Bianca would tell her elders about my destruction of Halcyon Hall. If I was lucky, the Lindqvists would only burn me in effigy for a decade or so.
A moment later, a figure emerged from the handball courts and made a slow circle of the dog run. It was Arabella, headed toward me, her eyes following Bianca.
“What was that?”
“Helshire stuff,” I said.
“A fire on a rainy night?”
I didn’t answer.
“Jessica,” she said. “Helshire is where the four families bump against each other. You have to be careful there. If any trouble spills beyond those ivy walls, Elizabeth will have your skin.”
“Whatever happens, it’ll be my problem.”
Arabella grunted, pulling out her phone to text. Across the park, Uncle Orrin glanced down at his screen. He waved at us and began to limp toward the exit.
“Thanks for the backup,” I said.
“Babysitting is my full-time job. Do I need to start running overwatch on you again?”
I shook my head. “Tell the family not to worry.”
“The elders aren’t worried, Jessica. They think Halcyon was struck by lightning. They have no idea what goes on there.”
“But you asked me about the fire the day after I got here.” I stared at Arabella for a moment, then reached out and took her left hand. She didn’t stop me as I pushed up the shirtsleeve—on her forearm was a tattoo, small enough to be mistaken for a blemish. Heart-shaped, black.
A Hefnd mark, just like Bianca’s.
“You killed someone? For personal reasons?”
“For justice. I’ll tell you about it sometime.” Arabella smiled. “I was the first Morton invited in. They wanted something from me.”
The family secret. The story of Uncle Max.
“Your junior year,” I said, “Yvonne and Tobias didn’t show up at Helshire. That’s when they knew for sure the cousins were gone.”
“I never told them why. I assume they still don’t know.”
“They asked Sebastian to join last year, thinking he might let it slip.”
“Sebastian, doing a Hefnd?” Arabella let out a sharp, hard laugh. “He’s too busy charming his enemies to kill them.”
“Maybe.” He’d donesomethingup in Albany.
Arabella was staring at me. “What do you mean ‘maybe’?”
“No idea,” I said. “Nobody tells me anything.”
34
The color of the month was unclear.
The girl who answered the door wore a loose summer dress, the grayish-green of dried sage. The walls of the hallway behind her were more radiant. Verdigris? Viridian? I’d learned a profusion of color names from Hiromi. Gertie had lived here since late May, but the stifling air prickled with the sting of turpentine.
They’d repainted more than once.
“Is she home?”
