“That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?” Jack asked her, his expression becoming remote. “That’s why you stopped me in the hall?”
“I really need to know.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “I know where it’s held.”
She soldiered on. “Have you been there?”
“Hazel,” he said, cautioning her.
“Please,” she said. “One way or another, I’m going to go.”
Jack tilted his head in a way that made her newly aware of how the planes of his face weren’t quite like Carter’s, of how his cheekbones were higher, his face longer. And she was aware, too, of the subtle points at the tips of his ears. For a moment, as when he delivered the warning to her and Ben, his familiar face was made strange.
She thought of Leonie’s story about him whispering in Matt’s ear, about Matt slamming his own fist into his own face, over and over again.
“I’ve got to get to class.” He started to walk away, then seemed to feel bad about it and turned back to her. “I’m sorry.”
She grabbed hold of his arm. “Jack,” she said. “Please.”
He shook his head without looking at her. “Did you know there are different names for different moons? This month it’s going to be the Hunter’s Moon, but March has the Worm Moon and the Crow Moon. May has the Milk Moon, July the Mead Moon. February has the Hunger Moon and late October the Blood Moon. Aren’t they lovely names? Aren’t they something, Hazel? Aren’t they warning enough?”
“How many times have you been there?” she asked in a whisper. If Jack’s mother even suspected, it would break her heart.
“Lots,” he said, finally, in a strangled voice.
“I’m going with you,” she said. “We’re going together tonight to the Blood Moon or the Hunter’s Moon or whatever name you want to call it—the Head-Chopping Moon, for all I care.”
Jack shook his head. “It’s not safe for you.”
“Did you not just hear me say I don’t care?” Hazel said. “Someone is using me and I need to know who and why. And you need to clear Carter’s name—and yours, too. We need to know what’s really going on.”
“Do not ask me for this,” Jack said, with odd formality. Hazel wondered if he was worried about betraying his other family. She wondered if his Fairfold was a Fairfold that Hazel couldn’t even imagine.
“I’m not asking,” she told him, as firmly as she could. “I’m going, even if I’m going alone.”
He nodded once, inhaling shakily. “After school. I’ll meet you on the kids’ playground.” Then he turned and sped off down the hall. A few stray students, late to class or sporting hall passes, slid away from him as though he were contagious.
CHAPTER 11
Changelings are fish you’re supposed to throw back. A cuckoo raised by sparrows. They don’t quite fit anywhere.
Jack grew up knowing he was strange, without, at first, knowing why. He wasn’t adopted—he could see that. He looked just like his brother, Carter. He had the same dark skin as his mother and the same tight brown curls and the same slightly-too-long first toes. But something was wrong. He might have his father’s amber eyes and his father’s chin, but that didn’t seem to stop Dad from glancing at him with a worried, nervous expression, an expression that said, You’re not what you seem.
His mother rubbed him with coconut oil after his bath and sang him songs. His grandmother held him and told him stories.
There was a village near the Ibo River, one story began, a story passed down to his grandmother from her Yoruban ancestors. In it, a woman named Bola had a son who grew too large to carry on her back to the market, so Bola waited until he was sleeping and went without him, latching the door behind her. When she returned, he was still asleep, but all the food in the house was gone.
She wondered whether someone could have snuck into the house. But the door had not been forced and nothing but the food was missing.
Soon after, a neighbor came to Bola and asked her to repay a string of cowrie shells. Bola hadn’t borrowed money from her neighbor and told her as much. But the woman insisted, explaining that Bola’s son had come to her house, saying that he was on an errand for his mother, who needed the cowries to buy more food.
Bola shook her head and brought the neighbor into her house. The child was napping on a woven mat.
“See,” she said. “My baby is very little, far too small to walk and talk. How could he have come to your door? How could he have asked to borrow cowries?”
The neighbor stared in confusion. She explained that the boy who’d come to her door looked much like the sleeping child, but was far older. When Bola heard this, she became greatly distressed. She didn’t doubt her neighbor and believed that her child must have been possessed by an evil spirit. When Bola’s husband came home that night, she told him everything, and he became troubled as well.
Together, they made a plan. Her husband hid himself in the house while Bola went to the market, leaving the baby sleeping behind a latched door, just as before. Her husband watched as the child stood, his body stretching as he grew to the size of a ten-year-old. Then he began eating. He ate yams, locust beans, ripe mangos, pawpaw, and savory plantains, washing it all down with water from a calabash. He ate and ate and ate.
Finally, his father, recovering from the shock of what he’d witnessed, stepped from his hiding place and called the child’s name. At the sound of his father’s voice, the boy shrank down to a baby again. In this way, Bola and her husband determined that their child was, indeed, possessed by a spirit. They beat the child with rushes to drive the spirit out. Finally, it fled, leaving them with their own sweet baby again.
Jack hated that story, but it didn’t stop his grandmother from telling it.
Years later, when Jack heard how he had come to be part of the family, he remembered the folktale and understood the reason his father looked at him the way he did. He was neither his father’s son nor his mother’s nor chosen by the family; he’d been foisted on them. He was wearing borrowed skin, watching them with borrowed eyes, and living with them in the life he’d almost stolen from Carter.
And, like Bola’s child, Jack was always hungry. He ate and ate and ate, fresh cheese and loaves of bread, jars of peanut butter and gallons of milk. Sometimes, when one of his parents took him to the grocery store, he would swallow a dozen eggs behind a turned back. They would slide down his throat, shells and all, filling up the aching emptiness inside him. He picked sour apples off the summer trees and gulped down cotton balls soaked in water when he was too embarrassed to ask for a fifth helping of dinner.
The first time he met Hazel Evans, he thought that she might be a creature like him. She looked wild enough, her hair clumped with mud and face smeared with berry juice, running through the woods in bare feet, sword strapped to her back. Ben Evans had come running behind her, nearly as wild.
They stopped short at the sight of him.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Hunting monsters,” Ben said. “Seen any?”
“How do you know I’m not one?” Jack asked them.
“Don’t be stupid,” Hazel said. “If you were a monster, you’d know it.”
Jack wasn’t so sure. But they’d shown him how to find blackberries and how to make a sandwich of dandelion leaves, wild onions, and fiddlehead ferns. More than anyone he’d ever known, Hazel was herself. Not scared of anything. Not scared of him.
And Ben understood about having magic. He understood all the ways that magic sucked.
Which was one of the reasons Ben was an awesome friend. They got tight after he came back from Philadelphia, in part because they made a pact to tell each other all the stuff they couldn’t tell anyone else. Ben confessed that his music alternately tempted and terrified him. He told Jack stories about the ways his parents were screwups. In turn, Jack told Ben about the magic sparking inside him and how hard it was to hide sometimes. He told Ben about the hunger and the loneliness.
“So the riders came again?” Ben asked one afternoon, after a full-moon night. They were walking home from school, past the glass coffin, where Ben would go on his lunch breaks to talk with the sleeping prince. Jack thought about teasing him, but Ben’s crush on the horned boy was only slightly more ridiculous than Jack’s own crush.
He nodded, torn.
“Does your mom suspect?”
Jack shrugged. “She never says anything, but she’s always rubbing the lintels with Saint-John’s-wort to keep the Folk out—or me in. Hangs a garland of marigolds over the doors on May Eve.”
“That sucks,” Ben said, looking up at the sky. “But it sounds like it could just be her standard operating procedure. If she knew, she’d say something, wouldn’t she?”
“Maybe. Just the other day, she made Carter carry dried holly berries in the pocket of his jacket. He got mad and chucked one at me. They sting like a bitch.”
Ben winced. “I bet.”
Jack remembered the way his skin had hurt for an hour after, as if from a spider bite. Fairfold was full of protections. People wore them around their necks, smeared them on their doors, hung them from the rearview mirrors of their cars. The stupid Saint-John’s-wort made him itch. So did cold-shaped iron, when it was near him, although it burned where it actually touched his skin. Pockets full of oatmeal or grave dirt made him sneeze. Some amulets made his head hurt; others made his head swim. None of it was deadly, not just from being close by, but the constant discomfort was a reminder of how little he belonged among the people of the town.
Jack picked up a dried-out stick, turning it in his hand. “It would almost be better if she did know.”
They’d come for the first time two months before, on a full moon. Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses—one black, one white, and the third red. Jack had woken from a sound sleep to music—music that made him feel an intense longing for the forest and the wind in his face and the casting-off of mortal things. When he went to the window, he saw them on the lawn, riding around the house, eyes flashing, hair streaming like pennants. Seven times they circled and then the riders paused, looking up as though they’d spotted him in the window. They were achingly beautiful and absolutely terrifying, black-eyed and red-mouthed. One wore a face familiar enough that it seemed to him that this must be a dream. He knew, without any speech, that they wanted him to follow. He shook his head, staying where he was, framed by the window, fingernails digging into the wood. After a few moments, they turned one by one and rode off.
In the morning, when Jack woke, the window had been thrown wide, despite his mother’s anointing of the lintel. Leaves were scattered all around his room.
“Creepy riders are creepy,” Ben said.
“Yeah, creepy,” Jack echoed, but even to his own ears, he didn’t sound sincere.
“You’re not going away with them next time, are you?” Ben asked, voice teasing.
“Shut up.” Jack chucked the stick at Ben, but he ducked and it flew past him.
Ben stopped walking and stopped smirking, too. “Wait, you are?”
“You don’t understand what they were like. How I felt. You can’t understand.” Jack spat out the words before he considered them, unwilling to tell Ben that he had gone that last time. He’d regretted not riding alongside them ever since they’d come on the first full-moon night. When he refused them a second time, it nearly broke his heart. The third time he was helpless to resist the call. He went, and after, he feared he could not summon up the strength to resist them again.
Maybe Ben saw something of what Jack felt in his expression, because he grew serious. “Sometimes I wonder about Kerem,” he said. “I worry that the music made him like me. And even knowing that doesn’t keep me from wanting to play again. That’s why I broke my hand. Otherwise, I’d play. Every time I wanted something bad enough, I’d play.”
Jack blinked, shocked. “How come you never said that before?”
Ben snorted. “Saving it for a special occasion, I guess. A special occasion where I could make you feel less crappy by telling you something awful about myself. But if you don’t want to go with them, you’re going to have to lash yourself to the bed like sailors who lashed themselves to masts to avoid jumping into the sea with Sirens.”
Ben might have understood more than Jack had thought, but he still couldn’t possibly have known what it was like to ride with them through the night or plunge into a moonlit pool. He couldn’t have understood what it felt like to dance until the force of his steps seemed to crack open the earth itself, to be among creatures who had never been human and could never be human, to be one of them. And Ben couldn’t have known the shame that Jack felt after, when, sweat cooling on his skin, he promised himself that when they came for him the next time, he wouldn’t go.
A promise that he’d never keep.