Chapter Three

Peanut Butter and Jelly

Ed came pounding down the stairs, starting Gwen from her empty, shocked daze. He was clutching a piece of paper, and his face was splotchy and streaked with tears. Gwen felt sick to her stomach at the sight. Nothing had shaken him so profoundly in years, and she desperately wished she could take the pain from his eyes.

“Come here.” She held her arms out to him, and he shook his head.

“No touching.” He held the note out to her. “Read this.” Gwen took the paper, scanning it quickly and feeling her chest tighten.

“Where did you find this?” She looked at her brother, who was gulping down air like he hadn’t taken a breath in hours.

“They were holding it. Between their hands. This feels fake, it feels like I’m watching it in third person.” Ed wiped at his face, and Gwen sighed, handing the note back to him and going to sit on the couch.

“I just feel angry. I try so hard to keep bad shit from happening and I missed this? This is probably the only-”

“You would have died.” Ed cut her off. “You saw them, you can see all of this. Whoever this was, they would have killed you, Gwen, and then I’d be alone.” Ed scratched up and down his sternum repeatedly.

“I don’t care, I-”

“You don’t CARE?!” Ed looked at his sister, eyes wide with disbelief. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me is that our moms are fucking mangled and the kids are fucking gone, Edwin.” “I cannot fucking believe you.” Ed went to walk back up the stairs.

*“Stop. Calm down. We need to be calm.”**

Gwen felt like her voice was ripping out of her throat as she spoke, and Ed stopped, his breath becoming even.

“Okay.” Ed began to pace, looking at the note again before crumpling it in his hands.

Gwen took a deep breath, trying not to pull at her hair. Ed was gripping the paper like his life depended on it. He turned to her sharply.

“I think we have to call the police.” Ed’s voice was strained, and Gwen could tell from the pinched expression on his face that he hated the idea. She shook her head.

“The police force here is fucking useless, you know that as well as I do. They couldn’t find a killer if one turned themself in. You know they’d just pin it on someone to make it easy, and we both know who it would be. I can’t go to jail again.” Gwen stood, stepping over the busted coffee table to grab her brother by the shoulders. “Stop fucking pacing.” Ed nodded, taking a shaky breath and running a hand through his hair.

“Okay, follow me on this.” Gwen let go of his shoulders and gestured for him to go on. “This note is talking about the fae, and the author didn’t want to be described, which is why they-” Ed paused, breath stuttering.

“Which is why we’re in this position. Keep talking.” Gwen carefully and slowly took the note from his hands.

“Mom was always telling us about our bio dad, right? The fucking story about the tall man and the cat thing taking him away. How they ripped open space or whatever and took him out of the world so that Dādī Hema wouldn’t have to raise him anymore.”

“Yeah, and Charlie would go on about how when she met Mom, she was this crazy librarian who couldn’t stop researching Celtic mythology, and when she found out why, she called bullshit on it, but Dādī Hema swore until the day she died that it was true.” Gwen looked at the note again. “It says that they took us. If they took us from our bio dad and dropped us here, wouldn’t we just have to find him to find them?” Ed shook his head frantically.

“No, no, I don’t think it’s that simple. The fae were Irish, at the beginning, but if they still lived there, they would’ve been found by now. All of the myths talk about a ‘Place Under the Hill’, like it’s somewhere else. Like, a world other than this one, right?” Ed shook his hands repeatedly.

“Oh, let me just fucking boot up my spaceship then. Pull an Elon.” Gwen re-read the note again, searching desperately for a clue. This person wanted to be found; they had to have left something.

“No, no, not like in space. Like, um… like a fucking-” Ed snapped his fingers, as though that could make the words come to him.

“Like a parallel reality.” Gwen interjected. “A world beside ours.” Ed snapped again and pointed at her.

“Exactly. Think of it like a sandwich, right? Like our world is the bread, and the jelly is some kind of barrier, and then the peanut butter and the other piece of bread are them.” He began to pace again, and Gwen rolled her eyes.

“Okay, Ed, so if the note is true, then how do we get there? I’m assuming we’re working on a time limit, so grease the gears and get thinking, Jimmy Neutron.” She sighed, leaning back against the shredded couch cushions.

“I don’t fucking know?” Ed stopped again, turning sharply again. “You have to think too, Gwen. Just because I’m the smart one doesn’t mean I can do all of it.”

“You’re the smart one? Just because you can put circuits together, doesn’t mean you can think, you motherboard motherfucker.” Gwen stood again, leaving the paper on the couch cushion.

“Shut up! Shut up and think. Okay? It can’t be that hard, or else they would have given instructions. If it’s wits, we can handle it, and if it’s fucking brute force, I’m sure you’ve got it handled.” Ed began shaking his hands again, furrowing his brow. “It has to be a spell or an offering of some kind. I remember Mom talking about how they like gifts.”

“Milk and honey, little metal screws, shit like that.” Gwen ignored the frustration that was clear on her brother’s face, going into the kitchen. She gagged again at the smell, looking at the remnants of their groceries on the floor. The milk was spoiled, she was sure about that from the pool of wet yellow clumps that spilled from the bottle, but she didn’t think honey could go bad.

She gingerly shifted some of the rotten shapes on the counter until she found the small, bear-shaped bottle. Unscathed, and more importantly, still edible.

Gwen walked back into the living room and paused in the doorway. Ed was gone.

“Ed?” She called out for him, setting the honey down on a side table. She moved toward the stairs, but a glint on the front porch caught her eye. She turned, walking over the broken glass to look closer.

There, sitting shattered on the porch, were Ed’s glasses. She leaned down to pick them up carefully, and then scanned the tree line. Nothing.

“Ed!” She shouted for him again, listening to her own voice echo back from the trees. It was so quiet. She went back into the house, grabbing a utility flashlight from the kitchen drawer, and set out into the trees.

She tore through the forest like a wildfire. Whatever had taken him, it couldn’t have gotten far. She searched every place they’d hidden as children, every little picnic area, every inch of their property. Her stomach filled with dread with every corner she turned, the fear of finding her brother, shredded to bits, overwhelmed her. The sun set some time during her search, but she simply turned on her flashlight and kept going, ignoring the unease that the sounds of the woods at night gave to her.

Gwen made it back to the house, and it was quiet. She was entirely, crushingly alone. She wailed, feeling the cold air bite at her skin.

Where had he gone? Gwen couldn’t remember a day before they had turned six when she had seen Ed without his glasses. It didn’t matter now. She was alone, and she was afraid, and she knew exactly what to do. They wanted a sacrifice? The fae would get their sacrifice.

She walked through the open door into the house, gasping when she cut her foot on the shattered glass.

“Fuck!” She sat on the arm of a chair, looking at her foot. She couldn’t see the glass and there was a lot of blood, but not enough to make her stop. She stood again, careful to watch her step, and went into the kitchen, fetching a pair of scissors from the drawer. She made her way slowly to the backyard, dreading what came next. She had no time to worry about whether or not it would work, she just needed to do it. To do something.

Gwen pulled her hair tie, letting her hair fall out of her ponytail in long tendrils around her face. She dropped the hair tie, grabbing a piece of hair and slowly, carefully, cut it so it fell onto her brow bone.

The feeling was intoxicating. She began freely shearing her hair, not concerned with how it fell, simply obsessed with the fact that there was less of it.

She took a deep breath when she finished, staring down. Every last long red lock lay in the fire pit. She shoved the pile of kindling into the pit and grabbed the gas can, beginning to pour a trail to the propane tank that powered their home. When she reached the tank, she unscrewed the lid and tossed the gas can onto the ground before ambling back to the fire pit.

It was odd, mostly, to think about where her day had gone. The moon was rising slowly now in the east, and she was covered in dirt and blood and hair, the mess a reminder of a war she had barely even begun. Her eyes burned with something far brighter than fire, though she could not see it. She had been safe here. Always safe. Kept safe, played safe. Not anymore. Now, she would be herself. Relentlessly, furiously so. Angry and loud and violent and pure. Never afraid again. She would never be afraid of what the people whispered on the bus or what the colors of her flag meant. Her only focus now would be getting her family back and getting the fuck out of here.

She struck a match and threw it into the fire pit. Her hair scorched almost immediately, catching the small trail of gasoline on fire. The scorch made its way through the grass, barely touching the propane tank that sat alongside the Puck family home. An explosion rocked the woods, shaking leaves from trees and bursting pipes from below the ground. Gwen was not there to feel it.