A wave of exhaustion swirled through my muscles, destabilizing my joints. From my ankles up, hazy, moss-colored winged insects invited me to collapse on the grass carpeting the rows between the earthen coffins and curl up for a nap. Inside the mound, the air verged on steamy, and the temperature was rising. I closed my eyes. Tried pinching the skin on the inside of my wrist. I shuffled three steps back, urged on by the little wings, then took three or four steps more, until I was on the grass and could lie down without getting dirty.
I was tired of being dirty.
I was tired of wearing stiff pants, sports bras, and clunky work boots.
From my horizontal position, all I could see was a forest of feet and shoes, legs and pants, skirts and ankles ringing the two living hidden folk and their two dead brethren. I tucked my knees toward my belly and my hands under the side of my face, and closed my eyes. With but a minute or five to rest, I would be good.
Kelp, salty, slippery, and cool, slid across my cheek. The feathery end trailed over my jaw and tickled my neck. I batted it away and dove deeper into the salty depths in an effort to elude whatever was trying to get my attention. Or I tried to swim away until I realized I was lying on a smooth, wide rock left damp by a retreating tide. My eyelids refused to open, but scents and sounds told me the ocean was near. The whoosh of gull wings, coupled with their cries, mingled with water gurgling, swirling, ebbing and flowing between the rocks around me.
Calliope, sweetheart.
I batted away another strip of seaweed.
Something wet unstuck my eyes. The tableaux in front of me had not changed. Living bodies ringed dead bodies. The trail of drool out of the corner of my mouth let me know I’d napped. A quick look at my phone verified almost thirty minutes had passed since I’d first closed my eyes. I stayed curled into myself, listened to my breath, and made another attempt to reach into the ground directly below my body.
My inquiry was met with the same silence I found at the demarcation line between the Pearmains’ orchards and this sacred site. The druids would know why this was. I hoped they could explain it, that it wasn’t some secret they had to keep on pain of—
“Calliope?” Rose’s pointed whisper brought me to sitting.
Those who were standing twisted and turned, I assumed because they were looking for me.
“Here,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “On the grass.” I flicked the flashlight app on my phone and waved. Surely they could see the beam through the misty green-gray light infusing the air.
Getting to my hands and knees and then to standing was an odd process of unsticking myself from where I had lain. One entire side of my body, my pants, shirt, and even my hair was damp—no, wet—and I smelled like a creature that had risen from the sea rather than a witch who had sweated a bit while napping in a patch of grass. The shape of my position was clearly embossed below me, the green darker and crushed.
I poked with one finger then my palm. Spongey. Water filled the imprint left by my hand.
“Calliope?” Rose’s voice held twin threads of urgency and annoyance. I was never going to be her star pupil.
“Coming.”
When I reclaimed the spot I had abandoned, Wes sniffed at my hair and clothes and pivoted to see where I had been. I pointed, the outline of my body still visible.
“You smell like the in-between,” he whispered.
I ducked my nose toward my armpit and sniffed. If the in-between was a place where dreams shone vivid then yes, I did smell like the in-between. Everything my senses catalogued while I napped was as real as the tableaux in front of me. My mother’s voice as clear as Wes’s whisper. I clutched at my shirt and squeezed until my fingers were wet, unsure how to reconcile the smell of the ocean and memories of my mother with this place where the dead lay all around.
Maritza glared at Wes and me. At a signal I did not notice, she waved her hand in a languid S-shape. Her needle rose, a black thread looped through its eye. Stirring the air in front of her as though standing at a massive pot, she directed the needle and thread outside our circle. The magic-infused objects went around and around, and every time they skimmed the backs of my legs, I shimmied forward a bit more. The others did too, until we were all mashed together, the four hidden folk at our shins.
“Stop.” Maritza’s voice rang with authority. Her needle hovered in the air. And the dead opened their eyes. “Bellflower. Sweetbough. What have you to tell us, now that you have spoken with your kin?”
“Fae. One man. Three women.” One by one, words drifted from their open mouths like mist over an embankment. I smelled earthworms and freezer burn on the dead men’s breath.
Tanner crouched and rested one knee on the ground. “Where did they find you?”
“The tunnels.” Both gave the dead’s version of a protracted exhalation. Movement under the shrouds made it seem they were fumbling at the threads keeping their body parts together. “Collars. Choke. Pain. Death.”
Peasgood and Hyslop linked elbows and set their free hands over the dead men’s hearts. Peasgood’s eyes filled with tears as he looked up at Maritza. “Please don’t make them go through this again,” he said. “Please.”
“We need names, my dear,” she answered, gentling her tone, “so that those who brought death to this sacred place will be revealed.” Adding a dose of palliative lightness to her voice, she said, “Bellflower. Sweetbough. Do you have names to share with us?”
The skin of the dead grew paler as every last bit of color coaxed into their cheeks by the raising ritual leaked away.
“Bellflower. Sweetbough.
