Thorn Jack (40 page)

Then Phouka released her and stepped back with a curtsy.

Finn raced toward the tree, ignoring the flames that licked out at her, singeing her gown, making her skin feel as if it were rippling. She closed her eyes and stepped into the flames before anyone running after her could stop her.

Cold tore through her. She spoke his name as her body began to incinerate, without pain, into a dream . . .

Strong hands grasped hers and pulled her back to her body, back to pain. In the burning-cold silence, someone gently spoke her name.

It woke her.

“Jack.” She reached up, to pull him out—

A burning corpse-thing lashed out at them, shrieking from the flames, grasping for them. Its claws sank into Jack's shoulders, pulling him back. His gaze met hers, despairing, and she felt him begin to let go of her hands. She met the fiery thing's green gaze and said, “Reiko Fata—
Let him go.
”

The thing crumbled, and Finn fell out of the fire with Jack.

FINN OPENED HER EYES AS
the fire vanished, drawn inward, leaving her unharmed, the charred remains of the oak falling away to reveal a sapling, its leaves unfurling, its trunk strong and green, tiny lights flickering among its branches.

When a hand clenched around hers, she lowered her blurred gaze from the glittering tree . . .

. . . to the bruised and sleeping young man who lay with his head in her lap, one hand, bare of any rings but the lions and their heart, twined with hers.

NATHAN RAN THROUGH THE WOODS
until exhaustion crumpled him beneath a crimson-leafed rowan.

When a voice spoke his name in a gentle, winter-poisoned voice, he raised his head.

The young man before him seemed sculpted from moonlight, autumn leaves, and ice. An ivory scar etched one cheekbone. His fur-lined coat billowed around an expensive suit. One ring-glittering hand rested on the ugly head of the white beast crouched beside him. The
crom cu
bared its teeth in a nasty smile.

“Nathan Clare.” The man's gentle courtesy made him all the more terrifying. He resembled a nineteenth-century aristocrat, but he was older than that and had learned to mimic humans so perfectly he could scarcely be recognized for what he truly was.

Nathan tried to curl away into the rowan tree. This death was not the one he had expected.

The white hyena at the young man's side grinned as the young man said, “Nathan Clare. You are quite abandoned.”

“Please,” Nathan whispered, “I didn't . . .”

“Come, lovely child.” The young man leaned down, smiling like a saint, his blue wolf eyes altogether without mercy. “Come with me, such wondrous things you will see.”

AUTUMN LEAVES, FLECKED WITH BLOOD,
swirled where a boy had knelt, pleading for his life.

 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

—
A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

A
jackal slinked through a hall where green lamps burned like tiny suns on black pillars. The jackal had been walking in this hall forever, because it had lost something it could not remember. When it heard a voice, its ears flicked up. Among the eternal odors of stone and dust there now drifted the fragrances of green things and water. The pillars stretched into trees as the creaking of branches and the whispering of leaves broke the dead silence.

Jack . . .

The hall blossomed with green light. Sunlight kissed the ground.

Jack . . .

The jackal flinched, curled back toward the darkness it had known for so long.

The voice came again.

Jack. Open your eyes.

“OPEN YOUR EYES, JACK.”

His lungs dragged in air. His lashes lifted. As brightness splintered into his skull, he cried out, flung an arm over his face.

“Jack . . .” Cool hands folded over his. “Open your eyes . . . it's only the sun.”

He drew his arm away.

Above him, a girl's face glistened with pollen and tears and soot. Flowers were tangled in her brown hair. He lay with his head in her lap as sunlight—
sunlight
—kissed the curve of her throat, the leaves falling around them.

He smiled as he gazed at a sun-painted world he'd believed he'd never see again, and all the aches and weariness of mortality anchored him to life.

FINN LAID A HAND ON
Jack's chest, over his beating heart.

They were alone now, beneath the green sapling. The Fatas had gone. Christie and Sylvie and the HallowHeart professors had returned to Drake's Chapel. Finn knew her father would soon come looking for her.

Jack touched her face, said hoarsely, “Let's go home.”

She helped him to his feet. He wore only his jeans and the moth key and the locket with his friend's portrait in it. The scars and tattoos were gone, and leaves crowned his tousled hair. He didn't smell like wild roses anymore, but of blood and tears. He studied her as she nervously combed fingers through her knotted hair. He smiled. “That was very clever of you: ‘Bring me her heart,' you said, knowing she'd give it to me.”

Finn toed the glossy leaves. “Well, it backfired—wrong key. Jack . . . your hand.” She reached out.

He raised the hand from which he'd cut the finger and wiggled all five digits. “I think the tree likes me.”

“You
are
very charming.”

“And devastatingly good-looking, don't forget.”

She smiled. He drew closer to her. She gripped his hands tightly, waiting for a kiss. Instead, he whispered, “You could have died. Don't do anything like that again. Where are Sylvie and Christopher?”

“With Avaline and the others—turns out Avaline was just playing Reiko and her regiment.”

“So . . . part of HallowHeart's staff are faery doctors. I wonder how long they've been charming their way into Fata intrigues?”

“I suspect they've been doing it for a while, because they were
very
convincing.”

“You
were very convincing.” He spoke with that careless antiquity that made her insides shiver. “I've been freed from a wicked queen and saved by a diabolical schoolgirl.”

“Better believe it. What will you call yourself now?”

His fingers twined firmly with hers. “My last name . . . it used to be Hawthorn.”

As they walked, he took the moth key from around his neck and handed it to her. She dropped it onto a crumbling wall. She didn't look back, didn't see the key stir and flutter and take flight. “Jack Hawthorn. I like it.”

AS THE SUN CONTINUED TO
rise, a moth swirled through the branches of a tree where an orange-haired figure, watching Finn and Jack walk away, began to fade. A whisper followed the moth's ascent into the sky.

“The battle is won, the serpent gone. Fling swords and armor in the air. 'Tho we spirits have done you wrong, 'tis you who have triumphed, true and fair.”

“DID YOU HEAR SOMETHING?” FINN
murmured to Jack.

“No.” And he kissed her, and it was only a mortal kiss, tart as autumn apples, hot as summer sun, with nothing of the otherworld in it at all, and everything of life and love.

 

E
PILOGUE

This is for you, these words that are true. They are your weapon, your shield, your guide. With all my love, from the other side . . .

—
F
ROM TH
E JOURNAL OF
L
ILY
R
OSE

D
ay faded.

The moth fluttered through the woods into a darker forest, where trees glittered with frost and briars latticed the snow, where a forbidding, decrepit mansion loomed, stone wolves guarding a riven stairway leading up to timber doors that belonged to a fortress.

As the last of the sun vanished, the mansion remade itself.

The broken windows glassed over and became honeyed with light from within. Crumbling stone smoothed. Music teased the air, and lamplight swept across a garden of briar roses and waxy lilies and sweet-faced statues with very dark shadows.

The moth swept to an open window, to a girl whose hair veiled her face as she whispered,
Go back. Keep my sister safe. Keep her away from the Wolf.

The moth fluttered up, back toward the light of the true world.

 

G
LOSSARY OF
F
ATA
T
ERMS

(Very loosely based on old Gaelic)

Aillidh, aingidh faodalach
—lovely, wicked waif

alainn cailin
—beautiful girl

amach
—out

amadan
—fool

ban leannan
—white sweetheart

ban nathair
—white serpent

caileag
—girl

Cailleach Oidche
—owl

coineanach
—rabbit

cro
—blood

crom cu
—crooked dog

Damh Ridire
—Stag Knight

Dubh Deamhais
—Black Scissors

Dubh ubha
—Black Apple

gabh I le
—go, come

leanabh
—child

leannan
—sweetheart

luch bheag
—mouse

Madadh allaid
—Wolf

Marbh ean
—Dead Bird

seanchaidh
—storyteller

sidhe
—Irish faeries

sluagh
—the dead

 

B
IBLIOGRAPHY

Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
, by Lady Gregory (1920)

The White Goddess
, by Robert Graves (1948)

At the Bottom of the Garden
, by Diane Purkiss (2000)

Classic Celtic Fairy Tales and Tales of the Celtic Otherworld
, by John Matthews (1997)

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats

 

I
F
Y
OU
L
IKED THE
S
TORY
, H
ERE'S
THE
S
OUND
T
RACK

“I'll Follow You into the Dark”
—Death Cab for Cutie

“Tam Lin”
—Fairport Convention

“A Man You Don't Meet Every Day”
—The Pogues

“Breathe Me”
and
“I Go to Sleep”
—Sia

“Haunted”
—Jewel

“Darkside”
—Kelly Clarkson

“A Thief at My Door”
—Karen Elson

“Wide Awake”
—Katie Perry

“Whispering”
—Alex Clare

“You Are the Blood”
—Sufjan Stevens

“Lucky You”
and
“Deathblow”
—Deftones

“Scarborough Fair”
—Sarah Brightman

“Live Like a Warrior”
—Matisyahu

 

A
BOUT
THE
A
UTHOR

Katherine Harbour was born in Albany, New York, and now lives in Sarasota, Florida, with a tempestuous black cat named Pooka and too many books.
Thorn Jack
is her first novel.

Visit her website at www.katherineharbour.com.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

 

C
REDITS

Cover design by Adam Johnson

Cover photographs: roses © by Maja Topcagic/Trevillion Images;

skull © by Croisy/Shutterstock Images; moth © by Papilio/Alamy

Harper Voyager and design is a trademark of HCP LLC

 

C
OPYRIGHT

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THORN JACK
. Copyright © 2014 by Katherine Harbour. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 9780062286727

EPub Edition JUNE 2014 ISBN 9780062286741

14 15 16 17 18
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 

A
BOUT THE
P
UBLISHER

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