Oak gives me an odd look. “As you did.”
“We should try to sleep,” I force myself to say. If I remain in his company any longer, I will ask if he intends to give me to Lady Nore. And then my plans will be discovered, and I, very likely, bridled.
He shakes his head, possibly at himself. “Of course. You’re right.”
I nod. Yes. Go back to sleep, Oak. Please. Go to sleep before I change my mind about leaving.
Though he means me harm, I will miss him. I will miss the way he moves through the world, as though nothing could be so terrible that he might not laugh at it.
I might even miss Tiernan’s grumpiness.
I go back on my blankets and wait, counting to a thousand again. When I am certain the prince is asleep, I push myself up and walk steadily into the tree line. I do not look back to see if the owl eyes of the hob are on me. I must behave as though I am doing nothing of note, nothing wrong.
Once I am away from the camp and the hob gives no cry of alarm, I leave off caution and rush through the woods, then through the town, until I come to the bus station.
It takes me a full three minutes before my glamour is nearly good enough to allow me to pass for human. I touch my face and my teeth to be sure.
Then, taking a deep breath, I walk into the brightly lit station. It smells like gasoline and disinfectant. A few humans are sitting on metal benches, one with a garbage bag that seems to be stuffed full of clothes. A young couple with a single suitcase between them, whispering together. An elderly gentleman with a cane who has fallen asleep and may have already missed his bus.
According to the schedule, the next one is passing north and west, up toward Michigan. It’s tricky to buy a ticket with glamoured money, because machines aren’t unaware that you’re feeding leaves into them, even if people are. Instead, I grab a receipt out of the trash and enchant it. It’s only a rough approximation of a ticket, and I will have to glamour the driver to let me pass, but the role will be more convincing with something in my hand. My magic is wobbly enough to need all the help it can get.
When I look up, I see a man with dirty pants and an unkempt beard watching me. My heart speeds. Was he only noting that I’d been rooting around in the trash, or am I so unlucky as to run into one of the humans with True Sight? Or is he something else, something more?
I smile at him, and he flinches as though he can see the sharpness of my teeth. After that, he stops looking at me.
I plug Gwen’s phone into the wall and wait.
I watch a girl kick a vending machine. A boy smokes a cigarette, pacing outside and talking to himself. An elderly man picks a penny off the floor.
Beside me, there is a sudden buzz. I look down and realize the screen of the phone has come back to life. I’ve missed ten calls while it was dead, none of them from numbers I know.
There are three texts from Gwen. The first reads: It’s fucked to text my own phone, and even more because everything that happened seems like it can’t be real, but I made it to my parents’ house. That hot elf guy was kind of a dick bt he told me about his ex & the prince, and it sounds like your in trouble. Let me know your OK.
Below that there’s a photo of her with the fiddler from the Court of Moths. They are draped over each other and smiling in the front seat of a car. The next message reads: MY BAE IS HERE. He says he woke up on the side of a hill. The last thing he remembers is someone who looked like a devil putting salt on his tongue. I don’t know what you did, but THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
And then: Are you OK? Please write to me so （a） I know you’re good and （b） I didn’t dream you.
I grin at the phone. Most of the people I broke curses for were as afraid of me as they were of the glaistig. It was strange to think that Gwen liked me. Fine, I had done something nice for her, but she still texted me as though we could be friends.
I text back: Hard to charge a phone in Faerieland. I made it to a bus station & am on my own. No princes. No knights. Glad you’re okay and your boy-friend, too.
Then the smile fades off my face. Because I have to call home. I have to warn Bex.
I punch in the sequence of numbers from memory.
A man’s voice picks up. My unfather. “Who is this?”
I watch the clock and the door, half-expecting Oak to come striding through and drag me back to the camp at sword’s point. I remind myself that I have the bridle, and that even if he was looking for me, he’d have no reason to look here.
“Can I speak with Bex, please?” I ask, keeping my voice steady.
For a long moment, my unfather is quiet, and I think he’s going to hang up. Then I hear him call for my unsister.
I bite my nails and watch the seconds tick by on the clock, watch the other people shuffle around the station.
She comes to the phone. “Yeah?”
“You have to listen to me,” I tell her, keeping my voice low so that the whole bus station doesn’t listen in. “You’re in trouble.”
She takes a sharp breath. “Mom! ” she yells, then she sounds muffled, like she has her hand over the speaker. “She called back. No, it’s her.”
I panic, worried that she’s going to hang up. “Just hear me out. Before that monster comes for you.”
Listen to this monster, not that one.
“Mom wants to talk.”
I feel a little sick at the thought. “You. Just you. For now, at least. Please.”
Her voice goes distant, as though she’s speaking to someone other than me. “Wait. Yes, I’ll tell her.”
“Why did you go outside that night?” I ask.
There’s a pause, footsteps, then I hear a door close. “Okay, I’m away from them.”
I repeat my question, anxiety narrowing my focus to the gum on the floor, the smell of exhaust, the pinesap on my fingers, the sound of her sighs.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” Bex says finally.
“You remember me?” I choke out.
“You lived with us for seven years,” she says, accusation creeping into her voice. “After you went back to your birth family, we hoped we’d hear something. Mom used to cry on that made-up birthday she invented for you.”
“She told me to leave.” I growl out the words. I know it wasn’t her fault, that she and Dad and Bex were glamoured. But how could I go back to them, make them face my monstrousness, allow them to reject me again? “Dad kicked me.”
I look at the clock. It’s nearly time for the bus to pull in.
Bex sounds angry. “That’s not true.”
I need to end this call. I pull the charging cord out of the wall and out of the base of the phone, then start to wind it up. Soon I will be on my way north. Soon I will be cold inside and out.
“You met the storm hag,” I say. “You know that whatever story you heard can’t be the whole of it. And you know that I was adopted, not a foster child any longer. I couldn’t just up and return to my birth parents, nor could they come and take me away. Think about it, and the story falls apart. Because it’s one that you were enchanted with to explain something unexplainable.”
There’s a silence from the other end, but I hear people in the background. I don’t think the door is closed anymore.
“I thought you were a ghost the first time I spotted you,” she says softly.