I WALKED home from the bus stop after school faster than usual. I could hear the piano by the time I got to the front lawn. I dropped my shoulders back down to their normal place. Laura was okay. When I got inside, I saw her on the piano bench, doing something to the keys that looked like she was jerking a needle up through stiff cloth. I looked at her fluttery sleeves moving with every note and wondered when I’d be able to talk to her about Nicky without her going all glamourized. Today was Friday. Whatever happened, it was supposed to happen by Sunday. That was what the Lady had said.
I wanted to look at the puppet theater right away, but I was starving. I went into the kitchen and felt a surge of rage when I saw the low-tide drift of dirty dishes on the counter. Laura had probably been home all afternoon. Sure, Mom. I’ll play Cinderella as long as you want. Don’t feel like you have to rush home or make Laura lift a finger.
Mom had been gone for five days. Not very long, considering that everything in the known world had totally changed. I thought about Mom’s faded skin and the way she wore the same two pairs of slacks and five sweaters to work so she wouldn’t have to make decisions and how she’d be conked out by the time I made dinner for me and Laura most nights of the week. Let the woman have her vacation. Maybe she’d actually come back with some strength so the rest of my senior year wouldn’t be about counting her pills and calling the office to say Mom was home with a migraine again today.
I picked up Nicky’s coffee mug, one Mom had made with a teal crackle glaze and an unstable handle. Nicky had been careful not to hold it by the handle, I could tell, or it would have come loose again where Mom had glued it the last time. I was going to see Nicky again soon. Today, if I could. I realized I had no idea where she lived, and I didn’t have a phone number for her. Should I IM her? Maybe I should write a message in milk like she did this morning.
I dug through the fridge for my favorite peach yogurt and carried it into my room. I toed the door shut to muffle the plinky piano noise. Laura’s whole repertoire had gone modern since she started college. I felt a flicker of nostalgia for this time last year, when she was a senior at McLean and I was a junior, and she entered that Copland competition and spent months playing nothing but the spare melodies of Rodeo. There were no complications from another realm then, just the same old sick Mom and spoiled Laura and me trying to keep the house together and survive my last required semester of PE. We’d had to do diet charts in health class that month. I shuddered at the memory and peeled the foil top off my cup of Brown Cow, pointed away so it wouldn’t splatter on my sweater.
My clothes were still heaped on the floor beside the bed. I flushed at the memory of how they’d gotten there. I kicked the crumpled jeans to the side to clear a path and hunched down in front of the dresser to look into the puppet theater.
I was imagining the worst that could be in the diary. I was adopted. Dad wasn’t my dad. I had some terminal disease, and I was going to die before I reached eighteen. Well, yeah, at this rate I’m definitely going to die before next month. At least I had last night.
The puppet theater was empty. I realized I had been expecting a message from Nicky or another one from Jerome. Seeing the scratched brown paint of the stage floor, dust smears in the corner, the disappointment hit me all at once. There were no puppets anywhere: not hidden in the velvet folds of the curtain, not stuck to the bottom of the box. And no leaves or any other kind of message.
Nicky had IM’d me once. I flipped my laptop open to find no messages waiting. How was I supposed to get in touch with this girl? And how was I supposed to find out where Timothy lived, or where he had Margaret’s diary, without Nicky’s help?
Okay. I wrapped my arms around my ribs and realized I felt hollow. Before I could stop it, the worst-case scenario scrolled across my mind. Last night was a one-time thing. She’s back home laughing her ass off. Oh, I am the biggest idiot I know.
Sometimes I only noticed the sounds in the house when they stopped. Laura stopped playing right then, and the da-da-DA da-DA echoed in my ears. The sound of the bathroom door being shoved closed. It was too warped to close the normal way—you had to shove it at the top while tugging on the doorknob to get any privacy or else the door would drift open on its own. Water running. Then Laura was standing in my bedroom doorway.
I looked at her: print blouse, brown hair falling down out of the pins she kept it up in. Her flared white skirt and stick legs made her look like a shorebird. A line of ink arced across her cheek and dissolved in a smear where she’d probably tried to rub it off. My sister, the girl who’s going to die next. And I don’t know where, or when, and even if I did, I couldn’t stop it. I was the one who was supposed to have the power to protect her. I just wished I knew what that meant. I wished I knew how to use it.
She was biting her thin lips. “Did you see your message?”
“What message?”
“It was on the table.”
And when I went out to the kitchen, it was perched on the upturned bottom of a mason jar in the clutter of the kitchen table, an origami fortune teller like the kind we used to make in fourth grade, made of pink construction paper with JOSY printed on it. You were supposed to open a certain flap and read your fortune. When I was little, it was always personal revelations like “you stink!!” This time my fortune was a phone number, signed NICKY xxx. I retrieved my phone and brushed Nicky’s narrow blue letters with my fingertips while I dialed. It figures. I’m looking all over for some magical communication, but the elf girl just gives me her number.
Once we’d said hello, too eagerly on my part, I told her about what Jerome said. “So I have to get Margaret’s diary, but I have no clue where Timothy would have it,” I finished.
“Probably his tree house, but it’s going to be locked,” she said as if to herself. She cleared her throat and added, “That’d be the place to start. I’ll come by in, say, an hour, and we can see if we can get in, okay?”
“His tree house?” But she was already gone.
I went back into my room to pick out an outfit appropriate for breaking and entering, wondering what the tree house was. I wrote a note for Laura rather than interrupting the weird Sofia Gubaidulina piece she was picking through. I didn’t want her to snap at me. For good measure I texted Neil to tell him I was going out with Nicky. It felt stupid, but that way I could tell Mom I’d done what she asked and told someone when I was going to be away from home. I pressed Send and wondered what kind of vehicle Nicky was going to pick me up in. I knew Neil would grill me about that.
It turned out to be a tandem bicycle. Green ribbon was laced through the back wheel’s spokes, and the handlebars were decorated with a twist of plastic daisies. A Pagan Lounge Lizard sticker glittered pink in the sun. Nicky dismounted and clicked the bike up the driveway.
“Nice wheels,” I said. She was wearing green cargo pants and a tank top the color of rust under her gray-brown-olive jacket. She looked like redwood camouflage.
“I borrowed it from Blossom. Hi.” She stepped up the one step to the front door and kissed my cheek, a feathery child’s kiss. She took a step back and looked in my eyes. She’s trying to guess how I feel. Just like I’m trying to guess how she feels.
I pulled her in for more of a kiss. The fabric on her back was warm from the sun under my hands. I smelled her smoky-cinnamony smell and thought Real. This is real. I have this right now, and nothing can take it away.
The bike worked just like a bike, no magical speed or anything. I didn’t know what I’d expected. I held on to the ram’s-horn handlebars mounted below Nicky’s seat, and she did the steering. The ride lasted maybe twenty minutes, and after we spun uphill behind the UC Berkeley campus, I was no longer sure where I was. I was sweating and breathing hard by the time she slowed the bike to a stop.
A narrow paved road curved up ahead of us and hairpinned down below, where we’d just ridden. To the right was a plastic-covered greenhouse set back from the road in an overgrown vegetable patch. I shook the stiffness out of my arms and headed for the ditch filled with waist-high grass, looking for a logical way through.
Nicky muscled the bicycle until it was lying in the ditch and then broke off a long strand of blond grass, holding it upright, both palms Namaste-style, and her face grew still. She grinned up at me after a few seconds. “That should do it.”
“Did you make it invisible?”
“No, but anyone who came this way would feel a powerful urge not to look in the ditch. That kind of magic is mostly deflection. Illusion,” she finished as she rose to her feet in a boneless motion. “It’s that way.”
I felt trepidation trickle through me. What if Timothy was home? I had no idea what would happen, but I was pretty clear that he didn’t like me. Or the idea of elves dating mortals. “Remind me why we have to break in again? He won’t just give it to you or Blossom?” I asked.
Nicky shaded her wide-set eyes with one hand. One of her rings glinted in the sun. “He thinks it’s his. Ours, I mean. He thinks it’s a fey thing now. He doesn’t want a mortal to have it. So this way he doesn’t know we have it. He’s prickly. Believe me, this is actually easier. We might be able to get him to let us read it, but….”
“Even that wouldn’t work.” I told her about the spell Jerome said was on the diary. If Nicky read it, she wouldn’t be able to tell me what was in it. I had to read it myself.
“He told you all that? Little leaves of spring. You are turning into one of us,” she said. I wondered what that meant.
When her mellow voice stopped, the silence echoed. I didn’t even hear traffic noises or the buzz of power lines. I looked in the direction she was pointing, across the road, as a crow shrieked and fell down into the air from the top branches of a redwood. The trees were thick there, and dark.
The tangy redwood smell hung in the hot air, and I heard small rustling noises everywhere as Nicky led me through the underbrush. If she was following a path, it wasn’t one I could see.
And then I tripped over a rock and looked down, and the path was there. I had to unfocus my eyes and look away before it took shape in my peripheral vision: a straight line of green so pale it was gold, lying on the ground and stretching out ahead. Where it disappeared from the leaf litter, the same color was repeated at knee level in the leaves of bushes and then farther away at the tips of fat oaks. The line twisted to the right just as Nicky slowed down to pull up a sock, and I stumbled against her.
“Whoa, taking over this scout mission, my little mortal?” she teased.
“Isn’t it that way?”
“You can see that?” She sighted along the path where it curved. “Well, rowan and thorn, it’s true, then.”
“What is?”
“I know the Lady gave you her protection. And a gift of your own. So now I guess it’s no wonder you can see things you couldn’t see before. Things that aren’t visible to mortals.” She resumed walking, faster this time.
Can I see things that are only in Faerie? Is there anything there I still can’t see? I watched the green-gold line lead us steeply downhill and worked that thought over.
There, at the bottom of a ravine, I saw the tree house. It was obscured by the circle of redwoods it stood in, and with its round walls, I mistook it for a huge burned stump at first. It was a tower. It was only wide enough for one big room, but it was maybe four stories high. I didn’t see any windows. The walls were a deep black-red color and looked rough. I saw why when we were closer: they were made of vertical boards with the bark still intact. Moss and sprays of tiny leaves lined the cracks.
I also didn’t see a door. I turned to Nicky to ask what to do and discovered that she was already pacing around the structure with both hands flat against the wood, listening. A branch snapped, and I jumped. Was Timothy here? Every rustle of a bird or squirrel was the sound of him approaching. Every breath of wind was a weapon.
“Got it,” Nicky breathed, and where there had been no door, a narrow door was now outlined in the same green-gold as the leaf path. It was beautiful, or I would probably think so if I weren’t so terrified that we were going to get caught.
Dandelion, I thought as soon as I was inside. That was the bitter green smell in the low-ceilinged room: the cut stems of dandelions. Dust twisted in a shaft of light, and I looked up, way up, to see a star-shaped skylight in the center of the roof. A row of low benches the same silver-brown as the smooth walls surrounded the bare floor, and things hung on hooks above them: a shimmer of fabric that could be a coat, a horse’s bridle that looked like it was made of flexible silver. Nicky’s long footsteps echoed in the hush as she strode across the room. “It’ll be up here if it’s here at all,” she called. She jumped up to slap the ceiling, and a rope thudded to the floor. She shook it out and was halfway up, boots squeaking on the dense twine, before I realized it was a ladder. A small square of ceiling had opened when the rope came down.
Oh no. I would never be able to climb a fairy ladder. I’d break it, and probably my tailbone when I landed back on it. With zero dignity.
“See anything?” I called upward.
“Not yet. Come up!” When I didn’t, Nicky’s face appeared in the square. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think I can fit.”
“You can. I’ll pull you.” And with a lot of swaying, I did make it up the ladder. I hated heights. There was a good reason fat girls tended not to climb. But the ladder held, and I felt my T-shirt stretch out as my stomach strained up through the square hole. I flopped out on the floor of the second level, disentangling one sneaker from the rope. Yep, that was some dignity, all right. There’s my new girlfriend, seeing me look like a beached whale. I rubbed a scratch on my forearm and took a long look around. Nicky was looking away at something on the wall. I wondered if she was being polite. I palmed my damp cheeks and knew my face was red.
If the ground floor was the entryway, this room was where the living happened. Bunk beds sat against one wall, the lower one bare, with folded linens on the wood slats. Cupboards followed the tight curve of the room, with green glass doorknobs set in the smooth wood at random intervals. And hugging the hole in the center of the room that let the light fall from ceiling to ground was a full drum kit.
“It’s a bachelor pad, what can I say? Two boys lived here for ages. You know how they can be,” Nicky said when she saw me looking at the drums.
“Two boys?”
“This is Timothy and Jerome’s place. They like their toys. Or T does. Jerome hasn’t lived here in a few years.”
“That serious doctor I met slept in a bunk bed?” I crossed to the cupboards as I spoke. The diary was here somewhere.
“Elves can be multifaceted. You should see him play Scrabble.”
“Oh come on,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was opening the little doors in the cupboards. Books, mostly—why would someone keep their books behind a solid wooden door?—and neat shelves that held clothes. An old-fashioned shaving kit with a straight razor and a fat bristle brush nestled on a shelf below a gold-framed mirror. I wondered where the plumbing was in the tree house.
But I didn’t find anything that looked like a diary. “I don’t think it’s in this room,” I said.
“You have to know him,” Nicky answered, and she shook the shiny turquoise book that was in her hand.
“What? Where was it?”
“In the kick drum. Under this… thing.” In her other hand was a streaked gray rag. “Please tell me he never actually wore this.”
“That’s where he kept that precious thing he bonded to his house?” I took the little book from her. The satin cover was embroidered with little Chinese fans. The pages were edged in gold, and the book had a fat ribbon tight across it that ended in a lock where the knot should be. I smiled at the little-girl nature of my sister’s diary. Literally a diary, like the kind I got for my eighth birthday but never used. Margaret used hers. About two-thirds of the pages were wavy where they’d been written in. It’s in here, the key to all this. Whatever it is. I felt a breath of fear.
“Like I said. Boys. Thought he was being clever—nobody would look there. And I don’t know how sealed it is. I’m good at teasing things out.”
“Oh, are you?” We looked at each other. I felt the blush creeping over my face, but I didn’t look down.
And then we were kissing. Her body was all along mine, belly to belly, fingers interlocking. I felt myself melt. “Hey, hey, we’re on a dangerous mission here,” I said when I caught my breath.
And I heard, faint but unmistakable, a steady jingle downstairs. Footsteps. Keys. Something.
“Oh shit, Timothy!” I whispered, as Nicky was tugging me toward the wooden staircase that curved around the room. I wondered just how paranoid Timothy was about visitors, with all that rope-ladder, no-door security. We tiptoed up the steep wooden steps as fast as we could and emerged on the next floor, this time with a polished rail where the stairs ended.
Nicky stuck her head down into the round center hole in the floor, listening. I stood next to the staircase with one sweaty hand on the railing and looked around the third floor of Timothy’s hideaway.
This floor was the gym. More ropes hung at intervals from the low ceiling, knotted and swaying. Mounted on one curved wall was a row of knives ranked in size from fat finger-length blades to swords that looked taller than me. A shudder walked down my spine, and I turned to see if the display got any more ghoulish on the opposite wall.
Nicky’s head rose up and she stood, unfurling herself upright again with nothing to hold onto. I thought again how like an animal she was, up on her booted toes, arms arced out like wings behind her until she got her balance. She gave me a wicked grin and set a finger on her lips, then mimed drinking. I strained to filter out the sound of my thrashing heartbeat until I could hear, faintly, water being poured two floors down. Okay. We were safe for now. Maybe he wouldn’t come upstairs.
The wall behind her held more glass-knobbed cupboards. The knives must be the worst of it. I pictured Timothy training here, throwing the little daggers at some target. For God knew how many years. I shuddered again. I couldn’t defend myself if he caught me.
Nicky might be able to run, but not me. I was a slow, fat mortal with no combat skills other than whatever instinct had gotten me out of the Winter Queen’s burned-out theater last night. I adjusted my sweaty grip on Margaret’s diary where my fingers were so tight they were shaking.
Nicky was creeping over to the cupboard wall. She beckoned to me, and I tiptoed as slowly as I could bear to. Thank God for quiet sneakers. She slid down to the floor in front of a curved slab of door and tugged at my pants cuff, looking up at me with an openmouthed grin. She was loving the danger, I could tell. It thrilled her. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I slid down beside her and adjusted my hips on the hard floor, feeling the bump of a knob behind my shoulder blades, and looked at the raw pink place on my palm where I’d lost my grip on the rope ladder downstairs and slid a few inches.
I heard heavy footsteps downstairs, and the flat slap of something metal on something wooden. I realized I was holding my breath and puffed it out.
Ssh, Nicky mouthed without making a sound. I looked at her eager face, the dense brows raised to make her round eyes look huge, the place where one front tooth slightly overlapped the other one as she smiled. Under the fear, warm sparks kicked to life in my stomach.
Something rattled—the knives?—and I felt a thud like the familiar first warning motion of an earthquake. My body stiffened. “He’s gone. I think he’s gone,” Nicky said in her barely audible whisper, and she crawled back over to the skylight hole. Her movements didn’t make any sound at all on the scarred wooden floor.
Are you sure? I mouthed.
“One way to find out.” She was cocky Nicky again, exhilaration in her round face as she slapped the banister and leaped down onto the stairs. I seized a knob at random above my head to pull myself up.
The cupboard door attached to the knob swung open. I stood up and started to close it, clamping the slippery diary under my arm, but a gleaming object caught my eye. I opened the square door as wide as it would go and stared into the dark cubbyhole. Three fluted glass jars sat on the shallow shelf. Each was a different shape, and they were sealed with wax the color of dried blood. They were all full of an opaque liquid that glimmered in rainbow colors like rave makeup where the hard light from the skylight hit the jars.
It was the same poison that had been in the syringe last night. The little fey creature had tried to attack me with it when we escaped the Winter Court theater. I was sure.
I wished I’d brought the vicious little syringe-dart with me, but it was at home, probably still in the pocket of the hoodie I’d worn yesterday. I seized the thinnest jar and slid it out carefully. It was lighter than I expected, although the glass looked thick. I tilted it in both hands and watched the liquid inside cling to the sides and slide, slower than water. This had to be the same stuff. I felt my heartbeat thudding in my face as I set the elegant jar back in its place. Timothy has the poison. He was the one who sent that nasty little animal out after me. He’s supposed to be on our side. But he has the poison.
“Nicky?” I called.
“Hurry!” she called back from downstairs.
“Come look at this first,” I said.
She reappeared faster than a normal person should be able to. I opened the cupboard door again and pointed at the jars. Nicky looked at them, and her hand went to her mouth. “Oh, Timothy.” She turned to me. “Remember last night, the corn goat?”
“It’s the same stuff, isn’t it?”
“He might have it for some other reason, but yeah. It is,” she said. She looked baffled.
“Can we get out of here now?” I said. She nodded and plunged back down the stairs.
My mind whirled as I raced down, one hand tight on the railing, one gripping Margaret’s diary. Nicky held the rope ladder steady for me as I climbed down, fingertipping the rope with the hand that held the book.
“Come on, we don’t want him to come back,” she was saying, and we dashed for the open door.
Open. It should have been closed, the way we’d left it. Something was wrong. Too late I saw what it was: across the doorway, which was a blinding square of sunny forest in the dim room, were four twists of leaf-green cable. They seemed to flicker, and I couldn’t tell if they were made of the same kind of magic as the path, or if they were just rope.
Nicky pelted for the doorway and recoiled backward like she’d been thrown. She yelped out a wordless pain sound and hunched over, arms across her stomach.
“What happened?” I hovered beside her.
“No idea. Oh my—haaah!” She shook out her arm gingerly. I saw a line of red hatch marks on the underside of her forearm, and when she held it out from her body, I saw that the bottom half of her tank top was shredded. The fabric fluttered under her ribs, and before I could glance away I saw more scratches there, white and deep.
“That looks bad.”
“It’s—ow—I heal fast. But the door. We can’t get out.”
I thought about that. There were no windows I’d seen, other than the skylight, and that didn’t seem like much of a solution. “Well, can you do your door thing with that spell or whatever it is on it?”
“I have a certain way with doors, you’re right. But whatever Timothy put on this one…. It’s security. A trap,” she said.
“Did he know we were coming?” I asked, incredulous.
“Probably not. The man is just one paranoid elf.”
“Would it really be so bad if he came back and…?” I trailed off. The poison. He wasn’t who Nicky thought he was. My idea of how he could hurt us had just gotten a lot more dire.
“Well, I definitely don’t want that to happen. I’d have to explain what I was doing here uninvited,” she said.
She went to the doorway anyway, palming all the way around it like she was trying to find a secret panel. She stepped back and lobbed something at the opening—the gray T-shirt, it looked like—but it only boomeranged back onto the floor at her feet.
I had an idea. “Look, what if we tried—you know how I have that thing where I can turn some things on or off now? The gift the Lady gave me? I could try it.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I sounded. I wasn’t going to be able to do anything if Nicky, with all her magic, couldn’t get out.
“Good,” she said, and gestured to the door. She was out of breath. How much pain was she in? I couldn’t tell.
I hovered my fingertips near the doorframe, and when nothing happened, rested them on each side of the opening. Off. Let us out, I thought. Nothing happened.
“Try now?” I said over my shoulder. Nicky ripped off a loose scrap of her top and pitched it at the door. Boomerang. It landed back on her boot.
“Um, okay, this is crazy, but what if we try together?” I said, feeling silly.
“Worth a shot, bright little mortal.” And Nicky seized my hand. I set my other palm on the silky wood frame to the left of the open door, mirroring her. Off, I thought again, harder this time.
Nicky took in a long gasp of air and threw her curly head back. “It’s done,” she said, and it was true: the green bands had vanished. I hadn’t felt anything when the magic switch was thrown. Maybe I hadn’t had anything to do with it. Whatever happened might have been all her. Or maybe that was how magic felt: like nothing. Maybe I’d never be able to tell when it was working in me. If that was even how it worked.
She inched toward the open space, leading with one shoulder, but this time she didn’t get bounced back into the room. She was clear, hurtling into the sunlight out past the tower. I raced through the doorway before the spell could reappear. I didn’t want to take any chances.
We ran all the way back up the hill through the woods to the road. The long weeds of the ditch, where the bike was hidden, came into view first. Almost there. Blood drummed in my face as I struggled for breath and tried to remember what my life had been like a few days ago, back when I wasn’t always running from something.
Timothy strode forward from the greenhouse. My gut went tight with fear. In the sunlight he looked like an ordinary college student, in his pale green T-shirt and floppy hair. But his voice was far from ordinary. It came out in a chilled stream as he addressed Nicky. “You would defile my house. The Lady’s grace will be removed from yours. You will be sundered from all that comforts you.”
“First, Timmy boy, it’s not your house, it’s your and your brother’s little playhouse. Big difference,” she replied. She was brash, too brash. She was going to get hurt. But I saw that it was an act. She was moving toward the bike as she talked. “Second, you’re not exactly in the Lady’s favor, are you? I saw you at the revel. And after.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I saw a muscle near Timothy’s eye jump.
The poison. I knew he couldn’t be in the Summer Queen’s favor if he had it. “You’re working against her! You sent that corn goat after me!” I shouted.
Timothy sighed rather than spoke, and his sigh was directed at Nicky. “Hush your pet.” But then he squatted over the ditch where the bike was hidden. I felt the magic this time: a silent, sooty burst that bent all the tall weeds down like a strong wind and seemed to fill my veins with chalk.
Then the feeling passed, and Timothy was gone, and so was the bike.
“Thorny thorn thorns,” Nicky said. “Weasel.” But her eyes, when she met mine, were full of glee rather than anger. “We’re on the right track, though. We got the goods. And you were a demon!”
“Your bike.” I was afraid Timothy would come after Nicky now or get her banished from the Court or whatever his threat meant. If he was working for the Winter Queen, what did that mean? Did Blossom or the Lady know? And all I could come up with to say was your bike? When she was injured? “Wait a minute, your arm! And your stomach—you’re hurt,” I said. There was a grim expression on Nicky’s face now that could be about holding in pain, or it could be fear. I didn’t know her well enough to know which.
“All good now.” And she pulled up her rust-red tank top to show me the smooth skin there, where I’d seen those angry scratches. They were gone.
And Timothy was gone, and for the moment the danger was gone. I gazed at her taut belly. “I still think I should kiss it and make it better.”
“Mmm. Definitely. Later.” We didn’t even touch, but the long eye contact gave me a low, pleasant shudder. Maybe it’s okay, how much I like her.
It was a long, hot walk back down the hill and into town. I tried to sort out what had just happened. “So Timothy’s working for the Winters?” I asked.
Nicky gave a pensive shake of her head. “I can’t imagine he really is. Blossom could tell us more, but Timothy’s always had a curiosity about Winter things. He thinks of it as research. All those weapons? He is one of the Summer Lady’s highest warriors.”
“Research? That’s creepy. He must have sent that goat thing after me, though.”
“Not necessarily. Mayapple—I think that’s what was in the jars—it’s a powerful poison, but it’s not that uncommon,” she said.
“You mean, among people who want to kill me and my sister.”
“Josy.” Nicky stopped walking, forcing me to stop too. She took my shoulders in her hands and looked me full in the face. Her round eyes sought mine, eyebrows knit with concern. “We are going to find the Woodcutter. We know that he and the Lady of Ice want to hurt you. But we know, because Timothy is in the Summer Lady’s own guard, that he does not.”
“He doesn’t exactly love the sight of me,” I said, but I knew she was right. I was just frustrated that I still didn’t know who the Woodcutter was. Part of me had wanted it to be Timothy, just so I’d have an answer.
I looked away, and she sighed and dropped her hands down my arms to take mine. Her skin felt dry and cool. “He may be a prejudiced bag of dung, but the Lady of Sunlight and all her court are bound to you now, just like you are bound to us. To it. Timothy would not hurt you. If he did, he would lose his favor with my Lady.”
“I guess that makes sense. And you guys only have to know me until this weekend, right?” I wondered what it would be like to go back to my fey-free life. I looked at Nicky’s slender fingers curled around mine. I didn’t want to think about losing her.
“Oh, I’m planning on knowing you for far longer. Far,” she said, and grinned, and kissed my fingers. “Let’s walk. I need to tell Blossom about her bike before she hears about it from someone else.”
We didn’t talk much after that. My fingers worked the edges of the diary I had managed to hold on to through running in the woods and the encounter with Timothy, and I used it like prayer beads, one corner for every thought. As we rounded the high curve of the road and the dense woods began to turn into the groomed gardens of people who could afford to live in the Berkeley hills, I asked, “What about—okay, the door at Timothy’s place, the spell on it. I thought my power thing—the gift from the Summer Queen—didn’t you say that only worked if it was a Winter spell?”
“That would figure. We’re not magnets with opposing charges. We’re not different races. Nothing like that. The Summer and Winter Folk are all fey, and all our magic is basically the same—it comes from the same source. He might have picked up a security spell from the Winters, so that might be why your gift worked to unravel it. But magic is more or less inert. It doesn’t choose a side on its own.”
I still didn’t trust Timothy. I mulled over everything Nicky had said as the laurel-scented sunlight baked my bare head, and sweat worked its way through my top. My feet felt bruised by the time we finally reached my house, and I was drowsy with the drop-off of adrenaline and the heat.
A man was sitting on the front step of my house, feet thrust under the camellia bush, reading a paperback book. My heart charged into alarm mode until I got closer and saw that it wasn’t Timothy. It was Neil.