Chapter 26

Cordelia had lost count of how many pixies she and her father had captured, and treated, over the years. Because they lived in cramped colonies and were known for their explosive tempers and their habit of spitting, licking, punching, and even biting their opponents, illness spread among them quickly.

It took her only an hour to make a simple trap from a length of rope, an empty whiskey barrel, and a bit of plywood she scavenged from the galley. It was likely the pixies were the South American variety, which often migrated north at the start of the sweltering summer; they had either been blown onto the ship by hurricane winds or had deliberately taken shelter there and simply gotten comfortable. The fact that they were setting up for the long haul was confirmed, she thought, by all the pounding and wailing, and by the fact that they’d gone after both underthings and eyebrows.

It would soon be mating season, and they were no doubt decorating extensively for at least one wedding.

It took Cordelia nearly another hour to convince Elizabeth to sacrifice several inches of her curls to the cause, to make a lure. Pixies loved human hair and used it for bunting, carpet, elaborate garlands, and even decorative accessories. But they loved curls most of all. Cordelia would need a good heaping pile of them to attract the attention of the group. Nothing brought a pixie colony together like the fight about how spoils should be divided.

“If I end up looking like a shorn poodle, I’ll toss in your eyebrows for free,” Elizabeth said, after finally submitting. But once a cascade of golden curls was lying at her feet, she marveled aloud how much lighter her head felt. And afterward, she kept swishing her hair back and forth across her shoulders and admiring her reflection in the back of a large cooking spoon.

“I look like an absolute urchin,” she said. “My mother will faint when she sees me.” But the idea seemed to cheer her enormously. Cordelia couldn’t help but wonder how Elizabeth’s mother would react when Elizabeth grew bony ridges on her spine and knuckles, if she could get worked up about a simple haircut.

She had to tell Elizabeth the truth.

By now, the sun was setting. Soon the pixies would wake, and the smell of strange intruders in the galley would draw them out to explore.

“Do me a favor, Gregory,” Cordelia said. “Go and tell Wincombe that it won’t be long before we’ve chased off all the angry spirits. Make sure the crew is ready to sail immediately.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” he said, touching his fingers to his hat in a salute.

His footsteps soon echoed into silence, and Elizabeth and Cordelia were left alone. At least, they were alone except for Icky, Cabal, and the dragon, of course. But they could hardly be counted on for conversation.

There was a long beat of awkward silence. Cordelia was still trying to work out the nicest way to tell a girl that she was, in fact, part-goblin, when Elizabeth spoke up.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

Cordelia took a deep breath. “I have something to tell you too.”

“I’ll go first,” Elizabeth said. “Mine is important.”

“Let me go first,” Cordelia said. “Mine is important too.”

“It’s not a competition, Cordelia,” Elizabeth snapped.

“Why don’t we both go at the same time, then,” Cordelia said.

“Fine.” Elizabeth tried to toss her hair, only to remember that she didn’t have enough hair to toss anymore. “On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three.”

“I’m part-goblin.”

“You’re part-goblin.”

For a second, both girls stared at each other, stunned. Then both said, at the same time, “You knew?”

“Of course I knew.” Elizabeth was the first to recover and speak. “I found out years ago, after we stumbled in on my great-aunt Gertrude in her nest. I mean, I didn’t know she was my great-aunt Gertrude when we found her, obviously . . . although I did think it was weird that she was using all the nicest guest pillows for a bed. . . .”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Cordelia asked.

Elizabeth’s eyes nearly popped out altogether. “Why do you think? My family was already getting hounded. There were reporters at our door, and crazies threatening fire, and then the SNP came barreling in and tried to smoke her right onto their pitchforks. Thankfully, my dad had tunneled an escape route beneath the garden. . . . She’s fine now,” Elizabeth added. “Remarried, and living in a four-bedroom hole in Arlington, Virginia. Sends up hideous Christmas knits every year. The last one had beetles in it.” She shuddered. “We were terrified someone would find out we were . . . you know . . .”

Monsters. The word hung between them in the silence. But even unspoken, it carried power—echoes of violence, of hatred, of cages and isolation.

“My father would have lost his job. My family would have lost everything. No. We had to be sure no one would know. We had to be sure no one would poke around and begin asking questions. That’s why,” she finished, “my parents said I shouldn’t speak to you again.”

Cordelia felt the words like the punch of a fist. “They . . . ?”

“They were worried that you would ask too many questions, or get suspicious. You might wonder how she’d managed to survive under the garden for so long, or remember the guest pillows the next time you slept over. Or you would someday notice the green at my mother’s roots, or the length of her hands and feet. . . . She made it through her teenage years without ever showing, luckily. But a size-fourteen shoe might still raise eyebrows. I was too ashamed, anyway. . . .”

“There’s no reason to be ashamed,” Cordelia said. “Most people have a goblin or two somewhere in their family tree.”

“Yeah, but not beneath their actual trees,” Elizabeth snapped. “I thought for sure you wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. Especially after I found out I was related to that . . .”

She trailed off with a helpless gesture.

“She is especially warty,” Cordelia said synpathetically. “Even for a goblin.”

Elizabeth nodded miserably. “You lied to me too, you know. You told me your father was a veterinarian.”

“Technically, that’s true,” Cordelia pointed out.

“Sure. But you left out some pretty important details.” Elizabeth’s eyes flashed yellow again, and this time stayed that way for several long seconds. “If I’d known you were knocking around with dragons and—and hufflepins—”

“Hufflebottoms,” Cordelia corrected her.

“—I would have told you the truth. And we could have stayed friends. Real friends.” Elizabeth looked down again, knotting her hands in her lap. “We moved houses. My mom insisted I grow my hair long and start wearing stupid frilly dresses everywhere, so I’d look like a walking wedding cake. I had to pretend to like St. George’s Academy—”

“Wait.” Of all the things Elizabeth had admitted, Cordelia thought this was the most surprising of all. “You don’t like St. George’s Academy?”

She might as well have asked if Elizabeth liked getting stuck with hot pokers.

“Like it?” Elizabeth repeated. “I hate it. I’ve always hated it. The teachers only teach us nonsense, like how to sew a hemline straight or make conversation at a party. The girls are a bunch of pack animals—if they catch even a whiff of weakness, or difference, or weirdness, it’s goodbye to your intestines.” She shook her head disgustedly. “I had to act like they did, and dress like they did, and speak like they did. I started to think like they did, sometimes. And then I would remember why all the pretending, and remember it was so that no one like the girls I called ‘friends’ would scream about the beastly terror in their watercolor class. So none of them would find out what I was, and hate me for it. So no one would.”

Cordelia felt a wrench of pity twist around her stomach. She couldn’t imagine how lonely Elizabeth’s life had been, for years now. She knew what it was like to carry a secret, of course—a big one. But although she’d learned to see the outside world as a threat to monsters—although she’d expected the monsters would be misunderstood and hated—she had never seen the outside world as a personal threat. She had never believed that she was the monster—and that everyone, everywhere, would surely hate her for it.

If she’d only been brave enough to tell Elizabeth the truth about her father, and the monsters, Elizabeth might never have believed it, either.

“But someone did find out. Actually—more like somemany. A whole organization, in fact.”

“The SNP,” Cordelia said, understanding.

Elizabeth nodded. “They’ve had their eye on my family ever since my great-aunt Gertrude had to flee in her underpants. They’ve had their eye on me.” She bit her lower lip with three rows of teeth. “My parents were hoping the goblin wouldn’t show. That I’d take after my mother—she hardly shows at all, really—and not my aunt and her side. My cousin Millicent,” she added, “was greening at just ten years old. By eleven she’d developed a taste for spiders. Can you imagine, Cord? She eats spiders. Sometimes she takes them with tea!”

It had been years since Elizabeth had called Cordelia by that nickname, Cord. Cordelia had almost forgotten the sound of it. It spread with all the warmth of hot chocolate.

It bobbed with all the floating joy of marshmallows.

“I’m not afraid of spiders,” Elizabeth finished. “I’m afraid to like them. I’m afraid one day I’ll look at a creepy-crawly and think, ‘Now that I think about it, it has been several hours since I ate lunch.’”

Although the idea of Elizabeth—with her flouncy dresses, and (formerly) flouncy curls—snacking mindlessly on daddy longlegs might have been comical, Elizabeth looked so miserable that Cordelia couldn’t find any humor in it. She thought about telling Elizabeth that spiders were actually full of protein and nutrients, but it didn’t seem, somehow, like the right thing to say.

“My father puts mustard on his toast like jam,” Cordelia said. “Sardines too. Spiders can’t be worse than that.”

Elizabeth attempted to smile, and failed. “The SNP is giving cash rewards for help purging Boston of evil. Signs of unnatural possession include discoloration of the skin, yellow eyes, and dental crowding.” She shook her head miserably. “I’d been hiding the signs for months, even from my parents. But the night before my birthday, I found . . .”

She tugged down the collar of her dress, and Cordelia swallowed a sharp inhale. The skin at her neck and shoulders had cracked already, revealing an underskin the color and texture of baked mud. That, too, would someday molt, into one of a hundred vibrant colors of the adult goblin’s skin.

“I had to run away,” Elizabeth said. “I couldn’t face my parents’ disappointment. I couldn’t stand to stay and ruin the life they’d worked so hard to protect. I set off for the train station, thinking old Gertrude might take me in. But when I saw you and Gregory . . .”

“You followed us,” Cordelia finished for her. Gregory had been right after all. There had been someone on their tail, all the way from Boston.

Elizabeth knitted her hands so tightly in her lap, another row of warts bloomed briefly on her knuckles. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have trusted you. I should have trusted you years ago.”

“And I should have told you the truth,” Cordelia said.

A lie, she thought, was a little like building a fence around somebody else’s house, as if it might protect anyone from breaking into yours.

“I thought you hated me,” she blurted out suddenly. “I thought I wasn’t good enough for you.”

“And I thought I wasn’t good enough for you,” Elizabeth said, so quietly Cordelia nearly missed it. When she looked up, her eyes were full of tears, and the vivid green of summer leaves. Her cheeks too. Several warts of strong feeling broke out suddenly on her nose.

She was a goblin. She was Lizzie.

She was the bravest, most beautiful girl Cordelia had ever seen.

“I missed you,” Elizabeth whispered.

“I missed you too,” Cordelia said, squeezing the words out through the enormity of all her feeling. “So much.”

Elizabeth smiled, even as huge tears, dark like moss, dampened her lap. “It isn’t a competition, Cord.”

Then Elizabeth fell onto Cordelia, or Cordelia leapt for her, and the girl who was part-goblin and the monster-keeper’s daughter laughed and cried and hugged and became best friends again. They stayed that way so long that Cabal grew jealous and squirmed into Elizabeth’s lap, and then Icky got agitated and began to tug at Cordelia’s hair, and then the dragon grew protective and began snapping at Icky.

They might have stayed that way forever—or at least, for hours—were it not for the sudden whirring of soft wings that announced the pixies’ arrival.