Mrs. Gordon held up her hand, cutting off Hazel’s words. “Enough, both of you. Jack, you get on out of here. You can’t come inside right now. You’re going to go off to the Evanses’ or someplace you think you can stay for a while. And you’re not to come back until I say so. Do you understand?”

Hazel never thought Mrs. Gordon would ever kick Jack out, not for anything. Ground him, sure. Make him do extra chores or take away his cell phone or dock his allowance, but not this. Not throw him out of her house like he’d never been her son.

There was a muscle moving in Jack’s jaw and his eyes shone too brightly, but he didn’t protest, didn’t beg. He didn’t even explain himself. He just nodded, once. Then he turned away and started walking, leaving Hazel to run after him.

“We’ll go to my house,” she said.

He nodded.

Together, without speaking, they walked, keeping to the edge of the road. The early-morning air felt good in Hazel’s lungs, and although her legs still ached from dancing, it was reassuring to put one foot in front of the other on the asphalt. The sun was rising fast, hot on her back, but it was still too early for many cars to be out, so she veered to walk on the center line of the street. Jack kept pace with her, striding along as if they were gunfighters heading into a strange new town, looking for trouble.

CHAPTER 17

Ben sat at his desk, watching Severin sleep. He just couldn’t quite wrap his head around the fact that the boy he’d whispered to through glass was lying on his bed, head pressed against his pillow, one horn making a deep indentation in it—a pillow Ben had drooled on and cried into and shed skin on, which seemed kind of disgusting the more he thought about it. But that was part of what made Severin’s being there so impossible. His room was such an ordinary place, filled with junk he’d amassed over seventeen years of life, and Severin wasn’t ordinary at all.

They’d talked for hours in the dark. Severin had wound up on the floor, head tipped back, showing the long column of his throat, eyes drifting closed as it got closer to dawn.

“You’re welcome to take the bed,” Ben had said, shifting to the edge of it, rumpling the comforter. “I mean, if you want to rest.”

At that, Severin’s eyes opened. He blinked rapidly, clearly disoriented, as though he’d half forgotten where he was. “No. I ought not. I fear never waking.”

Ben considered that. “Have you even slept since the curse was broken? Because that was more than two days ago. Forty-eight hours?”

Severin nodded vaguely.

“And you’re not planning to ever sleep again?” Ben asked, raising his eyebrows in a slightly exaggerated manner.

A corner of Severin’s mouth lifted. “You think I’m too tired to detect sarcasm?”

“That’s not sarcasm,” Ben said, grinning. “At least not sarcasm exactly.”

With a groan, Severin levered himself up and spread out on Ben’s vintage Star Trek coverlet, the one he’d told Hazel was ironic but secretly he just really loved. “Haven’t I slept enough?” he asked, but the words became garbled at the end, his body stretching and relaxing into sleep. He looked as beautiful as he’d ever been, messy waves of dark hair curling around his horns, brows curving up, berry-pink mouth slightly parted. Now that he was no longer enchanted, he slept restlessly, his eyes moving beneath lids and his body turning on top of Ben’s bed. Maybe he was dreaming for the first time since he’d been sealed in the coffin.

And so Ben sat like a lone and lonely sentinel until the sky was light outside and he heard a creak on the stair. He went to the door and cracked it open. His sister was in the hallway, Jack behind her. Hazel looked as if she’d come from a party, in a green velvet top she hadn’t been wearing yesterday morning. Her jeans were muddy and her shirt was ripped along one seam. Her hair was tousled and tangled with twigs. Ben watched as they went into Hazel’s room.

“Are you sure you’re not going to get in trouble, having me here?” Jack whispered. He sat on the edge of her bed.

Hazel shook her head and went to close the door. “Mom won’t care. She likes you.”

Where have they been? Ben stared at the closing door, wondering what exactly he was seeing. He’d figured that wherever Hazel had made Jack take her that night had something to do with how she’d been able to free Severin and whatever else she’d been lying about lately. But seeing them together, looking like they were about to sleep in the same bed, worried him for entirely different reasons.

He loved his sister, but she sure broke a lot of hearts. He’d rather Jack’s not be one of them.

The hallway went dark again. A few moments later his sister left her room. Ben thought she was going to cross to the bathroom. Maybe he could catch her before she got there and find out what was going on. But she stopped, leaned against the wall, and started to sob.

Horrible, silent cries that made her bend double, curling around her stomach, as though it hurt to weep like that. Lowering herself to the floor, she crouched down, almost soundless. Tears ran over her cheeks and dripped off her chin as she rocked back and forth.

Hazel never cried. She was forged from iron; she never broke. No one was tougher than his sister.

The worst part was how quietly she wept, as if she’d taught herself how, as if she was so used to doing it that it had just become the way she cried. When Ben was little, he remembered how much he’d envied Hazel, free from expectations or obligation. If she wanted to teach herself how to swordfight with YouTube videos and books checked out of the library, their parents didn’t tell her she should practice scales instead. She wasn’t the target of Mom and Dad’s lectures on how talent wasn’t meant to be wasted, how gifts came with obligations, how art was important.

He saw now the ways in which they tried to be careful with each other, afraid of hitting those raw places where they might hurt each other almost without trying. But sparing another person is a tricky thing. It’s easy to think you’re succeeding when you’re failing spectacularly.

After a few moments Hazel lifted her shirt to rub the velvet against her eyes. Then she got up with a last, shuddering sigh and went back to her bedroom.

Ben padded over and turned the knob. Jack was unlacing his boots while Hazel brushed the leaves out of her hair, her eyes red and a little puffy. They both froze.

“It’s just me,” Ben said.

“We weren’t—I mean, not really—” Jack started, making gestures toward the bed that Ben thought meant “I am not trying to dishonor your sister, although it is possible that I am hoping to have sex with her,” at the same time Hazel began apologizing for ditching Ben.

He held up his hand to stop them from talking. “I need one of you—ideally Hazel—to explain what’s actually been going on, and I need that to happen right now, starting with where you were last night.”

“We went to the faerie revel,” she said, sitting down heavily on her bed. She looked exhausted, the skin under her eyes as dark as a bruise. Ben hadn’t expected her to give in so easily after so much evasion. “It didn’t exactly go the way I’d hoped, but I found out some things. The Alderking offered to trade the town’s safety for the capture of his son. There’s only one problem, which is that he’s crazy. Okay, two problems, the second being that his idea of a safe town is bullshit.”