Valiant (7 page)

Fear closed up Val’s throat and held her in place. She watched the milky blood run down the sword and felt her hands start to shake again.

“There is only one human who knows this place. So what did Luis tell you?” The troll took another step toward them, his voice soft and furious. “Did he dare you to go inside? Did he say there was a
monster
?”

Val looked at Lolli, but she was stunned and silent.

The troll ran the point of his tongue over an incisor. “But what did Luis intend, that’s the real question. To give you a good scare? To give
me
a good scare? A good
meal
? It is entirely possible Luis might think I would want to eat you.” He paused, as if waiting for one of them to deny it. “Do you think I want to eat you?”

Val raised the blade of the sword.

“
Really
? You don’t say?” But then his voice deepened to a bellow. “Of course, perhaps you are merely a pair of unlucky
thieves.
”

Val’s instincts took over. She ran toward the exit, toward the troll. As he reached for her, she ducked, passing under his arm and hitting the strips of plastic. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard Lolli scream.

Standing there, trains rattling on the bridge overhead, still holding the glass sword, she hesitated.
She
was the reason Lolli was inside this place. It was Val’s own dumb idea to try to prove to herself that faeries were real. She should have gone back when she saw the tree. She shouldn’t have come here at all. Taking a deep breath, she ran back up the stairs.

Lolli was sprawled out on the ground, tears running down her face, her body gone weirdly lax. The troll held her by the wrist and seemed to be in the middle of demanding something from her.

“Let her go,” Val said. Her voice sounded like someone else’s. Someone brave.

“I think not.” Leaning down, he ripped Lolli’s messenger bag off her shoulder and tipped it upside down. Several coins bounced on the wood floor, rolling next to bottles filled with black sand, needles, a rusted knife, sticks of gum, cigarette butts, and a compact that cracked as it hit the wood, spilling powder across the floor. He reached down for one of the bottles, long fingers nearly touching the neck. “Why would you want—”

“We don’t have anything else of yours.” Val stepped forward and raised the blade. “Please.”

“Really?” He snorted. “Then what have you got in your hands?”

Val looked at the sword, gleaming like an icicle under the fluorescent lights, and was surprised. She’d forgotten that it was his. Turning the point toward the floor, she considered dropping it, but was afraid to be wholly unarmed. “Take it. Take it and we’ll go.”

“You are in no position to command me,” said the troll. “Put down the sword. Carefully. It is a thing more precious than you.”

Val hesitated, bending as if she was going to set down the glass blade. Not placing it on the ground, she still watched him.

He twisted Lolli’s finger abruptly and she shrieked. “May it pain her each time she itches to reach for a thing that isn’t hers.” He grasped a second finger. “And may it pain you to think you’re the cause of her pain.”

“Stop!” Val shouted, dropping the sword onto the wood planks of the floor. “I’ll stay if you let her go.”

“What?” His eyes narrowed, then one black eyebrow rose. “Aren’t you the gallant?”

“She’s my friend,” Val said.

He paused and his face went curiously blank. “Your friend?” he repeated tonelessly. “Very well. You will pay for her foolishness as well as your own. That is the burden of friendship.”

Val must have looked relieved, because a small, cruel smile crept onto his face. “How much time is she worth? A month of service? A year?” Lolli’s eyes sparkled with tears.

Val nodded. Sure. Anything. Whatever. Just let them leave and then it wouldn’t matter what she’d promised.

He sighed. “You will serve me for a month, one week for each item stolen.” Pausing for a moment, he added, “In whatever way that I need.”

She flinched and he smiled.

“Each dusk you will go to Seward Park. There, you will find a note under the wolf’s paw. If you do not do what it says, things will go hard with you. Do you understand?”

Val nodded. He dropped Lolli’s hand. She scrambled to shove her things back into her bag.

The troll pointed with one long finger. “Go over to that table. On it, there is a tincture, marked ‘Straw.’ Bring it to me.”

Val fumbled with the jars, reading the looping handwriting: toadflax, knotweed, rue, bloodroot, mugwort. She held up a solution, its contents thick and cloudy.

He nodded. “Yes, that. Bring it here.”

She did so, walking close to him, close enough to notice that the cloth of his coat was wool, tattered and full of moth holes. Small, curved horns grew through the top of each ear, making the tips seem like they were hardening to bone.

He took the jar, opened it, and scooped up some of the contents. She flinched away from him; the solution smelled like rotten leaves.

“Stay,” he said, as though she were a dog brought to heel.

Angry at her own terror but hopeless against it, she remained motionless. He ran the pads of his fingers over her mouth, slicking them with the stuff. She had braced herself for his skin to feel oily or horrible, but it was merely warm.

Then, when he looked into her face, his gaze was so intent that she shuddered. “Repeat the conditions of your promise.”

She did.

People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails spattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was supposed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.

Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—

Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before—

On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”

Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”

—E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE
, “T
HE
R
AVEN
”

The city lights were bright and the streets were clogged with smokers standing outside of bars and restaurants when Val and Lolli staggered out of the bridge and onto the street.

A man sleeping on broken-down cardboard rolled over and wrapped an overcoat tighter around himself. Val started violently at the movement, her muscles clenching so fast that her shoulders hurt. Lolli cradled her messenger bag as if it were a stuffed animal, wrapping her arms around it and herself.

It was strange how when crazy things happened, it was hard to follow the tracery of reasons and impulses and thoughts that got you to the crazy place. Even though Val had wanted to find evidence of faeries, the actual proof was overwhelming. How many faeries were there and what other things might there be? In a world where faeries were real, might there be demons or vampires or sea monsters? How could these things exist and it not be on the front cover of every newspaper everywhere?

Val remembered her father reading
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
when she was a little kid.
Trip trap, trip trap went the littlest Billy Goat Gruff.
This troll was nothing like the illustration in the book—were any of them?
Who’s that tripping over my bridge?

“Look at my finger,” Lolli said, holding it in the loose cradle of her other hand. It was puffy and bent at an odd angle from the joint. “He broke my fucking finger.”

“It might be dislocated. I’ve done that before.” Val remembered falling on her own hands on the lacrosse field, slipping out of a tree, trips to the doctor with his iodine and cigar-smoke smell. “You have to align it and splint it.”

“Hey,” Lolli said sharply. “I never asked for you to be my knight in shining armor. I can take care of myself. You didn’t have to promise anything to that monster and you don’t have to play doctor now.”

“You’re right.” Val kicked a crushed aluminum can, watching it bounce across the street like a stone might skim over water. “You don’t need any help. You have everything under control.”

Lolli looked intently into the window of an electronics store where televisions showed their faces. “I didn’t say that.”

Val bit her lip, tasting the remains of the troll’s solution. She remembered his golden eyes and the rich, hot rage in his voice. “I’m sorry. I should have just believed you.”

“Yeah, you should have,” Lolli said, but she smiled.

“Look, we can get a stick or something for the splint. Tie it off with a shoelace.” Val squatted down and started unlacing her sneaker.

“I have a better idea,” Lolli said, turning toward the mouth of an alley. “How about I forget about the pain?” She sat down against the filthy bricks and pulled out her soup spoon, needle, lighter, and a glassine bag of whatever-it-was from her pack. “Give me the shoelace anyway.”

Val thought of the moving shadows, remembered the amber sand, and had no idea what might happen next. “What is that?”

“Nevermore,” Lolli said. “That’s what Luis calls it, because there’re three rules: Never more than once a day, never more than a pinch at a time, and never more than two days in a row.”

“Who made those up?”

“Dave and Luis, I think. After they were living on the street, Luis started couriering for more faeries—I guess they have errands they need someone to run—and Dave took over some of the deliveries. One time he took a little bit of the Never, stirred it into some water like they do, and drank it up. It gives the faeries more glamour or something, to keep the iron from affecting them so much, but it gets us high. Drinking it was okay for a while, but it’s so much better when you shoot it in your arm or freebase it like Dave does.” Lolli spat into the spoon and lit the lighter. The solution sparkled as though it had just come alive.

“Glamour?”

“The way they make themselves look different, or other things seem different. Magic, I guess.”

“What’s it like?”

“Never? Like the ocean breaking over your head and sweeping you out to sea,” Lolli said. “Nothing else can touch you. Nothing else matters.”

Lolli drew up the stuff with the needle. Val wondered if she could ever feel that nothing touched her. It sounded like oblivion. It sounded like peace.

“No,” Val said, and Lolli stopped.

Val smiled. “Do me first.”

“Really?” Lolli grinned. “You want to?”

Val nodded, unbending her arm and holding it out.

Lolli tied off Val’s arm, tapped out the bubbles from the syringe, and slid the needle in as neatly as if Val’s skin had been built to sheathe it. The pain was so slight, it was less than the nick of a razor.

“You know,” Lolli said, “the thing about drugs is that they make things kind of shift, go leftward and sideways and upside down, but with Never, you can take everyone else upside down with you. What else can do that?”

Val had never thought too much about the inside of her elbow, but now it felt as vulnerable as her wrist, as her throat. She rubbed the bruise left when the needle was gone. There was barely any blood. “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

Lolli nodded, as though pleased with that answer. As she was cooking up another batch of Never, Val found herself distracted by the sound of the fire, the feel of her own veins squirming like a nest of snakes under her skin.

“I—,” Val started, but euphoria melted her bones. The world turned to honey, thick and slow and sweet. She couldn’t think of what she wanted to say, and for a moment she imagined losing her words forever. What if she could never think of what it was she wanted to say?

“Your veins are drinking down the magic,” Lolli said, her voice coming from a great distance. “Now you can make anything happen.”

Fire flooded Val, washing away the cold, banishing all the small agonies—the blister on her toe, the ache of her stomach, the too-tight muscles across her shoulders. Her fear melted away, replaced with
power.
Power that throbbed inside of her, giddy and eager, opening her up like a puzzle box to find all of her secret hurt and anger and confusion. Power that whispered to her in tongues of fury, with promises of triumph.

“See? It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Lolli said. She took hold of her finger and twisted. It made a snapping sound, like the crack of a knuckle, and popped back into place.

Everything looked too clear, too bright. Val found herself getting lost in the patterns of grime on the sidewalk, the promise of candy-colored neon signs, the scent of distant pipe smoke, of exhaust pipes, of frying oil. Everything was strange and beautiful and swollen with possibilities.

Lolli grinned like a jackal. “I want to show you something.”

The fire was eating away at the inside of her arms, painful, but deliciously so, like being flooded with light. She felt volatile and unstoppable.

“Is this how it always is?” Val asked, even though some distant part of her mind told her that it was impossible for Lolli to know what Val was feeling.

“Yes,” Lolli said. “Oh, yes.”

Lolli led them down the street, approaching an Asian man with close-cropped graying hair walking in the opposite direction. At first he backed up when they got close, but then something seemed to relax him.

“I’d like some money,” Lolli said.

He smiled and reached into the pocket of his coat, pulling out a wallet. He took out several twenties. “Is this enough?” he asked. His voice sounded strange, soft, and dazzled.

She leaned in to kiss his cheek. “Thank you.”

Val felt the wind whip off the Hudson, but the scorching cold couldn’t touch her now. The fiercest gust seemed like a caress. “How did you make him do that?” she asked, but it was all wonder and no apprehension.

“He wanted to,” Lolli said. “They all want us to have whatever we want.”

As they walked, each person they passed gave them what they asked for. A woman in a sequined skirt gave them her last cigarette, a young guy in a baseball cap handed over his coat without a word, a woman in a bronze trench pulled a pair of glittering gold hoops right from her ears.

Lolli reached into a trash can and lifted out banana peels, wet paper, slimy bread, and cups filled with sludgy water. “Watch this,” she said.

In her hands, the detritus turned into cupcakes so white and fine that Val reached out her hand for one.

“No,” Lolli said. “For them.” She handed one to an old man as he passed and he gobbled it like an animal, reaching for another and another as though they were the best food in the world.

Val laughed, partially at his delight, partially at their power over him. She picked up a stone and turned it into a cracker. He ate that too, licking Val’s hands for any last trace of it. His tongue tickled and that only made her laugh harder.

They walked a few more blocks; Val couldn’t be sure how many. She kept noticing fascinating things she hadn’t seen before: the sheen on a roach’s wings as it scuttled over a grate, the smirk of a carved face over a lintel, the broken stems of flowers outside of a bodega.

“Here we are,” Lolli said, pointing to a dark store. In the window, mannequins posed in pencil skirts printed with scenes from comic books, or lounged on modern, red settees, holding up polka-dotted martini glasses. “I want to go in.”

Val walked up to the window and kicked the glass. It spiderwebbed but didn’t cave. The alarm squawked twice and went silent.

“Try this,” Lolli instructed, picking up a plastic straw. In her hand, it changed into a crowbar, heavy and cold.

Val smiled with delight and hit the window with all the built-up aggression of hating Tom and her mother and herself, all the anger at the troll in the tower, and the fury at the entire universe. She beat the glass in until it folded like bent metal.

“Nice.” Lolli grinned and crawled through the window. As soon as Val was inside, the glass was back, uncracked, better than new.

Inside the store, lights came on and canned music started to play.

Each new glamour seemed to feed the power inside of Val instead of depleting it. With each enchantment, she felt giddier, wilder. Val wasn’t even quite sure which one of them was doing what anymore.

Lolli kicked off her shoes in the middle of the store and tried on a dress of green satin. Val could see her bare feet were red with blisters. “Is this cute?”

“Sure.” Val picked out a new pair of underwear and some jeans, tossing her old clothes onto the outstretched arm of a mannequin. “Look at this crap, Lolli. These are a-hundred-and-eighty-dollar jeans and they don’t look like anything. They’re just jeans.”

“They’re free,” said Lolli.

Val found clothes and then sat down in one of the cartoonish armchairs to watch Lolli try on more things. As she danced around with a beaded shawl on her head, Val noticed the display next to the chair.

“See this?” Val said, holding up an avocado-colored wineglass. “How ugly is this? I mean, who would pay for something this ugly?”

Lolli grinned and reached for a hat with pink feather fringe. “People buy what they’re told to buy. They don’t know it’s ugly, or maybe they do and they think there’s something wrong with thinking that.”

“Then they need to be protected from themselves,” Val said, and hurled the glass at the linoleum tile. It shattered, glass shards spinning out in every direction. “Anyone can see these things are ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly.”

Lolli started to laugh and she kept on laughing as Val broke every last one.

Walking back to Worth Street station with Lolli, Val felt disoriented, unsure of what had actually happened. As the Never ebbed from her, she felt more and more faded, as though the fire of the enchantment had eaten away some tangible part of her, had harrowed her.

She remembered a store and people that ate food out of her hands, and walking, but she couldn’t quite be sure where she’d gotten what she was wearing. She remembered a blur of faces and gifts and smiles, as hazy as the memory of a monster in a tower before all that.

When she looked down at herself, she saw clothes she couldn’t remember picking out—big black ass-kicking boots that were definitely warmer than her sneakers, a T-shirt printed with a heraldic lion, black cargo pants with tons of zippered pockets and a black coat that was much too big for her. It unnerved her to think that her own clothes were just gone, left behind somewhere. The boots pinched her feet as she walked, but she was glad of the coat. It seemed like they’d walked far into SoHo and, without the magic in her body, she felt colder than ever.

As they slipped through the service entrance and down the stairs, Val saw several people in the tunnel. The changing flicker of the candles lit up one of their cheekbones, the curve of a jaw, the paper bag–covered bottle one was lifting to his mouth. The girl with the swollen belly was there, wrapped up in a blanket with another body.

“There you are,” Sketchy Dave said. His voice sounded slurred and when the candlelight caught him, she could see that his mouth had the slack look of the very drunk. “Come sit with me, Lolli,” he said. “Come sit over here.”

“No,” she said, picking her way over to Luis instead. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” he said, and now his voice was miserable. “Don’t you know I love you, baby? I would do anything for you. Look.” He held up his arm. “Lolli” was carved into the skin in sluggishly bleeding letters. “Look what I did.”