She cranked down the passenger-side window.

“I’m her brother,” Ben volunteered. “Benjamin Evans. You were talking to Hazel.”

The policeman looked at them like he didn’t quite know what to make of the situation. “You both have identification?”

Ben handed over his driver’s license. The officer looked at it for a long moment and then handed it back.

“And you say you saw someone?”

“The horned boy. With Amanda. She was already unconscious, but he was here. And now he’s out there, and if he did this, then we’re all in a lot of danger.”

The cop looked at them for a long moment. “You two better get on home.”

“Did you hear me?” Hazel demanded. “We’re in a lot of danger. Fairfold is in danger.”

The policeman stepped back from the car. “I said, you better get on home.”

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked him. “I mean you weren’t born here.”

He looked back at her, uncertainty in his face for the first time. Then his eyes hardened and he waved them on.

“At least tell me if Amanda’s okay?” Hazel called after him, but he didn’t answer.

Ben drove home with the sun rising in the east, gilding the tops of trees.

As they pulled onto their street, he turned to her. “I didn’t expect you to do that.”

“It didn’t work,” Hazel said.

“Tonight,” he said, keeping his voice light and conversational with clear effort, “kind of got out of control, huh? Everything about it was unexpected.”

“Yeah,” she said, leaning her cheek against the coolness of the window, her hand on the latch of the car door.

He pulled the car into their driveway, the tires crunching over gravel. “I’m your older brother, you know. It’s not your job to protect me. You can tell me stuff. You can trust me.”

“You can tell me stuff, too,” Hazel said, opening the door and stepping out. She expected him to take the earring out of his pocket and confront her with it, demand an explanation. But he didn’t.

For all that they’d claimed they could tell each other stuff, they told each other nothing.

Hazel walked into the house. It was entirely dark. Even the lights in the outbuilding were off. She began to climb the steps.

“Hey, Hazel?” he called softly in the upstairs hall, and she turned. “What did he kiss like?” There was a confusion of emotions on his face—longing and maybe a little jealousy and a whole lot of curiosity.

She snorted a surprised laugh, her bad mood dissolving. “Like he was a shark and I was blood in the water.”

“That good?” he asked, grinning.

She’d known he’d understand. Brothers and sisters had their own language, their own shorthand. She was glad to be able to share the weird, ridiculous impossibleness of it with the only person who knew all the same stories, with the person who’d made up those stories in the first place. “Oh yeah.”

Ben went to her, slinging an arm over her shoulder. “Let’s get you fixed up.”

She let him lead her to the upstairs bathroom, where he sat her on the edge of the tub and then doused all her cuts with peroxide. Together, they watched the liquid hiss and froth over her skin before it swirled down the drain.

Then, kneeling awkwardly on the cracked beige floor tiles, he wrapped her legs and arms in gauze, the stuff they’d called “mummy bandages” when they were little. The old phrase rested on the tip of her tongue, making her remember times they’d come in here after a hunt, cleaning their skinned knees and binding up wrists or ankles.

The house was usually full of people back then, so it was easy to slip in and out. People were always dropping by, come to pose for a piece or to borrow some canvas or celebrate someone booking a job with a bottle of bourbon. Sometimes there wasn’t any food but a weird, boozy trifle left out on the counter, or a can of cold ravioli, or cheese that smelled like feet.

Over the years, her parents grew up and got more normal, even though they wouldn’t admit it. Hazel wasn’t sure if their memories of those days were as much a blur of people and music and paint and confusion as hers were. She wasn’t sure if they missed the way things had been.

What she did know was that normal was a lot more tempting when it was out of reach.

Once normal had been a heavy, smothering blanket she feared being trapped beneath. But now normal felt fragile, as though she could unravel it all just by teasing out a single string.

When Hazel finally collapsed in her bed, she was so tired that she didn’t even bother to pull her comforter up over her body. She fell asleep like a flame being extinguished.

That morning, Hazel dreamed that she was dressed in a tunic of cream wool, with chain mail on top of it. She was riding a horse at night, through the woods, fast enough to see only a blur of trees and flashes of hooves pounding ahead of her.

Then the leaves seemed to part, and by the light of the full moon, she found herself looking down at humans kneeling in the dirt, surrounded by milk-white faerie horses. A man, a woman, and a child. The humans were dressed in modern clothes, flannel, as though they’d been camping. A tent, slashed and sagging, rested beside a dampened fire.

“Shall they live or shall they die?” one of the Folk asked of his companions. He was speaking carelessly, as though it truly didn’t matter either way. His horse snorted and pawed the ground. “I bet they came out here to glimpse sweet little faeries gathering dewdrops. Surely, that’s enough reason to cut them down, no matter how they cringe and beg.”

“Let us see what talents they possess,” said another, leaping off his steed, silver hair flying behind him. “We could let the most amusing one go.”

“What say we give the big one ears like a fox?” shouted a third, a woman with earrings that chimed like the bells on her horse’s bridle. “Give his mate whiskers. Or claws like an owl.”

“Leave the little one out for the monster,” said a fourth, making a face at the child. “Maybe she’ll play with it for a while before she gobbles it up.”

“No, they’ve ventured into the Alderking’s woods on a full-moon night, and they must have the full measure of his hospitality,” Hazel heard herself say as she swung to the ground—was that her voice? She spoke with such authority. And the humans were looking at her with just as much fear as they’d looked at the others with, as though she were a faerie, too. Maybe in her dream, she was. “Let us curse them to be rocks until some mortal recognizes their true nature.”

“That could take a thousand years,” said the first one, the careless one, with a lift of one brow.

“It could take far longer than that,” she heard herself say. “But think of the tales they’d tell if they ever did win freedom.”

The human man began to cry, pulling his child to his chest. The man looked anguished and betrayed. He must have loved faerie stories to have sought the real thing. He should have read those stories more closely.

The silver-haired rider laughed. “I should like to see other mortals picnic upon them, all unknowing. Yes, let’s do that. Let’s turn them to stone.”