I sighed. All I wanted was to spend the day napping, eating, and maybe enjoying a tiny bit of this damn event before it ended. But I had to make sure Vivi was going to be okay, and figure out what to do about protecting my friends from Murmur. Putting in another volunteer shift of picking up trash or lighting lamps was a distraction I did not need. Dammit.
Worrying about all these things meant that I was wide awake when I reached Free Radicals. I wanted to be alone and quiet for even a little bit before Morph awoke. I found a chair that wasn’t too wet and a towel that was dry enough to finish the job, and settled into it, sinking down to cradle the back of my head. Silence sat with me, a friend close enough to be comfortable without words, and I watched the light inching toward full sunrise as it dabbed color back into the world. I pulled up one knee and my other foot in the grass wiggled in the wet blades.
It felt like I’d been here at Morph for a lifetime. Somehow it didn’t seem possible that just a few days ago I hadn’t even met any of the friends sleeping in the big canvas tent behind me. I realized with a little jolt that by this time tomorrow, it would all be ending. This colorful, ragtag little village of creative weirdos would be taken down, piece by piece, loaded into cars and moving trucks and re-purposed buses. It would be scattered across the Eastern seaboard until nothing remained here but empty fields marked by tamped-down grass slowly unbending and the fading traces of tire tracks in the dirt. Like it or not, I’d be tossed back into the real world, scratching some kind of survival out of someplace baked in a crust of hot asphalt and studded with concrete and glass and steel. My job would be to keep myself fed and off the street at night for one more day, and another, and another. After this, it seemed so long ago.
But then, everything that had happened last night also felt unreal. Just a vivid dream, except it was one that had left physical reminders on my skin. My brain was already coping by blurring the edges and putting some distance in there, trying to make it all less bizarre and figuring out how to fit it into my definition of reality. Good old brain. Of course, my definition of reality was really getting a workout this weekend, so chances were good that all these events weren’t going to get rewritten in my mind the way I hoped they would be for most of the people here.
I dozed a little, drifting off for a few minutes at a time without realizing it and then snapping awake as I remembered that there was still work left to do this weekend, struggling to focus on it and think through to some kind of plan. But it was so hard. I was so tired, and I had run out of knowing what to do next.
The tent flap rustled the grass behind me, and I glanced around to see Cherry emerge, rumpled and yawning and wearing a blanket like a cloak. She mumbled a greeting as she passed me and wandered down the path the same way I’d gone earlier. When she returned, she also looked like the walk had woken her up a bit. “Want company?” She dragged another chair over beside me.
“Sure. Sleep well?”
“Barely moved. I think I’m going to need about a week of that to start feeling normal again.”
“Sounds like paradise to me.”
She huddled in her blanket wrap and rubbed at puffy eyes. “I feel like I got beat with the tired stick. Shit. Did all that craziness really go down last night?”
“Yup.”
We sat in silence for a few moments. Cherry turned her head, studying me. “Were you out here because you’re thinking about what still has to get done?”
I nodded. “Kinda worked out that way.” I met her eyes and admitted, “I’m out of ideas.”
She chewed the corner of her lip. “We’ve got to do something to help Vivi. So I guess at some point we can go back to the fairy circle and see if they’ve drummed up any kind of cure.” She said it like the words tasted bad in her mouth. “That’s about it, right?”
“There’s a little more,” I said. “For me to do, anyway. I have to go to the fairy circle and pay for the help they gave us fighting the bogeys and sirins last night. And I need to--”
“Back up the truck a sec.” Cherry’s eyes sparked. “What do you mean you have to ‘pay for the help’?”
It took me a moment to rewind my memory of what I’d just said. “Pay...oh! Um...well, yeah. They sent in reinforcements after their fight was over.”
“Shit, Mari. What did you do?” She was really upset. It caught me off guard.
“Nothing,” I protested. “I mean--yes. I made a deal with them. But it’s nothing. Just some kind of delivery errand. I carry something across to--preserve its form, is what they said? Hand it off, they see me back through the door, bam, done.” When I said it out loud to someone else like that, I realized it sounded incredibly naïve.
“Oh, just like that.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. She was actually shaking. She popped out of her chair and paced a few steps, stopping right in front of me. “Not even just a deal. You’re going into Faerie. Oh my gods--I don’t--holy shit. What the fuck were you thinking?”
I hunched down, shoulders scrunched up. “I don’t know.” It came out more defensive than I intended. “That keeping people from getting killed was worth the risk? That we were kind of out of options by then? That it’s not like I have anyplace better to go or anyone to miss me, so what’s to lose?” I tried to ignore the way my heart quickened at the thought of stepping beyond the white heather.
Cherry looked like I’d slapped her. Her face reddened and she looked at the ground, making a sound that was almost a laugh, but brittle, breaking and splintering at the end.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She kept standing like that. Finally she said, “I’m going back to bed.”
“Wait.” I reached out to grab her hand. “Tell me. I don’t understand. Tell me why it’s such a bad thing.”
She looked at our hands. At last she sank back down into her chair and pulled her hand free, wrapping herself in her blanket. “Do you know how I know Joe?”
I shook my head.
“His family and mine lived on the same street. I met him the first day of kindergarten when I beaned him in the head with a kickball at recess, by accident. After school he asked if we could walk home together. I said okay and he offered me his arm.” She held up one arm, bent at the elbow, to demonstrate. “I didn’t know what he was doing. He said that was how his grandpa said a man should walk with a lady, like when you go to church or something. I said, ‘Like people getting married?’ and he said that if he didn’t marry Miss Piggy, he would probably marry me. So I ran away and screamed the whole way home just for good measure.” The hint of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Somehow we still ended up being friends after that.”
“I thought he was older than you,” I blurted.
The look she shot me told me to shut up and wait. “There were a lot of ghost stories about places in our town, and Joe and I were natural explorers. Connoisseurs of the weird. We called ourselves the Adventure Club and dared each other to go to the scariest places when we weren’t reading my dad’s Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown books. There was this one place. We called it the Troll Bridge. It was almost a tunnel, really. Joe and I made a bet about which one of us could go furthest into it right after sunset without getting scared and running back out. We started in. It was so dark I couldn’t see out the other side. Right away I could tell something was different about it this time. I’m not sure what--it’s been so long that I can’t be sure what I remember and what I just sort of filled in over the years. I remember my skin tingling because I was scratching myself like it itched. I think it smelled different, sweet like a peach orchard, but too many things to be just peaches. Like that fruit that Boden had. There were tiny lights that blinked on and off as they floated. It sounded like trees and vines growing. I lost my sense of direction and that scared me. I said I wanted to go home. Joe grabbed my hand, said Come on, don’t be a scaredy-cat, teased me that he was going to win the bet. I just panicked. I turned and
ran back out. I could hear him still laughing. Then he stopped.”
I was beginning to appreciate why she was so upset. “How old were you?”
“Nine.” Her eyes shimmered. “No one believed me when I said that Joe got lost under the Troll Bridge. They searched for him for weeks. My parents made me go to doctors to try to get me to remember what had ‘really’ happened. They thought I was making something up because I was so traumatized by the truth. But I wasn’t.”
I reached over to her and squeezed her hand. “It’s hard to lose your best friend when you’re just a kid.”
“Yeah.” She squeezed mine back. “You get it. Funny, I used to get so mad when my parents called Joe my ‘little boyfriend’. I said I never wanted a boyfriend. But then one day I dared him to kiss me, as a joke--or so I said. He said, ‘You don’t have to dare me.’ And that was my first kiss. I was seven and you know what? No one since then has measured up.” She laughed, short and bitter, and dashed at her eyes. “Don’t tell Joe I said that.”
“Cross my heart.”
“I never forgot him. Never gave up. Me and his mom. I used to go over there and she’d give me cookies and we’d drink tea and look at pictures of him. I don’t know if you know any Filipino families, but it doesn’t take long before they basically adopt you, so they were my second family. I think Mama Manolo hoped I’d end up marrying one of Joe’s brothers. There’s four of them, all named Paul.”
“All four?”
She laughed again. “All five, try.”
“Joe isn’t his name?”
“Middle name. They all have J middle names. Everyone called him Paulie in school, but at home it was Joe, Jamie, John--you get the idea. Real Catholic names. The two sisters were luckier, they just had matching initials. Mary and Martha. Anyway.” Her face softened into sadness. “When I got to high school, my mom got worried that I was too obsessed, that I should move on. I dated people, but I never let it get exclusive. Like if Joe ever came back, there had to be room for him. Guess the habit stuck when he did come back.”
I pulled my other knee up. The grass was too cold for my bare feet. “Okay, so--how did he get back?”
“It was years later. After high school, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to college far away and after that I got a place out west where all the hippies huddled up, good music scene, lots of woo-woo types I could study with while I tried to learn more about all this shit. But every time I went home to visit, I would always drive out to the Troll Bridge once and just sit there as long as I could stand it and wonder what really happened to Joe. And then not long after I moved, I went home for Christmas and this time I told myself I wasn’t going to go to the bridge. But I felt pulled there, like my gut was insisting I should go. I ignored it and ignored it and then I got on the road to drive home, and I was about ten miles out of town when I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned back. I told myself I was just going to pay respects and that it’d be the last time I went and then I’d be done.”
“Joe was there?” I guessed.
She shook her head. “Nope. Nothing but the empty bridge and the shadows getting long as the sun started to set. So I cried a little and tried to shake it off and said goodbye and pulled out. Couple miles down this back road toward the highway, I see someone walking along the side of the road. I start driving past and this person stops and looks at me and it’s Joe. The next few seconds are just a blur, just adrenaline and feeling like the world went sideways, and then I’ve driven into a ditch on the side of the road and my engine conks out. And I just...get out of the car. Don’t even take the keys or close the door. I’m just standing there. And he walks over to me and says my name and it’s him. I was afraid to believe it. But he still had--” She stopped, clamping her lips together and looking away from me as she blinked. “This stupid little friendship bracelet I made him not long before he went away. He looked young, like a teenager at most, but he talked like an old soul.”
“Holy shit.”
“I’m not sure how long we talked, there at the side of the road. I asked him, did he want me to take him to see his family. I had to tell him that his dad had died a few years back. Shit, he had nephews by his oldest brother. He wasn’t ready. But he asked if I would take him near the house so he could look at them without them seeing him. So I did. And he didn’t say anything but when he was done, he asked where I was going, and then he asked if he could come with me. So he came to live with me.”
She sighed, shifted, glanced back to make sure no one else was coming out of the tent, lowered her voice a bit. “It was a long drive back. We had time for him to tell me what happened. He can tell that to you someday if he wants to.”
“But he’d been taken to Faerie.”
She nodded. “Yeah. He made a deal he never told me about, and he didn’t believe anything would happen. He was just a dumb kid in over his head. But he paid for it with fifteen of our years and pretty much everything he’d had in life up till then. So, he lived with me and I helped him get used to being here again.” Her usual sly little grin peeked out. “It was pretty weird to introduce him to the Internet. He got obsessed with technology--like he could put machines between him and those memories. And we spent whole weekends getting high as fuck and watching tons of cartoons that he missed out on.”
“So if he seemed younger than you--”
“Over time I saw that he was, I guess, catching up to me. Physically. Like age-wise, I mean. It was slow enough not to freak the neighbors, but it was like time had been stretched in some weird way for him while he was gone, and now that he was back, this world was affecting him again and time was bouncing back to what we think of as normal. Tamar thinks that we all, everything that exists in this world, made some kind of agreement about the rules of our shared reality and that it means that there are forces of equilibrium that work to keep everything within those rules. And that’s why memory isn’t literal, because it lets us overwrite the stuff that would drive us crazy if we remembered it the way it happened. Joe says it’s an example of how chaos and order feed into each other and depend on each other.”
“What do you think?”
“I think the fae don’t really get how time works for us. I think they tried to send him back at the right age but they messed with his internal clock or something.”
That startled me. “So you think he’s aging faster than normal? Even now?”
“He’s been back just over eight years, but to me he seems maybe twelve years older than his actual age when he got back. It was more dramatic early in the time he got back. It slowed over time, or maybe it seems that way because people don’t always change as much after a point. I don’t know. But that’s why he seems older than I am even though we’re the same age.”
No wonder Cherry wanted nothing to do with the fae. “But--he had stuff with him this weekend, to make a fairy circle. Why does he deal with them at all?”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. “He has unfinished business. His words. He won’t say what. He’s just always ready.”
“Oh, Cherry. Oh, shit.” This time I scooted my chair closer before I took her hand.
Her eyes sparkled. “Who knows if he’ll come back at all next time? You saw what he was like with that damn fruit. Something in him aches to be there, and I can’t fix it. I’m not enough to make him stay.”
I felt even more stupid for my hasty decisions now.
Cherry seemed to follow my train of thought across the terrain of my expressions. “Hey,” she said, in a kinder voice. She shook off emotion, straightened up, lifted her chin. “Don’t freak out yet, okay? We’ll figure it all out. Somehow. We got through last night, right?”
“Yeah.” I had absolutely no conviction. The rumble of a car engine distracted me. I looked down the path and saw someone pulling up to the edge of the grass, where their luggage and packed tent waited to be loaded in the car. It was full dayligh
t by now, even though it was still so early, and I noticed several cars and vans parked nearby and getting loaded up. “Do you think everyone’s going to just take off today, after last night?”
“Maybe some more than usual,” she said. “But it’s been a hot weekend. Some people always bail early after the big burn.”
Sara emerged from the tent, glancing around like she was looking for someone. As soon as she saw us, she hurried over, clutching the sides of a patchwork hoodie closed and hunching into it. “We have a problem.” She beckoned us after her.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Cherry and I followed Sara back inside. It was dark and smelled like damp clothes. My eyes struggled to adjust. The futon lay flat, half of it empty but rumpled--Sara must have just gotten up from there. Vivi lay on the other half.
My heart flared with panic. In the faint light she looked pale and waxy, as fragile as the abandoned carapace of a cicada. Like if I touched her skin, her form would collapse. “Is she...?” I whispered.
Sara shook her head and sat on the bed beside her. “She’s alive.” Even as she said it, she took Vivi’s hand and checked her pulse to be sure. “But she isn’t waking up.” She nudged Vivi’s shoulder, patted her cheek, shook her a few times.
Cherry and I perched on the futon with them. I felt Vivi’s face. Her skin was cool and dry. I could hear the faint breath slipping past her colorless lips. The bone was so close to the surface where I touched her, and it made me recoil.
For the first time, it truly hit me that Vivi was going to die. That, despite everything we’d achieved this weekend, the one thing I had been so determined to do was going to fail. I imagined us all sitting like this, in this vigil, for--an hour? A day? Silent, helpless, waiting for the end to come, for that moment when one of us would nod and turn to the rest of us and say that she was gone.
“That’s it,” said Cherry. “We’re done with this. She’s the worst she’s been yet and it’s time to get her to a hospital.”
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 43