CHAPTER 17
Ben sat at his desk, watching Severin sleep. He just couldn’t quite wrap his head around the fact that the boy he’d whispered to through glass was lying on his bed, head pressed against his pillow, one horn making a deep indentation in it—a pillow Ben had drooled on and cried into and shed skin on, which seemed kind of disgusting the more he thought about it. But that was part of what made Severin’s being there so impossible. His room was such an ordinary place, filled with junk he’d amassed over seventeen years of life, and Severin wasn’t ordinary at all.
They’d talked for hours in the dark. Severin had wound up on the floor, head tipped back, showing the long column of his throat, eyes drifting closed as it got closer to dawn.
“You’re welcome to take the bed,” Ben had said, shifting to the edge of it, rumpling the comforter. “I mean, if you want to rest.”
At that, Severin’s eyes opened. He blinked rapidly, clearly disoriented, as though he’d half forgotten where he was. “No. I ought not. I fear never waking.”
Ben considered that. “Have you even slept since the curse was broken? Because that was more than two days ago. Forty-eight hours?”
Severin nodded vaguely.
“And you’re not planning to ever sleep again?” Ben asked, raising his eyebrows in a slightly exaggerated manner.
A corner of Severin’s mouth lifted. “You think I’m too tired to detect sarcasm?”
“That’s not sarcasm,” Ben said, grinning. “At least not sarcasm exactly.”
With a groan, Severin levered himself up and spread out on Ben’s vintage Star Trek coverlet, the one he’d told Hazel was ironic but secretly he just really loved. “Haven’t I slept enough?” he asked, but the words became garbled at the end, his body stretching and relaxing into sleep. He looked as beautiful as he’d ever been, messy waves of dark hair curling around his horns, brows curving up, berry-pink mouth slightly parted. Now that he was no longer enchanted, he slept restlessly, his eyes moving beneath lids and his body turning on top of Ben’s bed. Maybe he was dreaming for the first time since he’d been sealed in the coffin.
And so Ben sat like a lone and lonely sentinel until the sky was light outside and he heard a creak on the stair. He went to the door and cracked it open. His sister was in the hallway, Jack behind her. Hazel looked as if she’d come from a party, in a green velvet top she hadn’t been wearing yesterday morning. Her jeans were muddy and her shirt was ripped along one seam. Her hair was tousled and tangled with twigs. Ben watched as they went into Hazel’s room.
“Are you sure you’re not going to get in trouble, having me here?” Jack whispered. He sat on the edge of her bed.
Hazel shook her head and went to close the door. “Mom won’t care. She likes you.”
Where have they been? Ben stared at the closing door, wondering what exactly he was seeing. He’d figured that wherever Hazel had made Jack take her that night had something to do with how she’d been able to free Severin and whatever else she’d been lying about lately. But seeing them together, looking like they were about to sleep in the same bed, worried him for entirely different reasons.
He loved his sister, but she sure broke a lot of hearts. He’d rather Jack’s not be one of them.
The hallway went dark again. A few moments later his sister left her room. Ben thought she was going to cross to the bathroom. Maybe he could catch her before she got there and find out what was going on. But she stopped, leaned against the wall, and started to sob.
Horrible, silent cries that made her bend double, curling around her stomach, as though it hurt to weep like that. Lowering herself to the floor, she crouched down, almost soundless. Tears ran over her cheeks and dripped off her chin as she rocked back and forth.
Hazel never cried. She was forged from iron; she never broke. No one was tougher than his sister.
The worst part was how quietly she wept, as if she’d taught herself how, as if she was so used to doing it that it had just become the way she cried. When Ben was little, he remembered how much he’d envied Hazel, free from expectations or obligation. If she wanted to teach herself how to swordfight with YouTube videos and books checked out of the library, their parents didn’t tell her she should practice scales instead. She wasn’t the target of Mom and Dad’s lectures on how talent wasn’t meant to be wasted, how gifts came with obligations, how art was important.
He saw now the ways in which they tried to be careful with each other, afraid of hitting those raw places where they might hurt each other almost without trying. But sparing another person is a tricky thing. It’s easy to think you’re succeeding when you’re failing spectacularly.
After a few moments Hazel lifted her shirt to rub the velvet against her eyes. Then she got up with a last, shuddering sigh and went back to her bedroom.
Ben padded over and turned the knob. Jack was unlacing his boots while Hazel brushed the leaves out of her hair, her eyes red and a little puffy. They both froze.
“It’s just me,” Ben said.
“We weren’t—I mean, not really—” Jack started, making gestures toward the bed that Ben thought meant “I am not trying to dishonor your sister, although it is possible that I am hoping to have sex with her,” at the same time Hazel began apologizing for ditching Ben.
He held up his hand to stop them from talking. “I need one of you—ideally Hazel—to explain what’s actually been going on, and I need that to happen right now, starting with where you were last night.”
“We went to the faerie revel,” she said, sitting down heavily on her bed. She looked exhausted, the skin under her eyes as dark as a bruise. Ben hadn’t expected her to give in so easily after so much evasion. “It didn’t exactly go the way I’d hoped, but I found out some things. The Alderking offered to trade the town’s safety for the capture of his son. There’s only one problem, which is that he’s crazy. Okay, two problems, the second being that his idea of a safe town is bullshit.”
Ben just stared at her. He’d seen the Folk, but only a few, and those had been scary enough. He couldn’t imagine willingly walking into a gathering of them. Especially if he were Hazel, who’d killed at least three. Her daring always surprised him, but right then he was floored. “The Alderking wants you to bring him Severin?”
Hazel gave him a sharp look. “How did you know Severin was his son? He didn’t tell us that the other night.”
Ben shrugged. “I guessed. Well, who else could it be?”
Hazel shook her head. “You’re a god-awful liar. You’re still in yesterday’s clothes. Obviously, I’m not the only one with secrets. So where were you last night?”
Ben let out a sigh and walked all the way into the room, closing the door behind him. “Nowhere. Here. Severin came here. He wanted my help.”
Jack’s eyebrows shot up, and Hazel went completely rigid, as though she thought she ought to do something, but had no idea what. Ben couldn’t help but be a little bit pleased that he could occasionally be shocking, too.
“Is he—what did the horned boy say?” his sister asked.
Jack sat down on the chair in front of her vanity, looking deeply uncomfortable, as if he was afraid he was going to be asked to choose sides in an argument that hadn’t happened yet.
“For one thing, he wants his magical sword back,” said Ben.
“I hope you didn’t promise it to him,” Hazel said. “I don’t have it. And before you ask, I don’t know who does have it or where it’s being kept—I was looking for clues at the revel.”
“So what else did you learn?”
Hazel rubbed her hand over her face and glanced toward Jack. The look he gave her was expressive. “Not much,” she said finally. “Could you get in touch with Severin again? Could you get him to meet us?”
“I don’t know. You’re not thinking of actually trying to hunt him down for the Alderking, are you? You’re not going to hurt him.”
“I’m willing to do whatever I have to,” Hazel said, standing. A muscle in her jaw jumped, as if she’d been clenching her teeth.
There was a moment when Ben thought about not telling her, when he imagined himself going across the hall and not saying a single thing. But he thought about people being brought out on stretchers from the school, and he thought about what Severin had said about his own sister. “Will you tell me everything, all the stuff you’ve been hiding from me?”
Hazel glanced at Jack and he looked back at her, his eyebrows rising. She must have told him some of it, for them to share a look like that.
“I will,” Hazel said. “I should have before. Just, do I have to tell you right now? Because I’m dead on my feet and there’s a lot.”
Although it sounded like another excuse, this time Ben believed her. She looked exhausted and oddly fragile. “Okay. But he’s in my room.”
“What?” Hazel pushed herself up off the bed and took a step toward the door. “Are you kidding me?”
“Oh no,” Ben said. “No, you don’t get to be angry, you who’ve been lying to me and hiding things from me. You who brought my best friend with you and made him complicit in the lie. You don’t get to be mad!”
Hazel’s face shuddered. “I was trying to protect you.”
Jack looked as though he wanted to say something. He was clearly tired, too, bright-eyed and hollow-cheeked.
“He’s asleep. I’m not going to wake him up to be interrogated.” Ben’s heart was hammering. Although he’d demanded she tell him the truth, after seeing her reaction, he was starting to suspect that whatever she’d been hiding from him was bigger than he’d previously thought. He was a little scared to hear it.
“You’ll make sure he stays?” Hazel asked.
Ben had no idea how he was supposed to do that. “Yeah. When you get up, we’ll figure things out.”
Jack rose, as if maybe he’d remembered it was ungentlemanly to stay in a girl’s room when he’d slept over in her brother’s a million times.
“No, stay,” Hazel said softly, catching his fingers.
Jack looked helpless to refuse her.
Which made Ben wonder if he’d been wrong about Hazel being fated for Severin. “Sleep tight,” Ben said, backing out before Jack had time to reconsider. He wasn’t ready to share Severin with anyone yet. He was just getting to know him, just getting to think of him as a person it was possible to know.
As he crossed the hall, Ben felt a flash of fear that when he opened the door and then he saw that Severin was no longer there. It was as though by speaking Severin’s name aloud, by telling his sister about the midnight visit, he’d broken some spell. The window was open, curtain billowing and a few brown leaves resting on the floor where they’d been blown in from the trees outside.
Panicked, Ben climbed onto the slope of the roof, sending a loose strip of shingle flying to the ground far below. The sky was early-morning pale and bright, the dew still wetting everything.
Ben sucked in a breath of cool air. For a moment, he saw only trees and road. Then, a moment later, he spotted Severin sitting in a crook of the wide sycamore just past the gutters of the house.
Letting out a sigh of relief, Ben made his way slowly across the roof, trying not to slip. “Hey, are you—”
“I am not a thing to be fought over,” the horned boy said. He had stripped out of Ben’s hoodie and was in just the borrowed T-shirt and jeans, bare feet against the bark. But he looked entirely alien, shadowed by branches in the pale morning light.
“I know,” Ben said, edging closer to the tree. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you heard, but I guess you heard some of it. She wouldn’t hurt you, even if she could.”
Severin smiled. “I have a sister of my own, you’ll recall. I know what it is to not see our siblings for who they truly are. You’ve done me a good turn that I will not soon forget, Benjamin Evans. You’ve given me succor this night. Nothing more can be asked of you.”
Ben climbed up into the tree, unsure of where to put his feet. For a moment he thought he was going to slip, but he managed to steady himself. “Hazel went to the revel. She saw your father. He spoke with her. We need to pool information, figure out next moves. Besides, I know you like Hazel, even if you pretend like you don’t.”