First it turned red, but she did nothing. It was only once the metal glowed white that she pressed the very tip of the poker against the changeling’s shoulder.
It shrieked with pain, its voice spiraling so high that both kitchen windows shattered.
There’d been a smell like when you toss fresh grass onto a fire, and the baby’s skin turned bright, bubbling red. The burn left a scar, too. Hazel had seen it when she and Jack and Ben and Carter went swimming last summer—stretched out by growing, but still there.
Burning a changeling summons its mother. She arrived on the threshold moments later, a swaddled bundle in her arms. According to the stories, she was thin and tall, her hair the brown of autumn leaves, her skin the color of bark, with eyes that changed from moment to moment, molten silver to owl gold to dull and gray as stone. There was no mistaking her for human.
“You don’t take our children,” said Carter’s mother—or at least that was how the story Hazel heard went, and she’d heard the story a lot. “You don’t spirit us away or make us sick. That’s how things have worked around here for generations, and that’s how things are going to keep on working.”
The faerie woman seemed to shrink back a little. As if in answer, she silently held out the child she’d brought, wrapped up in blankets, sleeping as peacefully as if he were in his own bed. “Take him,” she said.
Carter’s mother crushed him to her, drinking in the rightness of his sour-milk smell. She said that was the one thing the Folk of the Air couldn’t fake. The other baby just hadn’t smelled like Carter.
Then the faerie woman had reached out her arms for her own wailing child, but the neighbor woman holding him stepped back. Carter’s mother blocked the way.
“You can’t have him,” said Carter’s mother, passing her own baby to her sister and picking up iron filings and red berries and salt, protection against the faerie woman’s magic. “If you were willing to trade him away, even for an hour, then you don’t deserve him. I’ll keep them both to raise as my own and let that be our judgment on you for breaking oath with us.”
At that, the elf woman spoke in a voice like wind and rain and brittle leaves snapping underfoot. “You do not have the lessoning of us. You have no power, no claim. Give me my child and I will place a blessing on your house, but if you keep him, you will come to regret it.”
“Damn the consequences and damn you, too,” said Carter’s mom, according to everyone who has ever told this story. “Get the hell out.”
And so, even though some of the neighbor ladies grumbled about Carter’s mother borrowing trouble, that was how Jack came to live with Carter’s family and to become Carter’s brother and Ben’s best friend. That was how they all got so used to Jack that no one was surprised anymore by how his ears tapered to small points or how his eyes shone silver sometimes, or the way he could predict the weather better than any weatherman on the news.
“So do you think Ben’s having a better time than we are?” Jack asked her, forcing her thoughts away from his past and his scar and his handsome face.
If Hazel took kissing boys too lightly, then Ben never took it lightly enough. He wanted to be in love, was all too willing to give away his still-beating heart. Ben had always been like that, even when it cost him more than she wanted to think about.
However, even he didn’t have much luck online.
“I think Ben’s date will be boring.” Hazel took the beer can from Jack’s hand and swigged. It tasted sour. “Most of them are boring, even the liars. Especially the liars. I don’t know why he bothers.”
Carter shrugged. “Sex?”
“He likes stories,” Jack said, with a conspiratorial grin in her direction.
Hazel licked the foam off her upper lip, some of her previous good cheer returning. “Yeah, I guess.”
Carter stood, eyeing Megan Rojas, who’d just arrived with freshly purpled hair, carrying a bottle of cinnamon schnapps, the pointed heels of her spiderweb-stitched boots sinking into the soft earth. “I’m going to get another beer. You want something?”
“Hazel stole mine,” Jack said, nodding toward her. The thick silver hoops in his ears glinted in the moonlight. “So grab another round for us both?”
“Try not to break any hearts while I’m gone,” Carter told Hazel, as if he was joking, but his tone wasn’t entirely friendly.
Hazel sat down on the part of the log that Carter had vacated, looking at the girls dancing and the other kids drinking. She felt outside of it all, purposeless and adrift. Once, she’d had a quest, one she’d been willing to give up everything for, but it turned out that some quests couldn’t be won just by giving things up.
“Don’t listen to him,” Jack told her as soon as his brother was safely on the other side of the casket and out of hearing range. “You didn’t do anything wrong with Rob. Anyone who offers up their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get.”
Hazel thought of Ben and wondered if that was true.
“I just keep making the same mistake,” she said. “I go to a party and I kiss some guy who I would never think of kissing at school. Guys I don’t even really like. It’s as though out here, in the woods, they’re going to reveal some secret side of themselves. But they’re always just the same.”
“It’s just kissing.” He grinned at her; his mouth twisted up on one side, and something twisted inside her in response. His smiles and Carter’s smiles were nothing alike. “It’s fun. You’re not hurting anybody. It’s not like you’re stabbing boys just to make something happen around here.”
That surprised a laugh out of her. “Maybe you should tell that to Carter.”
She didn’t explain that she wasn’t so much wanting something to happen as not wanting to be the only one with a secret self to reveal.
Jack draped an arm over her shoulder, pretend-flirting. It was friendly, funny. “He’s my brother, so I can tell you definitively that he’s an idiot. You must amuse yourself however you can among the dull folk of Fairfold.”
She shook her head, smiling, and then turned toward him. He stopped speaking, and she realized how close their faces had become.
Close enough that she could feel the warmth of his breath against her cheek. Close enough to watch the dark fringe of his eyelashes turn gold in the reflected light and to see the soft bow of his mouth.
Hazel’s heart started pounding, her ten-year-old self’s crush coming back with a vengeance. It made her feel just as vulnerable and silly as she’d felt back then. She hated that feeling. She was the one who broke hearts now, not the other way around.
Anyone who offers up their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get.
There was only one way to get over a boy. Only one way that ever worked.
Jack’s gaze was slightly unfocused, his lips slightly apart. It seemed exactly right to close the distance between them, to shut her eyes and press her mouth to his. Warm and gentle, he pressed back for a single shared exchange of breath.
Then he pulled away, blinking. “Hazel, I didn’t mean for you—”
“No,” she said, leaping up, her cheeks hot. He was her friend, her brother’s best friend. He mattered. It would never be okay to kiss him, even if he wanted her to, which he clearly did not, and which made everything much worse. “Of course not. Sorry. Sorry! I told you I shouldn’t go around kissing people, and here I am doing it again.”
She backed away.
“Wait,” he started, reaching to catch her arm, but she didn’t want to stay around while he tried to find the right words to let her down easy.
Hazel fled, passing Carter with her head down, so she didn’t have to see his knowing told-you-so look. She felt stupid and, worse, like she deserved to be rejected. Like it served her right. It was the kind of karmic justice that didn’t usually happen in real life, or at least didn’t usually happen so fast.
Hazel headed straight for Franklin. “Can I have some of that?” she asked him, pointing to the metal flask.
He looked at her blearily through bloodshot eyes but held the flask out. “You won’t like it.”
She didn’t. The moonshine burned all the way down her throat. But she slugged back two more swallows, hoping that she could forget everything that had happened since she’d arrived at the party. Hoping that Jack would never tell Ben what she’d done. Hoping Jack would pretend it hadn’t happened. She just wished she could undo everything, unravel time like yarn from a sweater.
Across the clearing, illuminated by Stephen’s headlights, Tom Mullins, linebacker and general rageaholic, leaped up onto the glass coffin suddenly enough to make the girls hop off. He looked completely wasted, face flushed and hair sticking up with sweat.
“Hey,” he shouted, jumping up and down, stomping like he was trying to crack the glass. “Hey, wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey. Come on, you ancient fuck, get up!”
“Quit it,” said Martin, waving for Tom to get down. “Remember what happened to Lloyd?”
Lloyd was the kind of bad kid who liked to start fires and carried a knife to school. When teachers were taking attendance, they were hard-pressed to remember whether he wasn’t there because he was cutting class or because he was suspended. One night last spring Lloyd took a sledgehammer to the glass coffin. It didn’t shatter, but the next time Lloyd set a fire, he got burned. He was still in a hospital in Philadelphia, where they had to graft skin from his ass onto his face.
Some people said the horned boy had done that to Lloyd, because he didn’t like it when people messed with his coffin. Others said that whoever had cursed the horned boy had cursed the glass, too. So if anyone tried to break it, that person would bring bad luck on themselves. Though Tom Mullins knew all that, he didn’t seem to care.
Hazel knew just how he felt.
“Get up!” he yelled, kicking and stomping and jumping. “Hey, lazybones, time to waaaaaaake up!”
Carter grabbed his arm. “Tom, come on. We’re going to do shots. You don’t want to miss this.”
Tom looked unsure.
“Come on,” Carter repeated. “Unless you’re too drunk already.”
“Yeah,” said Martin, trying to sound convincing. “Maybe you can’t hold your booze, Tom.”
That did it. Tom scrambled down, lumbering away from the coffin, protesting that he could drink more than the both of them combined.
“So,” Franklin said to Hazel. “Just another dull night in Fairfold, where everyone’s a lunatic or an elf.”
She took one more drink from the silver flask. She was starting to get used to the feeling that her esophagus was on fire. “Pretty much.”
He grinned, red-rimmed eyes dancing. “Want to make out?”
From the look of him, he was as miserable as Hazel was. Franklin, who’d barely spoken for the first three years of grammar school and who everyone was sure ate roadkill for dinner sometimes. Franklin, who wouldn’t thank her if she asked him what was bothering him, since she’d wager he had almost as much to forget as she did.
Hazel felt a little bit light-headed and a lot reckless. “Okay.”
As they walked away from the truck and into the woods, she glanced back at the party in the grove. Jack was watching her with an unreadable expression on his face. She turned away. Passing under an oak tree, Franklin’s hand in hers, Hazel thought she saw the branches shift above her, like fingers, but when she looked again, all she saw were shadows.