a chair, and the shirt was torn and bloody. Ariel picked the shirt up and stuffed it into the back of the wardrobe, among dozens of pairs of old shoes that perhaps Maeve had worn, many years before. Ariel looked at her wounds; they were nearly healed. She hoped the scars would not vanish.
The first words Maeve said to her downstairs were: “Have you seen Jack?”
This was ridiculous. How could she? She’d been in bed. Ariel shook her head.
Zenna came in from outside. She looked like someone lost. “He’s gone,” she said. “I know. They came for him.”
Ariel could not look at her cousin. She was thinking of fast paws, galloping along the wind, of hot moist breath, of the time when true sight came to her and made it so that she could never be the same again.
“You must be glad,” Zenna said to her. “Everything can be all normal again now.”
“Stop it,” Maeve said. “He might be taking a walk.” But the tone in her voice showed she didn’t really believe that.
How can you love someone who is so beyond all that is real it is impossible even to give them a name? If a person stands up in his real skin and shows you his real self, and you see it is not human, but something more beautiful and wondrous, even though it is potentially deadly, is that enough to change a life forever? But it is a fairy-tale, just words in the dark. How can you feel grief when that is taken from you?
The women of the Green House were struck down by grief. Even the geese by the pond lay down and stretched out their necks, spread out their white wings in the grass.
For a week Ariel was not entirely in the real world. The east wind had brought rain, dark and heavy, so that every day felt as if it was weeping. Ariel didn’t think about whether Jack and his people might come back for her or not. It was impossible to think about anything. She lived in memory alone, like walking through a gallery of pictures, studying each one, experiencing it, but without having any opinion. Her memories brought her great pleasure; her secrets. No one knew. No one suspected. Ariel was the sensible one. It was Zenna who would have strange things happen to her; be taken under the hill by the faery folk, and be allowed home for only six months of the year.
Ariel drifted through the weeping days, while Maeve and Zenna comforted each other. They drew closer in a way they never had before. They were changed too. But the spell over Ariel eventually began to melt away. She could feel the real world coming back. She could not turn into a beast and walk the wind. She could not drink blood and become “other.” That was the tragedy of it. She would never be the same again because she couldn’t be like them. Zenna had been right about that. But at the same time she was not how she’d used to be. She was marked, lines down her torso the color of mulberries.
On the night of the next full moon, Ariel climbed onto the roof of the house. Summer was ending, already the air smelled of decaying fruit and smoke. Autumn air would always smell that way, even if there were no fires, no fruit trees. There were no vampires on the roof, or down in the garden. How cruel they were. And how stupid was she to have believed that once would be enough. Of course it wouldn’t, but even so she had consented.
It was no surprise to her that Zenna wriggled out of her window and used the limbs of the ironwood tree to reach the roof. She did not speak to Ariel at first, but just stood beside her, hands on hips, gazing at the forest behind the house. Eventually she said, “Are you going to tell me or not?”
There seemed no point in being arch and saying, “What do you mean?” Ariel sighed. “I will show you,” she said.
Zenna turned round. Ariel could see she was full of pain and jealousy. She had guessed, no doubt, because Ariel’s secrets were written all over her; she smelled of them. Ariel took off her shirt. In the moonlight her skin was parchment and the claw marks looked like burns.
“Claws, not teeth,” Zenna said.
Ariel nodded. “When they take your blood, perhaps it is something in their saliva