Page 28 of The Wicker King

Jack shrugged helplessly. He couldn’t finish. He never did.

August just sighed and tugged the knot tight.

HOMECOMING

His mother had taught him to waltz. She had been in pageants. A real glamour girl with her tiara on straight and a smile like a thousand diamonds. Hand cupped just so to wave with grace to the cheering crowd. She came from money; they thought learning those sort of things was important.

The only waving she did now was at him sometimes when he went to school, and the only thing cheering was the television in the basement. But she hadn’t always been that way.

So August knew where to put his hands and he knew where to place his feet. He knew to rub the back of Gordie’s neck with his thumb to make her shiver. She pressed against him tightly.

Across the room, Jack watched.

He was with Carrie-Anne of course. She had shoved herself into a bright pink monstrosity and piled her hair up high on her head in some kind of curl nest. They were doing the traditional sway-from-side-to-side dance that pretty much everyone else was doing. Jack smirked at August over Carrie-Anne’s shoulder.

August rolled his eyes and decided to ignore him. He leaned his forehead against Gordie’s neck. She smelled sweet, like incense and hair spray.

“Do you want to go back to mine? My parents won’t be back till…”

“Yes. Fucking yes,” he said.

BANG BANG

They tumbled to the carpet and Gordie slammed his head against the door. It was like being pillaged. He liked the roughness. He didn’t care where it came from.

When she tore his tie off and dug her hands into his pants, he practically collapsed. He was all shaking hands and breathy gasps to her sharp claws and shouted expletives.

Gordie rode him like he wasn’t made of skin and bone.

August smoothed her hair out of her face tenderly, but she batted his hand away. He rubbed his thumbs into her hips, so she bit his neck. He scratched his fingers against the shaved part of her head and she made a pretty, pretty noise. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes as she ate him alive.

When she pulled him back roughly by his hair, August gasped, arching off the floor.

She wasn’t allowed to do that. No one did that except him. He reached up a hand to pull her arm off him, but she swiveled her hips and it was too late.

He fell. Groaning. Thinking of chapped lips, strong arms, and freckles.

FRET

Peter snatched the poem from August’s hand and glanced at it quickly. “This is gibberish,” he said. Roger peered over his brother’s shoulder with interest.

“No. It’s not,” August insisted. “I need you to analyze it so I can figure out what Jack and I have to do.”

“What you have to do is get him to a psychologist,” Peter said dryly.

“But—!” Roger chimed in before August could respond to the threat. “We’ll take a look at it for you. So far, it looks like some kind of quest.”

August nodded solemnly. A quest. He could do that. At least it wasn’t telling him they had to kill people.

“We’ll get back to you tomorrow. You can go.” Peter waved him away.

August scowled at Peter’s rudeness, but picked up his backpack off the grass and left the twins alone under the bleachers.

FIRST RECEIVER FALCON

August met him in front of the locker room right after the game. Jack stumbled in with the rest of the team. He took off his scrum cap and wiped the sweat and dirt from his face.

“We are in the very middle of the country,” he panted, with no preamble whatsoever. “Where the government is located. We move through their world like they move through my field of vision. Which means most people can’t see you, but they know you’re there. Also, the layers concept we’ve been discussing was actually more spot-on than we originally thought. I’m pretty sure places here actually coincide directly with places in the capital city.”