Reckless (Free Preview) (7 page)

His foe wasn't
very tall, and Jacob was more nimble, yet soon he felt the first cuts on his
arms and shoulders.
 
Come on, Jacob.
 
Look at his
clothes.
 
Do you want to end up like
that?
 
He hacked off one of the
needle fingers with his knife, used the ensuing howls of rage to catch his
breath — and barely managed to yank up his saber before the blades could slash
his face.
 
Two of the needles cut his
cheek like the claws of a cat.
 
A third
neatly pierced his arm.
 
Jacob retreated
between the trees, letting the blades cut into the bark and not his skin.
 
But the Tailor freed himself again and again
and didn't seem to tire, while Jacob's arms grew ever heavier.

He cut off
another finger as one of the blades hacked into the bark right next to
him.
 
The Tailor howled like a wolf, yet
he slashed at him with even greater rage — and there was no blood running from
his wounds.

You will end up as a pair of pants!
 
Jacob's breathing grew labored.
 
His heart was racing.
 
He stumbled over a root, and before he could
catch himself, the Tailor stabbed one of his needles deep into Jacob's
shoulder.
 
The pain buckled his knees,
and he had no breath left to call Fox back as she jumped at the Tailor and sunk
her teeth deep into his leg.
 
She had so
often saved Jacob's skin, but never quite so literally.
 
The Tailor tried to shake her off.
 
He had forgotten about Jacob, and as he
angrily struck out to hack his blades into her furry body, Jacob slashed off
his left arm with Chanute's knife.

The Tailor's
scream echoes through the dark forest.
 
He stared at the useless stump of his arm and at the bladed hand lying
on the moss in front of him.
 
Then he
spun around, wheezing, to face Jacob.
 
The remaining hand came down on Jacob with deadly force.
 
Three steel needles, murderous daggers.
 
Jacob thought he could already feel their
metal inside him, but before they could pierce his flesh, he rammed his knife
deep in the Tailor's chest.

The Tailor
grunted, pressing his fingers to his terrible shirt.
 
The his
knees
buckled.

Jacob
staggered to the nearest tree, fighting for breath while the Tailor thrashed in
pain on the wet moss.
 
One
final gasp and then silence.
 
Jacob did not drop his knife, even though the glazed eyes stared emptily
skyward out of the grimy face.
 
He wasn't
convinced there was such a thing as death for the Tailor.

Fox shivered
as if the hounds had been after her.
 
Jacob let himself drop to his knees next to her and stared at the now
lifeless body of the Tailor.
 
Jacob had
no idea how long he remained crouched there.
 
His skin was burning as if he'd been rolling around in broken
glass.
 
His shoulder was numb with pain,
and in front of his eyes the blades were still performing their murderous
dance.

"Jacob!"
 
Fox's voice seemed to come to him from
afar.
 
"Get up.
 
It's safer at the house!"

He got to his
feet.

The Tailor
still wasn't moving.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The journey
back to the gingerbread house seemed very long, and when it finally appeared
between the trees, Jacob saw Clara waiting behind the fence.

"Oh,
God!" was all she murmured when she saw the blood on his shirt.
 
She fetched water from the well and washed
the cuts.
 
Jacob flinched as her fingers
probed his shoulder.

"This one
is deep," she said as Fox anxiously crouched by her side.
 
"I wish it would bleed more
freely."

"There's
iodine and some bandages in my saddlebag."
 
Jacob was grateful that she was used to the sight of bloody wounds.
 
"What about Will?
 
Is he asleep?"

"Yes."
 
And the stone was still there.
 
She didn't have to say it.

Jacob could
see from the expression on her face that she wanted to know what had happened
in the forest, but that was the last thing he wanted to remember.

Clara fetched
the iodine from his saddlebag and dripped the tincture on his wound, but she
still looked worried.

"Fox,
what plants
do you
usually roll in when you're
wounded?" she asked.

The vixen
showed her some herbs in the Witch's garden.
 
They gave off a bittersweet aroma as Clara plucked them apart and
pressed them against Jacob's pierced skin.

"Like a
born witch," he said.
 
"I
thought Will said he met you in a hospital."

She smiled.
 
It made her look very young.

"In our
world, the Witches work in hospitals.
 
Remember?"

Clara noticed
the scars on Jacob's back as she pulled the shirt over his bandaged shoulder.
 
"How did those happen?
 
Must have been terrible
injuries."

Fox shot him a
knowing look, but Jacob just buttoned his shirt with a shrug.

"I
survived."

Clara looked
at him pensively.

"Thank
you," she said.
 
"For whatever
you did out there.
 
I'm so glad you came
back."

10

Fur
And
Skin

Jacob knew too
much about gingerbread houses to be able to find any sleep under the
sugar-icing roof.
 
He took the tin plate
from his saddlebag and sat down with it in front of the well, polishing it
until it filled with bread and cheese.
 
It wasn't a five-course dinner, like the one provided by the wishing
table he had found for the Empress, but at least the plate could fit into a
saddlebag.

The red moon
splashed rust into the night, and dawn was still hours away, but Jacob didn't
dare go see whether the stone in Will's skin had vanished.
 
Fox sat down next to him and licked her
fur.
 
The Tailor had kicked her, and she
had several cuts on her body, but she was all right.
 
Human skin was so much more fragile than fur —
or Goyl skin.

"You
should try to sleep," she said.

"I can't
sleep."

Jacob's shoulder
ached, and he imagined he could feel the Witch's black magic battling the Dark
Fairy's spell.

"What are
you going to do if the berries do work?
 
Take them back?"

Fox tried hard
to sound unconcerned, but Jacob heard the unspoken question behind her
words.
 
No matter how often he told Fox
how much he liked her world, she never lost the fear that one day he would
climb up the tower and never return.

"Of
course," he said.
 
"And they'll
live happily ever after."

"What
about us?"
 
Fox snuggled against him
as he shuddered in the cold night air.
 
"Winter's coming.
 
We could
go south, to Granady or Lombardia, and look for the hourglass."

The hourglass that stopped time.
 
Just a few weeks back, it had been all Jacob
could think about.
 
The
talking mirror.
 
The glass slipper.
 
The spinning wheel that spun gold.
 
There was always something he could hunt for
in this world.
 
And most of the time it
helped him forget that he had never been able to find the one thing he really
wanted.

Jacob took a
piece of bread from the plate and offered it to Fox.
 
"When did you last shift?" he asked
as she greedily snapped at it.

She tried to
scamper away, but he grabbed her fur.
 
"Fox!"

She tried to
bite his hand, but then the fox-shaped shadow, cast by the moonlight of the
wall of the well, began to stretch, and Jacob felt himself being pushed away by
the strong hands of a girl kneeling next to him.

Her hair was
as red as the pelt she so much preferred to her human skin.
 
It fell down her back so long and thick that
it looked almost as though she were still wearing her fur.
 
Even the russet dress that covered her
freckled skin glistened in the moonlight like the coat of a fox.
 
Its fabric seemed to have been woven from the
same silky hair.

She had grown
up in these past months, nearly as suddenly as a fox cub becomes a vixen.
 
But Jacob still saw the ten-year-old girl he
had found one night, crying at the bottom of the tower because he had stayed
much longer in the world he had come from than he had promised.
 
She had been following Jacob for nearly a
year by then, without ever showing him her human form.
 
He kept reminding her that she would one day
lose her human form if she kept wearing her fur too long, even though he knew
that, should Fox ever be forced to decide, she would always choose the
fur.
 
At the age of seven she had saved a
wounded vixen from her two elder brothers and their sticks, and the next day
she had found the furry dress on her
bed
 
It
had given her the body she had come
to regard as her true self, and Fox's greatest fear was that someday someone
might steal the dress and take the fur away from her.

Jacob leaned
back against the well.
 
It will be all right, Jacob
.
 
But the night seemed endless.
 
He felt Fox lean her head against his
shoulder, and finally he fell asleep, next to the girl who did not want the
skin that his brother had to fight for.
 
He slept fitfully and even his dreams turned into stone.
 
Chanute, the paperboy on the square, his
mother, his father... they all froze into statues standing among the trees next
to the dead Tailor.

"Jacob!
 
Wake up!"

Fox was
wearing her fur again.
 
The first light
of dawn was seeping through the pine trees.
 
Jacob's shoulder ached so
much,
he barely
managed to get to his feet.
 
All will be well, Jacob.
 
Chanute knows this world like no one
else.
 
Remember how he exorcised the
Witch's spell from you?
 
You were already
half-dead.
 
And the Stilt bite?
 
And his recipe against
Waterman venom?

His heart beat
faster with every step he took toward the gingerbread house.

The sweet
smell inside nearly choked him.
 
It was
probably the reason that Will and Clara were still fast asleep.
 
She had her arms wrapped around Will, whose
face was so peaceful, as if he were sleeping in the bed of a prince, not a
child-eater.
 
But his left cheek was
speckled with jade, as if it had spilled onto his skin, and the nails on his
left hand were nearly as black as the claws that had sown the petrified flesh
into his shoulder.

How loud a
heart could
beat.
 
Until it took your breath away.

All will be well
.

Jacob was
still standing there, staring at the stone, when Will finally stirred.

Jacob's eyes
told him everything.
 
Will put his hand
to his neck and traced the stone up to his cheek.

Think, Jacob
.
 
But his mind had drowned in the fear that was
flooding his brother's face.

They let Clara
sleep.
 
Will followed Jacob outside like
a sleepwalker caught in a nightmare.

Fox backed
away from him.
 
The look she gave Jacob
said only one thing.

Lost
.

And that was
how Will stood there.
 
Lost.
 
He touched his disfigured face, and for the
first time Jacob no longer saw there any of the trust his brother usually gave
so freely.
 
Instead, he believed he saw
all the blame he put on himself.
 
All the
If only you'd
been more careful, Jacob
...
 
If you only hadn't taken him
so far east
...
 
If only
...

Will stepped
to the window behind which the oven stood, and he stared at the image the dark
panes threw back at him.

Jacob,
however, was looking at the soot-blackened cobwebs under the sugared roof.
 
They reminded him of other webs, just as
dark, spun to catch the night.

What an idiot
he was.
 
What was he doing at a Witch's
house?
 
This was the curse of a
Fairy.
 
A Fairy!