She took out the book. FOLKLORE OF ENGLAND, the spine read. She flipped to page 241.
It was the story of a farmer who bought a stretch of land that came with a big, hairy, troublesome boggart who’d claimed the land for himself. After some argument, they decided to split the land. The boggart demanded everything that grew above the ground and told the farmer he could have anything below. But the farmer got the better of the boggart by planting potatoes and carrots. At the harvest, the boggart got only the useless tops. He was furious. He raged and shouted and stamped his feet. But he’d made the bargain, and, like all faeries, he was bound to his word. The next year, the boggart demanded whatever was below ground, but again the farmer got the better of him. He planted corn, so that the boggart was left with only stringy roots. Again the boggart raged, more terrible and angrier than before, but again he was bound to his word. Finally, in the third year, the boggart demanded that the farmer should plant wheat, but they would each plow the field, keeping what they harvested. Since the farmer knew the boggart was much stronger, he lighted on the idea of planting iron rods in the ground on the boggart’s side of the field, so the boggart’s plow became blunted again and again, while the farmer plowed merrily away. After hours of that, the boggart gave up, saying that the farmer could have the field and good riddance to it!
The words carrots and iron rods had been circled by a muddy finger.
Hazel frowned at the book. The story didn’t mean anything to her.
Confused and frustrated, she busied herself by pulling the muddy linens from the bed and stuffing them into the hamper. Then she grabbed a clean, but wrinkled, bottom sheet and an old blanket from the hall closet. Finally, she changed into rocket ship–print pajamas, flung herself down, picked up a paperback off the side table at random, and opened it, trying to distract herself, trying to convince herself that she needed an old sword about as much as she needed a Robin Hood costume.
The book turned out to be one she’d read before, where zombies chased around a brother-and-sister reporting team. After a few pages and the wash of words, she put it down. She couldn’t concentrate. None of it seemed as real as her memory of a mossy stone house with an elf-wrought knife lying on a worn wood table. None of it seemed as real as her sore hands, muddy feet, and missing night.
None of it seemed as real as Jack’s having a double life. She knew you had to be careful around faeries, no matter how beautiful or clever or charming, but somehow Jack had always been the exception. Now, though, thoughts of his silvery eyes and the odd way he’d spoken wouldn’t leave her. Somehow that and the memory of their kiss became tangled, and she felt like a fool.
So she rested, eyes shut, pretending to sleep, until she heard the creak of floorboards. Someone coming up the stairs and down the hallway. Ben coming to bed? Or was Ben already asleep and something else was creeping toward her? Hazel sat up and reached for her cell to check the time: two in the morning.
As she slid out of bed, she heard someone bang back down the stairs.
Shoving her feet into her wellies, clutching her phone, she followed as stealthily as she could. If the Folk could have drawn her from her bed, it stood to reason that they could draw Ben, too. He might not owe them anything, might not have bargained with them, but that only meant they had no right to him. They took lots of things they had no right to.
She found Ben already outside by the time she got her coat and made it out the door. He walked toward his car purposefully. She started to panic, indecision halting her in the shadows underneath an oak tree. There was no way she was going to be able to follow him on foot. She considered racing to the passenger-side window and tapping on it. If he was bewitched, that might snap him out of it.
But what if he wasn’t? What if he was going out to look for the horned boy alone? It wasn’t as if he had to take his tagalong little sister everywhere he went.
Ben pulled his car out of the driveway slowly, without turning on his lights.
Coming abruptly to a decision, Hazel went to the shed and yanked her old bike out from among the cobwebby tools. With shaking hands, she ripped off the reflective discs attached to the spokes, hurling them into the dark. Then she hopped up onto the seat and pushed off, pedaling fast. By the time she made it to the street, his headlights were on and he was making the first turn.
She braked gently, trying to stay out of his line of sight without losing the Volkswagen. Speed limits on the back roads were cautious, which made things easier, but there was no way she could keep up if he disobeyed them and gunned the gas.
The wind whipped her hair behind her, and the moon was high in the sky, turning everything to silver. She felt like she was pedaling into a dream landscape, a hushed world in which everyone but her and her brother was asleep. The last of her tiredness burned away as her muscles worked and she got into such an efficient leg-pumping rhythm that for a moment she didn’t notice he was pulling over. She stopped short, the bottom of her boots scraping against the road. Then she eased the bike off into the trees, where she dropped it among vines and felled branches.
A cold sweat had broken out along her back. She’d guessed where he was going: to the remains of the glass casket.
She followed Ben on foot, creeping along as slowly as she could. She hoped the snap of twigs wouldn’t betray her. Whether she was still good at moving silently through a forest or Ben was just distracted, he didn’t so much as glance in her direction.
It was a lot like hunting, except that it was her brother she was after.
The night was damp and chill enough for Hazel’s breath to cloud in the air. Creatures rustled in the underbrush and called to one another from the misshapen limbs of trees. An owl peered down at her with its clock face. She wrapped her coat more tightly around herself and wished that she’d bothered to change out of her pajamas before she’d left the house.
Ben stopped near the fallen trunk of an oak tree. He seemed to be reconsidering whatever had brought him all the way out here, pacing back and forth, kicking the leaves of a fern bush. Hazel wondered again if she should say something, call out and let him know that he wasn’t alone.
I followed you because I thought you’d been enchanted, she imagined herself saying. But now I realize that you’re probably not enchanted, because enchanted people don’t suddenly get confused about what they’re doing out in the middle of the woods in the dark. Sorry. I guess I probably shouldn’t have followed you after all.
That would go over well.
But then Ben resumed marching through the forest, feet kicking up leaves, and Hazel resumed following him. They walked until he came to the grove where the prince had slept, a grove they’d been to a hundred times. Broken glass and crushed beer bottles shimmered in the moonlight. But all the vegetation, from the trees to the shrubs to the thorny vines, was blackened and dead. Rotted, as though winter had come early. Even the evergreens had withered away.
And the coffin had been shattered. Everyone knew it, but it was different to see—a sacrilege, as though the casket had turned out to be no more magical that a car window someone smashed to get to a radio. Destruction had made it ordinary.
Ben walked over to the glass case and ran his hand over the metal edge, then he pushed the remains of the lid back, tinkling pieces of crystal breaking off and falling. His hand went inside—maybe touching the fabric—then he paused and looked toward where Hazel was, as though maybe she had stepped wrong and made too loud a sound.
What was Ben looking for? What had he come to find?
She made a silent vow that if her brother tried to climb into the coffin, she was going to step out of the shadows, no matter how mad it made him.
He didn’t, though. He circled it, as if he was as amazed by the ruin as she was. Then he bent, a frown on his face. When Ben stood, he had something cupped in his hand, something he’d taken from inside the coffin, something that flashed in the moonlight, something he was looking at in astonishment. An earring. A cheap green enamel hoop that Hazel hadn’t even noticed was missing from her ear.
Immediately, excuses sprang to mind. Maybe Hazel lost it the night of the party—though that wouldn’t explain the positioning: inside the case, under chunks of glass. And she was pretty sure she remembered putting them back on the next day. Okay, better, maybe another girl had the same earrings and she’d lost one.
Hazel had guessed she might have had something to do with the horned boy’s being loose, but some part of her had resisted believing it. Now, though, she had to believe. No explanation she came up with explained away the evidence.
She started trembling, panic rolling over her. Hadn’t she scolded herself for running straight into trouble every chance she got? For leaving no stone unturned, no bad idea unembraced, and no boy unkissed? No scab unpicked? No sorrow unnumbered? No hangnail unbitten and no stupid comment unsaid? Certainly no stupid bargain unmade. Apparently, that was still the case, even if she couldn’t remember it.
After a few minutes, Ben started back toward his car, swearing under his breath. Hazel crouched down and pressed her shoulders against a tree until he passed. Until she could get her breathing under control. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to tell Ben, but at least she’d have until morning to figure it out.
Hazel walked back to her bike. It was where she had left it, obscured by a clump of pachysandra that seemed to swallow the frame. She stood it up, pushed toward the road, and began to pedal, following the distant taillights of Ben’s car.
He seemed to be heading in the direction of home, so she no longer worried about keeping up. Instead, she concentrated on what she was going to do.
It was to the Alderking that she’d sworn her seven years. Maybe if she went to the hawthorn tree on the full moon and waited, she could make another bargain for answers. Or maybe she’d find the Alderking’s revel and ask him directly what he was intending to do with her.
She was pedaling faster, imagining what she might say, when she saw the body in the ditch. A girl’s body—pale legs splayed in the dirt, brown hair lying in a puddle. Someone was leaning over the body, someone with brown hair hanging in front of his eyes, some of it pushed back over his long, curving horns.
She startled, her whole body freezing up.
She lost her balance. The bike spun out from underneath her. It happened so fast that she didn’t have time to react, to correct herself. One moment she’d been speeding along, and the next she was slamming into the road.
The horned boy watched her crash, his expression unreadable in the moonlight.