CHAPTER 4
That night, Hazel tossed and turned, kicking the sheets, willing herself not to worry about promises made and debts coming due. She imagined them away, bound up in a hundred barnacle-encrusted safes, a thousand buried chests, chains tight around every one.
In the morning, her limbs felt heavy. When she rolled over to hit the snooze on her phone alarm, her fingertips stung. Her palms looked red and abraded. There was a splinter of glass the length of a pin nestled under the swell of her thumb, and a few smaller shining splinters scattered across her fingers. Her heart began to race.
She kicked off the covers, frowning, only to find that her feet were caked in mud. Chunks of it dropped off her toes as she got up. Dirt spatter clung to her leg all the way to her knee. The hem of her nightgown was stiff and filthy. When she pulled back the sheet, her bedclothes looked like a nest, with grass and sticks everywhere. She tried to think back to the night before, but there were only vague dreams. The more she concentrated on them, the more they receded.
What had happened? What had she done, and why couldn’t she remember any of it?
Hazel forced herself into the shower, turning the tap to as hot as she could stand it. Under the water, she was able to work glass splinters out of her hand, tiny beads of blood swirling away down the drain. She was able to wash away the mud and to stop trembling. But she was still no closer to having any answers.
What had she done?
Her muscles hurt, as though she’d strained them, but that and the dirt and the shards of glass didn’t add up to anything. She was breathing too fast, no matter how much she tried to tell herself to be calm, no matter how much she tried to tell herself that she’d known this was coming, that the hardest part was waiting, and that she ought to be glad that she could finally get it over with.
Five years ago, when Hazel was nearly eleven years old, she’d made a bargain with the Folk.
She had crept down to the hawthorn tree on a full-moon night, just before dawn. The sky was still mostly dark, still dusted with stars. Strips of cloth fluttered from the branches above her, the ghosts of wishes. She’d left her sword at home, out of respect, and hoped that even though she’d hunted some of the Folk—the bad ones—they would still bargain with her fairly. She was very young.
Keeping what she wanted in mind, Hazel crossed the ring of white stones and waited, sitting on the dew-wet grass under the hawthorn, her heart beating mouse-fast. She didn’t have to wait long. A few minutes later a creature loped from the woods, a creature she had no name for. It had a pale body and crept on all fours, with claws as long as one of her fingers. It was pink around the eyes and around its too-wide mouth, which was filled with jagged, sharklike teeth.
“Tie your ribbon to the tree,” hissed the creature, a long pink tongue visible when it spoke. “Tell me your wish. I bargain on behalf of the Alderking, and he will give you all that you desire.”
Hazel had a strip of cloth she’d cut from the inside of her favorite dress. It fluttered in her hand when she took it from her pocket. “I want my brother to go to music school in Philadelphia. Everything paid for, so that he can go. In return, I’ll stop hunting while he’s away.”
The creature laughed. “You’re bold; I like that. But, no, I’m afraid that is no sufficient price for what you want. Promise me ten years of your life.”
“Ten years?” Hazel echoed, stunned. She’d thought she was prepared to bargain, but she hadn’t guessed what they’d ask for. She needed Ben to be better at music. She needed them to be a team again. When she went hunting without him, she felt lost. She had to make this bargain.
“You’re so very young—stuffed with years yet to come. Won’t you give us a few?” asked the creature. It padded closer, so that she could see its eyes were as black as pools of ink. “You’ll hardly miss them.”
“Don’t you all live forever?” Hazel asked. “What do you need anybody’s years for?”
“Not anyone’s years.” It sat, its claws kneading the dirt in a way that made the creature appear both bored and menacing. “Yours.”
“Seven,” said Hazel, remembering that Folk were fond of certain numbers. “I’ll give you seven years.”
The creature’s smile went even wider. “Our bargain is made. Tie your cloth to the tree and go home with our blessing.”
Lifting her hands, fabric fluttering between her fingers, Hazel hesitated. It had happened so quickly. The creature had agreed without any counteroffers or negotiation. With cold, creeping dread, she became more and more sure she’d made a mistake.
But what was it? She understood that she’d die seven years sooner than she would have, but at ten, that was so vastly far in the future it seemed closer to never than now.
It was only on the walk home through the dark that she realized she had never specified that those years be taken from the end of her life. She’d assumed. Which meant they could carry her off any time they wanted, and, given how differently time was said to run there, seven years in Faerie might be the rest of her life in the mortal world.
She was no different from anyone who’d ever gone to wish at the tree. The Folk had gotten the better of her.
Ever since that night, she’d been trying to forget that she was living on borrowed time, trying to distract herself. She went to all the parties and kissed all the boys, shoring up fun against despair, against the suffocating terror that loomed over her.
Nothing was ever quite distracting or fun enough, though.
Standing in that shower, Hazel thought again of the walnut and the message inside: Seven years to pay your debts. Much too late for regrets.
She understood the warning, even if she didn’t understand why the Folk were being so considerate as to give her one. Nor did she understand why, if now was the time that she was to be taken, she was still in her bedroom. Had she been taken last night and returned? Is that why she woke up muddy? But then why did they return her? Were they going to take her again? Had seven years passed in a single mortal night? No one, certainly not her, would get that lucky.
Padding to her closet, towel clutched around her, she tried to think of what she could do.
But the note was right. It was much too late for regrets.
Picking out a navy dress dotted with tiny pink-and-green pterodactyls and matching green wellies with a clear umbrella, Hazel hoped that the cheerful outfit would help her stay cheerful, too. But as she sat on the bed to pull on the boots, she noticed there was a mess by the window. Mud, streaking the lintel, smeared on the glass pane—and something written in mud on the wall beside it: AINSEL.
Hazel went closer and squinted at the word. It could be the name of someone who was helping her, but it seemed just as likely to be the name of someone she should fear, particularly scrawled as it was, horror-movie style, across the pale blue paint of her wall.
It was incredibly creepy to think of some creature following her back to her room, one of the Folk crouched on her bedroom floor, painting the letters with a bony finger or sharp claw.
For a moment she considered going downstairs and telling her brother everything—the bargain, the note, waking up with the mud on her feet, her fear that she was going to be taken without ever getting to say good-bye. Once, he’d been the person she trusted most in the world, her other half, her co-conspirator. They’d hoped to right all the wrongs of the town. Maybe they could be close like that again, if only there were no more secrets between them.
But if she told him everything, then he might think what was happening was his fault.
She was supposed to take care of herself—that was part of what she’d promised him. She didn’t want him to know how badly she’d failed. After Philadelphia, she didn’t want to make things worse again.
Taking a deep breath, steeling herself to not say anything, she went downstairs to the kitchen. Ben was already there, packing his backpack with stuff for lunch. Mom had left a plate of homemade kale-granola-raisin bars sitting on the table. Hazel grabbed two while Ben poured coffee into mason jars.
On the way to school, Ben and Hazel barely spoke, eating their breakfast and letting the scratchy speakers of his Volkswagen Beetle fill the car with the nearest college station’s morning punk playlist. Ben yawned and seemed too sleepy to talk; Hazel watched him and congratulated herself on acting normal.
By the time they got to Fairfold High, she’d managed to mostly convince herself that she wasn’t about to be stolen away by the Folk at any moment. And if they were messing with her, like a particularly cruel cat with a mouse, then getting upset wasn’t going to help anything. It was with that resolve that she stepped through the entrance of the school. Jack and Carter were walking down the hallway, mirror images of each other at that distance, except one of Carter’s arms was slung over the shoulders of a smug-looking Amanda Watkins. Apparently, Amanda had finally gotten Carter. No more shadows; somehow she’d managed to score the real thing.
Hazel’s first thought was that Carter was a hypocrite for hassling her about breaking hearts when he was going to help Amanda break his brother’s.
Her second thought was that maybe Carter didn’t know that Amanda had called Jack his shadow. Hazel glanced at the careful blankness of Jack’s face as he walked beside them and was willing to bet he’d never told his brother.
It made her furious to think of Jack pining away for Amanda while Amanda was right there, fluttering her eyelashes at Carter. It made her want to channel her feelings of helplessness about her own situation into punching Amanda in the stomach. It made her want to kiss Jack again—kiss him so hard that the power of that kiss drove Amanda right out of his head, kiss him so wildly that all the other guys, even Carter, would be impressed by Jack’s powers of attraction.
But when she imagined crossing the hall and actually doing it, she thought of the odd, pained expression Jack had worn when he pulled back from their kiss at the party. She didn’t want him ever looking at her like that again.
“What’s going on up there?” Ben asked, drawing her attention toward a knot of church youth-group kids gathered in front of the auditorium doors, a crowd forming around them.
“He just wasn’t there anymore,” Charlize Potts was saying, her arms folded over the giant slouchy Hollister sweatshirt she wore with pink jeggings, white-blond hair spilling down her back.
“We were out in the woods this morning before school, trying to pick up a little, you know, so the tourists don’t trip over all the bottles you losers leave out there. Pastor Kevin doesn’t want the town to be embarrassed. The coffin was empty. Smashed. Somebody finally broke into it, I guess.”
Hazel froze. All her other thoughts washed away.
“He can’t just be gone!” someone said.
“Someone must have stolen the body.”
“It’s got to be a prank.”
“What happened Saturday night?”
“Tom’s in the hospital with two broken legs. He fell down some steps, so he couldn’t have gone back out there.”
Hazel’s heart sped. They couldn’t be talking about what she thought they were talking about. They couldn’t be. She took a slow step closer, feeling as though she were moving through something far more solid than air. Ben’s long legs took him past her into the crowd.
A few moments later he glanced back at Hazel, eyes shining. She didn’t need to hear him say it, but he did, grabbing her shoulder and whispering in her ear as if he were confiding a secret, even though everyone was talking about it.
“He’s awake,” he said, breath ruffling her hair, his voice low and intense. “The horned boy—the prince—is free. He’s loose and he could be anywhere. We have to find him before anyone else does.”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said. “We don’t really do that anymore.”
“It’ll be like old times,” Ben said, a grin pulling at his mouth. His eyes hadn’t been that bright in years. “The lone gunfighter coming out of retirement for one last battle, trusty sidekick at the ready. And do you know why?”
“Because he’s our prince,” Hazel said, and felt the truth of it. They were supposed to be the ones to save him. She was supposed to be the one to save him. And maybe she and Ben would have one last adventure along the way.
“Because he’s our prince,” Ben echoed, the way another person might have responded to a familiar prayer with “amen.”