The Darkest Part of the Forest Page 4

  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 palm, 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 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 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 coconspirator. 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 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 th
at 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.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Once upon a time, a little girl found a corpse in the woods.

  Her parents had raised the girl and her brother with the same benign neglect with which they’d taken care of the three cats and dachshund named Whiskey who already roamed around the little house. They’d have their long-haired, alt-rock friends over, drink wine, jam on their guitars, and talk about art late into the night, letting the girl and boy run around without diapers. They’d paint for hours, stopping only to fix bottles and wash the occasional load of laundry, which even clean managed to smell faintly of turpentine. The kids ate food off everyone’s plates, played elaborate games in the mud outside by the garden, and took baths only when someone snatched them up and dumped them in a basin.

  When the little girl looked back on it, her childhood seemed like a glorious blur of chasing her brother and her dog through the woods wearing hand-me-down clothes and daisy chain crowns. Of running all the way to where the horned boy slept, singing songs and making up stories about him all afternoon, only coming home at night, exhausted, wild animals returning to a den.

  They saw themselves as children of the forest, creeping around pools and hiding in the hollows of dead trees. They glimpsed the Folk sometimes, movements out of the corner of their eyes or laughter that seemed to come from every direction and nowhere at once. And they knew to wear the charms, to keep a bit of grave dirt in their pockets, and to be both cautious and polite to strangers that might not be human. But knowing the Folk were dangerous was one thing, and finding the remains of Adam Hicks was another.

  That particular day, Hazel had been dressed up like a knight, a blue dishrag tied around her neck for a cloak and a scarf for a sash around her waist. Her red hair whipped behind her as she ran, shining with gold in the lazy, late-afternoon sun.

  Ben had been sword fighting with her all morning. He had a plastic He-Man sword that their mother had brought home from the secondhand store, along with a book on King Arthur’s knights with stories about Sir Pellinore, who’d supposedly been one of the Folk himself before he joined Arthur’s court, the story of Sir Gawain breaking a curse on a loathly lady, and a list of the virtues knights had—strength, valor, loyalty, courtesy, compassion, and devotion.

  Hazel had received a baby doll that, if you filled with water, you could squeeze and make it pee, even though she’d wanted a sword like her brother’s. Ben, delighted to have the better present, chased her around, knocking sticks out of her hands with the plastic blade. Finally, frustrated, Hazel went into their dad’s toolshed and found a rusty old machete in the back. Then she smacked Ben’s plastic sword so hard that it cracked. He stomped back to the house for glue while she danced around in nine-year-old triumph.

  She spent a while whacking at a patch of dried-out ferns while pretending they were the terrible monster of legend, the one that lurked in the heart of the forest. She intoned a few lines of the rhyme under her breath, feeling quite daring.

  After a while, she got bored and went looking for blackberries, sheathing her machete in her sash and skipping through the tall weeds. Whiskey followed her at first, but then wandered off. A few moments later he started barking.

  Adam Hicks was lying in the mud of the bank beside Wight Lake, his lips bluish. Hollow pits where his eyes should have been stared up at the sky, maggots squirming inside, pale as seed pearls. The bottom half of his body was submerged in the water. That was the part that had been eaten. White bone peeked out from flesh that hung in tatters and ribbons, waving in the water like ripped strips of cloth. There was a smell in the air, like when she’d accidentally left raw hamburger overnight on the counter.

  Whiskey was running back and forth, sniffing the body, howling as if he thought he could wake Adam up.

  “Come away from there,” Hazel tried to call, but her voice came out like a whisper. She knew that not enough time had passed for her brother to be on his way back yet. She knew that it was just her and the dog alone out there.

  She began to tremble all over.

  Adam’s parents had moved to Fairfold a year before, making him not quite a tourist, but not local either. Dangerously indeterminate, tempting to the Folk. They are twilight creatures, beings of dawn and dusk, of standing between one thing and another, of not quite and almost, of borderlands and shadows.

  Looking out at the green water, trying not to stare at the red ruin of Adam’s eyes, Hazel thought of all the knights in the book she’d read that afternoon. She remembered that she was supposed to be one of them and tried not to throw up.

  Whiskey’s barking got more intense and more frenzied.

  Hazel was trying to shoo him back when a damp claw closed around her ankle. She screamed, fumbling for her machete, stomping on the grasping, toad-pale ha
nd with her free foot. The hag rose up out of the muddy water, her face sunken like a skull with cloudy eyes and long green hair that spread out, floating on the surface of the lake. The touch of her hands burned like cold fire.

  Hazel managed to swing the blade as the hag yanked on her leg. Hazel went down on her back, hard. Flies blew up from Adam’s body in a black cloud. As Hazel felt herself dragged toward the water, she noticed with dim and terrible satisfaction that the hag was bleeding from a slash in her cheek. Hazel must have struck her.

  “Little girl,” the hag said. “Barely a mouthful. Stringy from running. Relax, little mouthful.”

  Closing her eyes, Hazel swung the machete wildly. The hag made a hissing sound like a cat and grabbed for the blade. It sliced into the hag’s fingers when she caught it, but she held on, wrenching it from Hazel’s grasp and tossing it into the middle of the lake. It landed with a splash that made Hazel’s stomach turn.

  Whiskey bit the hag’s arm and growled.

  “No!” Hazel shouted. “No! Go away, Whiskey!”

  The dog held on, whipping his head back and forth. The hag lifted her long green arm high into the air. Whiskey rose, too, his hind legs off the ground, his teeth still embedded deep in her flesh, as though pressed against bone. Then the hag’s arm came down, slamming him against the ground as if he weighed nothing, as if he was nothing. The dog went still, lying on the bank like a broken toy.

  “Nononono,” Hazel moaned. She reached out a hand toward Whiskey, but he was just far enough to her right to be out of reach. Her fingers clawed at the mud, digging runnels into it.

  Strains of distant music floated toward her. Ben’s reed pipes. He had slung them around his neck on a dirty string a week ago, calling himself a bard, and hadn’t removed them since. Too late. Too late.

  Hazel tried to crawl toward Whiskey’s body, kicking against the cold grip of the hag. Despite her efforts, her feet hit the lake. Water splashed high into the air as she struggled.

  “Ben,” she shouted, her voice cracking with panic. “Ben!”