“WHAT THE hell? Where are we?” I said when I could speak. It was completely dark wherever we were. I turned around, but there was no building in any direction. The air smelled like bruised grass and the same toxic smoke as inside, fainter now as I caught my breath. Had we somehow traveled away from the theater? I reached into my bag for my phone. I should have tried to call Laura again from the Winter Court. Not that I’d had the chance.
“Back in the real world. Are you okay?” Nicky whispered the last few words forcefully, nose to nose. Intense eye contact with the girl who broke my heart. My eyes found the dim light that must be from a streetlight somewhere, and I saw that the top layer of skin was ripped off in a square patch on her temple. Soot was streaked low on one cheek, and tiny black dots peppered her forehead. The skin of her neck should have been shiny with perspiration, where it disappeared into a scarf, but it wasn’t. I could feel moisture still pooling at my waist and drying on my top lip. I guess elves don’t sweat. She’s not even out of breath. My fingertips slid on the keypad of my phone as I tried to speed-dial three.
“What did they do to you?” she persisted. I stuck my free hand into my hair to realign my part and came away with crisp flakes of wallpaper. She seized my arm below the elbow and turned it over in her hands. “Something happened here.” She traced my skin, not quite touching.
“Nothing. The Woodcutter. He grabbed me and—nothing. He glued my arms down for a while but I got… free.” And I still have no clue how.
Two rings. You better pick up, piano player.
“Yeah, I can see that.” She glanced up at me, brown eyes wide. “Magic leaves traces. I can feel it more than see it. It’s like a heat pattern. And that wasn’t the Woodcutter. That was just the Ice Lady’s muscle.”
Not the Woodcutter? I wanted to ask, but Laura answered this time. “What?” was her annoyed greeting.
“Hey. You’re there. Why didn’t you pick up before?” Please don’t be locked up somewhere. Please be okay.
“I told you, I’m with Saori at Professor Hill’s until late. We have chamber. Didn’t you see my note?” She’s all right. She was never at the Winter Court tonight. Relief sifted down through my body like snow and calmed everything.
“I’m not home,” I said.
“It’s late. You’re supposed to call me. I’m coming. It’s my sister. Mom’s been a bitch about making us call.” That must have been to her friends.
“Okay, I’m going.”
“Wait, Jo. I’m crashing here. It’s all the way in Half Moon Bay, and we have a coaching first thing tomorrow, so….”
“Cool,” I said, and she hung up.
So she wouldn’t be home tonight. I considered how I felt about being in the house alone. Maybe I could take Neil’s mom up on her standing invitation and sleep on their couch tonight.
I heard a breathy voice giggling behind me and turned around to find Blossom pulling me into a rosemary-scented bear hug. “You’re a champion! And your sister, she’s in a safe place?”
“With Professor Hill. Am I glad you’re on my side. Thanks for coming for me,” I said to her pale cotton-candy hair. Scratchy lace on her shoulder tickled under my chin. I laughed unsteadily. I felt wobbly as the fear and adrenaline tapered off.
That and the nearness of Nicky. The girl I wasn’t going to speak to ever again, even if she did just pull me out of a burning building. I tried to summon my indignation at being used. Lying elf. Look at her. Of course she has a girlfriend. Or twelve. I turned my back on the two elves and sat on the damp moss to pick splinters out of my socks.
Blossom was beside me in a swift second. “That was some nasty scene back there. Are you breathing?” She laid a glitter-manicured hand between her high breasts.
Dark eyes were the only thing she had in common with Nicky. I looked at the smooth field of her cheeks framed by white-blonde waves, the feathery eyebrows, and the bow of her mouth. “Yeah.” I sighed out loud to prove it. My sister was safe. I could breathe now. “So the Winter Queen, she’s not going to come here?”
“She is likely licking her wounds. The Lady of Winter and mine, the Summer Queen, can travel to your world, but it is not as easy for them to pass as mortal.”
I looked around for landmarks, since we were back in the real world, but all I saw were woods and the lumpy outline of something that could be a boulder, lit by greater-urban-area nighttime lighting. “She can send her guys out to make trouble, though. They can get around without being noticed so much, right?” I said.
Blossom nodded. “That’s right. Now I need to know. What did they do to you?”
I told her about my interview with the Winter Queen and my time in the locked dressing room. When I got to the part where the man I now knew was not the Woodcutter pulled a knife on me, she put both arms around my shoulders and said, “Oh, horrible. Oh, none of this was intended.”
My sweat had cooled to clamminess. I stuffed my hands in my hoodie pockets and hunched up my knees. I kneaded my question in my mind until it was formed enough to speak. “Listen… I need to know about this war. If I’m going to be—coin… and if my sister…. I need to know how to….” My throat closed as the aftershock of my night hit me and rolled, a slow quake of fear and relief that it was over.
Except that it wasn’t. “How to stop it,” I finished. The words came out in a wheeze, like trying to talk when you’re choking.
“We owe you an explanation. One that should come from the Lady, but she is not here.” Blossom’s wispy voice seemed to firm up as she spoke.
“Aren’t you her… right-hand woman?”
She nodded and tossed a fistful of empty air down into the dark ground at our feet. There was a wet hissing sound, and a hand-sized flame sprang up. I stared as it grew to campfire size and filled the air with its smell. “I serve as an ambassador at times, together with Timothy Desroches. But you have met his brother,” she exclaimed. She peered at me for confirmation.
“He was almost my brother-in-law. My sister was going to marry him.”
“Pretty Peg. In a way, she was one source of this present strife. It did not sit well with the Lady that Jerome chose a mortal to be his heart’s home. That… disagreement… opened fissures among my people, where we had thought there were solid walls.” She spoke in the measured way Nicky did when she told a story about the Folk.
Nicky was walking a wide circle from one edge of the darkness to the other. I made out a stand of redwoods where she stood now, bending to pick something up. Nicky rescued me. She didn’t have to do that. What does she want from me now? But I didn’t actually feel angry, even though anger would be the normal reaction. How I felt was baffled. And grimy. And like I’d been hit by a train.
“But Jerome’s love for Pretty Peg was only the match that was tossed into the powder keg,” Blossom went on. “What do you understand about the two fey courts?”
“Um, I like the Summer one better?”
She giggled, and for a brief second she seemed like a little girl. “I can hardly blame you. I’m not sure how far back to go. The Fair Folk are very old.”
I’d guessed as much. Nicky had told me they lived forever, after all. “Why get up in the people business? Why bother with me and my sisters?”
“The Summer Folk have always loved mortals, lived alongside you, even if you haven’t always known us for what we are. Brownies who look after mortal farms—even the children’s tales about ‘fairy godmothers,’ diluted as they are, have a grain of truth at their start. Though there are those like Timothy who think now that we should draw away, after all that has happened.”
“But not you. Or the Lady. Or—” And my eyes went to Nicky, near the trees.
“I expect Dominica has her own unique interpretation of tradition, given her new alliances,” Blossom answered.
I heard Nicky protest, “Do not call me that!”
New alliances? She can’t mean me, I thought. Blossom ignored Nicky with an expression so long-suffering I wondered if they could be sisters after all, despite the fact that Nicky could pass for a twelve-year-old Mexican boy, and Blossom was a pale, bosomy pin-up girl.
“So you like us. That doesn’t seem like grounds for war.”
“Our Winter kin do not share our affection for mortals. There is a pleasure they take in cruelty.” Her long pause was full of stories she didn’t speak out loud. She went on, “The Summer Folk—think of us as your good luck. Bringing lovers together as if by chance, warding off sickness for a woman who has young daughters to raise, no matter how she might poison her own body out of sorrow.” She met my eyes. Oh. She means Mom.
“So you’re like God. Guardian angels.”
Her smooth forehead gathered into a deep braid. “No, nothing like that. What mortals choose for themselves, the danger they willingly embrace…. You are thinking of our place in the world as fate, as if mortals had no free will. That’s not at all what it is.”
“But you bring the good.”
“What good we can. And the Winter Folk bring only harm and malice.” There was labor in her voice. I wondered what she was seeing in her mind. “All that my summer kin would do to nudge good fortune toward a mortal, each of those acts could have a counterweight by the Winter fey. A cruel one of the Folk could as quickly cause you to stumble into the path of destruction and would relish the result.”
“You mean they could still push Laura under a bus? In spite of all the protection she’s supposed to have now with the binding thing and Professor Hill and all? Or Neil, or anyone? I mean, aside from this whole Woodcutter thing, what would be in it for them?”
“It is in the nature of certain fey to be cruel. There is a delight they take in it that is… a shame of all my people.”
“So you’re fighting for control of the entire world?” I said it in a terrible British accent, but Blossom didn’t laugh.
“Like every mortal civil war, we would say it is a fight for a way of life. For innocent mortals who are barely aware of us, and most are not—child, there are places in the mortal world, blighted places where a simple lack of water has led to mortal violence. Mortal illnesses that spread with no restraint. There are places that have been won by Winter. If the Lady of Ice wins this war….”
“The whole world will be like that,” I finished. I nodded and let that thought sink in. “Yeah, so, innocent mortals. What the hell is it about me and my sisters?” I had asked Nicky that question at Flea, and she hadn’t answered. I’d tried to get Jerome to talk about it, but he was lost in his cloud of regret. I wasn’t sure I could get anyone from the Realm to give me a straight answer. I dug my fingers into the moist earth beside my leg and worried a root loose.
She told me the same story Nicky had told me about Margaret, but this time there was a twist. “Pretty Peg loved our Jerome, and he loved her. No one knew how their love was to last. A mortal cannot be made truly immortal, not by any method that would have left her unscathed. But Jerome had a gift for healing, a sense for combining the right plants at the right tides, hands that could remove pain with a touch.”
“He fixed Neil’s hand when it got slammed in the car door. It was broken, and he just held it, and it was fixed,” I said.
Blossom took in a long breath. “Yes, Jerome would do that.” She held her hands together in the folds of her skirt, interlocking the white fingers as if she were holding someone else’s hand in hers. “He believed he could make your sister immortal, or at the least extend her life and youth. She was so fresh and fair, and we are vain creatures. His love was not blind to beauty. He wished her to be lovely for all her days.”
“She was,” I said. I poked the fire with my toe until I smelled scorched rubber. “She died when she was twenty-three.”
“Oak and thorn, child, do you think I did not love her too? It should not have been. Her death should not have come, not the way it did, not with the sorrow it brought.” The words tumbled out, and she moved to put her arm around me again.
I leaned against her lacy shoulder and breathed her rosemary smell. Something frozen solid in me was thawing. The feelings I was afraid of, that I didn’t know what to do with. The voices in me that said Margaret died in agony. My sister, who loved me. She’s dead. And the older, scarier voices. Mom thinks you’re ugly and fat and pointless. Dad doesn’t even want to know you. I had been moving around that iceberg ever since Dad moved out. Breathing small breaths so as not to disturb it. But something threatened to break loose now, and I hissed out air between my teeth to stop myself from crying. Now was not the time for my big messy feelings. I was overwhelmed because I’d just been in a fey jail cell and then been hauled out a window by Nicky. I was probably in shock. Keep it together, missy.
“So Jerome only liked her because she was a pretty girl?” I sounded callous. I knew it. That was better than crying. It was too soon to cry with this woman I hardly knew and had no idea if I could trust. Even though she did peck out my captor’s eyes for me. You’ll be alone tonight. I promise you can have a good cry when you’re alone.
“There’s more to that story.” Nicky was back, with a pocketful of redwood cones the size of finger joints that she tossed onto the fire to make it flare. Her voice was soft, like she was talking to someone who had just woken up. She didn’t look at me, and she stood at enough distance from the fire that I couldn’t see her face.
Blossom said, “Some in the Summer Court, some close to the Lady, believed that Jerome sought the counsel of those Winter Folk whose knowledge of the magical arts is not tempered by care for the consequences. Jerome removed himself in voluntary exile when Pretty Peg was killed. I believe he could not endure the shame of being accused day after day by his own kin.” She addressed the fire, pointy chin level with the ground, and her baby voice went hollow.
I considered what I’d just heard. “Wait a minute. Jerome went over to the bad guys to get drugs or whatever so my sister could live forever?” The sad little doctor’s face floated up in my mind, head in his hands. No wonder he felt so guilty.
“Understand that he loved her. Understand that,” Blossom said. Her white face was pinched. She must hate all this.
“I know. But then what? Why war after that?”
“Because Jerome crossing over, even to trade, widened the doorway for other Folk to be swayed by the Winter Lady and her charms. Because that way she was able to amass a group of followers who could truly threaten the Summer Court. Before this, she and her little band were nothing but a faint needle of annoyance. An ambitious and seductive leader, yes, but do not get the wrong impression. It is the Summer Queen who is the true head of Faerie,” Blossom said.
I wondered if that part was more opinion than solid truth. Vile as they were, the Winter Court must believe they had the right to be in charge too. “So the bad guys never had an even number of people until now. Until Jerome did what he did,” I said.
“Not equal numbers yet, although we don’t know that for sure. But yeah, what started as a pesky little band of hellions is an army now.” That was Nicky.
Blossom added, “There was already unrest among the Summer Folk. There had to be soil for those toxic weeds to take root. Those who believed that we should not consort with mortals, not the way Jerome did, formed an alliance, a banner of sorts under which to march. The Folk have struggled to remain united since.”
“So my sister dies, and then you come after me? And Laura? What’s that about?” I still wanted an answer. I shredded the white root with my fingernails.
“We know what the Woodcutter’s choice was, but we cannot know why. Josy, you must hear this well. The Summer Lady’s chosen guard are the keenest minds and finest blades in the Realm. We have failed for nearly two seasons to find Pretty Peg’s killer. If he can evade us, we know he is very dangerous indeed,” Blossom said, or I thought she said “indeed,” because Nicky spoke at the same time.
“Revenge.”
They looked at each other, Nicky bending down with a question on her dirty face and then squatting on her heels on Blossom’s far side, as far away from me as she could be and still be near the fire. “And it is not all the Fair Folk who conspire against your family. Who want to hurt you because, in their eyes….”
“We started it. The rift. The war,” I said.
Blossom gave me a sympathetic frown. “It is not even all the Winter Folk, I suspect. The Lady of Ice wants the Woodcutter’s work to be complete. That is all I know about the answer to your question: why it is you three sisters.”
“Two. And it’s probably the ones who used to be in your court, the Winter guys who want to get us now,” I said, thinking out loud. Summer Folk who crossed over to the Winter side. I still wondered exactly what was in it for them. “Okay. So then—who is the Woodcutter? He could even be a good guy. A Summer fey. Right?”
“She’s quick. Can we keep her?” Blossom said, and the thaw in me loosened further.
I felt a tug on my ankle then and kicked out toward the fire without thinking. Blossom whipped around my legs, and with a quick thrust of her lace-sleeved arm, she seized something wriggly. She stood and held the animal up to eye level. It was a long skinny raccoon with a pointed hat.
I looked closer. It was not a raccoon. It was some kind of fey creature. Its skin was grooved in deep concertina folds that spread out to floppy dog ears. What I’d thought was raccoon skin was a long coat made of skunk fur. It swirled the tail around its neck with tiny black-clawed hands and mewled, “No fair!” I stood up to see it better and get away from the sharp claws on its padded feet.
“Run back to your master, willya?” Blossom’s voice was a candy-coated weapon. She did something with her fingers that made the creature buckle its stick knees up to its waist, and a flash of metal caught the light before it thudded softly to the ground just my side of the fire. “What did she send you for? To poison us with that little toy?”
“Not sent, my lady. Darts is for hunting. Was hungry. Did not know my ladies were companions of the Sun Lady’s favorite.” Its pupils were elongated diamonds. The whites around them expanded as it stared pleadingly at Blossom and then swiveled its triangular head all the way around to look at me.
“Well, we didn’t fill you in on that, so who did? Goat.” Nicky spat the word out like an insult. She only took one step, but it was with her whole body, torso twisting as one arm reached out its full length and one boot landed an inch from Blossom’s ballet slipper. She moved like a panther. It had never occurred to me to wonder if she could turn into an animal too. She was wearing a black T-shirt under a loose cargo jacket that hung off her shoulders enough for the taper of her ribs to be visible.
“Can not speak for hunger. My lady.” And the thing clamped its black lips between its buck teeth. Nicky patted her pockets and then nudged Blossom, who shook her head.
I grasped the situation. “I have an apple.” It was at the bottom of my bag. I rubbed it on my sleeve, but that only added soot. Nicky held out her hand, palm up, and I dropped the apple into it with no skin contact. Holding hands to run out of a burning building didn’t count. I wasn’t going to volunteer to touch her, not after last night at Flea.
Blossom set the fey animal down on its hind legs. It nibbled the apple in pockmark rows all the way around until the skin was gone. “Talk,” she said when the machine-gun bites slowed down.
“Am loyal to the Sun Lady.” Its twisting hands made it seem like a fey Charles Dickens urchin.
“Dung. You’re a spy. Tell us what you know.”
“Mortals are in danger. More danger than the mortals can fathom. Tiny mortal minds.” Diamond pupils flicked over me. The little animal seemed ancient and arrogant now.
Blossom reared her blonde head back and snatched the apple, and for a flicker of a second I saw a cobra, not a woman. I felt a prickle of fear mixed with giddy relief: this badass was on my side.
“Mortal Pretty Peg was Sun Lady’s favorite. Pretty Peg, she loved our own Jerome. Now brothers straddle both sides, sun and night, summer and ice,” the creature squeaked.
In my ear Nicky whispered, “He means Jerome and Timothy.” Her look was piercing, like she wanted me to respond. I nodded, tried to let my breath out, kicked at the ground. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her.
My right sneaker nudged the dart that had fallen when Blossom shook the animal. It was pencil-length with a skinny point and a glass shaft that widened to a flattened end. I rolled it with my toe, and the opaque liquid in the shaft sloshed.
It was some kind of syringe. And it was loaded with something that was intended to be shot into me. I picked it up, holding the cold glass gingerly between finger and thumb. The liquid inside was whitish and gleamed in rainbow colors like rave makeup. I slid the little weapon into my hoodie pocket, point down.
The skunk’s eyes were on me as it went on, “Now the sister of Mortal Peg is the Sun Lady’s favorite. And she slipped the grasp of the Snow Lady. Angered her.” His tone dropped from high storytelling to flat viciousness: “The mortal has another sister. At home. All on her owny-own.”
My head lifted, and instead of the dimly lit fey folk in front of me, my mind saw Laura’s back, slender shoulders hiding most of her sleek brown head as she bent into the piano keyboard. I squeezed my eyes shut on the image. She was supposed to be with her teacher, but what if she wasn’t? She might be home alone. She could have gone home in the time I’d been sitting here. Did the creature know something I didn’t? Did he have some way to see her? “Oh. Oh God. I have to go home.”
“Honey, she’s with—” Blossom stopped herself and glanced at the fey skunk. “She’s fine. He’s just fishing, aren’t you, goat?”
“I have to make sure,” I said. I didn’t know where I was, but if I started walking in any direction, surely I’d find a familiar street. I looked around to get my bearings. A gap between two redwoods on the far side of the fire looked like it could lead to a path.
“Not a good idea on your own. The Ice Lady’s little freaks could be all over the place,” Nicky answered, even though I hadn’t spoken to her, and she took a step as if to stop me from moving. “I’ll take you,” she finished.
I did not want that. I didn’t know exactly how I felt about Nicky right now, but I knew I didn’t want to be alone with her.
Coin, the Queen of the Winter Court had called me. That’s all I am to any of these people. An assignment. Something they can use. Just go home and forget about the fey.
Aloud I said, “I’ll take my chances.”
“Don’t. Do you think we can risk you?” Blossom said, shaking her head. Breathy, baby-skin Blossom. I was pretty sure she could kill me with one hand. “And I have to report.” She and Nicky exchanged a look that said We will so talk later.
Nicky faced me, and a look darted across her features that looked like regret, or like she was steeling herself for something that would be hard to endure. She untangled the thin scarf from her neck and dropped it over my shoulders, winding it once. When I tried to stop her, she said, “It’s to keep the spies from spotting you. Any more spies back here. Won’t work for long, so come on.”
And her hand was on the small of my back, and I was stumbling forward into the dark as she pushed me, and then we were on the sidewalk on 43rd Street under an orange streetlight that was brighter than the sun after all that darkness. Where had we been, in those woods? A park I’d never been to? I looked at the familiar landmarks: the Japanese stationery store that sometimes sold Mom’s pottery, Resurrection Bike, the coffee kiosk where the tattoo truck pulled up during school hours. All shuttered now.
“Josy, can I—” Nicky started to say just as I said, “What was up with that skunk thing?”
She smiled a downturning smile that made her look much older. “That was a corn goat. They’re turncoats—they’re not allied with one Court any more than the other. You did right, feeding him. He’ll be more likely to side with us now.”
“Turncoats. I thought he was a raccoon. Or a skunk. But it turned out he was just wearing a skunk coat. Because he’s a corn goat.” Suddenly, everything was hilarious. Being held hostage by killer fairies, half-animal assassins who talked like film noir villains, everything. It must be relief that I was still alive, pure and simple. None of this was actually funny.
Nicky smiled the smile again. I met her serious brown eyes and told myself to breathe. “So can I talk to you?” she said. She pointed an army-green shoulder in the direction of Broadway, which was also the direction my house was in. I hoped that was a coincidence. I hadn’t told her where I lived.
I nodded and fell into step beside her. Quick steps. She knew I was in a hurry. I didn’t know what kind of panic would come out of my mouth if I tried to talk, so I stayed quiet.
“First, are you really okay?” Full eyebrows made question marks in her soot-smeared forehead. It was satiny under the dirt. I wondered for the hundredth time how old she really was.
“Nothing wrong with me a hundred dollars won’t fix.” Tough girl. Don’t need you.
“Oh my God, I love Tom Waits.”
I laughed. My guard was slipping. “Okay, that actually makes me like you. And I already—never mind.” Shut up, Josy.
“I like you.” She swung around a light post and stopped in front of me so I had to look at her when she said it. How she looked was vulnerable, like a child, all the quick impishness erased. “Kind of more than I can handle right now. That’s why I want to talk to you. I thought you probably didn’t want to see me tonight, but I had to come.”
She likes me? Oh God. “Yes. I am okay. Despite”—I ticked on my fingers—“almost burning to death. Being kidnapped and almost held prisoner, no, actually held prisoner, by the people who killed my sister. Having my sister get killed in the first place. Being chased by dead—things with creepy candle things. They want to kill me! I am not exactly used to that! Plus making my best friend lie and steal his mom’s car. And Laura being next on the list of people who are going to get killed. All so some fairies can get their stupid battle on. Yeah. We’re fine. How about you don’t help us anymore?”
She’d winced when I started my list. She stuck her hands in her pants pockets now and looked up with a hangdog expression. “Is that all? Because you are safe with us. As safe as we can make you.”
“Yeah, exactly how safe is that after what happened tonight? And no!” My voice rose and echoed in the hard canyon made by the brick library building and the glass-and-steel office tower across the street. I felt droplets of fog cool my open mouth. I was bruised and exhausted, and I wanted to be done with all this drama. Just say it. What do you have to lose? “That’s not it! I’m tired of being jerked around by girls who make me like them. By you. I’m tired of being jerked around by you.” My anger dropped off like a coat, leaving all the hurt bare.
“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t believe how vulnerable she sounded. She didn’t look up from the ground for a long moment, and when she did, her face was serious. “I want to explain.”
“Explain how you used me?” I tried to hold on to my can of whup-ass, but it wasn’t working anymore. I reached out a hand in her direction but then caught myself and stuck it in the pocket of my hoodie on the side that was empty of the syringe. Lint pills comforted my fingertips.
“I was wrong. The Lady did ask me to bring you to her. That much is true. But I—if you could just get how much I—okay, I’m going to stop.” She took in a long drink of air that looked like the way Neil inhaled smoke when he was trying not to cry. “I didn’t know what you would be like. You were Pretty Peg’s sister, that’s all I knew. But then I met you. And I kind of—okay, you were honest, I’ll be honest too. You kind of slayed me.”
“But you don’t even know me.”
Her voice went higher, and stiff, like she was nervous. “I know that you have fierce loyalty to a sister who barely notices you except when her dinner is not on the table. That your mother would leave you alone after your whole family had suffered an inconceivable grief. That your father left you alone years ago. I know that your world-wise friend Neil would take any injury for you. I know, because I listen to the gossip, that your classmates wish they had your gift for language and numbers and the other trivia of high school. And I know that when I’m with you—but I’m no good at that.” She finished her speech like a little boy, hands in her jacket pockets, looking at her boots.
“At what?” We were at the corner of 43rd and Key Street now. My street. I watched my yellow high-tops turn the corner. I didn’t stop them. She’s going to know where I live now. All I’m doing is bringing this fey problem home. Like it’s not already there.
When I looked up, she was in front of me again. I stumbled and rocked on my heels to catch myself. She put her hands out, as if to steady me, and they rested on my upper arms. I glanced down at the long fingers of her hand on my left bicep, the way the blood vessel snaked around the middle knuckle. “At saying what you do to me.”
Oh. I breathed in fog and the cinnamon smell of her hair and wondered why I couldn’t feel my feet. “But you used me.” It came out in a whisper.
“I said I was sorry,” she said. She was searching my face from maybe two inches away. I could feel her breath on my mouth.
“Timothy said you had a girlfriend.”
“Timothy is a lying sack of shit. May the Lady forgive me.”
“What about ‘never give your heart to the fey’?”
“Just an old saying.” Her hands slid up my arms. We were between streetlights, arm’s length from the dense jasmine hedge that hid most of the black Victorian house on the corner from view. The creamy smell of the little white flowers filled my throat. She ran a finger and thumb along my right ear, and I took a shuddering breath to steady myself. She doesn’t have a girlfriend. She likes me. This is where she wants to be.
“How did you know I was at the Winter Queen’s theater place tonight?” I asked.
“Neil tried to follow you. Blossom found him at Tilden Park and sent him home.”
“I hope you people didn’t get him in even more trouble. He was already grounded.”
She shook her head, tugged lightly on a piece of my hair, brushed my collarbone with her fingertips. I felt an electric charge through the thick fabric.
“I have to go home.” I felt confused. I needed to go sort out my feelings before this went any further. I pictured the blinking fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink and the cold metal of the door handle when I would go into the bathroom to run the bathtub taps and drown out the sound of scales. The pile of textbooks next to my laptop and the dirty-dish architecture that must be in the sink. I was going to make banana waffles and write my Spanish essay and IM with Neil. I needed to do something normal. No matter how much my body was telling me to pull Nicky in until there was cinnamon on my tongue.
“Uh-huh. I’m coming with you. Just to the door,” she said. Her hand hooked into my elbow. Oh. Well, maybe I didn’t need to be alone to sort out my feelings. But what if Laura came home after all? I’d have to introduce them. Piano savant sister, meet nonhuman non… what? Girlfriend? She was definitely not my girlfriend. Date? Was there anyone else who dated elves? Besides my sister Margaret, of course. Me and her, we had our own little fetish group of two. I felt a twist of emotion that was missing her and fear about what would happen to me if I got more involved with the fey. Too late. So too late.
“So you know your sister’s okay, right?” Nicky asked. She managed to walk so that her shoulder touched mine, and the zipper on her jacket pinged against my thigh.
“I’ll call her again, but yeah.” I didn’t look at Nicky’s face when I said it. I was afraid of what she’d see on my face: the thought that we were heading to my house together, and there was no one there.
I didn’t slow down when we got to the driveway, just ducked under the wet camellia bush that covered half the front door. Through the big picture window I could see the lamp on in the living room, behind the ancient couch. I was glad Laura had left it on. I was still creeped out. I dug my keys out of my bag and leaned against the sticking dead bolt until it ground open.
“You mind if I look around?” Nicky said, and she was past me into the living room, head raised and sweeping the corners of the room with her eyes.
“Are you, like, my bodyguard now? I thought I had all this magic protection and stuff now.”
“Josy, tell me honestly that you believe your own home is unknown to my winter kin. You have to understand who you are to the Folk. A spy of the Winter Court found you just tonight. He had orders to—”
“I know. I saw.” I put my palms up. I give.
She grinned. One front tooth crossed the other one at the bottom corner. “I should have asked. Your person and your clan are safer than they were from any kind of fey mischief, yes, but it would put my mind at rest to see for myself that your sister remembered to lock the back door.”
“You did ask.” I shrugged my hoodie off and threw it over the back of the couch. I wondered how she knew Laura was so absentminded.
Nicky strode into the kitchen, kneeling at the back door with her hands on both sides of the knob. She bent her head and seemed to be concentrating hard on something I couldn’t see. I watched her straight back disappear into Laura’s bedroom and the bathroom, lights switching briefly on and then off again, and I froze with dread as she headed for my room. But all she did was duck her dark head in, then pull the door closed and turn toward the staircase. “More up there?” she asked.
“No doors up there, but yeah.” Had I made the bed? I did a frantic mental inventory of what was displayed on the shower rod. I remembered at least one hideous off-white bra with the lace all pilly and gray. As soon as Nicky had taken most of the stairs—two at a time—I dove for the bathroom.
There was a Post-it shaped like a pot of gold stuck to the middle of the mirror. A rainbow framed the top, and the blue sky was filled with thick pencil handwriting: I’m at rehearsal. L. Was it possible that I had left the house earlier tonight without going into the bathroom? I felt like an idiot. I texted Laura: yr still there right?
I pushed open the door to my room and stuffed the laundry that was on the dresser under the bed. A drift of crumpled mail and hair ties crested up against the puppet theater. I swept it all into the top drawer and skidded my palm across the remaining dust, but that only accentuated the sticky coffee ring.
On the puppet theater stage, paper Josy stood front and center with her round arms flung wide. She was smiling an openmouthed smile. I didn’t think she’d been smiling before. I fist-bumped the tiny orange heart on her T-shirt with a knuckle.
Nicky was standing behind a chair at the kitchen table, gazing into the overflowing jade plant with a polite expression on her face. Oh God. She heard all that speed-cleaning. My phone rescued me from eye contact by pinging. It was a text from Laura: yes.
“Um, can I get you something to drink?” I said as I set the phone down on the table. Suddenly, I was ten years old, having a friend over from school. The table was covered in dusty mason jars, and the newspapers under Mom’s pottery wheel were moldy. I looked at the piano, where I knew the wood under that peach shawl was cracked, and the wall covered in Grant family photos above that. In every one of me, I was grinning so wide my eyes almost disappeared into my fat cheeks. I cringed.
“So what time does Laura get home?” Nicky asked, ignoring my question.
“She’s going to stay over at her teacher’s. I mean, at Professor Hill’s. You must have heard us on the phone.” I met Nicky’s eyes, and hers widened, and the skin of her face all seemed to lift, as though she had breathed in some powerful smell, and the horses in my blood bolted like a gun had gone off.
“I never eavesdrop,” she said, and her voice was a little unsteady.
“I’ll make coffee.” It was ten steps to the kitchen from the hallway where I stood. She stopped me as I passed the table, tugging on the end of the stretchy scarf that was still around my neck.
“I don’t need coffee. Do you?” she said. She twisted the scarf at the level of my navel. If she pulled it tight, it would choke me. I let my fingers meet on the fabric above hers.
“I was—before, at the revel thing.” I knew I was stalling. “That was peach crazy. That wasn’t me being crazy. And that music. When we—”
“Oh, you mean when we kissed? Fey musicians’ll dance you to death if they take a mind to. They can make you do whatever they want.” Her eyes were down, fixed on my wrists. I looked into the crisp forest of curls at her hairline. When she looked up, we were close enough that I could feel the heat from her skin on my face. She murmured to my mouth, “Doesn’t seem fair.”
I was the one who closed her mouth with mine.
I was not a virgin. I had checked off the technical side of the hookup with Isaac Washington after the sophomore winter ball. We picked each other because he wanted to get rid of his virginity, and as far as I was concerned he was so soft and giggly he was practically a girl. I was pretty sure boys weren’t what turned me on even back then. In the two years since then, I had kissed exactly one girl. It was during service week for spring break, when I spent every afternoon with my California History class painting the rooms of four Habitat for Humanity projects with the same donated mud-yellow paint. Megan came with her church group. She was a junior at a private Christian school, and I was not the first girl she’d kissed. She had light brown hair and tiny moles all over her breasts, and we spent hours that week standing in freshly sheetrocked attics with a roofing shingle stuck under the door to jam it shut and our tops off, kissing until my jaw was sore and touching everywhere but below the waist. I still mentally traveled to a half-finished construction site whenever I touched myself.
Now Nicky’s fingers hooked my jeans where the scarf met them. We kissed with mouths closed for a breath or two, until I felt the dart of her tongue, and I lost my balance and groped to the side for the table. Cinnamon, cigarette smoke, and something else, something warm and organic that was entirely her. Her hands crept across my shoulder blades and then up along my neck to rake through my hair. I felt heat drop a plumb line through my body, and there was a direct channel from where she was licking my neck to whatever was happening between my legs, and my cheeks were burning coals, and when her hand strayed across one nipple and my legs stopped holding me up, and she stepped in between them until my weight was held up by the table, I thought, This is happening. Right now.