light.
“I’ll confess I know you, Jack Daw,” the witch continued.
“It’s Jack Hawthorn now.”
“My garden is a dangerous place for mortals, Jack Hawthorn.”
“Jack.” The alarm was peaking in Christie. “Why don’t I have a shadow?”
“The elixir changes you, mortal boy.” The witch drifted toward Christie, who took another step back as she reached out to brush short black nails across his neck, one fingertip following a scrawl of ink on his collarbone. Her face was exactly like Sylvie’s, her lips red as if she’d just eaten strawberries. A necklace of green and blue beads glistened across the swell of white skin above her bodice.
“Witch.” Jack’s voice knocked Christie’s head up. “Stop that. You can sense that he’s mortal? Even with the elixir in him?”
The witch smiled sweetly at Christie. She leaned close and whispered, “You’re different from most mortal boys. Do you even know what you are?” She twirled and sauntered back to the cottage, her gown’s hem drifting around her bare feet. “You may enter if you can guess my true name.”
Christie looked at Jack. “Do we want to—”
“Tarbh-naith irach,” Jack said. “Dragonfly.”
She shook her head and paused before her door. “You’ll never get what you need from me with that lack of imagination. My garden is hungry, so you’d best move quickly.”
Christie gazed around at the statues tangled in vines and shady-looking plants. A marble girl reaching for an apple had lost her arm. A stone man crouched in a cave of briars, his broken hands outstretched. As the leaves rustled, sounding like the voices of lost souls, Christie swallowed. “Were these peop—”
“You were meant to be a changeling,” Jack said to the witch, not seeming at all concerned by the growing sentience of the vegetation around them, “to replace a girl named Sylvie Whitethorn. Only something in the true world prevented that, so you survived betwixt and between.”
“She was going to replace Sylvie?” Christie now had his back against an apple tree.
“Do you know her?” The witch’s smile vanished. “My original?”
Christie, staring at her, whispered words that came to him like a protective prayer, “She never walks, but glides. A shadow of blue and green. A lovely flicker to the eye. And, in her heart, a queen.”
The witch’s eyes went from unholy silver to a delighted sapphire blue and she tilted her head to one side and said, “Drat. You gave me that poem. I shall have to give you something in return. Come on then. You may call me Sylph.”
She turned and moved into the cottage.
Christie, who hadn’t meant the poem as a gift, who barely understood why he’d spoken it, glanced at Jack, who strode toward the cottage. Realizing he’d be left alone in the whispering garden, Christie hurried after him.
THE HOME OF SYLPH DRAGONFLY wasn’t what Christie had expected. A fire crackled in a brick hearth. The two large rooms were cozy and cluttered with fantastically shaped bottles, trinkets, fossils, weird dolls, and plants grown wild on the sills of the latticed windows. There was an old-fashioned Sears sewing machine in one corner and a battered record player of Barbie-pink plastic on a corner table surrounded by vinyl albums. The forest-green walls were covered with photographs of people who didn’t look quite human. Christie peered at a sepia-tinted picture of a young man with pale, tangled hair. The youth was smiling, one hand resting on the shoulder of the girl who was now humming softly as she opened cabinets in the kitchen.
Christie turned to Jack, who was examining a bowl of apples. “Is that Moth in this pic—”
An invisible force slammed Christie against the wall.
Jack shouted. Christie shook his head and staggered upright, staring at Sylph Dragonfly, who pointed at the photograph and hissed, “How do you know him?”
Jack stepped between Christie and the witch and said, “We call him Moth. Please don’t swat the boy again—he’s very fragile.”
Shaking and bruised, Christie sank down into a chair near the table. His vision was weirdly vivid, and he was beginning to feel a rush that could have come from a hundred energy drinks.
Sylph frowned at the photograph of her and Moth. In it, she wore a black frock, and Moth was dressed in a ribboned jacket. “He is not a friend. He is a mad bastard and a liar and an agent of the Wolf.”
Jack bit into the apple he’d selected. “Break your heart, did he?”
“I don’t have a heart.” Sylph Dragonfly sounded defiant. “That aisling boy was charming. He stole things from me.”
“Things?” Jack’s look