Fair Peril

by Nancy Springer

  She wanted someone to love her, that was all. She really just wanted someone to love her.

  Buffy wanted to walk fast, but her body wanted to walk very slowly, if at all. Because she had to struggle along, it was after midnight before she and Adamus reached the mall.

  The plan, insofar as there was a plan, was to break in somehow, run for the food court when the alarms went off, and hope for a quick and easy transition into the realm of Fair Peril.

  But none of this was necessary.

  The main doors once again stood open. Police cars once again were parked outside with their flashers going. This time the cops and the security guards were outside as well, on the mall apron, fully preoccupied. They had all formed a knot around the youngest, newest rookie cop, to whom they were listening dubiously.

  “It came up out of the goddamn fountain,” he was insisting. “The middle fountain. I’d just walked past and I heard this splish-splash jingle-jingle and I turned around and there it was.”

  Assessing the situation from behind the nearest cruiser, with Adamus crouching by her side, Buffy barely restrained a squeak of joy.

  “And it was like a frog,” said one of the cops in carefully neutral tones.

  “Like a real skinny goddamn frog, except it walked on its hind legs and I swear to God it was six feet tall. And it had some kind of goddamn satanic tattoos on its arms, and it was full of rings.”

  “Rings on its fingers?”

  “No, dammit, nose rings all over the place, here and here and here and here.” The youngster was indicating sites on his own anatomy, the others were watching him carefully, and Buffy and Addie quietly slipped toward the door. “It came bouncing up to me—”

  “Clothing?” asked a cop with a notebook, businesslike.

  “What the hell would a frog be wearing clothes for? It had big webbed feet. It left water all over the floor.”

  Buffy and Addie were crouching inside the mall doors now.

  “It came up to me kind of hopping on its hind feet, and I was so goddamn freaked I never moved. It stuck its wet hands on me. I damn near shit my pants.”

  “It assaulted you?” The cop with the notebook maintained a severely professional tone.

  “It, um, it was trying to, um, stick its face in my face.”

  “It what?” Forget the professional tone.

  “It, uh, it requested me to kiss it.”

  “It talked?”

  One of the older cops growled, “Why the hell shouldn’t a pervert in a frog suit talk?”

  “It wasn’t a frog suit!”

  “Green latex or something.”

  Another cop put in, “Those fountains are only about a foot deep. How could something that big come up out of one?”

  “Look, I know what I saw! It wasn’t a guy in a frog suit, either. For one thing, it didn’t have no dick—”

  This was getting entirely too engrossing; time to move on. Buffy touched Adamus on his arm. Abandoning the young cop to his fate, the two of them headed into the penetralia of the Mall Tifarious. As soon as she dared, Buffy called softly, “LeeVon!”

  “Suppose it’s a golem?” Adamus whispered.

  “It’s a golem, okay, a golem with a tattoo of a really well-hung Mowgli on its butt.” Having no dick had to be rough on a guy turned into a frog, Buffy realized, especially this guy. That, and being hurled through the air by the pissed-off object of his affections. Why hadn’t the impact turned him human, like in the fairy tale? Why had it only worked halfway, turning him into a human-sized frog? Maybe Periwinkle was bi. “LeeVon!”

  “Best Beloved!” With a ring-jingle and a mighty flapping of wet feet on vinyl tile, LeeVon came kangaroo-hopping out of the shadows. He shimmered greenly—it was hard for Buffy to tell whether he was shinily, froggily wet or slick with otherworldly glamour. Tall and entirely too thin, he caromed up to them.

  “Oh, poor LeeVon!” Buffy was so relieved to see him alive that she hugged him, which was a mistake that cost her truly weird dreams on occasion for the rest of her life. She had just hugged a six-foot frog. He was indeed wet. His green skin pressed obscenely soft and tacky against her cheek. His body squished like no human body. She could feel his baggy throat pulsing.

  “Best Beloved, Best Beloved!” His voice a croaky sob, he hugged her back. “Buffy, you have to help me. If they don’t kill me soon, I will starve to death.”

  “Food court,” Buffy said. Or—was it because he had eaten the midnight food of that court that LeeVon was still a frog?

  “No! Take me to the Pony Ride, please, now, quickly!”

  Buffy stepped back from him and eyed him, trying to work out the logistics. “I don’t have a car,” she said, not to refuse him, just thinking aloud. But he thought she was going to refuse him. Agonized, he bounced in place, ringing like a wind chime.

  “Best Beloved, please!”

  “The Queen is expecting us,” Adamus interjected, similarly thoughtful. “She gets surly if she is kept waiting.”

  “You go,” Buffy said to Adamus, having made up her mind what she had to do. “Stall her or something. And, Addie, can you give LeeVon your clothes?”

  “What?”

  “He gave you his once upon a time.”

  Adamus winced, impaled on a point of honor. “My lady, mercy,” he begged.

  “I don’t need clothes,” LeeVon put in.

  “Yes, you do.” In the dark, with clothes to cover his shiny green nakedness, LeeVon just might be able to make it to the Pony Ride without causing a panic and bringing out the National Guard. “Adamus, do it.”

  Prince Adamus d’Aurca swallowed hard and started pulling off his tunic. “Very well.” He handed LeeVon the tunic and began extricating himself from his hose. “But surely he can go to this place by himself, milady. The Queen—”

  Buffy said, “I’m not a lady. I’m a mobile disaster area and I’m to blame that he’s in this fix. And I let him down once already.” These were things LeeVon was too kind to say. “I’d better go with him. Tell the Queen that I’m keeping a promise.”

  Then she found it hard to leave, for, standing there in his smallclothes, Adamus looked too vulnerable and all too sweetly flesh and too beautiful, like a strong, sleek golden colt, and too much the prince of her dreams.

  “Stop that,” Buffy said.

  “Stop what?”

  “Enchanting me. I’m going. Addie …” She did not know what to say to him. She did not dare to name the emotion she was feeling, though it trembled in her voice.

  With a great clang the mall security alarm went off. Instantly Adamus blinked out like a firefly, gone as if he had never stood there golden and gorgeous and half naked, while Buffy and LeeVon ran and leaped, respectively, for the door.

  “Hang on to my arm,” Buffy told LeeVon, “and try to walk like a human.”

  LeeVon obliged. The side street along which they were promenading was romantically ill-lit, and it wasn’t every evening that Buffy got to go strolling with a date in a velvet tunic, and LeeVon’s legs looked quite nice in Addie’s hose with the feet hacked open to accommodate LeeVon’s huge webbies. Still, Buffy hoped no one was watching.

  “You walk like a drunk.”

  “I can’t see where I’m going. My eyes are on the wrong side of my head.” Upright, with his snout pointing heavenward, LeeVon perforce goggled back the way he had come, but this did not seem to trouble him. “Just get me there, Best Beloved, and I’ll be okay. Something has happened.”

  “No duh. A lot has happened.”

  But LeeVon did not seem to be interested in hearing her story. Rather, he was intent on his own. “Hanging around in fountains can get kind of perilous at intervals, but it still gives a person plenty of time to think,” he said. “I got to considering, Why was I just waiting to be found, to be rescued? I mean, in general. I mean, my whole goddamn life. I thought, What would Kipling think of me? If Kipling were writing me, you can bet your sweet ass I wouldn’t be hanging around waiting for somebody to kiss
me. If nobody wanted to kiss me, well, I’d just fricking find somebody. Get a little proactive. Be the kisser instead of the kissee.”

  “Sounds good,” Buffy said automatically, because LeeVon had that excited tone people get sometimes when life starts to make sense or they have just had a really good bowel movement. But then she started to think. “Uh, LeeVon,” she said gently, “you tried that with Periwinkle, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And the cute cop at the mall?”

  “Certainly. Your point being?”

  “You got hurled above the treetops and you got an entire police squadron called out on your account.”

  “So?”

  “What if some guy in the bar decides to clean your clock?”

  “Oh. Goodness. I can’t risk that. Forget what I said; I’ll just stay a frog for the rest of my life.”

  Sarcasm didn’t become LeeVon, but Buffy had to admit he had a point. She said nothing.

  “I can’t see where I’m going at all.” His tone changed suddenly, becoming gentle and cheerful, almost tender. “Is it sensible for me to trust you to lead me, Buffmeister?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Yet here we are. It reminds me of those touchy-feely games we played in college where people led you around blindfolded.”

  “We’re almost there.” Buffy could hear Madonna’s “Vogue” throbbing ahead.

  “Help me, Best Beloved. I’m fainting with hunger.”

  He wobbled into the Pony Ride on her arm. Buffy hesitated, disoriented by darkness, strobe flashes, too many male bodies pumping and posing; she caught MTV-style glimpses of butt cheeks flexing below really minimalist cutoff shorts, of cocks enticingly delineated by tight athleticwear, of torsos bobbing with arms in the air, bare washboard bellies rubbing. She stood and stared, but LeeVon—and this was the guy who liked them young and cute—LeeVon scarcely bothered to glance at the dancers at all, crouching like an amphibious pointer and tugging her straight toward the food.

  “Jesus jumpin’ on the water!” gasped a male barfly as LeeVon entered his limited range of focus.

  “What kind of queer is that?” agreed the guy next to him.

  “You see it too?”

  “I wish I didn’t.”

  “Jesus some more, what’s that with him?” The barfly’s drunken attention had turned to Buffy. “Nice falsies, dude,” he called to her. “But get serious, wouldja? Perm the hair and try some makeup.”

  Good God. Probably the guy wanted her to shave her legs, too. “Get a life,” Buffy complained, but her critic didn’t hear her. He was gawking at LeeVon, who had reached the tray of buffalo wings on the counter and was throwing them down himself one per second, bones and all.

  “Jesus washin’ feet,” he said in awed tones. “Somebody bring that green guy some beer.”

  LeeVon glugged down the bowl of ranch dressing instead, then paused in his ravenings long enough to peer with one golden rolling eye. “Kiss me,” he croaked, “and I’ll turn into a librarian.”

  The male barfly squeaked and fled toward the loo. “I’m drunk, right?” appealed the other guy, a very presentable (in Buffy’s opinion) young blond. “Somebody tell me I’m just real, real drunk.”

  “You’re nice and drunk.” LeeVon advanced, steady now since he had eaten, handsomely puffed and erectile. “Haven’t seen you in here before, have I.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Let’s dance.”

  “Uh, me?” The man shrank against the bar. Tall, handsomely palomino, and well hung, with a banana-curled ponytail—he was no competition for Adamus, of course, but undeniably young and cute. Buffy wouldn’t have minded having him for herself. LeeVon’s type?

  “I am an ensorcelled librarian,” LeeVon told him.

  “Uh, okay, green dude. You want to talk about it?”

  “No,” LeeVon said throatily. “Talk is cheap.” Buffy had never seen him so masterful. Fair Peril might have done something for him. “Dance with me.” He maneuvered his chosen partner toward the floor.

  Buffy’s attention strayed to the few buffalo wings LeeVon had left on the tray. Chewing greasily on one, she turned her head to see how LeeVon was doing but found herself staring instead at a face at the far end of the bar, caught by its hard gaze aimed back at her, an alabaster oval face. Sitting there arrow-straight and solitary, the man—man?—but so much was surreal that it seemed unimportant whether it was a man or a woman, more important that the purple cape hung regal from slim, square shoulders, a flash of gold showed at the base of a fine throat, dark hair flowed free, the hard white face confronted Buffy, perfect and familiar and strange.

  “Drink, girlie?” a drawling voice invited. The bartender. The kind of place this was, probably he called everybody girlie.

  Buffy shook her head but asked, “Who’s that?”

  The bartender approximated the focus of her stare. “Her?” His voice lost its drawl and became soft and wary. “That’s the Queen. You know. The Queen.”

  Buffy didn’t know. Somewhere behind the music she was hearing strange noises, far, high noises that made her think of sky, wild geese flying perhaps, or wind. Then she wasn’t hearing the music at all, just the inside of her head, swoosh, as if her brain were going down the drain. Peripherally she saw LeeVon dancing as only a six-foot, long-legged, balletic frog could dance, great leaps of blind faith, trusting his blond partner to keep him from hurting himself. And his partner seemed to be doing that—but she did not know whether the man was drunk enough to kiss him. She did not know where Addie was, or whether he was all right. She did not know where her daughter was. She was not sure she knew who her daughter was. She felt so drunk on fatigue and sugar that she was giddily unsure of her own name. Buffles? Maddie-lin? Maddie?

  But she knew, as a flash of gold glared in those fine eyes, as a white hand lifted and beckoned at her, she knew that it was as the prince had said: the Queen was pretty damn pissed at her.

  “No,” she whispered. She had to stay a bit, to see whether LeeVon—

  But “No” was the wrong thing to say. The glittering eyes flared like fire, the white hand flexed. Buffy wanted to scream but couldn’t as she felt herself whirling away into darkness.

  Thirteen

  In silk and velvet LeeVon leaped, LeeVon vogued, LeeVon danced, jingling like a great green tambourine, and his attention was all for the partner who guided him by the hands, whose presence he sensed just inches from the taut, tender skin of his belly; the world he saw, behind him and upside down and wildly in motion, was like a video that accompanied the music, the dancing, the partner. It was a lushly atmospheric video—the dim, smoky room, dusky wood and tawny lights, starry display of glass behind the bar, the people, the half-naked men and the woman in the cloak and the woman in blue jeans, all ebbing and flowing to the rhythm of the music; he would remember it forever, what he had seen on this most important of all nights, yet it did not concern him.

  LeeVon saw Buffy disappear and kept right on dancing. On his own again. Just as she was once again on her own in her story.

  This, then, LeeVon dared to think it … this was his story.

  His story.

  All of this suffering, being turned into a frog and dragged around and thrown around and starving … it was for some purpose.

  The music was thumping, pulsing, pounding like his dancing heels, his dancing heart. With a titanic effort LeeVon jackknifed his head forward, creasing his throat, to look at his partner.

  The blond young man stared back at him in fascination and terror. Lovely, those wide gray eyes shaded by long toast-colored lashes. Lovely, those grave brown brows, that high forehead, the shining hair pulled back. LeeVon had never before noticed a young man’s eyes. Typically, he had been paying more attention to other parts. But this dancing partner was special, different, dancing arrow-straight, head high, brave gaze despite his fear, ponytail swinging—something about him reminded LeeVon of a character from Kipling, or maybe from Robert Louis Stevenson, some adv
enturous lad with the ponytail, the shining hair, the high forehead over sweet eyes, couldn’t think which boy, which book, maybe Alice in Wonderland—

  “Kiss me,” LeeVon said, his voice issuing as a strangled croak from his constricted throat.

  The dance went on, yet everything seemed to slow down. The young man’s lips parted, moving wordlessly. LeeVon felt his soul hanging upon the softening of that Cupid’s-bow mouth; he could have died that way and withered into a hook of bone hung on this darling’s pocket. Yet he knew that the soft stirring of those delectable lips was not for him. Not yet.

  He begged, “Kiss me. Please.”

  The young man moved his mouth again and this time managed to get a word out. “Why?”

  “Because …” To help me, to turn me human so I can get on with my life, so I can go back to being LeeVon the librarian … but as he thought it, with a soulquake, an interior cataclysm ten on the Richter scale, LeeVon realized that it was not enough. Not nearly enough, just to go back to being what he was before. His story wanted more. Demanded far more.

  The floor seemed to shift under his feet. He could not dance any longer.

  Because I want someone to love me.

  God oh Jesus oh God, he wanted, wanted, wanted to be loved and not lonely anymore. He had reached through his pride to truth, that was something … but no, it got worse. Oh God oh God of mercy, he wanted—this lover whose name he did not yet know. This one, this brave, grave, blond dancing partner, this gray-eyed ponytailed prince, and no other.

  The dance was drawing to a close. There was not much time.

  Say it, then.

  And he would have said it. He had found his way past pride. He could tell the truth.

  Kiss me. Do this for me. Love me.

  But—his own aching need—it was true, but it was the wrong truth for the story.

  LeeVon of all people knew: the happy ending had to be earned. Always.

  All around him, couples were going off to get a drink. He stood a green, silent grotesque on the dance floor. The one who could save him stood facing him, gray gaze steady upon him, waiting for an answer. How much longer would he wait?