Thorn Jack (4 page)

“This way. So you fell off a bridge?”

“I was trying to get something I dropped in the water . . . I don't even remember what it was.”

To navigate around the bridge, they waded through the weeds, and slowly the chill air and the astringent fragrance of broken greenery cleared Finn's brain of fog. As they approached a field of grass and dandelions, Sylvie whispered, “What's that?”

“
I
don't know . . .”

In the center of the field stood a group of people dressed in white and holding ivory umbrellas over their heads. They surrounded a stone table on which was set a black cake. Someone seemed to be chanting. When one of them turned, the last of the sun shimmered silver across his eyes and his brown hair swirled. Music, old and lilting, ghosted the air as the shadows of antlers seemed to crest from his brow.

Finn felt as if she was under a spell. The air buzzed around her and Anna Weaver's words returned to her:
They are shadow and light . . .

“Finn, we need to go. That looks like some sort of wake . . .” Sylvie touched her arm and Finn returned to the true world. She had almost fallen asleep . . .

The sun had dropped, and gloom veiled the meadow. Dead leaves scattered, crackling through air scented with rust and wet earth. The people in white had gone, but the stone table remained, shadows skittering across its empty surface. “Sylvie . . .”

Sylvie whispered, “Where did they go?”

“You saw them too.” Finn brushed a hand across her nose—it had begun to bleed.

There was a sound, similar to wind chimes, and, beneath it—what she had mistaken for the wind—was the moaning of a violin. A deep voice was singing in a lazy, hypnotic language that sent prickles across her skin.

Then a ghost stepped from the shadows beneath the birches, a young man in a black coat, silver hair falling across a perfect face. His eyes were pale, and his breath exhaled from him in a vapor. He was like something that had stopped pretending to be human.

“Sorry,” Sylvie said as she and Finn backed away.

They turned and strode quickly from the darkening field and the smiling young man who resembled a tombstone statue come to life.

“ARE YOU LAUGHING AT US,
Christie Hart?” Sylvie, her cheeks red from chill, scowled across the counter of Parrot Games. “You should have seen that white-haired . . . person.”

Christie quickly arranged the used games on a rack. There were scrapes across his knuckles from his scuffle with the Rooks. “A lot of actors come to stay here—”

“No.” Sylvie shook her head. “He wasn't an actor.”

“Maybe he was a robot. Maybe Fair Hollow's a secret robot community. We're not on any maps.”

“The uncanny valley effect,” Finn said, gazing at a game with a cyborg on the cover. She and Sylvie had returned to their homes to change for the party, but the whole evening had gone weird because of that wake and Finn felt a little off-center.

They looked at her. She blushed. “My mom was a biologist. The ‘uncanny valley' is what it's called when we see something that looks like us, but isn't, and it freaks us out. Something that's flawless and threatening to us as human beings.”

“Robots.” Christie nodded sagely.

Sylvie murmured, “He wasn't a robot. Halloween is coming. When the dead return.”

“A ghost.”

Finn narrowed her eyes. “You two don't really believe in ghosts and robots, do you?”

“Maybe not robots,” Christie said. “That
is
a little crazy. Were you near the birch forest?”

“Don't start with that.” Sylvie glared at him.

Christie grinned at Finn. “She's scared of ghosts.”

Sylvie pointed at him. “It's not a ghost in that story.”

“Um . . . what story?”

“In the birch forest”—Christie sat on the counter—“a man was hung in the 1700s, for robbing people on the road. And the tree from which he was hung, the birch tree, it had a spirit. A girl spirit. I'll be delicate and let you guess what happened between them.”

“I can fill in that blank.” Finn nodded.

“Okay, so I'm not listening to this?” Sylvie walked to the Wii console and picked up the controls.

Christie solemnly continued, “So they had a kid who was nothing but tree bark and bones, with no internal organs, just a mess of malice. But sometimes the story changes, and it's just a human girl, born without a face, who was left in the birch forest to die but who learned to speak to the spirits and fell in love with a dead man's ghost. To be with him, she took out her insides, and still searches for him, hidden behind a mask made of her lover's bones.”

“That's lovely.” Finn leaned against the counter, skeptical. “I haven't heard one like
that
before.”

“The birch girl's a popular Halloween costume around here.”

Finn remembered Anna Weaver's words about Halloween and death and, as the languid spell of sleep threatened, she pushed her short nails into her palm and hoped no one would notice.

“I'm gonna go change in the bathroom, then we'll go,” Christie said, glancing at Finn as he passed her; he looked concerned. She forced a smile, which only made him frown. As he snatched up his backpack and moved toward the restroom, Sylvie called, “What're you going to change into?”

“Gorgeous.” He shut the door.

Sylvie muttered, “He has way too high an opinion of himself. It's a problem.”

Finn, who had just defeated the enchanted sleep that had plagued her since Lily's suicide, shoved her hands in the pockets of the green velvet hoodie she'd chosen to wear because it reminded her of the Renaissance. Beneath, she wore a dress of brown silk, with calf-high boots. “We could leave without him, but he has the car.”

MUSIC THUNDERED ACROSS THE LAKE
dyed black by evening, the water glimmering with the reflections of bonfires as flames streaked the eyes of the revelers, painting skin orange and gold. The fragrances of lake water, wood smoke, hot dogs, and beer smudged the air.

Finn followed Christie and Sylvie down a stone stairway to the lakeshore, where a rock band bashed music from their instruments on a makeshift stage. Sylvie, in a little plaid dress and clunky Mary Janes, led Finn by the hand while Christie strutted beside them in jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt blazing with the silhouette of a bull. He idly greeted nearly everyone they passed and accepted a bottle from a boy with a mohawk. Sylvie took it from him and tossed it into a trash can. “No blackberry wine. Remember what happened last time?”

“That was tequila.” Christie tossed his head, then became diverted by a girl in white gossamer. He strolled toward her. As Finn and Sylvie sat on the sand and watched him begin to charm, Finn smiled. “Does he know that girl?”

“He knows lots of girls.” Sylvie leaned back on her arms. “
Lots
.”

“Hey, pretty ladies.” A lanky boy with a lotus tucked behind one ear dropped a bottle of wine into the sand next to Sylvie. “Sample the Fatas' finest vintage.”

Sylvie made a face, but Finn boldly took the bottle by the neck, pulled off the cap, and drank. It tasted like berries, night, and chill. “Wow.”

“Oh . . .
that's
the blackberry wine.” Sylvie took it from her, dark eyes wary. “You probably shouldn't have done that.”

Finn wanted to ask
Why not?
But the wine was immediately giving her a pleasant buzz.

On the stage, a girl in a pink dress, her hair a dandelion puff, walked to the microphone and began singing a Celtic-punk song as the guitarist and the drummer thrashed their instruments.

“Where's Christie?” Finn looked around.

“He'll find his way back. He always does. Isn't her voice amazing?”

As the song ended on a wailing note, a straw-and-flower manikin on the lake burst into flames. The whooping, shouting response that followed from the crowd was wild. The dandelion girl and her band began a savage reel of fiddles and drums while a bare-chested young man wearing horns lifted his arms in the air. A bald girl in an emerald gown solemnly watched the burning manikin as a white-haired boy in black bowed his head.

Finn's skin prickled as if lightning threaded the air. There was something sinister about the concert's pagan element, as if she were only seeing part of what was really happening. It felt like a rave that had been given a Hollywood special-effects budget and moved back to ancient times.

When the band's music descended into something dark and slow, a hush fell over the crowd. Finn looked away from the burning scarecrow on the lake and saw a willowy girl in a slip dress of crimson satin and platform sandals moving through the revelers. Sleek black hair framed the face of a young queen. Golden bracelets decorated her arms. As the crowd languidly parted before her—noticing her, it seemed, only in some dreaming part of their brains—the music thundered.

The dancing bodies closed around the girl in red.

Shadows caused by the dancers and the bonfires swirled as Finn and Sylvie rose. Sylvie said, “I'm going to find Christie. Wait here.”

Before Finn could open her mouth, Sylvie had vanished.

A darkly dressed young man carrying a staff topped with a stag's skull, red ribbons swirling from the antlers, glided past.
Come with me,
she thought he said, and she hesitated, her eyes downcast.

Then she followed the stag skull and the scarlet ribbons through the crowd. She didn't know what drew her after the stranger, only that there was a glitter of danger in the smoky air, as if the border between reality and an otherworld shimmered.

Finn slid through a group of girls in black and saw the young man holding the staff swagger to a pair of high-backed chairs, where he rammed the staff into the ground. Then he dropped into one chair where he sprawled to watch the concert. Pretending to admire the band onstage, she studied him with sidelong glances. He wore a long coat and jeans, a black shirt, and old-fashioned boots. Dark hair tipped with red fell over one eye to his shoulders. The firelight made a striking portrait of his face, glinting from the tiny ruby piercing the side of one nostril. His careless manner intrigued her—she'd never seen anyone like him off a movie screen, and he certainly didn't seem from this century. Shyly, she glanced at him again. He turned his head, his dark gaze meeting hers, brows slanting—

Then the dark-haired beauty in red came striding across the grass and leaned toward him and whispered in his ear. As she sat next to him, Finn looked away, then back again.

Sylvie returned, following Finn's gaze to the couple. “Jack Fata. Reiko Fata. Straight out of an Edgar Allen Poe story. I'm talking ‘Fall of the House of Usher,' possibly with some incest issues. She's a model, I think. He might be, too. Isn't he lovely?”

“I think I've seen her in perfume ads.”

“Probably. They're rich as sin. You think she's wearing Dolce and Gabbana? Or Prada?”

“I'm wearing Target.” Finn, hands still in her pockets, opened her hoodie jacket. “Where's Christie?”

“He wandered off with that girl.”

“So”—Finn shivered a little in her thin silk—“this is what you do for fun.”

Sylvie regarded the dancers. “This is what we do for fun. It's the rich kids who keep us entertained. The bastards.”

As the band bashed into another fiddle-crazed reel, a figure in a mask of green leaves grabbed Sylvie and pulled her among the dancing bodies. She yelped, “Aubrey!”

When a hand closed over Finn's wrist, she whirled to snap at whoever it was and met the dark gaze of Jack Fata. “Would you like to dance?”

“I'm not a good dancer.” She pulled her hand from his, mostly because her palm had begun to sweat in his grip. He had calluses, like a gunslinger or an auto mechanic.

“Neither am I.” His gaze languidly drifted from her eyes to the moth key she now wore as a pendant. She thought she saw a pinch between his brows, then those eyes lifted to hers and he smiled. “Maybe it's just the music.”

As if on cue, the Celtic-punk rock band ended their set and three other musicians stepped onto the stage—two young men carrying violins and a girl with flowers in her hair. As the music soared over the crowd and the girl began to sing in an eerie, wistful voice, Jack Fata unfolded a hand in Finn's direction. She found her own hand drawn back to his. He took her other, and, as they spun carefully on the grass, he said, “I'm Jack.”

“Finn,” she whispered. Her feet seemed to magically know what they were doing.

“Finn. Like Huck Finn or Finn the king of the Tuatha Dé Danaan?”

Her gaze flicked up to his face, because she was surprised someone her age and without a folklore professor for a father would know that. He'd even pronounced Tuatha Dé Danaan right. “The second one.”

“And why haven't I seen you, Finn?”

“Because I've been in San Francisco.”

His smile faded slightly, and that shrewd look returned. “And is it just you that's come here tonight?”

“With friends.” She couldn't look at him too long, so she focused on one of his hands twined around hers. His rings weren't chintzy or cheap—they looked old, like something a medieval prince would wear. She recognized a symbol on one of them and smiled crookedly. “The seal of Solomon. Are you a witch?”

“Maybe.” His mouth was lovely as it curved. “Are you?”

“Do I look like a witch?”

“I don't know. I've never met one.” He said
,
“ ‘
Who is she who looks forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, awesome as an army of banners?
' ”

No one had ever recited poetry directly to her before. She refused to let him see that she'd become breathless. “ ‘The Song of Solomon.' Are you a literature major or studying religion?”