“Learn to do a somersault!”
“Go to a drive-in movie theater. That’s a thing, right? I feel like that’s a thing.”
“Bake cupcakes with icing.”
“Go down a water slide.”
“Pet a cow! What? Cows are cute.”
“Ice-skate at Rockefeller Plaza.”
“Climb a tree?”
“Oh, have a real birthday party with paper hats!”
“Open a lemonade stand. One hundred dollars a cup!”
One hundred dollars? They’d definitely been living with billionaire fae for too long. I started laughing as I filled up one page and flipped over the list. “Okay, okay, that’s enough for now, guys!” I loved that we had plenty of activities to fill up our whole summer, though some of them, like going to a drive-in movie theater, I’d have to get a little creative with. Maybe Severn would let me set one up on the Wilde Tower rooftop with Power Wheels and a pop-up projector screen I’d buy online. I wondered how fae would react if we built a lemonade stand in the lobby.
“Great job. This is going to be such a fun summer. I’m so happy I get to spend it with you two.” I started to put my notebook away in my bag, but May grabbed my hand, her face suddenly very serious.
“Will you add one more thing to the list, Willow?” Her brow was knit together, and there wasn’t a trace of joking in her eyes. “It’s very important.”
I glanced at Henry, but he shrugged, not knowing what she was going to say.
May took a deep breath, then glanced at her brother. “We want to get a pet.”
Little May said it with such conviction that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that having a pet in New York City was usually impossible; most apartments didn’t allow it. Of course, Wilde Towerwasn’tmost apartment buildings. Severn’s name was on the building. It was his decision, though I dreaded having to go to him to ask and getting scolded again.
May’s seriousness made me pause for a different reason, too. When I had been just about her age, the only thing I had wanted in life had been a dog. My mom and I moved cities faster than the seasons changed, sometimes living out of our car for days on end, in and out of hotels. I’d fallen in love with the idea of a puppy. Something that would be with me from town to town. Something to curl up with at night, regardless of what hotel room we were in.
I’d never gotten my wish. I felt like I’d do anything in my power to give May hers.
“That’s up to Severn,” I said softly. “But I promise I’ll talk to him about it, okay, May?”
She nodded like she trusted me with this serious task.
That night, I lay awake in my giant bed and thought about my childhood moving from place to place. At the time, I’d taken my mother at her word when she said she had to move for different job opportunities. But she was a waitress; now, I realized she probably could have gotten a job anywhere. She’d only waited tables to pay the bills; her real passion was artwork, like me. Only she did oil paints, enormous wall-sized murals of faerie horses amid giant ferns. Every night, she had told me faerie tales when she put me to bed. They weren’t Grimm’s fairy tales or knock-off Disney plotlines. Her stories were strange, twisted things with no morals, where the bad guys won more often than the heroes.
I sighed to myself and stared out the window at the city lights and the swirling magical haze that carried on the wind like a swarm of fireflies. If only my mother had known that her fictional world wasreal. If only she’d lived long enough.
I hugged my pillow close. Now, with a grown-up’s hindsight, I realized that my mother had probably been scared. All that time moving from place to place hadn’t been for waitressing jobs. She’d been running from something. Though I hadn’t known it at the time, we’d been on the lam, hiding from some unknown danger, and she had sheltered me and distracted me with fantasy tales so that I would never know the truth.
I could still vividly remember hearing the news that she’d disappeared. It had been five years ago, a few days after my eighteenth birthday. She hadn’t come home from work. There was enough evidence—bloodstains on the stairs, part of a scrawled threatening note—to determine it was a homicide. Two weeks later, the police declared it a cold case, and she was officially ruled deceased. Her body was never found. The only other clue I had, which the police had dismissed entirely, was a soot stain on our rental apartment floor that looked to me like a black rose.
That night, in my own bed in Wilde Tower, I dreamed of soot falling from the sky and a sleek fae horse running down Fifth Avenue when a sudden, sharpbam-bam-bamjolted me away.
I sat up, breathing hard.
Were those gunshots?
Or had it been part of my dream? A nightmare? Thinking of the night my mother never came home?
In the next instant, while I was still trying to sort out what was real and what was a dream, the whole tower began to shake like we were in the middle of an earthquake. The forest-scene paintings fell off the walls. My novels and art books tumbled off my bedroom shelves. One landed square on my head, hard enough that I was sure it would leave a bruise. The sound of glass breaking from somewhere else in the penthouse mixed with more sharpbam-bam-bams.
I threw off the covers. All I could think about was the children.
Henry. May.
