The cats came for the odor of the smokehouse where Kizzy's father and uncles made sausages from the various things they killed. With their little rough tongues, the cats lapped up pooling blood before it could congeal in the dirt. The ghosts had no such thirst, but came for the clumps of asphodel that bloomed round the graves all summer, and for the bowls of boiled barley the rest of the year. Cats and ghosts both partook of the saucers of milk and that was okay. They consumed different parts of it: the cats its substance, the ghosts its essence, and none went to waste.
They came from afar, cats and ghosts both, because normal families didn't spill hot blood in their driveways or leave out food for the dead, and they weren't exactly spoiled for choice. Kizzy thought most of the ghostly visitors came from the cemetery down the road; surely all the spirits in her family's little plot had moved along, well provisioned as they were with coin, food, weapon, and wing for their journey. Surely they didn't linger here. Surely her grandmother hadn't.
How, then, had her knife come to be on Kizzy's pillow, and her swan's wing, torn feather from feather, in Kizzy's room? Kizzy frowned, puzzled, and went back in the house, passing her mother in the kitchen and choosing not to speak of the feathers and knife. Her people would be terribly disturbed by it; they'd surely keep Kizzy home from school to scry the meaning of the ominous visitation, to bless the grave, and to try to return the knife to its rightful owner. And Kizzy did worry that her grandmother's ghost was weaponless and vulnerable in the shadowed land. But her mind kept turning back to Jack Husk. She had to see him again, to see if he was real, so she said nothing of the knife.
She showered, dried her hair, and tied, untied, and retied the green scarf, deciding at last to go ahead and wear it. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and slid her grandmother's stiletto into her back pocket. She had a cup of coffee and a cigarette, brushed her teeth three times to scour away any yellow flavor, put on lipstick and then wiped it off, hopeful of kissing and scowling at her own absurd hope, and she almost left the house. But at the last minute she pulled off her clothes and stepped into a vintage dress she'd bought at the thrift store and never worn. It was made of apple-green kimono silk in a rippling pattern, with a mandarin collar and a row of big black buttons all the way down the front. She stood in front of the mirror for a minute, watching the way the silk slipped and shone when she moved her hips, then she pulled on black boots and hurried out the door.
Jack Husk was waiting for her in front of the Christmas tree farm, and he whistled low when he saw her. "Great dress," he said, his eyes sliding all the way down the row of buttons.
"Thanks," Kizzy said, blushing just as deeply as she had the day before, at school. She'd have to get used to him all over again, taking small sips of his beauty as if it was too hot a drink to swallow all at once. One shy glance revealed to her that Jack Husk wasn't carrying his new school books but a picnic basket. "What's that?" she asked.
He held it up and smiled, mischievous as an imp. "Breakfast picnic," he said. There was a checked blanket folded carelessly under the basket's handles. "Care to join me?"
"What, now! What about school?"
Jack Husk shrugged. "I'm not such a huge fan."
"Yeah, me either."
"Good. Then you'll come with me." He held out his arm for her in an old-fashioned, courtly gesture, and there was no question in Kizzy's mind how she would be spending her morning. She hooked her arm through Jack Husk's, laying her fingers lightly on the velvet nap of his sleeve, and walked beside him, noticing as she turned that the old man's dog was not in his place on the porch.
"Everything go okay with the dog yesterday?" she asked.
"Sure," he answered. "No problem. So, is there a park around here somewhere?"
Kizzy shook her head. "Just the cemetery."
"Oh, well, that'll work. Yeah?"
It was just ahead, behind a neat fence. Kizzy walked past it every day, but she hadn't been in it for years, not since she was a child and snuck there to listen to the snatches of ghost conversation that blew in on an icy wind from the next world. It wasn't a Gothic cemetery; there were no mossy angels weeping miraculous tears of blood, no crypts or curses or crumble. No poets or courtesans were buried here; no vampires slumbered belowground. It was only a collection of stone rectangles standing straight and ordinary. Even the dead loitering here spoke of dull things, like the one who worried she'd left the stove burning when she died.
But it didn't have to be some fabulous Parisian cemetery for the idea of a picnic in it to bloom in Kizzy's imagination into something daring. She imagined herself telling Evie and Cactus. A breakfast picnic in the cemetery with Jack Husk! Their eyes would bulge with glee and envy and they'd want to know everything. They'd want to know if he'd kissed her. She stole a glance at him and caught him looking at her lips, and she looked away, blushing hotly, and found the voice to say, "Yeah, okay," in what she hoped was a casual way.
They went through the cemetery gate, arm in arm in their antique clothing, and it was then that the ghosts, all of a sudden and with only a flitter of grass blades for a warning, hit Kizzy like a maelstrom.
Her skirt flared and twisted itself tight to her legs as a rush of cold wind swept around her. It circled deasil, thrice, just like her grandmother's ghost had done the day of her burial. But Kizzy felt a whole swelling of ghosts around her this time, a tide; her grandmother might have been there, but she wasn't alone. Kizzy froze in mid-step, chilled and startled, and looked up at Jack Husk. For a second some look passed through his sly eyes, some intelligence ... a hint of a sneer? And Kizzy almost thought he knew the sudden wind for what it was: an onslaught of ghosts. Had they swept around her only, she wondered now, or around them both? Had they included Jack Husk in their circle of protection? Or had they wound up Kizzy alone? Had that wind tried to slide between them, like a wall?
"Brrr ..." he said, shivering slightly. To Kizzy's dismay, he unhooked his arm from hers, but then he settled it around her shoulder, drawing her neatly against his side, and her dismay evaporated, along with any question she'd had about his awareness of rampant ghosts. "Cold wind," he said simply.
"Mm hm," Kizzy agreed. The velvet of his jacket was now snug against her cheek, and there was very little room to think of anything else but the feel of it, and of the way she'd caught him looking at her lips, and what that might mean.