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surprise and hopped a few steps forward. Kirby barked, tail wagging, plainly delighted that he had startled me. He trotted next to me, occasionally bounding off the side of the road into the brush to investigate the rustlings of some small creature or another.
    Finally, the trail began to look familiar to me. Kirby raced ahead, barking to announce our arrival. Mrs. Jackson walked out onto the front porch, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, her graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. I looked at her face and tried to imagine the woman who would burn photographs of her own sister. Her blue eyes swept over us, sharpening in concern when she saw the blood on my knees and the scrape on one palm.
    “Now, Molly,” she said, “what did I tell you about making sure that Tess knew her way around the trails before y’all went running?”
    “She knew her way around the trails, Mother,” Molly replied levelly as we walked up the steps to the porch.
    “I just don’t know my way around my own two feet,” I added, smiling sheepishly.
    Mrs. Jackson made sounds like an unhappy mother hen, placing me in one of the rocking chairs on the porch while she went to find antiseptic cream and bandages. Molly stared after her mother—no, her aunt, really—with hard eyes.
    “You’re not happy here, now that you know all this,” I said softly, after the door swung shut. I glanced at the kitchen window to make sure it wasn’t open. “Why not go?”
    Molly blinked, and sighed, leaning against the porch railing. “I just feel…like I don’t know anything anymore. But as little of the truth as I know here, at least I know more than I would in the world of the Fae.” She shivered, looking at me earnestly. “They kill mortals sometimes,” she said softly.
    I considered. What would Liam do, if he was foraying into a new world full of dangerous new beings, about whom he knew next to nothing? He would arm himself with what knowledge he did have, I decided. “We’ll ask Trillow and Glira and Wisp,” I said. “We’ll ask them how to hurt the Sidhe, and if there’s anything we can do to protect ourselves when we go.”
    Molly nodded, eyes far-away in thought. Then she suddenly smiled, looking up at me. “I can’t believe you’re actually talking me into doing this.”
    “I can’t believe you’ve actually been given an order by the Queen of the Unseelie Court,” I countered dryly. “And I am not talking you into this. You know you’ll go. I’m just coming with you, and trying to be smart about it.”
    Molly snorted a little, laughing. “Trying to be smart about walking into a Sidhe death-trap. Listen to you.”
    I rolled my eyes. “You’ll thank me later.”

Chapter 4
    M rs. Jackson opened the door with her elbow, hands full of antiseptic cream and boxes of adhesive bandages. Molly watched her struggle with the screen door coolly, looking away and pretending to observe Kirby digging in the yard when Mrs. Jackson finally made it out onto the porch.
    “Here, dear,” she said to me, offering a length of paper towel. I took it and wiped at my knees, dabbing away the crimson and trying to get all the little gritty stones out of the scrape. After scrubbing at the torn skin for a while, ignoring the stinging pain, I put down the towel and took a tube of antiseptic ointment from Mrs. Jackson. She hovered as I spread a liberal amount of the cloudy ointment on both knees. I peeled away the backing on the largest adhesive bandage I could find, slapping it over one knee with practiced ease. After repeating the process on the other knee and putting a smaller bandage on my left palm, I offered the boxes and tube of ointment back to Mrs. Jackson. She deferred.
    “You can keep them, honey,” she said, “in case you need them again.”
    I smiled and put the boxes down by the rocking chair. Kirby barked as he spotted a jackrabbit, rocketing off into the brush.
    I ate breakfast quickly, slopping some cold milk onto cereal and wolfing it down