Wink Poppy Midnight(49)

Mim looked at me and frowned, deep, lips tucking in at the corners. “Those weren’t Bee Lee’s cards. They were Wink’s.”

My heart stopped beating.

It did.

I put my palm to my chest and pushed in.

“I never told her,” Mim said. “But she started reading cards at twelve, and she learned it for herself. I thought knowing her future might help. Might make her embrace life, live it to the fullest. I was wrong. And then her father up and left too, and they were so close.”

I pressed harder, my whole hand into my chest.

“I don’t believe in tarot,” I said. “I don’t believe in fortune-telling.”

She pulled the cards out anyway, a quick tug of the hidden pocket. She laid them on the table.

A skeleton.

A dead man pierced with swords.

A cloaked figure, five gold goblets.

Two dogs howling at the moon.

A heart with three daggers, sunk to the hilt.

“Yes,” Mim said quietly.

I didn’t know what the cards meant, or what Mim saw in them, but there was sadness blazing in her Wink-green eyes.

“The cards could be wrong,” I said.

“Maybe.” Mim swept up the cards with one hand and put them back in her pocket. She turned to the glass jars and the dream balm, paused, and then looked at me over her shoulder. “Right or wrong, Wink believes them. And that changes everything.”



I FOUND WINK in the hayloft. The Orphans were put to bed at midnight and then it was just the two of us and a blanket on the hay and the moon shining in. We talked for hours. All truth, no fairy tales.

I was almost asleep when she kissed me. She kissed my neck and my chin and my ears and everything in between. She unbuttoned my shirt and I unbuttoned her strawberry overalls. She wrapped her bare arms around me and gripped my back, hard, and I swear I could feel her freckles pressing into my skin, every last one of them.

She didn’t arch her spine or flip her hair.

I pulled away. I looked at her, and she smiled. She smiled right into me—I felt it echo in my ribs, like a shout, like a deep, deep sigh.

Her body curved into mine, chest to chest, my face in her hair.

“Wink,” I whispered, sometime close to dawn, everything quiet but the sky still black. “Wink.”

I put my palm against her heart and waited for it to beat. And beat. And beat.

She squirmed and looked up at me. And I could see it in her eyes. She knew.

“Mim read my cards for you.”

I nodded.

I felt her shrug, her skin moving against mine.

“My heart might have two billion beats left in it, or two hundred.” She sighed. “But it doesn’t matter that much. It doesn’t. I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That’s how I would conquer it, conquer death.”

She sighed again, and nestled closer into me. “All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee’s hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.”



I SAW THE white stag on the way home. He was standing by the apple trees, gleaming like he was made of starlight. He took one long look at me and then bounded off into the dark.

I closed my eyes and made a wish.





THE END OF the summer.

The end of this story.

I kept my promise to Poppy.

I sent for Leaf.

I mailed a letter west, to California, to a cabin in the Red Woods.

Leaf followed his own beat and listened to no one. I didn’t know if my letter would work. Part of me wished I could ask the birds to fetch him, snatch him in their claws and carry him through the sky like Andrew in The Raven War. But part of me also hoped that Leaf would just come back on his own, because I asked him to.

The coyote knew he’d returned before I did. I saw him at the edge of the forest, watching the Roman Luck path. Leaf smiled when he saw the both of us waiting for him, the coyote and me.

Later, after he’d hugged Mim and Bee Lee and let Felix introduce his girlfriend and played Follow the Screams with the twins and Peach . . . he went to her. I left them alone for a while, but in the end I had to see. I snuck over to the Gold Apple Mine, hiding in the shadows like I used to. They were there, sitting by the creek, watching the setting sun, shoulder to shoulder, blond and red.





LEAF.

“So this is how you live now?” he asked.

I felt his eyes on me, on my back, cutting through my clothes, scorching my skin.

I looked at him over my shoulder. He was leaning against the doorframe of the old Gold Apple Mine, red hair and freckles and bony limbs, watching me start a fire. I smiled, a real Poppy smile, not any of those fake smiles I’d been using for so many years.

“Yes,” I said. “I figured it out. I figured myself out.”

Leaf laughed. He laughed, deep and bright, like he’d never done before, not with me anyway.

“Prove it,” he said.

And I did.





I WAS READING by the apple trees, bare feet in the green grass, when I heard the rumble. I looked up. Black clouds rolling in.