‘No, I took on an entire army of fairies singlehanded, won, brought Finn back with me, concocted this whole story to mess with you, and hid him in a cupboard. Oh look, here he is now.’
‘Calm your farm, Pearl, I didn’t mean it like that,’ Holly says. ‘I mean … they just let you leave?’
‘The prince said …’
I am in a mood to be generous. His voice had curled over me like a flame, licking at my skin. You have rid me of the Riders, after all, and now I may ride through mortal lands all I please. And so you may take one of them with you.
My hands are shaking again, liquid sloshing over the rim of my teacup.
‘He thought it was funny,’ I say. ‘The prince thought it was the most hilarious thing he’d ever seen to make me choose between the three of them, and to leave two of them behind.’
This is the last time you will ever see her, he had told Finn.
Liar, I had said to him, to a fairy prince who cannot lie.
And he’d laughed in my face.
‘You have a twin,’ Cardy says.
It’s the kind of statement that might be a question. He’s staring at the floor, fingers looped so loosely around his tea that it looks like it might slip from his grasp at any moment. ‘You have a twin,’ he repeats.
‘Apparently.’
‘Maybe not, though,’ Holly says. ‘Maybe it’s just some random other person that they made look like you. That would be exactly the kind of dick move they’d pull, right? Like, what if you’d picked her instead of Phil, and you got home and it turned out it was some fairy who tried to eat you or something?’
I shake my head. ‘The prince flat-out said she was my sister. They can’t lie.’
‘Does that mean you have a secret twin too?’ Holly asks Cardy.
He doesn’t answer.
‘Surely not,’ I say. ‘I mean … the odds would be ridiculous, right? It was already ridiculous that four kids were born on the same day in a town this tiny.’
‘Five kids. If she really is your twin.’
‘But surely there weren’t also a bunch of spares lying around, handy for the taking,’ I say. ‘Maybe Finn’s dad got lucky with me having a double all good to go, but there’s no way Cardy and Marie also had secret twins.’
‘Perhaps he just took Finn and your sister, then,’ Holly says. ‘As – I don’t know, an insurance policy.’
‘No,’ Cardy says. ‘It makes sense. If they didn’t want anyone to know who the Valentine was, they had to take kids for all of us.’
He stands up suddenly and starts pacing. ‘If the fairies didn’t take kids for all four of us, then it would have been a fifty/fifty equation,’ he says. ‘Is the Valentine Pearl, or is it Finn? But it wasn’t, or Jenny would never have bothered with me, and Marie would still be alive. They had no idea which one of us it was, because they stole a kid for each of us. Plausible fucking deniability.’
I try to remember the last time I heard Cardy swear, and fail.
‘I have to work out who they took for me,’ Cardy says. ‘I have to work it out, and I have to get him back.’
‘If it makes it any better, I don’t think it’d be anyone you know,’ I say. ‘Finn’s dad was a fairy king. He could have stolen fake-you and fake-Marie from anywhere.’
‘Of course it doesn’t make it better!’ Cardy explodes. ‘It doesn’t matter that I don’t know him! They stole a kid. From his family. From his home. From his land. And they did it just because they needed some fake-out fairies!’
I’ve never seen Cardy angry before, I realise. I’ve seen him annoyed, and upset, but even when he was in the hospital after Miller’s Creek, when he was demanding that I tell him what happened and I wouldn’t, he wasn’t like this.
Once, when an Unseelie fairy was possessing him, it used his body, his mouth, his voice to tell me that maybe Cardy should be their ironheart. He smiles and simpers on the surface but there is a fury in him that burns, it said.
Fairies can’t lie.
‘We have to get him back,’ Cardy says. ‘We have to get all of them back. I’m not going to stand here and let them do this, and I’m not going to let them steal any more kids ever again.’
My phone rings. I don’t know how it’s still functional after all it’s been through tonight. I’ve been swiping at it too much with bloody fingers, because the spider web of cracks on the screen is dark.
‘It’s my sister,’ I say. ‘Disey, I mean, not the long-lost –’
‘Just answer it,’ Holly cuts me off.
I look at the microwave clock. 5:30 a.m.
‘Dise?’ I don’t have to work to put on a groggy tone. ‘What’s up? Is something wrong?’
‘Pearlie, where are you?’
‘Home. Why?’
‘Do you know where Phil is?’
‘She’s here with me,’ I say. I should be getting a sinking feeling in my stomach, but all I get is another wave of weariness washing over me. ‘We made up. She’s asleep.’
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, Pearlie,’ Disey says, ‘or how we’re going to tell Phil, but I just got a call from the news desk, who heard it from the police. There’s been a murder. It’s Phil’s mother.’
I make Cardy and Holly leave before the cops get here. Holly isn’t keen on the idea – understandably, given that Tam is on the rampage – but I string together a few words about how knowing Emily’s location is leverage. It seems to make sense to her, and they go.
I have to wake up Phil. I tap first at my bedroom door, calling her name, but there’s no response, so I go in.
At first, I think she’s disappeared – that the Crown Prince was joking when he let me take her back – until I see her foot, poking out from under my desk. She’s curled into a ball under there, fast asleep.
‘Phil?’ I say, touching her gently.
No response.
I shake her harder. ‘Phil?’
She doesn’t wake up. I want to shake her even harder but if I wake her up too violently she’ll shove me again, and I might actually die if anyone touches my shoulder again.
But she won’t wake up.
Oh God, what if she’s catatonic again? What if she’s like she was after that night at Miller’s Creek, when Jenny and Kel kidnapped her? What if –
She blinks blearily at me. ‘Pearl?’
‘Phil,’ I say, the relief hot in my veins. ‘I need you to listen to me, okay?’
The realisation breaks over her face like a tsunami.
‘Focus,’ I tell her. ‘I need you to focus and listen to me. The cops are on their way now to officially inform you that your mum is dead. We need to keep our story straight.’
I vomit a bunch of words at her – ‘we were here all night, we stayed up late talking, we’ve been fighting recently but we made up’ – but she just looks at me, and I have no idea how much of it she’s taking in.
What if they insist on taking us down to the station or something? On taking DNA evidence? What if – what if –
There have been rumours swirling for months now that I’m actually a murderer, that I helped Jenny and Kel kill Marie. Sure, they’re mostly online conspiracy theories that no one except Julian reeeeeeally takes seriously (I think), but they’re out there.