Silence stretched between them for a long moment. Ben raised his eyebrows.
Jack grimaced. “Yes, I know, okay. It’s ironic, my telling you that, since I’m not human, either.”
“So come with us,” Hazel said, offering up her umbrella. “Share your invaluable inhuman insights.”
Jack shook his head, smiling a little. “Mom would skin me alive if I missed my science quiz. You know how she is. Can’t this wait until after school?”
Besides mandatory family games on Sundays, his mother was the kind of parent who packed lunches in stacked bento boxes, who knew exactly how her kids were doing in every subject, who monitored television time to make sure homework got done. As far as she was concerned, Carter and Jack were headed for Ivy League colleges, ideally close enough to Fairfold that she could drive up and do their laundry on weekends. Nothing was supposed to get in the way of that.
If Jack cut school, he’d be grounded for as long as she could make it stick.
“This is the single greatest thing that has ever happened around here,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “Who cares about a test? There will be a million more quizzes in your life.”
Jack tipped his head forward, highlighting the sharpness of his cheekbones and the silver in his eyes. And his voice, when he spoke, took on an unfamiliar, lilting cant. “There are many things I am forbidden from telling you, for I am bound by both promises and strictures. Three times I will warn you, and that’s all I am permitted, so heed me. Something even more dangerous than your prince walks in his shadow. Do not seek him out.”
“Jack?” Hazel said, stepping back from him, unnerved. Although she’d almost been killed by creatures like the water hag and the barghest, there was something about the elegant, riddling faeries that terrified her more. Right then, Jack sounded like one of them—and not at all like himself. “What do you mean, permitted? Why are you talking that way?”
“The Alderking hunts for the horned boy. The Alderking hunts for whosoever broke the curse. And he is not alone. If you help the boy, you risk much wrath. No prince is worth that price.”
Hazel thought of her hands, of the splinters, of the strangeness of her missing night and her dirt-covered legs.
“Wait, you’re saying that the Folk in the woods are trying to kill him?” Ben asked. “So you’ve known secrets about him this whole time and never bothered to tell us?”
“I’m telling you what I may,” Jack said. “Your prince may be in danger, but he’s also dangerous. Let it be.”
“But why? What did the prince do?” Hazel asked.
Jack shook his head. “That was your third warning, and I may say no more.”
Hazel turned to her brother. “Maybe—”
Ben seemed frustrated, but not astonished. This strange new Jack did not seem so strange or new to him. “I appreciate what you’re saying and all, Jack—we’ll be as careful as we can—but I want to try to find him. I want to help.”
“I expected nothing less.” Jack smiled and was himself again, at least on the surface. But that familiar grin sent a cold chill up Hazel’s spine. She’d always thought of Jack as a good boy, from an upstanding family, with good manners, one who made the occasional snarky remark and loved obscure biographies, but who was probably going to wind up a lawyer like his mom or a doctor like his father. She’d thought of his being a changeling as giving him an inner core of weirdness, sure, but in a town full of weirdness, it hadn’t seemed that strange. But as she stood in the rain, staring up at him, it suddenly seemed a whole lot stranger. “Fine,” Jack continued. “Try not to get killed by some handsome, paranoid elf who thinks he’s stuck in a ballad. I’ll try not to flunk out of physics.”
“How could you—why did you say all that?” Hazel asked him. “How could you possibly know any of it?”
“How do you think?” he asked her softly. With that, he turned and started back to the front entrance through the rain, bell ringing in the distance. Hazel watched the muscles move under his wet shirt.
Leaving her to puzzle over his words and try to figure out—
Oh. To try to figure out how he could know things that only his forest kin could possibly have told him. She watched Jack’s retreat into the school, wondering how she could have known him so long and not guessed. She’d thought he was happy in his human life. She’d thought he had only a human life.
“Come on,” Ben said to her, heading for the car. “Before someone catches us cutting class.”
Hazel slid into the passenger seat, folding her umbrella and chucking it into the back. Jack had unsettled her, but more than the danger he’d warned them about, she feared the possibility that they wouldn’t find any trace of the horned boy at all. That he would become one of those mysteries that never got solved, the kind that became a story people in Fairfold told one another and no one really believed. Remember when there was a beautiful, inhuman boy asleep in a glass coffin? they would say to one another and nod, remembering. Whatever became of him? Stories like that were will-o’-the-wisps, glowing in the deepest, darkest parts of forests, leading travelers farther and farther from safety, out toward an ever-moving mark.
Hazel had seen a surfeit of faerie awfulness, but she was still lured by stories of the beauty and wonder of the Folk. She’d hunted them and feared them, but, like the rest of Fairfold, she loved them, too.
“Has Jack ever talked to you that way before?” Hazel asked as Ben pulled out of the lot, wipers sending waves of water across the windshield. The sky was a glorious bright gray, so uniform that she couldn’t even see where one cloud ended and another began.
Ben glanced over at her. “Not exactly.”
“It was freaky.” She wasn’t sure what else to say. She was still puzzling through what had happened. He’d let his mask slip, apparently on purpose, and she felt stupid that she’d only just realized he’d been wearing a mask at all. “So he talks to them?”
Ben shrugged. “His other family, you mean? Yeah.”
Hazel didn’t want to admit how thrown she felt. If Jack was keeping secrets, they were his secrets to keep—and, she guessed, it was Ben’s job to keep Jack’s secrets, too. “Okay, if we’re supposed to find the prince against Jack’s good advice, where are we going to look?”
Ben shook his head, then grinned. “I have absolutely no idea. Where do you look for somebody who doesn’t even seem like he could be real?”
Hazel considered that, biting her lip. “Town would be strange. All the cars and the lights.”
“If he goes back to his own people, he’s dead, apparently.” Ben sighed and hunched over the wheel, maybe going through the same thoughts she’d had before, the same fear this would amount to nothing, that it was playing a child’s game they ought to have outgrown. Or maybe he was thinking about the ways magic had betrayed him before and was likely to do so again.
She was tempted once more to confess how she’d woken with mud on her feet and glass splinters in her hands, but now it seemed almost like bragging. And to explain why it wasn’t, she’d have to say too much.
In general, her family wasn’t very good at talking about important stuff. And of all of them, she was the least good at it. When she tried, it felt like all the chains on all her imagined safes and trunks started rattling. If she started to speak, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.