Ballad (13 page)

I felt a little twinge of guilt. Just a tiny one. “Because I got you beer?”

“No, man. Because you’re just so, you know. So you. Not like anybody else.” Paul paused and regrouped. “When I see you, I want that. To not be like anybody else. Even when you’re an ass, you know, you’re an ass just like you and nobody else, and everybody respects that.”

Nuala was looking at me while he said that. Her eyes glowed at me, huge in her face, in the darkness a few inches from me.

Do you think that too?

“Especially the ass part,” Nuala replied. She was still just looking at me, so intense, and I was just staring back at her.

I didn’t know how to respond to Paul. All I could think of was how good Nuala smelled and the little spray pattern her freckles made across her cheeks. Without looking away from Nuala, I said, “You flatter me.”

“Shut up,” Paul said. “Just take the compliment.”

I grinned. “You think you’ll still be this blunt when you’re sober?”

“No way.”

Somehow Nuala and I were holding hands. I couldn’t remember how it happened; if I’d reached for her hand first, or if she’d stretched her hand out of the darkness toward mine. But I was holding her hand and she was holding it back and somehow her fingers were slowly whispering across the skin on my wrist and my fingers were rubbing over the back of her palm. And I didn’t know what it meant—if it meant that we were just holding hands and this was just what you did with a psycho faerie girl, or if this feeling that was coursing through me was way more than my body telling me I was close to something supernatural.

“Plus, you know,” Paul continued, “you’re a freak too, and you’re still cool. You know? You write all over your hands and you’re like, totally obsessive, and still, every guy who knows you wants to be you.” Paul’s head thumped against the wall beside his bed. “It gives freaks like me hope.”

Nuala’s fingers on my skin seemed like my whole world. I wanted her to pull me underneath the bed and disappear into the darkness with me, but I managed, “You’re not a freak.”

“Oh, dude, you have no idea. You want to hear how messed up I am? No
way
would I tell anyone this normally. This is good shit.”

Nuala’s breath was on my face and I’m sure my crap sausage-and-green-peppers breath was on hers, but if she minded it she didn’t show it. Her mouth was curled into a very innocent and beautiful sort of half-smile I’m sure she would’ve killed immediately if she’d been aware of it.

“Get this. Every night, I hear singing.”

My fingers froze. Nuala’s fingers froze. We were both still, mirror images of each other.

“Every night I hear singing, and it’s like I’m dreaming. It’s like in a dream where, you know, you know it’s in a different language, but you can understand it? Anyway, this song is just a list. It’s a list of names.” Paul stopped, and I could hear him drink and drink and drink and drink. “And I just
know
when I hear the names, that it’s a list of dead. People who are going to die. I just know it is, because what he says afterwards, always, is
remember us, so sing the dead, lest we remember you
.”

I started to shiver. I hadn’t realized before then that I hadn’t been.

My voice sounded normal. “Who’s on it?”

“Me,” Paul said.

“You?”

“Yeah. And a bunch of names I don’t recognize. And Sullivan. And you. And—I didn’t know her name before you told me, but she’s on it. Dee. Deirdre Monaghan, right? Dude, I think we’re all going to die. Soon.” More drinking. “Do you think I’m crazy now?”

Nuala’s hand was a fist inside my fingers. “I don’t think you’re crazy. You should’ve told me sooner. I believe you.”

“I know you do,” Paul said.

I shivered, hard.

“I know you do, because you go running every time he’s about to sing. But if I’d told you, and you told me you heard it too, that’d make it real, you know?”

Nuala unfisted her fingers and used them to turn my hand slowly until words that I’d written on the back were visible to me:
the list
.

Shit
, I thought.

“Yes,” she whispered softly.

“I thought this crap would stop when I came here.” Paul’s voice was plaintive.

“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 wouldn’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.