A Taste of Silver

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A Taste of Silver Page 22

by S. B. Roozenboom

“Oh yeah, offer to go in his room,” Drake laughed. He’d quit the Sleeping Beauty dance and was standing behind Lea, running his hands up and down his stomach—the saddest excuse for a striptease I’d ever witnessed.

  “Rose, I’d be careful.” Lea grinned, ignoring the fact he was being felt up. “I can afford new tile, a new couch even if it comes up, but a broken bed—”

  “Alright,” Hayden scolded, starting to actually sound angry as his face became a black and red display again. “The next one to shoot a comment like that is going through the window. Am I clear?”

  They snickered. “We’re just warning her.” Drake abandoned his partner and skipped back to the counter. “Like any friend would.”

  “She doesn’t need that kind of warning!” Hayden took a drink of his water to cool his temper—and facial color. “If it were you, Drake, then she’d need that kind of warning.”

  Lea snorted. “Nice return.” He fell back on the couch, exhausted from dancing.

  “You never know. Could be me.” Drake winked in my direction.

  I flushed. Hayden saw his little gesture and shot a pillow across the room. It hit his roommate so hard that not only did I hear the pillow slap his chest, but it knocked him right off the counter.

  Drake landed with a rattling thud on the kitchen floor. “Whoooa,” he moaned.

  “Boy,” Lea chuckled as he glanced over his shoulder. “Old Mrs. Blacker will’ve heard that one.”

  “If her hearing aid’s on,” Hayden mumbled, picking the last shrimp off his plate.

  “Yeah,” Drake muttered, still laying there. “I can hear her yelling through the kitchen floor.”

  “No way,” Lea laughed. “What’s she saying?”

  “Um.” Drake laid still. “She’s saying that… Hayden’s a sucker for a hot girl—”

  “That does it.” Hayden was off the couch. He strode over to my chair and bent down. “Are you done?” He nodded quickly at my plate.

  I set it aside. “Yeah but—hey!” I gasped as he scooped me right out of my seat.

  “Ooooohhhhh,” the boys cooed together, eyes glued to the scene.

  “Ooh, Rose, you in trouble,” Lea teased.

  “Oh no, Rose! He’s taking you away!” Drake crawled off the tile floor, onto the carpet. “Hope you come back alive.”

  “Yup. Look now boys.” Hayden walked us to the door nearest the kitchen. “Say goodnight, Rose.”

  “Uh.” I was dazed, quickly obsessing over the fact that he was holding me. Not just touching, but holding. In his arms, warm fingers wrapped around my back and thighs. “Night?” I gave the boys a quick, probably very bemused, glance.

  “Have fun!” Lea waved.

  “Oh, Hayden don’t forget to use—”

  Hayden shut the door.

  I looked around the new room we stood in. It definitely passed for teenage boy room, though I only knew that from seeing Scott’s and reading a few of mom’s home décor magazines. Band posters were tacked to the walls. CD shelves lined half the west wall next to the closet. Grey sheets were strewn across the bed. Drawers were open, clothes littering the floor. His favorite colors were obviously black, red, and grey.

  I spotted a Kanye West poster above the bed. “Nice poster,” I commented. “You never told me you like Kanye West.”

  He didn’t reply. Turning my head, I felt my lungs close up. Our faces were just inches apart, his breath brushing my cheeks. He smelled like peppermint. “Um.” I cleared my throat, looking towards the ground. If I stared at him much longer, I might give into that urge I’d had early.

  He set me down. “Yeah. Kanye West’s pretty good.”

  “Wow.” I shuffled towards his CD collection. The bottom half was a mix of music and more books. Several Ne-Yo and Lil Wayne CDs sat on the second shelf. “You’re kind of a hip-hop, rap person, huh?”

  “Eh. I’m pretty eclectic.” He started picking clothes off the floor. “Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t exactly expecting to have you in here, but seeing as Dumb and Dumber had caffeine or something today, I didn’t feel like there was much choice.”

  “Yeah,” I laughed, pulling out a CD from a band I’d never heard of before called Blackened Footprints. “Well, they’re nice overall. I like them.” I liked that they were actually funny-funny, where as people like Derek tended to be arrogant or stupid-funny (not attractive).

  “Me too.” He stuffed clothes into random drawers. “When they aren’t all hyper. You can tell it’s been a while since we’ve had a girl at the apartment.”

  “I’d rather not know.” I was surprised by the sudden burst of jealousy inside me. The idea of Hayden bringing home a different girl, for some super skinny tan and blonde chick to be standing where I was… I hated it. I hated it more than the idea of Paul flirting with a barista girl at his new job.

  My face must’ve been showing these thoughts, because Hayden said, “I didn’t mean me. Drake and Lea are the ones that bring girls home.” He wadded a pair of jeans and tossed them at a hamper by the door. “And I don’t blame you for not wanting to know.”

  “Oh.” Secretly, his comment made me smile. Yay! He wasn’t the new-girlfriend-every-week type. Sitting on a black stool by the CD shelves, I spotted a framed picture of a man and woman on the stand beside his bed. “Who are they?”

  “Huh?”

  “Them.” I pointed. They looked familiar.

  He turned. “Oh. That’s Kent and Emily. Drake’s parents.” He picked up the picture, offering it to me. “They raised me after my mom left.”

  My fingers held the frame carefully. I stared at the couple, almost positive they’d been the pair on his Myspace page under his friends list. The woman had a mystic aura about her, something too flawless about her face. “Is she… Emily’s fey, huh?”

  “Yup.” He straightened out his bed sheets, then sat down. “She came to the human world a hundred years ago after a son of the Whirellas court broke her heart. She developed a love for human music, started hanging out at a music school in Iowa. She never joined any classes or anything, but she’d sneak in to watch the students play,” –he smiled— “She in particular liked a young clarinet player named Kent Versoza.”

  “Awww. That’s so cute.” I ran my thumb over the outline of Emily’s face and rippling black hair. There was just a hint of neon green against her blue eyes. “What kind of faerie is she?”

  “She descended from a long line of Paradidan de Beha Faeries.”

  “In human, please?” I laughed.

  He grinned. “In human it would mean, Birds of Paradise.”

  “Oooh. She’s a bird faerie, then? Or plant?” Mom used to fancy the Bird of Paradise plants, one of her numerous flower fetishes once she got over her obsession with yellow roses.

  “No, no. Bird,” Hayden confirmed.

  “That’s so awesome.” Her heart-shaped face smiled out of the photograph, and I wondered, “Does she still look like this?”

  Hayden’s smile dimmed. “Yes. She doesn’t age. People that see her and Kent together think he’s a cradle robber.”

  I flinched. Harsh. “How old is Kent?”

  “Well… he’ll be forty next Saturday.”

  Oh man. “And she still looks like this? Like she’s barely twenty years old?”

  “Yeah.” He squeezed the edges of the mattress. “That’s the problem with humans and faeries; one will age while the other doesn’t… it’s a heartbreaking outcome for the pairs that want to stay together.”

  “Wow. Poor thing.”

  Kent’s lips were twisted into a smile. If you crossed Pete Wentz with Billy Joe Armstrong, you’d get college boy Kent. The young man looked like he’d never been happier, like no woman could mean as much to him as the woman he was holding.

  It was so cute, but so sad.

  Hayden took the frame as I handed it back. “But like Emily used to say: faeries were meant to be nature’s guardians. As long as earth and light and shadows thrive, so will the faeries of the universe. She’ll be a
lright when Kent’s time comes.”

  A prickly thought came to mind. “Do you not age, either?”

  “Me?” He shook his head. “I’m not immortal. Drake isn’t, either.”

  “What about Lea?” I narrowed an eye, skeptical.

  “Lea is an interesting story, actually.” Hayden sprawled out across the bed. “Lea—don’t tell him I told you this cause he’ll deny it—is a prince.”

  My brows shot up. “No way!”

  “Yup.” He nodded.

  “A prince like you?” Two in one household. Wow.

  He cringed at my words. “Not exactly. He’s a prince of the Whirellas court, heir to a southern air kingdom known as, Aklès Khandi. But when his father started bossing him around and telling him what princes can and can’t do, he did what he knew the mortals did when they were pressured… he rebelled.”

  “And escaped to the human world?” I guessed.

  “Yup. Like Adrian, Lea left the throne.” Hayden stared at his ceiling. There was a narrow crack creeping out of one corner. “He knew his father wouldn’t follow or have control of him here.”

  “That’s wild.” I placed a hand under my chin, balancing my elbow on my leg. “So then, how old is Lea?”

  “Younger than most, actually. He’s only about a hundred and five.”

  My jaw dropped. “Woooow.”

  “Crazy, ain’t it? The fey consider you a little kid at that age.” He folded his arms behind his head, giving me a cricked smile.

  His whole pose made my insides buzz. My mind wandered, picturing myself nestled against his side, head on his arm. “So, uh.” I quickly thought up another question to distract my brain. “How do you get to the faerie world?”

  “Very, very, carefully.” He sat up, dreadlocks falling over his shoulder as he opened a bedside drawer. He flicked a finger at me.

  I obeyed, seating myself on the floor beside his legs. He pulled out a mapsized sheet of paper and opened it up. At first, I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. It was just a big triangle drawn over the lower region of the Atlantic. It took me a minute to realize it was connecting the tip of Florida with Puerto Rico and Bermuda.

  “The Bermuda Triangle?” I crinkled my face, puzzled. Was he about to go all Discovery Channel on me?

  “You ever wonder why planes and ships go missing here?” he said mischievously. “Why no one seems to be able to navigate that well?”

  I gasped. “That. Is. Insane!” This was ten times better than Discovery Channel! “So, what happens? Where’s the portal?”

  He pointed to the triangle’s center. A single green dot rested under his finger. “Here. Smack dab in the middle. Thousands of years ago, when faeries were first in contact with humans, the portal was no problem… but they were quickly learning their differences, and as man became more involved in metals and machines and cities, the first big disputes among human and fey happened.

  “Now humans didn’t know where the fey came from, and the fey planned to keep it that way. They put a field around the portal when they decided it was time to go home. They stretched it for miles out, so that humans could never find, trace, or map it, thus the Bermuda Triangle was created.”

  “That is so amazing.” I ran my pinky over the tiny green dot. “Is the island really small, then?”

  “Oh yeah. Perfectly round, you could probably walk the whole perimeter in less than half hour.”

  A black dot in the triangle near Bermuda grabbed my attention. It might’ve just been a tiny splotch of ink on paper, but something about it made the hair on my neck stick up straight. “Hey, what’s that one for?”

  A low growl rumbled in Hayden’s throat. “… FADE.”

  “FADE?” The word felt funny on my tongue. It wasn’t a word I was expecting unless he was steering towards a conversation about laundry detergents—which my frizzed neck hair said was not the case. “What is FADE?”

  His fingers tightened around the map. “The Faerie Alliance of Disposal and Escape.”

  “I… I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Good.” He almost sneered. “Be glad.”

  “So, does that mean you aren’t going to tell me who they are?”

  “To be plain? Faerie hunters.” He shrugged, glaring at the tiny black dot. “The first members of FADE were born in the early settlements, back when people started coming to America. The disputes between immortal and human started then. The faeries made enemies as they stole food and newborns, haunted nearby forests. When they decided to leave, heavy spells were cast over the humans so they wouldn’t remember the encounters. Faeries were to be wiped from the human mind.

  “But not all of them were charmed. Those that the faeries didn’t catch remembered, and these people despised them so much for their attacks, stealing, and ‘betrayal’ they wondered what it would take to get revenge, to destroy them for good so humans could shape the New World without interference.

  “FADE started as just a group, a gathering that felt faeries should come to an end. Then more people came forward with their memories, and their group turned into a sort of business, which eventually moved here,”—he pointed to the black spot— “to a deserted island in the triangle. About the same size as the portal’s island.”

  A big tower-like building on rocky shores is what I pictured when I thought of FADE’s island—like what was found in one of those secret agent, superhero kind of movies. “So it’s kind of like faerie KKK?” That sounded awful.

  Hayden nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it. They killed many faeries leaving for the portal—another reason not many are around today and prefer to be consistently hidden from human view.”

  I estimated the amount of space between the green dot and the black. Really, they weren’t that far apart. “So they know where the portal is, then? FADE knows how to find them?”

  “See that’s what really amazes me.” He actually laughed. “They don’t have a bloody clue where it is. They just know it’s in the triangle somewhere.”

  “They’re this close and they’ve no idea? After all this time?” That was amazing.

  “Nope.” He set the map in my lap, laying back on his comforter. “I mean, they’ve sent groups out to patrol the triangle, but more than half the time they either get lost at sea or—if they come too close—the Guardian disposes of them.”

  “The Guardian?” I dared to move up onto his bed, sitting crisscross beside him.

  “Head portal guard, basically,” he clarified. “There are numerous guards hiding in the waters and air near the island, but only one main guard who looks after the portal called the Guardian—or if you’re fey, he’s called, Wirenes fa Serpendia.”

  Folding up the map, I set it on Hayden’s chest. “Have you ever been to the portal?”

  “Never.” He grimaced, scratching his neck. “I try to avoid all this faerie stuff as much as possible.”

  I pulled my legs to my chest, letting my chin touch my knees. “I think it’s absolutely amazing.” Why he wanted to avoid such a brilliant, complex world that sounded so nature-friendly and well controlled, I didn’t understand. Of course, my conscience reminded me there was probably plenty I didn’t know… yet.

  Hayden tilted his head to the side, my direction. He looked like he was going to say something, but decided not to last minute. We stared in silence. Thoughtlessly, I reached over and touched the hand he had perched on his stomach. His skin turned to silver and he nearly jerked away, then stopped.

  I ran two fingers over the back of his palm, still fascinated. He was a creature right out of my fantasy novels, out of the books atop the fireplace in the living room written by ordinary, non-magic folk who could do nothing but dream of the world he was apart of. The overused phrase, too good to be true, came to mind again.

  The silver gradually started to disappear from his skin. Instead of being attracted to my touch, it seemed to repel until I was brushing his human hand. His fingers turned over and curled around mine, making my insides pirouet
te with joy.

  He whispered, “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

  His words stung. “Why not?”

  “Because. I’d jump off a cliff if something happens. All it would take is a paper cut or something stupid, and… you’d end up like Harvey.” He visibly swallowed, eyes twinkling. “Fey weren’t meant to be with humans, Rose. That’s why we have two separate worlds.”

  Ok, those words were like knives. They left me dumbfounded. My gaze fell, and I couldn’t find a comeback. Was that really the reason for two different universes, for the Sight and all that? We weren’t meant to coexist together? To be together?

  “Rosie,” he said quietly.

  I growled. “Don’t call me that.”

  He brought my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles. “I didn’t say us isn’t a possibility, I just… I think we should be careful. Take this one day at a time for now.” He blinked—or maybe he was batting his lashes again. “Is that ok?”

  Whatever is was it worked. “Yeah. I suppose.”

  His smile evolved to a grin. “Good.”

  I wanted to correct him, say: good for now. What exactly did one day at a time mean anyway? I needed a book on how to decode boys and their words. But his happiness was contagious, and somehow I was smiling, too. If he was happy, I was happy. For now.

  18) Wedding Shower

  H

  ayden pulled into the driveway exactly a quarter to nine. The minute his lights hit my Mitsubishi, I saw the curtains in the living room jerk aside. Dad’s face appeared and disappeared in a flash, like a ghost. “I think your dad’s waiting for you.” Hayden watched the window, unblinking.

  I laughed wickedly. “Be glad he’s not at the front door yet.”

  “I’m going to get an earful Monday.” He rested his wrist on the top of the steering wheel, head pressed against the seat. Somehow, he didn’t sound too worried about it. “Have you even told him I’m going with you tomorrow for the shower thing?”

  My answer was a sheepish grin.

  He lowered his eyelids. “Well that figured.”

  “Sorry. Trying to keep his blood pressure at a minimum.” I gathered my purse off the floor and released my seatbelt. “I’ll probably tell him… maybe.”

 

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