What Elias Didn't Say

Second of October, 1825. Ashby, M., age 30. Throat. Lynx, so-called. Did not survive. The house of Marrow informed. The house of Marrow did not answer. No further action.

(Marrow. As in Elias Marrow. As in the boy who taught me how to fall without breaking my wrist, like, four days ago. Cool. Cool cool cool. Also, "did not answer" isn't a dead end, Hollowmere, it's a whole second clue. — K.)

I gave Elias exactly one day.

Friday I sat through AP Gov with the Register zipped inside my backpack like contraband, which, to be fair, it was, and I watched him two rows over not looking at me. He has a way of not looking at you that's louder than most people's staring. Golden-brown hair falling over one eye, pencil moving, total stillness, like a cat on a windowsill who has absolutely clocked the pigeon.

Saturday night at eleven-forty I climbed out my window in the I ♥ NY hoodie and two pairs of leggings, crossed the backyard past Bea's sandbox, and found him already sitting on the split-rail fence at the edge of the trees.

"You're late," he said.

"I didn't text you."

"No." He dropped down. Didn't even make a sound when he landed, which I'm choosing not to find hot. "But you read the entry from 1825, and you've been chewing the inside of your cheek since second period."

"Okay, first, stay out of my cheek."

The corner of his mouth moved. With Elias that's basically a standing ovation.

"Walk with me," he said. "Not toward the Ring. North."

North was his side. I knew that from training, from the way he always stopped at a certain birch with three slashes in the bark, chest height, old and silvered over. He never crossed it with us. Tonight he put his palm flat on the scars as we passed, the way you'd touch a mezuzah or a subway pole you've grabbed a thousand times. Then we were over.

The forest changed. I can't explain it better than that. Wolf ground smells like wet dog and pine needles and somebody's campfire from three days ago. This was colder. Rock pushed up through the moss in big gray shelves, the birches got skinnier and whiter, and everything was quiet in a way that made my ears hurt. The moon was almost full, and it threw our shadows ahead of us long and thin, and only one of them crunched when it walked.

"So," I said, because silence makes me itchy. "Lynx territory. Very Restoration Hardware. Big on the neutrals."

"Katie."

"Who wrote Bobby Hollis into my book?"

He kept walking.

"Elias. Who killed a sixteen-year-old in the Ring and then wrote that you guys were there? With me? Because I was there, and you weren't, and I'm getting really tired of being the only person in this town who can count to three."

He stopped on a ledge where the rock opened up and the trees fell away below us, a whole black valley of Greywood silvered at the tops. Wind came up off it and went straight through both pairs of leggings.

"Someone who wanted the wolves and the ravens to read it," he said. "And believe it."

"That's not a who."

"It's the beginning of one."

I hate it when he does that. He answers like a fortune cookie written by a lawyer.

He made me work for it, and I'm not exaggerating. We went down the ledge on a deer trail and he made me name everything I noticed, like it was training, like we weren't talking about a dead kid. I noticed the scratches, higher up the trunks here, fresh ones, pale wood showing like a bad haircut. I noticed tufts of fur snagged on the bark, gray-gold, too long to be his. I noticed a smell like a butcher's walk-in on Ninth Avenue, coppery and cold, coming from somewhere to the left.

"Don't," he said, when I turned toward it.

"What's over there?"

"A deer. Mostly." He caught my wrist. His fingers were warm, which is so unfair when everything else is freezing. "They're not eating what they kill anymore. That's how you can tell."

"Tell what? Elias, I swear to God, if you say 'the beginning of one' again I will push you off a rock."

He let go of my wrist. Slowly. Like the letting go cost him something.

"There are lynxes who never wanted the Accord," he said. "They think it made us small. Hiding. Hunting on a ration like pets fed by the village. For a long time they were only old men who complained at gatherings. Then someone started listening to them."

"Someone."

"Someone of my blood."

The wind did the thing again. I put my hands in my hoodie pocket and found an old MetroCard in there, which I held onto like it could swipe me out of here.

"Your dad?"

"My father's dead." Flat. Register-flat. "My uncle raised me."

I waited. He looked out at the valley, and the moon caught his eyes, and for a second they weren't brown at all, they were a pale lit-up gold, like headlights coming around a corner.

"Lord Varek Marrow," he said. "He wants the Accord broken. Not bent. Broken. He wants us to stop pretending, to walk into Hollowmere at noon and let them see what's been eating them for a thousand years. He thinks they'll kneel." A breath. "He might be right."

"So Bobby—"

"Was his. And Carver. And the deer, and the Pruitt woman's hands, and every so-called anything since July. And he wrote that line in your book so Ronan's father would think I'd betrayed him, and Caspian's father would think Ronan had, and by the first snow we'd have torn each other apart and saved him the trouble."

I'm going to be honest with you. My first instinct was a joke. Something about how every family has the one uncle who gets weird at Thanksgiving. I had it loaded. It just didn't come out.

"How long have you known?"

He didn't answer, which was the answer.

"How long, Elias."

"Since Pruitt." He turned to face me. "I knew it was ours. I didn't know it was him until the night of the party. My house has known things and not answered for a long time. You read that tonight."

Did not answer. 1825. I'd made a joke about it in the margin.

"You let me train with you," I said, and my voice did something I didn't authorize. "You let me walk around thinking it was Ronan. You stood on my porch Thursday night while Bobby Hollis was—"

"Yes."

"Don't just say yes."

"What should I say?" He took a step, and I didn't step back, and that's on me. "That I was ashamed? I was. That I thought if I told you, you'd get in your father's terrible car and drive back to your city and the whole thing would come apart in a week? I thought that too. That I wanted you to look at me like you look at him?"

"I don't look at Ronan like—"

"You do."

We were too close. I could feel the heat off him through the hoodie, which, again, is physically unreasonable. His breath fogged and mine fogged and they met in the middle and turned into one cloud. He smelled like cold stone and cedar. My heart was doing the Q-train thing again, lights flickering, everyone pretending not to notice. His hand came up, and stopped, an inch from my jaw, and stayed there, like he was asking and also like he knew exactly what the answer was.

Let me be very clear: I did not lean in.

I just didn't lean out either.

Something huge moved in the trees below us. A long, heavy slide of weight through brush, and then nothing, the kind of nothing that's listening. Elias's head snapped toward it and his whole body went still in a way human bodies can't, and the pale gold came up in his eyes and stayed.

"Behind me," he said.

I was already there. Fun fact about me: I am extremely brave right up until something in the dark is.

Wings cracked the air over our heads, close enough that I felt the wind of them, and a raven came down on the rock beside us and was not a raven by the time its feet hit stone. Caspian straightened up, black coat, black hair, face the color of skim milk in the moonlight, and he looked at the inch between Elias's hand and my face like it was a crime scene.

"It's gone," he said. "It went east. Toward the village."

"Great," I said. "Love that. Super normal sentence."

"You told her," Caspian said to Elias.

"Some."

"Then tell her the rest. Or I will." Caspian didn't look at me when he said the next part. He looked at the valley. "The ravens knew. We see everything that moves in the Greywood, Katie, it is literally the only thing we're for. My father has watched Varek's people cross the north line every week since midsummer. He watched them on Thursday. He decided it was a lynx problem and that a lynx problem was a useful problem, because if the Marrows fall, someone has to hold the north." His jaw worked. "I agreed with him. Until about nine days ago."

"What happened nine days ago?"

He finally looked at me.

Oh.

"And the wolves?" I said, because I needed to say anything that wasn't oh. "Ronan's dad? Let me guess. Also knew. Also busy."

"The wolves thought it was the ravens," Elias said quietly. "Because the ravens would have told them if it wasn't."

So that was it. Three royal families, a dead sixteen-year-old, and everybody standing in a circle pointing at the guy on their left.

"I need to go home," I said.

They walked me. Both of them, not talking to each other, Caspian taking the trees in short black jumps and Elias on the ground a half step behind my left shoulder the whole way, close enough that I could feel him there like a hand on my back that wasn't. We came out of the woods behind the Pruitt place, a quarter mile down from our house, and that's where I saw them.

Two figures at the edge of the trees, by the old stone wall. Then four.

Max's laugh. I'd know it anywhere; it sounds like a car alarm that's happy. Mia's puffer jacket, the lilac one she stole from me in eighth grade. And with them, a tall boy with shaggy dark hair and a girl with a black bob sitting on the wall, swinging her legs, and as I watched, Mia went up on her toes and kissed the boy, and Max put his hand on the bob girl's knee like he'd done it a hundred times.

"Who," I said, "is that."

Caspian landed on the fence post beside me, human, a little out of breath. "Wren Ashby," he said, sounding like a man reading a bill. "She's one of ours."

"And the guy?"

Elias exhaled through his nose. "Tobias Holt. Ronan's cousin."

I was already walking.

I don't remember crossing the field. I remember the frost crunching under my Hokas and the twins' faces when they saw me, that perfect sixteen-year-old cocktail of guilt and oh my God, why are you like this. Tobias stepped in front of Mia, which, sweet, sure, and his eyes flashed gray-green in the dark exactly the way Ronan's do, and Wren went very still on the wall and tipped her head at me like a bird.

"Katie," Mia said. "Okay. Before you say anything—"

"How long?"

"Like, since the second week," Max said. "Of school. It's not a big—"

"Do you know what they are?"

The silence was worse than any answer. Mia's chin came up. Max looked at his sneakers.

"Do you know what's out here?" I said. "Do you know a kid your age died in the Ring on Thursday? Your age, Max. Throat."

"Bobby Hollis moved to Bangor," Mia said, but her voice wobbled on Bangor.

Wren slid off the wall. "That's what they're saying in town," she said softly. "That's what they always say."

Mia looked at her. Then at me. Then she said, very small, "Bea said you'd be mad."

All the cold in the field came up through my feet at once.

"Bea said."

"She was up," Max said. "When we went out. Sitting at the window. She said she was waiting for the kitty and not to tell Mom. Katie, she always says that, she's six—"

I ran.

Ronan told me, my first week here, that you don't run in these woods, city girl, and I want you to know I wasn't in the woods. I was in our backyard, past the sandbox, past the swing set Dad put together wrong, up the porch steps two at a time. The back door was open. Deadbolt thrown back. Chain hanging loose and swinging a little, like someone had just gone through.

Bea's room is the little one at the end of the hall that used to be a sewing room. Her nightlight was on, the moon-shaped one, throwing that sick green glow over everything. Her bed was empty. Her stuffed rabbit was on the floor. Her window was shut and latched from the inside, so she hadn't gone out that way. She'd walked down the stairs and through the kitchen and opened the back door herself, on tiptoe, the way she does when she's trying to be a good surprise.

On the kitchen floor, in the dried mud from Dad's boots, there was one print. Round. Bigger than my hand. No claws showing, because cats keep their claws in when they walk, which Lucy told me at dinner once, and I'd rolled my eyes.

Elias was in the doorway. I don't know when he got there. He looked at the print and his face did something I'd never seen it do, and that scared me more than the print did.

"That's not him," he said. "That's not Varek. I don't know whose that is."

Upstairs, the floor creaked. Dad's door. Mom's voice, sleepy: "Daniel?"

I had maybe ten seconds before every light in the house came on, and I used them. I pulled the Register out of my backpack and shoved it into the twins' arms as they came through the door, white-faced, and I took the big Maglite off the hook by the fridge, and I pointed it at Max.

"Wake Dad. Tell him Bea, tell him the back door, tell him lynx, and tell him I said if he lies to me one more time I'm taking the Odyssey and driving it into the Ring myself." I swung the light at Caspian, outside on the porch rail. "Find your father. Find whatever he saw tonight. I don't care what it costs you." And then at Elias, who was already turning toward the trees, already going gold at the edges. "You. With me. You know which way she'd go."

He did. He didn't even pretend not to. He went off the porch steps at a run, and I went after him into the dark, flashlight bouncing, the hoodie catching on every branch, yelling my baby sister's name into a forest that had been eating people for a thousand years.