CHAPTER 10
On the car ride home from the woods, Ben had a barely contained nervous energy that caused his hand to tap against the steering wheel and to fiddle with the radio. They’d passed Grouse Road and saw the flashing lights of the sheriff’s car and an ambulance, shining in the dark with reassuring steadiness. Someone had come to fix things, to fix Amanda, who Severin had claimed was still alive.
“We have to stop,” Hazel asked. “What if she’s—”
“Are you really going to tell them what happened?” Ben asked, eyebrows raised, turning the wheel to take a different route home.
In her mind’s eye, Hazel saw Severin circling her brother, a hungry expression on his face, a shining blade in his hand. And then a shudder went through Hazel when she thought of the awful sprawl of Amanda’s pale limbs in the patchy grass. Amanda had not seemed alive. No, Hazel wasn’t sure she knew what to explain to the police, even in a place like Fairfold.
“Go ahead and stop,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell them, but I have to tell them something. My bike’s there.”
She had no idea if they’d believe her or not. But when Ben showed up with the ax in his hand, she was reminded of all the reasons he had stopped hunting years ago. He’d understood how dangerous it was and how vulnerable they were back then, even if she hadn’t.
She didn’t ever want to put him in that position again. Just because he’d gone looking for the prince didn’t mean he wanted to get dragged back into danger.
Looking at her like she’d gone crazy, Ben pulled up several feet behind the ambulance. Hazel got out. Paramedics were bent over Amanda’s body.
An officer looked over at her. He was a young guy. She wondered if he’d grown up in Fairfold. If not, she was about to really freak him out. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “You better get back in your car.”
“I saw Amanda earlier tonight,” said Hazel. “With the horned boy. You’ve got to look for him—”
He walked closer, blocking her view of the stretcher and the paramedics. “Ma’am, get back in your car.”
Hazel got back in Ben’s car, slamming the door behind her. Her brother shook his head at her as the officer shone his flashlight inside. “Please roll down your window. Who’s in there with you?”
She cranked down the passenger-side window.
“I’m her brother,” Ben volunteered. “Benjamin Evans. You were talking to Hazel.”
The policeman looked at them like he didn’t quite know what to make of the situation. “You both have identification?”
Ben handed over his driver’s license. The officer looked at it for a long moment and then handed it back.
“And you say you saw someone?”
“The horned boy. With Amanda. She was already unconscious, but he was here. And now he’s out there, and if he did this, then we’re all in a lot of danger.”
The cop looked at them for a long moment. “You two better get on home.”
“Did you hear me?” Hazel demanded. “We’re in a lot of danger. Fairfold is in danger.”
The policeman stepped back from the car. “I said, you better get on home.”
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked him. “I mean you weren’t born here.”
He looked back at her, uncertainty in his face for the first time. Then his eyes hardened and he waved them on.
“At least tell me if Amanda’s okay?” Hazel called after him, but he didn’t answer.
Ben drove home with the sun rising in the east, gilding the tops of trees.
As they pulled onto their street, he turned to her. “I didn’t expect you to do that.”
“It didn’t work,” Hazel said.
“Tonight,” he said, keeping his voice light and conversational with clear effort, “kind of got out of control, huh? Everything about it was unexpected.”
“Yeah,” she said, leaning her cheek against the coolness of the window, her hand on the latch of the car door.
He pulled the car into their driveway, the tires crunching over gravel. “I’m your older brother, you know. It’s not your job to protect me. You can tell me stuff. You can trust me.”
“You can tell me stuff, too,” Hazel said, opening the door and stepping out. She expected him to take the earring out of his pocket and confront her with it, demand an explanation. But he didn’t.
For all that they’d claimed they could tell each other stuff, they told each other nothing.
Hazel walked into the house. It was entirely dark. Even the lights in the outbuilding were off. She began to climb the steps.
“Hey, Hazel?” he called softly in the upstairs hall, and she turned. “What did he kiss like?” There was a confusion of emotions on his face—longing and maybe a little jealousy and a whole lot of curiosity.
She snorted a surprised laugh, her bad mood dissolving. “Like he was a shark and I was blood in the water.”
“That good?” he asked, grinning.
She’d known he’d understand. Brothers and sisters had their own language, their own shorthand. She was glad to be able to share the weird, ridiculous impossibleness of it with the only person who knew all the same stories, with the person who’d made up those stories in the first place. “Oh yeah.”
Ben went to her, slinging an arm over her shoulder. “Let’s get you fixed up.”
She let him lead her to the upstairs bathroom, where he sat her on the edge of the tub and then doused all her cuts with peroxide. Together, they watched the liquid hiss and froth over her skin before it swirled down the drain.
Then, kneeling awkwardly on the cracked beige floor tiles, he wrapped her legs and arms in gauze, the stuff they’d called “mummy bandages” when they were little. The old phrase rested on the tip of her tongue, making her remember times they’d come in here after a hunt, cleaning their skinned knees and binding up wrists or ankles.
The house was usually full of people back then, so it was easy to slip in and out. People were always dropping by, come to pose for a piece or to borrow some canvas or celebrate someone booking a job with a bottle of bourbon. Sometimes there wasn’t any food but a weird, boozy trifle left out on the counter, or a can of cold ravioli, or cheese that smelled like feet.
Over the years, her parents grew up and got more normal, even though they wouldn’t admit it. Hazel wasn’t sure if their memories of those days were as much a blur of people and music and paint and confusion as hers were. She wasn’t sure if they missed the way things had been.
What she did know was that normal was a lot more tempting when it was out of reach.
Once normal had been a heavy, smothering blanket she feared being trapped beneath. But now normal felt fragile, as though she could unravel it all just by teasing out a single string.
When Hazel finally collapsed in her bed, she was so tired that she didn’t even bother to pull her comforter up over her body. She fell asleep like a flame being extinguished.