Indelible

by Dawn Metcalf

  “And your dad...?”

  “Doesn’t know.”

  Monica scraped her fingers no-no. “You are being naughty, naughty, naughty. He’ll have a cow. I nearly calved! Why didn’t you text me? What is it?”

  “A rose,” Joy said. “I think.”

  “You think?”

  “It hurt a lot,” Joy confessed, warming to the lie. “And I think I had a kind of...reaction. It was sort of hard to tell.”

  “Mmm, I’ve heard that can happen,” Monica said wisely. “Did you ask to see the autoclave?”

  “What are you? A walking PSA?” Joy sat back and rubbed just over her shoulder, pain cascading down her arm in pin-table waves. She picked up her spoon.

  “Well, I’m glad it’s nothing psycho-stupid,” Monica said. “Just a little bit stupid.”

  “Right,” Joy said dryly. “So much for No Stupid.’”

  “Well, nobody’s perfect,” Monica said, taking a bite of her Granny Smith apple. “Just please tell me he’s being good to you.”

  Joy nodded and traced her ear, thinking he was the first thing she’d seen this morning and the last person watching over her at night, keeping her safe. She smiled.

  “He’s being very good to me.”

  “Then there you go,” Monica said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  * * *

  Joy hadn’t realized she’d healed until the pain was already gone. It must have happened sometime between the bus ride and home. The biting cold had kept her mind off her arm. She’d dropped her book bag and hung up her coat and suddenly realized that she could—she’d moved both arms freely out of habit. Joy stood there, feeling as if she’d misplaced something, and it took her a moment to realize that it was the pain.

  Racing to the bathroom, she yanked her hoodie over her head, leaning her arm, thick with bandages, over the sink. Even though she hadn’t turned up the thermostat, she was suddenly sweating. Joy realized she needed to eat, but she needed this more.

  Joy unwound the wide pillow of gauze in hasty circles, gathering the wadded material into a medicinal-smelling heap. The bandages gradually began to darken to yellow, then amber, then umber, then a strange-smelling mixture of brown and black. She felt a tug as the layers pulled free and she wondered just what she’d find under there, drawn on her skin. Although she’d told Monica that it was a rose, she’d had only Graus Claude’s opinion of it and, let’s face it—the guy was a toad.

  She ran warm water and soaped up her left hand, slipping it under the last layer of sticky, crackling gauze. It didn’t hurt. It felt slightly numb and bumpy, like the nerves were half-asleep and a little raw.

  Wiping away the last bubbles of soap, she stared at the perfect pink scar. Drops of lather trickled down her arm and pooled over the back of her hand.

  A briar rose. Graus Claude might be a toad, but he was a toad with good taste. And he had treated her very well. She’d remember that in the future.

  For all the horror, the brand was beautiful. A single line drew layers of sharp petals and etched one jaded leaf. Joy twisted her shoulder and traced the brand with her finger, feeling the dead skin ridge, the tightness of sunburn without the sting. She touched it tentatively and then with a growing confidence. She’d gone through something horrible and emerged with this. Through every insane, upsetting and embarrassing thing she’d been through—her mother, her father, her brother, Ink, Hasp, Briarhook, the police—all of it had built up inside her, but nothing ever showed. Nothing ever looked different despite the fact that it was different, she felt different, and all the therapist talk was about going back to being the same even though she knew she would never be the same again. How could she? Some things were permanent—indelible—and could not be changed back.

  This change was permanent; it showed inside and out.

  She buried her fingers in the soiled bandages and brought her hand to her nose. It smelled of so many things, blood and flowers and fresh cotton and mint. She wondered if she should keep it for some reason, some sort of pharmaceutical analysis. It could pay for college—or a new house—but Joy suspected that would be more than a breach of trust. It was probably some otherworldly arrestable offense. She wanted no more police, human or otherwise, in her life. She grabbed a spare plastic bag and chucked everything inside, tying it tight.

  After dumping both it and her sweatshirt in the back of her closet, Joy grabbed a sleeveless T and pulled it on, weighing how she looked with a rose brand and a Happy Bunny shirt. She looked kind of manga badass. She twisted her hair into two floppy pigtails for effect.

  There was a low, stretching sound like someone lifting a heavy wicker basket in the hall. Joy peeked around the closet mirror.

  “Dad?”

  She hadn’t heard him come in, but she didn’t feel alone. The dry, twiggy sound came again, reminding her of the kitchen window and something just beyond her sight. The hairs on her arms prickled alert.

  “Joy?”

  She whirled. Ink stood a hand’s breadth behind her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Hi,” she said, hugging her bare arms and trying to regain her dignity. She didn’t understand why she felt awkward, given what they’d been through. She gulped a few breaths and rubbed her shoulders. It was really cold in the house, she’d just noticed. “Actually, I’m fine. Really. Thanks.” She turned her shoulder inward. “It’s healing—see?”

  He pivoted toward the light. “May I?”

  Joy shrugged. “Sure.”

  Ink touched the scar. Joy felt something akin to pressure, but no sensation of his fingers there. He traced the unbroken line of the brand. When his fingertips brushed the very edge of the leaf, they slid against her warm skin. She felt that. She felt every bit of that.

  “It’s healing well,” Ink said diplomatically.

  “It is.”

  “I am sorry,” Ink said.

  She cupped the scar under her palm. “Don’t.” It hadn’t been his fault, even though she’d been angry with him at the time. Ink dropped his hand and set his thumbs on his hips. She felt oddly guilty, embarrassed for having been captured, for becoming Briarhook’s victim, for being so helpless. But she didn’t feel helpless—she was strong. She was stronger than this. The rose brand reminded her: a wildflower with bite.

  Ink’s quickmetal shirt slithered over his chest as he sighed.

  “Graus Claude was correct,” he said. “It is beautiful.”

  The way he said it sounded like So are you.

  Joy turned away and faced the mirror, a reflection of herself sans Ink.

  “You were very brave,” Ink said. “Throughout all of it and after. And now here you are, smiling.”

  “Am I smiling?” Joy said, almost in disbelief. Then she realized that she was. She was smiling at him.

  Ink placed a hand on her shoulder; she felt it all over. “Are you willing to be brave again so soon?”

  Joy turned to him, no longer smiling. “What do you mean?”

  “There have been rumors, many rumors, since last night,” he confessed. “There are those who believe that you have been killed. By Briarhook, by Hasp, by Kilties or Caps. Others claim that you went mad and took your own life. A few, sensing the blood on my hands, suspect me and cry murder.”

  He drew his blade. It slipped through nothingness as he spoke. “The eyes that are watching are now beyond count. It would be good to have you with me, if only to prove that you are well.”

  She watched the knife. He watched her eyes.

  “What they are saying...about the blood on your hands.”

  “I have never killed anyone,” he said.

  Joy swallowed. “Until now...”

  “Briarhook lives.”

  “What?” Joy said. “Really?”

  Ink grimaced.
“When I felt it, that pain—” he pressed two fingers to his chest, below the sternum “—here, I went to Briarhook and told him that I had received his message and had come to give him my reply.” His fingers hooked into a small claw. “And since I could not dig that part out of myself, I attempted to share the experience with him.” Ink poked the silk that rippled and bore as he twisted his fingertips. “I dug it out of him.”

  “Dug what out?”

  “His heart.”

  Joy felt dizzy, about to pitch backward into the dark part of her mind. She’d all but told him to do it. Did he realize what he’d done? If he didn’t know chalk dust from chocolate, did he understand mortality? Life and death? Or was he as innocent and arrogant as Inq claimed? The implications chilled her.

  “Ink,” she tried to explain, “without his heart...you’ve killed him.”

  “No,” Ink said. “I put it in a box for safekeeping.”

  “In a box?”

  “You are no longer smiling,” Ink observed.

  She shook her head, pressing her palms to her temples. “You ripped out his heart and put it in a box?”

  “If he were wise, he would have kept it hidden,” Ink said. “Now Graus Claude has it and Briarhook is beholden to me, as witnessed by the Bailiwick of the Twixt.” Ink did not hide his pride. “His heart of stone lies in a box of iron and he will have to earn it back, piece by piece.”

  Joy fumbled over the sense of it. “So...Briarhook isn’t dead?”

  “No,” Ink said. “He is mine. And he cannot harm you ever again.”

  “Oh,” she whispered. Her mind reeled with the sharp realization that the Twixt was not her world and it did not abide by human rules. “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “And now you need to come with me,” Ink said. “To show that I have not taken your heart.”

  She stopped, her veins warming, her pulse thumping.

  “What if you have?”

  Ink drew a fine line of fire in the air and spoke softly over his shoulder.

  “Well, then, fair is fair.”

  * * *

  Joy sat idly by the feet of a giant blond man who had beaten seven others in an ugly bar fight. He’d pushed himself drunkenly out a small bathroom window, landed in the glass-strewn alleyway and collapsed atop a pile of flattened cardboard boxes by a recycling bin. Now that the guy was unconscious, Ink could begin his work. Joy munched on a handful of peanuts and handed him instruments in a steady stream.

  “Seven by seven,” Ink said as he traced a small line of erupting black birds. “Reminds me of one of the old marks—the seventh son of a seventh son.” He exchanged the razor for the wand. “Not much call for that anymore.”

  “Why not?” Joy asked.

  “Birth control,” Ink answered and blew the leaf wand dry. “The whole system of signatura began with the pacts sworn between Folk and humankind, back when they were united in safeguarding the places and people who kept magic alive.” He gestured to the hulking man splayed across the alley. “But then the Folk became greedy and the humans became clever and the Council chose to shape True Names into sigils so that none of the Folk would ever again be tethered by humans against their will. Scalpel, please.”

  “Yes, doctor!” Joy quipped and passed it over.

  “You jest, but it was not I who healed you,” Ink said as he cut a new design. “I knew Graus Claude would know what to do.”

  “More like his butler, Kurt,” Joy said, placing the wand back in its compartment. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “We are acquainted.” Ink’s words fell like lead weights.

  “O-kay,” Joy said. “Well, do you know what happened to his throat? Why can’t he talk?”

  Ink’s mouth was a thin line as he worked around a shard of glass. “Kurt came to Graus Claude as a casualty of war—a victim of some plague let loose upon your world.” Joy moved one of the size-fifteen shoes. “It brought fever and sweating and swelled throats closed with growths the size of fists. Kurt’s mother knew the Old Ways, summoned the Bailiwick, and begged for his life. Graus Claude took her offer and her son and removed the glands, which saved him. He lives in service to the Bailiwick, but it is done with equal parts debt, gratitude and pride. No one knows if Kurt took a vow of silence, or if his voice was forfeit in the exchange, or whether Graus Claude’s actions consciously or accidentally made him mute. It is one mystery of many surrounding the Bailiwick’s manservant.”

  Joy widened her eyes and shook her head to clear it. “Wow,” she said.

  Ink smirked as he completed the line. “Wow, indeed.”

  “Hoy,” a voice behind them snapped like the wind. “How did he do, then?”

  A young woman stood tall and proud in the alley. Joy didn’t need Ink to tell her that she belonged to the Twixt. Her blond hair was braided and knotted together in a complicated nest at the back of her neck. Thin blue lines ran vertically from eyebrow to eyelash, and she had a blue dot centered just under her lower lip. She wore a heavy, hard corselet of worn, beaten bronze. A short cape fell behind her shoulders. A ram’s horn hung at her hip.

  “What was he supposed to be doing?” Ink asked.

  “Fighting,” she said.

  “Then, yes,” Ink allowed. “If he was meant to be fighting, he did that very well. However, if he was meant to stay upright, then I am afraid that he failed miserably.”

  Joy gaped. Had Ink made a joke?

  The blonde warrior-girl laughed right from her gut, and a delicate rattling echoed behind her.

  “Indelible, indomitable, irrepressible Ink!”

  Ink smirked as he looked up from his work. “I think you have me confused with my sister.”

  “Oh, no! I think I should know the difference. But you,” she said admiringly. “You look no worse for wear. Those blithering hags at the Halls have it all wrong, am I right?”

  “You are right,” Ink said. “As always.”

  “As always!” She smacked her breastplate. “Of course!”

  Joy smiled at the woman’s easy bluster and charm. Leather-and-steel vambraces shone on her arms, and a horse-head pendant hung at her throat. She cast her sea-blue eyes to Joy.

  “And you must be the lehman. Let’s have a look at you!”

  Joy stood up timidly. The tiny chitter of wood chimes followed the tattooed woman as she slapped Joy’s arms.

  “Good,” she said. “Strong. I can see it.” She poked Joy unceremoniously in the chin, just under her lip, like pressing a button. Joy staggered back and licked the spot. The young woman tossed her head in delight. “What’s this?” She gripped Joy’s biceps hard as she twisted the arm over, inspecting the scar. She could have easily flipped Joy heels over head.

  “Briarhook,” the young woman said. “He learned his lesson, did he?”

  “More like ‘earned his lesson,’” Ink muttered. “It was eagerly taught.”

  She laughed again. “Vicious! Just as the Bailiwick said.”

  “You have been listening,” Ink noted.

  The blonde fighter jerked her chin, unapologetic. “It’s not difficult. There is a lot being said,” she shot back. “Still, it is good to see what is true and what is not with my own eyes.” She nudged Joy. “Speaking of which, keep your eyes on this one. He is our prize stag!” She laughed uproariously as Joy blushed. Those sea-blue eyes seemed to peer straight to the back of her head. “Virgin!” she howled triumphantly. Joy could’ve died.

  “Feel free to tell the others what is true and what is not,” Ink said, “but some details are private.” He gestured to his work. “Come, I am nearly finished.”

  The woman bent over the fallen man, already bruising in his sleep. “He’s one of the Einherjar, you know,” she said. “His name is Gunner. Strong name. A good name, but they spelled it wrong.” Joy noticed
that when the blonde woman leaned over, her cape had fallen forward. It was made entirely of finger bones. When she moved, Joy heard the tiny things clatter.

  “What is your name?” she asked Joy.

  “She is unfamiliar with...” Ink started.

  “Joy,” she said, then realized maybe she shouldn’t have spoken by the way Ink looked at her. She finished, albeit quieter. “Joy Malone.”

  There was a short silence punctuated by an approaching ambulance whine.

  “Sweet natured and strong,” the tattooed woman said. “A good name! Names have power. May it serve you well.” As strange as her words were, they sounded sincere. She slapped Joy roughly on her back. “Remember, should the EverBattle come—ring a bell and call for me! I am ever-vigilant!”

  “And what’s your name?” Joy asked.

  “Filly.”

  “Filly?” Joy almost laughed. Almost. Then she remembered the bones.

  “Of course we will,” Ink added smoothly. “Good quarter to you.”

  Filly raised a fist in salute. “Victory!”

  Ink saluted with his blade. “Victory!”

  A crash of light and she was gone.

  Joy rocked back at the suddenness of Filly’s grand exit. There was a hollow patch of quiet where she’d been standing larger than life a moment ago.

  “Okay—who was that?” Joy blurted.

  “What we’ve been waiting for,” Ink said, standing up. Joy handed him his wallet, which he folded and pocketed in one smooth motion. “She is young, comparatively speaking, and more than a little brash,” Ink explained. “But she will boast the right words into the right ears. Filly was merely the first to step forward—not surprising, considering I invited her to do so—so now we have the tale telling somewhat under control.” Ink smiled proudly, dimples creasing both cheeks.

  Joy stared at him. “This was a setup?” she said. “You planned all this?”

  “Not entirely,” Ink said. “He was already drunk and loud and all too eager to impress a certain pretty, blonde woman who was egging him on to fight.”

  Joy looked uselessly over her shoulder at the open window behind them. “Filly was in there? She was at the bar?”