Kaye couldn't help wincing. Corny was under the damn hill. She knew it. She looked desperately at Roiben, but he regarded her blankly. He couldn't hear Janet. He'd never even met Corny.
"I'll see you, okay?" Kaye said.
"Sure. Whatever. 'Bye."
She hung up.
"Who was that?" Roiben asked.
"Janet's brother is still under the hill… with Nephamael."
Nephamael's name made Roiben stop in his place. "More secrets?"
She winced. "Corny. He was with me that night… when I was a pixie."
"You are a pixie."
"He was there that night—the one when you didn't know it was me—and when I left, he… met… Nephamael."
Roiben's eyebrows shot up at that.
"Corny was totally out of his head. Nephamael hurt him, and he… liked it. He wanted to go back."
"You left a friend—a mortal—under the hill… alone?" He sounded incredulous. "Are you completely heartless? You saw what you were leaving him to."
"You made me leave! I couldn't get back in. I tried."
"I thought we were going to be honest with one another. What manner of honesty is this?"
She felt completely miserable.
"Do you know who Nephamael is?"
She shook her head, dread creeping over limbs, making her feel heavy, making her want to sink to the floor. "He… he's the one that put the enchantment on me and who took it off."
"He was once the best knight in the Unseelie Court—that is, before he was sent to the Seelie Court as part of the price for a truce. He was sent there, and I was sent to Nicnevin."
Kaye just stood, stunned, thinking about the conversation she had overheard between Nicnevin and Nephamael. Why hadn't she deduced that? What other meaning could there have been? "So Nephamael still serves Nicnevin?"
"Perhaps. It seems more likely that he serves only himself. Kaye, do you know who concocted the plan to sabotage the Tithe?"
"You think it was Nephamael?"
"I don't know. Tell me, how did your friends become aware you were a pixie when not even the Queen of the Unseelie Court could see through your glamour?"
"The Thistlewitch said she remembered when I got switched."
"Now, how is it that they know Nephamael?"
"I don't know."
"We lack some piece of information, Kaye."
"Why would Nephamael want to make trouble for Nicnevin?"
"Perhaps he sought revenge for being sent away. I doubt he found the Seelie Court to his taste."
She shook her head. "I don't know. I have to get Corny."
"Kaye, if what you say is true, you know that he may well no longer be alive."
She took a sharp, shallow breath. "He's fine," she said.
Chapter 12
"And for those masks who linger on
To feast at night upon the pure sea!"
—Arthur Rimbaud, "Does She Dance"
She'd only ever brought one other person to the Glass Swamp. The summer when she was nine and Janet had taken to constantly teasing her about her imaginary friends, Kaye had decided that she was going to prove they were real once and for all. Janet had stepped on a half moon of bottle glass, cutting through her sneaker and jabbing into her foot on the way to the swamp. They'd never even made it down the ridge.
It had not occurred to her until now to suspect that Lutie or Spike or even poor, dead Gristle had something to do with that.
Darting lights were easily visible from the street, and shouts carried through the still air. She couldn't hear the voices well enough to discern whether they were about to stumble down into a bunch of kids drinking beer or into something else.
Roiben was all in black—jeans and T-shirt and long coat that all must have been conjured up from moonbeams and cobwebs because she was sure they didn't come from any of the closets in her grandmother's house. He had pulled the top part of his hair back, but the shock of white somehow made him seem even more inhuman when he was dressed in modern clothes.