He shakes his head. “We don’t work that way. To some I’m ancient, to others very young. The same is true for you.”
I can’t make this make sense for me. “How old are you to me?”
“To you? To you I’m me.”
It sounds like a riddle. “And what is that?”
He looks as if he’s searching for the right word. “Perfect, wouldn’t you say?” he decides finally, pinning me with a platinum stare.
“My entire life was a fiction you created for me,” I point out helplessly. “And then you kept me there.”
“You were protected,” says Ben. “It wasn’t a fiction; you were just protected. Did it feel like fiction? Did it not feel real?”
I can’t answer that question. He must know how real it felt. If it hadn’t felt real, I wouldn’t feel like my heart was breaking at the moment, because I would have been in love with Ben the same way you might be in love with a famous actor. I wouldn’t have been as desperately in love as I was.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Ben says when I stay silent.
“If what everyone is saying is true, you did have a choice,” I point out.
“Do you think we’re lying?”
“I don’t know.” I pause. “I think you’re at least an expert in enchantment. I think, if you wanted to, you could get me to believe anything you like—even that I’m a faerie princess.”
“I can’t force you to believe anything that you don’t want to believe, ironically because I’m an expert in enchantment.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the protective enchantment—no one can force you to do anything.”
“So you can’t lie to me?”
“I can’t lie to you, no. Well, not if you don’t want me to.”
“Do you think I do stupid things sometimes?”
“Yes,” he says fervently.
I am uncertain if he would have lied to me there or not. But I guess it’s the best I can do to test it.
I look at him for a long time. He studies me in return. I think of how, only hours earlier, he was just a boy on the Common to me. Hours? Or was it lifetimes? Maybe this is what Ben means about faerie age being uncertain. Maybe time passes like this for faeries.
Thinking about everything we’ve been through this day (year? century?) reminds me. “You died,” I say. “When we got to the meadow.”
“Did you let go of my hand?” asks Ben, sounding unconcerned.
“I fell,” I defend myself.
“I wasn’t dead,” he says. “I was resting. Jumps drain energy, and I was wet and diluted. I didn’t have a lot to spare. It’s how we ended up there instead of Boston in the first place, easier for me to lock on to my home world. Boston is tricky under the best of circumstances, all those barriers against faeries. I would have been fine; the recovery was just quicker if I could steal some energy from you.”
“Some what?”
“Well, you, you’re drenched in ability, but you don’t know how to use it. In the meantime, I was wet and named, so I needed to borrow a bit of yours to get us enough charge to get out of Park Street.”
“So you stole power from me by holding my hand?”
Ben crinkles his nose. “‘Power’ makes it sound so…‘Stealing’ makes it sound so…”
“I didn’t give you permission for that.”
“You didn’t tell me not to though. That’s the key to my enchantment over you right now. No one needs permission. They just need to avoid outright refusal.”
I frown. “Tricky,” I accuse.
“Well.” He flashes a bit of a smile. “Yes. I’m a faerie. And a good one.”
“My aunts don’t like you.”
“No one really likes faeries except for faeries. I don’t blame them entirely; faeries made it bad for ogres before there was Parsymeon. Your aunts want you to be all ogre. They wish your faerie blood would go away.”
“And what do you wish?” I can’t help but ask.
He looks at me, his gaze unerring, so intent that I think, wildly, for a moment, that he’s about to kiss me.
“I don’t even know who you are,” I blurt out before Ben can even answer the question.
Ben looks at me for another long moment. “I am Benedict Le Fay,” he tells me. “I am the best traveler in the Otherworld. And I am and always have been entirely at your service.”
“Because I’m the…whatever you say, the fay of the autumnal equinox.”
“Because you turned out to be you.”
I swallow thickly. Half of me is so thrilled, I want to stand up and dance. The other half of me is terrified. The best traveler in the Otherworld is entirely at my service. I don’t even know what that means. I eventually look away, clearing my throat, trying to find something less intense to talk about.
“People keep saying your name. Does it keep hurting you? Will calls you Benedict all the time, not even Ben.”
“Oh, you have to have intent,” says Ben. “Just saying a name isn’t enough; you have to say the name with the proper—or improper, I suppose—intent.”
“But I didn’t even know there was an enchantment when I said your name,” I point out, confused. “I had no intent to dissolve the enchantment.”
“You were angry with me,” he explains, his eyes still on me, reflecting starlight. “You intended to hurt me. Malicious intent, that’s all it takes.”
There is a moment of silence between us. “What happened to your mother?” I ask suddenly. I’m not sure why.
Ben looks away from me. “I don’t know,” he says, and I believe him.
“Your father mentioned her.” I don’t want to bring up the exact quote, about how wrong Ben was.
“He does that. He brings her up whenever he’s trying to get me back into his idea of good behavior. But we don’t know what happened to her, either one of us. One day she just…disappeared. That’s what my father says, anyway. I don’t know.”
I study Ben’s profile, which is tipped up in the direction of the moon and the stars. “Do you believe him?”
“Who else do I have to believe?” he asks with a shrug.
“What will happen to you?” I say after a second. “If my mother catches us.”
Ben is silent for a very long time. “I don’t know.”
“You have an idea?”
“There’s a reason why our names must be known under faerie law. When a member of the Seelie Court uses your whole name on you…I mean, other faeries can do it, and it isn’t pleasant, but when it’s a Seelie…”
“What happens?”
There is another long moment of silence. Ben clears his throat. “Well, I have never seen it done, but probably the mortal term for the outcome is death.”
Apparently my mother is a homicidal maniac. Great genes. The shiver I’ve been suppressing fully rises. I lick my lips. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Ben looks at me in surprise. “Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere else. If my mother catches me, she can’t do anything to me, right? Because of your enchantment? But if she catches you…”
Ben shakes his head. “I won’t leave you. Not now. Now, when your faerie blood’s no longer hidden, when the Seelies can find you? No.”
“But the Seelies can’t get into Boston.”
“The Seelies haven’t been overly motivated before. They’re very lazy. Now there’s you. Who knows what will happen now? Armies could be mobilizing as we speak. And I can only protect you so far. The Seelies have a way of making you want the things they want.”
“But—”
“But I was supposed to kill you. Years ago, centuries ago, or minutes ago, depending on which time you’re keeping. I didn’t. I’ll be named just for that. It doesn’t matter whether they find me with or without you.”
“What if you…put up a new enchantment? Hide me again?”
“I can do that,” Ben agrees. “But the prophecy is in motion. The enchantment would only be temporary.”
“But it would buy us time,” I say desperately. I want to forget about stupid faerie time; I’ve only just turned seventeen. I don’t want to launch a coup d’état. I don’t want to be stalked by homicidal faeries. I want to go back to my regular life—my aunts who love me, my father who I adore, Ben who I flirt with on the Common—and forget I ever wondered anything at all about my mother. I was going to try to get Ben to take me to the prom. That’s how normal my life had been, and now it’s this.
“You would have to forget all of this,” Ben says. “And another enchantment—is that really what you want?”
He’s right, and I know he’s right—I don’t want to be enchanted; I want to know the truth. I’ve always wanted to know the truth. I feel like I’ve been looking for it my entire life. I just wanted the truth to be something happier. I shake my head, unsure what else to say, not really trusting myself to speak, honestly.
Ben stares at me, his eyes now a washed-out periwinkle. “Selkie,” he says. “I—”
I never hear what Ben is about to say, because at that moment, the air around us fills with the chiming of a million tiny bells.
CHAPTER 11
It doesn’t seem like that should be a threatening sound, but I have time—barely—to register Ben’s eyes going wide with obvious panic. And then he reaches for me, a hand on my arm, and then we are gone. We are in a world with suffocating heat, then a world so cold my lungs feel like they’re freezing. We move through worlds so swiftly I can barely register them—worlds of day and worlds of night, worlds with winds that could knock me off my feet, worlds with snow drifting up to our waists. The weather does not have time to even affect me. We even skip through a world with driving rain, but I am touched by no more than a drop or two before we are at the next world. And then finally Ben stops. We hit a world of still darkness, and we stay long enough that I suck in oxygen, long enough that, now that the world has stopped whirling, I lose my balance and collapse against Ben’s chest. He is still dressed in the multilayers he wears against the Boston rain, and they make a comfortable pillow, but he is breathing very quickly, even as he holds me up, and he says in my ear, “Can you stand? I need you to stand. We can’t stay here. We have to jump again. I just have to warn him.”
I make an effort to stand, managing to gasp, “What…?” but Ben dashes off before I can gather myself enough to form the question. I can hear him shouting, and it takes my ears a second to stop ringing and realize that he’s shouting for his father. He comes back, and I say, “Did you find him?”
He is no longer breathing heavily. His voice is calm and even and harder than I have ever heard out of him before, so much so that I could almost think it isn’t Ben at all in front of me. “No. They’ve already been here. Don’t you see? This isn’t night. They have torn the very sun from the sky.”
I don’t even have time to register this before Ben reaches out and pulls me roughly against him and says, “Close your eyes. You’ll be less dizzy,” and I am less dizzy when we finally stop, who knows how many worlds later.
Only slightly less though. When Ben lets go of me, I stagger a bit and finally decide it’s easier to just sit on the ground. It’s another meadow—this one of wildflowers—and it looks like a bright, cheerful world, only I am terrified.
“What happened? What was that?” I ask.
Ben is pacing, his hands in his dark hair, and he is muttering to himself.
“Ben,” I say. “What happened to my aunts?”
“They’re fine,” he answers, distracted. “I’m sure they’re fine. They were in the house—ogre magic in the walls of the house, tough to cross immediately. Stupid, stupid, for us to be outside, and no time to think; your enchantment couldn’t protect you. You didn’t have time to think—”
“What was that?” I ask again.
“Seelies,” he says. “Lots of Seelies.”
“Seelies…chime like that?”
Ben doesn’t answer. I think of how close I might have been to my mother. Was she really trying to kill me? I think of what Ben had said, tearing the sun from the sky. What sort of beings would do something like that? I do not want to ask what had happened to his father.
“Can we go back to Boston now?” I just want to get back home, back to my aunts. This unfamiliar world is terrifying in its otherness.
“Shh,” Ben snaps at me. “I have to think, let me think—” He cuts himself off, listening to something I can’t hear, and something passes through his eyes, something I can’t quite read but it is something knowing and something decisive, and he turns to me and pulls me up and closes his hands around my shoulders. “Listen to me.”
“Ben—” I begin. I sense, instantly, that whatever he is doing now, I do not agree with it.
“Listen to me,” he repeats more sharply. “Listen to me as you have never listened to anything in your life. This sweatshirt is your protection, do you hear me? As long as no one but you sees this sweatshirt, you are safe. Remember this about the sweatshirt. Remember how important this sweatshirt is.”
“How would I forget?” I ask, bewildered. “You’ve already told me.”
“Selkie Stewart, I am sorry for this.”
I stare at him, wide-eyed. “Sorry for what?”
He leans forward and kisses me, very quickly and very chastely, and into the silence of my shock in the wake of this, he says, “Good-bye.”
***
I fumble for the blaring alarm clock by my bed. Aunt Virtue is in my room, on her hands and knees, poking a broomstick under my dresser, no doubt looking for gnomes.
“Good morning, dear,” she says without looking at me.
“Good morning,” I respond and yawn.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Yeah.” I swing myself out of bed and pause, looking at myself in the mirror over the dresser, in the old Yankees Suck T-shirt I have worn to bed every night for a while now. I have this tendency to wear the same T-shirt to bed until it is threadbare. “I had the strangest dream.”
“About what?” asks Aunt Virtue absently, not sounding very interested.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Can’t quite remember. But it was very complicated.” I open my closet door and stand regarding my clothes for a second. “I think there was a rat involved,” I decide finally and select a tweed skirt for the day.
CHAPTER 12
Mike is surprised when I kiss him impulsively, outside Cabot’s Ice Cream where all the kids from school go.
“I didn’t think you liked me,” he says, regarding me quizzically, like I’m some sort of exotic species.
“You didn’t?” I respond, just as quizzical, because I think I’ve been obvious about liking Mike. I have liked him forever. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t like him.
Mike shakes his head, an indulgent gesture, and says, “You’re something, Selkie Stewart. Just what, I don’t know.”
“A faerie princess, maybe,” I say and giggle at my own joke.
Mike laughs at me and kisses me again, and it is only afterward, as he is drawing back, that I find myself confused.
“Your eyes are brown,” I say.
“Yeah,” he answers slowly, looking amused.
I am staring at his eyes, but I am not seeing them. I am seeing other eyes—pale eyes, eyes a color I can’t place… I am frowning with the effort of this—it feels like it is just on the edge of my memory, odd, pale eyes, and a quick grin to go with them, a nose that crinkles, and… “I thought your eyes were…” I trail off, confused.
“They’ve always been brown,” says Mike.
“Of course,” I say. “Of course. I knew that.” I smile, like I was joking.
But that nig
ht, after Mike drops me off and we name a time and place for our next date, I walk across Beacon Street to the Common and sit on a bench. There is someone who should be there who is not. I cannot shake this ridiculous feeling.
I decide maybe I am just missing my mother—it happens sometimes; I should really make an effort to look for her, something I want to do but have been procrastinating forever—and I go inside.
***
“Everything in your house is so old,” says Kelsey. She is lying on my bed, and I am very painstakingly redoing my makeup for the umpteenth time, because I fail at mascara and because it has suddenly become very important to me that I not fail at mascara.
Sometimes, I don’t know who I am now that I have started dating Mike.
“I mean,” continues Kelsey, not minding that I’m barely paying attention, “normal people don’t have houses like this.”
“We are normal people,” I say, slightly irritated, studying my reflection. Kelsey has dried and straightened my hair, on her insistence, even though it’s naturally straight, and it looks like spun gold shot through with silvery streaks where it picks up the light. I am pleased with the outcome of my hair, less pleased with the outcome of my eye makeup; it looks harsh and abrupt in my pale face, seems to swallow my sky-blue eyes.
“What’s up with that clock?” says Kelsey. “I find it creepy. When I got here, it was chiming eleven o’clock, and now it’s chiming seven. I’ve only been here twenty minutes!”
“It’s just broken,” I say. “It’s not creepy.”
“It’s just this house,” says Kelsey. “It’s like it’s been here since, I don’t know, since before Boston.”
“You mean, when Boston was called Parsymeon?” I tuck my hair behind my ears, switch its part, experimenting.
“What?” says Kelsey quizzically.
“When Boston was called Parsymeon,” I repeat. “You know.”
“No, I don’t know. Boston was called Parsymeon? When?”
“Before it was called Boston. How do you not know this? Didn’t we learn that at school?”
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