

It was a lot like hunting, except that it was her brother she was after.

The night was damp and chill enough for Hazel’s breath to cloud in the air. Creatures rustled in the underbrush and called to one another from the misshapen limbs of trees. An owl peered down at her with its clock face. She wrapped her coat more tightly around herself and wished that she’d bothered to change out of her pajamas before she’d left the house.

Ben stopped near the fallen trunk of an oak tree. He seemed to be reconsidering whatever had brought him all the way out here, pacing back and forth, kicking the leaves of a fern bush. Hazel wondered again if she should say something, call out and let him know that he wasn’t alone.

I followed you because I thought you’d been enchanted, she imagined herself saying. But now I realize that you’re probably not enchanted, because enchanted people don’t suddenly get confused about what they’re doing out in the middle of the woods in the dark. Sorry. I guess I probably shouldn’t have followed you after all.

That would go over well.

But then Ben resumed marching through the forest, feet kicking up leaves, and Hazel resumed following him. They walked until he came to the grove where the prince had slept, a grove they’d been to a hundred times. Broken glass and crushed beer bottles shimmered in the moonlight. But all the vegetation, from the trees to the shrubs to the thorny vines, was blackened and dead. Rotted, as though winter had come early. Even the evergreens had withered away.

And the coffin had been shattered. Everyone knew it, but it was different to see—a sacrilege, as though the casket had turned out to be no more magical that a car window someone smashed to get to a radio. Destruction had made it ordinary.

Ben walked over to the glass case and ran his hand over the metal edge, then he pushed the remains of the lid back, tinkling pieces of crystal breaking off and falling. His hand went inside—maybe touching the fabric—then he paused and looked toward where Hazel was, as though maybe she had stepped wrong and made too loud a sound.

What was Ben looking for? What had he come to find?

She made a silent vow that if her brother tried to climb into the coffin, she was going to step out of the shadows, no matter how mad it made him.

He didn’t, though. He circled it, as if he was as amazed by the ruin as she was. Then he bent, a frown on his face. When Ben stood, he had something cupped in his hand, something he’d taken from inside the coffin, something that flashed in the moonlight, something he was looking at in astonishment. An earring. A cheap green enamel hoop that Hazel hadn’t even noticed was missing from her ear.

Immediately, excuses sprang to mind. Maybe Hazel lost it the night of the party—though that wouldn’t explain the positioning: inside the case, under chunks of glass. And she was pretty sure she remembered putting them back on the next day. Okay, better, maybe another girl had the same earrings and she’d lost one.

Hazel had guessed she might have had something to do with the horned boy’s being loose, but some part of her had resisted believing it. Now, though, she had to believe. No explanation she came up with explained away the evidence.

She started trembling, panic rolling over her. Hadn’t she scolded herself for running straight into trouble every chance she got? For leaving no stone unturned, no bad idea unembraced, and no boy unkissed? No scab unpicked? No sorrow unnumbered? No hangnail unbitten and no stupid comment unsaid? Certainly no stupid bargain unmade. Apparently, that was still the case, even if she couldn’t remember it.

After a few minutes, Ben started back toward his car, swearing under his breath. Hazel crouched down and pressed her shoulders against a tree until he passed. Until she could get her breathing under control. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to tell Ben, but at least she’d have until morning to figure it out.

Hazel walked back to her bike. It was where she had left it, obscured by a clump of pachysandra that seemed to swallow the frame. She stood it up, pushed toward the road, and began to pedal, following the distant taillights of Ben’s car.

He seemed to be heading in the direction of home, so she no longer worried about keeping up. Instead, she concentrated on what she was going to do.

It was to the Alderking that she’d sworn her seven years. Maybe if she went to the hawthorn tree on the full moon and waited, she could make another bargain for answers. Or maybe she’d find the Alderking’s revel and ask him directly what he was intending to do with her.

She was pedaling faster, imagining what she might say, when she saw the body in the ditch. A girl’s body—pale legs splayed in the dirt, brown hair lying in a puddle. Someone was leaning over the body, someone with brown hair hanging in front of his eyes, some of it pushed back over his long, curving horns.

She startled, her whole body freezing up.

She lost her balance. The bike spun out from underneath her. It happened so fast that she didn’t have time to react, to correct herself. One moment she’d been speeding along, and the next she was slamming into the road.

The horned boy watched her crash, his expression unreadable in the moonlight.