Ballad

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “I did too,” I said.

  I left Paul dozing on his bed in an imagined alcohol stupor and retreated to the fourth floor bathroom. I knew it was stupid to call her, because no way was I going to gain any comfort from it, but I felt weirded out by Paul’s revelation. Pushed off-balance. It was one thing for me to be involved in some supernatural plot. It was another thing to hear Dee’s name on a list of dead and think she was somehow up to her neck in something too.

  “Dee?”

  I picked a chip of lime green paint off the brick wall. The night was so black outside the little window beside my head that the glass acted like a mirror, reflecting an image of me with the cell phone pressed up to my ear.

  “James?” Dee’s voice was surprised. “It really is you.”

  For a moment I didn’t say anything. For a moment, it hurt too badly to know that it was her on the other end of the phone, the memory of her words after the kiss choking me.

  I had to say something. I said, “Yeah. Things wild and crazy over there?”

  I heard a night bird call, loud and clear and very close. I couldn’t tell if it was right outside my window or coming from Dee’s end of the conversation. Her voice was low. “We’re just getting ready to go to sleep. That’s our version of wild and crazy.”

  “Wow. You animals you.” I bit my lip. Just ask her. “Dee, do you remember when we first ran into each other here? Do you remember what you first asked me?”

  “You must think I have the brain of an elephant to remember that far back. Oh. Oh. That.”

  Yeah, that. When you asked me if I’d seen the faeries. “Have you seen any more?”

  A long pause. Then: “What? No. No, definitely not. Why, have you?”

  My skin still smelled like Nuala’s summer rain and woodsmoke scent. I sighed. “No. Is—everything okay with you?”

  She laughed a little, cute, uncertain laugh. “Yeah, of course it is. I mean. Um. Other than me being messed up. Right?”

  “I dunno. I asked you.”

  “Then yeah. Everything’s okay.”

  My voice was flat. “No faeries.”

  “Shhh.”

  “Why shhh?”

  “Just because they’re not around anymore doesn’t mean I go around shouting the word from the rooftops,” Dee said. “Everything’s fine.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long moment. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. At least honesty. What was I going to do, call her out on it? I sighed and rested my head against the dingy wall. “I just wanted to make sure.”

  “Thanks,” Dee said. “That means a lot to me.”

  I looked at my reflection in the old, narrow mirrors on the wall across from me. The James-in-the-mirror frowned back at me, the ugly scar as dark as his knitted eyebrows.

  “I better go,” Dee said.

  “Okay.”

  “Bye.”

  I hung up. She hadn’t asked me if I was okay.

  Nuala

  A frightening menagerie, my emotions are

  Too many and varied to number

  Like creatures they crawl and they fly above

  Tearing my body asunder.

  —from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

  I was watching James sleep when I was summoned. For the moment when I was traveling, all I could think of was the last thing I’d been looking at: James in his own personal battleground that was sleep, arms wrapped tight around a pillow, arms scrawled with our handiwork. He was dreaming of Ballad, all by himself, without any prodding on my part. He was dreaming of the main character, who was really a metaphor for himself, an egotistical magician in a world full of ordinary people. And he dreamt of a building to stage the play in, a low, flat yellow-brick building covered with ivy. And Eric was there, playing guitar, and whatshisface—Roundhead—Paul—was playing one of the characters in the play, his gestures exaggerated and face shocked. Everything was so vividly painted, down to the musty smell of the building, that it was as if I, for once, was dreaming.

  And then

  jerk

  I was gone.

  I materialized in a huff of crackling fall leaves, their edges cold and sharp on my skin, the October night frigid and still. I stood in a stand of night-black trees, but close by, the front lights of the dorms glowed softly.

  Even after I smelled the bitter smell of thyme burning, it took me a moment to realize I’d been summoned. It wasn’t like it was something that happened every day. No one needed to summon me.

  “What are you?” snapped a voice, close by.

  I frowned, turning toward the voice and the scent. A human stood there, an old, ugly one, at least forty. She had a match in one of her hands, the end still smoking, and a still-glowing sprig of thyme in her other. For a moment I couldn’t think of what to say. I hadn’t been summoned by a human in years.

  “Something dangerous,” I told her. She looked at my clothing with a raised eyebrow.

  “You look human,” she said, contemptuously, dropping both the match and the thyme to the ground and stomping them into the crackly leaves of the forest floor with the heel of her leather boot.

  I scowled at her. She had a four-leaf clover hanging at her neck, its stem tied to a string—this was how she could see faeries. I realized suddenly that I had seen her before, in the hallway outside the practice rooms. The sniffing woman. I retorted, “You look human too. Why did you summon me?”

  “I didn’t need you in particular. I did a favor for your queen and I need some help with it now.”

  She didn’t smell afraid, which irritated me. Humans were supposed to smell afraid. They also weren’t supposed to know that burning thyme summoned us or that four-leaf clovers let them see us. And most of all, they weren’t supposed to be standing there with one hand on their hip looking at me like well, so?

  “I’m not a genie,” I said stiffly.

  The woman shook her head at me. “If you were a genie, I’d be back in my car by now and on my way back to my hotel. Instead, we’re arguing about whether or not you are one. Are you going to help me or not? They said I was supposed to get rid of the mess afterwards.”

  I was curious despite myself. Eleanor had humans doing favors for her and whatever the favors were, they left messes behind? I invested my voice, however, with the maximum amount of disinterest that I could muster. “Fine. Whatever. Show me.”

  The human led me a few feet into the woods, and then she got a little white flashlight out of her purse and shone it at the ground.

  There was a body. Somehow I’d known there was going to be one. I’d seen dead people, of course, but this was different.

  It was a faerie. Not a beautiful one like me—in fact, quite the opposite. She was small and wizened, her white hair spread like straw over her green dress. One foot poked out of the bottom of the dress, toes webbed.

  But she was like me, nonetheless, because she was a bean sidhe—a banshee. A solitary faerie with no one to speak for her, who lived alongside the humans, wailing to warn them of an impending death. And she was dead, flowers spread out all around her from her death throes. I had never seen a dead banshee before.

  I thought of asking who killed her but I knew from a quick glance into the human’s head that it had been her. She was an idiot, like most humans, so it was easy to get to the memory of her tracking the banshee by the sound of her wail. I saw her withdraw an iron bar from her purse, and then just—struggle.

  Eleanor had asked a human to kill one of us?

  “Clean it up yourself,” I snapped. “I’m not a maggot.”

  She nudged the webbed foot with the square toe of her boots, lip curled distastefully. “I’m not doing it. Can’t you just”—she made a vague hand gesture with a perfectly manicured hand—“magic it away?”

  “I wou
ldn’t know. I’ve never had to get rid of a faerie body before.”

  The human winced at the word faerie. “That’s not what the other one said, yesterday. He just said he’d take care of it, and when I looked back, it was gone.”

  Wariness crept into my voice. “What was gone?”

  “A bauchan. He didn’t have any problems getting rid of it. He just did his … thing.” Again, the stupid hand gesture. I would’ve done something nasty to her, just for the stupidity of the gesture, but if Eleanor protected her, there’d be hell to pay.

  A bauchan. Another solitary faerie known for human contact. I was starting to get freaked out. It was one thing to burn every sixteen years—when I burned, I came back. I didn’t think I’d come back from an iron bar through my neck.

  “I can’t help you. Summon someone else.” Before she could say anything else, I rushed away, halfway invisible, reaching out for the current of thoughts I felt coming from the dorms.

  “Well, hell,” I heard her say, surrounded in a swirl of dry leaves at my disappearance. And then I was gone.

  I fled to the warm, moving darkness of the dorm, and perched at the end of James’ bed. Across the room, Roundhead snored softly. I should’ve gone further away, so that I wasn’t the closest faerie if that killing human tried to summon a faerie again, but I didn’t want to be alone. The fact that I knew I didn’t want to be alone scared me more than not wanting to be alone.

  Invisible, I crawled next to James. Instead of wrapping my arms around his shoulders or stroking his hair, like I would’ve if I was sending him a dream, I curled up against his chest, like I was a human girl that he loved. Like I was Dee, who didn’t deserve him, for all his fractured, self-involved asshole-ness.

  Behind me, James shivered, his body warning him again of my strangeness. Stupidly, that made me want to cry again. Instead, I became visible, because he shivered less when I was. His sheets smelled like they hadn’t been washed since he’d arrived, but he himself smelled good. Solid and real. Like the leather of his pipes.

  Curled in the stolen circle of his body, I closed my eyes, but when I did, I saw the banshee’s body. Then I saw a bauchan, red-coated, grinning from the woods at a human. Then, grinning from the leaves, staring at the sky with dead eyes. A length of iron rebar sticking out of his neck.

  Behind me, lost in sleep, James was having a nightmare. He was walking through the woods, the dry leaves snapping beneath his feet. He was wearing his Looks & Brains T-shirt and it exposed his arms, written dark with music up to the edge of his short sleeves. Goose bumps twisted the musical notes written on top of them. The forest was empty, but he was looking for someone anyway. The woods stank of burning thyme and burning leaves, summoning spells and Halloween bonfires.

  “O,” he said in the dream, a short sound rather than a word. He crouched down in the leaves and put his face into his written-upon hands, his shoulders shaped like mourning. He was a dark blot in a sea of dead leaves. Beside him, my body lay in the leaves. Just over James’ shoulder, I could see more rebar jutting from the side of my face and my eyes staring at infinity.

  The real James shivered—hard, body-wracking shudders, and all I could think was, he’s a seer. What if this is the future he’s seeing?

  I turned over and stared at his sleeping face, hardly visible in the dim light, wanting him to stop dreaming. He was close enough that his breath was warm on my lips. This close, I could see the ugly pucker of the scar above his ear and could see how big it must’ve been before they sewed him back together. It was amazing his brains hadn’t fallen out. I frowned at him. I knew he needed to sleep because he’d been up all the night before, but I wanted him awake.

  I pinched his arm.

  James didn’t jerk or start, or even hesitate. His eyes just opened up and looked right into mine, an inch away.

  When he spoke, it was barely audible; any sound was just to pretend that I needed him to talk aloud. “You’re not dead.” His thoughts were still cloudy, slow, sleep-drugged.

  I shook my head, the sheet making a rustling noise against my ear. “Yet.”

  James’ mouth moved, more breath than voice coming out. “What do you want?”

  It wasn’t the same as before, though. Before, when he asked that question, “from me” was implied. Not tonight.

  I pulled his arm from underneath his pillow, his skin tightening with cold as my fingers circled his wrist. He let me take his arm and drape it over my shoulders, so that the iron band around his wrist pressed against my upper arm. It made my head buzz a little with the contact, but unlike with other faeries, it didn’t kill me. And it would make me immune to any more summoning spells.

  James thought, why? But he didn’t say anything.

  I pressed his wrist against me, hard, so that the iron was making plenty of contact with my skin. “So that if someone tries to summon a faerie, it won’t be me.”

  James still didn’t say anything, just rolled his shoulders forward to make the position more comfortable.

  “Don’t kill me,” he whispered. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  He did. And with the knobs of his iron bracelet fiery hot against my skin, I did too. I didn’t even know that I could.

  James

  “James?”

  My face was nicely smashed into my pillow. Without moving, I pressed my phone against my ear. “Mmmm. Yeah. What.”

  “James, is that you?”

  I rolled onto my back and stared at the pale morning light that striped across the ceiling. I readjusted the phone so that I didn’t accidentally hang up. “Mom, why is it that every time you call my cell phone, you ask if it’s really me? Are there hundreds of other misplaced calls that you’re not telling me about, where you almost dial my number but it’s not quite right and you get guys who are almost me but not quite right?”

  “Your voice never sounds the same on the phone,” Mom said. “It sounds mushy or something. Are you hungover?”

  I sighed heavily. I looked over at Paul’s bed; he was still totally comatose on it. Drool on the pillow, arm hanging off the side, looking like he’d been dropped onto his bed from an airplane. I felt intense envy. “Mom. You do know it’s a weekend, right? Before ten o’clock? Before nine o’clock?”

  “I’m sorry to call you so early,” she said.

  “No you’re not.”

  “You’re right, I’m not. I’m coming to see you, and I wanted you to be awake to come meet me at the bus station.”

  I sat up in a hurry, and then jumped a mile. “Holy shit!” Nuala sat at the end of my bed, knees pulled up to her chin and arms wrapped around them. I hadn’t even felt her there. She looked dangerous and brooding and wretchedly hot.

  “I know you didn’t just swear.”

  I mouthed what the crap? at Nuala (who shrugged) and then said, to Mom, “I did, Mom. I said it just to spite you.”

  “You had plans more important than seeing your dear mother, who misses you intensely?”

  “No, I just got stung by something. I’m very happy to see you. As I always am. I am positively ecstatic to hear you’re coming. It’s as if the clouds have opened up and, holding my hand out, I discover that it’s not rain, but strawberry Jell-O.”

  “Your favorite,” Mom observed. “My bus is supposed to be there by ten-fifteen. Can you make it there? Bring Dee. I have stuff from her mother for her.”

  “Maybe. She might be busy. People are very busy on weekends, you know. Sleeping and stuff.” I looked warily at Nuala; she had an exquisitely evil expression on her face. She reached under the covers and grabbed my big toe. She started rolling it around in between her fingers like she was going to unscrew it. It tickled and hurt like hell. I kicked to dislodge her and drew my legs underneath me, out of her reach. I mouthed evil creature at her, and she looked flattered that I’d noticed.

 
“Someone with Terry Monaghan’s genes could never sleep late on weekends. If poor Dee’s busy, it’s because she’s tied up designing a bridge or taking over the world. I have to go now because I want to finish reading this novel before we get there. Go get dressed. I’ll buy you two lunch.”

  “Great. Wonderful. Charming. I’m going to get out of my nice, warm bed now. Bye. See you soon.”

  I’d like to say that I then called Dee and she picked me up and we went to meet my mom and everything was rosy between us, but in the real world—the world where James gets screwed over by anyone who can manage it—that didn’t happen. I didn’t call Dee. I didn’t even do like they do in movies, where they punch in the number and then snap the phone shut real quick before the other person can answer.

  Instead, after I hung up with Mom, I stared at the imprinted pattern on the back of my phone until I decided that it was not really a meaningless marketing squiggle but rather a Satanic symbol meant to improve reception. I had a pen on the desk by my bed, inches away, and I used it to write 10:15 on my hand. A lot of the words had been scrubbed off by my shower the night before; the sight of half-finished words made me feel sick to my stomach. I completed the words that I could still salvage and used spit to rub off the illegible smudges that were too far gone. By the time I looked at the end of the bed again, Nuala had disappeared. Typical. When I might want her around, she was gone.

  I opened and closed my phone several times, snapping it, just trying to get my brain back. It wasn’t like I felt bad about not calling Dee, because I didn’t think she would’ve picked up when she saw my number anyway. I just felt this raw gnawing somewhere in my stomach, or my head, like I was hungry even though I wasn’t.

  “Wake up, Paul.” I kicked my blanket off; it crumpled in a soft heap where Nuala had been sitting. Leaves fluttered to the floor, dry and lifeless. “We’re going to go get lunch with my mom.”

  Mom has an inability to be on time. This inability—nay, this essential property of her existence—is so powerful that even her bus wasn’t on time. Couldn’t be on time. So Paul and I sat outside the bus terminal on a bench, the fall sun bright on us but lacking any force.