Wink Poppy Midnight (14 page)

T
HE STORY HAD
started in earnest now.

The threads were spinning.

Midnight was shook up. He destroyed the monster. That was always a turning point on the Hero's journey, like when Peter kills the wolf on the other side of the Wardrobe and the Lion tells him to clean his sword. Like when Elsbeth cuts out Jacob's heart, and roasts it on a spit, and feeds it to his lover, in
Elsbeth Ink and the Seven Forests.

There are Scottish folktales that tell of people who go off into the Highlands, and disappear into the mist, and are never seen again.

That's what happened to Roman Luck.

That's what happened to my father. He disappeared into the mist. I thought he was the Hero, but he was just a man.

I told Midnight that I'd held Alexander in the fog the day he died. Alexander was the Hero in
A Cloak, A Dagger, A Journey—
but he'd been alone when the poison reached his heart, at the end. He fell down on the road, his hands clutching the golden penny whistle that the black-haired princess gave him the day he saved her life.

I'd imagined what it would have been like, imagined it so clearly, with the cold mist on my neck and his eyes going dark and his body going stiff in my arms. It was real. It happened.

Mim came into my room, later that night, after the Orphans were asleep. She asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell her.

I just shook my head and kept quiet.

I
WAS STRETCHED
out in my bed and staring at the windows. It was raining again. I stayed there so long Dad knocked on my door, a cup of green tea in his hand. I got up, took it, and slid back under my covers.

Her body, slumped and blue in the gray light.

The look in her eyes.

Her screams when the blood came rushing back.

I threw on a jacket and walked in the rain, into town. I went the long way around. I didn't want to go by the Roman Luck place. I couldn't.

I stood on her doorstep. Didn't ring the bell.

I'd done this the last two mornings.

“She's not there.” Thomas stepped out of the shadows by the lilac bushes, wet blond hair sticking to his forehead. “She's missing. Her parents are gone at a medical conference and she's missing and no one is going to answer that door, Midnight.”

My heart skipped a beat. Thomas hadn't seen Poppy either? I thought she'd been avoiding me, just me. “I need to talk to her, Thomas. Badly. I'm sure she's around somewhere. She's probably just down by the river. She likes to have picnics in the rain, bread and cheese and a bottle of wine and cold, fat raindrops on her cheeks.”

“That was the first place I looked.”

“She could be at the coffee shop, the one with the high ceilings and the caramel-colored lattes.”

He shook his head.

“Or at the church—she likes to sit in a back pew and listen to the organist practice.”

Thomas's eyes were red and he looked . . . smaller,
somehow. Almost fragile. “She's gone. Disappeared. I was scared something like this might happen. That's why I've been watching her house.”

“Something like what?” And my voice started high and went even higher at the end.

“Poppy's been sad lately. Really sad. Didn't you notice?”

“Poppy's not sad. She's never sad. She laughs at everything. That's the first thing I knew about her. She always just laughs.”

This was a lie.

I'd seen her crying her eyes out, three nights ago.

Thomas shook his head, wet hair flying. “If you can't see past all that, past the way she brushes everything off to protect herself, then you don't deserve to know her.

“It's all an act, Midnight. It's an
act.
She's been perfecting it since she was a kid, and so she's really good at it, but it's just an act.”

Poppy, sobbing and screaming when she realized I was really going to leave her, all alone, in that house . . .

How well had I known the girl I'd been sharing my bed with for a year?

Thomas started talking again. He was staring off toward the gazebo and rambling, like I wasn't even there.

“. . . Briggs and his temper, the things he said, that last time he caught me and her together. Poppy just laughed them off, like always, but they were so mean, so
mean
. He said she was
a liar and a spoiled brat. He said no one would ever really love her, and she didn't deserve love, she deserved to die alone. But no one deserves that, no one . . .”

Thomas put his hands over his eyes, and pressed. The rain started up again, and the drops hit his fingers and ran down his wrists and forearms. I zipped my jacket shut, and waited.

He moved his hands away from his face and looked at me, red, red eyes. “I'm scared Poppy might have run away. She did that once, last year. She was gone for three days. Did you know that?”

I did.

“We have to find her. We have to help her, Midnight.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Thomas.”

“So you'll help me? You'll help me look? I don't trust Briggs. I don't trust any of the other Yellows. I don't want them to know. They hate her. They follow her around, and do what she says, but they all hate her.”

I looked at the wet grass, and the edges of the lawn blurred, a blurry green swirl. I felt sick again for a second. I put my hand on my heart and took deep breaths.

Was Thomas right?

You must all really hate me,
she'd whispered to me there on the sofa in the Roman Luck house.
You must really, really hate me.

“What don't you want the Yellows to know? That she's missing?”

“No, they already know she's missing. I don't want them to know about the letter.” Thomas reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out a black piece of paper. “I found this last night in our hiding spot. Mine and Poppy's. It was in the hollow of one of the Green William Cemetery trees. No one knows about it except us.”

He handed it to me, and his eyes were kind of pleading.

I opened the letter, shielding it from the rain with my arm.

Silver letters, silver on black:

I'm scared, Thomas, I'm scared of myself, I'm scared what I'll do.

When the time comes, I'll jump, I know I will.

Don't tell the other Yellows, they won't understand, tell Midnight, only Midnight.

Remember when we hiked up to Three Death Jack at night and watched the skiers on Mount Jasper and the ski lift was lit up like Christmas? We felt like Greek gods, sitting on Mount Olympus. You said I was a natural, laughing at all the mortals and their maudlin, trivial lives . . .

This life, my life . . .

It's not trivial.

It's . . .

Mine.

Mine, mine, mine.

I held the paper up to my nose. It smelled like jasmine.

“It's a clue,” Thomas said. “She meant it as a clue. We can use it to find her.”

And there was something about the way he said that, something in his voice, that made me doubt.

I looked over my shoulder, all around Poppy's perfect green yard.

Nothing.

No one.

Was this another of Poppy's tricks? Like when she hid in the forest and made the Yellows stop us and demand that stupid kissing contest? Was she going to step out from behind one of the lilac bushes, laughing her head off at me for being so gullible? Was this her revenge for what Wink and I did to her? An elaborate setup with letters and clues and Yellows?

Or maybe that wasn't it. Not at all.

Maybe this wasn't about revenge.

Maybe it was something else entirely.

Thomas took the letter back, put it away, and looked up
at Poppy's bedroom window, the one that faced the street. “I have this feeling that if we don't find Poppy soon, we won't find her at all. I've read and read the letter, twenty times, a hundred times. What does it mean? What's the clue?”

I
FOUND THE
boy, the tall, dark-haired one with different-colored eyes, blue and green, one sky and the other sea. I was walking through the trees in the rain, thinking maybe I'd spot the solemn Strangers dancing to melancholy tunes in a woodland patch of dappled sun, like they did in
Wild Edric and the Londonderry Girl.
And that's when I saw him, rooting around in the wilderness behind the Roman Luck house.

He didn't seem surprised to find me standing beside him. He stared right through me almost, as if I wasn't there at all. He was on his knees, brushing away dirt and dead pine needles with his hands, acting kind of hatter-mad. He kept looking over his shoulder, as if the trees were hiding things behind their fat trunks, which maybe they were.

The dark-haired boy got to his feet and then picked something up from the ground where he'd just been kneeling. A shovel.

There wasn't a good reason to bring a shovel to the woods. There wasn't a
sane
reason. The Folk brought shovels to the woods and dug things up and put a glamor on them. They made the dug-up things look like the babies they'd stolen and were raising as their own. And sometimes the Folk returned and buried those stolen babies right back in the dirt, if they screamed too much and were not liked. But the dark-haired boy wasn't doing this. He wouldn't even know about it.

“Why are you digging?” I asked.

The rain had stopped, and the sun was poking out, and the dark-haired boy with the different-colored eyes nodded at me, kind of nicely.

“Poppy's disappeared,” he said.

“A lot of people disappear,” I said.

“I was horrible to her,” he said. “Horrible, horrible. She thinks I hate her.”

“No she doesn't,” I said.

“She left a note,” he said.

“Let me see it,” I said.

And he put his dirty hands in his pockets and pulled out a black piece of paper with silver letters.

Briggs.

Briggs, do you know how you gave me that marble once, the really big one with the gold
streak in the middle that you said you won in a fight when you were a kid, and I made fun of you for being into marbles, but you just ignored me and said it matched my gold hair, and I should have it?

We were in the woods drinking lemonade out of teacups and I got sentimental suddenly and told you to bury the marble under that big pine between the two little aspens so I'd always know where it was.

You hate me, Briggs. You all hate me, and I deserve it. I deserve every ounce of it.

I wish I'd kept that gold marble. I wish I had it now. Promise me you'll find it, you have to promise, even if you're angry, even though you hate me, promise you will.

Ask Midnight to help you look. He's good at finding things.

“Can I keep this?” I said, holding the letter up in the air, but he was already gone. The boy with two different-colored eyes walked off into the woods, tiny flecks of sun filtering through the trees and sparking off his silver shovel. He went deep and deeper, until he disappeared.