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Please see our important Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

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Here is a boy, barely thirteen, broken, lying in the road, twisted metal around him, twisted metal in him. Here is his heart, pierced by the shrapnel of the truck, a truck no longer, now a confusion of tangled wire and torn steel and glass pebbles. The boy’s name is Sheridan. He will live a few minutes more.

Here is another boy, barely thirteen and an eon, shaggy blond-white hair shining silver in the sun. He pads barefoot through the shards, his step so light his feet are immune to sharp things. His heart too is light, but not so immune. It is pierced by the sight of the broken boy before him.

“Finlay?” the broken boy croaks, his breath running out. He had just been thinking of him, right before the accident, and now here he is, standing over him, lower lip trembling.

Here is a spider, fat as sorrow, transparent as time, hunched in the palm of Finlay’s hand. It clambers urgently over curled fingers, descends to Sheridan’s chest, and scuttles through the tear in his shirt.

The spider’s plump body sinks into the ragged red mouth of Sheridan’s wound and pushes out a cold steel shard. Sheridan struggles to say something, to say anything, to move or to stand or even to take a breath. Then a thin cool wire unspools inside him and somehow it sooths. The spider busies its fat little body—squeezing and throbbing in the small spaces in his chest. A single filament winds around his heart and back and in and through. The thread builds and layers and binds and scaffolds until the struggling heart is calm.

Finlay puts a hand behind Sheridan’s neck and gently eases him flat on the road. The spider emerges and shivers off the moisture of viscera. Sheridan wonders if it will close the tear in his chest but it does not. The wound is left open. The spider scurries up Finlay’s arm and disappears over his shoulder.

Sheridan hears, or thinks he hears, Finlay say, “It’s only for now. Glass silk is fragile but so is a human heart.”

And then Sheridan sees only dark.

• • • •

Finlay’s breath tickles the fine fuzz on the ridge of Sheridan’s ear.

“Let him carry you. You’re too weak to walk yet.”

Sheridan’s body stiffens from a dream of falling. No, not falling, exactly. Tipping. Swaying. Rocking. Something is carrying him. He sits on something hard and lumpy and cold, legs spread wide to accommodate an upward hump. He finds it difficult to balance but a warm hand presses against his back and steadies him.

When Sheridan blinks away the blur, he sees the thing under his legs is the shell of a giant tortoise. The rocking motion is their lumbering gate.

Finlay walks at pace beside them, a silver flute between his lips. He pipes gentle notes that tumble into a well inside Sheridan, a deepness he hadn’t known was there until the first note landed. Now it ached to be filled.

They are in the woods.

“Where are we going?” Sheridan asks.

“Deeper.”

The sunlight had faded but it isn’t dark—glowing specks fill the air. Pollen? Spores? They settle into Finlay’s silvery hair and on his freckled nose—tiny stars in a Finlay universe. Dots glow in his eyelashes. When Finlay meets Sheridan’s gaze and smiles at him, Sheridan looks away and feels the tips of his ears burn.

Finlay laughs and shakes out his hair. A million miniature lights explode out and surround them. He cups a hand and waves his arm, scooping them toward Sheridan.

Sheridan’s vision glows with a proscenium of pinpricks and he knows he has faerie dust in his eyelashes too. His silk-bound heart quickens.

The tortoise stops before a massive yew, which looks to Sheridan like an assemblage of many smaller trees huddled together.

Finlay slides his flute into his pocket and whispers to Sheridan, “That’s the Faerie Sovereign,” and there, sitting in the crook of the tree as if the tree were an enormous throne, is the Sovereign—old and young, antlered and bearded, shoulders square and breasts full, wrapped in rich, iridescent gossamer robes. The air around the Sovereign is thickest with faerie dust. Sheridan breathes in and his lungs taste never-ending spring. Around the Sovereign stand dozens of faerie folk, some tall, some small, some wide, some thin, some light, some dark, some like children, and even one mostly like a mushroom. Each has a touch of animal about them. Bear. Bee. Fox. Bird. Rat.

Finlay steps forward and turns to stand shoulder to shoulder with his fellow fae. Sheridan can see now that Finlay possesses a ghostly wolf’s tail. A faint pair of triangular ears jut out of his shaggy hair, visible just when the light catches them right. Finlay still stands on two feet, and his face still looks like a Finlay face, but his eyes—how had Sheridan never noticed?—his eyes are wild and full of lupine mischief.

Choose your heart.

The voice is warm and wise and speaks through a corridor of eons and rings in Sheridan’s head like bell.

Choose your heart, the Sovereign offers. The faerie folk step forward, each holding a heart in their hand.

Tell us who you are: bear or bee? Fox or rat? Bird or—

“Wolf,” Finlay offers, and Sheridan sees in his hand a perfect wolf heart, firm and gleaming and ready.

Sheridan slides off the back of the tortoise. It’s all too much. Everything inside him goes cold. He shakes his head. Stumbles back. That heart isn’t his. None of them are.

Sheridan bolts.

Behind him, a wolfy howl echoes through the woods. The glass threads are tight around his straining heart, but he keeps running.

• • • •

It wasn’t that many days ago that Sheridan first met Finlay.

Sheridan was alone, as usual, hoodie up, as usual, eating a bologna sandwich on the loner bench in the quad, as usual, his eyes not down but on Finlay, which was not usual because Sheridan hadn’t ever noticed him before. Finlay was sort of walk-jogging from place to place, one circle of friends to the next, crisscrossing the quad, barging into conversations, taking sips from a juice box, smiling, laughing.

There was something about Finlay that Sheridan couldn’t put his finger on. He looked taller than he was—something about his slight build, the narrowing of his cheekbones, the way he carried himself. The day was warm—they’d had a string of them—but Finlay wore a sweater and jeans. A neat multi-colored collar popped out of the sweater.

Finlay’s eyes locked on Sheridan across the quad and Sheridan’s throat squeezed shut. Things felt different suddenly. The texture of the air. The color of the sunlight. Sheridan’s skin felt tight. He wasn’t sure it was even his skin anymore. He felt a stranger in his own body. What was happening to him?

Finlay’s unruly white-blond hair flashed silver in the sunlight. He made his way toward Sheridan. There was a kind of wildness in the wind, a roughness and chaos. The world had untamed itself.

Sheridan jumped up, meant to escape, but Finlay was surprisingly fast on his feet. And besides, Sheridan didn’t really want to flee.

What should he even say?

Finlay laid his hand on the side of Sheridan’s face and rubbed his thumb on the corner of his mouth.

“Mustard,” Finlay said, laughing. He flashed his thumb, stained bright yellow. He wiped it casually on his jeans and patted Sheridan on the shoulder and then was gone.

Sheridan’s mouth tingled the rest of the day.

• • • •

When Sheridan looked at himself in the mirror before sixth period, he saw a slight sparkle to his lip where Finlay had touched him.

Faerie dust.

As fantastical as it was, it suddenly made sense. Not that Sheridan believed in faeries, but he didn’t not believe in them either, exactly. There had been rumors—local legend, really—of fae in the woods not far from Sheridan’s home, though he never paid much attention. It was low-level background noise, nothing more than your average backwoods lake monster, bigfoot, or UFO sighting. Fae popped up casually in conversation from time to time with the locals, especially the elders, but always with a wink, so you were never inclined to take it seriously. Some shops and businesses traded in the legend, of course. The diner on the south edge of town, Puck’s Palace, had a menu with silly fantasy names like “magic meatloaf” and “fairy fritters” and if you ordered from the kids’ menu you got a little plastic elf toy. Puck’s went in and out of business on a regular basis.

Sheridan rubbed at his mouth but the glittery shine refused to come off. The harder he rubbed the harder it stayed. Thanks a lot, Finlay, he thought. What are you even doing here? Shouldn’t you be in the woods, wearing a mushroom cap for a hat or something? The thought made him laugh out loud. He could still feel Finlay’s hand on his face.

The bathroom door banged open and another kid raced behind him and into a stall. Sheridan quickly wet a paper towel and scrubbed at his face. Had he been spotted? Could everyone see this stuff? Would other kids stop him and ask how he got faerie dust on his mouth? What would he even say?

When the bell called for class, he hurried down the hall pretending to have an itch on his face, or something in his eye, any excuse to keep his arm or hand over his mouth. No one looked at him, as usual, but he still felt terribly exposed, like a dream of showing up to school naked.

• • • •

Sheridan was attracting pixies.

Or, more accurately, the faerie dust was, which he had started to forget about until a pixie found him after school and followed him home. It wasn’t any larger than a dragonfly and as iridescent as a soap bubble. It kept smacking into him like a crazy June bug.

It was irritating.

Any other day, Sheridan would have just screamed and fled at the sight of a pixie but he was having a faerie kind of day he guessed and, anyway, he was more concerned that other kids might see a pixie following him and wonder why. But no one else could see. Maybe no one else believed. Or maybe you had to be marked with faerie dust.

The second time the pixie buzzed his ear he swung his backpack at it, almost knocking himself off his own feet, but it easily dodged and mistook the attempt to clobber it as a game and started to annoy him on purpose—tweaking his nose, pinching his butt, and once getting tangled in his hair. At least now there was no doubt the woods were full of faeries and Finlay was one of them, or maybe at least faerie-touched, as the old-timers called faerie-human offspring.

Sheridan was pretty certain he’d managed to slip into the house without the pixie following him, and his thoughts continued to circle around Finlay. He made an honest attempt at doing his homework but wound up with several sketches of a boy with shaggy silver hair and dragonfly wings. When he sat down for dinner his mind was far away, lost in a faerie-filled woods. His mother noticed his mouth.

“You have something on your face. Is that glitter? How did you get glitter on your mouth?”

Sheridan’s whole face burned. He rubbed and shrugged.

“I know why,” his dad said.

Sheridan’s stomach dropped.

“He’s been smooching some girl!”

Sheridan was both relieved and grossed out. “No. Dad—”

“Sparkle lip gloss. It happens! I’ve worn your mom’s lipstick to work on more than one occasion.”

His mom waved off his dad.

Sheridan was pretty sure his insides were shriveling into a small black mass.

Then the pixie showed up, hovering over his dad’s head. His mom couldn’t seem to see it. It lifted both legs high and shat a steaming stream of faerie dust onto the top of Dad’s head. Sheridan jumped up, snatched the giggling pixie, excused himself, and flushed the troublesome, still-laughing creature down the toilet.

Now he had faerie dust all over his hands and, of course, it didn’t come off—not even with soap.

When Sheridan sat back down to dinner, he wanted to tell his dad he didn’t kiss girls and not only that, there’s a boy. But it didn’t feel like the right time. Even if everything inside him felt too big to keep in.

There’s a boy. He wanted to say it. He wanted to shout it.

“I think I’d like a nice sweater,” he said instead, thinking of how huggable Finlay looked in his sweater.

His father paused, a bundle of salad greens halfway into his mouth. “It’s almost summer.”

His mother laughed and didn’t look up from her plate, where she was chasing an errant pea with her fork. “You don’t wear sweaters.”

His dad shoved the salad the rest of the way in.

“And a nice shirt to go under it. A stripey one with a collar.”

His dad exhaled sharply through his nose and swallowed. That nose sound was the final word.

There’s a boy. He’s super nice and he wears sweaters and I want to hug him.

“How did you and mom meet?”

“Oh, you don’t want to hear that old story,” his mom said in a way that meant she definitely wanted him to hear it.

“I was building a thing, you know, for vines—” his dad started.

“A trellis,” his mom clarified.

“A trellis in her dad’s backyard,” his dad continued around a chunk of potato. “Hot day. Had my shirt off. She couldn’t resist me. She made me lemonade. I told her she was going to marry me.”

Sheridan imagined Finlay in their backyard, building a trellis. No shirt, no sweater. His silvery sweat-dampened hair clinging to his forehead. They took turns sipping lemonade from the same glass.

“Your father hated me,” his dad’s voice cut through Sheridan’s daydream.

“He still does,” his mom said, and picked up the plates.

• • • •

That night, alone, fighting to fall asleep, Sheridan felt as though he had a small animal scratching inside him, wanting to burst out. With every second that ticked by, the animal grew larger and stronger, and its small claws grew sharper as it honed them on the bones of his ribcage.

• • • •

The next day at lunch, Sheridan retreated to the last safe place on campus: the library. The simple fact was he couldn’t handle seeing Finlay again. Couldn’t handle it if Finlay ignored him, couldn’t handle it if he didn’t. He sat at an out-of-the-way table, but one with a view of the entrance. He watched everyone that came in while he ate his bologna sandwich—no mustard, no mayo, no condiments of any kind that might stain his lips. If for some reason Finlay wandered in, Sheridan could make a quick escape.

Still, Finlay was the only thing Sheridan could think about. Every brain cell burned, and the ash and smoke swirled into a Finlay-shaped cloud where his brain used to be. Finlay had wiped mustard from his mouth so casually—what if it meant nothing? Of course it meant nothing. But…you don’t touch another boy’s mouth for nothing, do you? You wouldn’t wipe mustard off the mouth of a boy you didn’t care about, would you?

Big Bad, who used to be called Big Brad but who had gained a reputation for punching “wimps” to teach them, allegedly, how to fight back, and who had bruised Sheridan on more than one occasion, stalked into the library. He came only so far as the front desk, like an uninvited vampire, where he loudly complained that he needed a stupid book for his stupid history paper.

Sheridan started packing up as soon as he spotted him but wasn’t able to get away before Big Bad tossed a mocking hey girlfriend his way, and he couldn’t be sure but he thought everyone in the library laughed, including the librarian. It’s just a harmless joke, Sheridan told himself in a voice that sounded an awful lot like his dad’s. Don’t be so sensitive.

The sun was white and hot and seared his vision as he stepped out of the library. Sheridan scanned the quad for Finlay. He’d been foolish to think the library was safe. The only safe space was Finlay. He shouldn’t be hard to spot—just look for the flash of silver. Or a knot of commotion. Something loping about, restless, out of place. Look for laughter, look for joy.

Nothing.

His chest felt so heavy. Breathing suddenly took effort. Sheridan had to will his heart to pump. Why had he stayed inside? And only now it was sinking in that this was the last day before spring break, and if he didn’t see Finlay today, he’d have to wait a whole week.

Was Finlay even here today? Did Finlay miss him too? Did he make some other friend, a better friend, one that wasn’t afraid to be painted with faerie dust?

Maybe it was better this way, Sheridan forced himself to think. The pain would fade. Gradually, he’d just stop thinking about him.

• • • •

He didn’t stop thinking about him.

Sheridan’s throat was clenched all day like he wanted to cry. Later at home, when his dad decided to make a quick run to the store, Sheridan tagged along in the hopes of distracting himself.

“Your mom wants cantaloupe,” his Dad grumbled at him while they were waiting at the deli counter, which meant Sheridan should go get one from the produce section.

Sheridan trotted down the soap and shampoo aisle, turned at the soda pyramid, and was about to beeline for the cantaloupe when he saw a tallish boy with silver hair sticking his face in the flower bouquets one by one and taking a big breath each time.

An electric stab jolted Sheridan’s heart. His feet froze, became part of the floor. He couldn’t take a step, he was convinced, without tearing a big chunk out of the ground. Sheridan decided the store was out of cantaloupes and was about to vanish himself back to the deli counter when Finlay spotted him.

“Hey Sheridan, smell these—they’re great!”

He knows my name.

Magically, Sheridan’s feet moved. As he came closer to the flower display, Finlay grabbed his arm and pulled him over. “Come on, come on, smell!”

But Sheridan was distracted by a single petal, thin and white, lying on Finlay’s cheek.

He felt an impulse to brush it away, but he refused. It was silly. It wasn’t mustard. It surely would blow off eventually.

“Smell, don’t you want to?”

Finlay smiled. Maybe it amused him that Sheridan stood there, transfixed. Didn’t he know the effect he had on people? On him?

“I need a cantaloupe,” Sheridan said stupidly.

“I’ll find you a good one!” In two quick hops, Finlay was standing over a cardboard box corralling a hundred cantaloupes. He picked one up and held it right to his face. His nose smushed down on top, wrinkling his freckles. His glittering eyes peered over the rind at Sheridan. Miraculously, the petal remained on his cheek.

“This one’s good!” He held it out.

Sheridan took it and held it close to his chest.

“Finlay.”

“Yeah?”

But that was all. That was all he had to say. He just wanted to say his name out loud. Finlay.

Finlay smiled and took a step closer. The air between them sparked.

Sheridan gently brushed the petal off Finlay’s cheek with the tips of his fingers. Finlay’s skin was smooth and warm and Sheridan brushed again even though the petal was gone.

Sheridan’s dad grabbed his arm and yanked him sideways, pulled him through the produce section and toward the door. “What do you think you’re doing?” His voice was flat. His face was hard.

Sheridan’s stomach dropped. His dad wouldn’t let go of his arm. He stumbled to keep up.

“He’s—ow, Dad, he’s a boy from school—”

“I don’t care.”

Sheridan sat in fog of shame in the back seat the whole way home. He realized when they pulled into the driveway that his dad had abandoned their grocery cart and they hadn’t bought any of the food they came for—but he was still holding the cantaloupe. Unpaid for. Stolen.

Sheridan retreated to his room and didn’t ask for—and wasn’t offered—dinner. He fell asleep holding the cantaloupe that had touched Finlay’s lips.

• • • •

The next morning the cantaloupe had grown even more fragrant. Sheridan sat in bed, still tangled in sheets, and held it to his nose and took deep breaths. This is where Finlay touched it to his mouth. Sheridan pursed his lips and lightly kissed the cantaloupe.

And again, pressing just a little harder.

The melon was rough and unyielding and not at all what he imagined Finlay’s lips would feel like against his, but that wasn’t the point. Their lips touched in the same place, separated only by time.

Sheridan opened his mouth just a little more and a tiny whine escaped, surprising him. His bedroom door snapped open then, and his dad stood in the frame, a rectangle inside of a rectangle. Sheridan whipped the cantaloupe behind him, pushed it into the bunched-up nest of comforter and blanket and pillow.

His heart raced and his vision grayed. Did his dad see him kissing a melon? Were his lips red from rubbing against its roughness? Could his dad smell the aroma of cantaloupe and longing in the air?

“Shirts, underwear, socks, and pants.” His dad tossed a duffle bag into the middle of the room.

“What?” Sheridan stared at his dad dumbly.

“You’re going with your uncle for break.”

• • • •

Sheridan’s uncle liked to shoot things and his fourteen-year-old cousin liked to set fires—which was ironic since his uncle was a volunteer firefighter. That was most of what he knew about his uncle and his family. They had a ranch or a cabin or a compound or a fallout shelter in the middle of, if not nowhere, far enough to be inconvenient for frequent visits. Thank the gods.

They were on their way there in his uncle’s rattletrap truck, the three of them squeezed together in the front cab, his cousin reacting violently if Sheridan’s knee or hip or arm touched his during a tight turn.

Sheridan didn’t get any explanation from his parents as to why he was suddenly shuttled off for the break, but it probably accomplished a dual goal of keeping Sheridan away from Finlay during his free time and his uncle was probably supposed to make a man out of him by having him kill some poor animal.

It didn’t matter. Sheridan was going to make himself invisible for the next six or seven days. He was good at that. Then, when he got back home, he would find Finlay and tell him he liked him and wanted to be with him. Then he’d tell his parents. Then he’d tell everyone. Hi, he’d say upon meeting a stranger, my name is Sheridan and—

“—I love Finlay,” he said out loud without meaning to. He sharply drew in a breath, but it was too late to suck the words back into his mouth.

Both his uncle and cousin turned their heads to give him a curious glance.

That’s when the elk horns smashed through the windshield and a pungent musk-and-manure stench overwhelmed his senses.

Sheridan’s final thought as the truck simultaneously compacted and tore apart around him, was that the last word on his lips in this life would be Finlay.

• • • •

They find Sheridan a mile away from the wreckage, still running, shoes gone, shirt torn, chest gouged open but somehow not bleeding to death. He does not remember the ambulance, the emergency room, or going into surgery. When a doctor checks his sutured chest wound, Sheridan asks if the doctor can cut away the spider silk around his heart and replace it with regular stitches. Make me normal, he pleads. After a momentary stare, the doctor chuckles. He does not see the glass silk thread supporting Sheridan’s heart, does not see how fragile and broken he really is.

Sheridan’s cousin and uncle remain in the hospital for several days more and he isn’t allowed to see them. Not that he asks. His mother wants to hug him tight, but his chest hurts too much for hugs, he says. His father doesn’t have much to say. Sheridan guesses he is angry but isn’t sure at what or who. Did his uncle tell his dad he had confessed his love for Finlay and, in the distraction, nearly killed everyone?

Regardless, his dad’s plans to make a man of Sheridan had been scuttled. Now he’s stuck with this reedy boy with a fragile heart strung together by the thinnest of threads.

• • • •

When Sheridan returns home and limps to his room, he opens a window because the air smells like rotten cantaloupe. His bed is made and things have been neatened—his little wooden desk chair (a child’s chair, really) pushed in, his books and papers tidied, his clothes picked up off the floor, his trash can emptied. He smooths his hand under his pillow. Checks between the bed and the wall. No cantaloupe. His mother—he assumes it was his mother who straightened his room—must have tossed it. But the scent lingers. So does the pain.

• • • •

Sheridan loves baths but doesn’t love to take them because he feels childish. He is still very sore from the accident and is told soaking in a hot bath is good therapy. He is grateful but still embarrassed.

When he sinks into the hot water and leans back, tears come. He’s glad he locked the bathroom door because he can’t seem to stop himself and the more the heat of the bath soaks into his muscles, and then his bones, the harder he sobs. He presses a washcloth to his face and continues to sob. He doesn’t know for how long. He drifts off eventually and dreams about Finlay.

Sheridan holds an ice cream cone in the grocery store and shares licks with Finlay.

“You can’t hold it in,” Finlay says. “The thing with the claws.”

Finlay licks small drips off Sheridan’s knuckles. His tongue is warm and soft soft soft.

Sheridan wakes with a start from someone banging on the bathroom door. Water sloshes onto the floor. It’s his mother, checking if he has drowned. The water is cold and he is not drowned. He’s fine. He’s just getting out.

Sheridan shakes off the dream and shakes out the cold water drops hanging at the edge of his hair and pats himself dry. He catches a flash of red in the mirror. He has bled through his dressing. The gauze rectangle on his chest is bright and crimson and screams your wound is not healed it will never be healed.

He peels it off with some effort and dabs his chest clean with the towel. The wound is stitched tight. He doesn’t understand where the blood came from. He hides the red-stained towel under his mattress until he can safely dispose of it.

• • • •

Sheridan hates lunch. He hates lunch and he hates bologna sandwiches, and he hates the loser’s bench even though it really is the best place to sit where the sun can’t reach you and make you hot. So that’s where he sits.

The Vice Principal plops down next to him. It’s his job to reach out to losers, everybody knows that. He has a breast pocket full of multi-colored Sharpies, an ugly plaid tie, and no hair.

He was going to ask if Sheridan is doing okay after the accident. Sheridan can sense it. Every adult so far had.

“Nice shoes,” the VP says.

“I’m fine,” Sheridan says automatically. He doesn’t need a pity friend.

“Are they comfortable? I should buy some like that for myself. Do you think they’d look good on me?”

Sheridan hates his shoes. He hates his shoes and he hates the Vice Principal’s shoes and he hates the Vice Principal. No adult ever paid attention to him before his accident and now everyone wanted to see if he was okay. He hates them all. Sheridan feels a twinge deep in his chest.

A single silk thread snaps inside him. His heart kicks unexpectedly.

“Go away!” he shouts at the Vice Principal.

A fine red mist sprays from his mouth and dots the Vice Principal’s shirt and ugly tie.

“I’m fine!” he shouts before the Vice Principal or anyone else can react. He hurries toward the library bathroom, his only refuge now. On the way, he feels two more silk strands snap, whipping into twisted coils inside him like broken guitar strings.

His heart refuses to be bound.

• • • •

Sheridan’s cousin is in his bed. Sheridan, who had been in the same accident and the same hospital, was made to camp out on the floor of his own bedroom with his sleeping bag and leaky air mattress because his cousin is fresh out of the hospital and away from home. His cousin’s head is shaved on the side and a curving, puckered line of skin is pinched shut with staples. They glint in the moonlight. He has been staying with Sheridan’s family until his dad gets out of the hospital. Sheridan never had a sleepover before. This isn’t a good start.

Sheridan stares outside his window at the moon, which he can see more clearly from the floor than he ever could on his bed, and tries to ignore the sound of breath and friction coming from his cousin.

When Sheridan is just about asleep, his cousin says, “My dad’s coming home tomorrow, so you can have your bed back soon.”

Sheridan makes a mental note to wash the sheets. Or maybe just dispose of them.

“He’s going to burn the woods. Kill those things. They made the elk do that, you know. Get in our way. With their magic and stuff.”

Sheridan gets up on his elbows, alarm biting his heart. “He’s going to what?”

“Prescribed burn. That’s what they call it. They set fires on purpose. Bet you didn’t know that about firemen. They burn stuff.”

He can’t.

Sheridan’s heart races. He feels it strain against each remaining glass thread. Three of them snap, splintering to dust. Sheridan groans. He can’t catch his breath.

“I’m going to help, probably,” his cousin continues. “I’m not really allowed but I might go anyway. I want to burn something so bad. You should come. They tried to kill you too.”

Sheridan shucks his sleeping bag and jumps to his feet.

“Oh gross,” his cousin complains. “Put some pajamas on, I don’t want to see your wiener!”

But Sheridan is already crawling into his closet, digging into the stratified layers of childhood debris on the floor. Nobody had tried to kill them, not even the stupid elk that tried to cross the road. It was an accident. Sheridan feels another heart-thread twang apart and spots of blood, black in the moonlight, drip from his nose. He digs through comics and clothes and army men and wiffle balls and action figures and deeper still because he knows the one thing he needs is buried deep. Finally, he closes his fist on something long, thin, and cylindrical.

• • • •

Here is a boy, barely thirteen, sitting calmly in the back seat of an Uber, his shattered heart tapping out its final beats. Sheridan is dying but that’s okay. By all rights, he should have died on the road. Finlay saved him. He isn’t afraid to die, but he absolutely wants to live.

His cousin left in the early morning, picked up by his uncle, and presumably they’re on their way to burn the woods. If his uncle took his cousin home first, he’d have plenty of time. If not—

The Uber brings Sheridan to where the accident happened. When the driver leaves him, he is utterly alone. Over the treetops, he sees a thin column of rising smoke. He’s too late. Sheridan kicks off his shoes and runs barefoot into the woods and hopes the last string of spider silk will hold out.

There is no path. He doesn’t remember where he had entered the last time. He had merely awoken on the back of a giant tortoise. He still feels the warm reassurance of Finlay’s hand on his back. When he’s far enough into the woods that he can no longer see the road, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the recorder he retrieved from his closet last night. Just a plastic tube. Cheap as hell. He had used it mostly to annoy his parents. Nothing resembling music had ever come out of it.

He draws a breath, tastes the sharp sting of smoke at the back of his tongue, and blows. The recorder bleats. Remember the notes, he encourages himself, remember the notes that Finlay used to call the fae. Open the veil. He wets his lips and tries again, gentler, as he pads deeper into the woods.

• • • •

The air is dimmed with haze and Sheridan’s eyes sting. He senses time running out. The fire is almost here. His heart is almost done. He puffs into the recorder as he runs, emitting random squawks.

When he falls into the shallow stream, he doesn’t have the strength to rise. He hopes Finlay finds his body here, recorder in hand, and understands that he’d been on his way to find him.

“Finlay,” he says, wanting his name, again, to be the last thing on his lips before he dies. “Finlay, Finlay, Finlay.”

On the bank of the stream, a boulder shifts and rises and the face of an ancient tortoise peers curiously into his.

• • • •

The tortoise carries Sheridan deeper into the wood than he could ever go on mortal feet, to a place where smoke cannot reach, where age cannot reach, where hate cannot reach. When Sheridan looks back on the bank of the stream, he sees a small, deflated lump sitting in the mud, cold and still, one silvery thread still wrapped around it. He supposes it used to be his heart, but he no longer recognizes it.

Sheridan crosses his legs and finds it easier this time to get his balance as the tortoise galumphs along. When the air fills with glowing specks, he knows he is close. Finally, the tortoise stops and settles to the ground, and Sheridan finds himself sitting before the Faerie Sovereign and dozens of faerie folk, full of whispers and murmurs. His eyes scan for one in particular. He has to be here.

What heart? Asks the Faerie Sovereign, as if Sheridan hadn’t run away, as if no time had passed.

Four step forward, hearts in hand.

A heart that is shared shall never diminish. Bear or Bee? Fox or Bird? Rat or—?

“What is best?” Sheridan asks. But he knows.

The Faerie Sovereign’s eyes smile. The one you love.

Sheridan scans the gathered fae. He could have any heart. The choice is his to make. He knows what he needs, but can’t find him in the crowd, and the empty place where his heart should be feels cold. Sheridan trembles but holds his feet firm in the rich damp soil. This time he will not run. Not yet.

Choose, the Faerie Sovereign urges again.

He has to be there.

Even if he can’t see him.

Choose now.

“My heart is a wolf,” Sheridan says.

The whispers and murmurs hush. The Faerie Sovereign gathers up their robe, drapes it over their arm, rises gracefully, and moves away. When the rest of crowd has gone, only a tallish boy with silvery hair remains.

Finlay’s ghostly wolf-ears glow and his tail swishes behind him. In his hands he holds his untamed heart.

“A heart shared shall never diminish,” Finlay says, and presses it through Sheridan’s bare chest. His warm hands are still resting on his skin when they feel his new heart kick.

Sheridan grins. He grabs Finlay’s hand and bolts. They lope into the woods, legs and hearts pumping in tandem, wind talking in their ears.

Together they race alongside the muddy stream, the touch of their feet so light they leave no mark in the soft clay. Behind them, the waters rise and swell in their wake, pulled by magic.

Smoke stings Sheridan’s nose; the air grows thick with it. Deeper in the woods, an orange glow signals the oncoming fire. Sheridan snarls.

Finlay smiles, his eyes wild, and leads Sheridan up a rocky outcrop. They pause at the top, arms around shoulders, toes curled over the edge, ears pricked, chests heaving.

The stream roars around them, spreads over the banks, and blankets the forest floor as it rushes further into the woods. Moments later, Sheridan hears the steaming hiss of water meeting fire and the faint, surprised shouts of men being washed out of the woods.

Sheridan laughs and wraps his arms around Finlay and they jump and tumble down the slope of the outcrop and roll on the dampened ground, leaves sticking to their backs, twigs trimming their hair, and instantly they are up and rushing through the woods again, unstoppable and unafraid.

Sheridan’s heart is free, and it sings. Together, they howl.