by Dawn Metcalf
“Come away, Joy. Now,” Ink said. “Please.”
Joy gazed down at her friend, half-bandaged, half-healed.
“But it was an accident,” Joy insisted.
“There are no accidents,” Ink said. “You once told me that.”
Joy was fixed to her seat. It was unfair to ask her to do this—to ask her to not do this—to condemn Monica to disfigurement and to wear Joy’s mistake on her face for life. Her best friend knew nothing of the Twixt or the Red Knight or the Tide! She had only wanted Gordon and her parents to love her and get along despite their differences—and everything was fine with them—but Monica didn’t know that because she was lying in a hospital bed, unconscious, and it was all Joy’s fault!
Monica lay still as an accusation between them, half of her bloody slate wiped clean.
“No,” Joy said, gripping the scalpel hard. “I was wrong. This is wrong!” Hot tears filled her eyes. “Monica has nothing to do with any of this! She was never meant to be there. She was never meant to get hurt—she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and it was my fault that it happened and I won’t let her pay for my mistake!” She shook the scalpel for emphasis. “Please, Ink, I can’t let that happen. I can’t let her be scarred for life—not when I can do something about it.”
Ink both grew and shrank, his face looming closer, his eyes growing wider.
“Joy.” Her name strangled from his throat. “Do not do this.”
Then something strange happened: he cried.
The hot pink light that danced in his eyes wobbled and ran, not in black rivulets, but with real tears. Clear drops of water spilled off his lashes, running down his face and hugging his jaw. Joy stared, disbelieving. She’d never seen him cry. It felt like a kick in the stomach. As she watched, she somehow recognized the tiny scintillating flashes in the droplets that caught the light.
The Sight.
They were hers—her tears—once cried into his eyes.
Joy remembered after the battle with Aniseed, sealing his severed throat closed and praying that he’d open his eyes and look at her, she’d cried—her tears splashing onto his face, over his eyes, into his eyes and he’d held on to them all this time and he was giving them back to her now. It was the same aching, heart-wrenching sadness that brought its salt to the surface, and she relived that stabbing loss all over again.
She was losing him. He was losing her.
Ink.
He was crying her tears back at her, but she couldn’t give in.
“You said you didn’t want me bound by the Twixt and its rules,” she said. “You said you wanted me to have my freedom.” She sobbed for breath to say the right things, the ones that would make him understand, make them an “us” again, whole. “I want that for Monica. She deserves anything she wants. She deserves to be beautiful and safe and loved and free.” Joy placed a soft hand on the patch of Monica’s hair sticking through the web of gauze. “She deserves better than this.”
“You do not know what she deserves,” Ink said. “You only know that you love her.”
“That’s right,” Joy said.
“Despite what is right?” Ink said. “Despite who else it may harm?”
“This won’t hurt you, or Inq, or anybody,” Joy said with conviction. “I wouldn’t do that. I love you, Ink. You know that.” She turned the scalpel in her hand “No one will find out. No one will know.”
His voice hardened. “I will know.”
Joy stopped, fingers trembling. Her tears changed from anger to heartbreak—she felt the difference even though they tasted the same on her lips. Her hands shook as well as her words. “Don’t ask me to choose,” she begged him. “You can’t ask me to choose between my best friend and you.”
He stepped back. “I have never asked,” Ink said quietly. “And you always had to choose. Now you have made your choice clear.” He gestured toward the hospital bed. “Love has made you blind and foolish,” he said as his straight razor snapped open and swept a line of nothingness clean in half. Ink turned away and snarled over his shoulder. “You and I, both.”
He marched through the breach and disappeared, the yellow curtain zipping closed behind him.
The rattling settled. Machinery beeped. Joy stared at the curtain.
Ink was gone.
THIRTEEN
HER BODY JOSTLED and bounced in the passenger seat of Stef’s new Nissan. She’d left Monica’s bedside and wandered into the hall, into the lobby and into the parking lot, following the walking path along the river until her brother pulled up a timeless time later. Even sitting in a moving car, she felt like she was wandering. Her feet knew they should be doing something even when her mind didn’t.
Gordon had stuffed Joy’s purchases into the backseat. One of the white paper bags had a tiny spray of brown blood. Stef and Gordon had exchanged words in low voices; Gordon had said something to Joy and she’d smiled. He looked at her uneasily. That was okay. None of this was real. She couldn’t have left Monica’s face half-finished, the signatura half erased after Ink had left her sitting there, battling guilt and anger on her own.
Ink had left her.
“It’s for the best,” Stef said.
Joy could vaguely remember saying something that prompted this sentence, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was. They’d been in the car for some time, so she couldn’t be faulted for forgetting. Everything was hazy. What was it? Joy sifted through the foggy memory of getting into the car. She’d seen Stef drive up, waited for the shiny silver Nissan to stop, opened the door, put her purse by her shoes, fastened her seat belt and said something. She remembered the dull shape of the words in her mouth.
She’d said, “He left me.”
That couldn’t be right. Stef was mistaken. That couldn’t be for the best.
Joy struggled to remember what else she might have said when her phone went off. She watched her fingers automatically answer the text.
Miss Malone,
I have been notified of your recent indiscretion and regret to inform you that such an action constitutes a breach of magnitude that I cannot abide. As you have elected to perform services on clients proscribed by our mandates, I must consider your decision an end to our association. Therefore, this notice serves to terminate our agreement as well as your employment, effective immediately. Your prior earnings have been allocated to alleviate any outstanding debt and all other accounts are closed as of this date. I need not remind you that further contact is prohibited in accordance to our laws. Do not attempt to reply to this message.
May you succeed in other future endeavors.
Sincerely,
GC
Joy smoothed back her hair from her face. She was surprised that her fingers came away wet. She laughed or sobbed or made some noise that sounded like both.
“What is it?” Stef said.
“I just got fired,” Joy said, knowing Stef would think she meant the café, but it didn’t matter. She let her hand fall. None of it mattered anymore. “I’ve lost my job, my best friend’s in the hospital and my boyfriend left me all in one day.” She streaked her tears against the windowpane. “That’s everything. I’ve lost everything.”
Stef squeezed the wheel, looking absurdly like her father, minus thirty years and sixty pounds. “I know it feels that way, but it’s not true,” he said. “You have your family and your friends—real ones—the ones that matter.” Stef stopped at a yellow light, something he rarely did. He was being extra careful with her. Joy didn’t know how to feel about that. “Monica’s going to be okay, Dad will be home soon and you can always get a new job.” He signaled and turned. “I know things feel officially out of control, but it’s over now. This is life going back to normal.”
This is normal? Joy kept her fingers on the glass, imagining she could feel the wh
ip of leaves and twigs, of shrubs and grass speeding past. What if she just opened the door? What if she tumbled out into the blurry landscape? She’d want it to sting. To hurt. To break things. To wake her up. Words slipped from her lips.
“Did life go back to normal after Dmitri left?”
Stef’s knuckles whitened. He drove the last two turns sharply, pulled into their lot and parked the car with a jerk, cutting the engine off with a twist of the key. His voice was quiet and flat.
“No.”
He got out and grabbed her bags from the backseat. She followed, vaguely wondering if the Red Knight would appear.
There was no one waiting for her as she made her way across the lot. There was no one in the courtyard or standing on the stairs. There was no one by the door, which had recently been repaired, or lurking in the hallway or slicing through space. There was no one in her kitchen or in the hallway or in her room.
There was no one there.
No one at all.
* * *
Joy couldn’t sleep.
The feelings raged—bigger than her body, bigger than her room—too big and terrible to contain inside the four walls of her house, and so she kicked off the covers, slipped on her shoes, grabbed her zip-up and keys, unlocked the alarm and went outside. She fumbled down the stairs into the courtyard. Slammed the gate. Started to walk. Started to run.
She didn’t know where she was running—running to or running from—but she tried to outpace the tiny voices in her head whispering doubts and recriminations, running a little bit faster when they turned to shame or blame, pushing until the only sound in her head was the gasping of her breath and the pounding of her blood in her ears. Her feet slammed into the pavement, her pores open and weeping sweat, her face hot and cold and dripping, her bangs sticking to her face. She swatted them away like summer flies.
Joy ran knowing that something would pursue her. She ran like prey. She ran like bait.
If it was the Red Knight, good. He couldn’t touch her and she wanted to break him! If it was Indelible Ink, good. She wanted to scream at him and cry. If it was Invisible Inq... Joy slowed down a notch. She had no idea what the female Scribe would do, but she was sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. Perhaps Graus Claude would take care of it on behalf of the Council. Perhaps Kurt would shoot her.
You are considered rogue, Miss Malone.
Joy kept running, feeling the beat of her body match the cadence of her playlist; from classic soundtracks to Lady Gaga, she filled her head with music to drown out the noise. She revisited years of routine tunes that went on and on and on, half remembered twitches in her body as her limbs relived impacts and jumps, springs and twists, and her stomach switched places with her head in the trance of no-mind as she flew. The white noise of adrenaline. The pull of gravity. The smack of landing again and again. Joy gratefully lost herself in herself for a while.
She should have known the thump of music would bring her here.
It was night and the moon was fierce. The Carousel sat on the hill, built of long shadows and solid shapes, a quiet theater for the night, a modern Pantheon for gods. There was something huge and awesome about the massive six-row carousel even though it had been gutted, converted into so many other things over the years that never stayed, although the Carousel itself did.
She circled it, wondering how old it was.
Joy leaned against the temporary fence that surrounded the Carousel on the Green, threading her fingers though the links and hanging her head to catch her breath. The metal shivered, rattling cold and hard against her skin. She wiped her forehead against the back of her arm and stared into the darkness of the central pillar. She couldn’t remember what music had been playing when she’d first seen Ink, but she felt it all the same.
She closed her eyes, afraid to say his name, afraid he wouldn’t care, afraid he wouldn’t come.
An ache squirmed in her belly like cold snakes and twisted.
Ink.
She walked slowly along the chain-link fence, staring into its depths. Mottled shapes played tricks with the moonlight, sliding along the floorboards, peeking in and out of the mirrored beams. Things moved, but not as she moved, which was strange. It was as if the carousel horses were lingering ghosts. Joy remembered riding a painted mare with wooden flowers and inset glass jewels. As a little girl, she’d thought that they were magic. And, perhaps, she’d been right. Hollowed out, the old Carousel still hummed with an echo of merry-scary music.
Something on two legs moved.
Joy stopped.
“Hello?” she whispered, trying to see who it was. Was it Folk or human? Enemy or friend? Stranger or lover? “Hello?” she said again.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said a voice that she didn’t recognize. Joy was worried that perhaps it was some beat cop or a skater kid from the streets, which frightened her more. She was protected against magical assault, but still wasn’t too sure about bullets or a hit to the head, no matter what Inq said. She remembered Ilhami in a blaze of semiautomatic fire and light. She stepped back. A face came closer to the fence, crisscrossed with shadows.
“You’re Ink’s girl, right?” the guy said. “You can’t come in.”
Joy swiped her hair out of her eyes and took a quick breath. It was the DJ from Carousel’s Under 18 Nights, but there was something wrong with his face. With the way he said words—the shape of his lips as he said them. Or maybe it was the weird curly half-beard poking off his chin. Ink’s girl. Joy stared. He knew about the Twixt—maybe was one of the Twixt, or a human handler, like Mr. Vinh.
“I’m not here for the club,” she said. “I’m...” What was she doing? What did her feet know that she didn’t? She ran here. She’d been running. She’d been running to him. “I’m looking for Ink.”
“Yeah. I got that,” he said, leaning one elbow against the fence. They made a strange parody of a mirror with no glass. “What I’m saying is that you can’t come Under the Hill, persona non grata, so you might as well go home.”
“The hill?” Joy said, glancing down at the well-trampled grass. “The hill is hollow?”
The guy laughed and shook his head full of curls. The chuckle sounded patient, if exasperated, but okay with it, like he was used to having to explain. “Boy, I hope you’re smarter than you are pretty or the Council’s gonna eat you for breakfast,” he said, tucking a curly lock behind his pointed ear. His elfin ears had tufts of fur at the tips that could be neatly hidden beneath his giant headphones, which he now wore around his neck. She recognized his shape backlit by the central pillar behind his turntables and gear. He tapped his foot on the ground. When Joy looked, it wasn’t a shoe, but a hoof. “This is the Hill,” he said. “Under the Hill is one of the entrances to the Twixt, like a sliding door between worlds, get it? It’s basically what makes the Glen ‘the Glen’ and not Middle-of-Nowhere, North Carolina.” He waved a careless hand at the Carousel. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why they built this thing here.” His jolly eyes flashed. “Not everyone travels like your boyfriend, natch?” he said, hitching up his baggy jeans. “Or should I say ‘ex-boyfriend’?”
Joy swallowed. “Word travels fast.”
“Yeah, well...” He shrugged, headphones bouncing. “Not much else to do.”
“Can you—” Joy stopped, twisting her fingers in her sweat-stained zip-up. “Can you tell me where he is? Can you tell him something for me?”
He shook his head. “I’m not one to get in the middle of a lover’s quarrel...though I don’t mind starting one.” He leered mischievously. “But the smart bet is to let things take their course. Settle down. Get Zen. Listen to me on this one—go home, calm down, have a pint of ice cream, sleep for a day. Just turn around, little lady, and go home.”
Joy threaded both her hands through the chain link.
“He is my home.”
/> He threaded his fingers back at her. His fingernails were broken and cracked, speckled with dirt and glitter.
“Yeah, well,” he said. “I suggest you move on.” He pushed back from the fence, which shivered as he let go. “See you when I spin you,” he said and shot dual finger guns at her. “Don’t let the night hit you in the ass on your way out and I’ll do you a bonny favor and pretend you were never here, a’right?” He bobbed his chin as he strode back into the shadows of the old Carousel. He ran a finger along the length of his nose and shot her a wink. “You were never here.”
Joy frowned and let it go. She heard the warning bright and clear.
“I was never here,” she agreed.
“Good girl,” he said. “Now go home.”
Biting back her disappointment, Joy stepped away from the fence, feeling the young man recede from her at the same pace, continuing to share their mirror-moment as they both faded into the dark. She turned down the incline once she was at the foot of the green, only looking back as she left, wondering if she’d turn into a pillar of salt or if the Carousel itself might disappear like the Goblin Market or Atlantis.
“Later, little lady.” The merry-mischief voice bubbled up from somewhere unseen. Joy didn’t bother to look for its source. “Say hi to Stef for me.”
* * *
Stef knocked on her door. “Ten minutes.”
It was the closest he’d gotten to admonishing her. He knew that there was nothing to pull her out of bed except love and guilt—either one was good, but both were enough.
If it weren’t for visiting hours, Joy would have stayed in bed. She burrowed beneath the covers, thick and heavy with smothering comfort. Her sleep had been a dreamless quicksand trap, sluggish and swallowing, and she’d had to claw her way to wakefulness more than once. Most of the time, it wasn’t worth the effort.
She’d slept all day yesterday, only getting up to pee and eat cereal. Her hair was matted. Her tongue tasted awful. Her brain felt blurry. She smelled.
Ten minutes. She squinted at the clock. Okay, nine.