The look on her face scared me; I snatched my hand back. “She gave it to me on my birthday.”
“You’re wearing her ring,” Mom repeated. “You’ve been wearing it all along. Since before the coma.”
I shrank back from this wild-eyed creature that had taken the place of my mother. Luke’s hand on my back steadied me. “She gave it to me, Mom. In the driveway.”
Mom pointed at it wordlessly, her finger shaking, and then made her hand into a fist. Finally, she formed the words and spat them at me. “She’s dead.”
Strangely, I thought of the emotion I ought to feel without feeling it, as impartial as a National Geographic field researcher, carefully watching the events and chronicling them in a notebook. Deirdre finds that she is saddened by the news of her grandmother’s death, and moreover, suddenly fears for the rest of her family and friends.
But I didn’t actually feel those things. I knew that I ought to, but I felt absolutely nothing at all, like I’d just walked into the kitchen and Mom had told me off for being late.
“Did you hear me?” Mom didn’t even seem to notice that Luke was there. “She’s dead. The hospital called us. Your father’s on the phone with them now.”
“How?” I finally managed.
Mom’s voice shook. “Does it matter?”
“Terry?” Dad’s voice, deep and calming, called from the other room. “Could you come here a second?”
Mom whirred to the other room; the kitchen seemed empty and mute without her frenzied presence. I didn’t want to look at Luke. I didn’t know why. Maybe because he would look at my face and see that there were no tears, that I was a terrible person. In my pocket, my phone beeped a text message; it didn’t realize that this wasn’t an ordinary night, and that a moment of silence was called for.
Luke reached out and caught my arm, turning me toward him. “You can cry later, Dee. The tears’ll come later.” He looked at me, eyes narrowed. “I have to go find what she was working on. Something to protect your family. I’ll bring it back here.”
Fear rose up where grief wouldn’t. “Don’t go. Please don’t go.”
“You say that now, but how would you feel if the hospital called and it was your father?” He tipped my chin up with his finger. “That’s what I thought.”
I felt tears prick my eyes, but for the wrong reasons. I let him kiss my mouth gently and hug me before he let himself out the kitchen door.
In the other room, I heard my parents fighting; Dad talking in his low voice, and Mom screaming at him. I stood alone in the dim yellow kitchen and took my cell phone from my pocket. One unread text message.
It was from James, and like half of my messages, it had been delivered late—it was sent three hours previously. The subject line was that of all our epic texts—the line we used for things too serious to talk about in person: deep thoughts.
I opened it.
d. i love u.
I sank down onto the tiles and put my head in my hands, listening to my mother screaming at my father and wondering when it would all start to hurt.
Finally, I worked up my courage and dialed James’ number, trying to plan what to say when he picked up. It rang and rang, until I heard his voice: You’ve reached James’ cell phone. By dialing this number you’ve increased your coolness level by ten points. Add another ten by leaving a message after the beep. Ciao.
I hung up. I’d never gotten his voice mail before—no matter how crazy the time was or where he was, he’d always picked up.
I felt alone.
Book Four
The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone—
In the ranks of death you will find him.
—“The Minstrel Boy”
sixteen
I was having one of those dreams. Where I wasn’t sure if I was awake or not. It felt like I was awake, lying in my bed. But my head was still fuzzy as if I was sleeping, and the voice that sang to me was vague and dreamy.
The voice went up and down the scale, not unpleasantly, singing in no fixed measure, whispering to me that the name Deirdre meant “sorrow.” In the foggy way of dreams, I recognized the story of yet another Deirdre. This third Deirdre was betrothed to the King of Ulster, even though she was in love with someone else. Deirdre eloped with the hot young thing, Naois, who was her true love, thoroughly pissing the king off in the process. The king pursued her, had Naois and his brothers killed, and then stole Deirdre away to be his wife. Deirdre, stricken with grief, threw herself from his carriage and smashed her head on a rock, killing herself. The breathy voice of my dream sang that all Deirdres come to bad ends.
At least Naois’ Deirdre was clever enough to kill herself before it got any worse. All these old Irish legends ended in tragedy; what did I expect now that I was living one? Come away, human child, whispered the voice in breathy timbre, come away from the pain of the world.
It was like some kind of supernatural version of those “stop smoking” mind-control tapes you listen to while sleeping.
I opened my eyes. I felt like crap—I ached like I’d been lifting trains the night before. My grandmother had been killed by the faeries, my best friend was in love with me, my boyfriend was a soulless assassin for an otherworldly schizophrenic, and my pillow was wet.
Ew. Why is my pillow wet? I sat up hurriedly, looking at my surroundings with distaste. Oh, ten kinds of gross. My sheets were wet. My pillowcase was wet. The bedside table was covered with perfectly round beads of water. Everywhere I looked, I saw a layer of dew, coating every surface with scented condensation. My eyes lifted to the window, which stood wide open, and I lifted my wet fingers to my nose. They reeked of thyme.
What the heck is going on? I looked down at Rye, who still lay on the floor by my bed, morning light from the window reflecting brilliantly in the dew on his coat. “Some friggin’ guard dog you are. So, are you on Their side or mine?”
Outside, very close, I heard a laugh, high and light, halfway to a tune. I leapt out of bed and leaned out the window so fast that the sill heaved the breath out of me. The morning sun forced my eyes into a squint, but I thought I saw a smudge of darkness blink out of the corner of my vision, far below my window, gone too fast for me to say if it had really been there or not. I lifted my hands from the windowsill and looked at them; petals were stuck on my palms. Poppies, maybe.
Friggin’ sketchy faeries. I was going to smell like a bag of potpourri left in an Italian restaurant for the rest of the day. Picking petals off my skin, I knocked the rest of the blooms to the ground outside, frowning at the empty yard. I retreated back into my room and retrieved my phone from the bedside table.
James still didn’t pick up, and his voice mailbox was full, so I tried Luke’s number. It rang and rang before making a strange static sound and disconnecting.
I stared at the phone in my hand and observed how white my knuckles were, pressing out against my skin. There could be a thousand reasons why neither was picking up, but about nine hundred of them made my stomach roll unpleasantly.
Feeling distinctly unsettled, I turned to go downstairs, and found myself looking directly into a pair of enormous green eyes.
“Holy crap.”
It took me a moment to realize that the eyes were Delia’s, and that they only appeared enormous because they were so close. Of all Delia’s talents, I hadn’t thought the ability to be soundless was one of them.
Delia handed me the phone. “Phone for you.”
I tried not to look too hopeful as I took it, but she’d turned before I had time to look too pathetic and closed the door behind her. I lifted the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
I didn’t immediately recognize the voice, but the fact that it wasn’t Luke depressed me hugely. “Hello? Is this Dee?”
Then the voice clicked in my mind; it was one I hadn’t heard in a while: Peter, James’ older brother. “Peter? Yeah, it’s me. I didn’t expect you to call.”
There was a pause. “I didn’t call. Your aunt called me.”
; I frowned at the closed bedroom door, wondering if I’d open it to find Delia crouched on the other side. “Okaaaay. That’s weird … how did she have your number?”
“I’m not in California. I’m at my parents.”
There was something off in the way he said it that made me realize I hadn’t been listening properly to his tone until then. “Hey. Is something wrong? When did you get in?”
“I flew in from California last night. God, Dee, you haven’t heard? Mom and Dad didn’t call you?”
Every so often, I know what someone’s going to say before they say it. This was one of those moments, and I sank down on the edge of the bed, gripping the comforter with one hand. I knew I was going to need to sit down to hear what was coming. “Heard what?”
“James—” The word was strangled. Peter paused to regroup, and when he continued, his voice was back in control. “He had an accident on the way back from his gig last night. He—uh—he hit a tree.”
I bowed my head down, one hand squeezed into a fist so tight my nails bit into my palm, and the other pressing the phone against my ear. I made myself ask, “How is he?”
“The car is totaled, Dee. The left side’s just … gone. The police, they had dogs out last night, they’re still looking for the—for James.”
I knew what he stopped himself from saying—“the body.” So it was bad, then. I felt suddenly sick at the idea of James’ car, his life, crushed beyond recognition. How many times had we parked in the very-farthest-away spot in a lot so that no one would open their car doors into his paint? All for nothing.
I swallowed. “He wasn’t in the car?”
Peter was silent a long, long minute, and then he said, voice breaking, “Dee, they think he crawled out. They think he crawled out and died somewhere. There’s blood everywhere—I saw it. God, Dee!”
My nails dug into my skin. I wanted to say something to comfort him, but it seemed false coming from someone who needed comfort themselves. “Pete—I don’t know what to say.” It felt horribly inadequate. We both loved James—I should have had something more insightful to say.
Then I thought of what I wanted to ask. “Will you help me look for him?”
Peter hesitated. “Dee—you didn’t see how much blood —I—God.”
“If he’s alive, I can’t just sit here.”
“Dee.” Peter’s voice shook, and when he spoke again, it was in simple, clipped sentences, like I was a little kid he was trying to make understand. “He’s dead. There was too much blood. They’re looking in the river now. They didn’t even tell us to keep our hopes up. He’s dead. They said he was.”
No. No, he wasn’t dead. He just wasn’t. I wouldn’t believe it until I saw his body. “Tell me where it was, then. I want to go.”
“Dee, you don’t. I wish I hadn’t gone. I can’t get it out of my head.”
“Tell me where.”
I didn’t think he was going to, but he did. I wrote it down on the back of the envelope from Thornking-Ash and hung up. Now I had to find some way to get there.
I dialed Luke’s number, letting it ring twenty times before I hung up. There was some sort of large gooey lump in the back of my throat that I kept trying to swallow; it wouldn’t go away, and only seemed to get bigger when Luke didn’t pick up. Giving up trying to swallow it, I put on some crappy jeans and my scuffed Doc Martens. I felt the need for busyness, the desire to prepare myself for the search. And all the while I got ready, I was amazed at how cold I felt inside, how calculating. I was watching the entire thing on Dee TV from a million miles away.
I went downstairs, pausing at the sound of raised voices in the living room.
“Terry, you aren’t going to cater your own mother’s wake. Let Julia or Erica do it.” Delia’s voice was condescending and loud as usual; she took her coffee black with an extra scoop of superiority.
“Like hell I won’t!” Mom’s voice was near-scream. “I’m not having my family fly in to eat soggy canapés over my mother’s coffin.”
“Our mother.”
Mom laughed, high and wild. “You’re a piece of work!”
I didn’t really want to walk in on that right now. Maybe I could just steal the car while they were fighting. Maybe Dad would take me. I edged into the kitchen and found Dad swallowing the last of a cup of coffee and stuffing his wallet into his back pocket. He looked hunted.
“Dee, are you okay?”
The stupid lump was still there. I talked around it. “James—”
“Delia told us.”
Of course she did. Probably smiling the whole time. I wondered if she had a soul. “I want to go look for him.”
Dad set down his coffee cup and looked at me. I realized I must look crazy, standing there with my wild eyes and the crumpled Thornking-Ash envelope held tightly in my hand. His voice was gentle as he tapped his cell phone on the table. “Dee, I talked to his parents while you were upstairs. They said he was dead.”
“They haven’t found his body.” I knew I sounded like a stubborn kid, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I want to look for him.”
“Dee.”
“Please take me. Just let me see the car.”
Dad’s eyes were full of pity. “Dee, you don’t really want to see that. Trust me. Just let the police do their work.”
“Peter told me they’d already started looking in the river! They aren’t looking for him anymore, not really! He’s my best friend, Dad! I don’t need protecting!”
Dad just looked at me and shook his head.
I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been refused anything before—because I’d never asked. If I’d had my own car, if I’d had my own license, I could’ve been gone already. “I hate being treated like a kid! I hate it!”
It felt so weak. Not at all what I needed to scream to make myself feel better, but it was all I could think of. I stormed outside and sat on the back step, picking at a thread at the bottom of my jeans. It seemed wrong for the sky to be so blue, for the summer sun to feel so good on my skin, like I could be fooled into thinking this day was just like any other summer day. It wasn’t. They would never be the same.
I couldn’t just sit here.
I took out my cell phone and scrolled down through the calls I’d received until I found Sara’s number. I only hesitated a second before I hit send.
“Yeah?” That one word, said in Sara’s usual voice, pulled me back to the ground.
“This is Dee.”
“Ohmygod, Dee, I heard about him. James Morgan, I mean. God, he was on the news! I am so sorry.”
Weirdly, her emphatic words brought me closer to tears than any I’d heard that day. I swallowed them. “I don’t think it was an accident.”
“Oh—whoa—what? You think he was drinking?”
“No. I think the faeries did it.”
There was a pause, and I was afraid she had decided that Freckle Freak was just a sketchy boy. Then: “Shit. No way. Seriously?”
Relief surged through me. “Seriously. They haven’t found the body yet, so he could still be alive. I want to go look for him, but my parents are being all—”
“—crappy about it. Yeah. Sure. I can see that. Parents suck.”
I gathered courage. “I was wondering if, maybe, since you have your license, if—”
Sara surprised me and finished my sentence. “Give me, like, two seconds. Where do you live? Yeah. I gotta get out of the house anyway, I’m going crazy. Gimme two seconds. Promise.”
Two seconds actually meant twenty minutes, but Sara did come. She stopped at the end of the driveway like I’d told her to, and I ran out to her old Ford Taurus before my parents could realize she was there. We stopped a few miles away and consulted a stained map book from the back seat, tracing the crooked back roads we’d have to take to get to the scene of the accident.
“That’s the middle of super-nowhere. What the crap was he doing back there?” Sara asked, but I didn’t have an answer. In awkward silence we headed out of town and dr
ove down endless identical Virginia back roads: narrow, twisting paths dappled by the hidden sun. What short glimpses of the sky I saw revealed brilliant blue, broken by perfectly white clouds. I couldn’t believe anything bad could happen on such a beautiful day.
I hunched in the passenger seat, scrolling through every option on my phone. Received calls, missed calls, dialed calls. Voice mail, text messages. The letters blurred in front of my eyes, meaningless strings of words to my churning mind. Then my fingers stopped and I gazed dully at the message I’d unconsciously surfed to.
d. i love you.
I blinked my eyes dry. I had to keep my cool.
“Thanks for taking me,” I said finally, breaking the silence.
Sara seemed relieved that I had spoken. “Oh, yeah, no problem. I mean, seriously, what was your parents’ problem anyway?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess … my grandmother died last night, too.”
“Wow. That’s crap timing.” Sara stopped at a stop sign and craned her neck to look both ways.
I swallowed, the lump still stuck in my throat. I didn’t know what to say.
“I think it’s nice that you’re sad about her,” Sara said.
I looked at her, eyebrow raised, quizzical. I wasn’t offended, but it seemed like such a stupid thing to say.
“My grandmother—the one I have left, I mean—she’s invisible.” Sara shrugged. “It’s like she’s from another planet. She doesn’t watch movies, she doesn’t know any of the music I listen to. We talk about the weather and stupid shit like that, ’cause I can’t think of anything else she notices. The other day I thought about her and I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing she’d ever worn. How awful is that? I feel bad that I don’t feel anything about her, but it’s just like she’s—like she’s already dead. The world changed and left her behind.”
It was the most personal exchange we’d ever had, and it was weird. I felt like I ought to say something to clinch the moment, to forever lock us in the bond of friendship. But I couldn’t think of anything. Too late, I said, “Makes you afraid to get old, doesn’t it?”
Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception Page 18