Maybe it would be a good thing if her mum had called the cops. If they were distracted by another missing girl, then it might give me a bit of extra time before they came for me.
‘I’m on my way,’ Holly says. ‘I just have to drop Tricia home, okay? I’ll be home in, like, I don’t know, half an hour? Forty minutes?’
As soon as she hangs up with her mum, she’s on the phone to Lili. ‘Lil, if anyone asks, I need you to cover for me. I was at your place all day today, okay?’
A pause, and then, ‘Fine, fine, I was with a guy, but you can’t tell anyone.’
Another pause, and, ‘Ewww, no, it wasn’t Finn. We’re done, remember? Plus, he’s dating Pearl now.’
All she does is say my name, and it somehow sounds like an insult. I wish I had that talent.
‘Yeah, I don’t get it either, but no one said boys were smart. Cover for me, okay? In case anyone asks? Thanks babe. Bye.’
My own phone vibrates in my back pocket. It’s Disey.
You coming home soon?
Soon, I reply.
If anyone drove past Holly and me right now, they’d see two stereotypical images of the teenage girl – walking along, not really watching where they’re going, too busy looking at their phones to talk to each other. They’d probably be like, ‘Ugh, those teens, with their selfies and their flower crowns and their boy craziness – when are they going to grow up?’
They wouldn’t know what’d happened. They wouldn’t know what we’d done. They wouldn’t know anything about us, but –
‘Are you okay?’ Holly says. ‘You look like you’re about to burst into tears.’
‘I am extremely not okay,’ I say. ‘I haven’t slept in a thousand years, Phil’s mother is dead, my boss is in jail for a murder she didn’t commit and it’s my fault, and Finn’s gone and the one lead I had on getting him back turned out to be a dead end.’
She doesn’t respond.
‘I mean, I didn’t get kidnapped and tortured, but –’
‘It doesn’t have to be a competition about who’s had a shittier day,’ she says. ‘We can both have had shitty days. That’s allowed.’
‘Oh. Um. Yeah.’
I go to turn the corner but she grabs my wrist (thankfully not the one that Tam nearly broke, which is starting to ache). ‘There’s a bike path through here that’s way shorter. Come on.’
I consider protesting – walking down a dark path through the trees seems like a terrible idea in a town with fairies on the loose – but there’s no point, because there are no fairies on the loose, not any more. The scariest thing we might run across on this path is … I don’t know, fruit bats or something.
It’s ironic, really. The most dangerous creatures in the history of the universe have abandoned Haylesford, and it makes me want to weep with despair.
‘I didn’t mean it, you know,’ Holly says.
‘What?’
‘What I said to Lili. About you and Finn. About not getting it. I do get it.’
‘I … have no idea what to say to that,’ I say. ‘Thanks? I guess?’
‘We have to get him back.’
‘I know.’
‘Tam’s not having his life,’ she says. ‘Even if you give up, I won’t let him. It makes me sick to see him in that house.’
‘I climbed in through the bedroom window,’ I say. ‘He slept in Finn’s bed. He didn’t make it afterwards.’
The noise Holly makes is half sympathetic, half snarl.
‘And I’m not going to give up on him,’ I add. ‘Ever.’
‘Good.’
We walk in silence for a few moments before she speaks again. ‘We should have taken care of Tam when we put Emily down. Chained him to her and let him rot.’
‘He’s not like her. He’d die.’
‘I don’t really give a shit about that, or him, or anything he wants, or anything he cares about,’ she says. ‘He grabbed me at Woolies, of all places.’
‘What, he jumped you?’
Holly shakes her head. ‘Not in the supermarket. That came later. I was in the aisle with all the toothpaste and stuff and he appeared behind me like a ghost and said the Seelie wanted to speak to me. I went with him.’
‘Why did you go? You must have known –’
‘Must have known that nothing good was going to happen to me? Yeah, I knew. Of course I did. But when the Seelie summon you, you go, or what happens to you will be even worse.’
I remember the night Finn and I stood in the bush near my place, watching the Seelie dance, watching them force Holly to dance on hot coals (well, he stood – I grovelled, because my pathetic human eyes couldn’t take it), and shiver.
‘Of course, I should have just legged it,’ she goes on. ‘I had this moment where I wondered whether I might be able to work something out with them – that maybe I could bargain to get Finn back – but … ugh. I should have guessed that he was lying through his teeth.’
‘You couldn’t have known.’
‘I could have worked it out. Finn’s dickhead fairy brother wants all the Seelie fairies back in fairyland so he can close the doors, right? That was the whole reason he was obsessed with working out who the Valentine was in the first place. If I’d thought about it for one second, I’d have realised that there was no Seelie posse waiting to chat with me. I should have guessed it was just Tam trying to get Emily back.’
‘It’s kind of hard to think when he does that thing where he pops up behind you all threatening,’ I say.
Holly sighs. ‘Yeah. I know.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Depends on what it is.’
‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I know you told Finn, but obviously he didn’t tell me, because he respects your – your confidence or whatever, but –’
‘Just get to the point. You don’t need the monologue about how Finn is a good guy. Preaching to the choir. Spit it out.’
I hesitate. ‘You told me once that you’d been mixed up in this your whole life. That the fairies had been using you to spy on us forever.’
‘You want the whole big story?’
‘Not if you don’t want to tell it, but –’
‘No, it’s fine,’ Holly says. ‘And honestly, I was being kind of dramatic when I was all, “This has been my whole life! You don’t understand how I suffered!” It wasn’t bad at first, not really. I was spying on you and Finn and Cardy and Marie for the Seelie, sure, but it’s not like I was one of their possessed zombie-slaves or anything. I didn’t even realise I was doing it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Every year on the same day, for as long as I could remember, my aunt Rosie would come and take me out,’ she says. ‘We’d go walking in the bush together, just the two of us, and she’d hold my hand. That was what I used to remember most about it, the feeling of her hand in mine, because it used to make me feel like everything would be all right. Like it would be more than all right. That it would be amazing. That it was the day before my birthday, and tomorrow was just going to be the best day, and it would last forever.’