six.
Wynn hadn’t been entirely right. It was more of a pissed-off, frustrated look than outright meanness on the boy’s face.
Jude Ambrose.
Marsden knew him in an instant.
Not just because they’d gone to school together since they were little kids, making him a part of her life in Glory, no matter how small, but also because nearly three weeks ago, she’d been the one to discover the body of his older brother in the covert.
Rigby had been twenty-one. He’d left a note folded into the cash she’d stolen from his wallet. It’d been more than cryptic, was still hidden in her room even now, tucked away between books. She was stuck with it—to throw it away was unthinkable, but to give it back to Jude would be telling him she was a skimmer, the only explanation of how she’d come to have it. Even mailing it anonymously was too risky when only so many people saw a body after death by suicide in her family’s covert.
As it was with most of the kids in school, she couldn’t call Jude a friend. He was a senior and she was a junior; the times they passed each other in the hall were only occasional. If they’d ever spoken, she had no recollection of it. But she still knew him, if only because they lived in the same town, had grown up within the same boundaries. So it was all too easy for her to picture him at his older brother’s funeral, to imagine the events of the terrible day unfolding after reading the brief obituary in the local paper.
Seventeen years old, tall and lithe, his dark eyes both burning and hollow as he stood in a neat slate-gray suit next to Rigby’s coffin. Beside him would be his closest friends from school, other guys she’d known since elementary and each of them just as much a non-friend to her as Jude. The school counselor would be there, wishing he could do more. Other mourners from town, as defeated as they were grieving, forever helpless in the face of the covert’s strange, twisted lure. The promise of dark magic in its soil.
It would already be hot out, the late-spring sun a blistering yellow coin in the sky. The air would smell of fresh grass, bitter and sharp, of a coming summer already destroyed.
The service would be closed casket.
Marsden knew this. Had seen Rigby herself. Knew an open service could never be an option.
And she hadn’t been wrong about Jude wearing a gray suit, though by the time she saw him outside the covert the day of the funeral, his tie was little more than a twist of mangled fabric, his dark pants dulled with road dust, his white shirt sleeves messily shoved up past his elbows. He hadn’t seen her watching him from within the line of trees, but she’d seen him, leaning back against his family truck parked on the shoulder of the highway, his eyes turned toward the covert’s entrance. It came off him in waves, a thick grief and confusion that was layered into the June heat blanketing the entire town. She could sense it even from where she’d been standing, barely daring to breathe. From the time on her watch and what she remembered reading of the obituary, Marsden realized he must have walked out during the middle of the wake. She was still wondering what might have driven him to do so when he’d turned abruptly, climbed into his truck, and sped off down the highway.
He wasn’t, she supposed, classically handsome, but he was infinitely memorable, made up of parts crafted with driven, relentless motions. His face, all sharp angles and wary, deep brown eyes. A mouth that looked like it hurt to smile.
How hard would those eyes go, how brittle that mouth, if he ever found out what she was hiding? Something she could never give up without giving herself up?
Jude wore a stretched-out black tee with a chest pocket, baggy olive shorts, sandals that were starting to fall apart. She’d always heard his family had money, but if so, he didn’t make it obvious. He had some kind of booklet shoved into one of his side pockets. The sun was already in full force, making the outline of his figure shimmer in the heat. He was tall and broad-shouldered, slim but still muscular, his big hands the kind sketch artists live for—full of jutting bones and deep hollows, stories in every long swoop and arc.
He didn’t belong here.
That was the thought that kept popping up in Marsden’s head as she moved toward him. He met her stare head-on, something he’d never done in the halls whenever she saw him.
Well, that was more her own doing than his. It’d become habit a long time ago, the way she never really met anyone’s eyes at school anymore. It came from too many years of being stared at, whispered about, snickered about.
Still, his gaze was steady on hers, intense, the cool eye of a storm. Different from she remembered it being, the ways she’d seen it before. In school, surrounded by his friends, his eyes had been warm, lit up; by himself, they turned unwelcoming, nearly hostile. And that was even before Rigby.
What could Jude Ambrose want with her now? When they’d been strangers for years and years? The last thing she needed was one more problem to deal with when her whole entire life was a problem. A mess. A dead end.
She decided he was too tall. She also decided that his dark hair was way too thick and pretty, with its black-gold shine, its soft-looking waves. It half covered his eyes, was tossed all over his forehead, in desperate need of a cut. His skin was all coppers and bronzes, going a deeper hue along the top of his cheekbones, the slope of his nose—wherever the sun touched it. He wore a fat ladder of friendship bracelets—blacks, whites, neons—around one wrist. Their weave was careful and intricate and somehow feminine, and Marsden wondered who had made them for him.
From behind where he stood, past the fence her great-grandfather had built with his own hands, the smell of the covert bled loose and free, a roaming cloud of ginger. It drifted out and surrounded them, thick with spice and heat and other mysterious things.
She hadn’t expected his eyes to be so dark. Which was stupid, because hers were just as dark, and Jude was as mixed as she was, except black to her Chinese.
It was another reason why Marsden had stayed aware of him in school. So that she couldn’t help but glance over and imagine what it was like for him, growing up in Glory half-black, while nearly everyone else was white, white, white. She wondered if he ever got paranoid over a lengthy stare, at a laugh that came from behind as soon as he moved past, whenever someone else got chosen for something with no real explanation. If he was sometimes confused about why the white half of him didn’t make him belong.
She also wondered why, just as she pretended she didn’t care what anyone thought, Jude acted as though he wouldn’t mind if someone did have a problem. Like he would welcome a confrontation.
Maybe that was the difference between them, she thought—hurt or be hurt. Maybe he’d learned something she hadn’t yet.
“Hi.” She didn’t bother with a smile as she reached him. “Were you looking for something?”
“You’re Marsden Eldridge.” His voice was rough and rusty, like he hadn’t spoken in a while. “From school.”
She waited a beat, but he said nothing else. “And you’re Jude Ambrose. From school.”
His eyes narrowed as she said his name, a muscle along his neck jumped, and Marsden tried not to be irritated. He was on her property—why was he acting like she were the intruder?
But then an image of Rigby popped into her head—grisly, scattered, still too fresh—and she decided to start over.
“I’m really sorry about your brother.” Already, Jude seemed like a puzzle. The same way Shine was a puzzle, full of hidden doors, tricky passageways, dangerous traps. “Rigby.”
“It was—you were the one who found him.”
Marsden nodded. “The covert is family property. I try to check often enough that if someone goes in, they won’t accidentally see something.”
He shoved his wavy hair out of his eyes with one hand, his expression slightly less guarded now. “Thanks for not talking about it with anyone.”
“I wouldn’t do that.” She couldn’t stop her frown. “Why would I?”
“Sorry, I don’t mean it that way. I just meant that I knew you kept it quiet because I never heard anything going around. And Glory—well, this place can talk. And it likes its stories. The covert has its share.”
She tried to smile, hoped it looked even remotely close to natural. “Latest I’ve heard is that saying its name three times in a row, while standing beneath a true crescent moon with your eyes shut, means a year of bad luck.”
There were other stories, of course, passing from ear to mouth, ear to mouth. Stepping foot over the property line at midnight meant dooming someone else to die that very same second. A breath breathed while walking past meant living one less year. Running through the place beneath a full moon bought three wishes—but only if you first outran the ghost of poor crazy Duncan Kirby. He with the still-smoking hunting rifle in hand, chasing after you in boots slick with blood and splattered with Indigo mud, bellowing the names of his wife, his kids, the river, the town.
Jude smiled in return, and it broke across his face slowly, carefully, like a newly formed wave shyly brushing over the shore. Marsden liked how it looked on him. She didn’t know what to think about that.
“Two years of bad luck,” he said, “if it’s a weekday.”
“And if you do it too close to the covert?”
“You’ll open your eyes to see Duncan’s ghost right in front of you.”
She nearly shivered, despite already knowing the tale. “I guess my ancestors don’t play around.”
“Makes you wonder how they’d punish skimmers.”
“‘Skimmers.’ ” The word, clumsy and ugly in her mouth—she flushed. How could she have forgotten who she was talking to about the covert? His brother’s body was still imprinted all over its ginger plants, its soil saturated with it, her hands shadowed. “What are those?”
He looked surprised at her surprise. “You know, grave robbers, tomb raiders. Looking for bodies to steal from before they’re taken away.”
“Steal what?”
“Money would be the first thing, most likely. Then jewelry, or whatever’s valuable—Seconds pawnshop would resell it, even.”
Marsden shoved her hands into the front pocket of her shirt to hide how they wanted to twist. The toast inside had gone soggy and cold—her fingers were colder. “People trespass, but you don’t know they steal. Skimmers are likely just another story in town.”
A hint of impatience played on his lips. “Because neither of us know any personally? Doesn’t mean they’re not around.”
“The jewelry part makes no sense.” Her nerves thrummed. She hoped she sounded steadier than she felt. “People would recognize pieces.” But she knew that didn’t mean much. Glory had long grown comfortable with death, and most wouldn’t care where a good find came from.
“You can still steal money, though,” he said.
“You can’t prove it was stolen.”
“Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”
“It doesn’t mean it does.” She knew she sounded defensive, but she couldn’t help it. Whatever little ground they’d managed to gain together already seemed lost. “You can’t believe everything you hear about the covert, you know. And this place is mine. I would know what was real or not, don’t you think?”
Jude’s gaze had cooled. His voice was raw again. “Look, I’m not here to accuse you or anything. Or to be told I’m stupid.”
She saw his dead brother in his eyes and fresh guilt filled her.
Did he know? she wondered. That the anger she saw in him even before Rigby died was nearly all gone now, turned into grief? Was now something so bleak she felt it in her own chest just by looking at him?
From over his shoulder, the sudden piston of a small black form split apart the ground. The squirrel ran toward them, barely visible in the grass that rose up to cover her ankles, surrounding the covert’s fence in a wide ring of pale green. Technically, this part of the property belonged to the township; it wasn’t uncommon for Glory to let the grass grow unchecked for weeks before finally sending someone to cut it. More than once, Marsden had given in and mowed it herself, the grass bleached nearly white by the sun by then.
She took out the toast, recalling Wynn’s pleas to go with her. To talk to the boy with the angry face and ask him what was wrong. Her little sister, with her weakness for things that she believed she could help—squirrels living with ghosts in the covert, boys with sad eyes and dead brothers. But Shine had said no, and only Marsden promising to feed the squirrels on her behalf appeased her sister enough to be satisfied with waiting with Dany for rhubarb and ice cream.
“You just pulled out a really disgusting-looking piece of toast from your shirt pocket,” Jude said slowly, staring at her hands. Then he glanced back up to meet her gaze, lifted one brow, and asked with great care, “I’m guessing you must be hungry?”
A small laugh escaped before she’d even known it was there. “My sister’s trying to bribe herself a pet. She’s decided squirrels will do.”
“Didn’t know squirrels liked toast.” His slow grin was back, making it hard to stay annoyed with him. Making him way too easy to look at.
“She says they prefer waffles, but I have to draw the line somewhere.” She passed over half the toast. “Here—do you mind? I promised her.”
Jude took it without hesitation, and Marsden sighed inwardly—how could she not think he was okay, considering how he wasn’t even questioning being asked to feed toast to a rodent?
She led him a few feet along the outer curve of the wooden fence, and he followed silently, taking this so seriously she admitted she found it endearing.
If Wynn were there, she’d already be head over heels at seeing Jude smile the way he proved to be able to.
Sudden memories of a very young Jude began to fill Marsden’s head as she walked. Each image turned over on itself until it was clearer than the last, just as though she were searching for gold along the Indigo, shaking her pan, tilting out water and mud and silt—the fog of time, the messiness of her own childhood—until only the precious metal remained, finally revealed in full.