Thorn Jack

 

D
EDICATION

To my dad, who believed

 

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book wouldn't have existed in book form without Shari Wentz and Christine Bubinak, who encouraged its journey. The story wouldn't have existed in this form without the advice of my fabulous agent, Thao Le, the patience and belief of my terrific editor, Diana Gill, and the sharp eye of copy editor Laurie McGee. Thanks also to my family, for their support, and to my friends Val Nicotina, Madeline Stark, and Therese Dale, for keeping me grounded and sane.

Contents

 

P
ROLOGUE

Their creed is “Mischief, Malevolence, and Mayhem.”

—
F
ROM THE JOURN
AL OF
L
ILY
R
OSE

B
ecause Jack was always glad to be away from his family, the Summerwoods had become a sanctuary for him. He moved carefully through the trees, the hem of his coat sweeping over fallen leaves and pale toadstools, while things tangled in his dark hair and moonlight illuminated the path and the old rings on his fingers.

He didn't really need the moonlight.

Through a screen of Emory, he saw them, their skin glimmering with pollen beneath the gossamer and velvet tatters of their clothing, their eyes silver in the glow of the fire around which they were gathered. Fireflies and moths swirled in the darkness beyond them, straying toward jewel-knotted hair and fingers scabbed with rings older than the ones he wore.

He should have been afraid.

He stepped forward, into the firelight.

The only way to escape
them, the trickster had told him long ago,
is to find the braveheart, the girl, who will make you bleed.

 

C
HAPTER
O
NE

But those of aire can easily convert

Into new forms, and then again revert,

One while a man, after a comely maid.

And then all suddenly to make thee start,

Like leaping leopard he'll thee invade.

—“
A
P
LATONICK
S
ONG OF THE
S
OUL,”
H
ENRY
M
ORE

They are not like us. Prick the skin of whoever comes for you . . . if he bleeds, he is human. If he does not, he is from the third kingdom . . .

—
F
ROM T
HE JOURNAL OF
L
ILY
R
OSE

T
hey call us things with teeth
, Finn's sister had once said, in one of her moods and still wearing her ballerina costume as she huddled on the front porch. She hadn't explained this disturbing statement to Finn. They had argued that night, the night eighteen-year-old Lily Rose had ended her life.

Finn was seventeen when the almost enchanted habit of sleep became a haven for her . . . there were never any dreams and therefore no memories to replay in that vulnerable state of unconsciousness. She lost her appetite. Her body became bird fragile. Her skin bruised easily, as if invisible things were pinching her. In an effort to ward away thoughts of broken glass, she lined her eyes with kohl and left her hair in tangles. She moved through her days like a dead thing, not wanting to be with friends, not wanting anything.

I wake up,
she told someone,
and all I want to do is go back to sleep.

The night before the move, she dreamed.

She wandered barefoot around a pool, past tropical plants and songbirds in cages. Everything was in black-and-white, but her summer dress was green. Girls with flowers in their hair chatted with bare-chested boys and everyone wore metal masks that resembled the faces of frozen children. Throats and arms were decorated with jewelry formed into insects or leaves. There was a buzzing in the air, disturbing and constant.

As a figure in a robe of black ribbons glided past, its identity concealed behind a beaked mask, a voice like ashes and velvet came from behind her, “That is a plague doctor.”

Finn turned to find a young man in white jeans and an ivory half mask over his eyes crouched at the pool's edge. A crown of roses the color of blood wreathed his sleek, dark hair. She murmured, “I didn't bring a mask. Why is he a plague doctor?”

“Because he is the Black Scissors and we are a plague.”

“Why is everyone else masked?”

“They don't want anyone seeing what they really are.”

She looked around. “My sister brought me. Her name is Lily Rose. Have you seen her?”

He slid up and walked to her. He took the rose wreath from his hair and placed it on hers. She felt the wet kiss of petals, the bite of tiny thorns against her temples. He smelled like burning wood, evergreen, wild roses. He said, gently, “Is this too strange?”

“I don't like it here.” The buzzing had become loud, unbearable.

He looked at her and a blood drop slid from his left eye, then became a crimson fly that crawled across the scene as if the air were celluloid. “Why are you telling me? I'm dead.”

Finn woke at three in the morning. With the exception of the San Francisco traffic outside, the town house was silent. She sat up and switched on the lamp. The dream was still a vivid afterimage.

She rose and walked to the trunk where she kept her sister's belongings, lifted the lid, and withdrew a reel of film. Lily Rose's boyfriend, Leander, had been a student filmmaker who had liked old-fashioned things. He'd given the Super 8 reel to Finn at the funeral, but she'd never dared to watch it. She hadn't been able to watch anything with Lily Rose in it, not recital footage, not digital memories.

She crept down to her da's study, where he kept the Kodak projector he'd purchased at a garage sale. She set the reel into place and aimed the projector at the pale wall. After threading the film through as Lily Rose's boyfriend had taught her, she pressed the motor lamp switch and sat on the floor to watch.

The first image cascaded into black-and-white footage of her sister at a pool party scattered with flowery girls and boys in metal jewelry. Lily Rose stood alone, a tough ballerina in sneakers and a silver slip dress. Finn's throat ached. She wanted to reach in and drag her sister out and scream at her.
Why did you do it?

The scene scrolled into a jittery shot of a courtyard clotted with briars and gargoyles crouched on stone walls. Lily Rose, spectral in a black gown, stood between two pillars, her head bowed. There was a shadow in the background, the silhouette of a man in a long coat. Finn leaned forward.

The film snapped. The projector buzzed. The wall flashed a wolfish shape, then went blank.

Finn rose and carefully put the projector away. She returned to her room, where she set the film back into the trunk, among her sister's shadow boxes of pinned moths, her ballet costumes, photos of Nijinsky and Nureyev, her iPod containing everything from Belle and Sebastian to Kanye West. She remembered Lily Rose's pale face the night she'd chosen to die. It didn't seem real, still. It was as if her sister had only been stolen away.

She lay back down and buried her face in her pillow, the tightness in her throat as painful as if she'd swallowed thorns. It had been nearly a year since her sister's death.

FINN AND HER FATHER WERE
leaving San Francisco because every day in the town house was a reminder of Lily Rose. They had finally packed up her room, where Finn would sometimes sprawl on Lily's bed and pretend her sister was out for the night, that she'd be back late, slightly silly from wine coolers and talking about weird things. They were leaving because her father, despite two Ph.D.s, was still only an assistant professor without tenure, and an assistant professor of world mythology was number one only when it came to budget cuts.

They were leaving because they'd both agreed it was time to start over.

The next day, Finn and her father left San Francisco and the town house filled with memories.

THE OTHER HOUSE APPEARED ON
a road lined with Victorian homes and oaks that looked a hundred years old. Finn opened the car window and scowled. Compared to the citrus sunlight of California, the apple chill of New York seemed gloomy and menacing.

Her father, whose shaggy blond hair made him resemble a mad poet, steered the SUV into the drive. This riverside town was his childhood home, and he had been a boy in this house. As a gust of air through the open window flung her hair into her face, she clawed the strands away. “Has the house been closed up since Gran . . . ?”

She couldn't say the word. Her grandmother had last been seen at Lily's funeral, when she had just come from one of her trips to Ireland. Whenever Finn thought of Gran Rose, she pictured a tall woman in an elegant dark suit standing alone on the porch, scowling at the sky. She wished she'd known her grandmother better.

Her father answered casually, “Your aunt Sibyl was looking after it before she moved.”

Finn slid from the SUV and stared at the weather-struck house. It looked old, its porch scattered with wicker furniture, its windows dark. She watched yellow and red leaves flutter from the oak on the front lawn. She wistfully thought of texting her two best friends about the house, but she'd scarcely spoken to them in a year. She'd hardly been able to speak with anyone since Lily—

Her eyelashes fluttered and she fought the urge to sleep.

“Da.” She used the nickname she'd given her father when she'd been six, after she and seven-year-old Lily had had a fight and Lily had, irrationally, insisted he was
her
dad and Finn was not to call him that. Finn had stubbornly retorted she would call him
Da
from then on. She blinked and quickly wiped a hand across her face before her father could see. “It looks different.”

“Does it?” Her da lifted their suitcases from the back of the SUV.

“It looks old.”

“Well, you were very young last time we were here.”

This time, Lily wasn't here with them.

As they walked up the path, she glimpsed a shadowy figure beneath the oak. She was so startled, she tripped. Her da caught her by the elbow as she peered at the tree, but she saw nothing. It had been nothing.

The porch creaked beneath their steps. The door opened only after her father fiddled with the lock and kicked at the bottom. As they entered the parlor, Finn halted. “Wow.”

A chandelier of emerald glass hung from a ceiling painted with stars. The green walls were decorated with framed paintings of fairy ladies. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were cluttered with books, seashells, and tiny birdcages. A tribe of Pierrot dolls that looked as though they'd been through a war huddled on a purple divan. The stairway wall was decorated with ornate little mirrors. Behind the sofa, a narrow table was scattered with animal skulls and fossils.

He said, “Your gran was very imaginative.”

“You mean
eccentric
.” The house smelled like an old church, like candle smoke and sandalwood.

“That's not very nice. Go pick a room.” He opened another door. “It still smells like her cigars . . .”

The house was like a forest, dark, with light whispering across dusty wood and mirrors. Finn wandered up the stairs into a hall hung with tiny prints: a frog in gentleman's clothes; a hedgehog reading a book; a rabbit wearing a crown. She moved to a door carved into images of leaping rabbits and opened it. Beyond was a circular room like the inside of a tower, its walls pale green, its furnishings antique. In a tarnished mirror, her reflection revealed a plain, thin face veiled by messy brown hair.

She stepped forward. Above a set of glass doors leading onto a terrace, words had been painted:
THE
OCTOBER ROOM.
She whispered, “My room,” and was glad she'd opted out of dorm life, which was ridiculously expensive and a sacrifice of privacy for independence.

When she heard the moving truck grinding and hissing into the drive, Finn hurried back downstairs.

The movers, directed by her father, quickly had boxes and a few pieces of furniture crowding the dining room. As she began unpacking, she chose the precious things first, placing her mother's delicate paintings on the table. Above the divan with the Pierrot dolls, she hung the photograph of Lily Rose with flowers in her hair. Finn's two favorite photographs were of her mother and father when they'd been young—her mother with freckles, her dark hair crowned with daisies; her father a boy with sun-bleached hair and a puzzled expression.

Her father dropped another box onto the pile, stopped, and studied the photographs.

Finn murmured, “You lived here as a kid. Does it always smell like things burning?”

“Only when it's cold.” He understood she was avoiding the topic of the photographs.

She sat on the wooden floor and plucked at the strings of the neglected acoustic guitar he'd bought for her after her harrowing attempts at Hendrix and the Smashing Pumpkins on Lily's electric Epiphone. She said, “I've got a million things to unpack. What about lunch?”

“I've made you waffles. Do me a favor? Unpack my office? I can't find anything—and I need my Sharpies.”

“Whatever.”

“And, once again, the kingdom of Whatever asserts itself.” He crouched beside her. “It'll be all right, Finn. This is where we were meant to be. And you've got your first year of college to look forward to. It's a fantastic liberal arts school with a supreme biology department—if you change your mind and decide to go your mother's way.”

“Not likely.”

It wasn't the first time they'd moved. After her mother had died on a winter highway, her da had taken her and Lily Rose to San Francisco, where life, for a while, had been a world of sunlight and sea. It had been easy to believe that San Francisco had always been their home, that the frigid sorrow of Vermont had never existed.

Finn hated snow. Here, there would be snow. She looked up from the guitar, out the window. The oak there seemed to be leaning close, as if eavesdropping.

“D'you miss San Francisco?” Her da spoke as if he expected her to have a mental breakdown. It was irritating.

“Da. It's been a year. I'm fine. You're right—we'll be fine here. I'm glad we left.”

“You can still keep up with Maria and Alex, with all that fancy tech stuff.”

The thought of her neglected friends in San Francisco made her feel dark again. “Yeah.”

He rose and headed toward the kitchen. “Come get your waffles.”

She took her gaze from the oak tree and the overcast sky and scrambled up, brushing off her jeans. “Do we have whipped cream? I'm not having waffles without whipped cream.”

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, FINN
dragged artifacts out of cartons and hung prints representing world mythologies on the walls of her father's office. Blue-skinned Shiva smiled next to Viking Odin. A blood-gowned Japanese goddess languished alongside a Celtic youth with blue spirals painted beneath his eyes. She'd grown up with these otherworldly beings whose imaginary worlds were so much more appealing than her own.

She was alone in the kitchen when something struck the screen door to the backyard.

It was a goat. It made a babyish sound and butted the door with its head again. Moving toward it, Finn made a shooing motion. “Go. Go away.”

The goat, which wore a bell around its neck, only looked at her. As she pushed at the screen, the nuisance ran away.

She didn't know why she followed it, down a needle-strewn path among the pines, to another house, a rambling fairy tale of towers and gables with a fox-faced gargoyle perched on the roof. Crooked trees clung to the outside of the house as if holding it together. Sounds tumbled from beyond the screen door—the hoarse yells of boys, an insane trill of piano music. A dog barked, and chickens scurried behind a mesh fence near the front. There were five cars parked in the driveway and a motorcycle on the lawn.