The Darkest Part of the Forest

  She wondered how much worse she was about to make it.

  “Jack,” Hazel called, before she could lose her nerve.

  He turned, and his smile was real enough that she felt somewhat better. At least until she saw how red and watery his eyes were, as though irritated by all the charms and oils, because any protection from faeries must work against him. Then she saw how raw Carter’s knuckles looked. Blood was drying across them. There must have been a fight.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” she asked, weaving her way to Jack through the tide of the hallway.

  Carter gave him a playful shove in Hazel’s direction. “Go on, then. Don’t keep the girl waiting.” Hazel wondered what she’d done to get on Carter’s good side.

  Jack looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

  They matched their steps to each other’s. He had on a striped cardigan over a worn Afropunk festival T-shirt. Heavy silver hoops shone in his ears. He tried to hold on to the smile for her, but it sat in odd contrast to the rest of his expression.

  “You okay?” she asked, clutching her books to her chest.

  He sighed. “I just wish Carter didn’t have to deal with this. You probably heard it all already, but just in case, he didn’t do anything to her.”

  Hazel started to protest that she already knew that.

  He shook his head. “And I didn’t, either. I swear it, Hazel—”

  “Listen,” she interrupted. “I really do know it wasn’t him. Or you. I saw Amanda last night with the horned boy.”

  “What?” His brows went up, and he stopped looking eager to convince her of Carter’s innocence. “How?”

  “I told the police, but I don’t know if it matters,” she said. “And I’m sorry to have to ask you this on top of everything else, but I need to know where the Folk hold their full-moon revel. Can you help me?”

  “That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?” Jack asked her, his expression becoming remote. “That’s why you stopped me in the hall?”

  “I really need to know.”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I know where it’s held.”

  She soldiered on. “Have you been there?”

  “Hazel,” he said, cautioning her.

  “Please,” she said. “One way or another, I’m going to go.”

  Jack tilted his head in a way that made her newly aware of the way the planes of his face weren’t quite like Carter’s, of how his cheekbones were higher, his face longer. And she was aware, too, of the subtle points at the tips of his ears. For a moment, as when he delivered the warning to her and Ben, his familiar face was made strange.

  She thought of Leonie’s story about him whispering in Matt’s ear, about Matt slamming his own fist into his own face, over and over again.

  “I’ve got to get to class.” He started to walk away, then seemed to feel bad about it and turned back to her. “I’m sorry.”

  She grabbed hold of his arm. “Jack,” she said. “Please.”

  He shook his head without looking at her. “Did you know there are different names for different moons? This month it’s going to be the Hunter’s Moon, but March has the Worm Moon and the Crow Moon. May has the Milk Moon, July the Mead Moon. February has the Hunger Moon and late October the Blood Moon. Aren’t they lovely names? Aren’t they something, Hazel? Aren’t they warning enough?”

  “How many times have you been there?” she asked in a whisper. If Jack’s mother even suspected, it would break her heart.

  “Lots,” he said, finally, in a strangled voice.

  “I’m going with you,” she said. “We’re going together tonight to the Blood Moon or the Hunter’s Moon or whatever name you want to call it—the Head Chopping Moon, for all I care.”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s not safe for you.”

  “Did you not just hear me say I don’t care?” Hazel said. “Someone is using me and I need to know who and why. And you need to clear Carter’s name—and yours, too. We need to know what’s really going on.”

  “Do not ask me for this,” Jack said, with odd formality. Hazel wondered if he was worried about betraying his other family. She wondered if his Fairfold was a Fairfold that Hazel couldn’t even imagine.

  “I’m not asking,” she told him, as firmly as she could. “I’m going, even if I’m going alone.”

  He nodded once, inhaling shakily. “After school. I’ll meet you on the kids’ playground.” Then he turned and sped off down the hall. A few stray students, late to class or sporting hall passes, slid away from him as though he were contagious.

  CHAPTER 11

  Changelings are fish you’re supposed to throw back. A cuckoo raised by sparrows. They don’t quite fit anywhere.

  Jack grew up knowing he was strange, without, at first, knowing why. He wasn’t adopted—he could see that. He looked just like his brother, Carter. He had the same dark skin as his mother and the same tight brown curls and the same slightly-too-long first toes. But something was wrong. He might have his father’s amber eyes and his father’s chin, but that didn’t seem to stop Dad from glancing at him with a worried, nervous expression, an expression that said, You’re not what you seem.

  His mother rubbed him with coconut oil after his bath and sang him songs. His grandmother held him and told him stories.

  “There was a village near the Ibo River,” one story began, a story passed down to his grandmother from her Yoruban ancestors. In it, a woman named Bola had a son who grew too large to carry on her back to the market, so Bola waited until he was sleeping and went without him, latching the door behind her. When she returned, he was still asleep, but all the food in the house was gone.

  She wondered whether someone could have snuck into the house. But the door had not been forced and nothing but the food was missing.

  Soon after, a neighbor came to Bola and asked her to repay a string of cowrie shells. Bola hadn’t borrowed money from her neighbor and told her as much. But the woman insisted, explaining that Bola’s son had come to her house, saying that he was on an errand for his mother, who needed the cowries to buy more food.

  Bola shook her head and brought the neighbor into her house. The child was napping on a woven mat.

  “See,” she said. “My baby is very little, far too small to walk and talk. How could he have come to your door? How could he have asked to borrow cowries?”

  The neighbor stared in confusion. She explained that the boy who’d come to her door looked much like the sleeping child, but was far older. When Bola heard this, she became greatly distressed. She didn’t doubt her neighbor and believed that her child must have been possessed by an evil spirit. When Bola’s husband came home that night, she told him everything, and he became troubled as well.

  Together, they made a plan. Her husband hid himself in the house while Bola went to the market, leaving the baby sleeping behind a latched door, just as before. Her husband watched as the child stood, his body stretching as he grew to the size of a ten-year-old. Then he began eating. He ate yams, locust beans, ripe mangos, pawpaw, and savory plantains, washing it all down with water from a calabash. He ate and ate and ate.

  Finally, his father, recovering from the shock of what he’d witnessed, stepped from his hiding place and called the child’s name. At the sound of his father’s voice, the boy shrank down to a baby again. In this way, Bola and her husband determined that their child was, indeed, possessed by a spirit. They beat the child with rushes to drive the spirit out. Finally, it fled, leaving them with their own sweet baby again.

  Jack hated that story, but it didn’t stop his grandmother from telling it.

  Years later, when Jack heard how he had come to be part of the family, he remembered the folktale and understood the reason his father looked at him the way he did. He was neither his father’s son nor his mother’s nor chosen by the family; he’d been foisted on them. He was wearing borrowed skin, watching them with borrowed eyes, and living with them in the life he’d almost stolen fr
om Carter.

  And, like Bola’s child, Jack was always hungry. He ate and ate and ate, fresh cheese and loaves of bread, jars of peanut butter and gallons of milk. Sometimes, when one of his parents took him to the grocery store, he would swallow a dozen eggs behind a turned back. They would slide down his throat, shells and all, filling up the aching emptiness inside him. He picked sour apples off the summer trees and gulped down cotton balls soaked in water when he was too embarrassed to ask for a fifth helping of dinner.

  The first time he met Hazel Evans, he thought that she might be a creature like him. She looked wild enough, her hair clumped with mud and face smeared with berry juice, running through the woods in bare feet, sword strapped to her back. Ben Evans had come running behind her, nearly as wild.

  They stopped short at the sight of him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Hunting monsters,” Ben said. “Seen any?”

  “How do you know I’m not one?” Jack had asked them.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Hazel said. “If you were a monster, you’d know it.”

  Jack wasn’t so sure. But they’d shown him how to find blackberries and how to make a sandwich of dandelion leaves, wild onions, and fiddlehead ferns. More than anyone he’d ever known, Hazel was herself. Not scared of anything. Not scared of him.

  And Ben understood about having magic. He understood all the ways that magic sucked.

  Which was one of the reasons Ben was an awesome friend. They got tight after he came back from Philadelphia, in part because they made a pact to tell each other all the stuff they couldn’t tell anyone else. Ben confessed that his music alternately tempted and terrified him. He told Jack stories about the ways his parents were screw-ups. In turn, Jack told Ben about the magic sparking inside him and how hard it was to hide sometimes. He told Ben about the hunger and the loneliness.

  “So the riders came again?” Ben asked one afternoon, after a full-moon night. They were walking home from school, past the glass coffin, where Ben would go on his lunch breaks to talk with the sleeping prince. Jack thought about teasing him, but Ben’s crush on the horned boy was only slightly more ridiculous than Jack’s own crush.

  He nodded, torn.

  “Does your mom suspect?”

  Jack shrugged. “She never says anything, but she’s always rubbing the lintels with Saint-John’s-wort to keep the Folk out—or me in. Hangs a garland of marigolds over the doors on May Eve.”

  “That sucks,” Ben said, looking up at the sky. “But it sounds like it could just be her standard operating procedure. If she knew, she’d say something, wouldn’t she?”

  “Maybe. Just the other day, she made Carter carry dried holly berries in the pocket of his jacket. He got mad and chucked one at me. They sting like a bitch.”

  Ben winced. “I bet.”

  Jack remembered the way his skin had hurt for an hour after, as from a spider bite. Fairfold was full of protections. People wore them around their necks, smeared them on their doors, hung them from the rearview mirrors of their cars. The stupid Saint-John’s-wort made him itch. So did cold-shaped iron, when it was near him, although it burned where it actually touched his skin. Pockets full of oatmeal or grave dirt made him sneeze. Some amulets made his head hurt; others made his head swim. None of it was deadly, not just from being close by, but the constant discomfort was a reminder of how little he belonged among the people of the town.

  Jack picked up a dried-out stick, turning it in his hand. “It would almost be better if she did know.”

  They’d come for the first time two months before, on a full moon. Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses—one black, one white, and the third red. Jack had woken from a sound sleep to music—music that made him feel an intense longing for the forest and the wind in his face and the casting-off of mortal things. When he went to the window, he saw them on the lawn, riding around the house, eyes flashing, hair streaming like pennants. Seven times they circled and then the riders paused, looking up as though they’d spotted him in the window. They were achingly beautiful and absolutely terrifying, black-eyed and red-mouthed. One wore a face familiar enough that it seemed to him that this must be a dream. He knew, without any speech, that they wanted him to follow. He shook his head, staying where he was, framed by the window, fingernails digging into the wood. After a few moments, they turned one by one and rode off.

  In the morning, when Jack woke, the window had been thrown wide, despite his mother’s anointing of the lintel. Leaves were scattered all around his room.

  “Creepy riders are creepy,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, creepy,” Jack echoed, but even to his own ears, he didn’t sound sincere.

  “You’re not going away with them next time, are you?” Ben asked, voice teasing.

  “Shut up.” Jack chucked the stick at Ben, but he ducked and it flew past him.

  Ben stopped walking and stopped smirking, too. “Wait, you are?”

  “You don’t understand what they were like. How I felt. You can’t understand.” Jack spat out the words before he considered them, unwilling to tell Ben that he had gone that last time. He’d regretted not riding alongside them ever since they’d come on the first full-moon night. When he refused them a second time, it nearly broke his heart. The third time he was helpless to resist the call. He went, and after, he feared he could not summon up the strength to resist them again.

  Maybe Ben saw something of what Jack felt in his expression, because he grew serious. “Sometimes I wonder about Kerem,” he said. “I worry that the music made him like me. And even knowing that doesn’t keep me from wanting to play again. That’s why I broke my hand. Otherwise, I’d play. Every time I wanted something bad enough, I’d play.”

  Jack blinked, shocked. “How come you never said that before?”

  Ben snorted. “Saving it for a special occasion, I guess. A special occasion where I could make you feel less crappy by telling you something awful about myself. But if you don’t want to go with them, you’re going to have to lash yourself to the bed like sailors who lashed themselves to masts to avoid jumping into the sea with Sirens.”

  Ben might have understood more than Jack had thought, but he still couldn’t possibly have known what it was like to ride with them through the night or plunge into a moonlit pool. He couldn’t have understood what it felt like to dance until the force of his steps seemed to crack open the earth itself, to be among creatures who had never been human and could never be human, to be one of them. And Ben couldn’t have known the shame that Jack felt after, when, sweat cooling on his skin, he promised himself that when they came for him the next time, he wouldn’t go.

  A promise that he’d never keep.

  CHAPTER 12

  Instead of going to lunch, Hazel went to the bathroom to splash water on her face. Studying her freckles in the mirror, looking past eyeliner and eye shadow to the blue of her iris, hoping to see someone who knew what she was doing staring back. Someone she could believe would get her out of this. No such luck.

  Jack might take her to the revel, but once there, she was going to need to figure out the right questions to ask, the ones that would make them think she knew more than she did, the ones they would answer without knowing they were giving anything away. The girl in the mirror didn’t look like a master of deception, though. She looked as if she was already in over her head.

  If she couldn’t trick them, then it would be good if she had something to trade, because with the Folk, nothing was ever free. If she’d been like Ben, she could have played a song for them and, even broken-fingered, it would probably have been so good that they would have granted her any boon. If she’d been like Jack, they would have told her stuff because she was one of them.

  But she was Hazel. She had no magic. Which meant she needed to be on her toes, thinking fast and paying attention to everything. With a sigh, she took one of the paper towels from the dispenser, wiped her face, and went into the hall.

&nbs
p; A freshman boy came around the corner so fast he nearly knocked into her. He was crying, openly crying. Lourdes’s little brother—Michael, she thought that was his name. Tears streamed over his blotchy cheeks. He was weeping so hard that a choking sound came from his throat.

  “Mike?” she said. “Did something happen?”

  “I can’t,” he managed through the tears and ragged breaths, wiping at his wet face furiously. “I can’t stop. She’s coming. She’s almost here.”

  The door to a classroom to Hazel’s right flew open, and seniors flooded into the hall, eyes wild with terror and wet with tears. Megan Rojas fell to her knees and began to tear at her clothes in an orgy of grief.

  “Please,” Franklin sobbed, turning his face to Hazel, his grief so raw she barely recognized him. “Please, make it stop. Kiss me. Make it stop.”

  Abruptly, she remembered Jack’s warning: Something even more dangerous than your prince walks in his shadow. Do not seek him out.

  Hazel backed away from Franklin, from the choking tears and his terrified, upturned face. In all the stories of the monster, none of them had included anything like this.

  “It’s so sad,” Liz was saying, over and over, words muffled by tears. “So sad. So very, very sad.”

  Hazel had to do something—she had to find Ben before whatever was happening to them happened to him. She started to run, turning a corner into the art room hallway. Light streamed in from a bank of windows facing a grass-covered courtyard. One of the freshman Language Arts teachers was locking a door. A burst of laughter came from another classroom. It was as though she hadn’t just come from a hallway full of weeping students.

  “Shouldn’t you be in class?” Ms. Nelson asked.

  Hazel began to speak, stammering over words, when, above their heads, a loudspeaker crackled to life. Someone on the other end seemed to be crying. The sound of it stuck in Hazel’s head like taffy.

  Ms. Nelson looked puzzled. “Someone must have hit the button in the office without realizing it.”