The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (104 page)

“No one,” Sam said. “There wasn’t anyone else there.”

Behind them, from a room down the hall, a door closed.

They all froze, looking at each other.

“He’s here,” Lisa said.

Phoebe looked up at the Hanged Man and stumbled a little, suddenly light-headed, as if she herself were upside down. Her stomach churned, and a wave of nausea overtook her. She hurried from the room, down the hall in search of a bathroom, making it just in time. She vomited, rinsed out her mouth with lukewarm water, looked at herself in the mirror. For just an instant, a nebulous figure moved across the mirror, behind her. She spun. No one. Nothing.

“Shit,” she mumbled, gripping the sink. She thought she felt the baby twitch inside her, her own little divining rod telling her something was terribly wrong.

She walked on shaky legs out of the bathroom and saw there was one more room across the hall, the door closed. She crept slowly up to it, placed her hand on the knob, turning it gently, pushing the door open. The room was warm, sweet smelling but with a sour undertone.

“Oh,” she said, not meaning to speak, the sound escaping anyway. In front of her was a pretty white bassinet, a changing table stocked with diapers, powder, wipes, diaper rash cream. On the edge of the table, a bottle of formula. Phoebe touched it—still warm.

“You’re too late,” a voice told her. It was gravelly, unfamiliar. The hairs on the back of Phoebe’s neck stood up. She tried to make herself turn around but found she was frozen in place, as in a nightmare.

CHAPTER 46

The Girl Who Would Be Queen

H
e made them both pregnant this time. He was getting his son, one way or another.

They talked about escaping. When the babies were born, they were going to take them and run.

“They’ll never let us,” the queen said. She’d been there longer. She’d lost hope long ago.

“I know people,” she told the queen. “There are places where we would be safe. Sometimes there are happy endings,” she said. Hansel and Gretel pushed the witch into the oven, took her treasures, and found their way back home. Sleeping Beauty was woken with a kiss.

They didn’t see Teilo much. They continued to hear arguments through the flowered walls. Angry words saying things like “How could you?” and “I trusted you!” and “You’ve ruined everything.”

The girls waited. Their bellies grew. To pass the time, they told each other stories.

Once upon a time there was a little girl. And she had a little curl. Coal black hair. Dark eyes. She lived with her mother and father and brother on the edge of a forest. She ate oatmeal for breakfast and called it porridge. She had a shelf full of books and a silver comb and mirror that were magic. She had a secret hiding place in the attic. She went to school. Learned the golden rule. Loved her English teacher, who taught her things like what a metaphor is and how every story, if you look at it right, is a circle with a beginning, middle, and end.

She had a cousin named Evie, who said, “Don’t go into the woods anymore.”

And Evie was right. She should have listened.

CHAPTER 47

Phoebe

JUNE 13, PRESENT DAY

“W
ho is Teilo?” Sam demanded. Hazel stood in the center of the nursery, holding a large glass of what smelled like straight gin with ice. She was short and chunky, with black tousled hair streaked with grey. Her cheeks were rosy and covered with thin spidery red veins, her eyes dark. She wore a pair of stretchy navy blue pants, stained at the knees, a white cardigan, and fleece slippers.
House clothes
, Phoebe’s mother would have called them. Phoebe saw an instant resemblance to Phyllis, only this was a ravaged version—the dark sister who stole children away.

“Do you really need to ask that?” Hazel asked, her words a slurred, drunken hiss. “After everything you’ve seen? You of all people should understand the truth, Sammy.” She waved her drink in his direction, some of it spilling over the edge.

“What truth is that?” Sam asked. “What I understand is that you kept Lisa here. Made her think she was with the fairies. It was
you
. You and some mysterious six-fingered rapist who lives in your goddamn basement! Who is he, Hazel?”

“I did what I did because I
had
to. I did it to protect my children.”

“Evie?” Sam said. “How in the hell did stealing Lisa protect Evie?”

Children.
She’d said children.

Phoebe remembered what Becca had said about Hazel having a stillborn baby that everyone in town heard crying.

“He’s your son,” Phoebe said. “Teilo is your son.”

Hazel chuckled, sounding more like a dainty Mrs. Claus than a psychotic kidnapper. “No. Gene is Teilo’s son.”

“Who?” Sam asked.

“The Dark Man,” she said. “Teilo.” When Hazel said the name, a shadow crossed her face. She took a long sip from the glass of gin, hand trembling.

She’s afraid of him
, Phoebe thought.

“But who the hell is Gene?” Sam asked.

“Your cousin,” Phoebe explained. “Evie’s older brother.”

“Evie doesn’t have a brother.” Sam shook his head firmly.

Poor Sam. Sometimes he was too smart for his own good. By the time his brain analyzed and processed, he was half a step behind.

“Why?” Phoebe asked Hazel. “Why keep him hidden?”

“He walks between the worlds,” Hazel said. “Half human, half fairy.”

“I have fucking
had
it with the fairy shit!” Sam exploded. “Where’s Lisa’s baby? What have you freaks done with him?”

“I said, you’re too late,” Hazel said calmly, smoothing at a crease in her stained pants. “They’ve taken the baby.”

“Where?” Sam asked. “What are they going to do to him? Lock him up in another secret room in someone’s filthy basement?”

Hazel flinched a little, then smiled, showing crooked, stained teeth. “No. They’ll take him to Teilo. In time, he’ll be joined by another, a human girl not yet born who will be raised by the fairies. Together, they’ll change the world.”

“This is insane,” Sam said. “You can’t actually believe all this.”

“It’s the prophecy. And it’s all coming true. Ask her,” Hazel said, looking at Lisa. “She knows the truth. She’s seen the future.” Hazel looked down into her glass, closed her eyes, and took another deep swallow.

Sam shook his head. “Lisa barely knows her own name anymore.”

Hazel laughed. “You still think this is Lisa?”

Phoebe’s mind ran in circles, then something clicked into place, like tumblers in a lock.

“Let me guess, she’s a
changeling
? Jesus!” Sam said. “Hazel, you pulled all this insane fairy crap from your own sick, twisted mind and brainwashed Evie. You kidnapped your own niece. And on top of it, you’ve got a secret son who never sees the light of day? What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Hazel shook her head. “I didn’t want to believe either, at first, Sammy. But then I saw the truth. Sometimes I wish . . . I wish things had turned out differently. But they didn’t. And you can’t run from your own destiny. You can’t hide from Teilo, no matter how hard you try.”

“Where have they taken the baby?” Sam said, raising his voice and speaking slowly, annunciating each syllable. “Where is Teilo?”

“Where do you go when there’s nowhere else to go?” Hazel said, rocking back on her heels. “Home, Sammy. You go home.”

CHAPTER 48

The Girl Who Would Be Queen

T
eilo got what he wanted, what the dreams and prophecies promised: a boy child with thick dark hair, the palest skin, eyes like chestnuts, a mouth as red as any ruby. He smelled like warm summer rain. And the only time he seemed to stop crying was when her nipple was in his mouth. He rolled it around in there like a sweet cherry, then clamped down tight and went to work. Queen cow, pumping out milk, walking the halls with the baby howling, one of the guardians telling her to shut him up. Then another guardian hissed, “You shut up before Teilo hears you and fries up your skin for breakfast! That’s the prince you’re talking about.”

Things were tense since Teilo’s son was born. There was arguing all the time. Evie fought with the guardians, who then fought with the man who called himself Teilo but wasn’t really.

Her own baby had been stillborn. She must have come too early. She was perfect in every way, though. Ten fingers. Ten toes. A head full of damp, curly hair.

A week later, the queen’s baby, the perfect son, came. The queen had a hard labor, much worse than her own. There was so much screaming. So much blood. The guardians, they tried to stop it. “We should get her to a hospital,” Evie said. She was yelling, begging. And she was crying. Actual tears.

“No,” said her mother. “Teilo would be furious.”

So they let her die.

Lisa, her name had been. Queen of the Fairies.

S
he’d heard the guardians talking. They said they had no use for her anymore.

“She’s got a loose screw,” one said. “A fucking mental case, that one is. Not even the kid’s mother. Just a wet nurse plucked at random off the street because Gene thought Lisa was lonely. So he brings her a fucking crank addict? How’s that for a playmate for the Queen of the Fairies? Disgusting!”

“Too late now,” the other said. “It’s your fault, really, when you look at it. It was your job to keep Gene under control. She’s serving a purpose now, feeding the baby. When we don’t need the girl, we’ll get rid of her. And take care of any evidence.”

Evidence.

Evidently.

Eventually.

Fucking mental case.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought she was special, but really she was just dumb. A bad girl who skipped school, stole her mother’s cigarettes and brandy. She left home at sixteen, looking for something more. She lived on the street. Learned to make a buck however she could. It was funny what some guys would pay for. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. That was a saying her ma used to have. Sometimes she missed her ma. Mostly, she didn’t. Each day on the street was like panning for gold: you never knew what you’d find, who’d turn up.

He was dressed all in black, not much older than she was. His hair was dark and slicked back. He had a goatee. His boots were spit-shined so that you could look down and see the reflections of streetlights and clouds. He was a magic man, he told her. He gave her a twenty just for a smile. That’s when she saw his gloved hands, each with an extra finger.

The next day, he came back with a pack of smokes, a handful of pills, bright and colorful as candy.

“What would you say if I told you there was a whole parallel world beside ours and that the beings who lived there controlled our destiny?”

The girl laughed.

“You know how sometimes, sometimes when you’re just sitting there, you catch this movement in the corner of your eye—just a shadow, really—and you blink, sure you imagined it?”

She nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. It happened to her all the time.

“That’s them,” he said.

She took out a smoke and lit it.

“People like you and me, we get that the life people are living is really an illusion, don’t we? Smoke and mirrors, hiding the real deal. The steal of a deal. That guy coming out of Banana Republic with a seventy-dollar shirt. The woman with her grande half-caff latte. They don’t have a clue. But you and I, we know different.”

The girl blew smoke at him, smiled. “So what, exactly, are you saying?”

“I’m saying I can show you the truth. I can take you away from all this and change your life forever.”

N
ow the girl was just tired. And she wasn’t a girl anymore. She’s what—in her twenties? Thirties maybe even. Time meant nothing in the fairy world. Her body hurt. Her teeth ached. She lay in bed at night and heard voices no one else seemed to hear. They’d get loud, then soft, but stayed steady, like a pulse. A strange heartbeat in her ears. Lisa’s babies. Hers. Lisa’s voice saying, “I lived next to a town called Reliance. My brother, his name is Sam. If I ever get out of here, he’s the first one I’ll find.”

W
hen they started the baby on formula, she knew it was over.

Evie came into her room one night, said, “You need to go. Now.”

Evie had been so kind to her these last weeks. She snuck her and the baby out when the guardians were away. They went for rides in the country. Evie took her to a library in the afternoons, even let her check out books. It was far away, a place where no one would recognize them.

But now Evie was panicked as she pried open the window and helped her through.

“Where will I go?” she asked.

“As far as you can,” Evie whispered.

She pulled herself through and ran. But it wasn’t her own life she was running toward. It was Lisa’s, the girl who was Queen of the Fairies. Because somehow, after their years together, she knew Lisa’s life better than her own. It was more real to her—more vivid and sparkling and full of hope than her own past.

Once upon a time there was a girl named Lisa who lived in a house with her mother, father, and brother, Sammy. They all loved her very much. She ate oatmeal for breakfast and called it porridge. Her father was very sick and she thought she could save him. She was a good girl.

Good girl.

Good girl.

CHAPTER 49

Phoebe

JUNE 13, PRESENT DAY

“S
o what you’re saying,” Phoebe said, “is that there really is no Teilo.”

“Right,” said Sam. He was speeding along through dark and twisting roads, hurrying back toward Reliance, hoping like hell the baby would be there. “He’s just a figure in some fucked-up fairy tale my mother and Hazel believed in, a story their own mother told them. They passed it down to their children. Hazel was a little . . . unbalanced, and took the story too literally. She came to really believe it, and then there was the pregnancy. I’m guessing that’s what put her over the edge.” Sam paused, took a breath. “Maybe she was raped,” he said, shuddering. “And, to deal with it, she convinced herself that it was Teilo’s baby. She hid him away, raised him with this crazy belief that he was of fairy blood. Some families have shit like cancer and heart disease passed from one generation the next—we’ve got malevolent stories.”

It made sense in an awful way. A legend passed down from one generation to the next that made each child feel special, like they were part of something much larger, much more magical than the mundane world of friends and school and rock collections.
There are fairies on the back side of the hill. Your great-grandfather was really a changeling left to pass as a human infant in a crib.

Didn’t everyone want that? Have a secret longing to be more special than the guy next door? Didn’t everyone secretly wish there was another world you could find a doorway to, step inside, and become a queen?

Phoebe could understand that longing.

She had spent her whole life being nothing special. The girl who fell between the cracks. Who barely got through school, didn’t show much promise. The daughter of a drunk who wasn’t destined for any sort of greatness.

There was some part of her—some desperate, pathetic part, dying to be special—that wished it was true that Teilo really might have chosen her to give him Sam’s firstborn.

Phoebe swallowed hard, feeling like she had a golf ball stuck in her throat.

Phoebe remembered what Dr. Ostrum had told her—that the people in Reliance hadn’t vanished overnight, it was a slow drying-up, people moved on to other places. But that didn’t make for a good story. Every town needs a mystery or two, she’d said.

“So who is the father of Lisa’s baby?” Phoebe asked.

“It’s gotta be this cousin, Gene,” Sam said. “Shit, I bet he was there that summer, hiding out in the woods, masquerading as the Fairy King! We found a bed of ferns one time, a blanket and those brass binoculars.”

“Oh,” Phoebe said, relieved that they were talking about an actual person, not a mythical being. But then she remembered the dark shadow she’d seen pass behind her in the bathroom at Aunt Hazel’s. Thought of the nightmares.

“I still don’t understand,” Phoebe confessed. “Everything that happened at the cabin, the other Evie . . .”

“I think all hell broke loose when Lisa ran away,” Sam explained. “I mean, they’d kidnapped her, held her against her will for years, used her for some fucked-up incestuous breeding project where they were trying to make some crazy fairy prophecy they’d probably made up themselves come true. Lunatics! They knew she’d come to us. And they knew that the fairy book linked them to the kidnapping. It was proof. They wanted it back. And they wanted Lisa back before she told anyone about Gene, the baby, and the room in the basement. So they sent the fake Evie, knowing it would lead us to the real Evie, who seemed like this helpless wreck of a woman. Someone who needed taking care of. God, they played us, Bee. They knew our every move before we did.”

But there was one piece in Sam’s scenario that still wasn’t quite right: Lisa.

“Gabrielle,” Phoebe said, turning to look at the girl in the backseat. “Was Lisa already there when they took you, or did she come later?”

“What?” Sam asked. “What are you talking about, Bee?”

The girl bit her lip, looked up at Phoebe, and nodded. “She was there. She was the true queen.”

The car drifted from the passing lane into the right lane as Sam turned to look in the backseat. A horn blasted.

“Sam!” Phoebe cried. “Keep your eyes on the road. If you get us all killed, we’ll never find the baby.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam muttered, eyes focused on the dark highway, hands gripping the wheel as he straightened up the car. “Whose baby is it? Who is this girl? Where the hell is Lisa?”

“The baby’s Lisa’s, right?” Phoebe said.

Gabrielle nodded.

“Did you have a baby too?” Phoebe asked, remembering what Franny said about the milk leaking from the girl’s breasts.

She nodded again. “My baby died. They gave me Lisa’s.”

“Where is Lisa?” Sam asked again.

Gabrielle began to cry. Phoebe understood. Lisa was under one of the white crosses in the orchard. Whether she died giving birth or they killed her because they had no use for her after, she was gone.

“And did your babies have the same father?” Phoebe asked.

Gabrielle nodded. “Teilo. The Dark Man. King of the Fairies. He’ll come for you too,” she said, staring right at Phoebe. “You’ll see soon enough. You have something he wants.”

Phoebe’s stomach clenched.

“I don’t get it,” Sam said. “What the fuck is going on?”

“They took another girl,” Phoebe explained. “I saw the name Gabrielle written on the wall in the locked room in the basement. Then when we were talking to Hazel, I realized this isn’t Lisa. You were right all along, Sam.”

“But why?” Sam asked. “Why take a second girl?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” Phoebe said. “A companion maybe? But there’s something else I’m not understanding. If your mother knew Hazel really believed in the fairies, which she must, because she wrote the diary, then how did she not suspect her when Lisa went missing? Why didn’t she send the police after Hazel right away?”

Sam shrugged.

Phoebe pulled Phyllis’s red diary from her back pocket and opened it:

“Sam, how old was your mother when Lisa was born?” Phoebe asked.

“I don’t know exactly. Twenty, I think. Why?”

Phoebe didn’t answer but went back to reading.

“Oh my God,” Phoebe said, staring down at the diary.

“What?” Sam asked.

Gabrielle looked at Phoebe and giggled. “You can’t change what’s happened. Or what’s going to happen,” she said. “One of the guardians, she used to come sit with us. She’d tell us stories. Stories about us. She said that everything happened for a reason. We didn’t always understand the reason, but Teilo did. Not the fake Teilo, that’s not who she meant, but the real one. We all had our destinies, she used to say.”

Destiny. Is that what this was all about? Phoebe touched her belly.

“Bullshit,” Sam said, peering back at Gabrielle in the rearview mirror. “Who told you all this? Hazel? Evie’s mother?”

“No,” Gabrielle said. “The older one. Lisa’s mother. She was Teilo’s queen once, too.”