Nameless: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (TALES OF BEAUTY AND MADNESS)

by Lili St. Crow

  Cami just held on grimly as tires spun, the car sliding. Ruby yelled a cheerful obscenity, goosed the accelerator, and steered into it. Tire chains and silvery octopus-leg catchcharms gripping again, ice crackling on the window as Cami, wedged uncomfortably in the glossy black Semprena’s tiny concession to a backseat, found her lips moving silently.

  Praying, she had decided, would not hurt.

  “It’s just snow!” Ruby crowed, and shot them through a yellow light with half a second to spare. The newscast crackled through the speakers.

  —brings the total toll of disappearances to seventeen. The mayor’s office had no comment, but Captain Ventrue of the New Haven Police Department—

  Titons reared, their horns stabbing empty air, a plow behind them creaking as the zooming little car startled the giants, and Ellie and Cami screamed at the same time, in oddly perfect harmony. Their cries swallowed the end of the ’cast and the Red Twists came on, the bassline of “Born Charmed Enough” thumping the windows and rattling Cami’s teeth.

  Driving with Ruby was always an adventure, but it was better than the small, cushioned but stifling buses Juno used to take less fortunate girls straight to their doors. Private schools did not like losing their students, and if there wasn’t a transporter or two on file you had to use a bus. Walking home in New Haven was risky—in other words, it was only for the public school kids.

  Like Tor, Cami thought, and squeezed her eyes shut.

  She’d seen him around the house, of course. Things weren’t quite upside down with Papa gone, but they were definitely not the same. Some of the maids had been let go, Marya piqued about something or another they did wrong or didn’t do right. Chauncey had caught the head groundskeeper “intoxicated, Miss Cami,” and asked her if he should be fired.

  Like she knew. But with Papa gone, Marya sulking, and Nico off at Hannibal, she was the only one to ask. N-n-no, she’d told him. N-not unl-less it h-h-happens ag-g-gain.

  And he had nodded, looking profoundly relieved, and walked away whistling as if he’d heard it from Papa’s mouth. She squirmed at the memory.

  She’d even turned Ruby down when it was time to skip and head to Southking again. And Rube was not happy over that.

  Stop being a foot-dragger, Cami. Mithrus, you’re turning into an old lady overnight. Being engaged makes your brain soft.

  Missing Nico was never pleasant. And before he left, he’d been odd. Treating her like … what, exactly?

  Like she was something new. Something strange. And he hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye. Just vanished like a Dead Harvest dream, and Marya had scolded Cami both for her own costume and for the shredded ruin of Nico’s.

  He’d gone out with the youngbloods after all.

  Think about something else.

  Something had happened to her at the Stregare party, but it had vanished just like the nightmares, and all she could remember was the Borrowing Room and the dust choking her as Mocia and her clan-cousin writhed on the couch. A bolt of queasy heat went through Cami’s belly whenever she thought of it. Had Nico ever, with a Family girl …

  Ruby shrieked, a wild joyful cry, and Ellie cursed with colorful inventiveness as the Red Twists harmonized about being born with flippers or fins. The car lifted as if it intended to fly.

  Cami let herself think about Tor the garden boy instead.

  He sometimes fetched things for Marya, carried things into the cellar, and the feywoman had started to ask for him. Not by his name, of course, she called him the Pike because he was long and dark.

  Hearth-fey didn’t like big changes inside their domains. Marya was … upset.

  And me? What am I?

  Nothing but the pin holding the house up. A tired, shivering pin. If she was a Family girl, would it be easier?

  That was another incredibly uncomfortable thought, one she did her best to shove away. The Semprena slowed, banking like a plane and gliding to a stop. Ruby twisted the volume dial down to merely “overwhelming” instead of “minotaur roar.”

  “You can open your eyes now, Cami.” Ruby sighed. “That wasn’t even very fast.”

  “Death by cardiac arrest, induced by vehicular shenanigans.” Ellie waited for a few seconds, unclicking her seatbelt. “There’s the Strep.”

  Cami’s eyelids fluttered open. The world poured in, full of the peculiar flat blue-white of snowlight. The Sinder house on Perrault Street was a fantasy of four stone spires and a sort of grim medieval feel, not helped by the tall curlicue wrought-iron gates. Ruby’s Gran had a teeny, welcoming, very expensive cottage in Woodsdowne, but this was Perrault and the houses had serious, carnivorous faces. A tall line of firs frowned over the charm-smoothed stone wall enclosing the estate, and the glowing Sigil on the gates was a pair of high-heeled shoes.

  The Strep was a famous charmer, after all.

  Ellie’s dad was a lawyer specializing in inter-province negotiations, and gone an awful lot. At some point the Strep was probably going to get herself knocked up, probably by one of the boyfriends she brought in when Daddums was working late, and the hormonal shifts were going to make her even more of a pain in the ass for Ellie.

  In one of the towers, a shadow moved across the golden glow of electric light. The Strep had a carefully fertilized mane of frosted-blonde hair, and it always sent a shiver down Cami’s back.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Ellie said finally. “Babchat later?”

  “But of course. Let Cami out, it’s her turn to pound on my dashboard.”

  Great. But she wriggled out while Ellie held the door, then hugged her. “C-c-courage,” she whispered. “T-t-t-tis only the St-t-t-trep Monster.”

  The tired old joke wrung a tired old laugh out of Ellie. Her dad had been gone for two days, to New Avalon up north at the edge of the province, for high-powered negotiations. Something about inter-province trade agreements, fighting over who would pay to send rail-repair crews out into the Waste.

  The smudges under Ellie’s storm-gray eyes were getting awful dark. “Someday I’m gonna walk home and get kidnapped just to avoid her.” She tried to sound light, but there was a terrible flat ring to the words.

  “D-d-d—” Stupid words. “Don’t,” she finally got out, her breath pluming in the cold air. The iron gate was opening, sensing Ellie’s nearness.

  “Shut the damn door, it’s freezing!” Ruby yelled, but Cami waited, leaning on the car door until she saw Ellie trudge, slowly and safely, up the paved drive and heard the dull thud of the front door slam behind her. “Come on, Cami! She’s not gonna get snatched in her own driveway.”

  You just never know. Some of the vanished weren’t charmers, just young mere-humans, but the entire city was on pins and needles now. Cami privately wondered how many people would be concerned if whoever was doing the snatching hadn’t started taking young charmers. None from Juno yet, but there were a couple girls gone from Hollow Hills. One had even disappeared between the Hills’ bus and her family’s front door, the snow scuffed as if a struggle had taken place and the branches of several nearby bushes broken.

  The tabloids, for once, weren’t screaming about celebrity follies or Twists. Cami avoided reading them, but there was only so much you could ignore.

  She dropped down into the front seat, pulled the door to, and took Ruby’s scolding all the way home with several nods, one or two uh-huhs, and five full minutes of cursing when Ruby opened up the Semprena on the straight shot of Grimmskel Boulevard. Remarkably, she didn’t stutter once while she was terrified.

  Ruby told her it was a goddamn miracle, blew her a kiss, and the Semprena vanished toward the downward slope of the Hill before the large iron gate had finished scraping itself open.

  Camille shivered, the wind nipping at her bare knees. The gate groaned, creaked, ice falling from its scrollwork and the charm-potential under the surface of the metal running blue with cold. The defenses here were old and thick, laid in with the stones when the Seven had first come to New Haven and added in layers with each succes
sive generation. Papa had remarked once that the Family had been in New Haven before it was New, and once a long time ago, when talking to the wide, perpetually smiling Head of the Cinghiale, he had paused and looked into the distance.

  I remember when we were hunted, before the Reeve made us citizens. We should all remember thus.

  And Marcus Cinghiale had nodded, his own iron-gray hair slicked back and his bullet-eating grin turning cold. You are always cautious, old friend. We trust in that.

  Neither of them had noticed Cami playing in the corner of Papa’s study, stacking wooden blocks.

  She returned to the present when another gust of wind nipped at her knees, and the sound of cold air rushing over winter’s surfaces modulated into an eerie wail.

  Almost like a wolf-cry. Or voices in a chorus, rising through a word that would explain … what?

  For a bare millisecond she toyed with the idea of turning away and walking down into town. Going into the core’s diseased brightness, step by step, and seeing with her own eyes what the chaos-driven Potential in there would do to her. Would it make her a minotaur? Would she go running through the streets, bellowing, thick blankets of mutating Potential clinging to her body and her head swelling with bone and horn?

  She was in-between, just like a jack. Not Family, not charmer-clan, not Woodsdowne clan, who knew if she was fully mere-human? Who would notice if she simply vanished? Would they say her name on the newscasts? Or would she be gone without a ripple?

  Blank static filled her head, tugging at her fingers and toes. It formed words, spoken low and soft, so caressingly soft.

  … nobody. You are nothing.

  “You gonna stand out here all day?” he said, quietly, and she jumped, letting out a thin shriek. Her schoolbag almost fell, she clutched at it and found Tor the garden boy watching her, leaning against the gate.

  FOURTEEN

  THE IRON MOVED RESTLESSLY, SENSING HER AND ALSO testing him. He was allowed to be there, true … but the gate didn’t like it, not the way it liked Family.

  Not the way it liked her, either.

  She dropped her gaze, suddenly acutely aware that he was in a battered, scuffed tan leather jacket and jeans that probably did nothing against the cold. Aware as well of her black wool-and-cashmere coat just long enough to cover her skirt, a gift from Papa at Dead Harvest last year, and her expensive silver-buckled maryjanes. She edged for the gate, and he watched her.

  “I’m not gonna bite you.” Now he sounded … what? Desperate? Angry, like Nico.

  They’re not even remotely alike.

  Then why did she think of them together? And why was she blushing, uncomfortable heat prickling at her throat?

  “I kn-kn-know.” The words surprised her. She stepped over the threshold and the gate stopped quivering. “S-sorry.”

  The snow was a blanket. Bare branches reached up, the driveway ribboning between their grasping hands. Hummocks and hillocks where there used to be gardens, a deceptive layer of white blurring everything. Waiting to catch an unwary foot, just like her goddamn tongue waited to trap the simplest words.

  “You’re not like them.” His boots ground against the driveway, scraped free of ice and snow and sealed with charms. Had he maybe charmed part of it, too? She didn’t see Potential on him, but then again, hers was invisible too.

  At least for now, and maybe once it settled too. You couldn’t ever tell with Potential.

  What does he mean, not like them? Family? Of course I’m not. She shrugged, tucking her school scarf a little tighter and setting off for the house. Ruby could have taken her up to the door, but she’d been letting her off outside the gate instead. Cami didn’t blame her. Of course Rube was pissed when Cami said no, not today. Because Cami could always be relied on to give in and go with. It was her job.

  “Hey. Look, I’m always saying the wrong thing to you.” He caught up with her. The gate screeched a little as it swung to, steel jaws closing gently. “I don’t know what to do. Help me out a little here, huh?”

  Oh, man. Here it comes. She swung to a stop and faced him, her heel digging into a patch of odd charming on the concrete, scraping roughly and striking a single colorless spark. A long strand of hair fell in her face, working its way free from the cap Marya had knitted her. “What.” The word came out whole and hard, on a puff of frost-laced breath. “Do you. Want?”

  “Bingo.” His smile was instant, and it looked genuine. His nose was raw-red from the cold, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunching his muscle-broad shoulders. “Hi. I’m Tor.”

  I know that, do I look subnormal? “I know.”

  “And you’re Cami. You’re beautiful, and you don’t talk because you’re nervous. So people end up talking to you a lot, because you listen. And because they want things out of you.” He dug one toe into the pavement, stopped. Tilted his dark head. Snowflakes stuck to his hair, some melting. He was crowned with winter.

  Well, don’t you get a prize. Irritation stung her, but she kept her mouth shut. Instead, she just nodded. The wind grabbed at her knees, sinking into unprotected flesh—the cashmere was barely longer than her skirt, and the knee socks were pure wool but didn’t help as much as they could. She spared another nod, and started taking mental bets about what game he was playing. Would he want money? A date? Something to do with Nico, maybe—more than a garden boy’s scholarship?

  If I went to public school, would Nico ever look at me? Or would I be invisible to him, like the maids?

  More and more these days, Cami was wondering about that.

  “I want to talk to you. And hear you talk, too.” His shoulders hunched even further. “I want to hang out sometime, maybe. If you can stand to be seen with a poor kid. That’s it.”

  That’s never it. Her mouth opened. “That’s n-never it.” And maybe I was a poor kid too. There was no way for him to know that, really, but it still bugged her. People always had all these thoughts. Assumptions. And her stupid tongue would never let her make them see, even if she felt like doing so.

  A shrug and a wry expression, as if he understood. His nose was red from the cold and their words were clouds, hanging uneasily between them as if on singing wires. “Yeah, well, you can get me fired. You’ve got all the power here. I’m not even supposed to look at you. I know that.”

  Chip on your shoulder much? But she knew what he meant. She hitched the bag strap higher. A cup of hot chocolate and one of Marya’s scones sounded really good right about now, and there was double HC Calc homework. Plus there was Ruby’s French to get in before it was Babchat-time. “Why?” Why me?

  “Because you’re not like them.” Patiently, but not as if she was an idiot. “I dunno. I just … it’s stupid. Fine. Never mind.” He took two steps back, then shook his dark head, dislodging little crystals of snow. Had he been waiting for her? Out here in the cold?

  Maybe not. But she could ask.

  “D-d-d-do you w-walk here?”

  Tor actually blinked, as if she’d said something extraordinary. Another head-tilt, and those eyes of his were really black, she decided. Not just too dark to tell, not just a deep brown. Black.

  Was it a Twist? But Marya was thorough and careful. Fey could smell Twists, and didn’t like them. Some said it was because they were unpredictable, like the fey themselves. Marya was predictable, really, but she was a hearth-fey. Her world was the kitchen, her universe pretty much bounded by the house walls. Even Cami was only worth noticing because she belonged to the house.

  “The bus drops me off on Hammer. Then I walk.” He paused. “It’s not bad.”

  “Aren’t y-you af-f-fraid?” Maybe boys didn’t have to worry so much.

  “Why? This is a good neighborhood. It’s not Simmerside. Or the core.”

  Simmerside. Where the Twists lived next to the normal too poor to live anywhere else. Where the sirens and gunfire spilled out of the core and into the waking world. “The c-c-core?”

  “No, I haven’t been there, you think I’m crazy? I’m a S
immerside kid, Joringel Street Orphanage. So out here, nothing much to be afraid of. Plus, those wackos kidnapping kids mostly go for girls. See? We’re talking.”

  Kind of. But she nodded. She’d heard of Joringel; another branch of the Mithraic Order used to run it before there was some scandal and the city had taken over administration some ten years ago. It was still a bad place to grow up.

  Would she have ended up there?

  “It’s not so rough, right? You look like you could use a friend. Or at least someone to talk to.”

  And you’re going to fill that gap, right? Riiiight. “I h-h-have f-friends.”

  “Yeah, ones that leave you on Southking alone. Or who don’t even wait for you to get inside your gates.” He made a dismissive gesture, his hand chopping down. A healing scrape across his knuckles was vivid red, the skin a little chapped.

  “D-d-do y-you have f-f-f-friends?” At least he waited for her to get all the words out, and didn’t act like waiting was a big deal.

  “No.” Quiet and very definite, like he’d thought about it. A lot. He unzipped his jacket, and she almost took a step back. When he lifted up his T-shirt—how was he out here in just that, without shivering too hard to speak?—Cami actually did step back.

  Welts and burns crisscrossed his torso, most of them scars and a few still ugly-colored, as if his skin hadn’t forgotten them yet. A wave of nausea pushed hot bile up to the back of her throat.

  She knew those scars.

  “No,” he repeated. Not angrily. He pulled his shirt back down, zipped his jacket up. “Now you know about me. I’m angry, and I’m mean, and I’m halfway to Twisted, rich girl. I’m not gonna lie. Come on. Your nose is red.”

  He turned, and set off down the black streak of the driveway. Snow whirled down, and Cami finally made her voice work.

  “Wh-wh-who d-d-d-did—”