Betwixt

by Tara Bray Smith

  The three had behaved just as he had wanted them to. Moth had watched Nix search, only to separate from Ondine and weave through the crowd, as he was now doing, alone. Looking for him. Good. The first time would be easier to witness solo.

  Morgan — he’d heard — had fallen asleep in her car and Rei, from San Francisco, had been sent out to pull her in. Done, Rei reported, shortly before Moth found his rocky perch. He imagined he’d spot Morgan soon, wandering through the crowd, a little dazed, a little charmed, solitary, just like Ondine.

  Just to make sure the daze was permanent, Moth had dispatched Jinn, also from S.F., with some dust. Nix, he knew, would already have had some. Usually they took it willingly; the Ring of Fire was the perfect opportunity to sample the stuff. They’d be less suspicious then. With what they were about to find out, this was crucial.

  The only one that was missing was Bleek. Moth knew the dealer had been asking around Portland about the location of the gathering, and there was a good chance of his making his way here, however dangerous. The proximity of so many uninitiated would be enough to outweigh the risk, but so far there had been no sighting.

  If he could eliminate Bleek here, Moth thought, his problems would be solved. He hadn’t been feeling well lately — at twenty-two, the small window of years past eighteen was closing on him, and he could feel the end coming, like air being squeezed out of a tire. He had lost weight and shrunk from the small amounts of food he allowed himself. The constant, grinding energy had made a mess of his teeth. He didn’t like the devilish cast they gave him, but what little he sold in dust wasn’t exactly enough for cosmetic dentistry. He almost envied Bleek his tidy business, but reminded himself that Bleek was evil and selfish and dark, and it was his duty to eliminate him — a task he had not yet managed to complete.

  He sweat involuntarily in his small hiding place at the mere thought of passing before his time. His fate then — nothing less than infinite cosmic pain — was enough to keep him to his given tasks.

  Moth looked at the stage where the Flame played. They would be leaving soon, too. He had known a few of the members from his own inititation a few years ago. They worked in Seattle mostly, and he thought their trick of becoming a band ingenious. Rings sometimes played tricks before their time and this one — an anonymous, unsigned band that had risen to the top of the download charts — had kept them in the world just long enough to cause problems. One member had died. A pet they had gotten to dance was starting to become inured to the effects of dust and had to be chained. Some pathetic abandoned human thing.

  Where had they kept her, this big, Brunhilde-esque blonde? The Northwest was Viv’s territory and though she was good at hiding things, Newberry National Volcanic Monument wasn’t exactly an airport Hilton.

  Around the smoky, fiery scene below him, night had fallen. A flash lit up the stage and he counted. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand. Thunder boomed. The eye was less than a mile away. Nix, Ondine, and Morgan would be given their dust and the finial would be covered and ready. The great ring was forming. The exidis was near.

  Moth stretched out his legs and readied himself. His sign flashed by him as he moved his hands toward the earth, and he thought again of Bleek and what it would finally feel like to go. One look at the scene below — the blinding lightning, the billowing fires — was enough to scare him. Because of the mess with Bleek, he’d had to wait longer than most. Would he still be able to see himself from there? What would it feel like to be unbound? Would he miss … himself? These were questions that only Viv could answer, and though he’d asked her a million times what it was like, her answer was always the same: Like everything and nothing, like forever and never, all at once.

  Lightning cracked again. He dislodged himself from his narrow ledge and headed toward the stage.

  ONDINE WAS BORED, and Nix hadn’t returned with Moth, so she decided to make her way alone to where the Flame was playing, to meet them at the place Nix had designated. Closer to the stage, past the fires, she was able to make out the band. A typical four piece: one girl and three guys — drummer, guitarist, bassist, singer — and a fifth figure, a woman, who held no instrument, stood away from any microphone, and swayed. She was a big, striking blonde, larger than the skinnier, smaller, black-clad people on the stage. Ondine felt like she had seen pictures of the woman on some blog, but only parts of her face. Now here she was in the flesh: not quite Valkyrie material, but Ondine hadn’t expected the infamous Flame dancer to be so tall. She moved quartertime to the music, her hips tracing wide figure eights, her hands carving the air like a child scooping handfuls of bubbles off her bath. The boys and girl behind her shook their hair and gyrated, but the woman just swayed and smiled. Her eyes were wide and happy and welcoming and empty, seeing everyone and no one at the same time.

  It was only when Ondine got up to the stage that she saw the thick rhinestone collar around the woman’s neck. Her smile was fixed, but while she moved — spacily, stonily — one of her hands pulled at her collar, as if she were curious about it.

  Quick — quick! Wooden doll,

  Hurry, lovely wooden doll, spin round

  Was she really that tall? Ondine took in the crowd, which she could see clearly now for the first time. Girls and boys, long hair, short hair, curly hair, no hair. All young, all different colors. Blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes, black. Brown skin and pink skin and tanned and freckled and pimpled. They were smiling and laughing, dancing with each other with a kind of buoyant, blissful energy Ondine had rarely experienced. Or, at least, not since she was a child. Not since running around the yard chasing Celeste at Irvington Montessori. For that’s what she was reminded of: childhood. The innocent, boisterous freedom of being a kid.

  So this was what everyone was waiting for. The Flame rocked. Ondine was surrounded by strangers and Nix was nowhere in sight, yet for the first time that day, she felt at home. Had he … ? No. She banished the thought, losing herself in the tangle of glowing wet bodies, in the endless waves of sound that washed over her, tossing her and spinning her and twisting her. She was having a good time. She couldn’t deny it. Maybe she was sick of Nix. Maybe they were too close.

  A flash drew Ondine’s eyes back to the stage, and behind the music a low rumble sounded. The storm must be close, she reckoned, yet no one around seemed worried. The rain had ceased and there in the bowl of the crater she felt protected. Familiar pinpricks of color swirled around the band. She thought they were fireflies at first, but realized they were butterflies, their iridescent wings throwing off glancing sparks of red, green, blue, orange, and yellow, shifting under the spotlights.

  Butterflies? That must have cost a pretty penny.

  Ondine laughed, delighted, and caught the eye of a cute brown-haired boy who’d wrapped his shirt around his waist and was eyeing her, edging closer to her, sensing her openness.

  Orange wings — white wings — blue wings — green.

  Filaments of fire — unspoken and unseen.

  Her arms were in the air. She was dancing. She couldn’t tell who moved closer to whom, but she and the boy pressed together, bumping, and one of her hands dropped down to the small of his back and one of his hands dropped to the small of hers and then lower, holding her butt lightly, easily. After all the chaste nights she’d spent with Nix, like a geriatric couple on an Alaskan cruise, Ondine felt lust like pepper in her mouth. She nudged one of her legs between his, inched up his thigh. She had to pull her mini up to ride higher and she did it, her bare skin feeling the coarseness of the boy’s denim-covered leg.

  His hands clasped hers and she looked down. A small tattoo of an X traced the inside of his wrist.

  “What’s your name?” She leaned toward him and smiled. Never in her life had Ondine Mason asked a boy his name.

  He smiled back. His teeth were white and very straight. “Jinn,” he said.

  “I’m Ondine.”

  “Right.” He grinned again.

  She said it louder. “M
y name is Ondine.”

  The boy nodded and pressed closer. He removed something from his right pocket, a small packet of paper, and emptied its contents into his other hand, dancing all the while.

  “Do you want some?”

  Ondine had never actually seen dust. All the times with Nix, he’d gone into the bathroom. She knew it didn’t require anything — one just ate it, like sugar — but to see it there, in his hand, gave her a singular feeling. Not scared. Not comfortable. It glittered and had a vague goldish cast. It looked, she thought, like powdered Crystal Light.

  “You just lick it,” Jinn said, holding out his hand. “It’s not strong.”

  Never in her life had Ondine done drugs. But dust was harmless. Nix was finished with it. What might a taste do? She was having fun. She wanted to have more.

  “It’s sweet. You’ll like it.”

  She licked his outstretched palm. It tasted like salt at first, then sugar, then something chemical, like Advil. She swallowed and waited.

  “Don’t worry.” Jinn bowed his head to look into her eyes. “It’s really not strong at all.”

  Her newfound friend’s smile grew as wide as the girl’s onstage, and Ondine could feel it mirrored on her face. She was confused and ecstatic at the same time. It was incredible, this thing — the Ring of Fire. Who had thought of it? Why had she been invited? All the waiting — yes, it had been worth it. She hoped no one would ever discover this secret thing — her thing now — but not just hers, all of theirs. The connection she had been yearning for, it was here. She was scared, but her fear felt liberating rather than imprisoning. Jinn’s grip tightened; he whirled her around. Faces flashed. A small group of people had separated from the rest of the crowd to dance closer to a nearby fire. Above them a kind of pillar had been raised. Twenty or thirty feet high, white, with silken streamers billowing from its stem. Ondine felt momentarily nervous but couldn’t remember why. A dozen or so kids held hands around it, then started moving, as if around a maypole. They held the streamers in their hands. Some of them Ondine recognized, though she didn’t understand how till she discerned that the music had stopped. On the stage only the dancer remained, still swaying, looking out into the crowd, but sadder now.

  Before Jinn’s mouth covered Ondine’s and her eyelids fluttered closed, she saw the word on their lips, the same word that was coming from her.

  Exidis.

  With her eyes closed and the taste of Jinn on her mouth, she saw the thing she had not been able to see with her eyes open. The girl on the stage. Swaying as if floating. But not as if. She was floating. Two feet above the stage, wading through the air as if through water. And the people on the ground, the richly hued, impossibly beautiful ones, spinning in a great circle, chanting the word Moth had given her.

  She was in Jinn’s arms, on his thigh, in his kiss.

  A figure appeared from the twilight: a cloud, a whirl, a moonbeam, hanging for a moment in the air. Ondine watched Jinn’s face crack, then fall in wonder. He had separated from her now, and was staring up at the woman’s oval face, crowned by a ring of black-and-silver hair. Her purple-gray eyes glittered, her lips parted, revealing the serrated edge of small white teeth. Her voice shimmered. Dappled silver coruscation.

  “Welcome to the Ring of Fire.”

  Everyone around Ondine silenced. She felt light-headed, confused. Dust, she thought cloudily. This must be the dust.

  “You will hear this from me only once. The rest of your teachings will come from your guide, the one who told you about this gathering, the great gathering of our kind. You will be scared. You will doubt us. But you know who you are and you must listen carefully, starting now.”

  Ondine felt her knees begin to quiver and buckle. She could not make out any distinct faces in the crowd. That boy — with the little X — where had he gone? She felt something sharp on her knees. She tried hard to keep her head up but could not. And still, the woman’s voice, like a beautiful snake.

  “You’ve known it since you were young. You inhabit a world that is not ours, yet — but not theirs either. You are different. You have felt it since you were children. People give you wide berth; they want you. They want to be you.”

  Ondine felt as if the woman’s voice were being piped into her ear. Then sound very far away. Then close again.

  “You’ve been given the responsibility of furthering our tribe.” Now the woman with the strange braided hair was looking coldly at the dancer on the stage, who was sitting, head in her hands. Had her voice darkened? Ondine tried to hear what she was saying, but her voice kept moving in and out again, as if on a tide.

  “You are changeling fay … Not human…. The fire that runs in your veins, in your bodies …”

  She smiled, bowed her shining head.

  “We must give you a chance to enter. It is decreed: Those who are fay must be allowed a choice to pass through the Ring of Fire.”

  Ondine felt her hands hit rough rock.

  “We changelings travel through the mortal world and endure its tests.” A shadow passed over the woman’s flickering eyes. “We remember love; we taste the sweetness of mortality, and pass on the cup. Very soon, when your time comes, you will have to choose: mortal or fay. A tortured humanity or the power of the illuminated.” Her voice hushed. “The incandescent.”

  The shroud on the giant pole at the center of the gathering fell away and the sky turned fluorescent. Thunder shook Ondine’s bones. She rose with great effort. Was the crowd parting in front of her? And the woman, was she floating? Like the Flame dancer had been before? The chanting twisted its way into her brain, till what she heard and what she thought were indistinguishable. Exidis. Exidis. Exidis. The butterflies had grown and turned into whizzing balls of multicolored fire. She felt one pass, its stinging. She would have run if she weren’t so very tired….

  When the bolt struck, its path had been so clear in Ondine’s imagination that she was not surprised to see the twelve people holding the cloth-wrapped spokes fall to the ground, their eyes rolling into their heads. Only one stood apart, a girl with long red hair pulled back in a low ponytail. When the lightning cleared, the redheaded girl rushed over to a blond boy Ondine had noticed earlier in the forest. He was still holding one of the white-wrapped chains. A little blood leaked from his mouth — it looked to her like chocolate syrup. The crowd stilled. The air smelled like burnt meat and rain.

  CHAPTER 11

  WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING OUT about yourself that you’ve always known, how are you supposed to feel? Not shocked, because the knowledge isn’t wholly a surprise. Nor at ease. Consciousness rarely breeds ease. Maybe you feel tentatively located, as if you had just moved into a new house. Not a home yet; the place doesn’t exude that kind of wear, comfort, and memory. But it’s yours now and you must live in it.

  Nix Saint-Michael had rarely felt at home in his life. Maybe with his mother and grandfather in Sitka, but that was long ago, and other than a few memories — like half-forgotten movies now — home eluded Nix. He had come to feel that he didn’t need a home, and he didn’t believe any bullshit about how home is where the heart is, or if he were at home in himself, he’d be fine. Nix knew nothing was ever really fine, even before he started seeing the lights.

  The woman who had come out of nowhere right before the lightning struck had said the word fay. Changeling fay. The fire that runs in your veins, in your bodies…. Then a lot of other insanity that Nix couldn’t hear because he was backing away by then, running, in fact, from the whole ugly fiasco. Someone had died in front of him. A kid. His age. An innocent. When Nix saw him there at the edge of the gigantic maypole or lightning rod or whatever it was they had raised, holding a spoke that was clearly metal wrapped in cloth, he had tried to run toward him but the bolt had come too fast.

  We taste the sweetness of mortality, and pass on the cup …

  He hadn’t stayed long enough to hear any more. He had run. Though the rest of the kids around the pillar, incredibly, had survived a direct l
ightning strike — they were moving, shaking, trying to wake up; Nix could see that much — that one kid, the blond boy whom he had seen in the forest earlier, the fire around him already blazing, that kid had died. Nix had known he would. That’s why he’d been so quiet earlier.

  He had brought her here, his friend, Ondine. It was his fault they were there. It was his fault a person had died.

  You’ve known it since you were young.

  “No.” Nix said it aloud. “No. No. No.”

  He walked toward the trees. The last thing he heard was the woman in the long black coat telling someone to call an ambulance. By then he was yards away.

  The storm had passed over the mountain and he could see it in the distant dark like a flashlight underwater. The moon had risen. It was a little less than half full, and its light shone clear in the mountain air. No. Nix said it again. This was Moth’s fault. The one who lured them there. The one he’d been looking for and could not find. Yet he could not explain the profound sadness that rose from his stomach, wrapped its tentacles around his chest, and squeezed.

  He had heard more than he had wanted to. Seen more, too. He had walked into this nightmare on his way down the dark well of madness and here he was. What was the real Nix doing in the real world? Was he having a conversation with himself on a street corner somewhere? Was he down in the Shanghai Tunnels, loaded? Was he even in Portland? Was he even himself?

  He had to get his head clear before he could help Ondine. And Morgan, he remembered suddenly. She was supposed to be there that day. What had happened to her?

  Nix’s legs felt weak so he stopped, putting a hand on a nearby tree to steady himself. Like the first day on the water with his grandfather during the salmon run. But that was a good memory and this was bad. Worse than bad. Nix felt the tree’s trunk, rough. A needle grazed his cheek. He looked around him, seeing a dark path, illuminated only by the moon and the faraway storm. He could hear the low buzz of people talking through the trees, but no one word was distinct. His mouth felt dry, his forehead moist.