Where Marcus met him, bike in tow. “Zeke asked me no questions; I told him no lies.”
First break Kevin had gotten all day. He embraced it with gusto and gratitude. “Good for me.”
“For both of us,” Marcus said. “I don’t want my ass beat either.” He reached up with a high-five.
Kevin obliged and watched him disappear into the club again before he even tried his balance on the bike. Shaky going at first, but he caught the rhythm.
He thought maybe he would go home after all, seeing as it was almost 2:00 AM and it’d take him a while to pedal the five miles to the house, and he had no idea how long it would take for Simone to exit the club and make it back to her bus. Which, he remembered from last night, had up and vanished into thin air some time before 3:30. He could try again tomorrow night.
Nice set of excuses for not taking advantage of already being down here, of having a bead on exactly where Simone was, knowing that his father had maybe a week, and how badly his own life was screwed besides. He groaned out loud.
Who was he kidding?
He was flat-out fascinated by Simone and flat-out terrified of her at the same time. That was why he wanted to head home. He could come back tomorrow with Rude. Strength and safety in numbers, and all that. Hell. Kevin couldn’t be sure there was such a thing as safe anymore.
Also, it was fucking two in the morning and Rude hadn’t called him. He’d had his cell turned off in the club but he hadn’t heard the thing ring since. He checked it again to be sure. No missed calls. One message from Amy wanted to talk about the party. The one she’d told him about this morning. God, this morning felt like a thousand years ago.
If Rude said he’d do something, he did it. The fact that he hadn’t churned Kevin’s gut through a queasy, forward roll.
He sent a text.
Two seconds later, he had incoming—straight out of Rude’s mind. Blood. So much blood.
He froze.
And saw a person-shaped shadow in front of him too late to stop. He swerved to avoid hitting them and overbalanced the bike. Vaulted the handlebars. Skidded on the heels of his hands across a patch of gravel into the overgrown grass in the ditch on the side of the road.
The person he’d almost hit came running. Kevin balled up his fist in case this was some kind of shakedown. In case he needed to throw a right hook.
“Hit me if you think it’ll make you feel better,” Simone said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HER VOICE BROUGHT BACK every emotion, every bodily sensation he’d felt in the club. In a split second, his equilibrium was completely destroyed. “Don’t talk to me. Please.”
“Isn’t that what you came here to do?” She bent over him and grabbed hold of his hands.
He let her help him up. Her touch shook him. He pulled himself free as soon as he could without losing his footing. It was damned rude, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“How bad are you hurt?” she asked.
He took inventory: Skinned hands, bleeding and slimed with the crushed grass. Jeans, sliced at his knees, which were also scraped up. Helmet-less head, intact and miraculously not concussed. No broken bones, nothing sprained. He’d been very lucky.
His hand strayed to his pocket. The rock charm? Still there. And in pieces.
He rested his head in his hands. This was no good. No good at all. His legs started to go to jelly like they had in the club, the shock coming back at him.
He needed to sit down again. Fast.
“Kevin?”
He gazed at Simone. She narrowed her eyes and peered through him. “We need to get you back to the bus. You’re worse off than you look.”
“It’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a whole can of Bactine.”
Simone took him by the arm, and this time it didn’t pain him. Not much anyway. Whatever mojo she worked on him earlier, she’d dialed it down.
“I’m really sorry about this, Kevin,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d be back so soon. Or that you’d come looking for me the way you did. You shouldn’t have been in there watching me sing.”
“It was a lot more than watching,” he said, accidentally in his out-loud voice.
“It always is,” she said matter-of-factly.
It was harder for him to feel embarrassed when she wasn’t. “Oscar said the Faery King took you because you can do that with your voice.”
“Oscar talks out of his ass a lot, but this time he’s right.” She wrapped her arm around his waist to support him and started walking.
“Wait.” He glanced over his shoulder. “My bike—”
“Has gone on ahead.”
True. The place where he’d ditched? Just concrete and the shreds of himself he’d left on it.
“It’ll take forever to get to the bus if we walk like this,” he said.
“We’re not going to.” She picked up the pace faster than he could keep up. His feet came off the ground. “We’re going my way. Hold on tight.”
He did.
They fell just like he and Rude had last night, forever and ever. The street rushed at him. He shut his eyes, expecting the bone-crunching jar of striking the ground again. It never came.
All the breath evacuated his lungs. He tasted road dirt and packed earth and wriggler worms and beetles and rainwater. His lungs began to burn. Pressure built inside—and outside—him. Squashing him.
He opened his mouth. No sound came out. No air streamed in. He screamed. It filled his head to bursting even if no one else could hear it.
Just as suddenly as the pressure had grown, it relaxed. He tasted diesel fuel and metal and grime-crusted rubber. And fresh air. He gulped it in. Opened his eyes to meet Simone’s gaze.
She pried his arms from around her and forced him to sit on the torn vinyl seat behind him, one without a painting but stuffed with blankets. Then she ducked into the back of the bus and rummaged through a lot of paper, judging by the sound. He couldn’t see; the candlelight only illuminated so much.
“How, Simone? Did we just go—”
“Underground? Yep.”
He leaned back into the blankets. They smelled of fabric softener and patchouli and paint.
Simone found what she’d been looking for. Or at least the clatter at the back of the bus ceased. She reappeared, the light dancing on her skin, holding a bottle of something green. “Don’t fall asleep here, Kevin.”
“Don’t worry.” That was the last thing he wanted. Because time? Of the essence. Plus, he didn’t think he could survive staying with her, not after everything that had happened tonight. And he ached. Every muscle. Every molecule.
“You’d be surprised how easy it is to drift off,” she said. “And you need rest more than anything right now. Healing sleep.”
He shook his head. “What I need right now is to find out what’s up with Rude. I heard him think.”
Simone cocked her head. “He’s fine.”
“But I heard him.”
“Danger’s passed,” she said. “You’ll see.”
Relief flooded him. “Great. Then maybe you can tell me how to help my dad—that’s why I came here in the first place. Then you can get me home before he wakes up. The charm I had for insurance on that last one is toast because I spilled on the bike, so any help you’re willing to give me in that area would be real welcome.”
“Ambitious sonofabitch, aren’t you?” She handed him the bottle. “Drink this first.”
Now that he could see it better, the bottle had a top like a mason jar, the kind his mom used to use for canning jam this time of year. The liquid inside looked viscous. And vile. “What for?”
“It’ll heal you up,” she said. “It’s non-negotiable.”
Another bargain. If he gave her what she wanted, she’d give him what he’d come for. “If you poison me, Simone, my ghost will haunt you.”
“If I poison you, your body will die and you’ll pass from this world without a care. It’d be a relief, not having to carry around the weight you
’ve been hefting these last few days.”
She had a point. Not one he liked, but still. “Smart-ass.”
“In over your head,” she said.
He winced.
“Did I hit the mark?” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. She didn’t bend enough to show him gratuitous cleavage, and that was probably for the best.
He waved off. He didn’t want to spar with her. He wanted his information and her help in the exact order he needed it. “Sincerely, Simone. Oscar said my dad came to see you. He said you would know what happened to him. And if my mom…if she actually died or if she was taken.”
Her gaze softened. “Your mother’s gone, Kevin. She died in the accident, and the Faery King didn’t take her spirit.”
He swallowed hard. Hearing her say that hurt more than he’d expected—but he’d known the answer before she uttered it. He knew when it happened that it was final. It was only his father who’d never accepted it.
Oscar thought he’d helped by sending him to Simone. He’d given him hope. What was worse than false hope?
“Where did it go?” he asked. “Her spirit, I mean.”
“On to wherever it was scheduled to go.”
He blinked at her.
“We don’t all go to the same place, you know.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said.
Simone sighed. “The important part is that she felt very little pain when she passed over, and that she’s golden now, wherever she is.”
And all this time Kevin had thought the important part was she was dead. “So what did you tell my dad?”
“Same thing I just said to you. He didn’t buy it. He wanted more proof than my word. He stole something from me.”
His father, a thief? “What did he steal?”
“A bottle of potion not unlike the one you haven’t bothered to drink yet,” she said.
“Fine.” He unlatched the lid and sniffed. The concoction smelled like mint. Mint, he could handle. “Down the hatch.”
The smell couldn’t disguise the flavor. He’d always imagined mud would taste like that. Mud that’d been polluted with antifreeze and blended with copper wire.
He’d have spat it out, but Simone tipped the bottle so the whole slurry poured into his mouth. He swallowed out of self-preservation and he still choked.
Simone pounded him on the back and snatched the bottle back before he could throw it at her.
“You really did poison me,” he said.
“Medicine always tastes bad, Kevin.” She settled across from him again. “You’ll be good as new in about twenty minutes.”
“Comforting,” he said, with a heaping dose of snark. But how could it be bad not having to explain to his dad how he got so scraped up?
“Where were we?” She blew the hair out of her eyes. “Oh, yeah. He took a bottle of Edgewalker Brew, the stuff you use to walk between the human world and the Faery realm. That shit has a very specific time limit. He’d have known that if he’d asked me for it instead of bogarting it. I’d have given it to him, and I’d have told him to be in one place or the other when the juice ran out.”
It was his father’s own fault he’d ended up broken. He’d blown off the rules and got caught. The same thing he’d given Kevin hell for.
Only Kevin was just grounded. His dad would die.
“He took a potion?” Kevin asked. Something about liquid draughts, from every movie he’d ever seen involving poison, nagged him.
“Yes, again. He did.”
The memory clicked into place. “Is there an antidote?”
“Sure, Kevin. A tear from the Faery King. He has to give a crap, and he has to grieve. He hasn’t done that in a thousand years.”
“You’re kidding.” That couldn’t possibly be the answer.
“I wish I were.” She laid a hand on his arm, like a friend would do. The gesture held no unasked for energy, no mojo.
“I have to make the Faery King cry, or else.”
“And it can’t be because you kicked his ass and his bruises hurt. It has to be emotional.”
He didn’t have the first clue how to make that happen. “Do you know how?”
“Mostly I piss him off. It’s not the same.” She grinned wryly. “Fighting against my destiny, even unsuccessfully. Associating with humans. The list of annoyances goes on. Luckily he doesn’t come here. It’s my place. Off limits to His Excellency.”
“But my dad—”
“All night, you’ve talked about your dad. You keep making this whole thing out to be about your father.”
“It is,” he said.
“What else did Oscar say today? I know he told you something more—about Tweedledee and Tweedledum?”
It took him a second to catch up. “The cops.”
How under orders they’d ruined his life and would keep at it until no one would miss him much after he’d been kidnapped by the Faery King. Yeah, there was that.
“Oscar does say a lot of things,” Simone said. “He’s right about this one, too, sorry to report.”
“He told me to hide on Halloween.”
Simone nodded. “If you can.”
“Fuck that noise.”
“Exactly,” she said. “But you might not be able to hide anyway. You might have to go out. It might even be your last chance. To save your dad. To save yourself.”
“Oscar said the King and the Hunt would take me.”
“They might have to, Kevin. Any case, you can’t stop them if they want to. The King can hear thoughts, and not just when there’s life and death at stake. He can read minds. He’s the only one of us who can. The most powerful of all of us.”
A seed of despair sprouted in his gut.
“No one has ever been able to stop him,” she said. “He lets people go when he decides, or if they pass a test, but that’s it.”
A test? “What do I do now?”
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself, Kevin.”
But she was supposed to help him. She was the key, Oscar said.
She rose. “We’ll think of something, but right now it’s a couple of hours before dawn, and this bus is gonna go poof in a few minutes. I don’t want you on it when that happens, you dig?”
He dug.
“Your bike’s outside. Take it with you, but don’t ride it home. It’ll take too long, and there’s a monster accident gonna happen on your route that you’re in danger of joining.”
“How do you know that?”
She tapped her forehead. “Where do you think seers like Oscar get their power? From the Faeries. Faery is the land of ever-becoming, not the land of already-happened. That means we see the things that are about to go down in the human world before they take shape.”
“Oh,” he said, not a hundred percent sure he got that. But it sounded like she could tell the future, like Oscar. What did she know that made her say those things to him about his last chance?
He wanted to ask her, but she marched him off the bus double-time. He saw his bike leaning against the side of the vehicle, not a scratch on it. Like he’d never wrecked it.
If he shouldn’t ride, how would he get home?
“Simone?” He turned back just as the door squealed shut.
In that instant, the edges of the bus began to fade. He grabbed hold of his bike and hauled it away in the last second before the bus disappeared into Faery without leaving so much as a tire print in the street dust.
Nothing like standing alone in an alley, abandoned and heartsore. At least the cuts on his hands had started to knit. The poison potion had some kick.
He pulled out his phone. He’d call a cab if he had enough money, but he’d blown most of his wad on the cover charge and the T-shirt at Phantom. That left only one person he could count on at this hour of the morning not to freak out or hang up on him: Rude. Who still hadn’t called him.
And who turned onto the street just then, the Explorer’s headlights bouncing merrily with the road’s rises and dips.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KEVIN HAD NEVER been so glad to see anyone in his life. He persisted in that delusion until Rude pulled to a stop with a squeal of brakes and rolled down the passenger-side window.
His friend looked like shit. Dark half-moons under his eyes, bloody nose, hollowed-out cheeks.
“Get in,” Rude said, his voice hoarse.
Kevin barely managed to throw the bike in the back of the vehicle and get his ass in the shotgun seat before Rude shifted into reverse and backed up at light speed. Kevin caught hold of the door with his fingertips. He strained to close it—and made it just in time to keep it from shearing off on impact with a utility pole. Rude didn’t even blink.
“You said you were going to stay home, Kev. But you went out. I tried looking for you, but you were just gone. Disappeared. Completely off my radar.” Rude fishtailed the Ford onto the street that would take them to the freeway. He had to stop then. It was either that or drop the transmission right out of the car.
Kevin took hold of the wheel. “I’ve been busted up enough tonight already, Rude. I don’t need you taking your turn, too. So the answers are: I changed my mind. It was an accident. What are you talking about, radar? And what the hell is wrong with you?”
Rude glared at his hand. But he didn’t try to move it. And he didn’t say a word about it. Some of the fight seeped out of him. “You carry one of my charms, I have a fix on you,” he said.
Kevin would never have thought of that. He wasn’t sure he liked it. “Keeping track of me?”
“You used the charm,” Rude said. “I felt it. After that, I didn’t know what happened to you.”
Well, how about that? That made them even. “Can’t help that much right now.”
“It’s been a rough night, dude.”
“Tell me about it.”
Rude launched into a Tale of Weird. He’d showed up at the restaurant like he’d arranged with Oscar only to find it dark with no one there and blood spattered on the back stoop by the dumpster. And there’d been someone in the dumpster. A very unhappy Faery that Oscar had beat in a fight. Who took out his anger on Rude.
Kevin couldn’t help noticing that, bad as Rude seemed, he didn’t have a single bruise. Well, unless he counted the bloody nose. “You don’t have two scratches on you.”
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