“Why didn’t you give me the ring sooner? You know, at birth or something.”
“I really thought that They had given up on us. But then I saw him, and I knew They were back.”
I didn’t have to ask who “him” was. My stomach lurched again, only this time it was nerves, and not the good kind. I didn’t know what to say. Anything I said would betray my increasing infatuation with him, and I didn’t think Granna would respond well to that. And even if I could get a question out with an innocent voice, I didn’t want to hear the answer.
I held on fast to the image of him saving me, and clinging to me after the cat was dead; I tied myself to it like a sailor to a mast, with a storm on the horizon.
And the storm came. “He’s one of Them, Deirdre.”
I shook my head.
“I know he is. I saw him twenty years ago, and he looked just the same as he did the other day.”
She had mistaken him for someone else.
“Right before the rest of Them show up, he does. He was there for Delia.”
I managed to get a few words out. “He saved me, Granna. Did you forget that part?”
She shrugged, irritatingly nonchalant. I wanted to smack her for casually trampling over my heart. “It’s all games, Deirdre. They love games. Cruel sports. Don’t you remember the old bedtime stories? Riddles and names and trickery. And why would They want you dead, anyway? They want to steal you away.” She mistook the look on my face, and unusual sympathy crept into her voice. “Oh, don’t worry! I’ll find you another piece of iron jewelry.”
I grasped the key at my neck and thrust it toward her. “He can touch iron, Granna. You said They couldn’t touch it. Well, he can. He could touch the ring, and he gave me this. He warned me about Them.” I pushed my chair back angrily. “I don’t think he’s one of Them.”
Granna pulled the lid off her box of emotions just long enough to let a frown escape. “Are you sure he can touch iron?”
In my head, his fingers touched the skin next to the key, held my fingers, glanced against the ring.
“I’m sure.”
She actually let another frown, a deeper one, out of the box. “He must—he must be some sort of half-breed. Something—did he have eyedrops?”
My heart, which had begun to beat faster at the word ‘half-breed,’ stopped when she mentioned the drops. I didn’t have to answer; my face told her everything she wanted to know.
“He has to use the drops to see Them.” She stood up and pushed her chair in. “I’m going to have to see if I can make something that will work on him.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Do you have to?”
She looked at me again, hard. “Deirdre, everything he’s told you is a lie. They don’t have souls. They don’t have friends. They don’t love. They play. They’re big, cruel children and They want shiny new toys. You’re shiny and new. He’s playing you.”
I thought I ought to feel like crying, then, but my eyes weren’t even a little wet. Or I should be angry, or something, but I was just nothing. I was so full of nothing that it was something.
“Go and relax on the sofa. I’ll be in the workshop, and I’ll take you home when I’m done.”
I didn’t answer, because nothing had no voice. I just did what she said and retreated to the living room, reaching for the image of Luke holding me, and finding nothing.
I watched Cops reruns until the shadows shifted and lengthened over the edge of the white wicker couch. The eight-hundredth cop was slamming the eight-hundredth criminal over the back of their car when my phone rang. I looked at the number and picked it up. “Hi.”
“Capital D!” James’ voice exclaimed, distantly.
I couldn’t work up the same enthusiasm. “Sorry I didn’t call you today. I’m at—”
“Granna’s. Your mom told me. She sounds pissier than an incontinent water buffalo. Can I come over and hang out?”
I considered. I didn’t know what I wanted, but being alone wasn’t it. “That would be great.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” James said, and I heard a car door shut outside the window. “Because I’m already here and it would suck to drive back home now.”
The phone went dead in my hand, and then I heard the screen door slam. James found me in the living room, and I stood up to move a stack of holistic healing books from the other end of the sofa.
He set a large, fast-food cup on the end table. “I know Granna doesn’t make it sweet enough, so I brought you some of the real stuff from Sticky Pig.” He eyed my arm, which was clean but obviously chewed on. “Are you okay?”
He looked so normal and safe, standing there with his summer-brown arms and his Sarcasm: Just Another Service I Offer T-shirt. He looked like every summer I’d ever known and reminded me of everything I couldn’t seem to have right now. I fought valiantly with a strange rush of emotions for about one-third of a second, and then I burst into tears.
“Hey, hey!” James sat down with me on the couch and let me cry onto his sarcasm T-shirt. He didn’t ask any questions or try to get me to talk, because that’s how awesome a friend he is. Realizing that just made me cry more. And then I thought of how pathetic this whole crying jag was, which made me cry even more.
James bundled me closer as I started to shiver, his arms wrapped tightly around me like a living sweater. My teeth chattered. I finally stuttered, “I think I’m in shock.”
He reached up and wiped tears from my cheeks with the side of his writing-scrawled hand. “Does this have anything to do with the chomp marks on your arm? If you had them before, I don’t remember them. And I’ve got, like, a crazy eye for detail.”
I laughed pitifully. “If I’d had a video camera when I got them, I’d be rich. It was this giant cat-thing.” I swallowed a new batch of stupid tears and shuddered again, involuntarily. “When will the shivering stop?”
“When you calm your ass down.” He stood up and tugged on my good arm. “C’mon. You need fries, obviously.”
I let him haul me up, feeling better already. “What I need is a supernatural stun gun.”
“Maybe they’ll have one of those, too. I didn’t look closely at the daily specials.”
A thought occurred to me. “I have to tell Granna I’m going. She’s doing some sort of voodoo in her workshop.”
We headed into the hot day, following the rock step-stone path Granna had made to her workshop. Herbs and gangly flowers intruded into our way, along with their insect retinues, and I laughed when James swung wildly at a bee that came too close.
“Squealing like a little girl,” I said.
“Shut up, you!”
Granna’s voice came from inside the open door of her shop. “Is that you, James?”
James followed me into the dim blue of the workshop. “Uh-yup.” Though the workshop was lit by three exposed lightbulbs, and light fell in through the open door, it was no match for the blazing sunlight outside. I blinked until my eyes got used to the change.
“What brings you here?” Granna looked up from her main work table. She’d pushed her paint cans, brushes, and varnish to one side to make room for her latest project; presumably, the faerie equivalent of a bug bomb. Or maybe just the equivalent of insect repellent. Whatever it was smelled sharp and unpleasant, like too much air freshener sprayed in a small room.
“A little bird told me Dee was hungry.” James poked around Granna’s smaller work tables, looking at the wood plaques painted with complex patterns and prodding at a large rock tumbler. “I rode to the rescue. I know where I can find her some good saturated fats.”
Granna laughed. She liked James; but then again, everybody did. “She could use a bit of looking after right now.” Then she paused. I think she was waiting to see how much I’d told James before going on.
James picked up a stone with a hole in it and looked at Granna through the hole. “We wouldn’t want anything unnatural to carry her away, hmm?”
Granna, satisfied, went back to mercilessly ma
shing an innocent plant into a green paste. “No, we wouldn’t. Have you got anything iron on you?”
“Nope.”
Granna offered him the iron band from her wrist; it was smooth and dull, with knobs on the two ends that almost met. “This is the last bit I have. Take it.”
“I think you need it more than I do.”
She shook her head and gestured to the pile of paste. “This stuff will work a good sight better than iron when it’s done. If you’re going to be going out and about with her, you’ll need it.”
James accepted it, reluctantly, and spread the two ends of the band to fit around his wrist. “Thanks.”
Granna gestured to me with a green-muck covered pestle. “Use your head, and remember what I told you. I’ll see you later this evening. I’ll bring this over. Don’t tell your mother I’m coming or she’ll feel compelled to make a truffle cake or slaughter a pig.”
I laughed. It was too true not to.
James, at my elbow, tugged me toward the door.
“Oh.” Granna frowned at me. “And watch what you say around Delia.”
How interesting
ten
It was always noisy at the Sticky Pig, the only real restaurant in town. It was still too hot to eat outside, though, so we joined the ranks of loud, hungry people waiting to get a table. Smelling the smoky scent of barbecue and standing behind the “Please wait to be seated” sign with the smiling pig on it, I had a momentary sense of déjà vu, or missing time or something. Something about coming here so many times over so many years made me forget how old I really was now, and what I’d been doing before I walked in. James brought me back to the present by elbowing me.
“Come away from the light,” he said in a low voice. “Deirdre, come back to the land of the living, come back to us—ah! There she is, folks!”
I gave him a withering look. “I was thinking.”
“About outer space, I guess, if your dreamy, distant expression was anything to go by.” He smiled charmingly at the hostess, who was dazzled. “Deuce, please. None of that smoking crap.”
She was too smitten to respond, so I translated. “Two for non-smoking, please.”
The hostess nodded mutely and led us to a booth. We slid in on opposite sides. After she’d gone, I leaned toward James. “She was cute.”
James picked up the menu (as if he didn’t have it memorized by now) and muttered, “Not interested.” He was looking at the back of the menu; the pig on the front smiled at me from beneath its checkered apron. “Lucky day. They do have supernatural stun guns as a dinner special.”
I swatted the menu down from in front of his face. “And she was dazzled.”
He pulled it back up again, engrossed by the list of side dishes. “Not interested.”
“Why not?” I was really pushing it too hard, but I felt guilty. I was falling for Luke like a load of books out of a truck, and if I could at least get James to flirt with someone, I wouldn’t feel so much like I was betraying our best-friendship.
He lowered the menu and looked at me, eyes narrowed. “I’m interested in somebody else, for your information.” He looked away. “I wasn’t going to tell you.”
Relief washed over me. Thank you, God; may she be very pretty and all-engrossing and human.
“You know, you can tell me that sort of stuff.” Okay, the guilt came back a little bit right there because I hadn’t told him that sort of stuff. “Do I know her?”
James shrugged. “Maybe.” He brightened a bit. “She was in my science section this year.” He smiled, but not with his eyes. I looked at them intently, and he seemed to feel the need to elaborate. “Her name’s Tara.”
Funny thing, that, but as he spoke and I looked at his eyes, I felt like I saw movement shimmer around his head, like oil floating on top of water. I blinked.
“She has red hair,” James continued. The oil shimmer became more solid; juxtaposed over James’ face was an indistinct female face, hair hanging choppily down on either side of her cheeks. “Wavy. And green eyes.” A pair of gray eyes looked back at me, moody and introspective. “You’ll laugh,” he added, “Because she’s a goth chick. Black makeup and all. Spiky choker. I dig that.” But the girl in front of me, dark-haired, gray-eyed, no makeup, with a blue V-neck, wasn’t a goth chick. The girl that was shimmering out of James’ consciousness was me.
I looked away from his eyes, at the floor, and the image vanished. “She sounds interesting.”
Okay. Maybe I was delusional. Maybe I was just imagining myself floating mysteriously in the air on a cosmic television screen. But I didn’t think so. I think I read his mind.
Oh man.
This was about one thousand times harder to swallow than being able to move spoons.
The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around it. I could avoid moving spoons. I couldn’t very well avoid looking into someone’s eyes for the rest of my life. I didn’t want this.
“Deirdre!” I focused on James again. “He asked what you wanted to drink.”
The pimply waiter stood by the table, and I tried to look at him without looking at his eyes.
“Sorry,” James jumped in. “My friend here was attacked by my mother’s ill-tempered Bichon Frise earlier today and I’m afraid she’s in a bit of shock. Could you get her some sweet tea? Better bring her some fries, too.”
The waiter fled. I stared at the table.
“What is wrong with you? You’re completely spaced out.” James reached across the table and knocked my chin up with his finger. “Is this about the killer cat or the goth chick?”
I sighed miserably. “I didn’t want normal until I didn’t have it anymore.”
At that, he smiled. “Dee, you were never normal.”
His answer was too easy, like some inspirational poster. “I was never this not normal. I’m a total freak and freak-magnet, now.”
“Dee, moving clover and being hunted by evil fey doesn’t change who you are. It’s like learning to play a musical instrument. It’s just something you do. And the evil fey—well, they’re kinda like stalker-groupies. You’re still the same you underneath, no matter how big the spoons are that you learn to move or how wildly the groupies are rocking the van as you drive away. The only thing that can change you during all this is you.”
I frowned at him, careful not to study his eyes too closely. “When did you get so smart?”
He tapped his forehead. “Brain transplant. They put in a whale’s. I’m passing all my classes with my eyes closed now, but I just can’t get over this craving for krill.” He shrugged. “And I feel sorry for the whale that got my brain. Probably swimming around Florida now trying to catch glimpses of girls in bikinis.”
I laughed. It was impossible to talk about anything serious with James, but it was impossible to be upset, too. I think I probably took him for granted. “Why do you believe me?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because it’s crazy.”
James’ eyes darkened, and for a second I thought I saw something more to good old safe James. “Maybe I’m crazy as well.”
By the time James dropped me off, it was nearly dark. Granna hadn’t come by the house yet, or if she had, Mom didn’t mention it. I wondered how long Granna’s green muck would take to prepare. And where she’d learned to make it.
I escaped from Mom’s grip before she could question me too closely and put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover up the chew marks. As I walked back into the twilight kitchen, Mom looked up from one of the bar stools. She pushed a mug of hot cocoa across the island toward me. A white flag. I accepted it without hesitation. For starters, I’d forgotten how she’d left me at the church; also, her made-from-scratch cocoa covered a multitude of sins.
She looked into the steam of her cocoa as it swirled upward, looking young and pretty in the dim ochre light of the kitchen. Knowing Mom, she probably painted the walls ochre for just that reason. “Did your gig go well?”
So
it was to be the cozy approach.
“Very well. Granna and I had a good time together. She—” I stopped, realizing that Granna had asked me not to tell Mom she was coming. “She has my dress at her house. I accidentally got some soda on it and she’s going to clean it.”
“And James got you some dinner?”
I took a sip of the cocoa. Dark chocolate sludge slid down my throat and for a moment I forgot what the question was. Mom had to repeat it. I took another sip. There was a hint of orange in there. “At the Sticky Pig.”
“I’d rather you spend time with James than Luke.”
I frowned, but didn’t look up. It was one thousand times easier to cross Mom when you didn’t look at her. “Why?”
“For one thing, I know James. I know his family. I know you’re all right when you’re with him.”
“I’m all right when I’m with Luke.” I thought of him sliding the dagger silently into the cat’s jaw, sticking a blade through its brain without a second’s hesitation.
“He’s too old for you. And he doesn’t go to your school.” The last sentence was a bit indecisive. She was guessing.
I looked up, right at her. Her weakness lay in her indecision. I wondered how many times I’d had an opening in a discussion like this and missed it because I was too complacent.
“You’re right. He’s only here for the summer, and he’s a senior. I know he’s a little old. But I’m not doing anything stupid. And he’s a gentleman. Is there anything wrong with that?”
Mom blinked. I don’t think she knew what to do. Had I ever rationally contradicted her before? Ever? She drank her cocoa, still young and pretty, but now with a glaring chink in her armor.
I could have waited for her to say something, but I didn’t. I pressed home my victory. “And I have my cell phone with me all the time, so you can always get me. Don’t I always answer it? You raised me to know what to do. You’re going to have to trust me.”
Oh, damn, that was good! I washed my smile down with some cocoa. That was killer.
Mom sighed. “I suppose you’re right. But I do want to know whenever you’re out with him.” She stood up and went to the kitchen to rinse out her mug, her head framed by the dark night window above the sink. “What does James think about this?”
Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception Page 10