‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Maybe I wanted to ask a question, and I thought that, given you lived in my house for three months and pretended to be my cousin, you’d do me the courtesy of answering. Why does no one remember who you are?’
‘They do remember who I am,’ he says. ‘I am Finn Blacklin.’
I’m momentarily so filled with rage I can’t even form words. It’s only the last vestiges of self-preservation which keep me from headbutting him in the teeth.
‘No,’ I say at last. ‘No, you’re not.’
‘This is the life that was meant to be mine,’ he says. ‘These are my parents that live here, the father that sired me, the mother that gave birth to me, before I was snatched away by the Seelie King and a fairy changeling was left in my place. The child that lives here is my brother, my blood, not his. I am Finn Blacklin. Tam Linford never existed.’
‘You one thousand per cent existed. I was there. I remember. You lived in my house. I saw you and I heard you and God, did I smell you, Tam. And so did Disey and Shad, so why don’t they remember you any more? Who’s taking those memories out of people’s heads?’
‘I owe you nothing,’ he snarls at me. ‘No answers. No loyalty. You and yours have done nothing but take and take from me and here you are to ask for more.’
I might be angry, but Tam is furious. He’s practically pulsating. If he were a cartoon character, he’d be bright red and steam would be coming out of his ears.
I swallow.
‘One answer,’ I say. ‘I just want you to answer one question, and then I’m gone, Tam. I’m gone, and you never have to speak to me ever again.’
Silence.
‘Or – or maybe you do want to speak to me again,’ I venture. ‘Maybe we can make a deal. There must be questions you want answered, right? You’re living Finn’s life now. I’m his girlfriend. No one knows him better than me. I can tell you the things you want to know, and –’
‘I have no need of you for that.’
‘Tam –’
‘I have no need of you at all.’
‘Will you be saying that when Matty’s birthday rolls around?’ I improvise wildly. ‘When he’s crying because you forgot, will you still be saying you don’t need me? I know you’re angry with me, Tam, and I don’t blame you, but we can be adults about this. Last night you said we could work together, and I said no, and I was wrong, and I’m sorry. You were kind to me, and I should have listened to you.’
‘Yes. You should have.’
‘Just answer my question – just tell me who’s making everyone forget about you – and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I promise.’
I could write a catalogue of Finn’s smiles, if someone decided that was a thing that the world needed. Smiling seems like such a simple action, but he has infinite variations on a theme. There’s the mischief-managed smile that used to irritate me so much at school when he and his mates would pull some stupid prank. There’s the oh-hi-nice-day generic smile that means hello, the forced smile in student leader meetings when that one kid in Year Ten decides to monologue for a million hours, the hopeful smile I see sometimes in his eyes when he wants something, the smile that he smiles against my lips when we’re halfway through kissing, the slow lazy smile that spreads across his face whenever I remove any article of clothing – smiles and smiles and smiles for days.
But I’ve never seen Finn smile the way Tam does, a smile so casually cruel.
‘I said,’ Tam says, ‘I don’t need you,’ and grabbing me by the scruff of the neck, he drags me outside.
I trip over the lip of the screen door as he hurls me out onto the patio, but he has hold of the back of my shirt and hauls me upright, the material bunching tight around my neck and choking me. The strange thump sounds again as he drags me past the pool – I think he’s going to throw me in for a second and everything goes white, because even though I might take a few steps into water when Finn is there waiting for me, I can’t be alone in deep water, not after Miller’s Creek – but then we’re past it and he kicks open the door of the shed at the bottom of the yard and throws me bodily inside and –
‘Holly!’ I exclaim.
‘Help me,’ she croaks, her voice raspy and broken.
‘You can help yourself, Holly-Anne,’ Tam says. ‘Tell me where you hid the Silver Lady, and I will let you go.’
‘Go to hell,’ she spits at him.
She might already be there, because she sure looks like hell. Tam’s tied her to one of the loungers the Blacklins keep next to their pool, hands and feet bound with cut-up sections of garden hose. She’s filthy, and her lips are dry and cracked, blood crusting at one corner.
She looks like she could pass out at any moment, but her face curls into a snarl and she yanks so hard at her bindings that she lifts the whole lounger up on one side. It thumps hard as it hits the ground. ‘You’re free, idiot,’ she rasps at Tam. ‘Emily’s gone, and you’re free. You should be thanking me for getting her out of your head.’
‘The Silver Lady did you a great honour, taking you as her handmaiden,’ Tam says. ‘You betrayed her, and she does not easily forgive, but she has forgiven before. I will intercede for you. I will tell her you were misguided and misled and bewitched by the Valentine, and she will forgive you. Just tell me where she is.’
‘No,’ Holly spits back. ‘Never.’
‘She will break eventually,’ Tam says to me, an infuriatingly calm note in his voice. ‘It has not even been a day yet. Thirst breaks everyone in the end.’
I try to wheel around to face him, but he still has hold of my shirt and I end up almost suspending myself off the ground. His arm doesn’t move, because of course his muscles are made of whatever substitute they use for iron in fairyland. ‘You could kill her!’
‘I would prefer not to. But she has been intransigent. All this could be over if she told me where she hid the Silver Lady.’
‘Tam, what if Finn’s – your parents come home? What if they come home, and they’re like, “Oooh, time to get working on some of those summer handyman projects I’ve been meaning to do” and they come in here and they find out you’ve turned their shed into your own personal torture chamber?’
‘She will break long before that.’
‘You don’t know that. Finn sent your parents away, but he’s in magical fairytale land now. What if it … there’s probably some magical fairytale term for it that I don’t know, but what if it wears off, that thing where he told them to get out of town? What if they’re pulling up outside right now? What if they’re opening the front door? What if –’
‘Pearl,’ he says, his hand tightening on the back of my shirt, ‘stop.’
‘Or what if the cops come? I’m a person of interest in Phil’s mum’s murder. What if they decide they need to question me again? If they can’t find me, how long do you think it’ll be before they go, “Oh wow, how about we check her boyfriend’s place?” and come here looking for me and find this? Is that how you want to spend your new life as Finn? In jail?’