CHAPTER 8
The night the prince went missing from his coffin, Mom made spaghetti with jarred sauce for dinner, along with shake cheese from the green can, and frozen peas. It was a typical deadline dinner, so familiar that Hazel craved it when she was sick the way other kids craved chicken soup. Dad was already gone and was going to stay in New York through the week for meetings. Mom tried to get them to talk about their day, but Ben and Hazel just stared at their food and answered stiltedly, too distracted by everything that had happened to make much of an effort at conversation. According to their mother, the mayor had already reached out to a local sculptor—a friend of hers—to inquire whether it might be possible to create a fake version of the prince, so his absence wouldn’t affect tourism. The official story was that vandals had stolen him.
“When I was a girl, we all adored him,” Mom said. “I remember there was this one—oh, you know her, Leonie’s mom—anyway, she went out to that casket every Saturday with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex to keep the glass shiny. That’s how obsessed she was.”
Ben rolled his eyes.
Mom looked pleased with the reminiscence. “And Diana Collins—Diana Rojas now—tried to wake him up by reenacting that Whitesnake video, rolling around on his casket like it was the hood of a Trans Am, wearing only a string bikini and baby oil. Ah, the eighties, right?” Absently, she rose and crossed the room to pull out an old, beat-up sketchbook from the bottom-most bookshelf. “You want to see something?”
“Sure,” Hazel said, a little confused. The image of Megan’s mother and baby oil was stuck in her head.
Mom flipped through the pages, only slightly yellowed by time. There, rendered in No. 2 pencil, in BIC pen, in colored markers, was the prince, asleep. The drawings were okay, not great, and it took Hazel a moment to realize what she was looking at.
“You drew these,” she said, her voice coming out slightly accusatory.
Mom laughed. “Oh, I sure did. I used to go out to the woods after school, pretending that I was going to sketch trees and whatnot, but I always wound up drawing him. I did a big painting of him, too, in oils. It was one of the pieces that got me into college.”
“What happened to it?” Hazel asked.
Mom shrugged. “Someone bought it off me for a couple of bucks when I was living in Philly. Hung it up in a coffeehouse for a while, but I don’t know where it is now. Maybe I’ll paint another, since he’s gone. I’d hate to forget him.”
Hazel thought of the knife stuck in the wood of the old table and wondered how gone he truly was.
After dinner, Mom opened her laptop in front of the television and watched some cooking show while Hazel and Ben stayed in the kitchen, eating grapefruit marmalade on toast for dessert.
“So what now?” she asked her brother.
“We better find the prince before Jack’s warnings start coming true.” Then, with a frown, Ben nodded at her hands. “You fall or something?”
She looked down at them, no longer red, healed to scabbed lines. Something happened last night. The words sat on her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak them out loud.
After she’d nearly gotten killed by the redcaps all those years ago, after he’d seen the bruises and heard the story, he’d begged her never to hunt alone again. We’ll figure something out, he’d promised her, although they never did.
If he knew she’d made a bargain with the faeries, he’d be really upset. He’d feel bad. And it wasn’t like there was anything he could do about it now. “I must have got scraped out in the woods,” she said. “Sticker bush or something. Ah well, totally worth it.”
“Yeah,” he said faintly, getting up and putting his plate in the sink. “So you think he’s out there, somewhere, bedded down in our old sleeping bag? Eating our stale pretzels?”
“And drinking the drip coffee of our modern age? It’s a nice thought. I hope so,” Hazel said. “Even if he’s the villainous prince from your stories.”
Ben snorted. “You remember that?”
She turned her head, trying to summon up a smile. “Sure. I remember all of it.”
He laughed. “God, I haven’t thought about our telling each other all that stuff. It’s so crazy, the idea that we get him—that he woke up in our generation.”
“There’s got to be a reason,” Hazel said. “Something’s got to be happening out in the forest. Jack’s right about that.”
“Maybe it’s just time. Maybe his curse is up and he smashed the coffin himself.” Ben shook his head, his mouth lifting at one corner. “If our prince was smart and wanted to be safe from the Alderking, he’d come straight to the center of town. Go door-to-door. He’d be invited to more dinners than a preacher on a Sunday.”
“He’d be invited to more beds than a preacher on a Sunday,” Hazel put in, to make Ben laugh, because Pastor Kevin was much lusted over by the youth-group kids for belonging to some semifamous Christian rock band. The horned boy was a way bigger local celebrity, though. If he showed up in the middle of Main Street, the Fairfold Women’s Auxiliary would probably hold a very sexy bake sale in his honor. Ben was right: If the prince didn’t mind hiding from the Alderking in the bedrooms of Fairfold, he’d be set.
“All this rushing into danger isn’t like you,” Hazel said, finally, because she had to say something.
Ben nodded, giving her an odd look. “Finding our prince is different.”
She pushed herself up from the kitchen table. “Well, if you have any brilliant ideas, wake me. I’m heading to bed.”
“Night,” Ben said cheerfully—maybe a little too cheerfully—and started for the living room. “I’m going to check the local news. See if they’re sticking to the vandal story.”
Climbing the stairs, Hazel resolved to try to stay awake as long as she could, hoping to catch whatever had called her from her bed the night before. She’d heard stories of people so enchanted that they slipped out of their houses to dance with faerie Folk on full-moon nights, heard stories of people waking up at dawn with raw feet, lying in rings of mushrooms, with a yawning chasm of yearning for things they could no longer recall. If she was going to be used by the Folk, she wanted to know about it.
Of course, there was the possibility that, having used her for whatever service was needed, she wouldn’t be summoned back for a long while, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
In her room, she knelt down and slid an old wooden trunk from underneath her bed. The wood was cracked and warped in places. When she was very little, Ben would hide in it and pretend he was Dracula in his coffin, and then the prince in his. When she was even littler than that, Mom had put her toys and baby blankets inside. But now it was the place where her old sword rested, along with a bunch of mementos of her childhood. Rocks with shining mica she’d loved and pocketed on walks through the woods. The silver gum wrapper Jack had folded into the shape of a frog. Her old, makeshift green velvet cape, which was supposed to be part of a Robin Hood costume. A daisy chain so brittle from drying that she didn’t dare touch it or it would fall to pieces.
Those were the things she expected to find when she opened the box. She’d thought she could take out the black-painted sword and stuff it between the mattress and box spring.
It wasn’t there.
The wooden trunk was empty except for a book and a folded-up tunic and pants—ones made from a light silvery-gray material she’d never seen before—and beside them a note in the same eerily familiar hand that wrote the message inside the walnut: 241.