Briar Queen (2 page)

J
ack Hawthorn had begun to dread sleep. He dreamed now, and most of those dreams were nightmares. He wasn't used to fear: the drumming of his heart, the quickening of breath, the blood coursing through him.

In his apartment above the abandoned theater, sprawled on his bed beneath a film poster of Rudolph Valentino as the sheik, he traced his gaze across the ceiling's metal girders, down to the objects he'd collected over many, many years. Moonlight silvered the eyes of a taxidermy owl, a brass teakettle, an apple-green iPod, things he'd taken to prove that he was a part of the true world and not a phantom.

Now, he
was
a part of the true world, thanks to an annoyingly reckless girl with caramel-colored eyes.

He rolled off the bed. He dressed quickly and headed for the window. Shoving it open, he climbed onto the fire escape swirling with snow and dropped down into the parking lot.

In the Summerwoods, now barren with winter's descent, Jack passed the ruins of a chapel built by an English explorer named Drake and moved into a grove of birches, their paper-white bark blending with the snow to create an illusion of endlessness. Snowflakes dusted the dark brown hair falling around his face as he ventured farther into the woods.

At last, he crouched down beneath a rowan tree scored with five unsettling marks, to examine the frost-glimmering leaves. Because he was no longer a thing of the dark, he didn't see the murdered boy crouched nearby, hyacinth
flowers drifting from a cavity in his chest. The boy, whose body should have been rotting beneath the sparkling leaves, said, “
Jack
.”

Jack didn't hear. He picked a few things from the ground and stared at them, closed his fingers around them, and bowed his head.

The dead boy, once named Nathan Clare, didn't speak again. He'd seen the locket Jack had lifted from the leaves, the human tooth.

Jack rose and walked away.

Nathan Clare huddled in the snow, one hand curled against the hole in his chest. He couldn't tell Jack about the bloody horror of his death or warn him about what hid in the forest. Nathan would have to wait for
her
. . . the girl who had once tried to save him.

Inanna was a goddess of light. Ereshkigal, her sister, was a goddess of darkness. Inanna missed her sister and went to the underworld to visit her. When she entered that place, at each gate she passed, she had to remove an article of clothing or jewelry. Soon, she had nothing left to protect her. When Inanna reached the underworld and moved toward her sister, the creatures of the underworld thought she was trying to take Ereshkigal back to the true world. They captured Inanna and made her one of the dead. But Ereshkigal helped her sister return to the light, and so remained in the dark forever
.

                
—A M
ESOPOTAMIAN MYTH

H
e has teeth, and claws, and eyes that bite.

The voice of her sister, Lily Rose, was clear in Finn's head as Finn sat in a chair beneath the young oak that had once been a malevolent thing, its winter-bared branches now glowing with tiny stars that caused the snow around her to shimmer. She didn't know why she was here, but she felt she'd done some terrible thing
.

Footprints suddenly appeared in the snow—something invisible was walking toward her. She whispered, “Go away . . . go away . . .”

Someone spoke her name. She reluctantly lifted her gaze
.

A shadow in a scarlet gown stood before her, its dark hair writhing, veins
glowing red beneath its charred, blackened skin. The air crackled
.

“Reiko,” Finn whispered. “I'm sorry.”

The girl queen's venom-green eyes opened in her burning face. “Little mayfly. The Wolf is at the door.”

SOMETHING WAS KNOCKING TO GET IN
.

Finn opened her eyes and heaved a breath. Cold crept beneath her bedcovers. Winter frosted the walls of her room, the floor, the mirror. One of the glass doors to the terrace had fallen open and was banging back and forth in a wood-smoke-scented wind.

She got up and shut the door. The bolt had come loose, so she secured it with a chair beneath the handle and stepped back, considering the whiteness drifting past the glass. It was the first snowfall she'd seen in a long time, and it was beautiful and menacing. As she listened to the heat rattling through the old radiators, she remembered a burning queen and what inhabited a certain abandoned hotel. She shivered. She looked around the tower room she'd made hers, with its cluttered bookshelves, her mom's watercolors, antique furniture she'd scavenged from other rooms in the house. No books flew across the room. Nothing shattered. She still wasn't sure if the occasional poltergeist in the house actually
was
her sister who had killed herself a year ago. “Lily?”

There was no answer.

“DOES HE HAVE TO BE THERE EVERY MORNING?”

“Yes, Da, he does.” Finn had dressed quickly and applied a little of the dessert-themed makeup she'd taken a liking to, the chocolate eye shadow and strawberry-cupcake lip gloss. “He walks me to classes. He's a gentleman.”

Her father looked annoyed. When they'd moved here a few months ago, they'd only had each other. Those few months in Fair Hollow had changed everything. Finn ventured, “So . . . are you going out with Miss Emory tonight?”

“It's not odd for you, is it? Me and Jane?”

“Well, she's my botany professor.” Jane Emory was also part of a secret society who knew about Fair Hollow's supernatural residents, the Fatas—Finn hadn't told her father about the Fatas. She could never tell him about the Fatas.

Her father, who hadn't shaved or even combed his blond hair, glanced out the window again. He was always disorganized on Monday mornings. She'd set his thermos of coffee, his laptop, and his coat and car keys near the door.

“I've put all your stuff there.” She shoved her unruly brown hair into a wool hat and, grabbing her scarf, nearly knocked down a random pile of books on the
counter. That even the kitchen was cluttered with books was a testament to her and her father's reluctance to let go of anything they'd read and loved. “See you.”

“You need to carry all those textbooks?”

“Ironic, that you should ask—don't we have shelves for these?” She poked at the pile of paperbacks on the counter. “I've got a lot to catch up on.” She was, in fact, dangerously close to sending her approaching exams into a tailspin.

“Tell
him—
”

“His name's Jack.”

“Tell Jack he's welcome to spend Christmas with us.” Her da grimaced as if it hurt to say it. “If he'd like.”

“Da . . . I'm
so
proud of you right now.”

“Get out.”

She grinned and stepped outside. The sunlight was already turning the snow to slush, but it was still sharply cold and her breath misted as it left her. She liked the cold. It cleared her head.

Jack Hawthorn stood at the bottom of the steps, waiting. In the day, he was a sight—dark hair falling around a regal, sharply boned face that belonged to another era. There always seemed to be a secret in his eyes. His anorak was lined with fake fur. He wore jeans and work boots. The tiny ruby glittering on one side of his aquiline nose had become a symbol of the blood that now ran through him where, before, his insides had been an alchemy of rose petals and Fata magic. She looked him over, skeptically. “You're not going to pass for ordinary, no matter how much you try.”

“I'm used to attention.” He smiled and crooked his arm. She slid hers through. As they began walking, her breath hitched.

His shadow was missing.

When they emerged from the darkness cast by a maple tree, his shadow had returned—maybe it had only been a trick of the light?

He caught one of her hands, drew off the glove, and kissed her cold fingers. His lips were warm and she felt as if a thread of electricity went straight from her fingers to her midriff. She didn't like displaying affection in front of other people, but, with him, she didn't mind. So she circled her arms around his neck while he held her as if afraid he might break her and kissed her with fierce caution. She always experienced a luscious peril when they kissed, as if she was practicing magic.

“We've got to get you to class.” His voice was hoarse.

Reluctantly, she stepped back from him and pressed one hand over his heart. “Did it hurt?”

“Did what hurt? And if you say ‘When you fell from heaven?' I'm going to be very disappointed in you.”

“When your heart grew back?”

“Life was less complicated without it. But it wasn't really life.”

“You look as if you haven't been getting a lot of sleep.” She glanced at him as they began walking again. “You've been trying to find Nathan.”

“One of Reiko's allies still hasn't been accounted for.”

“You mean Caliban.” She hated speaking the name of the killer whose true soul was that of a white hyena, his mortal mask an angelic-looking psycho. He had served Reiko Fata, the queen of a people who only mimicked being human. “So is every Fata in America an outcast or a criminal?”

“Not all. The native Fatas are lawful, but keep to themselves.”

“What about Reiko's court? Are they all outcasts? And Phouka?” She thought of the punk-elegant girl now in charge of the Fatas.

“Renegades, outlaws, outcasts, all.” Jack tucked a sheaf of hair behind one ear. “And Phouka is still a mystery to me.”

“And Absalom Askew?”

“And him.”

She knew Jack walked in the woods at night to meet with his friends. He still had his apartment above the abandoned cinema. He continued to work for Murray, the collector of antique automata and electronic games. Jack, stolen by the Fatas in the 1800s, had lived for nearly two hundred years among the ones who called themselves the children of night and nothing. They had tried to sacrifice him, and failed, and turned him into a Frankenstein creature, heartless and bloodless. He was flesh and blood now, as he'd wanted to be for two hundred years.

She didn't tell him about her dream of Reiko Fata, his burning queen of shadows.

JACK'S PRESENCE, AS USUAL, CAUSED FRICTION
between Finn and her two best friends. As the four of them met on the grounds of HallowHeart College, in Origen Hall's snowy courtyard, Christie, his cheeks flushed
and his dark red hair sticking out from beneath a woolen hat patterned with Celtic symbols, avoided looking at Jack. Sylvie watched Jack as if he were a lovely beast that might pounce. She toed the frosty leaves, twitched at her dark braids, and narrowed her eyes.

Christie spoke as if Jack wasn't standing right there. “I thought HallowHeart's core curriculum was to keep
his
kind away. He's going to classes now?”

“Not yet.” Jack smiled.

Christie finally looked at him. “You nearly got Finn killed. And Sylvie. And me.”

“But you're not dead, are you? Because, if you were, you'd notice.”

“I still have nightmares about those doll-things with all the teeth. So does Sylvie. Right, Sylv?”

“Well, not real—”

“Phouka saved you from the Grindylow.” Jack spoke patiently. “How is Phouka, by the way?”

“I wouldn't know.
You
would.” Christie hunched up and returned to ignoring him.

“I don't think I know her as well as
you
do.” Jack smiled again, and Finn wanted to pull his hair.

“Why is he still talking to me?” Christie pointedly addressed Sylvie, who slid to her feet and flashed a grin at Jack, who smiled back—this time, not like the devil. Sylvie said, “Walk with me, Jack?”

“It would be a pleasure, Sylvie Whitethorn.”

As Jack strolled onward with her, the two of them chatting like old friends, Finn turned on Christie. “Why are you being such a—”

“He's antagonizing me.”

“He's not. You're acting like a child.”

“Compared to him, I
am
a child. So are you.”

“Christie, stop.”

He bowed his head and said, “What about Nathan Clare? And Angyll Weaver? And that psycho Caliban is still on the loose. People
died
because of Jack, Finn.”

Finn's throat tightened when she thought of Nathan Clare, the boy Reiko Fata had tricked into a life meant for sacrifice. He'd been missing since Halloween night. His adoptive family—now led by Reiko's former lieutenant, Phouka—had spun it so that, to the general public, Reiko and Nathan had moved to Europe. “We don't know about Nathan.”

“We
do
know, Finn. And the only thing that's different about Jack now is that he doesn't smell like a night forest full of roses anymore.”

She stared at him. He said, “What?”

“Nothing. You're just very odd.”

“
I'm
odd? Have you taken a look at your boyfriend lately?”

“Shall I sigh dreamily and say ‘Every chance I can get'?”

“I'm sad for you, Finn. I really am.”

JACK HAWTHORN CREATED A RIPPLE EFFECT
in the corridors of Armitrage Hall. Walking beside him, Finn tried to ignore the stares of the other students. The rumor was he'd left his rich family to romantically survive on his own, even changing his name . . . all for Finn. There were a few who knew the truth, the privileged pretty boys and girls known as the blessed.

One of the blessed stepped into their path—Aubrey Drake held up a hand and smiled charmingly. His black hair was clubbed back, and his brown skin glowed as if he'd just returned from a tropical vacation. “Peace, Finn. Jack, I need to talk to you. There are some things happening.”

“I don't recall”—Jack spoke in that idle tone that meant he was politely avoiding savagery—“needing your advice about anything.”

Aubrey looked at Finn and lowered his voice. “You wasted one of their queens, and a
knight
. That's like . . . I mean, do you know what you've done?”

Two ancient beings had walked into a supernatural fire meant for her. Finn still had bad dreams about it.

“Reiko might have been an outlaw, but she had
allies
.” Aubrey frowned at Jack. “You really didn't expect . . . I don't know—retribution?”

“What I didn't expect”—Jack's smile was a razor glint—“was you and your friends to be attending the sacrifice of an innocent girl.”

Aubrey's expression became desperate. “We didn't know there was going to be an actual goddamn
sacrifice
. And we walked away.”

“Instead of helping.”

“Jack, what could we have done?”

Jack stepped close to the six-foot-tall football player and whispered with a terrible, leashed anger, “You left her to
burn to death
.”

Finn didn't like the ugly turn this conversation had taken. “Jack.”

Jack's eyes seemed to silver. He lowered his lashes and looked at Aubrey. “Good-bye, Aubrey.”