The Darkest Part of the Forest Read online

  Of course, there was the possibility that, having used her for whatever service was needed, she wouldn’t be summoned back for a long while, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  In her room, she knelt down and slid an old wooden trunk from underneath her bed. The wood was cracked and warped in places. When she was very little, Ben would hide in it and pretend he was Dracula in his coffin, and then the prince in his. When she was even littler than that, Mom had put her toys and old blankets inside. But now it was the place where her old sword rested, along with a bunch of mementos of her childhood. Rocks with shining mica she’d loved and pocketed on walks through the woods. The silver gum wrapper Jack had folded into the shape of a frog. Her old, makeshift green velvet cape, which was supposed to be part of a Robin Hood costume. A daisy chain so brittle from drying that she didn’t dare touch it or it would fall to pieces.

  Those were the things she expected to find when she opened the box. She’d thought she could take out the black-painted sword and stuff it between the mattress and box spring.

  It wasn’t there.

  The wooden trunk was empty except for a book and a folded-up tunic and pants—ones made from a light silvery-gray material she’d never seen before—and beside them a note in the same eerily familiar hand that wrote the message inside the walnut: 241.

  She took out the book. FOLKLORE OF ENGLAND, the spine read. She flipped to here.

  It was the story of a farmer who bought a stretch of land that came with a big, hairy, troublesome boggart who’d claimed the land for himself. After some argument, they decided to split the land. The boggart demanded everything that grew above the ground and told the farmer he could have anything below. But the farmer got the better of the boggart by planting potatoes and carrots. At the harvest, the boggart got only the useless tops. He was furious. He raged and shouted and stamped his feet. But he’d made the bargain, and, like all faeries, he was bound to his word. The next year, the boggart demanded whatever was below ground but again the farmer got the better than him. He planted corn, so that the boggart was left with only stringy roots. Again the boggart raged, more terrible and angrier than before, but again he was bound to his word. Finally, in the third year, the boggart demanded that the farmer should plant wheat, but they would each plow the field, keeping what they harvested. Since the farmer knew the boggart was much stronger, he lighted on the idea of planting iron rods in the ground on the boggart’s side of the field, so the boggart’s plow became blunted again and again, while the farmer plowed merrily away. After hours of that, the boggart gave up, saying that the farmer could have the field and good riddance to it!

  The words carrots and iron rods had been circled by a muddy finger.

  Hazel frowned at the book. The story didn’t mean anything to her.

  Confused and frustrated, she busied herself by pulling the muddy linens from the bed and stuffing them into the hamper. Then she grabbed a clean, but wrinkled, bottom sheet and an old blanket from the hall closet. Finally, she changed into rocket ship–print pajamas, flung herself down, picked up a paperback off the side table at random, and opened it, trying to distract herself, trying to convince herself that she needed an old sword about as much as she needed a Robin Hood costume.

  The book turned out to be one she’d read before, where zombies chased around a brother and sister reporting team. After a few pages and the wash of words, she put it down. She couldn’t concentrate. None of it seemed as real as her memory of a mossy stone house with an elf-wrought knife lying on a worn wood table. None of it seemed as real as her sore hands, muddy feet, and missing night.

  None of it seemed as real as Jack’s having a double life. She knew you had to be careful around faeries, no matter how beautiful or clever or charming, but somehow Jack had always been the exception. Now, though, thoughts of his silvery eyes and the odd way he’d spoken wouldn’t leave her. Somehow that and the memory of their kiss became tangled and she felt like a fool.

  So she rested, eyes shut, pretending to sleep, until she heard the creak of floorboards. Someone coming up the stairs and down the hallway. Ben coming to bed? Or was Ben already asleep and something else was creeping toward her. Hazel sat up and reached for her cell to check the time: two in the morning.

  As she slid out of bed, she heard someone bang back down the stairs.

  Shoving her feet into her wellies, clutching her phone, she followed as stealthily as she could. If the Folk could have drawn her from her bed, it stood to reason that they could draw Ben, too. He might not owe them anything, might not have bargained with them, but that only meant they had no right to him. They took lots of things they had no right to.

  She found Ben already outside by the time she got her coat and made it out the door. He walked toward his car purposefully. She started to panic, indecision halting her in the shadows underneath an oak tree. There was no way she was going to be able to follow him on foot. She considered racing to the passenger-side window and tapping on it. If he was bewitched, that might snap him out of it.

  But what if he wasn’t? What if he was going out to look for the horned boy alone? It wasn’t as if he had to take his tagalong little sister everywhere he went.

  Ben pulled his car out of the driveway slowly, without turning on his lights.

  Coming abruptly to a decision, Hazel went to the shed and yanked her old bike out from among the cobwebby tools. With shaking hands, she yanked off the reflective discs attached to the spokes, hurling them into the dark. Then she hopped up onto the seat and pushed off, pedaling fast. By the time she made it to the street, his headlights were on and he was making the first turn.

  She braked gently, trying to stay out of his line of sight without losing the Volkswagen. Speed limits on the back roads were cautious, which made things easier, but there was no way she could keep up if he disobeyed them and gunned the gas.

  The wind whipped her hair behind her, and the moon was high in the sky, turning everything to silver. She felt like she was pedaling into a dream landscape, a hushed world in which everyone but her and her brother was asleep. The last of her tiredness burned away as her muscles worked and she got into such an efficient leg-pumping rhythm that for a moment she didn’t notice he was pulling over. She stopped short, the bottom of her boots scraping against the road. Then she eased the bike off into the trees, where she dropped it among vines and felled branches.

  A cold sweat had broken out along her back. She’d guessed where he was going: to the remains of the glass casket.

  She followed Ben on foot, creeping along as slowly as she could. She hoped the snap of twigs wouldn’t betray her. Whether she was still good at moving silently through a forest or Ben was just distracted, he didn’t so much as glance in her direction.

  It was a lot like hunting, except that it was her brother she was after.

  The night was damp and chill enough for Hazel’s breath to cloud in the air. Creatures rustled in the underbrush and called to one another from the misshapen limbs of trees. An owl peered down at her with its clock face. She wrapped her coat more tightly around herself and wished that she’d bothered to change out of her pajamas before she’d left the house.

  Ben stopped near the fallen trunk of an oak tree. He seemed to be reconsidering whatever had brought him all the way out here, pacing back and forth, kicking the leaves of a fern bush. Hazel wondered again if she should say something, call out and let him know that he wasn’t alone.

  I followed you because I thought you’d been enchanted, she imagined herself saying. But now I realize that you’re probably not enchanted, because enchanted people don’t suddenly get confused about what they’re doing out in the middle of the woods in the dark. Sorry. I guess I probably shouldn’t have followed you after all.

  That would go over well.

  But then Ben resumed marching through the forest, feet kicking up leaves, and Hazel resumed following him. They walked until he came to the grove where the prince had slept, a grove they’d been to a
hundred times. Broken glass and crushed beer bottles shimmered in the moonlight. But all the vegetation, from the trees to the shrubs to the thorny vines, was blackened and dead. Rotted, as though winter had come early. Even the evergreens had withered away.

  And the coffin had been shattered. Everyone knew it, but it was different to see—a sacrilege, as though the casket had turned out to be no more magical that a car window someone smashed to get to a radio. Destruction had made it ordinary.

  Ben walked over to the glass case and ran his hand over the metal edge, then he pushed the remains of the lid back, tinkling pieces of crystal breaking off and falling. His hand went inside—maybe touching the fabric—then he paused and looked toward where Hazel was, as though maybe she had stepped wrong and made too loud a sound.

  What was Ben looking for? What had he come to find?

  She made a silent vow that if her brother tried to climb into the coffin, she was going to step out of the shadows, no matter how mad it made him.

  He didn’t, though. He circled around it, as if he was as amazed by the ruin as she was. Then he bent, a frown on his face. When Ben stood, he had something cupped in his hand, something he’d taken from inside the coffin, something that flashed in the moonlight, something he was looking at in astonishment. An earring. A cheap green enamel hoop that Hazel hadn’t even noticed was missing from her ear.

  Immediately, excuses sprang to mind. Maybe Hazel lost it the night of the party—though that wouldn’t explain the positioning: inside the case, under chunks of glass. And she was pretty sure she remembered putting them back on the next day. Okay, better, maybe another girl had the same earrings and she’d lost one.

  Hazel had guessed she might have had something to do with the horned boy’s being loose, but some part of her had resisted believing it. Now, though, she had to believe. No explanation she came up with explained away the evidence.

  She started trembling, panic rolling over her. Hadn’t she scolded herself for running straight into trouble every chance she got? For leaving no stone unturned, no bad idea unembraced, and no boy unkissed? No scab unpicked? No sorrow unnumbered? No hangnail unbitten and no stupid comment unsaid? Certainly no stupid bargain unmade. Apparently, that was still the case, even if she couldn’t remember it.

  After a few minutes, Ben started back toward his car, swearing under his breath. Hazel crouched down and pressed her back against a tree until he passed. Until she could get her breathing back under control. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to tell Ben, but at least she’d have until morning to figure it out.

  Hazel walked back to her bike. It was where she had left it, obscured by a clump of pachysandra that seemed to swallow the frame. She stood it up, pushed toward the road, and began to pedal, following the distant taillights of Ben’s car.

  He seemed to be heading in the direction of home, so she no longer worried about keeping up. Instead, she concentrated on what she was going to do.

  It was to the Alderking that she’d sworn her seven years. Maybe if she went to the hawthorn tree on the full moon and waited, she could make another bargain for answers. Or maybe she’d find the Alderking’s revel and ask him what he was intending to do with her directly.

  She was pedaling faster, imagining what she might say, when she saw the body in the ditch. A girl’s body—pale legs splayed in the dirt, brown hair lying in a puddle. Someone was leaning over the body, someone with brown hair hanging in front of his eyes, some of it pushed back over his long, curving horns.

  She startled, her whole body freezing up.

  She lost her balance. The bike spun out from underneath her. It happened so fast that she didn’t have time to react, to correct herself. One moment she’d been speeding along and the next she was slamming into the road.

  The horned boy watched her crash, his expression unreadable in the moonlight.

  CHAPTER 9

  She hit the pavement. Her hands, thrown out to protect her face, hit first, skidding along the road. Her breath was knocked out of her. She rolled sideways, skinning her elbows and scraping the back of her head. Everything felt raw and awful. For a moment she stayed there, dirt in her mouth, waiting for the pain to ebb.

  She could hear the wheels of her bike spinning and something else—the horned boy coming toward her. His footfalls on the asphalt sounded as loud as snapped bones.

  He knelt down, looming over her.

  His skin was pale, seemingly bleached by the chill. He was still wearing the fine embroidered blue tunic he’d had on for generations, the fabric darkened by rain, ivory boots spattered by mud. His horns rose up over his temples and curved back behind his sharp ears, close to his head and ending in points just past his jawline, so that, to someone at a distance, they might appear like thick braids. Even his bone structure—the planes of his cheekbones, height of his brow—seemed subtly different from a human’s. He seemed overall more finely wrought, like a crystal wineglass revealed to someone used to coffee mugs. His eyes were a mossy green that made her think of deep pools and cool water, and he looked down at her with those otherworldly eyes as though puzzling something through.

  He was every bit as monstrously beautiful as he’d ever been. You could drown in beauty like that.

  “What did you do to her?” Hazel asked, trying to push herself up. Blood was seeping from both of her knees and along her arms, making her pajamas stick to her skin. She didn’t think she could run; her muscles were too stiff and too sore.

  He reached for her, and she realized that she was going to have to run anyway. She got up, lurched three steps, and saw that the girl lying in the ditch was Amanda Watkins.

  Her skin was white—not pale or even sickly, but white as a sheet of paper is white. The only pinkish parts were along the very tips of her fingers and around the inside of her eyes. Her lips were slightly apart, and the cup of her mouth was filled with dirt, a few vines curling out from the corners. She had a high heel on one foot, but her other foot was bare and mud-covered.

  “Amanda?” Hazel called, staggering toward her. “Amanda!”

  “I know you. I know your voice,” the boy said, sounding hoarse, as if he’d been shouting for a week. He grabbed her arm and, when she whirled on him, stared at her with glittering, hungry eyes. “You’re the very girl I sought.”

  She felt as if she’d waited her whole life for him to wake up and say those words to her. But now that he had, she was absolutely terrified. She tried to pull away. His fingers held her in place, as chill as if they’d been plunged into ice water, seeming to reach through her skin. She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a strangled sound.

  “Quiet,” he said, his voice harsh. “Be quiet. I know who you are, Hazel Evans, sister of Benjamin Evans, daughter of Greer O’Neill and Spencer Evans. I recognize your voice. I know all your foolish desires. I know you and I know what you’ve done and I need you.”

  “You… you what?” She imagined her nine-year-old self whispering to him through the glass and blushed a hot, shameful red that went all the way down her throat. Could he really have heard all the things they’d said to him, all the ridiculous things that had been said around him, for all the time he was there?

  “Walk.” He pulled her along the road. “We must go. We’re out in the open here.”

  She struggled against his grip, but he pulled her along, squeezing her wrist tightly enough to bruise.

  “What about Amanda? We can’t just leave her!” she shouted.

  “She sleeps,” he said. “My fault, perhaps, but I cannot alter it, nor is it of much consequence now. Things will be worse for her and for everyone else if you don’t tell me where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  “The sword.” He sounded exasperated. “The one you used to free me. Do not play at ignorance.”

  Dread turned Hazel’s stomach. She thought of the nearly empty trunk underneath her bed. “A sword?”

  “Return Heartsworn. Things will go better for you if you simp
ly do as I ask. If you trifle with me, I will have to show you why that is unwise.”

  “Ask?” Hazel snapped automatically. “You call what you just said ‘asking’?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She urged herself to think. It was disorienting to stumble along, aware that he might be taking her somewhere to kill her and at the same time, confusingly, embarrassed that he was going to kill her while she was wearing her pajamas and wellies. If she’d known she was going to die at his hand, she would have dressed up.

  His lip curled into an almost smile, and he jerked her arm. “Asking in the nicest way I know.”

  “Want my help?” she said. “Then tell me what you did to Amanda.” As she spoke, she fumbled in the pocket of her coat for her cell phone. He might be a magical creature, a real knight, but he’d still been asleep for a hundred years. She bet he didn’t know shit about modern technology.

  “I? You are much mistaken if you think it was I who did that. There are worse things than me in these woods.”

  “What kinds of things?” Hazel asked.

  “You have perhaps heard of a creature who was once one of the Folk and is now something else. A creature of mud and branch, moss and vine. She hunts me. It was she who set upon your Amanda. No blade but Heartsworn could even scratch her, so you can see it would be in your own best interest to give me the sword.”

  Oh, Hazel thought, a little bit dazedly. No big deal. Just the monster from the heart of the woods, the creature of legend. She tried to keep her fingers steady as she typed to Ben without looking at her phone, grateful for a lifetime of texting during class: HELP AMANDA HURT ON GROUSE RD!!! MONSTER!