Valentine

by Jodi McAlister

  Crap, if he – or Helena – sees me lurking outside the door I’m going to be in trouble. I look around quickly before ducking into the fire escape. The door doesn’t quite shut all the way, and so I can still see out a bit. Perfect.

  ‘Lovely to meet you, young man,’ I hear Helena say.

  The door opens. And out walks Helena, who looks exactly the same as usual – and OMG, that is so not Cam. I would recognise that leather jacket anywhere.

  That is totally Finn.

  And here I was thinking I was the only one with any brainpower in this operation.

  I watch Cam standing there, smiling his dopey Cam smile and shaking Helena’s hand, and I am so freaking impressed. Who would have thought Finn Blacklin could be this sly? Or could approach a problem with any other attitude than I will come at you like a train? Maybe I haven’t been giving him enough credit.

  Helena goes back into her office and closes the door. ‘Psst!’ I hiss.

  ‘Hello?’ Finn says, turning, an expression of mild surprise in Cam’s eyes.

  ‘In here,’ I say. ‘It’s me, Pearl.’

  He comes into the fire escape obediently. ‘Hey,’ he says.

  ‘Good disguise, Finn,’ I say.

  He gapes and turns back into himself. ‘How did you know? Was I that obvious?’

  ‘Please, I’ve known you forever, I know your wardrobe by heart,’ I say. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘You said you thought she was one of Them, so I thought I would check it out.’

  ‘What would you have done if she was one of Them?’

  ‘Worked something out.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Can we not do this, Linford? Please?’

  I subside. ‘And?’ I ask. ‘Is she evil?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t just come out and ask, but . . . I don’t think so. I didn’t get any bad feelings from her, not really.’

  ‘Well, she can’t be the sharktooth man,’ I say, as something occurs to me.

  ‘You mean the dude from the club? The one that turned up at your window last night?’

  I nod. ‘That dude has the Sight. If Helena had the Sight, she’d have seen through your Cam disguise right away.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean she’s not evil, though,’ he says. ‘But I’m not feeling it. Really.’

  ‘But whoever it is that’s walking around being evil is obviously doing a pretty good job of it,’ I say. ‘Shouldn’t you be able to sense them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Finn says. ‘I don’t know how any of this works. Maybe they can mask their – evilness as well as their looks.’

  ‘I don’t think we should call them evil any more,’ I say. ‘It gets confusing. There’s Seelie and Unseelie. And while I’m not particularly keen on either team right now and would happily categorise either of them as evil, I think we can agree that the Unseelie are way more evil.’

  ‘Agreed,’ he says. ‘Now tell me more about this Julian thing.’

  ‘I don’t know what I can tell you that I didn’t put in my Facebook message,’ I say, but I spell it all out to him again anyway. He punctuates my monologue by swearing occasionally and at one point, when I start talking about the immortality stuff, smashing his head against the wall.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I say.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘What’s it going to do, kill me?’

  ‘You can still be killed,’ I say uncertainly.

  He doesn’t answer. He just stares into the stairwell. ‘I don’t want to live forever,’ he says hoarsely. ‘I don’t want to see everyone I love die.’

  I have no idea what to say to that. So I just keep talking.

  ‘– one thing I’m not sure about is why it was just Julian this time,’ I say eventually. ‘Normally he and Holly-Anne seem to be, like, a tag team, so I’m not sure why –’

  ‘Holly was with me,’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say uncomfortably. ‘I – um –’

  ‘Not like that, Linford,’ he says. ‘I told you it was over and I don’t lie. Ever. But I still care about her, you know? And I think I owed her a few explanations.’

  ‘You owed her explanations?’ I say. ‘She’s the one who –’

  ‘And plus, I wanted to see what I could find out from her,’ he says. ‘I figured she was way more likely to talk to me than to you.’

  ‘You didn’t, like, tell her anything, did you? About who you are?’

  ‘No, I did not say to her, “hey babe, guess what? I’m this Valentine changeling that everyone is after”,’ he says. ‘I’m not an idiot, Linford.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were, just –’ I stop myself before Finn and I can provoke ourselves into another argument. ‘With Julian, just before he left, it was like he got possessed. He basically turned into a robot. Did anything like that happen to Holly?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I was with her all night and nothing like that happened.’

  ‘All night?’

  ‘You have a dirty mind, Linford, you know that?’

  ‘Anyway, I got attacked by a bunch of cats today,’ I say in a rush, before he can work out just how true that is.

  ‘What?!’

  I fill him in on the black cat/Kel situation. He’s silent for almost a minute after I stop talking.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I ask at last, touching him on the shoulder.

  ‘Pearl, do you realise just how close you’ve come to dying?’ he asks.

  ‘I’ve tried not to,’ I reply honestly.

  He swears again under his breath. ‘I didn’t know it was – you really shouldn’t leave the house, Pearl. They’re coming – they’re getting closer – you need to stay safe –’

  ‘So there can be another Marie? Another Cardy?’

  He looks at me bleakly with his perfect green eyes. ‘If I didn’t exist, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ I say firmly. ‘You are not going down that path, Finn. That way madness lies.’

  ‘You didn’t deny it,’ he says, not looking at me.

  I roll my eyes. ‘It is not your freaking fault you exist, okay? Now stop dwelling on it. We can sit down together and have a whole big philosophise once this is all over – then we’ll discuss who’s to blame for what and the other mystical questions of the universe. But you are not doing it now. I won’t let you. Now, come on, get up. I brought my sister lunch and my brother will probably send out an APB on me if I’m not home soon. Put your Cam suit on and let’s get out of here.’

  He stares at the wall. I poke him in the shoulder. ‘Come on, up.’

  He gets up slowly. He looks at me for a second, hesitating, like he’s trying to work out what to say. Then he exhales, and the moment is gone. ‘Let’s go,’ he says, and he’s Cam.

  I desperately want to ask him what that was all about, but this doesn’t exactly seem like the time or the place. We go out into the corridor. Disey’s office door is slightly ajar so I figure that means I can go in. ‘Wait here,’ I say to Finn.

  He nods obediently. I tap lightly on the door. ‘What?’ Disey snaps.

  ‘Um . . . Dise?’

  She looks up. Her hair is a bird’s nest and her reading glasses are halfway down her nose. She has big dark circles under her eyes. ‘Pearlie? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I brought you lunch,’ I say, gesturing to the takeaway bag on her desk. ‘Though it might be cold by now.’

  Disey groans. ‘Thanks, but I have to scold you now because you know I don’t want you running around by yourself and I really don’t have the energy.’

  ‘Dise, you should come home – you look terrible,’ I say honestly.

  ‘I’m going to, I’m going to,’ she says, shuffling papers.

  ‘Have they –’ I hesitate. ‘Have they found anything yet? Cardy, I mean.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not yet, Pearlie,’ she replies. ‘But I promise I’ll tell you as soon as I hear anything.’

  ‘Thanks,
’ I say, because what else can you say to ‘yes, I will tell you when they find the heart and liver of the boy you might have loved’ than that?

  I remember last time this happened – Finn and me in the police station, in the classroom when Ms Rao told us that all that was left of Marie was a heart and a liver. I remember the feeling that the world was roaring past my ears, like I was on a train going through a really dark tunnel, everything whooshing past at an uncontrollable, unstoppable speed. I remember the guilt and the nausea and the horrible, horrible knowledge that Marie was gone forever.

  This time I just feel numb.

  I go about my normal routine when I get home. I shower and brush my teeth and put on my pyjamas. I eat and make polite conversation and chat to Shad. I stack the dishwasher. I go into my room, draw the curtains and shut the door. I sit down at my desk. I open up Facebook.

  And then suddenly, so suddenly it comes as a surprise even to myself, I put my head in my hands and weep and weep and weep.

  I have to stifle my sobs so Shad doesn’t come running, but I can’t stop myself shaking. Tears pour down my cheeks like a waterfall. I can taste the saltiness in my mouth. I’m shaking and I can’t stop, not even when I grip the edge of my desk with all my strength. I try to take a sip of tea to calm myself but I choke on it instead of swallow and I drop the cup and there’s tea all over the floor and I’m shaking shaking shaking and I pick it up but I drop it again and this time it breaks and I’ll never get this out of the carpet without Shad hearing but it’s okay because the Seelie will probably make Holly and Julian clean it up and Marie is dead and Cardy is dead and I saw the sharktooth man lick his blood off his hands and it must have hurt so much and I nearly died today and I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe.

  I gulp air furiously and try to keep quiet but I can’t help little squeaks coming out and I don’t want Shad to see me like this but oh God, I would like nothing more than to throw myself in his arms and have him hug me and hold me and stroke my hair and tell me it will be all right. And then Disey would put her arms around the both of us and say that if anything wanted to get me it’d have to go through her and I’d know that there was nothing in the world that could ever get through Disey and she would be warm and Shad would be warm and we’d all be together and we’d drink tea and eat chocolate and all fall asleep on the couch together like we used to.

  I have never lied to them before.

  But now I have to.

  I have such a wave of self-revulsion I feel like retching. I’m ugly and I’m vain and I’ve been lying to everyone I care about and Cardy and Marie are dead and I’m sure that’s somehow my fault whatever I might have told Finn and I can’t think any more and I just want this whole thing to go away and –

  The tap on my window is so gentle that I don’t even register it at first, but when it comes a second time I breathe in sharply. I wipe my tears away with my sleeve and sniff hugely. My iron pendant is on my desk and I put it round my neck.

  What are you doing, Pearl? my mind screams at me. It’s the sharktooth man! He’s messing with your mind! He’s going to get you outside and cut your heart out and you’ll die!

  My feet keep walking. My hand reaches for the curtain.

  Don’t do it! my mind shrieks at me.

  I pull the curtain open.

  It’s Finn.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he says from the other side of the glass.

  This must be one of those unfortunate dreams I have. In fact, I’ve had this one before. I’m going to open the window and let him in and he’s going to back me against the wall and I’ll unbutton his shirt and –

  ‘Come on, Linford!’

  ‘Prove it,’ I say. ‘Prove that it’s you, Finn. Tell me something only you would know.’

  ‘Um . . . okay. In Year Three, I put a lizard in your schoolbag.’

  ‘So that was you.’

  ‘Yes, it was me, and I was majorly disappointed when you didn’t scream. Can I come in now?’

  I open the window and pop the security screen out. ‘Thanks,’ he says, clambering in and closing the window behind him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask faintly, still clutching the screen.

  ‘Checking on you,’ he says, taking it from my hands and resting it against my drawers.

  ‘How did you do that to me?’ I ask.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Make me come to the window.’

  ‘It’s an advanced art called knocking.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Whatever it is you think I did to your mind, I didn’t,’ he says, holding up both his hands. ‘I just knocked. I swear. Are you alone?’

  ‘My brother’s here,’ I say. I am still not convinced that this isn’t a dream.

  ‘Why did you just pinch yourself?’

  ‘I –’ am not answering that question, Finn Blacklin, no sirree. There there be monsters. ‘What are you doing here? Someone might have followed you.’

  ‘I was careful. I masked myself.’ He turns into what looks like the guy who busks outside Woolies and back again.

  ‘But it was still dangerous. Like, really dangerous.’

  ‘I saw something,’ he says, sitting down in my desk chair. ‘When I was driving home. I wanted to make sure you were all right.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have texted me or something?’

  ‘I –’ he bites his lip. ‘It was the black horse, Pearl.’

  ‘What?’ I exclaim, aghast. ‘Where?’

  ‘The bridge over the creek, near the oval.’ He spins round and round in the chair. I want to grab him and hold him still. ‘I stopped at the stop sign – you know the one? Anyway, I caught sight of it in the trees, so I pulled over and got out to have a look.’

  ‘You did what?!’ I’m so furious with him I want to smash something. ‘Don’t you know how –’

  ‘And I followed it.’

  ‘You what?!’

  ‘It went down near the creek. I hid behind a tree. I watched it.’

  I can’t speak. I’m too busy being angry.

  ‘I must have stood there for about fifteen, twenty minutes,’ Finn says. ‘Still as I could make myself, you know – like a statue. I masked myself as invisible as I could, and watched.’

  ‘Enough with the suspense,’ I interrupt. ‘What happened?’

  ‘After a while, it went into the water.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It disappeared, Pearl! We’re not just talking up to the knees here. It went right in. No swimming, no nothing. Under the water. Gone. After a while it came back up again. But not the whole thing – just enough so its eyes and its nostrils were above the water. It looked like a crocodile or something.’

  ‘Maybe it was a crocodile,’ I say. ‘That’s what some people think took Marie and Cardy, isn’t it? A rogue croc, washed down from up north. That must have been what you saw. Horses can’t go –’

  ‘I saw it, Pearl.’

  There’s a ringing in my ears. That horse was in my backyard. I was this close to touching it. This close.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say firmly. ‘That’s useful information. Thank you, Finn.’

  He looks at me like I’ve just told him I’ve decided to join the circus. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘And . . . and I’m going to look it up,’ I say. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’

  I shoo him out of my desk chair, sit down at my computer and open Wikipedia. I have an incredible mental blank. How do you search for a horse that breathes underwater? Maybe I should have gone to Google instead. But Finn’s staring over my shoulder. I can’t renege on Wikipedia now I’ve gone there. What would that look like? Um – um – um –

  I pick the first thing that comes into my head and type ‘water horse’ into the search box.

  And something comes up. Kelpie – redirected from water horse. The Kelpie is a supernatural water horse . . .

  ‘Isn’t a kelpie a dog?’ Finn asks.

 
‘Shut up,’ I say absently.

  And there it is, right there. It keeps only its eyes above the surface to scout for prey. It is black and strong and beautiful. It can turn into a handsome young man. If a human climbs on its back, it will dive into the water and drown them – and then eat all of them except their heart and liver.

  ‘Holy –’ Finn begins, and launches into another of his incredible tirades of swearing.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ I whisper. ‘That’s what killed them.’

  I can see it in my head, almost like a movie. Marie at the party, drunk and angry at Finn for scaring the horse away. The stables, the darkness, the dark bush surrounding. Stumbling away from the light. The horse waiting. Her hands, reaching, reaching, stuck to its skin. She clambers onto its back. Her shoe falls to the ground, red satin dull and brown in the darkness. She clings to it as it gallops away, inebriated, intoxicated, ecstatic. It prances and dances through the woods and she laughs as the wind spreads her hair out behind her and the branches whip past them. The creek is rising up to meet them and she laughs and laughs as the horse gallops in, silvery drops splashing everywhere, and she keeps laughing as the water surrounds her and the horse pulls her down into the darkness. The black maw of the water swallows her up and she’s choking and retching and screaming as it gets into her lungs but she can’t break free of the horse until suddenly it releases her and she’s struggling, struggling, pushing her way back to the moonlight but there are only teeth waiting for her, sharp teeth, razor teeth . . .

  ‘The sharktooth man,’ I say. ‘It can turn into a man. It’s the sharktooth man.’

  And I was in his arms at the club.

  ‘Oh God,’ I say, unable to say anything else. ‘Oh God oh God oh God oh God –’

  ‘Pearl,’ Finn says, ‘shut up.’

  ‘Don’t tell me to shut up!’ The anger feels good, clean, red, like the water must have been oh God oh God oh God, it could have been me, it should have been me. ‘They were eaten! They were –’

  ‘I mean it, shut up! Listen!’

  I listen.

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’ Finn says, with something like awe in his voice. ‘The music? It’s like . . . bells. Or waves. Or . . . it’s like what a rainbow sounds like.’