Insidious Read online

  She looked up into his eyes as he whispered, “Now you.”

  Without a second thought, Joy peeled her shirt off over her head and flung it somewhere on the floor. She smiled. Ink smiled, his eyes riveted on her. She watched his midnight eyes follow the shadows, tracing her curves. He very tentatively reached up, fingers extended, as if afraid to touch a bird that might fly away. Joy waited in that moment, impossibly long and longing, so attuned to that first, delicate touch that she almost missed it—her senses rising to meet his.

  His fingers touched—two, three, four—tracing the top of her clavicle to where it dipped at the base of her throat, following down over the swell of her breast. Ink watched his own fingers explore the curve, stroke slowly underneath, cupping the soft weight in his hand. Joy tried to breathe, letting him see, letting him feel—so present in that intensely magical moment like they’d shared when he’d first touched her ear. Curiosity was beguiling. Innocence was a drug. There was no rush getting here, there was just here. Now. This moment. This touch, like a surprise. Both of them so very, very here.

  She watched him as he saw her skin tighten. She felt him understand what it meant. What she wanted. His eyes, mesmerized, widened.

  He froze.

  “I have to go,” he said, rocking the mattress as he nearly leaped off the bed.

  “What?” Joy said, her skin growing cold. Her words tripped to keep up. “Wh—Where are you going?”

  Ink pulled his shirt on inside out and snapped his razor open, eyes averted, chain swinging wildly.

  “I have to see Raina,” he said and sliced open a door.

  Joy sat up.

  “What?” she shouted, but he was already gone.

  EIGHT

  JOY STORMED AROUND the house in the morning, slamming down dishes and yanking drawers. Her father and Stef stayed ominously quiet and got out of her way wherever she went. They exchanged looks from across the kitchen and quietly holed up in the den as Joy mutilated a fresh box of cereal, managing to tear the bag sideways. Special K flakes flew everywhere.

  “Everything okay, Joy?” her dad ventured.

  Joy smashed in the box top, her voice louder than she intended. “Everything’s—” she sputtered. She couldn’t say fine. Grabbing the spoon in her fist, she said, “Everything’s d— Everything’s peach—” She licked her lips, tasting the words, and slammed down the bowl. “Everything is completely, utterly p—!”

  But she couldn’t say perfect, because it wasn’t.

  She ground her teeth and sat down at the table. Hard.

  Stef kicked his foot up on the arm of the couch. “Well, I’m convinced.”

  Joy scraped the bowl and stared across the table, at the very seat where Ink had first explored her earlobe and filled her with querulous butterflies. She closed her eyes for a moment, got up and switched seats. She chewed as if she were pulverizing each awful thought before swallowing it.

  She rubbed her eyes as she chewed. It had taken her several fitful hours to finally get some sleep. She’d had to scrub the memory of Ink’s touch off her body with a loofah and peppermint soap, and yet his eyes stayed with her as if watching her still. Her body itched. Her fingers clenched. Her worries spiraled like a storm. Raina? followed quickly by What went wrong? chased the screaming tail of Did I do something wrong? only to loop back to Raina?! again.

  Raina. The mysterious sophisticate with the exotic Pantene hair and the shimmering, gold-gloss lips; the one who’d shimmied out of Enrique’s funeral with Ink just as smooth as you please, her arm hooked in his, leaving Joy and Inq behind. THAT Raina?!

  Joy squeezed her head in her hands.

  That mental merry-go-round had been enough to keep her up all night.

  Her father pointed a finger at Stef, who held his hands up, the picture of blamelessness. Dad sighed and came over to the table but held back from actually touching her. He knew when Joy was all-over prickly.

  “Anything I can do?” he asked.

  Joy shook her head and crunched her breakfast, feeling sadder and more frustrated by the minute, as if having witnesses made it worse. She ignored the men silently calculating the date and swore to herself that if one of them offered her chocolate or used the word period except at the end of a sentence, she would completely lose it. Period.

  “Okay, then,” her father said, “I was going over the route with Stef and wanted your—”

  “It’s fine,” Joy said.

  “Right. Well. On the way to the site, I thought maybe we could—”

  “Fine,” Joy said and scooped the last spoonful of cereal into her mouth. “It’s all fine. Whatever you’ve planned is one hundred percent fine by me. Just tell me when I’m driving and when we leave.”

  Mr. Malone tapped his finger against his lip.

  “We leave early, 4:00 a.m. tomorrow morning,” he said. “And we’ll drive in shifts.”

  Joy stood up with the bowl and spoon in hand. The chair squeaked sharply across the floor.

  “Fine,” she said and went to the sink.

  “Okay...” her father said, resigned. “Fine.”

  Joy rinsed and dropped her dishes in the rack. She wiped her hands on the towel and spied her brother’s head peeking over the back of the couch.

  “Get up,” she said. “We’re going out.”

  Stef frowned. “What?”

  She threw the towel on the counter. “We’re going out,” she said. “Now. Grab your keys.”

  “Hey, I’m not your—”

  “Now.”

  Stef leaped off the couch and grabbed his keys out of the dish in the hall. He glanced at his father. “We’re going out,” he said needlessly.

  “So I heard,” her dad said, trying not to grin. “Nice talking to you both. Please, come back in one piece.”

  Joy held the door open as Stef flipped the keys in his hand. “You gave her the other X chromosome,” he said. “I blame you.”

  She nearly slammed the door in her brother’s face. Turning, she took the stairs two at a time, forcing him to follow.

  “What’s your problem?” Stef said, trailing after her. “Where are we going?”

  Joy hit the pavement, both feet slap-slamming down. “Abbot’s Field,” she said automatically. It was where she went when she was feeling like this, but the truth was that it was exactly where they both needed to be. She needed answers, and she needed them now. It was the only thing keeping her from thinking about Ink.

  “I’m not your off-mat trainer anymore,” he said. “Or your chauffeur, by the way. You can get there on your own.”

  She turned around, grabbed his arm and pulled him bodily along. “We’re both going,” she said, head full of steam. “You said you’re willing to help me? Fine. You’re helping me get to Abbot’s Field.”

  Stef marched up to his Nissan, looking annoyed.

  “Joy...”

  She glared at him. Whatever he saw made him stop. The alarm beeped off. The locks snapped open. She got in and sat down in a huff. Stef dropped into the driver’s seat and keyed the ignition. Watching him turn the key made her think of Ink, which made her clench her fists under her armpits and cross her legs.

  Stef backed out of the spot with a muttered, “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  They drove away in silence, both fuming in their separate seats. Stef squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles were white. Joy distracted herself by texting her mother and Monica on her phone. Both messages were basically the same: Men suck! The scenery sped by in a whirr of tires and air-conditioning.

  “The only reason I’m doing this is that it’s the quickest way to get you off my back,” Stef said.

  Joy shrugged. “Whatever works.” She flipped back to her contacts and scrolled through the names, knowing that Raina and Ink weren’t among them. Her thumbs
paused over one name. She tapped it and held the phone to her ear.

  “This is Antony.”

  She could picture his face—Antony was very distinctive. He’d once said his parents were a mix of African, Native American, Spanish, Japanese, English and Haitian. He looked like a model, ran triathlons and was an environmental architect. She could hear big machinery grinding in the background.

  “Hi, it’s Joy,” she said, plugging one ear. “I have a quick question.”

  “As long as it’s quick.”

  “Who’s Raina?”

  There was a loud beeping, and Antony moved away from it. “Raina? You met her at Enrique’s funeral. Tall woman, fast talker, great hair.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” Joy said uncomfortably. “I mean, who is she? How does she know...us?”

  “Oh, that,” Antony said. “She’s one of us. One of Inq’s.”

  Joy’s mind flipped one-eighty. “She’s a Cabana Girl?”

  Even with the noise in the background, she could hear Antony snicker. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t call her that,” he said jovially. “She’s a woman—all woman—and she’ll kick your ass if you forget it. Raina’s the hen that rules us roosters. She’s in a class all by herself.”

  Joy swallowed another pang of jealousy. “Then, what’s she doing with Ink?”

  “Ink?” Antony said, enunciating the hard k to make sure he’d heard the right twin. “Huh. Well, if there was ever any guy, it’d be him...”

  Joy hung up, furious. A cold fist of realization squeezed her stomach into a ball. She’d never said anything to Ink about them being...exclusive—she hadn’t thought she had to!—but with Inq and her torrid band of harem hotties as his only reference, Joy had been stupid not to think of it before. And therefore, it was stupid to feel angry or jealous or hurt, and even more stupid to feel betrayed, and insanely stupid to feel hot, seething anger curdling in the back of her brain—but she did. All of it. All at once. She bit the inside of her cheek and banged the phone against her forehead.

  Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

  “Try hitting harder for me,” Stef quipped. Joy slammed her head back against the headrest, blinking hard. Stef sighed and made a concerted effort to sound sincere. “What’s up?”

  “It’s just...hard,” she said. What she didn’t add was dating one of the Folk, but her brother heard her anyway. Their family was really good at hearing things unsaid.

  “Yeah,” Stef said soberly. “I’ll bet.”

  He pulled along the woody stretches surrounding Abbot’s Field. Driving far from the scattered camp kids and Frisbee games, he wound down the gravel path to the old soccer field with its pristine, well-trimmed grass and its spongy, level ground. He didn’t need to ask her where to pull over; she had practiced here for years, and Stef, as her home coach, would put her through her paces here at Abbot’s Field. Once upon a time, Stef was her number-one fan. Now he looked like he was going to hit her with a brick.

  And the worst was yet to come.

  “Come on,” she said, stepping out of the car. “Over there.”

  Stef got out and shut the door. “Am I supposed to have any idea what’s going on?” he asked. “Or am I about to get Punk’d?”

  Joy turned. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said as she walked, welcoming the familiar feel of Abbot’s Field under her feet. This was her place, her space to dare to go beyond her comfort zone, and if there was ever a time she really needed it, it was now. “I really need your help, and I agreed to meet up with someone in order to find some way of tracking whatever spell is on the Twixt.”

  Stef paused. “This isn’t like last time, right?” he said. “Because I haven’t quite recovered from watching a monster muskrat eat his own heart and you taking off through a tree.”

  “No,” Joy said. “It’s not like last time.” She took out the satyr’s glow stick and turned it in her fingers. She took a deep breath, smelling the grass and the dirt and the wind through the trees. “This guy just wanted to talk to you,” she said. “That’s all. Just talk.”

  Stef’s eyes widened behind his rectangular lenses.

  “What guy?” he asked.

  She tried to act nonchalant as she snapped the glow stick and shook it. “Some satyr from the Carousel,” she said.

  Stef paled. “A satyr?”

  There was something in his voice that pierced every wall, every protection she thought she might have managed to keep him safe, but by then it was too late.

  A neon-colored globe of light lit up the grass, outlining individual blades and the fractal bark of trees. It expanded, enveloping both of them in a bubble, blurred at the edges, poking a neat hole in space. Joy could see Abbot’s Field in the distance with its familiar fence posts and well-trodden grass, but her feet stood somewhere else—another field, another wood—thick and unfamiliar. It wasn’t the meadow inside the Bailiwick or one of the conifer glades she’d been dragged through with Kestrel in pursuit of the Red Knight, but there was something about it that tugged at her memory. It was like she’d been here before.

  Joy squeezed the plastic tube in her left hand and her scalpel in her right. She wasn’t taking any more chances of something going wrong. And when she saw the DJ in the wild grass, she thought he looked familiar, too, but not because she’d seen him only yesterday—it was because the look on his face was exactly like Stef’s.

  Her brother spun around, arms hanging helpless and loose like a question, like they didn’t quite know where to belong. Joy forgot that he wasn’t used to travel in the Twixt. That wasn’t it—she knew that wasn’t it—but she couldn’t help trying to act like it was.

  She stepped nearer to him. “Stef, this is—”

  “Dmitri,” Stef whispered.

  Joy stopped. The satyr stared back, unblinking, his breath coming fast in his chest. Her brother put a hand over his mouth. The red bracelet on his wrist was knotted with iron beads, his last protection. “Oh my God, Dmitri,” he spoke through his fingers. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” He shook his head and leaned away until his foot shot back to keep his balance. He was rooted to the spot. “I can’t—”

  “Stef.”

  Stef froze as if the satyr’s voice were a spell, his words of disbelief evaporating into nothing. Joy touched her brother’s arm and kept her eyes on the DJ, who crossed and uncrossed his dark, curly arms, looking uncomfortable and shy.

  “I’ve heard of you,” Joy said. “When I was little—” she glanced at her brother “—you were one of his imaginary friends.” Her voice got a little harder. “Not so imaginary, though, are you?”

  Dmitri shook his head, a tiny waggle of his chin hairs. “No,” he said quietly, not looking away from Stef. “This is real.”

  It looked as if Stef might speak, but the words were gone. His mouth trembled, frowning, opening and shutting with a million, billion unsaid things. It scared Joy to see Stefan like this. He was beyond upset—he looked trapped, terrified—and when his eyes began to shine with angry tears, she couldn’t take it. She lifted her scalpel and pointed it at the satyr.

  “Stop it!” she said at Dmitri. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it!”

  “I can’t,” Dmitri said, nervously bobbing on his strong goat legs. “And I won’t.”

  “Yes, you will,” Joy said. However the satyr might be twisting their deal, it ended now. “By rowan and ash and whatnot, you promised!”

  “You promised!” Stef shouted. Joy spun around in surprise. Stef glared at Dmitri, nearly vibrating in anger. “You promised me that you would never, ever come looking for me again,” he said. “By rowan, yew and ash and be by ironwood bound!”

  Joy nodded. That was the phrase. But she had the feeling that they weren’t talking about the same thing at all.

  “I didn’t come looking for you,” Dmitri said softly. “I’ve always known where you w
ere, where you’d gone, where you’ve been.” He smoothed his cheeks down his jaw and curled his fingers around the end of his beard. “I just waited.” He gestured vaguely at Joy. “I waited until you could come to me.”

  Stef turned on Joy, eyes blazing. She stumbled over a rock in the grass.

  “You did this?” he hissed at her. “Why? Why would you do this?”

  Her older brother had never asked her such a question; it was the sort of honesty that she’d wanted from him when their mother had left, realizing that he had known—or at least he’d suspected—about the affair and hadn’t told her. All she knew was that, afterward, she’d been left out and left wondering why? That was how he sounded now, hurt and betrayed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t know.”

  He quickly switched targets, stabbing two fingers at Dmitri, who stood unarmed and unarmored before the wizard’s wrath.

  “That summer,” Stef said. “When it was over, they told me—” He stuttered and took a breath. “They told me that you were sent,” he spat the word. “That you were sent there to lure me in, to bring me over.”

  Dmitri shook his head. “No.”

  Stef thundered. “Bait for the trap!”

  “No.”

  “Those are the rules!”

  “No!” Dmitri shouted. “It wasn’t like that!”

  The satyr’s voice cracked like a branch in a canyon, echoes rebounding inside the bubble, ricocheting against her ears. Joy stared at the two of them. Stef towered in his rage. Dmitri was trembling, defiant. Joy wanted to pull a Winnie the Pooh blanket out of nowhere and hide. She felt five years old all over again with the grown-ups shouting, and she didn’t understand; she was only scared and confused.

  “Stef!” The satyr almost laughed. Almost. But he was too angry and too honest to care anymore. “Don’t you get it? Didn’t you hear? They told me the same thing!”

  The words hung in the air and fell like dead birds, each one landing smack as they hit. The two men faced each other, the air between them crackling. Dmitri’s tufted ears lay flat against his mop of brown curls.