It was two o’clock in the morning. Down the hall, Sullivan was behind his closed door, oblivious to my wandering. Somewhere on the fourth floor, Paul was snoring. I envied his ability to sleep. I felt like I ought to pace or scream or something; I couldn’t stop thinking about Halloween. Every time I did, my hair stood on end again and fresh goose bumps spread along my shoulders. Sleep was out of the question.
The lobby held its breath, silent and dark, tinted weirdly red-orange by the streetlights outside the front windows. The world’s most comfortable chairs cast shadows that stretched and grew to ten times the size of the chairs themselves. I crashed in one of them and sat there, so motionless that it felt like I had forgotten how to move.
I felt alone.
I didn’t have a pen. I took the worry stone out of my pocket and ran my thumb over it until the urge to mark my skin faded.
Nuala, are you here?
“I’m here,” she whispered from one of the other chairs; she sat on the very edge of it, as if ready to jump up and run if she had to. I don’t know why she bothered whispering if I was the only one who could hear her, but I was too glad to see her to tease her about it. I hadn’t seen her since the practice on the hill, and I’d almost thought she’d gone for good. Sort of half-standing, I dragged my chair across the wood floor until our chairs faced each other and our bare knees were touching.
I looked into Nuala’s face. I didn’t really want to ask her the question out loud. Do you really think we’re going to die, like Paul thinks? And do you think it’ll be Them that does it? I mean, not a freak dorm fire?
In the dim light, Nuala’s pale eyes were black and I could see dark circles beneath them. “They’re killing faeries. Solitary faeries, like me. The ones that have a lot of contact with humans. I saw the bodies. Maybe they think we’ll warn you of something. Not that they’ve told us shit.”
It was weird to think that she looked tired. She looked very human and vulnerable, dwarfed by the sheer size of the chair behind her. If it had been Dee, I’d have needed to comfort her or make a joke, but with Nuala, I didn’t have to pretend. She could already see what was inside my head, so there wasn’t any point in showing her anything but the truth.
And the truth was I was starting to feel like things were getting out of control. I dropped my face into my hands and rubbed my eyes until I saw sparks of color.
“Haven’t you already seen it, though? You’re supposed to be super-great-seer-guy.” Nuala’s voice was bitter, as if she thought I’d deliberately withheld tales of imminent death and destruction from her.
“Nuala, all of Paul’s revelations, you telling me there’s worse than you here, something weird going on with Dee—it’s all news to me. I’m just not a good psychic. I can tell when something’s not right, sometimes, but I can’t tell what it is, or when it is, or if I’m supposed to do anything about it. I’ve tried to make it make sense, but I can’t. It’s just feelings instead of words. And you want the honest-to-God truth? There’s so much weirdness going on I can’t even pick out what makes my hair stand on end. I’m just—” I stopped.
“ … overloaded,” Nuala finished for me, reading my thoughts. “Whatever’s happening has to be something big as hell.”
I jerked, thinking I heard sounds in the night. Both of us froze, sitting quietly, listening, until we were sure there was only the sound of trucks rushing distantly by on the highway and that it was just us.
Even though the dorm was silent, I didn’t speak out loud again. Instead, I rubbed my thumbs over Nuala’s slender, bare knees, tracing the lines of her bones and the place where her kneecaps pushed against my kneecaps. I stared at the shadows we cast on the floor. What the hell’s going on, Nuala? Why won’t They leave us alone? What could They possibly want from us?
She was silent a long moment, watching my lettered fingers on her skin. Her voice was a little uneven: “Power. She wants power. I think she’s made an alliance with the daoine sidhe.”
Those are the ones called by music, aren’t they? I thought they were enemies of the queen.
“Of the old queen. The one your not-girlfriend helpfully got killed in all her teen brilliance. That was back when the daoine sidhe could only appear on Solstice, or with awesome music. But something’s changed. It couldn’t be that way unless the new queen was allowing it. The faerie that—” Nuala stopped, tried again. “The faerie you saw—the swan asshole—he was one of them. He shouldn’t have been able to dance unless it was Solstice.”
“I’d like to find him.” The words surprised me. Out loud, and angry.
Nuala looked at me, eyes dark and fierce, and her expression said: me too.
“You look tired,” I said. For some reason, I didn’t like to see her looking tired, just like I didn’t like to hear her falter when she described the swan faerie.
She didn’t even think before answering, which I was beginning to figure out meant she was lying. “No, I don’t.” She looked away from me and then said, abruptly, “I’ll find out what they’re doing. I don’t have anything to lose. I’ll be dead in a week and a half anyway.”
I sighed, and pressed my hands flat against the sides of her legs, waiting for my arms to race with goose bumps. Nothing happened. “You’ll rise again, though. Like a phoenix, right? From the ashes. So you won’t really die.”
Nuala made a harsh gesture toward her chest. “This girl will die. Everything that makes me who I am now will be gone. Just because another body climbs from the ashes doesn’t mean it’s me.”
I slid my hand along her thighs just far enough to take each of her hands where they were braced by her legs. I gathered them into my own and held them between us. She had such long, soft hands. Nothing like my square, blocky palms, with fingers muscled hard from so much piping. “I’d be freaking out if I were you. You’re so brave it makes me feel bad.”
“You’re brave,” Nuala said. “Stupidly so. It’s part of your charm.”
I shook my head. “This summer, before I had my car accident, I knew I was going to crash. I knew the moment I woke up that day to go to the gig. I knew it all day long. I just kept waiting for it to happen.” I laughed in a very unfunny way. “I was a wreck all day. And then, when it happened, all I could think was, so this is it.”
“You can’t read my mind.” Nuala’s hands were tense in mine. “I’m freaking out. You wouldn’t think I was so brave if you knew what I was thinking.”
I looked at her. “What are you thinking?”
She immediately dropped her eyes to our hands; our fingers had somehow knotted together. My rough, written-on fingers all tangled around her slender, unmarked ones. “How hard it is. How unfair. How much it’s going to hurt like a bitch to get burned alive.” She laughed, too, harsh and unhappy.
“Why do you go? If you know you’re going to die in a bonfire on Halloween, why not just lock yourself in a room somewhere? Then when they light the fires and ask you to come out, just tell them they can put their matches where the sun don’t shine.”
Nuala gave me the most scathing look in the history of scathing looks. “What a clever idea. I’ve never thought of that. And I’m sure all the previous versions of myself never did either. Idiot.”
“Okay, okay. Point taken. This will probably earn another scathing look, but are you sure?”
“Sure about what? You being an idiot?” Nuala laughed derisively, but her fingers were trembling in mine; I held her fingers tight to still them.
“Sure that you’re going to be burned.”
“Were you sure you were going to die in a car crash?”
She had me. I made a face.
“I just know, okay? Everyone else knows and a million faeries have told me, but even before that, I knew. I can’t even stand to be near a candle.” Nuala’s shoulders shivered; she clamped her arms to her sides to still them. “I thought
for the past few years that it would be the dying that really hurt, because it’s not like I had anything worth remembering. Nothing I couldn’t do again, you know? But now it’s the forgetting. I don’t want to forget.”
“What changed?”
Nuala stared at me, and her voice was furious. “You, you asshole! You ruined everything. You’ve made everything impossible.”
When they say “my heart skipped a beat,” they’re full of crap. Really, what they mean is, your heart sort of stutters and thinks about stopping for a second before it remembers that beating is good for it. Oh shit, no, Nuala. Not me. Not stupid, cocky me.
She jerked on my hands. “Shut up! I already know you’re a prick.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Nuala spared me from having to come up with something else to say. “I was thinking about attraction. I have this theory on it. On love.” She wouldn’t look at me.
I swallowed, but managed, “This ought to be good.”
Nuala shot me a hard look. “Shut up. I don’t think love has anything to do with how the other person is. I mean, maybe a little. I think what really matters is you yourself. Like, you know, let’s say you lo—really liked a self-involved ass. That doesn’t matter. What matters is how that ass makes you feel. If you feel like the best person in the world when you’re with him, that’s what makes you like him. It really isn’t about how nice a person he is at all.”
I ran my tongue over my bottom lip. “I like it. It’s like the selfish person’s guide to love. It’s not you, baby, it’s me I’m in love with.”
Nuala smiled self-consciously at nothing in particular. “I thought you’d see what I meant.” She paused, and when she started again, it was like she couldn’t stop, like the words just kept tumbling out of her. “I like what I look like now. I like what I act like. Everyone thinks I’m going to jump you and suck out your life because I want you so bad, because you’re such a great piper. They don’t think I can resist. But I can. Here you are and you look amazing and I haven’t taken anything from you. I don’t even want to. I mean, I do, I mean, it’s killingme not to, but I don’t want you to give up any of your life for me. I’ve never done that before. I’m—proud of myself. I’m not just a leech. I’m not just another faerie. I don’t want to use you. I just want to be whoever it is that I am when I’m with you.”
I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know how I felt. I didn’t feel like writing anything on my hands. I didn’t feel like jumping and running from the room. I didn’t feel awkward or weirded out or freezing cold or hungry or anything. I just felt like sitting here with my knees touching her knees and with my forehead leaning against our collective ball of fingers.
“I don’t want to forget this—that because I fell in love with you, I didn’t kill you,” Nuala said. Her voice was funny; it was hard for her to say what she was saying. “You don’t have to say anything. I know you’re in love with stupid, selfish Ungirlfriend and not me. That’s okay. I just—”
I leaned forward and kissed her. I know I took her by surprise because her lips were still forming a word when my lips touched them. My skin tightened with cold, just a little, as I kissed her, but no goose bumps.
I leaned back into my own chair and closed my eyes. Opened them again. Sucked in my lower lip, that tasted all of summer and Nuala, and pushed it back out again.
Nuala looked back at me.
“Was that okay?” I asked.
Her voice was so incredibly casual that I knew she had to be working hard to make it so. “It was a good kiss. I mean, don’t flatter yourself, it wasn’t the best kiss the world has ever seen, but—”
“Was it okay to kiss you,” I said. I said it really slowly and carefully, because I was trying to work it out for myself too.
Nuala just stared at me, and I stared back at her. Then she carefully unfolded my fingers from hers and pulled her knees away from my knees, and stood up. She stared at me some more from her vantage point above me, her blonde hair falling all around her face as she looked down on me like a killer angel. I just looked back at her, and I was looking so hard that I forgot to think about what my expression was.
Nuala climbed very slowly into my chair and sat down on my lap, her smooth, summer-scented legs curled up on either side of me. Holy freaking hell. I was still trying to maintain some control over my brain when she reached out and picked up my arms, one at a time, and linked them around behind her body.
Finally, she leaned toward me with a private, wicked smile on her face that turned me on like nothing ever had.
And she kissed me.
I think you might go to hell for making out with a faerie.
I kissed her back.
I woke up a second before I heard her voice.
“Wake up!” Nuala’s voice was right in my ear. “Someone’s outside.”
I opened my eyes. My right leg was asleep because Nuala was on top of it, smashed beside me in the most comfortable chair in the world. “Hell,” I hissed at her. “My leg’s all pins and needles.”
Nuala slid from my lap, landing noiselessly beside the chair, and looked down at her hand, her face surprised when she realized I still held her fingers. I used her weight to pull myself out of the chair and grimaced as my prickly foot hit the ground. I couldn’t hear anything.
What are we doing?
Nuala’s voice was barely audible. “I want to listen.”
We walked hand in hand toward the back doors. Well, Nuala walked. I limped and felt stupid for it. We stopped just on the other side of the doors, cloaked in warm darkness, standing several feet apart but still holding hands tightly. Like we were playing Red Rover, waiting for something to bust through the door and try to break through our defenses.
Now I heard what Nuala had.
Sullivan.
There were two voices outside the door, and one of them was unmistakably Sullivan: precise and savage. “ … want to know what business you have here. In the middle of the night right outside the dorms.”
The other voice was lofty, female, and somehow very familiar. “I was camping. I couldn’t sleep so I decided to walk into town.”
“Like hell you did. I saw you set the thyme on fire. I know what that does. You think I don’t know something’s going on here?”
Nuala leaned over swiftly to whisper right into my ear, her lips pressed up against my skin to keep her words from getting to anyone else. “I’ve heard her voice before. She’s been killing solitary fey.”
I didn’t have time to wonder at the idea that both Nuala and I found her voice familiar; the conversation on the other side of the door was still going.
“I think you probably think you’re a lot cleverer than you are,” the female voice said. I could almost place it, just from the condescension that dripped from it. “But you don’t really know anything. I think you should let go of my arm before I get really angry and decide to tell the cops something very unfavorable about you.”
Nuala looked at me. “Human,” she whispered.
“Oh, ma’am,” Sullivan’s voice was twenty degrees below zero. “You do not want to threaten me. I have seen so much worse than you.” A pause; scuffling. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what you were doing summoning Them right behind my kids’ dorm. Don’t give me any bullshit about camping or herbal research, either. I know. I know.”
“It’s not any of your business. If you know anything about Them, you know that you’re better off if you don’t put your nose where it might be cut off.”
Delia, I thought suddenly, and Nuala frowned at me, not recognizing the name. Dee’s aunt. I recognize her voice now. The faeries saved her life a long time ago, and she’s been helping Them ever since.
Nuala’s eyebrows arched sharply.
“Don’t tell me what I’m better off doing. I�
��ve given up the last two years of my life to make sure these kids don’t have to go through what I did.” Sullivan’s voice was a growl. “But all that time, I never thought I’d have to worry about a human. Tell. Me. Why are you here?”
Delia’s voice was frigid. “Fine. I was just using the music here to help me summon one of the daoine sidhe. One of them owes me a favor.”
“I must look extremely gullible to you.”
“You look very fragile to me, actually.” A long pause, and I wondered what filled it on the other side of the door. “You look like someone who has a lot to lose, and I know individuals who would be happy to help you lose it.”
Sullivan sounded grim. “You are sadly mistaken. I am delightfully unhindered by the attachments and accumulated possessions of most humans, thanks to your friends. I can, however, make you extremely uncomfortable if you don’t start telling me why you’re here.”
“I’m doing favors for the new queen,” Delia snapped. “Their politics. Things they can’t manage themselves.”
“New queen?” Sullivan’s voice sounded thin. “Eleanor?”
My heart stopped. Why did Sullivan know her name?
“Yes, Eleanor. I scratch her back and she scratches mine.”
Sullivan’s voice was strained. “Why is she here?”
Silence. Was there a nod or a head-shake in there that we couldn’t see? Or just nothing?
Then Sullivan again, sounding uneasy. “There’s a cloverhand here ?”
Delia laughed. “And to think you’re supposed to be protecting these children! You don’t know anything at all.”
Ballad Page 17