Ballad (10 page)

“You’re a mess,” I agreed. I had my arm around her. My heart was pounding hard as I worked up the guts to say for the third time what I was really thinking to her. I closed my eyes and swallowed. And I did it. “Dee, why did you really leave? What’s wrong?”

I’d really said it out loud.

But it didn’t matter, because she didn’t answer. She pulled out of my arms and stood up, walking over to the railing. She stood there so long, watching the cars like they were the only important thing, that I was afraid someone would miss us and come looking. I stood up and joined her at the railing, silently watching the world.

Dee looked at me. I felt her eyes on me, examining my face, my hair, my shoulders, as if she were somehow analyzing me, sizing me up. Seeing how I’d turned out after nine years of being friends.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she asked.

I took a breath.

“James,” she said again. “I just want to know. Do you want to kiss me?”

I turned to face her. I didn’t know what to say.

She made a strange, uncertain face, mouth pulled out straight on either side. “If you want to … you can.”

Finally, I spoke, and when I did, my voice sounded weird to me. Not mine. “That’s a funny way to ask someone to kiss you.”

Dee bit her lip. “I just thought—I just wanted to see —if you don’t want to, I mean, I don’t want to ruin, I mean … ”

This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen, and I just didn’t know what to say. I closed my eyes for a second, and then I took her hand. Goose bumps raced along my arms in an instant, and I closed my eyes for another second. I had the completely obsessive desire to find a pen and to write something on my hands. If I could just write
kiss
or
WTF
or
mouthwash
on my skin, I’d be able to sort this out.

A car alarm went off, far away. I leaned forward and very softly kissed her lips. It wouldn’t change the world. There weren’t any choirs of angels that descended to attend our kiss. But my heart stopped and I didn’t think I’d ever breathe again.

Dee’s eyes were closed. She said, “Try again.”

I cupped my hands around the back of her neck like I’d imagined doing one thousand times. Her skin was warm against my palms, sticky with the heat, smelling of flowers and shampoo. I kissed her again, so careful. There was a long, long pause, and then she kissed me back. I was freezing cold in the hot D.C. day, her mouth on mine and her arms finally coming around my back, holding me tight as I kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. We stumbled into the back corner of the balcony, still kissing, and then I pulled away to rest my face against her hair and try to figure out what the hell was happening.

We stood in the shadows there, her wrapped up in my arms, for a long time, and then she started to cry. At first I just felt her shaking, and then I stepped back a little to see her face, and found it streaked and wet.

Dee looked up at me, her face a mess of tears, eyes desperately sad, and bit her lip. “It made me think of Luke. I thought of him kissing me. When you were kissing me.”

I didn’t move. I think she thought I was—I think she thought I was a better person than I was. More … selfless. More … something. I dropped her hands and took a step back.

“James,” she said.

I was dead inside; her voice didn’t affect me at all. Another step back took me to the door to the balcony; I fumbled with the handle. All around me, I smelled clover and thyme and flowers. My sixth sense was whispering to me, but I just wanted out.

“James,
please
. James. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it.” Dee’s voice broke, but she just kept saying my name. I finally got the damn door open; cold air blasted me. Dee started to cry like I’ve never heard her cry. “Oh, God, James, I’m so sorry.
James.
”

I went straight down the hallway, down the stairs, past the flying-monkey guy, through the door, into the parking lot, and out between the cars to where the bus was parked.

Nuala was waiting on the curb when I got there, but she didn’t say anything when I sat down beside her. Which was good, because I didn’t have any words inside me. No music either. I was nothing.

I crossed my arms on my legs and put my head down on my arms.

Finally, Nuala asked, “Are They here for you or for her?”

Nuala

This summer-sweet night is only one minute
upon another minute upon another

Beautiful cacophony, sugar upon lips, dancing to exhaustion

I thought of you, before this minute upon
another minute upon another

Until, numb, my lips fell onto the mouth of another,
and I was undone
.

—
from
Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I left James alone after the D.C. trip. Well, not entirely. I didn’t talk to him or send him any dreams, but I still followed him. I was waiting for him to play my song again. Waiting for him to play any music again. I spent the evenings outside his dorm, sitting on the back portico where he’d found Dee that first night and listening to the sounds of human life inside. Radio Voyeur.

A few nights after the D.C. trip, well after the sun had gone down, I heard sounds of a different sort, from outside the dorm instead of inside. The faeries, singing and dancing again on the same hill behind the school. This time I didn’t approach Them, just stood under the back columns of James’ dorm and listened, my arms hugged around myself. It was the
daoine sidhe—
the faeries that were made of and called by music. They shouldn’t have been able to appear when it wasn’t Solstice, but there They were, unmistakable with their wailing pipes and fiddles. Was this part of what Eleanor spoke of, when she said that we were going to get stronger? The reappearance of the previously weak
daoine sidhe
?

A touch on my shoulder made me start, halfway to invisible before I could figure out what was going on.

“Shhh.” The voice was mostly laugh. “Shh, little lovely.”

The laugh pissed me off first, then the pet name cinched the deal. I spun and crossed my arms. A faerie, tinted green as all the
daoine sidhe
when They were in the human world, smiled down at me, his hand held out toward me.

“What do you want?” I asked crossly.

His smile didn’t falter and he kept his hand outstretched. He smelled like a faerie, all clover and dusky sunsets and music. Nothing like James’ faint scent of shaving cream and leather from his pipes. “You needn’t be out here all alone. There’s music and we mean to dance until morning.”

I looked behind me at the distant glow of the faeries on the hill. I knew the words to describe a faerie dance, because Steven, one of my pupils, had written most of them as I’d whispered them in his ear: cacophony, beautiful, sugar, laughing, exhaustion, breathless, lust, numb. I turned back to the lovely green faerie in front of me. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“You’re the
leanan sidhe
,” he said, surprising me because he knew and had asked me to dance anyway. His eyes roved over me. “And you’re beautiful. Dance. We’re stronger all the time and the dancing is better than ever. Come away with me and dance. It’s what we’re here for.”

I looked at his outstretched hand without taking it. “It’s what
you’re
here for,” I told him. “I’m here for something else entirely.”

“Don’t be foolish, little thing,” the faerie said, and he took my hand, pulling it from where it hung by my side. “We are all here for pleasure.”

I pulled on my hand; he kept it. “Didn’t you hear? I’m dying. No fun dancing with a dying faerie.”

He pulled my hand to his lips and kissed it, then turned it over and kissed the delicate skin of my wrist too, equal parts lick and bite. “You’re not dead yet.”

I jerked my hand again, but now he held my wrist, and he was strong
—
much stronger than a
daoine sidhe
should’ve been, this close to humans and iron and everything modern. “Let the hell go or I won’t be the only faerie dying around here.”

“So you’ll only dance with humans, is it?” His voice was gentle, as if he weren’t holding me tight, as if I hadn’t used the word “faerie.” He used my wrist to pull me closer and he said into my ear, “They say that when the
leanan sidhe
kisses a man, he will see heaven.”

I could kill him if I had his name. I was bad at fighting, but I was good at killing. A faerie wouldn’t give me his name, though, especially one of the fragile
daoine sidhe
that kept so much of our magic. “Do they?”

“They do. They also say”—and his lips pressed right against my ear, promising, as all faeries did, eternal life and thoughtless joy—“that if the
leanan sidhe
lies with a man, it is pleasure like none other found on earth.” He reached down between us and caught my other wrist in a hot hold.

So it was to be rape. Only the faeries never called it that. They said “ravished” and “seduced” and “overcome by desire.” It was a very human thing, to be taken by a faerie against your will. A proper faerie had rights; a proper faerie would never have had this
daoine sidhe
’s lips on her neck and music humming through her because the queen wouldn’t have allowed it. But I was neither faerie nor human, so no one cared what happened to me but me.

I thought about all this and I thought about the way his fingers on my wrist felt unpleasant, like the touch of a milkweed, and I thought about the way the fall moon was brilliantly white as it rose above the columned-dorm like a rack of smiling teeth, while his hand rummaged over the body James had made beautiful.

One of his hands held the back of my neck, his fingers so long that they came most of the way around it. Just enough force behind the grip to tell me what he could do. He tipped my chin up, like he was a proper lover and I had flown into his grasp willingly. “I would very much like to see heaven.”

I spat on him. The spit glistened on his cheek, brighter than his dark eyes in the dim light, and he smiled like I had just given him the best gift in the world. I hated him and I hated every other faerie for their damn condescension. I could have screamed, but it occurred to me then, in a way that it never had before, that there wasn’t a single soul in the world who would hear me and do something about it, no matter where I was on the earth.

“Tears? You
are
very human,” the faerie remarked, though he was lying, because I never cried. “Don’t weep, lovely, it ruins your beauty.” The faerie reached inside my shirt. I jerked violently, struggling, for the second time in my life totally unable to get what I wanted.

With my free hand, I made a fist
—
a familiar, easy gesture
—
and I slammed it into his nose. I’d read somewhere that you could shove the bridge of someone’s nose into their brain and kill them if you hit them just right.

He was dizzyingly fast; he turned his face so my fist glanced off his jawbone and then grabbed for my arm. I was faster, though, and I raked claws along his forehead and cheek, leaving nail marks, pale white for a second and then full of rising red. It had to have hurt, but he was eternally smiling.

The faerie still held my wrist in his hand, gripping so tight now that I gasped, twisting against the pressure of his fingertips on my skin, the feel of him crushing my bones together.

I struggled, kicking, shoving, twisting in his grip, as if it would make any difference, but he was strong. Solstice-strong. Way too strong for a
daoine sidhe
right next to a human building.

I wanted my mind to tear away, to disappear into a dream of agonizing beauty, but everything I’d given to others, all the transcendent brilliance and otherworldly dreams, was out of my reach. He was taking it for himself.

James

I was awake, skin prickling, eyes peeled wide open. I was awake like I’d never been, so awake that it hurt. The room was black as a butt crack and I knew without looking that the clock glowed 3:04. I knew because my dream was still burnt on my eyes
—
a dream of waking a second before I actually did.

I sat up, grabbed a shirt from the end of the bed, jerked on my jeans, and thought about grabbing my shoes. No time. There wasn’t any time.

Across the small room, Paul groaned, an invisible, dark lump in his bed, turning and grabbing his pillow. He had kicked off his blankets; he must be hot, even though I was shivering.

I slid out the door and into the hallway, holding my breath, trying to be fast, trying to be silent. I didn’t even know where the hell I was going. Or why I was hurrying.

Dull greenish light in the hallway vaguely illuminated the closed doors of the other rooms. I padded down the hallway, into the dim stairwell that smelled of sweat and the middle of the night. I paused by the window I normally snuck out of to see the antlered king, but that wasn’t what I’d seen in my dream. It was the back door I needed.

I crept into the main hallway of the ground floor, past Sullivan’s room. I imagined the door opening up and Sullivan springing out like a knobby jack-in-the-box, but it stayed shut and I made it through the lobby to the back door. I turned the lock to make sure I’d be able to get back in, and then, shuddering with the cold, I pushed the door open and stood on the back porch.

I saw Nuala.

She was curled against the side of the dorm, body unnaturally twisted, arms stretched sort of above her and out, like she was crucified. She had her face half-turned toward me, tears streaked down her cheeks, and she was kicking in front of her. It seemed to take forever for her to notice me, standing there, staring at her, and when she did, I saw some weird, unidentified emotion in her eyes. In that long moment, her body jerked in a weird way, and I finally figured it out.

Because I can see Them and you can’t.

“Don’t just stand there,” Nuala snarled. Not nasty, though. Like a trapped wild animal.

I grabbed at my iron bracelet, working the knobs loose from my wrist, and I lunged toward her. Nuala’s arms dropped, released, and she pointed me toward her invisible attacker. Too late to be useful to me.

Something struck me, hard, electric, inhuman, and I staggered and swung with the iron bracelet. I was blind, but I wasn’t stupid. An invisible body thumped hard against one of the columns, and I charged at the column with the iron outstretched in front of me like a sword. I punched again, and this time the faerie appeared, green-tinted, beautiful, and alien.

“Hello, piper,” he hissed at me.

And then he was a swan, as if he had never been anything else, and he winged through the columns and away. I watched the white blot disappear into the dark sky, and then I turned back to Nuala. She was crouched on the bricks, ineffectually pulling at her hair like she was trying to make it look presentable, and she was still crying. Not like a human, though. Her tears streamed silently down her face, one after another, and she didn’t even seem to notice them as she jerked at her shirt and sucked at some sort of cut on her wrist.

“Was he the only one?” I asked.

“Bastard,” Nuala said. She spoke as if her tears didn’t change her voice. “Bastard faeries. I hate Them. I hate Them.”

I dropped down in front of her, not sure what I was supposed to be doing or feeling. The bricks were cold and prickly through the knees of my jeans. I didn’t know what to say. Was I supposed to say “are you okay?” I didn’t even know what had happened. Had she been raped? Was there such a thing as
almost
raped? Her clothing was all messed up and she was crying
—
the psychotic creature was
crying—
so I mean, that couldn’t be good. I mean, it had to have been something bad.

I felt like maybe I should give her a hug, or something, even though she’d never indicated that she was the sort that would appreciate fond human contact. Unless it was the brush of your skin against her fingertips as she stuck a knife between your ribs.

“Just shut
up
.” Nuala pressed her hand over her face. “Hell, James. Just shut up.”

I realized that she meant my thoughts at the same moment that Nuala realized there were tears on her face. Standing up, she pulled her wet palm away from her face and stared at it, looking absolutely stricken and very human. She moved her fingers slightly, watching the tears glisten in the faint light. Looking at them made more silent tears streak from her eyes, one after another, as if they would never end, as if the worst thing in the world was that she had discovered she was crying.

I felt disoriented. We had roles that we played when we were around each other, and now Nuala was letting me down. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be around her anymore.

Nuala scrubbed her hands against her short jean skirt, wiping the tears off in an angry movement, and then jerked down the bottom of the skirt, straightening it out. I reached behind her to knock the crap off the back of her shirt. She flinched at my touch. I didn’t know what to do about that so I pretended not to notice.

“So now you know.” Nuala didn’t look at me, just kept busy flicking invisible pieces of lint off her clothing.

This was easier than silence. “Now I know what?”

“How it is. With me.”

I blinked. Clearly, from the expression on her face and the ragged edge to her voice, this was supposed to be a statement pregnant with meaning. I ran back over the scene in my mind and everything she’d said. “Nuala, you’re the one who reads minds, not me.”

Nuala looked back at me and her stance said so clearly
no, never mind
that I almost thought she’d said it out loud. But instead she said, “I’m one of the solitary fey. You know what that means?”

She paused as if she really did expect me to answer.

“Means I’m a freak, James.”

I didn’t remember her ever calling me by my name before, and it had a really weird effect on me, like I couldn’t trust anything I thought about her anymore. I had a pen in my jeans, and I
wanted
to get it out. I could already see the shape of the letters I would write:
call by name
.

“I don’t care if you do,” Nuala said. She jerked her chin toward the pocket where my pen was. “Don’t you get it? I’m a bigger freak than you are.”

I crossed my arms tightly across my chest. I should’ve said something sarcastic to lighten the mood, but I didn’t want to. I wanted her to finish saying what she was going to say.

“And nobody vouches for me. You don’t know how lucky you are. You have human laws and school rules and you have your parents and Sullivan and even Paul, and they all keep the world from you. I’m just me, nobody to nobody. Is it so stupid that it’s taken me this long to figure out that I’m
jealous
of you?” She laughed, wild and unhappy. “You, who were supposed to be my asshole free ride until I got torched this year and forgot about everything.”

I sighed. If she’d been Dee, I would’ve waited a second longer, to let her completely implode, but she wasn’t Dee, and I didn’t think Nuala worked quite the same way. I thought about what I had wanted to write on my hand, so that I wouldn’t forget to do it.

“Nuala,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Nuala, can we just have, like, a cease-fire? I mean, you can go back to calling me an ass and trying to lure me to my death tomorrow and I’ll go back to treating you like a psychotic bitch and researching ways to exorcize you in the morning, but seriously, can we just have a cease-fire for tonight? ’Cause, seriously, trying to think about this is making my head hurt, and
—
can we just go somewhere and get some food or something? Is there even someplace that has food at this time of night?”

Her face was unreadable. “I just keep thinking that at some point, I’m going to stop being surprised by how stupidly ballsy you are. Were you
ever
afraid of me?”

I said, truthfully, “You scare the shit out of me.”

She started to laugh then, crazy, real laughing, like I was the funniest thing in the world. When she laughed like that, it made her either the scariest girl or the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t decide if the feeling inside me was because I wanted to make her do it again or because I wanted to run away.