“Where have you been? What happened?” I am angry that he left, that he let them take him away. I tug back.
“Cole, say something.” I try to turn toward my home, toward Near, when he pulls me to him again, pressing me against his cool, wind-touched form. His cheek brushes mine. I feel like I’m forgetting something, but then his lips find my lips and his kiss knocks the air out of me.
“Follow me,” he whispers in my ear, his breath cold against my face. I feel my legs bend beneath me, and I will them to keep me up as I let him lead me, and he adds, “I’ll tell you everything.”
“What happened? Where did Otto take you?” The questions pour out. “Where did you go?”
“I’ll show you,” he says, so low and hushed that the sounds barely seem like words at all.
“I found the bones,” I say. Cole’s grip on me tightens for only a moment, and his face darkens, but the shadow passes and his eyes grow calm. The wind picks up around us, and he holds me tightly, his arm wrapped around my waist as he guides me across the moor. Whenever I resist or ask him to explain, he pauses and turns to me, his eyes looking down into mine, and brings his hand to my chin. I feel my face grow hot beneath his palm. When he kisses my forehead, it’s like a raindrop on my skin.
“Cole,” I whisper, confused and relieved at once, but then he kisses me again, really kisses me, cool and ghostly smooth. There is no fear in his kiss, no uncertainty. He kisses me and brushes the back of his hand against my flushed cheek and leads me away, out onto the hills. I barely even notice the village disappearing behind us. I yawn and lean on him in the darkness, sure that this is a dream, that perhaps I have slipped to the wooden floor in the bedroom of my mother’s home. And here, in this dream, Cole is alive and we are walking. I can feel and see him beside me, but the rest of the world seems to have fallen away.
“Where are we going?” I ask. Cole’s grip on me is strange, at once light and tightening, and I resist momentarily, focus on the motion of pushing. Pushing him back from me. Pushing with my fingertips. It takes effort. Cole stops again and turns to me.
“Lexi,” he says in his whispering way, tracing the curves of my face with his fingertips.
As gentle as his fingers seem, I can’t loosen their grip. I blink, the cold air and the panic gnawing its way through my chest. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be home. “Let go, Cole, and tell me what’s going on. Tell me what happened.” And then, when that still elicits nothing but more kisses, I growl, “Cole, let go!” But he doesn’t. He holds me tight with one hand, while the other, which had been on my cheek, wanders down my jaw to my neck. His fingers close around my throat. I gasp, mostly in shock, and fight his hands, but my own go through them, straight through his like they are nothing but…air.
“I did it,” he whispers in my ear, his wind fingers tightening around my throat. I can’t breathe.
“Did what?” I gasp, as Cole’s stone eyes meet mine. Strange how much they look like real stones now.
“I took the children.” The words break into hisses. “I took them all.”
I try desperately to break free, to fight back, but nothing touches this Cole made of wind and stone. The dream dispels, and the world is taking shape around us again, the night thick and the hills rolling away in every direction. How have we gotten so far from the village? Even if I could scream, would the sound reach Near? Would it just melt into the wind?
“What’s wrong, Lexi?” he asks as he chokes me. “You look upset. Hush now. Everything will be all right.” Cole begins to hum that awful tune as my pulse pounds in my ears and the wind whips around us.
How could I have forgotten my father’s knife? I’m not even wearing shoes, I finally realize, looking down at my scratched and bleeding feet. I don’t feel it. Fear has overtaken all other feelings. I push into him with all my force, and not all of him is wind, because I connect, meet with something solid, and he steps back, lets go. I stumble to the tangled grass and wince as a stray and broken branch tears through my nightgown, scratching my leg deeply. Warmth runs over my knee.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask, gasping for air.
“You got in my way,” hisses Cole, and his voice is no longer his, but angrier, older. My fingers close around the branch, still tinged with my own blood, as I push myself to my feet and swing it at Cole, hard. I miss, and the wind picks up and rips it from my hands. I stumble forward. Cole, made of stone, sticks, wind, and something horrible and dark, is leaning over me.
The wind tugs at my limbs, whistling white noise in my ears as it pulls me to my feet. And around the boy I named Cole, several sharp branches rouse themselves from the ground, floating up like leaves in the wind.
“Good night, Lexi,” he whispers, and the branches turn their points toward me and sail through the air. Just then, something takes hold of me from behind, firm and flesh and bone. Arms close around my chest and force me down, down to the matted earth of the moor as the branches soar through the air and smash into shards against the rocks behind me.
The angry moor-made Cole lunges forward, but the form pinning me down lets out a kind of growl, and the wind cuts through from a different side. When it touches Cole, he crumbles midstride to the ground in a heap of stones and twigs and grass. I close my eyes and fight the body on mine, trying to free myself from the warm weight of it. I throw a punch and feel it connect.
“Dammit, Lexi,” comes a familiar voice. “It’s me.”
I blink and find myself looking into Cole’s dark eyes, like some nightmarish duplicate of the face that just disintegrated.
“Get away!” I cry, throwing him off and stumbling back against the rocks. “Don’t come near me.” Cole looks hurt, but I am aching, too, and confused.
“What are you talking about?” he asks quietly, and the edges of his words are clear and crisp. He looks from me to the pile of moor things that had moments before been a frightening likeness of him.
“It wasn’t me,” he says, approaching slowly, as if I am a deer and he’s afraid of startling me. “It wasn’t me. It’s okay.” He takes another step. His face is as pale as the moon overhead. “It’s okay.” My breaths are coming heavily, and I clutch my arms to myself but do not run.
“I’m sorry, Lexi.” Now his fingertips graze my cheek, and they are warm and not made of wind. “It’s okay.” He slides his arms around me. “It wasn’t me.”
I stare past him at the pile of stones. “Then who was it?”
But by the time the question leaves my lips, I know. I step back and slide down onto one of the shorter rocks, trying to catch my breath, the shards of wood scattered around my feet. The world is not swaying as it was, though I still feel ill. The cut on my leg isn’t too deep. In fact, I don’t feel any pain. I shiver, partly from shock, and Cole peels off his cloak and wraps it around me. The shirt he has on beneath is worn and thin, and I take him in for the first time. Alive. And hurt.
In the moonlight I see it, the stain, even darker than his shirt, that’s spread across part of his chest. I touch my fingertips to it. They come away wet.
My uncle. My uncle did this. Or Bo. Cole takes my bloodstained hand as I pull it away, instead drawing me closer, wincing even as he does so.
“I got away,” he says. His hand is warm in mine, and I want to throw my arms around him because he’s there and real, but the stain on his clothes, and the pain in his eyes, warns me not to. I still cannot pull my eyes from the darkness covering his shirt, and part of me is thankful it’s night and the blood is cast in black and gray instead of red.
“I’m fine,” he says, but his jaw clenches as my fingers wander over the stain.
“If by ‘fine’ you mean ‘bleeding,’ then yes, you are,” I snap, trying to examine the wound. I start to lift his shirt, but his hands catch mine.
“I’ll be fine,” he corrects, easing the shirt back down and pushing my fingers gently away.
“Let’s get you home,” he says, helping me to my feet.
“I
don’t think so, Cole. You’re the one who needs help. We need to get you to the sisters.” He’s shaking his head in that slow way Magda does. An amused smile tugs at his mouth.
“Lexi, I left you alone for one night, and you got yourself abducted and nearly killed by the Near Witch. There’s no way I’m letting you walk home alone.” He gestures to the shards of wood at my feet, at my generally bedraggled state.
“To be fair, it looked like you,” I say, suddenly tired. “And when you didn’t come today, I was so…” My voice trails off, finds another path. “When I saw that thing”—I point to the pile of twigs and moss and stone—“I was just so relieved.…”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, taking my hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”
My eyes wander to the dark stain.
“What happened?” I can’t stop shaking my head. I feel like all my cottony padding is being pulled out, and the blood and the feeling are coming back.
“They took me out,” he whispers, “onto the moor…” His fingers drift up to his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here.”
“It does matter.”
Cole slips back, and I gasp as he tugs the collar of his shirt aside enough to reveal strips of gray fabric, the lining of his worn cloak, wrapped around his shoulder, just above his heart. The gray has turned almost black where the bullet struck.
I don’t have words for the anger bubbling up in me. “Who?” I manage to growl at last.
“Not your uncle, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He lets go of the shirt with a wince. “He couldn’t do it. Another man took the gun.”
“Bo,” I say. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Better already.” The pain bites into the corners of his eyes, but he tightens his grip on my hand. He leads me back across the moor, tucking me gingerly in beside him. Despite his injuries, he seems to feel what I feel:We are each anxious that the other will blow away. And he shares the same desperate need to remind his skin of my own, to prove that he is still here and I am still here.
“How did you survive?” I ask.
“Not as well as I’d have liked,” he says, taking a shallow breath. “Things are going to get harder.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had no choice. Staying in control wasn’t a high priority at that moment.” He almost laughs, but stops in pain.
“You showed yourself to them, as a witch?”
“The only thought in my head was surviving.”
“What did you do?”
Cole’s arm falls away in response, and by the time I turn to face him, all of him is fading, rippling like heat. The wind picks up and blows through him, and he just bleeds away before my eyes. I turn in a circle, but he’s gone. Panic flashes through me as the wind grows, tugging at Cole’s cloak, curling itself around me; and moments later it’s his arms again, holding me close, eyes looking down into mine.
“Lexi, when they led me out on the moor, for the first time in a very long while, I didn’t want to suffer. I didn’t want to lose…everything for someone else’s crimes. Would that I had realized it a little sooner,” he says, with a small pained laugh. “The only thing I could think of when he raised the gun, when he pulled the trigger, was you. Wanting to hear your voice. Wanting to feel your skin against mine. I feel connected to you, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that being severed. Lost.”
He kisses my forehead. Mouths the words thank you against my skin.
“Luckily for me,” he says, “the hunting party didn’t expect me to do what I did. You should have seen them. Even rabbits don’t scurry off so fast.”
I laugh with him now because we need to laugh. I laugh as his kisses find their way down my cheek, to my lips. They leave tracks across my face, cool and smooth enough to make me pause, to make me remember the Cole of sticks and stones that kissed me with moor wind. He winces as he leans in to me, and I’m still laughing as his mouth finds mine, warm and alive. There is no cyclone around us, but the world is falling away again. Everything beyond our skin is falling away. His kisses push the moor-made Cole, the Near Witch’s Cole, from my mind. They push the fear of failing, the fear of banishment, away. His kisses push everything away.
The darkest part of the night passes, and we keep walking. We are almost to my house. And then he stops. I realize that there’s probably a hunter, almost certainly Otto, waiting on the other side of the last hill. Cole brings his hand to his chest defensively, eyeing the slope. I take off his cloak and slip it back around him.
“Cole,” I say, remembering. “I found her bones. The witch’s.” I don’t know why I’m suddenly excited, but I haven’t had a chance to tell him. I try to keep the smile on my face for him. He needs it. “I went back to the forest and I found them.”
“I knew you would. What do we do now?”
“We go back first thing in the morning,” I say.
And then I remember. I’m not supposed to be out here. I’m supposed to be with Wren. Watching Wren. Guarding the window that the ghostly replica of Cole drew open.
“First thing.”
I’m already pulling away.
“Good night, Lexi.”
“I’ll see you in a few hours,” I promise. Our hands slip apart, and he’s gone.
My cottage comes into sight, and Otto is there, propped against the door in the chair my mother set out for Tyler, and fast asleep. His chin is to his chest, and he makes a sound like a rumbling stomach. The sun is just out of sight now, the haloed light at the edges of the moor announcing its approach.
Soon the morning will come, it says as it brushes the grass. Soon the day will dawn, it says as it reflects on the dew. First thing, I add, as I creep back through the window and latch it shut. I see the familiar nest of blankets still piled on the bed, and slip in beside it with a swell of relief. First thing, we will set things right.
IN MY DREAMS, SOMEONE IS SCREAMING.
The voice cries out and gets caught in the wind. It’s tangled, faltering. And then it changes, stretches long and thin, pulled taut before it breaks, and all is quiet. Silent as the sisters’ stone house, where even the wind can’t go. Stifling. I wake with a start, the blankets wrapped too tight around me, too hot. The only sound in the room is my heartbeat in my ears, but it is so loud I’m sure it will wake my sister. By some strange workings, I slept. Not only until dawn, as I had planned, but much longer. Too long. The sun is cutting through in slivers of gray light as I wrest myself free, one limb at a time, from the sheets wound up around me. I stop as my eyes take in the room, registering the subtle changes.
There are two wooden tables beside the bed, one on either side. On mine, my father’s hunting knife rests in its leather sheath, nicks and indents and all. But on Wren’s side, her charm is sitting, cast off, still smelling faintly of earth and sweetness. The window is open and the sun is bright, and the blankets are piled in the same way they were last night, like a nest. But my sister is not beneath them.
The air snags in my chest. Wren is probably tucked into my mother’s bed, but I feel sick as I spring up, tugging my clothes on and wincing as the fabric brushes the deep scratch on my leg. I fasten my father’s knife around my waist, cast a sideways glance at the mirror, blow a dark strand from my face. I stumble across the hall and into my mother’s room. It’s empty. The bed is unmade, and there’s no indent on the left, the side Wren always takes, where my father used to sleep. No mark on the pillow.
No Wren.
Voices spill out of the kitchen, my mother’s and Otto’s, low and strained and lined with something worse, the kind of thing that catches in your throat and bends your words out of key. I hurry in.
“Where is she?” I nearly choke on the question. “Where’s Wren?”
And the answer is in Otto’s eyes as he casts a troubled glance my way, a look that has little sympathy, and more than a touch of blame. He’s leaning on the table, a mug of something hot and strong in one hand. His other hand rests on the rifle spread in f
ront of him, where the morning loaves of bread should be. My mother is not baking. She is standing at the window, staring out and clutching a mug of tea tight enough to turn her fingers as white as flour. The image sways, and I realize my head is shaking back and forth.
And the silence in that kitchen, the absence of an answer to my question, that silence is choking me.
I run to my mother and wrap my arms around her waist, tight enough for her to know I’m here. Flesh and blood and bone, and here. She squeezes back, and we stand there for a suspended minute, clinging in silence. I try to breathe deeply, try to focus. I will find my sister, I remind myself. I will find my sister, I tell my mother silently. Cole and I will find the children today, and we’ll fix this. I repeat this over and over again. Wren’s not gone. It’s just for a little while, just until we reach the forest.
My mother peels herself away from me and turns back to her work. She measures the flour in slow, steady motions, her eyes unfocused, the way she did in the days after my father’s death. Bring her back, her knuckles press into the dough. Bring my baby back, she folds the words in.
“It was that witch,” says Otto. And for a moment, only a moment, I think he knows the truth. Until he adds, “We should have held him down.”
Otto sets the drained mug on the table, not with the usual thud, but a tense and quiet drop. He pulls his gun from the table.
“You still think it was Cole?” I ask, turning on him. “The one you tried to kill?”
“He attacked us,” Otto says hollowly. “We had no choice but to defend ourselves.”
“Did he attack you before or after you shot him?”
My mother’s eyes flick up.
There’s a dead pause before Otto says, “How do you know we shot him?”
“I heard Bo bragging about it.” The words just bubble up. “Bragging about how you couldn’t do it.”
His fingers tighten around the gun and I turn away.
I have to get out of here.