Rules of Engagement

Fourteenth of September. Carver, D., age 58. Back, both shoulders. Found at the edge of Route 11, facing the trees. Lynx, so-called. Survived. Struck from behind while walking away. No further action.

(walking AWAY. he was leaving. you're allowed to leave, right? somebody tell me you're allowed to leave. — K.)

I didn't sleep. I'm telling you that so you understand the state of me at six a.m., standing at the edge of the backyard in my I ♥ NY hoodie and yesterday's leggings, holding a travel mug of coffee I'd made strong enough to strip paint, shouting at a tree.

"Gerald. I know you're up there."

The pines didn't answer. The fog was doing that thing it does here, lying across the grass like a sheet somebody forgot to fold. Behind me the house was dead quiet, Dad's truck in the driveway, the chain still on the back door because I'd gone out the window. Old habits. New window.

"Gerald, I swear to God, I will buy a BB gun on Amazon Prime. It will take nine days to get here because this place is the end of the earth, but I will wait."

A branch dipped. A black shape dropped, opened its wings once, and by the time it hit the grass it was a boy in a black peacoat brushing pine needles off his sleeve like he'd been inconvenienced.

Caspian Crowe looked at my coffee. "You could have just knocked."

"On what? Your nest?"

"I don't have a nest."

"You have a vibe of nest."

He smiled the way he always did, with only half his mouth, like the other half was saving itself for something better. "What do you want, Harrow?"

I'd rehearsed it at four in the morning. I'd rehearsed it so many times it had gone smooth in my mouth, like a subway token.

"I want all three of you," I said. "Here. Tonight. The ring. And before you make that face, I mean in a hostage-negotiation way, not a Bachelorette way."

They came. That surprised me more than anything, honestly. I'd half expected to stand alone in the middle of those broken stones like the last girl at a party when the Uber surge hits.

Ronan came out of the trees first, human and barefoot, in a gray Henley that had seen things. Elias arrived without arriving: one second the far stone was empty and the next he was sitting on it with one knee up, chin on his wrist, eyes catching the flashlight gold. Caspian was already there. Caspian was always already there.

Nobody stood inside the ring with me. They stayed at the edges, each on his own side, three points of a triangle so exact it looked like someone had measured it.

"Here's the deal," I said, and my voice only cracked on deal, which I'm counting as a win. "My father lied to me for eighteen years. Your families apparently need me for some thousand-year group project I never signed up for. Everybody in this town has decided I'm a thing. A key. A lock. Whatever. And I get it, I'm very important, very chosen, love that for me." I took a breath. The air tasted like cold pennies and pine. "But I'm not doing anything you tell me to do until you tell me the truth. And I'm not walking into these woods again without knowing how to not die in them. So you teach me. All three of you. And you answer my questions. Honestly."

Elias laughed, low. "Or?"

"Or I walk." I lifted my chin. "I've got a dad who knows exactly how to run from this place. I bet he gives lessons."

That landed. I watched it land on all three of them: Ronan's jaw going tight, Caspian's eyes flicking toward Elias, Elias going so still he could have been carved into the stone.

"She'd break it," Caspian said quietly. "Just by leaving."

"She doesn't know what that means," Ronan said.

"So tell her," I snapped, and for one second, honestly, I thought they would.

They didn't. Not that night. What I got instead was training, which, let me be very clear, is not the same thing as answers, and I said so roughly forty times over the next two weeks.

Ronan took mornings. He'd show up at the logging road at five-thirty and make me run, which was rich coming from the guy who once told me I don't run in these woods. When I pointed that out, he said, "You don't run from things. You run to places. There's a difference," and then made me sprint uphill until I saw God and God was wearing Hokas.

He taught me how to fall. How to roll off a shoulder instead of breaking a wrist. How to listen for the second before something moves, the hush that comes when the birds stop. He never touched me more than he had to. Every time he did, a hand flat between my shoulder blades, fingers on my elbow fixing my angle, he took it back fast, like I was a stove.

Caspian took afternoons, in the library of all places, which tracked. He taught me to read the Register, actually read it: which wounds meant which teeth, why "so-called" got used for some entries and not others, how the handwriting changed every forty years when a new clerk took the job. He also taught me nothing at all, because every lesson turned into an argument.

"You're reading it like a tabloid."

"It is a tabloid. It's a thousand years of 'Local Man Mauled, Nobody Cares.'"

"It's a record of who kept their word and who didn't."

"Oh, so it's Yelp."

He put his pen down, slow. "Do you ever stop?"

"Do you ever stop sitting outside my window?"

He leaned across the table until I could smell him, cold air and old paper and something like the inside of a church, and said, "I stopped the night you found out. Did you notice?"

I had. I didn't tell him I had. I turned the page so hard it nearly tore.

Elias didn't take a shift. Elias just appeared, usually at dusk, usually when I was alone, and taught me things no one had agreed he could teach me. How to see in low light. How to stand so the wind carried my scent away from the trees instead of into them. Once, in the backyard, he stepped behind me so close I felt the heat of him along my whole spine and murmured, "Don't turn around," and I didn't, and he said, "Good. Never let anything that big know you've noticed it," and when I finally turned, there was nobody there except Bea at the kitchen window, waving at the dark like it was an old friend.

The kiss happened on a Thursday, which is a stupid day for a kiss. I want that on the record.

We were up past mile four, past where I'd ever been, and Ronan had me doing the falling thing on a slope covered in wet needles. I went down wrong. Not hurt-wrong, just graceless, all elbows. He caught my wrist on the way down and we both went over, and I ended up on my back in the moss with him braced above me on one arm, breathing hard, his hair in his eyes.

"You did that on purpose," I said.

"You fell on purpose?"

"You did the catching on purpose."

His gray eyes were very close. They had a darker ring around the edge I hadn't noticed before, like a storm had drawn a line around itself. He didn't move. Neither did I. Somewhere a long way off something cracked a branch, and neither of us looked.

"Katie," he said, and he'd never said my name before, only city girl, only Harrow, and it went through me like the express train blowing past a local stop.

I kissed him first. You'll want to know that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I grabbed a fistful of his ruined Henley and pulled, and he made a sound low in his chest that was not entirely human, and then his hand was in my hair and the moss was cold under my back and he tasted like rain and something wilder, and for maybe ten seconds I forgot my father, the Register, the whole thousand years.

He pulled away first. He sat back on his heels and looked at me like I'd handed him something heavy.

"That was a mistake," he said.

"Wow. Okay. Great review. Two stars."

"Not you." He dragged a hand down his face. "They'll know. By tonight. Both of them."

"Know what? That I kissed a guy in the woods? Ronan, I'm from Manhattan. That's not a scandal, that's a Tuesday."

"You're the Harrow," he said. "You don't get to kiss anyone without it meaning something."

He was right, which I hate.

Caspian didn't show at the library the next day. He showed at my locker instead, leaning on it, looking at me with an expression I'd never seen on him, flat and cool and absolutely furious underneath.

"Wolves," he said. "Of course. Loud, warm, obvious. You went for the golden retriever."

"He's a wolf."

"He's a dog with a title." He straightened. "You understand what you did. You picked a side in front of the whole Greywood."

"I picked a mouth."

"Not here you didn't." His voice dropped. "Every raven over this town saw it. My father saw it. Do you think the ravens bow to a Harrow who's already bent toward the wolves?"

Then he walked away, and I stood there with my combination lock spinning under my thumb, and I couldn't remember a single number.

Elias was worse, because Elias wasn't angry. He found me that night on the back porch. He sat on the step below mine so we were eye to eye, his voice soft as fur.

"I don't blame you," he said. "He's very easy to want."

"Is this the part where you tell me you're easier?"

He smiled. "I'm the part where I tell you the truth. You think you're choosing a boy. You're choosing a border." He reached up and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, slow, letting his knuckle rest against my jaw, and I didn't stop him. I want to tell you I stopped him. "My people have been waiting a thousand years for a Harrow to look at us like that. Be careful who you let watch you do it."

I told Juniper everything the next afternoon, in her aunt's car, with the engine running because the heater only worked in drive. Wolves. Ravens. Lynxes. Dad. The ring. The kiss. I talked for twenty minutes straight and she didn't interrupt once, which, if you know Juniper, should tell you how bad I looked.

When I finished she sat there with both hands on the wheel.

"Okay," she said. "So the lynx kid. Elias. He's a cat."

"Juniper."

"No, I need a second, my whole life just makes sense. He hisses at the Pepsi machine." She turned to me, and her eyes were wet, and her voice was steady. "You should've told me Tuesday."

"I thought you'd run."

"From you? I've lived here my whole life and nobody's ever told me the truth about anything. You're the first." She reached over and yanked the drawstring of my hoodie so the hood scrunched shut over my face. "I'm in. Whatever this is. You need a gossip on the inside, I'm literally the only qualified applicant."

I laughed into the hood so she wouldn't see the rest.

Here's the evidence. I'm giving it to you exactly how I found it.

That night I opened the Register to add my notes for the week, the way I'd started doing, the way Caspian said the clerks used to. And under Carver's entry, below my own scribble, in somebody else's handwriting, flat and neat and fresh enough to smudge under my thumb, was a line that had not been there that morning.

Nineteenth of September. Ring, the middle stones. Hollis, B., age 16. Throat. Lynx, so-called. Did not survive. Three princes present at the Ring with the Harrow girl.

Nineteenth of September was Thursday.

Thursday, all three of them had been with me. Every minute. I could account for every one of them, Ronan on top of me in the moss, Caspian circling overhead, Elias waiting by my back porch when I got home.

So whatever killed Bobby Hollis inside the ring that night, it wasn't any of the boys I'd been so sure were lying to me.

I wrote one thing in the margin. My hand shook so badly the letters came out in pieces.

(then who.)