Wink Poppy Midnight(31)

I sat back down and Wink ran her fingertips over my scalp. She smelled like cinnamon. “Mim knows we did it. She knows we tied her up and left her there.”

Wink’s fingers stopped moving. “Yes.”

“Is she angry?”

“Yes.”

I turned, so I could see her face.

The summer sun was bringing out Wink’s freckles. They were darker than they had been just a few days ago. Her freckled skin was so different from Poppy’s perfect milky white. And I liked it. I liked it so much it hurt.

“Wink, I’m scared that the night in the Roman Luck house damaged Poppy in some deep way. I don’t think we did the right thing. I don’t feel, in my heart, that it was right.”

“She would have done the same to me, if you hadn’t stopped her. Sometimes the only way to fight evil is with evil.”

But I’d seen Poppy shivering and shivering and I’d still tied her up and left her in the Roman Luck house. And then I’d fallen asleep and not gone back to free her until dawn.

“You destroyed the monster, Midnight. That’s what the hero does.”

After Poppy, after all her lying and lying, I didn’t believe anyone about much of anything anymore. Except Alabama, and he was in France.

But I wanted to believe Wink.

Her eyes met mine, and I saw a cloud pass over them, like she knew. Like she’d just read the doubt in my mind.

And then she hugged me, tight, her arms around my neck, her cheek in its hollow, her skin nuzzling into mine. She wound her fingers in my hair, and her freckles flowed around me like a scarf and she was whispering things in my ear, hero things, Thief things . . .

Bee Lee started climbing up the hayloft ladder. I knew it was her because she was singing a little song to herself about chickadees and werewolves. When she got inside she went right up to me, like she sensed something. She ran sticky fingers over the back of my hand and smiled at me.

“Are you okay, Midnight?”

I shook my head.

“I have bad days too.” She pulled a strawberry out of her pocket, plucked the green stem off, and gave it to me. “But tomorrow will be better. That’s what Mim always says. You just have to eat a strawberry and then wait for tomorrow.”



I WENT TO Poppy’s house. I stood at the door for ten minutes, and never rang the bell.

It wasn’t until I finally turned to leave that I saw Thomas lurking in the shadows near the lilac bushes, watching me.

He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything.

I ate supper with my dad, late, which he liked. Tomato, mozzarella, and pesto sandwiches, sitting on our front steps, facing the orchard and the creek and the Bell farm.

There were fireflies.

If I was extra silent and he knew something was wrong, he didn’t ask me about it.

My bedroom smelled like jasmine. It hung on the air, thick and humid. I threw off my clothes and fell on the bed and closed my eyes and told myself it wasn’t real. Poppy wasn’t in my room. She’d never be in my room again. I’d seen to that.

I’d made my choice. I’d gotten my wish.

My mom used to make pumpkin hot chocolate every fall. She’d put milk, vanilla, cinnamon, maple syrup, and chocolate in a pan, and then when it was hot she’d whisk in a can of pumpkin puree. Alabama and I could drink whole mason jars of the stuff, and did. And now just the sound of my feet crunching on fallen leaves conjures up the smell of it, crystal clear, like I had a mug of it right in front of me.

The jasmine . . . it was like the pumpkin hot chocolate. It was all in my head.

But I dreamed of her anyway. I dreamed she came in through the window and lay down next to me, her silky blond hair spreading across my chest.





THE STORY HAD started in earnest now.

The threads were spinning.

Midnight was shook up. He destroyed the monster. That was always a turning point on the Hero’s journey, like when Peter kills the wolf on the other side of the Wardrobe and the Lion tells him to clean his sword. Like when Elsbeth cuts out Jacob’s heart, and roasts it on a spit, and feeds it to his lover, in Elsbeth Ink and the Seven Forests.

There are Scottish folktales that tell of people who go off into the Highlands, and disappear into the mist, and are never seen again.

That’s what happened to Roman Luck.

That’s what happened to my father. He disappeared into the mist. I thought he was the Hero, but he was just a man.

I told Midnight that I’d held Alexander in the fog the day he died. Alexander was the Hero in A Cloak, A Dagger, A Journey—but he’d been alone when the poison reached his heart, at the end. He fell down on the road, his hands clutching the golden penny whistle that the black-haired princess gave him the day he saved her life.

I’d imagined what it would have been like, imagined it so clearly, with the cold mist on my neck and his eyes going dark and his body going stiff in my arms. It was real. It happened.

Mim came into my room, later that night, after the Orphans were asleep. She asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell her.

I just shook my head and kept quiet.





I WAS STRETCHED out in my bed and staring at the windows. It was raining again. I stayed there so long Dad knocked on my door, a cup of green tea in his hand. I got up, took it, and slid back under my covers.

Her body, slumped and blue in the gray light.