Thorn Jack (30 page)

Her da knocked at her door. She called out for him to come in. When the door opened and she saw his face, she gripped the journal. Carefully, he said, “Finn . . . there's been an accident . . . Sylvie . . .”

Dread coiled through her as the journal slid from her nerveless hands.

SYLVIE, WHILE BICYCLING, HAD SOMEHOW
fallen and hit her head against a tree. Now she lay, unable to wake, in the stillness of a hospital room.

Finn ran down the path to the Hart house and felt wild relief when she saw lights in every window. As she loped onto the porch and rang the bell, her vision blurred. Sylvie . . . she couldn't lose another. She couldn't bear it.

Christie's brother Liam answered the door, his eyes red. “Finn. Christie's not here . . .”

A terrible apprehension knifed through her. “Where is he?”

Liam sagged against the door. “They took him to emergency. I don't know what's wrong . . . he had an attack or something. They'll make him better. I mean, that's their job . . .”

She couldn't answer. Her lashes fluttered as she fiercely fought the urge to fall down. She turned and trudged away, ignoring Liam's call. As she moved through the trees that separated her house from Christie's, she thought,
He's only had a seizure, epilepsy, a brain injury, a psychotic episode.
But she knew it wasn't any of those.

Sylvie and Christie had been
attacked
.

Finn leaned against a tree so that she could be sick. Cold air washed over her face. She twisted around in the silver and black light and realized she had strayed from the path. She was alone.
They
had made it so.

“Reiko Fata,” she whispered, as the leaves rustled and icy air pulled the breath from her. She wanted to run to her house and tell her father everything.

Then something dark and snarling untangled within her, and she knew that whatever direction she took, it would lead to the enemy and an answer. So she began to walk.

The house that appeared through a scrim of branches turned out to be SunStone. With smiling suns carved above its round windows and its glass doors painted with images of solar radiance, it seemed deceptively innocent. As Finn followed a path of yellow tiles, she saw no signs of life. Gripping the balustrade carved into twisting lines of mice, she stomped up to the doors and took the moth key from her coat, fitting it into the lock. She hesitated, her spirit crackling with rage and anguish and fear, before shoving the doors open, revealing golden shadows and ghostly silence.

She stepped in. She wore the iron and silver, and Eve Avaline's cross-dagger was in her coat pocket. As moonlight slid through windows that resembled topaz suns, the air was suddenly lit with an eerie glow that mimicked morning. Gilded furniture was wrapped in plastic, and a wooden floor was covered with dust. A fireplace shaped into a rayed sun gaped beneath an odd painting of two mice in fancy clothes. She remembered that Apollo, the Greek sun divinity, had once been a god of mice and plagues.

Something whispered from deep within the house,
Come.
Finn thought of Sylvie and Christie and gripped the hilt of Eve's dagger as she stepped into a room scattered with figures wrapped in plastic—manikins, naked and lifeless. In the middle of the floor was a red corset.

Fear had left her and been replaced with an exhausting anger. She walked slowly toward the corset, then wrinkled her nose at the reek of meat. When she realized what caused the smell, she stumbled to a halt and couldn't believe what she saw—the corset was soaked with blood, congealing, streaking the floor beneath . . .

Her courage broke. She whirled to run.

Then a shadow moved beneath a window, and the yellow light silvered a feral eye, long teeth—

Finn bolted, racing back through the house, out the doors, into the woods.

When she tripped over a root and hit the ground, she swallowed a cry of pain. As she lifted her head, she saw a light in the woods flickering orange. Struggling up, she glanced over one shoulder, wincing at the sharp pain in her knee, and lurched forward.

It emerged from the shadows between the trees—a low, sloping form, white as bone, with long teeth in a banded muzzle.

She scrambled away from it and plummeted toward the orange light and the voices. The hyena followed with a cackling cry.

As she broke through the brambles, the people around the campfire fell silent, firelight glinting in their eyes. A young man with long red hair lowered a fiddle and lavished her with his gaze. “It's Jack's sweetheart.”

“She's skinny,” said a blond girl in a gown of green gauze.

A black-haired boy, his hands poised over a drum, frowned. A blue flower was tucked behind one of his ears. “Yes, Aurora Sae, but she's brave. What do you think she's running from, Atheno?”

The man in torn jeans and a necklace of charms smiled. His silver hair, streaked with black, fell to his hips—Finn recognized him as the snake magician. “She's running from the
crom cu
.”

Finn pressed back against a tree as the firelight caused tattered shadows to dance around the vagabonds.

A tall girl, her bald head painted with designs, sniffed the air. She wore a black corset and jeans embroidered with red wasps. “I smell him near. He's slinking.”

“Darling Emory's right. He's here. I won't cross the crooked dog.” A brown-skinned boy with rippling hair rose, his elegance enhanced by a suit of shabby velvet and a necklace of pearls gleaming against his chest.

“Hush, Dogrose.” A silhouette moved forward, firelight glinting from the ruby stud in his nose. “The crooked dog is gone.”

“Jack.” Finn turned on him and almost collapsed. With a mighty effort, she didn't, remaining stone still as he walked to her. He shrugged off his fur-lined coat and held it out to her, but she backed away even though she couldn't stop shivering. “Did you know what she would
do to them
?”

He tossed the coat over a tree stump, his face turned away. “What did she do?”

“She
hurt
Christie and Sylvie. Were you supposed to
distract
me while she did it? Jack?”

The young man with the red hair sighed. “I only did my duty, Jack.”

Jack turned on him. “
What did you do, Farouche?
”

The young man stepped back. “You know what I am.”

As Finn listened, her hands curling into fists, Jack gently asked, “And the boy who likes poetry?”

“Fox-struck, is all. Reiko did that also.” The bald girl rose. She was pretty, but her eyes glowed, feral. “This girl will bring us all to grief, Jack.”

Finn wanted to kill them, but Jack said to her, quietly, “These are my friends, Finn. It is Reiko striking at those you love. Where is your father?”

“Da . . .” Finn whispered.

FINN AND JACK RAN FROM
the woods, onto her porch, and Finn fought a wavy of dizzy fear as the door fell open, revealing a dark hall with wet leaves scattered across the floor. The feathers of the fake raven on the bureau rustled. The eerie wallpaper seemed to form faces that spat vines and leaves. Shadows were oddly cast, as if the light had gone sour. “Da!”

“Finn.” Her father appeared in the parlor doorway with Jane Emory. “Jane's come. She heard about Sylvie.”

Jack remained on the porch.

“Jack.” Her da looked grim. “Hello.”

“Mr. Sullivan. Miss Emory.” Jack looked at Finn, his gaze shadowy. “I'll speak to Reiko, Finn.”

“Jack, wait—”

But he was already gone into the dark.

Finn turned back and met Jane Emory's gaze and
knew
that she was one of Professor Avaline's.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE
night, Finn opened her glass doors, stepped onto the terrace, and let the chill and the starlight calm her. In her desperation, she'd thought of going to Professor Avaline, but Avaline had betrayed her.
Don't think. Don't think. Just breathe
. She whispered, “Jack. I know you're here.”

He moved from the night and sat on the railing opposite her. “I spoke to her.”

She nodded, waiting, her stomach in knots.

“To save them, you must agree to whatever she says.”

Her throat closed. She wrapped her sweater-coat close around her. “She took them because I bound you to me. And because I know about Nathan.”

“Yes, Finn. You can't trick her. Others have tried.”

“Jack”—his name sounded like it was being scraped out of her—“help me.”

“I
am
helping you.” His eyes were dark with soul damage. “Just
do as she says
.”

But she knew what Reiko would demand in exchange for Christie and Sylvie. She felt it might kill her. “I can't.”

He looked away from her. In a low voice, he said, “When I first saw you, when she told me to speak to you, you were a game. Then I actually spoke to you and I was intrigued—why did Reiko choose you? Then I wondered if you could be used against her. Then I came alive.” He closed his eyes, whispered, “Without you, I will die again.”

“Jack.” Her throat closed up. “I won't—”

He looked up and smiled coldly. “I'm already dead. So is Nathan. Your pretty friend and the fox poet aren't. Now, listen.”

She sat on the railing beside him and listened and all the while felt as if her heart was being devoured, piece by piece. When he was done, she whispered, “What it if doesn't work . . .”

His smile was quick and bitter. “You haven't got a choice. It's either me or them. And you're a good girl, Finn, not a selfish one. You won't desert them.”

“I won't forget you.”

He smiled again and rose before she could touch him. “If you do, you'll only bring good to the world. Farewell, Finn Sullivan.”

He vaulted over the railing, abandoning her again. Fiercely, she repeated, “
I won't forget you.
”

 

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—“La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!”

—
L
A
B
ELLE
D
AME
S
ANS
M
ERCI,
J
OH
N
K
EATS

They had been named Rue and Ruin, and they were lovely, sinister, as soulless as barracudas. There is a rumor among the tribes and the courts that the two brothers are the children of divinities, of a king of graves and a queen of battles.

—
F
ROM THE JOURNAL OF
L
ILY
R
OSE

O
rdinary life had been infected by an otherworldly menace that had struck down Finn's friends with terrifying ruthlessness and left Finn alone.

Alone, she planned a rescue.

She met Anna at the Weavers' shop and gave the girl the mysterious moth key along with Lily Rose's journal. “I need you to keep these safe.”

Anna touched the lid of the lockbox that contained the key and the journal. “I will. Would you like your fortune told?”

“No, Anna. I know how this will end.”

FINN DIDN'T WEAR IRON OR
silver because they wouldn't allow her to see Reiko if she did and she knew she must follow Jack's instructions with the precision of an agent entering enemy territory. She put her hair up with the dragonfly pin her mother had given her. She dressed in Lily Rose's favorite black T-shirt, the one with an image of a punk fairy holding a skull. The jeans with the rhinestones on the sides and the red Converses had been gifts from her da. Her last ornament was a tiny medallion of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, given to her by Gran Rose.
Arm yourself with things from loved ones
, Jack had said.
No weapons . . . that gives them an excuse for violence against you
. He would deliver her message. He'd told her she would receive an answer at sunset.

She waited on the front porch, gazing at the jack-o'-lanterns on the lawn across the street and listening to Lily's music through her iPod earphones. At five, exactly, a red Mercedes glided into the driveway and Phouka slid out, dressed in white leather, auburn hair tucked beneath a chauffeur's cap. She winked at Finn as she held open the door. “Reiko got your message.”

Finn slid into the front seat as Phouka tucked herself behind the wheel. Unsettled by the other girl's surreal loveliness, Finn looked away from her. “When did they take you?”

Phouka effortlessly backed the car out of the driveway. “That's not polite, Serafina. Don't ask such questions.”

Finn hadn't slept, and she was wired from too much espresso and sick to her stomach. “Where are we going? Can I ask that question?”

“Tirnagoth, and don't be sassy. Why did you take up with him? You could have stayed a
happy
girl.”

Finn, glimpsing people's lives in lamp-lit windows and watching kids playing on lawns as the sun began its descent below the horizon, murmured, “But I wasn't happy. What did she do to my friends?”

“They've been taken.” Phouka looked grim.

“Taken
where?
What are those . . . things in the hospital that look like them?”

“Bits of Fata trickery—fetches. As for where your friends have been taken . . . I can't tell you, Finn. My advice—just do as you're told.”

She hit the car's CD button and a gorgeous violin reel accompanied by drums pulsed through the car. Finn recognized it as the music that had been playing the night she'd first met Jack and said, “Tell me why she took Jack.”

Phouka looked at her, one hand on the wheel. “Because his dad was an exorcist in Hungary. His mom was a gypsy witch in Ireland. They pissed off a lot of . . . people. He's a Jack, Finn. A Jack of Thorns. A
sluagh.
You don't grasp the concept, but you should not be feeling for him what you do.”

“What, exactly, is a Jack?”

“A Jack or a Jill is a harnessed spirit, one who has come to the attention of a powerful Fata.”

“How are they . . . made?”

“You don't need to know the gruesome details.” For a while, they drove in silence, and Finn wondered if she was being driven to her murder. Then Phouka said, “Here we are.”

The Mercedes slid up the scarcely there road, to Tirnagoth's gates, which opened gracefully despite a veil of creepers. In the early evening, the hotel looked beautiful, its pale stones kissed with rose and silver, its ruinous mass surrounded by blood-red roses and apple trees that sharply scented the air. It was a between place now. Waiting.

This is their world.
Finn shivered.

Phouka halted the Mercedes and waited for her to get out. “You're on your own from here. Good luck, Serafina Sullivan.”

Finn walked alone toward the metal gates shaped into a face framed by swirling hair. She told herself she wasn't being tricked into an abandoned building where she would be murdered. They were subtler than that—they worked at their victims' psyches. She didn't have the moth key, but the gate opened at her touch. She remembered a phrase from Lily Rose's journal:
Without us, they can't do anything in the physical world. They are shadows whose kings are Rue and Ruin.

But they were more than that.

As she stepped forward, the last of the sunlight vanished and the veil of ruin was swept away in one golden, swooning moment scented with clover and smolder as the weedy courtyard and clogged pool became as neat as new, and red lamps made the water blush. The windows glowed with an illumination that brushed the faces of the graceful statues, which looked newly sculpted. The garden glimmered with tiny lights.

Finn remembered to breathe. She straightened her coat and strode toward the entrance, and it was fury that drove her up the stairs, through the doors, into the deserted lobby, where the chessboard floor glistened beneath a chandelier of red glass and, at the top of the stairway, a black window depicting a white serpent glowed malevolently, like something out of an otherworldly church. She called into the silence, “Hello?”

“She knows you're here.” Caliban Ariel'Pan leaned against a pillar. He still seemed alien, even in a black T-shirt and jeans. He straightened and ambled toward her, and something about the way he moved made Finn flinch. She knew he wanted to kill her—the desire to do so glinted in his eyes. He held out a hand. “May I take your coat, madam?”

She removed her coat and handed it to him. He took it, smiled, gestured her up the stairs. The rings he wore gleamed dully. “Go on, if you want to save your friends. Take a left.”

Reluctantly turning her back on him, Finn moved slowly up the stairs, past portraits of gorgeous people in glittering costumes, until she reached a corridor of red-patterned wallpaper, where she heard music, old-fashioned and crackling, a sound that reminded her of where she was and what she was dealing with. Dread snaked through her.

Two figures in an archway parted to watch her. Both had red hair and eyes so black it was as if the pupils had bled to drown the whites. The girl was sleek in a tasseled flapper's dress. The boy wore a black suit and a crimson tie. She could feel the cold drifting from their snow-white skin, their
otherness
. They weren't attempting to conceal what they were.

There was a scarlet door at the hall's end. She moved past them toward it and pushed through, into a scarlet room, where her reflection gazed at her from night-darkened windows, and light from crimson lamps stained the wall painting of a naked boy leaping over a bull. A statue of a goddess in a skirt, snakes twined around her arms, stood on a table between censers burning myrrh. It felt like a temple.

“Serafina.” Reiko Fata moved forward, her body draped in a slip dress of green silk. She looked unnervingly like a teenage girl as she smiled sweetly. “Would you like something to eat? Drink?”

Finn had come without armor and only Jack's words and her wits as weapons. She whispered, “What did you do to Christie and Sylvie?”

“Remember your manners.” Reiko's eyes went black.

Finn continued, her voice stronger now, “What did you do to them? If you're so afraid of me, why don't you kill
me
?”

Reiko's eyes narrowed. “You live because I
don't
fear you, Serafina Sullivan. By law, I cannot harm
thee,
but I can bring harm to those around thee.”

“I won't let you.”

“Won't
let . . .”
Reiko breathed. Then she smiled. “I see. Reckless girl. Have you really stopped caring what happens to you?”

“You tried to
hurt
me when I was little.
I remember you.
”

“Do you, Serafina Sullivan?” The room became a ruin, its walls streaked with mold, broken windows bleeding moonlight, shards of glass littering the floor. There was an odor of wet stone and earth, a graveyard fragrance. The air had become shatteringly cold. “
And I remember
you.”

Reiko vanished into a ribboned shadow streaked with blood red.

Finn stumbled back and choked on a scream.

It was over in an instant. The elegant apartment returned, and Reiko was sauntering toward her, her platform shoes like cloven hooves, her eyes green again. “You are alone, Serafina Sullivan. Avaline and her lot won't help you. No one will. You'll say farewell to Jack. I'll take away your memory of him. Every friend and family member who comes near you will also forget him. Only then will Sylvie Whitethorn and Christie Hart return to what they were.”

Jack.
Despite her fear, Finn thought of his delicately scarred hands and darkened eyes, the pain he disguised with careless remarks. He had warned her about what she would need to do, and the pleading words that came from her hurt her stomach. “I'll do what you want. Just give them back.”

Reiko didn't smile. “Go up those stairs.”

Finn turned and walked toward a staircase of spiraling metal, which creaked as she ascended. When she came to a black door with a dirty pink window in it, she hesitated. She didn't know what waited for her on the other side, some unnamed horror . . .

She shoved it open and stepped into a candlelit chamber.

Jack sat beneath a painting of a pterodactyl flying with a lady's white evening glove in its beak and that image made Finn shiver—it reminded her of the Fatas, with their reptilian desire to exist beneath illusions of elegance and politeness. Jack's black velvet shirt was unlaced to reveal the serpent tattoo over his heart, and his sleeves fluttered with ribbons like funeral banners. When he looked at her, his eyes bled dark. She wanted to be angry at him—he had led her into this, knowing what his family was, knowing what they were capable of. She said, “I'm here to say good-bye.”

He glanced away from her as if he couldn't care less, but his body was taut. “You're only a schoolgirl. I was playing with you, you know.”

“Stop it.”

He smoothly stood up and closed the distance between them before she could speak again. As he gently took her hands in his, she saw that he still wore her ring, the lions clasping a heart. He whispered, “Forget me and be safe.”

As he stepped back, the dead look returned to his eyes. Refusing to just let him go, she stepped forward, pressed a hand over his heart, felt the faint beat of what Reiko would take from him—and she saw how it would happen: Jack cutting out his own beating heart and handing it to a smiling Reiko.

As she spoke, she felt as if something were being torn out of her
,
“Will you be—”

“It doesn't matter. Save them, Finn, before they become lost. Let me worry about Nathan.
Forget us
.”

“
I can't
.” She hated the wretched sob in her voice.

“Go.” He gently removed her hand from him. “You're in the house of your enemy.”

She turned and stumbled blindly down the stairs.

Reiko Fata stood in the center of her chamber, holding a basket. In it were clothes and a wooden box. She spoke with no smile in her voice. “Listen carefully, Serafina Sullivan, and I will tell you how to bring Christie and Sylvie back.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, FINN STOOD
outside Tirnagoth's gates. Phouka and the Mercedes had gone; the Fatas had left her to find her own way back. She clutched Reiko's basket against her and lifted her gaze to Tirnagoth's windows. The hotel had returned to its illusion of abandonment, its shattered windows dark, drafts rattling through its moldering insides.

She might never see Jack again, but
they
were in there, unseen spirits who could manifest into flesh and blood, pretend to be people. She wanted to scream at the ruin. She wanted to claw Reiko Fata's heart out.

She sank down against a tree and huddled there, feeling as helpless as a child.

When something whispered in the shifting shadows, her head jerked up. She thought she saw a girl's face behind a screen of brambles.

Go. Now,
the voice whispered.

She rose and stumbled away in a scattering of autumn leaves.

After an hour of walking, she reached the Elder Street Church, which was an eerie sight with its crooked roof and tiny graveyard. When she opened the gate, she saw the tree Reiko had told her to look for; Finn shuddered, because its graceful trunk reminded her of a girl's body, and its leaves glistened like tear-filled eyes. She refused to think further as something close to madness fluttered around her brain. She moved forward, placing the charm Reiko had given her on the tree. With calm terror, she crouched down and spoke Reiko's word.