Briar Queen_ A Night and Nothing Novel - Katherine Harbour Page 0,123

a kid. It’s my fault for opening that door, for revealing myself. All the Wolf had to do was promise her a place at his side as a queen of shadows.”

Finn had known her sister hadn’t been happy—all those late nights and sneaking out and coming home through the window with the bite of alcohol on her breath. Finn knew her sister’s flaws; Lily was not some brave, adventurous hero—but rather selfish, reckless, and angry with the world.

But in Lot’s house, Finn suspected with a glimmering of unease, Lily had become something else.

Leander said quietly, “Finn, Lily can’t leave the Ghostlands.”

Although she’d heard it before, the shock of this statement made her cold. She told him, “I know you’re worried Seth Lot will follow her. But we’ve got friends back home, people who can protect us. We’ll be safe.” She changed the subject. “How did you become a Jack?”

The rosy light haloed his tangled hair. His short fingernails were grimed and his suit was still grubby. He looked so beaten, she regretted the cruelty of her question.

Then he answered it: “It was in 1987. In San Francisco. I found one of their places. I met a girl. Her name . . . can you believe I’ve forgotten it? She was a Jill.” He hesitated as if trying to find his way around gruesome details. “She didn’t understand what she was doing. The Fatas . . . they’re drawn to the lost and lonely like sharks to blood.”

“She fell in love with you. The Jill.”

“I loved her. But the Fata who made her—that name I remember—it was Amphitrite. She was a sea witch and she wasn’t happy that I was taking away her Jill. As twisted as she was, Amphitrite saw her Jacks and Jills as her children. So I made a deal with Amphitrite. My girl was returned to almost human, enough to forget what she’d been and go home. And I drowned.”

“Returned her to almost human?” Finn didn’t want to comment on his drowning.

He nodded. “A spell. She was still a Jill, physically, but the illusion of being human would keep anyone, even physicians, from noticing. And she believed it.” He continued, gently, “Like what happened to Jack after the Teind. He believed he was mortal.”

“But”—Finn spoke with bitter realization—“he wasn’t.”

Lily twisted in her sleep, cried out, and pushed at the air with one hand. Finn curled beside her and put her arms around her.

Leander came and stretched out on Lily’s other side and, together, they cradled the stolen-away girl they both loved.

ROWAN CRUITHNEAR WOULD LEND THEM his car in the morning. He’d given Jack directions to a train station not used by the Fatas anymore—one unknown to Seth Lot.

“Then we’re almost home.” In the second-floor room Cruithnear had given her and Jack for the night, Finn sat on the bed. Outside was a deep forest of evergreens—a completely different view from the hedge maze in the front of the house. She’d changed into the summer dress of silver silk Cruithnear had given her. She’d put on a fur hunter’s cap and wrapped herself in a fur jacket because she wanted the terrace doors open. Jack had started a fire in the hearth, but the cold air felt good—it cleared her head. “It’s beginning to snow.”

Jack sat beside her. He’d changed out of his bloody clothes into a black jersey and jeans—Cruithnear apparently had many visitors who left clothing.

Finn thought of Lily Rose in the house of the Wolf and pictured Leander drowning to give a girl back her life. She thought of Hester disintegrating, never to be seen again. She curled her fingers in the fur coat. Her jaw clenched.

“Do you see those lights flickering through the trees?” Jack’s voice soothed the prickly sorrow of her thoughts.

“Are they pixies? Will-o’-the-wisps?”

“Those are the souls of the dead passing through the Ghostlands. Don’t ask me where they’re going, but that’s what they are.”

“They’re beautiful.” She watched them and wondered if she knew any of them.

“You wouldn’t think a river of human blood ran beneath that beautiful world out there, would you? Or that a beast disguised as a man stitches up the young with magic. Finn, the train we’re going to take . . . to get back to the true world, we’ll be passing along the border.”

“What border?”

“The one between the land of the living and the land of the dead.”

“Oh.” She didn’t say anything else because she figured the two of them had been walking that border for