CHAPTER 16
Wake up,” Jack was saying, his voice floating somewhere above Hazel, his hand on her cheek. He sounded hoarse, as though he’d been shouting. “Please, please, please. Please, wake up.”
She struggled to open her eyes. It was as though they had been glued shut. When she finally managed to blink, she found Jack looming over her, looking angrier than she’d ever seen him. He punched the ground and closed his eyes for a long moment, drawing breath.
“What were you thinking?” he shouted, voice echoing off the trees. It was then Hazel realized that they were still in the forest, that there was a bed of grass and moss underneath her, and that the sky overhead was the pale gray of dawn.
She tried to sit up, but she was too dizzy. “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I was—I don’t know. I’m sorry. What—what happened?”
“You mean before or after you tried to drown yourself in an underground lake?” Jack paced the carpet of pine needles, resting his head against the trunk of a tree and looking up at the clouds as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d been saddled with such an enormous burden. “Or how about how you recited prime numbers instead of speaking words? Or how you threatened some hulking, hairy grim with a knight’s sword, a sword, by the way, that I have literally no idea how you swindled away from him? Or how you passed out and I couldn’t wake you up and I was really worried, because there’s a lot of that going around right now?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, faintly, because she honestly couldn’t think of anything else to say. She didn’t remember much past the press of the elf girl’s mouth, past her lips parting and the taste of honey and wine. Everything else was blank blackness.
“Don’t apologize,” Jack told her, scrubbing his hand over his face. “I’m not—I’m not myself. Don’t listen to me right now.”
Hazel pushed herself up into a sitting position and looked around. Her dizziness and blurriness were receding a little. “How did we get here?” she asked, not recognizing the stretch of forest. “Did we walk?”
“I carried you,” he said with a lopsided smile.
She must have been horribly heavy, like a sack of flour with the ability to drool. And although she hadn’t imagined she could be more humiliated, it turned out that no matter how far you fall, there’s always a lower place.
“Thanks,” she said, trying not to cringe. Then she remembered the Folk didn’t like being thanked. She’d never thought of Jack as someone to whom their rules applied before, but after the revel, she was forced to think differently. “Sorry.” That was the third sorry, and she was tempted to follow it up with a fourth and a fifth, a litany of sorrysorrysorry.
“Hazel,” he said with a vast sigh. “I’m not mad, okay?”
“Okay.” She didn’t believe him, but there was no point in arguing. She flopped back down.
Her feet were wet, her boots sodden. She couldn’t remember how they got that way, but she could guess. Underground lake. She wanted to kick them off, but she also wanted to stay where she was, lying on her back and feeling sorry for herself.
Jack sat down on a root beside her. He’d lost his coat somewhere, and the front of his shirt was a little ripped, as though someone had pulled it too hard. “Not mad at you, anyway. I was pissed at myself.”
“Why?” she asked, snorting with disbelief. “I knew the rules and I broke them.”
“You acted the way every human acts when given faerie wine. Every human, since the world began. I should have stopped you. I saw what you were doing and what she was doing, and I was caught up in the moment and I didn’t do a damn thing. Sometimes when I’m with them, I feel like a different person. A different creature entirely from a person. But you—you were supposed to be under my protection. I didn’t behave well, and then yelling at you—well, I haven’t behaved myself at all. Both of my mothers would have me beg your pardon. I’m sorry, Hazel.”
A trace of the way they spoke was still in his voice. It made him sound, oddly, more like himself. It was the way that sleepy people sometimes slipped back into an accent they no longer possessed when fully awake.
Light was filtering through the trees, warming the ferns and grass around her. Overhead, birds were calling to one another, and beside her, the scents of crushed brambles filled the air.
Dawn was coming.
“I’m fine,” she said, reaching out to tug at his hand. He flopped down beside her.
“No thanks to me,” he said.
“Many thanks to you, and still, fine. I had an adventure.” She sighed. “But the Alderking told me something. He said that I had to bring him Severin.”
“Severin?” Jack echoed.
“The prince,” Hazel said. “I’ve got two days. If I don’t manage to do it, the Alderking said that he’d send his people against the town.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “When you spoke to him, you told me you didn’t find out anything.”
“I lied,” Hazel said, with a twist of her mouth.
He didn’t look angry. Instead, he seemed intrigued. “Why?”
Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. What was that from? It echoed in her head, a bit of nursery rhyme logic. She took a deep breath and tried to be as honest as she could. “I didn’t want to see the look on your face, because I was sure you’d be horrified—you do look kind of horrified now—and I’d have to admit how screwed we all are.”
“You don’t have to do this alone,” Jack said, turning full onto his back and looking up at the lightening sky over the tops of the trees.
Hazel remembered what it had been like to have a partner, back when she believed there was nothing so terrible that Ben would back down from it, back when she thought her job was to be a knight. Ben’s knight. The one who held the blade, who went out in front, keeping him safe so he could save everybody else and tell the tale. “You don’t have to say that,” she told him.
“If I had to say it, it wouldn’t mean much.” His grin was quick. “But I’ve been thinking. Why would the Alderking single you out? Why believe that you could bring him Severin? And why aren’t you asking those questions, too? Hazel, what aren’t you telling me?”
“What do you mean?” Hazel said, stalling. Her heart beat triple-time. Jack was clever, clever enough to figure out that she’d omitted things, maybe even to guess at what she’d omitted.
The idea that someone could see through what she wasn’t saying, could guess at her secrets, tempted her to tell him everything. She was so tired of being alone. “I’m freaking out. My heart is beating a million miles an hour. Feel it. Here, give me your hand.”
He shook his head, but then he seemed to relent, letting her take his fingers and press them against her skin. His palm opened, cool and careful over her heart.
“Anyone would be freaked out,” he said. “That’s normal.”
“I never wanted to be normal,” Hazel told him softly, and it was an ache in her to admit that to someone who’d probably never felt that way. Then, even softer, she said, “Distract me.”
“Distract you?” He regarded her from beneath half-lidded eyes, hand still against her chest.
“What?” she asked, smiling without quite intending to. She couldn’t read his expression, but she could read the way his body bent toward hers.
“You really want me to…?”
“More than anything,” Hazel said, soft and sure.
Leaning over, not speaking, he brought his mouth to hers. For a wild moment she wondered if he wanted her. Her and not just this.
At first, the kiss seemed part of the night and the dancing, full of dreamy madness. Jack kissed her as though he could reassure himself she was awake and okay only so long as they were touching. He kissed her as though he thought she’d turn to smoke the moment he stopped.
She rolled toward him, and his arm came around her, pressing her closer, his fingers against the small of her back. Everything felt liquid and slow. As her hands fumbled with his shirt, trying to get it up and over his broad shoulders, as she pressed her cheek against smooth brown skin, and as he made a soft sound in the back of his throat that seemed to be his way of holding in check some other, less polite sound that Hazel desperately wanted to hear, she couldn’t help thinking of how strange it was to be doing this with a friend.
She pulled back, looking at him, his mouth swollen, his breaths ragged. His eyes were closed.
“Hazel,” he started to say, and she realized that whatever it was he was about to tell her, she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want apologies and she didn’t want excuses and she didn’t want to stop.
She kissed him, pushing him back against the ground, and then kissed him some more for good measure. His hands came up and under the back of her shirt, clever fingers sliding over her ribs. He looked obscene and filthy and gorgeous with his jeans undone and pushed low on his hips. With her hands splayed over his stomach and his hips canted toward her.
“Hazel,” he said again, and this time he put his hands against her shoulders to keep her a slight distance from him. He said the words slowly at first, as though it was hard for him to concentrate, but once he began speaking, the rest tumbled out in a rush. “Hazel, I just want to say that I like you. And I mean… maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t know if you’d do this with me if you knew that. I kind of think you wouldn’t, so that’s why I’m telling you. But if you want to keep doing whatever we’re doing, then I am fully prepared to shut up now.”
Hazel’s face went blank; she could feel the momentary pause where her panic showed. And even though she tried to smile to cover it, it was too late. He knew her way better than she thought. Way better than she was comfortable with being known.
Jack nodded once, sliding his hands over her to try to zip up his pants.
“You like me?” she asked, needing him to say those words again, so she could be sure he meant them the way he had seemed like he did.
Weirdly, that made Jack put his hand to his face, rubbing over his eyes and cheek. “Yeah. You’re surprised? I feel like everyone guessed. I mean, why do you think Carter is always giving you shit?”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said. “Not because of that!”
He looked at her with an expression she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen on his face before, hungry and a little desperate. “I thought about kissing you so many times at parties. I imagined pressing you back against the bark of a tree, shoving aside those boys you didn’t care anything about. I thought you might like the laugh of it, me being your brother’s best friend and all.”
“You think I want to hurt Ben?”
Jack shrugged. “I think both of you always want a little bite of whatever the other person’s got, that’s all.”
It unnerved her, how not wrong he was. “So why didn’t you, then? Why not kiss me?”
His laugh was a soft huff of breath. “The last thing I need is another thing to pretend about. I didn’t want to act like I didn’t have feelings for you when I did. But, I mean, I’ve liked you for a long while. My mother once—she showed me a girl wearing your face.”
Hazel shifted away from Jack, so she could concentrate on what he was saying without the heat of his body clouding her thoughts. “Wearing my face?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, you know that my people can glamour themselves to appear in different forms. They were messing with me.” He frowned. “Hazel? What’s going on?”
Nausea twisted her stomach.
“Hazel?” Jack repeated, louder this time. He waved his hand in front of her face. “Look, I didn’t mean to completely freak you out. We can forget about what I said.”
“It’s not that,” she told him softly, putting her clothes back together. “I have something I need to tell you. Something I should have told you before.”
He waited, shifting so she could sit upright.
He’d guessed enough about her that she hoped he’d understand why she’d hidden the rest. Before she could think better of it, Hazel started talking.