Blood & Flowers (7 page)

Lucia had the tears that I wanted to cry running down her face. “Don't go,” she whispered. She waved at the paper that Nicholas still held. He looked like he was holding a rotting fish by the tail. “Just don't show
up,” Lucia continued. She sat next to Tonio and took his hand. “We'll hide.”

I looked at everything crammed into Max's apartment. I thought of all we'd left behind at the chocolate factory. I thought, too, of all of us, and I asked, “Where? How? Because if he can't get Tonio, you can bet he'll go for Max. And if he can't get Max, he'll go for one of us.”

“We didn't do anything,” Lucia wailed, and she cried even harder. Tonio put his arm around her shoulders and she buried her face in his collar.

“When this happened before,” Nicholas said. “Um, I mean—well, what did happen? With the prison sentence and all.” He sounded like his question might be in bad taste, but that it needed to be asked anyway.

“Furies of badness akin to the Dark Courts of Evil,” muttered Floss.

It was all too much for me—the tension, the thick hard air, the innuendos. I lost all the calm that I was supposed to possess. “Floss,” I snapped, “what the hell are you talking about? Speak English, for Mab's sake.”

“If I'm speaking for Mab's sake, I don't need to
worry about what you do and don't understand, mortal.” Her eyes actually flashed and she moved a step closer to me.

I didn't know this Floss. I stepped back, moving fast, and tripped on Tonio. I would have landed flat on the floor if Max hadn't grabbed me and kept me upright.

“Enough,” Max said. His tone was hard and strong and fierce. “Enough, all of you. Just stop everything for one minute. None of you are helping him”—he pointed, of course at Tonio—“and all of you are hurting one another. I don't have the resources to keep anyone else upright and functioning right now. We all have to take care of one another if we're going to come out of this intact. But I have to say that right now, Tonio is my main concern.”

He glared at each of us in turn, then added, “Am I making all this clear?”

Nicholas was the first to speak. “He's right. We can't help if we spend all our energy infighting.”

“Sorry,” Floss said, staring at the floor between my feet.

“Sorry, too,” I said. I looked straight at Floss when I spoke, willing her to look up. When I saw her eyelids flicker, I added, “Sorrier, actually. I spoke first.”

Floss shrugged, but she lifted her head. She looked like Floss again.

Lucia was still next to Tonio. She said, “Nicholas is right. Max, too. We have to work with one another. It's important.” She sounded so sincere, so honest, that I almost smiled. If we couldn't get together behind Lucia, who could we get behind?

And just like that, snap, we were the Outlaws again. Now in more ways than one, apparently, because with the mess we were in, who knew what we might have to do next?

N
icholas was buried in precedents. He wasn't finding much, or so it seemed, because he kept growling and smacking books on the table. Every time he did that Floss, who was sitting across from him folding complicated-looking paper flowers, would jump and swear in a soft, controlled, not-at-all-like-Floss way.

Max and Tonio were sitting close, talking in low inaudible voices. Lucia was in the kitchen boiling water for gallons of tea. And me? I was drifting, on the move because I couldn't seem to sit still. Really, at this point in time, book art didn't seem to be what was called for, and I wasn't sure what else to offer.

“Persia,” Floss said. I thought she was irritated because I kept wandering back and forth behind her chair, but all she seemed to want was help. “Come here. These still need stems.”

“Okay.” If I couldn't do books, I could still do paper.

Floss rolled a stem, slim and perfect. It looked like she was rolling an exquisite joint. I tried one and it looked more like an unwieldy cigar. “Hmmm,” I said. Making flower stems was more difficult than making a book with cross bindings. I held my stem up for a Floss inspection. She barely glanced at it, then said, in an unusually calm tone, “That's fine.”

“So, Floss,” I said to keep my mind as occupied as my fingers. “Why are we making flowers?”

She looked at me sideways and sighed. If she'd said, “Stupid question,” she wouldn't have been any clearer. But all she really did say was, “I need to get a message home and I don't have time to go myself.”

I rolled a few more stems while I thought about this. My stems were getting better, which was probably the only nice thing that had happened today, but I still couldn't make the connection between Floss's
words and what my hands were doing. “I don't get it,” I admitted, after a full minute of thinking.

Floss pursed her lips. She grabbed a small clay pot and smacked it down between us, smacked it hard enough that Nicholas looked up briefly and frowned. Floss ignored him and dumped a bunch of stemmed flowers in the pot. Like magic they rearranged themselves, became a lively little bouquet. She added three of the flowers with my stems. They sprang to life too, although I could tell that the weight of the stems was dragging them down.

Floss waved her hands over the pot and the new green smell of spring filled the room. Even Tonio and Max looked our way. Then Floss leaned in close to the flowers and whispered. They nodded their little flower heads, just once, so fast that I almost doubted what I'd seen.

“Now,” Floss said, “I put them on the back porch, near the steps. Then a flyer picks up the message, delivers it, and brings the answer back.”

“How do you know when the answer's here?” I was amazed by all of this. Fey air mail. “Does someone
show up at the door or what?”

Floss raised her eyes to the ceiling and sighed. “No, Persia. The flowers die. The answer's in the petals.” And she waved her hands over the flowers again. The life washed out of the vibrant petals, and a few small pieces of paper fell to the table, touching the wood with a whisper of sound. I looked at them, looked hard, but there were no words, no symbols that I could see, nothing at all.

I pointed. “Is that it? The answer?”

Floss sighed again. “Were these by the back door?” She raised both eyebrows before she added, “Think before you speak.”

Oh.

“A demonstration, right?”

Floss nodded.

“How did you…” I touched one paper petal and heard it rasp against my finger.

Floss shrugged, waved the flowers back to life, said, “Magic,” and went back to rolling the last few stems.

Lucia came in just as the flowers sprang to life for
the second time. She carried a teapot the size of a small porcupine, which she set carefully in the middle of the table. She sniffed the green spring in the air and watched the flowers nod in a breeze I couldn't feel, then said, “You're sending a message. What does it say?”

Floss looked straight up at Lucia and said, “What we need for Tonio. Help.”

 

The flowers were dead before dusk. Lucia found them when she took the tea leaves out to the compost bucket. She called Floss, her voice pitched high with something that was either excitement or nerves.

I followed Floss out to the tiny porch above the back stairs. Paper petals were scattered across the scarred peeling wood like rune stones. Floss scanned the porch from right to left, from left to right, then trudged inside, head down.

Trudged. Floss didn't trudge, she always moved with the grace of a trained ballet dancer.

I swallowed and licked my lips. “Lucia?”

When she turned to look at me she moved as if
her eyes were being pulled away from those petals by a slow puppet string. When I saw those eyes my stomach dipped.

“It's bad, isn't it?” I asked.

Lucia took a long breath. “I don't read flowers very well,” she hedged, but when a tear dribbled down her cheek I didn't really believe her.

“Floss didn't look too happy,” I pointed out, “so it must not be good.”

She stared at me and said, “Well.” The word seemed to be dragged out of her throat. It was followed, with equal slowness, by “I think it says they won't help.”

As if further explanation was needed, she kept talking in that same sad little voice. “She's always been the odd one. In her family most of them practically glow with fey righteousness. In Faerie, that righteousness is intense. There's not a lot of room for those who don't follow the prescribed line. It all makes Floss stand out. Her younger brother's the only one who's like her, and he hides it much better.” Lucia stopped for a second and smiled a wistful, secret little
smile; then she continued. “And she spends all this time here with us. She doesn't go home much at all. And if she does, she doesn't see them. So I think—I guess they don't see much point in helping her now.”

I absorbed this Floss information. It was nothing like what I'd expected to hear. Not the part about no help. I'd pretty much gotten that already. But the family part. That was what I hadn't understood before when Floss said her family was hard to deal with. I understood it now. It sounded like I'd left home for almost the same reasons that Floss didn't go home. For my part, I couldn't stomach the conservative, holier-than-thou attitudes that were supposed to be my life guidelines, especially when they came from my drugged-out, fey-phobic parents. I wondered just what ideas Floss and her parents differed on, but I didn't bother to ask. I didn't think I'd get an answer. It seemed, though, that Floss and I had a lot more in common than I'd ever thought. Neither of us did what we were supposed to do, and neither of us, apparently, were big on family bonding.

Still, Floss and Faerie had been our golden door,
our last-ditch escape route, at least in my mind. If things were as bad as Lucia said, I was afraid that we were in big trouble.

I made a sharp right turn and marched back inside. I passed Nicholas, who was putting more water on to boil. He looked at me, looked behind me at Lucia, set the kettle in the sink with barely a sound, and followed us without saying one word.

Our little parade stepped in time past Tonio and Max, who were still huddled. It seemed like they'd been that way talking, talking for days. Even they noticed that something was happening. They fell in behind Nicholas, which meant that all the Outlaws were together when I went up to Floss. She was sitting in her workroom, hands oddly still, and she seemed to look deep into an emptiness I couldn't see. I hated to disturb that contemplation, but we needed to know what we had for options. That date on Tonio's subpoena was getting closer hour by hour.

“Lucia says it's bad news,” I blurted. “She says they won't help.”

Floss focused on me, then her eyes widened as she
saw everyone behind me, but all she said was, “My, word travels so quickly here.” Her tone was very mild.

I know I slumped. I'd really wanted Lucia to be wrong. I'd really wanted to know we had some excellent, last-minute place we could go to if it came to that. In fact, I'd counted on it all along. Whenever something seemed to be getting worse I'd think, well, we can always run to Faerie. Lucia did it when she needed a place to hide. We could do it too. Except now it looked like we couldn't. Or if we did, it might not be much better than here, at least for Floss. Same problem, different players, sort of.

Floss let her eyes scan each of us; then she said, “My family members aren't the only inhabitants of Faerie, you know.”

“It's true,” Lucia said. “But you do have to know that some of the other ones can be scary.” As an afterthought she added, “At least sometimes.”

I remembered Lucia and Floss's earlier conversation about the troll. I started to ask about him again, but I saw Floss's lips curve into an almost smile, so I waited. “As you say,” she said to Lucia. “But, as you've
also said, just some of them and even those aren't always frightening. Some of the scary things you're remembering are probably mind leftovers from when you first crossed over. You were alone then. Everything's scarier when you're alone.”

In an even voice Lucia said, “That's true. And I know about the good ones too. There's El Jeffery, for sure. And Freddy.” When she said the name Freddy her voice became gentle and her eyes shone. Then she stood a little straighter and added, “But even though I think we need to keep Faerie as an option, I want them to know everything's not perfect. That's important. For decision making.”

I wanted to know who the people Lucia mentioned were. Was El Jeffery Floss's brother? Was Freddy an old friend? I wanted to know just what we'd meet in Faerie, if we ever did go. I didn't ask because Floss nodded her head and, as this was a conversation about her home, I figured whatever she said took precedence. What she said was, “Of course, and you're right. They need to be prepared if and when they do go. But remember, when you're with me now
we move quickly. We're on a mission of some type. Scouting locations. Looking for silver down. Things like that. We don't really chat much with most beings. We really don't even see many people. Scariness has different levels.”

“We should at least mention the ones I see out of the corners of my eyes sometimes,” Lucia said, sounding firm. “Those are the ones I think they need to know about the most.”

Floss shrugged. It made her look like the Floss I was used to, and it was reassuring. “If they're eye-corner creatures, of course they're scary,” Floss said. “That's their job, after all.”

I filed that bit of information away, just in case.

Floss was still talking. “But there are people I'm on good terms with. Lots of them. So don't despair. At least not about that, not yet. Just keep what Lucia said in mind. She's right in thinking that it could influence your decision.”

Tonio spoke out loud for the first time in what seemed like months. “I agree with Floss. We have so many more things we can despair about just now.”

I twisted around to see him, because if Floss sounded like Floss, Tonio sounded even more like Tonio. His eyes had a little of their spark back and he looked taller and stronger. I wondered, not for the first time, just what he and Max had been saying to each other during all those long hours of huddled discussion.

Tonio kept talking. “Let's all just despair about getting through today. And then tomorrow. Something's bound to happen soon.”

Max put his hand on Tonio's shoulder. They looked so strong, so together, that I tried to let myself relax for the first time since we'd gotten Major's message. And it worked, for right then. But it was hard to keep the tension at bay. For me the feelings just snuck up every now and then, like the little nudges a kitten makes when it rubs its head on your ankle, or nips at your fingertips. And as time wandered on I could tell by the way different people acted that our problems had to be tugging on their minds too.

So what do people do when they're in a tense, tight situation? The kind that sometimes makes breathing
hard, that wakes you up in the middle of the night and makes you rub your stomach, that peers over your shoulder and occasionally bumps into you just so you don't forget it's there?

Here's what the Outlaws did. We performed, adhering to that old adage, “The show must go on.” And we performed to large crowds. The street talk didn't seem to keep anyone away. In fact, it almost seemed to play in our favor. Kind of like saying, “We know some of the weeds in the abandoned lots are drugs. Make sure you report it if you find it.” Which of course makes everyone start looking in every abandoned lot they can find and makes no one start reporting a thing. So sure, some people came looking for drugs, but even if they did, when they didn't find any they still stayed. And the rest? They came to see a great show, which is exactly what they got. The power of the Outlaws!

We played to sold-out houses, and we played well. As Tonio's court date came closer we played with a kind of desperation. It was almost as if we believed that good shows would keep the demons, and the law,
away from us. And it worked, sort of. Floss swore she didn't see even one demon of any kind, and no police ever showed up to challenge an audience.

There was one afternoon when Floss stopped in the middle of painting eye makeup on a flying fish and simply stood in place, brush in hand. I was walking past, arms filled with that night's programs, and noticed the lack of normal Floss frenzy. I never knew if Floss was simply hyper or if being fey gave her extra energy, but she was always doing
something
. It was as if her fingers and her brain had to be active for her to be happy. I said, “Something wrong?”

Floss shook her head like a wet dog. Then she focused on me. “Persia,” she said.

“Right. Many points scored.” I watched her, waiting.