“Even if he wants to go?”
“Dru—”
“Go up there and bring him back down,” Drusilla said. “Please, Emma.”
Emma wondered if she looked bewildered; she felt bewildered. “Why me?”
“Because you’re a pretty girl,” said Dru, a little wistfully, looking down at her own round body. “And boys do what pretty girls want. Great-Aunt Marjorie said so. She said if I wasn’t such a butterball, I’d be a pretty girl and boys would do what I wanted.”
Emma was appalled. “That old bi—that old bat, sorry, said what?”
Dru hugged the book more tightly to her. “You know, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Butterball? Like you could be something cute, like a squirrel, or a chipmunk.”
“You’re much cuter than a chipmunk,” Emma said. “Weird teeth, and I have it on good authority that they speak in high, squeaky voices.” She ruffled Dru’s soft hair. “You’re gorgeous,” she said. “You always will be gorgeous. Now, I’ll go see what I can do about your brother.”
The hinges on the trapdoor that led to the roof hadn’t been oiled in months; they squeaked loudly as Emma, bracing herself on the top rung of the ladder, shoved upward. The trapdoor gave way and she crawled out onto the roof.
She straightened up, shivering. The wind off the ocean was cold, and she had only thrown a cardigan on over her tank top and jeans. The shingle of the roof was rough under her bare feet.
She’d been up here too many times to count. The roof was flat, easy to walk on, only a slight slant at the edges where the shingles gave way to copper rain gutters. There was even a folding metal chair up here, where Julian sat sometimes when he painted. He’d gone through a whole phase of painting the sunset over the ocean—he’d given it up when he’d kept chasing the changing colors of the sky, convinced each stage of the setting sun was better than the one before, until every canvas ended up black.
There was very little cover up here; it took only a moment to spot Mark, sitting at the edge of the roof with his legs dangling over the edge, staring out toward the ocean.
Emma made her way over to him, the wind whipping her pale braids across her face. She pushed them away impatiently, wondering if Mark was ignoring her or if he was actually unaware of her approach. She stopped a few feet from him, remembering the way he’d hit out at Julian.
“Mark,” she said.
He turned his head slowly. In the moonlight he was black and white; it was impossible to tell that his eyes were different colors. “Emma Carstairs.”
Her full name. That wasn’t very auspicious. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I came up here to bring you back down,” she said. “You’re freaking out your family and you’re upsetting Jules.”
“Jules,” he said carefully.
“Julian. Your brother.”
“I want to talk to my sister,” he said. “I want to talk to Helen.”
“Fine,” said Emma. “You can talk to her whenever. You can borrow an extra cell phone and call her, or we can have her call you, or we can freaking Skype, if that’s what you want. We would have told you that before if you hadn’t started yelling.”
“Skype?” Mark looked as if she’d sprouted several heads.
“It’s a computer thing. Ty knows about it. You’ll be able to look at her when you talk to her.”
“Like the scrying glass of the fey?”
“Sort of like that.” Emma edged a little closer to him, as if she were sidling up to a wild animal that might spook at her approach. “Come back downstairs?”
“I prefer it here. I was choking inside on all that dead air, crushed under the weight of all that building—roof and timbers and glass and stone. How do you live like that?”
“You did just fine for sixteen years.”
“I barely remember,” he said. “It seems like a dream.” He glanced back toward the ocean. “So much water,” he said. “I can see it and through it. I can see the demons down under the sea. I look at it and it doesn’t seem real.”
That was something Emma could understand. The sea was what had taken her parents’ bodies and then returned them, broken and empty. She knew from the reports that they’d been dead when they’d been cast into the water, but it didn’t help. She remembered the lines of a poem Arthur had recited once, about the ocean: water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.
That was what the sea beyond the waves was, to her. Deep death waiting.
“Surely there’s water in Faerie?” she said.
“Not any sea. And never enough water. The Wild Hunt would often ride for days without water. Only if we were fainting would Gwyn let us stop to drink. And there are fountains in the Wild of Faerie, but they run with blood.”
“‘For all the blood that’s shed on earth, runs through the springs of that country,’” said Emma. “I didn’t realize that was literal.”