Page 4 of The Queen's Box

“That dumb baby rattle?” she’d scoff. “Either you hid it, or more likely, it never existed at all.”

It had existed, though. Its chime had left its imprint deep on Willow’s soul.

It was after finding the rattle and hearing its silver chime that seven-year-old Willow had begun to dream of the forest she’d so briefly glimpsed. Night after night, she dreamed of it.

She never again saw the woman with the long, wild hair. Years later, however, she saw someone else.

He’d come to her on the night of her thirteenth birthday. His name was Serrin—Serrin, the syllables lovely on her tongue, the name both foreign and known—and his blue eyes gleamed like sea glass, like the sweetness of a burbling creek. He had high cheekbones, a nose that was slightly too long, and a smile that was earnest and true.

He wasother, her dream boy. The pointed tips of his ears made that clear. But it was more than that. Serrin wasn’t like the boys she passed on the street, the ones who smelled of beer and aftershave and gazed at Willow hopefully, and he had nothing, absolutelynothing, in common with...

No. Her skin crawled, and she shoved him out of her mind—the teacher who taught falsely, the man who’d stolen Willow’s childhood.

Serrin wasn’t like any rough, coarse human. Serrin was the glimmer at the periphery of a room, the flicker of movement just out of sight.Fae.Sometimes, in her dreams, he filled her with sunshine. After those dreams, she woke up believing all was well with the world. Other times, she woke up sweaty, her heart racing with dread. Something bad, something bad. It lurked in the darkness, this thing that was bad, but one day, it would reveal itself. And when it did...

Serrin.

He was the answer, the key, the shaft of light in darkest night. It made no sense. None of it did. Willow was many things, but she wasn’t an idiot, no matter how often she felt like one. And because she wasn’t an idiot, she knew, rationally, that... what?

Option one: She was crazy, as in cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. As in,Bye, now. Off to the nuthouse. You take care!

Willow had been to the nuthouse once already. The name on the sign in front of the building read, “Mountain Crest: AMental Facility for Teens,” but it had been a nuthouse. Willow’s shoes had been taken from her because: shoestrings. Could someone really hang herself using shoestrings? The guards at the nuthouse hadn’t wanted to find out.

Willow hadn’t been sent to the nuthouse because of Serrin.No oneknew about Serrin.

Was it possible that no one knew about Serrin because Serrin didn’t exist?

There was a rabbit hole there to fall into, and it was a scary one. Willow didn’t like peering into it. But—and this was a bigbut—before Serrin, there had been the silver baby rattle, and with it, the vision of the forest and the woman with the wild hair.

Willow’s mother refused to talk about any of that with Willow. Not the rattle, not what happened to it, and certainly not why her face had gone so white just before she’d snatched it out of Willow’s hand.

Which meant there was something there.

Which meant (probably) (hopefully) that Willow wasn’t cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or, if she was, then her mother was, too. And that seemed unlikely. Her mother was a member of the Junior League. She did volunteer work at the library and took afternoon classes on flower arranging!

On the other hand, Willow’s grandmother had hanged herself. It was so awful to think about, so awful to put those words together in that order. Willow’s grandmother hadhangedherself, with deliberation and a rope and that final, irrevocable step off the stool or whatever it was she’d started off on to get to the right height. That plummeting moment that could never be taken back.

What kind of person hanged herself? A crazy person. Sure. Maybe. But also, maybe a person who was made to think she was crazy because, for whatever reason, she saw the world (or worlds) in a way that most people didn’t.

That line of thought did lead to another possibility, so...

Option two: There was something in their blood. Willow’s, her mother’s, and Ash’s and Juniper’s, too, if the math held. Something old and strange and rippling with power. Not madness but... magic.

People who believed in magic were often labeled crazy because, duh, magic wasn’t real. But if the magicwasreal...

There were other rumors about someone in Willow’s mother’s past. These rumors weren’t linked to Willow’s grandmother, whose name was Wrenna and who’d hanged herself. No, there’d been someone else—a great-grandmother? A great-great-grandmother?—who’d been seen as “off” in some way. Or different. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the silver baby rattle Willow’s mother refused to talk about. Willow’s mother—whose name was Mercy—dodged all discussions about her past.

Mercy had been raised by her adoptive parents, Lemuel and Elizabeth Ann Whitmire. Willow knew that. She also knew that the Whitmires had been extremely religious in that particularly Southern way that overlapped with snake charming and speaking in tongues, if Willow had correctly interpreted the hints her mother accidentally let drop. And the Whitmires’ religiosity had overlapped with something—something—in Mercy’s past, the daughter they’d adopted as an infant.

Religious fanatics didn’t much like magic, Willow suspected. Or, if they did, it was only the baby Jesus kind of magic, and they didn’t call it that. That kind of magic was divine grace, holy intervention, a miracle. Which honestly just reinforced Willow’s conviction that magic and craziness were linked for all the wrong reasons, and which made her feel better about option one, the possibility that she was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Willow was not cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and Serrin did exist. There. Those were her truths, and she was sticking to them. But that lurking danger she sensed...

What was it?Whowas it? And how did it involve Serrin?

CHAPTER TWO

“SO WHAT DO you think?” Ash said, materializing next to her.

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