"Corny! I got thrown out. I couldn't find a way back to you." She looked at the clock. It was one o'clock in the afternoon. "I thought maybe the hill was only open at night."
"I'm coming over."
She nodded and then, realizing he couldn't see her, spoke the thought aloud. "Yeah. Definitely. Come over. Are you okay?"
The phone clicked off, and she scrubbed a hand restlessly through her hair before letting her head fall back onto the pillow.
"The glamour looks good," was the first thing that Corny said as he walked into her bedroom. Then he looked around. "Hey, you've got rats."
She blinked up at him. "How did you get out? I was going crazy looking for you. If the cops had seen me they would have thought I was some nutjob grave robber trying to dig up bodies with my bare hands."
"I woke up outside the hill this morning. I figured that you'd ditched me and I was going to do a Rip Van Winkle and find out that it was the year 2112 and no one had ever even heard of me." He grinned wryly.
"Roiben threw me out. I'm sorry. I didn't want to leave you, but I was afraid if I told him that he would figure out who I was."
Corny smiled. "He didn't know?"
She shook her head and shuddered. "So, what did you think of the Unseelie Court?"
A slow, wicked smile spread on his face. "Oh, Kaye," he breathed. "It was marvelous. It was perfect."
She narrowed her gaze. "I was joking. They were killing things, Corny. For fun. Things like us."
He didn't seem to hear her, his eyes looking past her to the bright window. "There was this knight, not yours. He…" Corny shivered and seemed to abruptly change the direction of his sentence. "He had a cloak all lined with thorns."
"I saw him talking to the Queen," Kaye said.
Corny shrugged off his jacket. There were long scratches along his arms.
"What happened to you?"
Corny's smile widened, but his gaze was locked in some memory. He shifted it back to her. "Well, obviously I got inside the cloak."
She snorted. "What a euphemism. Did he hurt you?"
"No more than I wanted him to," Corny said.
She didn't like it, neither what he was saying nor the way he looked when he talked about it.>Outside, it was cold and bright. It didn't seem possible, but the night was past. A breeze made the remaining leaves shudder on their branches, and Kaye crossed her arms to seal in whatever warmth she could as she jogged across the hill. She knew where the brown patch of grass had been. It was simply a matter of getting inside again. If she just stuck to the wall, she thought, probably no one would notice her. Corny would be there, and this time, she would pay better attention, mark the exit in some way.
The grass was no browner in one place than another. She remembered the location well enough. Next to the elm tree and by a grave marker that read Adelaide. She dropped to her knees and dug, frantically clawing at the half-frozen topsoil. It was dirt and more dirt, hard-packed, as though there had never been a passageway to an underground palace.
"Corny," she shouted, well aware that he would not be able to hear her deep beneath the earth.
Chapter 8
"For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror we can just
barely endure,
and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us."
—Rainer Maria Rilke, "The First Elegy," Duino Elegies
Corny woke on the hillside to the sound of bells. He was shaking with cold. His teeth were chattering, his head felt thick and heavy, and just shifting his weight made his stomach lurch. His jacket was gone.
He was lying alone on a hill in a graveyard, and he had no idea how he had come to be there. He saw his car, hazard lights still dimly flashing where he had pulled off alongside the road. A wave of dizziness hit him. He rolled weakly to one side and retched.