Rowan Wood Legends Read online

  “Gregor sent me to ask her how to read the book. You know, the one you didn’t want to give me because you didn’t trust me.”

  I snapped my gaze back to his face. “I didn’t want to give it to you because it was mine.”

  “Cat, who are you talking to?” Aylen called out from the living room.

  “No one,” I yelled back, hoping she wouldn’t come to check, but this was Aylen. My aunt never passed up a chance to butt into conversations.

  Something shattered behind me. Aylen gasped as burning tea splashed her jeans. Or maybe she gasped because Ace was standing in front of her. Thankfully, she couldn’t see him glow like I could because she didn’t have the sight. She was gingawi like me, but her faerie side was dominant, so she couldn’t see through faerie dust like I could—one of the many terrific hunter gifts bestowed upon me. The other gift was smelling like decaying flesh to faeries.

  “Oh…Great…freaking…Spirit, you are Ace Wood,” she all but shrieked.

  It reminded me of when she’d met Lily at Bee’s Place. She’d been completely transfixed by her celebrity spotting. The Woods were like Hollywood stars to humans: rich, powerful, and beautiful. Humans didn’t know they possessed magic. I wondered how they would react to that information. Fear? Or further admiration?

  “Aylen, right?” Ace said. “Catori’s told me so much about you.”

  Aylen fanned herself, then moved closer to us, and stuck out her hand.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t shake hands,” he said. “It’s an old pet peeve of mine.” Aylen sulked, so Ace smiled. “A crazed fan tried to poison me once.”

  “Was that crazed fan a hunter?” I muttered.

  Aylen didn’t react to my comment, too starstruck. Then again, I hadn’t said faerie hunter. That would probably have gotten me a reaction.

  Ace’s lips curved the slightest bit. Whether in response to my question or simply for Aylen’s benefit, I didn’t know. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Aylen.”

  That kindled a vigorous smile on my aunt’s face. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, too. Actually, it’s way more than a pleasure. It’s an honor! Cat, you didn’t tell me Ace Wood was your friend,” she said in a loud, stage-like whisper.

  “We’re not really friends.” I regretted speaking those words instantly. They weren’t true. Or were they? An apology teetered on the tip of my tongue.

  “She’s right. We’re not. Merely acquaintances,” he said, an edge to his voice. He dragged his hand through his dark blond hair that was cropped at the sides and longer on the top.

  The apology dissolved.

  “Can I ask a teeny tiny question?” Aylen stepped in front of me and turned her mascara-laden eyes on Ace. “I read something about you expecting your first child in the fall. Is it true?”

  “You’re having a baby?” I squeaked.

  A muscle leapt in his jaw. “I’m not. My fiancée is,” he said, barely opening his mouth.

  “So it’s true,” Aylen exclaimed. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! I need to call my friends.” She clapped her hand in front of her mouth. Her opal ring glimmered in the night.

  That’s why he hadn’t shaken her hand. The opal was surely set in iron, and iron burned faeries.

  “You mind if I tell them, Mr. Wood?”

  Ace shook his head. “It’s no secret.”

  And yet I hadn’t heard of it. Then again I didn’t read gossip columns.

  “They’re going to flip.” She pulled her cell phone out of her jeans’ pocket. “Could I take a picture with you?”

  Before Ace could even answer, she’d raised her phone in the air and snapped a selfie. She brought her phone back down and started typing furiously on it, probably posting the picture all over social media. I wondered if Ace minded.

  “Hey, chica, you’ll never believe what I just heard…” She stepped around a puddle flecked with ceramic shards. It took me a second to realize it was the remnants of the mug she’d been carrying.

  I knelt down to clean up the mess when I spied the word Mom in white lettering. I picked up the piece and cradled it in my palm, wishing what little faerie magic I possessed could mend objects, but faerie magic only worked on living beings.

  Which reminded me…

  I jerked my head toward Ace. “Can you call her soul back?” True faeries—not a half-breed like myself—could resuscitate the dead.

  “It’s too late.”

  “You didn’t even try.”

  “It has to happen in the seconds following a person’s death. Besides, do you really want to owe me?”

  “This wasn’t me striking a bargain, Ace. This was me asking you to be kind. Compassionate.”

  “Same thing. Different wording.”

  Holly was really gone. Just like Mom. Just like Blake.

  “She was sickly,” Ace said. “I doubt she would’ve wanted to come back…”

  I took in a shaky breath. He was probably right, but had it really been her time to die? I stared at the navy shards at my feet. Everything was falling to pieces around me or breaking. With shaky fingers, I started collecting the rest of the broken mug.

  Ace crouched down in front of me. “Are you crying?” The scorching heat from his skin wafted through the air and licked my skin.

  “No,” I sniffled.

  “Liar.”

  I’d bought the mug with my pocket money when I was nine. “Everything I care about dies or breaks. Maybe I should just stop caring…” I sighed, released the navy shards, and stood back up. “I’ll go get a broom.”

  “I got it.” His hand hovered over the debris. Blue flames flickered over his skin and then scattered over the thick porcelain, incinerating it before my very eyes. Instead of turning to ashes or melting, all traces of the broken mug evaporated into thin air.

  I stared wide-eyed at the empty space. “How come the slats didn’t catch fire?”

  “We focus our fire on what we need burned.”

  That’s how Cruz had made vomit vanish from the hearse the night I met him. That’s how he’d cleaned up the broken glass in our kitchen. Thinking about Cruz prompted me to ask. “Did he tell you about me?”

  Ace unrolled his long body. “Do you remember when I stopped you from eating the cupcake back at Astra’s?”

  He’d told Stella I was allergic to beets so I wouldn’t have to sample her mallow-spiked cupcakes in front of the faeries. Mallow was a hallucinogenic herb that didn’t affect hunters but made faeries high and humans overeat. “You knew?”

  “I had my suspicions.”

  “Because of the way I smelled?”

  “At first I thought you smelled different because you were half human, but humans are more pungent…and not in a good way.”

  “Don’t tell that to all your human lovers.”

  He snorted.

  “So…how do I smell?” I asked.

  He fixed me with his penetrating eyes. “Sickly sweet.”

  “Sickly sweet? Wow. Great.”

  He watched me, and then he stared at the slats underneath my boots. “I heard you could choose. Like your ancestor.”

  “I can, but I won’t.”

  His eyes returned to mine. “What happens if you don’t?”

  I rubbed the tattoo on my hand—the word I’d gotten inked into my skin. Human. “I stay exactly the way I am.”

  “How’s that a good solution?”

  Wanting to put an end to that conversation, I asked, “So faeries don’t know how to read English?”

  “What?”

  “You said you came to Rowan to ask Holly how to read the book.”

  He smirked. “We know how to read English.”

  “I don’t understand then.”

  “The pages are blank.”

  My heart pumped. I’d read stories on those pages. I’d seen words. I’d even seen a diagram. Had I imagined everything? No, Aylen had seen things too. “Didn’t Stella read the book with Aylen?”

  Ace scrutinized my face. “Stella said Aylen read th
ings out loud to her. So I’m assuming the ink only appears to those who have the sight.”

  “Except Aylen doesn’t…”

  “So maybe it appears to hunters.”

  “I’m not a hunter.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean.” He dug something from his pocket and handed it to me. It was a ripped piece of paper.

  My gaze skimmed over the words:

  The Wytchen Tree

  Copyright © 1938

  And then there was a little symbol of a tree. I assumed it was supposed to be a rowan wood rendering.

  “You see something?” he whispered.

  I considered telling him it was blank but chose to go with the truth. If Stella knew Aylen could read it, then it was no secret. And perhaps it would force them to return it to me.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said after I read the few printed words out loud.

  “It’s all just a bunch of myths and legends inside, Ace.”

  “If that was all there was, then why did Holly make her text invisible to faeries?” His eyes darted to my hand. “And why is your hand glowing?”

  “Maybe it was for my family’s eyes only. And my hand is glowing because I’m human, and I have a pulse, a heart. And it beats. You know, to keep me alive? Don’t you have one?”

  “Me? What would I need a heart for?”

  “Right. It would just get in the way. Just like a conscience, huh?”

  The metallic clank of the stretcher alerted us to company. Ace glanced inside the house. I studied his profile, the stiffness of his mouth and jaw, the incandescent glow of his eyes.

  “Please, Cat, what did you see in the book?”

  “Give it back, and I’ll tell you.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not mine to give back.”

  “Well, it wasn’t yours to give away in the first place.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am too. I’m sorry I trusted you.” The contours of his face became blurry. “Didn’t Gregor order you to kill Holly?” I asked, remembering the afternoon we’d sat together in my attic while I sorted through my mother’s clothes and shoes.

  He shuffled back a step. “I can’t believe you would think me capable of that, Catori.” Ace never called me Catori. His preferred nickname was Kitty Cat. I guessed I wasn’t mistaken when I’d told Aylen that Ace and I weren’t friends. Believing faeries could be friends with hunters or humans or whatever the hell I was had been idiotic.

  Suddenly, he levitated.

  The two EMTs were in my living room. In a second, they’d reach the front door. I knew faeries disguised flying with dust, either by cloaking themselves or by creating the illusion they were walking away, yet I worried.

  “You’re the one who told me Gregor wanted her dead if she didn’t cooperate. You said—”

  “I know what I said. Just like I know what I did.” He shot up into the sky before I could respond.

  Something metallic glinted in the air, then tumbled down and hit the floorboards with a small clink. Had a coin escaped Ace’s pocket?

  I squinted. It was no quarter.

  I shot my gaze in the direction of the hearse.

  Next to it sat my Honda.

  Ace had brought my car back.

  Just before the stretcher rolled over my car keys, I swiped them off the floor and squeezed them tight.

  My accusation tasted bitter now.

  Clutching the keys, I looked up into the blackened sky. Just because he afforded me kindness didn’t mean he’d extended it to Holly.

  Right?

  3

  The Vanishing Body

  After Jimmy and the EMTs left, after my father went to bed without having determined cause of death, Aylen stayed up with me.

  “You know, Mom used to tell me and Nova this adsookin—this legend—at bedtime. That the Gottwas used special wood to bury their dead. Rowan wood. Apparently it has magical properties. At least, that’s what our tribe thought.”

  I looked away.

  “They also used to wrap their sick in rowan bark and stick them in sweat lodges. Apparently rowan smoke worked wonders on the new diseases the settlers brought with them from Europe.”

  With my eyes, I traced the cherry pattern on the ceramic bowl I’d painted during Cass’s seventh birthday party. It sat in the middle of our wooden coffee table, a gash of vermillion in our navy living room.

  Aylen crouched in front of our fireplace, holding a long match to the wad of fluffy lint she’d scraped off our dryer’s filter. Fire ignited and consumed the gray fluff before spreading to the logs. “I’m making a rowan wood fire in honor of Holly. Apparently the smoke will help guide her to the Great Spirit.”

  Holly had chosen to become fae. I doubted the Great Spirit wanted anything to do with her. But maybe our Great Spirit was forgiving.

  Aylen sat back on her heels and stared at the white fire. “It’s crazy to think that such a large tribe was entirely decimated. That we’re the last. And we’re not even pure Gottwa. It almost feels as though we’re the last of our kind. Maybe that’s how dinosaurs felt. ”

  I smiled at her comparison. But then I thought about it and said, “Or you could see it like we’re the first of a new kind.”

  She smiled at me. “Look who’s become an optimist.”

  An optimist? Is that what I was? Or was I simply a scientific observer?

  Aylen came over to me, kissed my forehead, and told me she was going to bed. After she closed the door to the guest room, I sat on the couch and watched the fire. I thought about Ace, but thinking about the faerie rattled my nerves. My gaze climbed to the wall over the fireplace where Mom had suspended my grandmother’s copper basin.

  Each summer, Grandma Woni would make jam in that pot, filling the house with the smell of syrup and juice. She’d always mix edible flowers into her stewing fruit. Foraging for the flowers was my job. She’d slip the journal filled with watercolor paintings of comestible plants into my little hands and send me out to Holly’s field to pick them. Sometimes Blake came with me. We’d imagine we were out on a treasure hunt. We’d roam around the field, checking and rechecking the pages, hoping to find exact matches. When we succeeded, we felt as thrilled as if we’d won a prize.

  After filling my tote bag with mauve angelica blossoms or marigold petals, we’d lie in the grass and watch tireless bees sip nectar and surf drunkenly through the crackling air.

  The fire popped, whisking me away from the buzzing blue field, away from Blake. A charred log fell over and hissed, splattering embers on the rug. I shot up, dragged the fireguard Aylen had forgotten to put back in place, and swept the ashes off the rug with the chimney brush.

  After making sure no more cinders darted over the screen, I padded down to the basement. It took me two attempts to find the cold chamber that contained Holly. They’d unwrapped the blanket from around her body but hadn’t stripped off her white cotton nightgown.

  Seeing her so frail twisted my insides. I slid the drawer out completely and gazed down at the ancient gardener. I wasn’t sure if it was because Ace had told me she would turn to ashes, but it seemed like her skin had taken on a silver sheen.

  “What happened to you, Holly?” I murmured, eyes roaming over her unmoving face. “Did you really catch something so…so human as chicken pox?”

  I received no answer. Not that I was expecting one. My gaze tracked down her arms. They were covered in the same welts as her face. Even the long scar, which ran from her thumb knuckle to her wrist, was covered in pink bumps. Oddly, whatever infection she’d contracted hadn’t spread to her chest and legs. I was pretty certain varicella was not a localized illness, but perhaps it affected faeries differently than it affected humans.

  My mother hadn’t taught me much about examining cadavers—mostly because I’d always pressed my palms against my ears and hummed loudly whenever she and Dad discussed it—but I’d seen enough CSI shows to identify signs of struggle.

  Without daring to touch Holly, in c
ase it was an infectious disease, I checked her neck for bruising, but found none. My gaze slid down to her fingertips. From what I could see, there was no residue under her nails. Would she even have had the energy to claw at an attacker?

  I looked around me, trying to find gloves to shift her over, when I noticed movement on the stairs. I jerked sideways so fast I slammed into the metal shelving. My heart rattled as loudly as the surgical utensils behind me, and my marked hand blazed.

  “Kajika,” I exclaimed, clapping my hand over my heart.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, walking over to me. His dark brown eyes were pink with burst blood vessels, and his shoes were stained with mud. I spotted a rip in his sweatshirt sleeve and a dirty scratch on his cheek.

  I peered behind him, half-expecting Ace to show up…half-wanting Ace to show up. Even though my brand connected me to Cruz, it was always Ace who showed up because Cruz and I were not on good terms. He knew not to approach me.

  Ace didn’t arrive this time, though. Slowly, my erratic pulse quieted, and I pushed away from the shelving. “Did you get into a fight?”

  “No.” Kajika ran a hand through his silky black hair. His knuckles were raw and red.

  I approached him and captured his hand to inspect his knuckles. “Then why is your hand bleeding? Why is your sweater torn?”

  “She’s gone, Catori,” he murmured.

  I looked up at him. I was tall, but he was taller. Much taller. “I know, Kajika.”

  “You know?”

  I frowned and tipped my head toward Holly. “She’s here.”

  He peered around the dimly lit chamber. “Where?”

  Couldn’t he see Holly? I pointed to her. “Right here.”

  “I am not talking about Holly. I am talking about Gwenelda. When I returned to the house, Holly was dead, and Gwenelda was gone.” His sigh reverberated against the stainless steel doors. “What if she—”

  “Killed Holly?”

  “No!” He yanked his hand out of mine and squared his shoulders. “No. Gwenelda is not a murderer. She cared about Holly. More than she should have.”