Thorn Jack (23 page)

Finn turned to find Sylvie had also gone. “Damn it.” She remembered what Reiko had said.
They're ours. Only they don't know it yet.

Jack was suddenly seated beside her. “Did you drink the wine?”

Finn looked startled as she realized she had. “Yes. I forgot—”

“Idiot. That was blackberry wine. Don't look at me. Find your friends. I need to keep Reiko distracted.”

“What? Jack—”

But he was already walking back toward Reiko.

Finn blinked, rubbed at her eyes, and wondered why the air had begun to shimmer.

CHRISTIE WASN'T USED TO BEING
nervous around girls. Phouka, walking beside him, made him nervous.

“You're not afraid of my family, are you?” She sounded as if she knew he was.

“I'm very afraid of your family. Your tribe.”

They paused beneath a window of Mermaid House, where interior light illuminated the blue face of a girl drowning in the stained glass. Christie looked down at his new Timberlands and frowned. He pictured Phouka in sunlight, her hair sweeping around her face. When he spoke, his voice was low. “What's your real name?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It does.” He thought of happy girls lured away from ordinary lives, into a world where sunlight never warmed their skin. “It does matter. I bet it mattered to your family.”

“You went to Tirnagoth.” Phouka idly walked around him. “You saw some things.”

“Tell me you don't live there. Or in any of these house wrecks.”

“You're asking me a question,” Phouka said, smiling slyly, “that you already know the answer to.”

He felt as if he was walking through the woods, naked, on a winter night. He refused to let her see how scared he was. Her eyes, in the Harlequin shadows and light, glinted an inhuman silver. Christie had never believed in anything he couldn't see, not in any of the spooks that supposedly roamed Fair Hollow. But now he stood before one of the causes of that supernatural activity, and his brain had seized up like his car had in front of the Luneht house.

“What are you?” He wanted to run, but her silver eyes pinned him.

“Again, Christie: Question? Answer: You like learning things, don't you? Would you like to know things?”

“No.”

She stepped toward him, quick and graceful, not at all like a spook. But he knew better. She whispered, “Say something pretty to me. Something of yours.”

He looked down at his boots again. “She was a spirit, once wild and free. She became Other, wild, not free. I looked for her, but cold was she. I said to her, ‘I would bleed for thee.' That pale, lost, and wild beauty.”

She leaned toward him and kissed him, and her mouth was warm and sweet and not at all cold.

SYLVIE HAD ONLY LEFT FINN'S
side for a second, to try to catch Nathan Clare's attention—he seemed the most normal of the Fatas—when she heard someone call her name. She walked toward a figure standing near the house and felt apprehension when the figure seemed to be nothing more than a clot of shadows.

Sylvie,
something whispered.

A black rabbit darted past her feet. As it loped away, she found herself on a path that led to a greenhouse lit from within by old-fashioned lamps.

When she saw what waited for her in the doorway, she whispered a curse. Hip Hop smiled sweetly. “She wants to speak to you. She knows you can see the dead.”

Sylvie didn't move until Hip Hop had swaggered away. Then she walked slowly toward the greenhouse, because she had to
know
.

Reiko stood in the center aisle, clipping leaves from a spiky plant, the red gossamer of her gown smoking against the dark leaves. Her looped hair was threaded with medallions. She didn't look at Sylvie as she spoke. “What do you think of this garden? It has been neglected.”

Sylvie, on the threshold, asked with false casualness, “What do you grow?”

“What you'd expect: monkshood, wolfsbane, nightshade, thornapple. Mandrake. Other things.”

Sylvie knew she should be afraid, but the drowsy buzz from the apple wine—she'd avoided the blackberry—made her bold. “Are you a witch?”

Reiko Fata set down the shears and brought a handful of leaves to her nose, then inhaled. “All girls your age are witches. You keep the power hidden, use it for the ordinary. But you . . .
you're
something different.”

Sylvie shivered.

Reiko moved down the aisle, caressing the plants. “There's no need to be ordinary, Sylvie Whitethorn. Come to us and see things you've never dreamed of.”

Sylvie stepped back.

“I know you see them sometimes, the
sluagh
.” Reiko walked around a table of bromeliads. “Would you like to meet Thomas Luneht?”

“He's dead.” Sylvie felt all the romance of her fascination with the dead and their histories sinking into a swamp of fear. The young woman standing before her knew all the secrets that Sylvie had, idiotically, wanted to learn. At that instant, Sylvie became aware of something moving in a dark corner of the greenhouse; she heard a breath like a young man's sigh. Lifting her gaze to look past Reiko, she felt a wrenching nausea.

“He's fond of you. They're drawn to the ones who show interest in them.” Reiko, whose green eyes were now a shimmering silver, smiled at Sylvie. “Poor boy made the wrong kind of friends. You can be a pawn in this game, Sylvie Whitethorn, or a player. Thomas was a pawn.”

“
Game?
What kind of
game
—”

“The one”—Reiko smiled as the shadow in the corner began to move forward—“between our kind and yours. Join us, Sylvie, and be so much more than you are.”

Sylvie stumbled back into a table as Thomas Luneht, who had committed suicide nearly forty years ago, stepped forward, looking as warmly alive as she was. He met Sylvie's gaze and said, “Don't liste—”

Reiko quickly waved a hand and he became a shadow that vanished in ribbons of darkness.

“No.” Sylvie began to back away. Dazed by the eerie night, the splendid Victorian greenhouse, the tall, electric-eyed queen offering her another world, she couldn't think. So this was how it happened, how they lured people to them. She thought of being Other, of losing all that she was. “I
can't
.”

She turned and walked swiftly from the greenhouse, hugging herself against the solitary cold of being human.

THE GARDEN PARTY HAD BECOME
less quaint and more wild as the torches and candles blazed and the musicians slashed their instruments in a frenzy of familiar melodies gone mad. The Fatas in their punk-romantic clothes seemed to have increased in number, and the three Rooks were crouched on the empty chairs, picking at the feast. They didn't resemble Malcolm Tirnagoth's children anymore. They reminded Finn of monstrous birds. As she turned away from them, she thought she heard feathers rustling.

She stalked past a boy who seemed to have antlers growing from his brow and avoided a girl in a golden gown, her hair like flames. When the dancing crowd parted for an instant, she saw Caliban Fata speaking with the white-haired Fata named Lazuli and her vision blurred again—Caliban's face became a hideous mask of jagged teeth and yellow, glowing eyes. Lazuli turned his head and his face was a deer skull.

Finn cursed softly and didn't raise her head again. Her gaze fixed on the ground, she wove through the Fatas; she thought she glimpsed hooves beneath one gown, a clawed hand holding a goblet. She needed to get away before she looked at Jack and
saw
him. The blackberry wine was doing something terrible to her brain—it was showing
them
unfettered by whatever glamour made them seem human.

“Serafina.”

The breath left her, because it was Reiko's voice, but whatever stood behind her—Finn didn't dare look—no longer wore the shape of a girl. She closed her eyes as tentacles of cold shadow streaked with old blood and fire whispered around her.

“Do you think Jack is interested in you?” Reiko continued. “I told him to charm you, to keep you from another. This will be your last night with him, mayfly. He's waiting for you in Mermaid House.”

Wishing she hadn't come, Finn headed toward the house, which was probably not really a house, but a trap. She halted, hoping Jack would come out. She didn't want to go in there—but she'd been promised she wouldn't be harmed, because she'd been
invited
and, maybe, to the Fatas, that quaint notion was to be honored.

The door was unlocked. Finn stumbled into a hall lit by lamps of blue glass with a trail of water glistening on turquoise tiles. Following the water to a bathroom with copper fixtures, she found a tub filled with a rank sludge that reeked of dead fish. She twisted away and desperately called out Jack's name.

The watery trail became wet footprints, which she followed to the doorway of a parlor with a fireplace shaped into a huge, black shell. A chandelier like frozen water glittered from the ceiling, and a dark, salty fragrance tainted the air. She heard the voices before she saw the speakers.

“. . . don't like it here.”

“It's too hot.”

“Do you smell that?”

Three strangers sat in chairs of twisted wood. The girl's hair was coral red, her lips mermaid blue. She wore strands of pearls and a gown of pale blue gossamer. A boy with wet hair sprawled in the chair beside; he was dressed in a kilt, and his eyes were as black as those of a seal. The third figure had its back to her, its hair silvery, its shoulders broad. This one spoke in a deep voice. “I smell it, too, selkie boy. Virgin blood.”

He turned his head, revealing a horselike profile and a claw-fingered hand that held a red cup.

Finn flinched as the figure became an older man in jeans, his eyes bright with malice. The girl turned and looked directly at Finn, her eyes glinting silver. “I see her, kelpie. And she sees
us
.”

Keeping her gaze on the trio, Finn backed away.

Someone grabbed her hand and whispered, “
Run!
”

As the silver-haired man rose, Finn whirled and ran with the girl in the white gown, the one Nathan had been dancing with. They burst from the house, running toward candlelight and laughter.

“Wait.” Finn leaned against a tree to catch her breath and the girl turned. As Finn sank down, arms on her drawn-up knees, the girl crouched beside her, her expression wary. There was glitter in her dandelion-puff hair and she had freckles.

“They're the
Uisce,
” she said. “You shouldn't have gone in there.”

Finn felt as if she'd nearly drowned. “Who are they?”

“Guests come for All Hallows.”

Finn slumped against the tree.
You will die on All Hallows' Eve,
Anna Weaver had told her. She whispered, “What happens on All Hallows?”

The girl didn't seem any more human than the eerie trinity in Mermaid House. “That's when we pay the Teind.”

The word made Finn flinch. She knew what that word meant. If she felt she had been drowning before, now she could see no way to the surface—

“My name is Booke.” The girl's voice, like a lamp, brought Finn out of the dark. “Mary Booke.”

She held out a hand and Finn shook it. “I'm Finn.”

The girl grinned. “I know. Nathan likes you. It's difficult for him to make friends.”

“Well,” Finn said, thinking of the three people in Mermaid House, “his old friends are kind of intimidating.”

“Yes.” Mary Booke looked down at her hands, folded on her knees. “They are all the things you should fear.”

Finn couldn't tell if the girl's eyes silvered or not. She said softly, “Are you and Nath—”

“No.” Mary Booke looked up, and her eyes were only gray. “We don't love, Finn Sullivan. Love for us means death.”

She was gone in a swirl of gauzy fabric.

A shadow fell over Finn, who flinched as a voice said, “What have I told you about entering these houses?”

She squinted up at Jack. When he didn't blur into something else, she realized with relief the blackberry wine had worn off. “You told me not to enter SatyrNight.”

“Well, they're all the bloody same.”

“Don't talk to me like that.” She rose to face him. “Reiko told me you were in there.”

He looked away, his profile regal against the dark. “I was. I had to speak with one of Reiko's . . . friends.”

“Would the friend be one of the three wet weirdos who said they could smell my blood?”

His mouth tightened. He didn't reply.

“What is the Teind, Jack? Or should I say,
who
?”

Softly, he said, “And why would you want to know that?”

There was a bench behind her. She sat on it and stared defiantly up at him. “I know what it means. What does it mean to the Fatas? What aren't you telling me?”

“What are you doing?” He reached out and brushed his curled fingers against her brow. “What are you doing, Finn? You are mucking about with
demons
—”

“I don't need a lecture from
you
. Don't tell me you didn't suspect what she was when you first met her.”

“Even knowing they existed, I was still fooled. And how charmed has
your
life been since meeting me?” He sat beside her.

“I've got to find Christie and Sylvie—”

“Your friends are safe—they're smart.” His hand folded over one of hers and tightened, but he didn't look at her, watching the Fatas. “Don't leave me.” His voice, hoarse and broken, made her throat hurt. There were rose petals in his tangled hair. His profile was cameo pale. She thought,
What have they done to you—

The vision that struck stopped her breath . . . Jack, younger seeming than he was now, huddled in a stone room. Around him were roses, red as Valentine's Day hearts. A wreath of them crowned his hair. He wore only dark trousers, and there were no rings on his fingers. Finn was there, like a ghost, kneeling before him, speaking without a voice. The fragrance of the roses was overwhelming, mingling with the heavy aroma of the blood that congealed on the floor and streaked his bare feet. He pushed his hands through his hair, and she saw the raw, red wound on his chest, a Frankenstein surgery bound with scarlet thread. She cried out and reached for him—