“If they admit that they wish for you to remain with them,” said Lady Nore, her voice soft for the first time, “then you may stay.”
Wren padded into the hall, her heart frantic, rushing into her parents’ room as if she’d had a nightmare. The noise of her shuffling feet and her ragged breaths woke them. Her father sat up and then startled, putting an arm up protectively over her mother, who looked at Wren and screamed.
“Don’t be scared,” she said, moving to the side of the bed and crushing the blankets in her small fists. “It’s me, Wren. They did something to me.”
“Get away, monster!” her father barked. He sounded frightening enough to send her scuttling back against the dresser. She’d never heard him shout like that, certainly never at her.
Tears tracked down her cheeks. “It’s me,” she said again, her voice breaking. “Your daughter. You love me.”
The room looked exactly as it always had. Pale beige walls. Queen size bed with brown dog fur dirtying their white duvet. A towel lying beside the hamper, as though someone had thrown and missed. The scent of the furnace, and the petroleum smell of some cream used to remove makeup. But it was the distorted-mirror nightmare version, in which all those things had become horrible.
Below them, the dog barked, sounding a desperate warning.
“What are you waiting for? Get that thing out of here,” her father growled, looking toward Lady Nore and Lord Jarel as though he was seeing something other than them, some human authority.
Wren’s sister came into the hall, rubbing her eyes, clearly awakened by the screaming. Surely Rebecca would help, Rebecca who made sure no one bullied her at school, who took her to the fair even though no one else’s little sister was allowed. But at the sight of Wren, Rebecca jumped onto the bed with a horrified yelp and wrapped her arms around her mother.
“Rebecca,” Wren whispered, but her sister only dug her face deeper into their mother’s nightgown.
“Mom,” Wren pleaded, tears choking her voice, but her mother wouldn’t look at her. Wren’s shoulders shook with sobs.
“This is our daughter,” her father said, holding Rebecca close, as though Wren had been trying to trick him.
Rebecca, who’d been adopted, too. Who ought to have been exactly as much theirs as Wren.
Wren crawled to the bed, crying so hard that she could barely get any words out. Please let me stay. I’ ll be good. I am sorry, sorry, sorry for whatever I did, but you can’t let them take me. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy, I love you, please, Mommy.
Her father tried to push her back with his foot, pressing it against her neck. But she reached for him anyway, her voice rising to a shriek.
When her little fingers touched his calf, he kicked her in the shoulder, sending her to the floor. But she only crawled back, weeping and pleading, keening with misery.
“Enough,” rasped Bogdana. She yanked Wren against her, running one of her long nails over Wren’s cheek with something like gentleness. “Come, child. I will carry you.”
“No,” Wren said, her fingers winding themselves in the sheets. “No. No. No.”
“It is not meet for the humans to have touched you in violence, you who are ours,” said Lord Jarel.
“Ours to hurt,” Lady Nore agreed. “Ours to punish. Never theirs.”
“Shall they die for the offense?” Lord Jarel asked, and the room went quiet, except for the sound of Wren sobbing.
“Should we kill them, Suren?” he asked again, louder. “Let their pet dog in and enchant it so that it turns on them and bites out their throats?”
At that, Wren’s crying abated in astonishment and outrage. “No!” she shouted. She felt beyond the ability to control herself.
“Then hear this and cease weeping,” Lord Jarel told her. “You will come with us willingly, or I will slay everyone on that bed. First the child, then the others.”
Rebecca gave a little frightened sob. Wren’s human parents watched her with fresh horror.
“I’ll go,” Wren said finally, a sob still in her voice, one she couldn’t stop. “Since no one loves me, I’ll go.”
The storm hag lifted her up, and they were away.
Wren was discovered in the flashing lights of a patrol car two years later, walking along the side of the highway. The soles of her shoes were as worn as if she’d danced through them, her clothing was stiff with sea salt, and scars marred the skin of her wrists and cheeks.
When the officer tried to ask her what had happened, she either wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. She snarled at anyone who came too close, hid beneath the cot in the room they brought her into, and refused to give a name or an address as to where her home had been to the lady they brought with them.
Their smiles hurt. Everything hurt.
When they turned their backs, she was gone.
CHAPTER
1
T
he slant of the moon tells me that it’s half past ten when my unsister comes out the back door. She’s in her second year of college and keeps odd hours. As I watch from the shadows, she sets down an empty cereal bowl on the top step of the splintery and sagging deck. Then she glugs milk into it from a carton. Spills a little. Squatting, she frowns out toward the tree line.
For an impossible moment, it’s as though she’s looking at me.
I draw deeper into the dark.
The scent of pine needles is heavy in the air, mingling with leaf mold and the moss I crush between my bare toes. The breeze carries the smell of the sticky, rotten, sugary dregs still clinging to bottles in the recycling bin; the putrid something at the bottom of the empty garbage can; the chemical sweetness of the perfume my unsister is wearing.
I watch her hungrily.
Bex leaves the milk for a neighborhood cat, but I like to pretend it’s me she’s leaving it for. Her forgotten sister.
She stands there for a few minutes while moths flit above her head and mosquitoes buzz. Only when she goes back inside do I slink closer to the house, peering through the window to watch my unmother knit in front of the television. Watching my unfather in the breakfast nook with his laptop, answering email. He puts a hand to his eyes, as though tired.
In the Court of Teeth, I was punished if I called the humans who raised me my mother and father. Humans are animals, Lord Jarel would say, the admonishment coming with a breathtakingly hard blow. Filthy animals. You share no blood with them.
I taught myself to call them unmother and unfather, hoping to avoid Lord Jarel’s wrath. I keep the habit to remind myself of what they were to me, and what they will never be again. Remind myself that there is nowhere that I belong and no one to whom I belong.
The hair on the back of my neck prickles. When I look around, I note an owl on a high branch, observing me with a swivel of its head. No, not an owl.
I pick up a rock, hurling it at the creature.
It shifts into the shape of a hob and takes off into the sky with a screech, beating feathered wings. It circles twice and then glides off toward the moon.
The local Folk are no friends to me. I’ve seen to that.
Another reason I am no one, of nowhere.
Resisting the temptation to linger longer near the backyard where I once played, I head for the branches of a hawthorn at the edge of town. I stick to the dimness of shadowed woodland, my bare feet finding their way through the night. At the entrance to the graveyard, I stop.