Black Swan Rising (22 page)

I hurried anxiously outside, afraid he had vanished as abruptly as he had this morning, but I found him leaning on the railing at the foot of the steps, facing the river. A bank of fog was boiling
at the end of the street, completely obscuring the West Side Highway and the water beyond it.

“Where do you think he is?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Somewhere on the river, maybe. Or underground in the sewers, or out to sea. He’s using the waterways to spread his contagion.” He turned around to face me. “Why didn’t you listen to Oberon when he told you not to see me?”

I could have answered that he was the one who’d come to my house tonight, that I hadn’t sought him out, but I knew that wasn’t what mattered. I was glad he’d come—no, more than glad. I was
relieved
. If he hadn’t come, I’d have gone looking for him. “Oberon doesn’t know everything,” I answered, feeling disloyal at how peevish I sounded. “Oh, but he did teach me this.” I looked around to make sure no one was watching, then snapped my fingers. A spark flew off my thumb and leapt up into a flame.

Will laughed at my obvious delight in my new trick, then cupped my hand in his and gently blew at the flame. Instead of going out, it flared up and I felt a surge of warmth move through my body from head to toes. The flame danced and swelled, then lifted off my hand and shot into the sky, soaring upward like a Roman candle.

“Show-off! How did you do that?”

“I’ll tell you, but you have to promise that if you’re ever in trouble, you’ll send up a flare to let me know.”

“Sure. Now, tell me how you did it?”

“It’s easy. All you have to do is put your lips together and blow.” He lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against it. I felt the graze of his fangs over my knuckles. “I have to go. Asian markets are opening soon. But remember . . . if you
need me . . .” He dropped my hand. Before I could say anything more, he’d ducked into his car. The Silver Cloud had melted into the fog at the end of the street before the heat of his lips had faded from my hand. It was just long enough for me to wonder where that warmth had come from.

I was relieved when we got home that Becky had a show to do. Jay and Fiona were waiting for her on the front steps, huddled in their coats, Fiona’s Honda Fit packed to the rooftop with musical equipment. Fiona hugged me fiercely, her blunt, shoulder-length hair brushing against my face. It was bright red this week, but had been blue-black the last time I’d seen her. She seemed to have dyed it to match the faux-fur coat and thigh-high boots she was wearing.

“Sorry for your troubles, Garet,” she said in her lilting Irish accent. She’d been an exchange student at Pratt for a semester, then stayed on when London Dispersion Force started taking off. “I went by the hospital today to see your dad. He was brilliant, all excited about some painter who’d been to visit.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Fiona that the painter was dead. “That was sweet of you to visit him,” I said. “Good luck tonight at the show. I bet that record producer offers you a huge contract.”

Jay, who was rearranging an amp in the trunk, groaned. Becky swatted him. I decided to leave before I got dragged into a band fight. I wished them all luck and climbed upstairs
to my studio. When I dropped my bag on my worktable, I thought I heard something squeak, but, when after looking around I didn’t detect any source for the sound, I decided it must have been my overstimulated imagination. I dug the lover’s eye brooch out of my pocket, laid it on my desk, and stared at it. It didn’t bat an eyelash. In fact it didn’t move at all. Had I imagined that it had moved in the shop?

Keeping an eye on the brooch—I didn’t like the idea of it spying on me—I reached into my bag for my jeweler’s loupe . . . and felt something bite me.

I dropped the bag and it exploded. Orange and yellow flames shot up to the ceiling, scorched the plywood that was nailed over the skylight, and drifted down to my worktable in a shower of sparks. The fireball landed in front of me, rolled over and then stood up.

“Lol?”

The little creature chattered away as she shook out her wings and picked lint off her arms and legs, but I couldn’t understand a word she said. She sounded angry, so I apologized for surprising her, for the state of my messenger bag—a breath mint was melted in her fiery hair, I noticed—and asked if I could do anything for her. I wasn’t sure if she understood. Hands on her slim hips, she strode up and down my worktable, looking at my soldering equipment and poking into my supply boxes. She came to a dead halt when she saw the lover’s eye, though. She hissed and flew into my lap.

“Pretty scary, huh?” I asked. “I don’t know why I took it from Dee’s shop. I guess I thought it might come in handy.”

She started to hum . . . or, rather,
vibrate,
then she flew back to the table, hovering just above the brooch, and peered into the eye. I wasn’t positive, but it seemed that the eye widened
as if in surprise. Then Lol cautiously extended one pointy orange finger and poked it.

The eye blinked and teared.

Lol tittered and moved to poke it again.

“Stop it!” I cried, snatching up the brooch. “There’s no need to torture . . .
it
.” I looked down at the eye cradled in my hand and it looked back up at me. “I think I’d better put it away until I can figure out what to do with it.”

I had some leather jewelry boxes, which I used for my more expensive pieces, that I’d had made in Italy. I took out a red box stamped in gold with the Cygnet trademark. The interior was lined with white velvet. I placed the brooch in it carefully, snapped the lid shut, then put the box in the locked metal cabinet where I kept my silver and gold. While I did all this, Lol flew around the room investigating. She explored my bookshelves, sneezing at the dust, rummaged through my junk shelves, and spilled a coffee can full of nails.

I decided it was best to ignore her. I went into the bathroom and took a long, much overdue shower. When I got out, I didn’t see her anywhere, but I noticed that my bedroom door was open. I went in and found her curled up in my sweater drawer in a nest of my best cashmere sweater, snoring loudly.

I decided she had the right idea. I climbed into bed and turned the light out. For a moment I was confused by the quality of light in the room, but then I saw that it was Lol shedding her pink-orange glow like a night-light, and then I was asleep.

I slept until noon the next day. Lol was nowhere to be found when I woke up, but I did notice that all my drawers had been rearranged, and there were tiny footprints outlined in talcum
powder across my bureau top. When I walked downstairs, I smelled fresh brewed coffee and something buttery. Jay and Becky were in the kitchen, lathering clotted cream on scones.

“Did you sleep with a pastry chef lately?” Becky asked me through a mouthful of scone.

“I thought it was a hedge fund manager,” Jay muttered. “There’s a baker too?”

“Well, someone is expressing his fondness in baked goods,” Becky said, holding up a grease-stained brown paper bag. “I found this by the front door this morning . . . with this note.” She handed me a purple Post-it.
Meet me at the Empire State Building at 1:00 a.m.,
it read. “The Empire State Building,” Becky said. “How very
Sleepless in Seattle.
Whatever you’re doing—or
whom
ever you’re doing—to deserve all this, don’t stop!”

“I’m not
doing
anyone, Becky,” I snapped. “Sheesh! Tell me what happened last night with the record producer.”

“He wants to sign us up, only Jay here has
artistic reservations
.” Becky rolled her eyes.

“We already have a label,” Jay said, picking crumbs off the table. “A label that doesn’t dictate our style. I’m just not sure these guys
get
us.”

“What they’ll get us is a seven-figure advance . . .”

I listened to Jay and Becky go back and forth, debating the merits of their present label—a small indie record producer based in Brooklyn—against their new offer. It was pretty clear who was going to win the argument. Becky had been the captain of our high school debating team and was prelaw at NYU before she dropped out to form the band with Jay and Fiona. She had figures, examples, and logic on her side. Jay had only a stubborn misgiving. His replies became shorter and shorter as
the argument went on.
He
appeared to become shorter and shorter as he slumped farther down in his chair.

“Maybe you can talk to the producer about your ideas for the band,” I suggested to Jay. “I really love the new song, by the way. I heard it on WROX the other night. Such a sad love song. I love how you evoke the whole tradition of the troubadours and all their unrequited longing for the unapproachable love object.”

Jay turned a bright red at my praise and slumped down even farther in his chair. Then he muttered something and fled the table.

“What did I say wrong?” I asked Becky.

“Nothing. It’s just . . . I think Jay might have been thinking of you when he wrote that song, and I guess he didn’t like hearing you describe his feelings as
unrequited longing for the unapproachable love object
.”

“Me? Why would he be thinking of me . . .” I stammered to a halt under Becky’s glare. “Shit. I’m an idiot.”

“Yeah, well . . . you’ve had a lot on your mind.”

“Should I go talk to him?”

“Nah, I’d leave him alone for now. I think he likes to brood. Maybe we’ll get some new songs out of him.”

I followed Becky’s advice and left Jay alone. I couldn’t help thinking as I walked to the hospital, though, that I’d taken the coward’s way out. Jay was my best friend. Even more than Becky, he’d been the one who held me together after my mother died. For a whole year he’d spent every day after school with me, just hanging out while I made jewelry, ready to take me to a sci-fi film fest at the Film Forum or willing to order in Chinese food and watch old movies with me on TCM. He was the perfect company for the emotionally strung-out zombie I’d become.
Restful, not too cheery, always available. I had never thought of him in a romantic light, but then I hadn’t been thinking of
anyone
in that light. Although I’d had no shortage of interested men in college, none of them lasted very long. The artists I met in school and through the gallery always proved unreliable and too insecure, and the corporate types I met in the auction houses and galleries seemed to be missing something. Or maybe I was the one missing something. It occurred to me now that many of the guys I’d dated over the last ten years had been perfectly nice—some were even more than nice—but I had failed to feel anything for any one of them. And now the first man I did feel something for was a four-hundred-year-old vampire. What was wrong with me?

I was so wrapped up in my self-pity that as I rounded the corner of Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue, I ran straight into a man coming the other way. He was middle-aged and well dressed in a Barbour raincoat and tweed cap, carrying a folded
Wall Street Journal
and a Starbucks coffee cup.

Before I could get out an apology, he snarled at me, “You’re going the wrong way, asshole!”

I was so taken aback—both by the obscenity and the notion that there was a right and wrong way to walk on the street—that I stared openmouthed and speechless as he stomped off. I looked around for a sympathetic glance from a passerby, but although the corner was busy, everyone who passed was sunk too deeply into his or her own thoughts to have noticed the incident.
Everyone
. I stood on the corner for five minutes and didn’t see a single person walk by who looked happy. Even the art students on their way to Parsons looked weighed down by their portfolios. True, the day was the coldest we’d had so far this winter. Still, I couldn’t remember a gloomier mood in the
city since just after 9/11, and even then there’d been a feeling of shared tragedy, not this insular brooding. Was it the recession, I wondered, or was it the influence of Dee’s demons making itself felt on the city?

I felt the same oppression inside the hospital. I ran for an open elevator, but no one in it held the door for me. I overheard a doctor yelling at a nurse for bringing the wrong chart and a woman snapping at her bleary-eyed toddler to “stop whining.” The instant I walked into my father’s room I could see that the malaise hanging over the city had crept into him. He looked shrunken lying in his bed, his eyes hooded and heavy, staring blankly at the ceiling. He didn’t stir at the sound of my arrival, but when I said his name, his head swiveled around and he managed a weak smile.

“There’s my beautiful daughter,” he said. I could have wept for the bravery of that smile after all the gloom I’d seen out on the streets, but I managed to smile back instead.

“Hey, Dad, look what I brought.” I took out Santé’s painting from the portfolio I’d brought it in and propped it up on the chair by his bed. Instantly his face brightened.

“Would you look at that? She looks exactly like she did when I first met her.” He furrowed his brow. “How did Santé capture her like that?”

“Ober—Obie Smith said Santé painted this from a dream.”

My father laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. I poured him a glass of water from the plastic carafe on the tray beside his bed. When he’d sipped some water, my father wagged his finger at me. “That Santé, he was full of bullshit. I know where he got this picture. There’s a photograph of your mother as a young girl in France. It’s in my bedroom on my dresser. You know the one.”