Black Swan Rising (31 page)

“You and Marguerite—the Marguerite who was my ancestor—were sisters?”

A ripple moved through the glutinous gel and I felt a corresponding chill crawl over my flesh.

Yesss
. . .
sisssters
. . .
Only she was called to the Watchtower and I became
. . .
I became thisssss.

This was a part of the story Oberon hadn’t told me.

When Marguerite became mortal
. . . A rattling gasp shook what was left of Melusine’s body. Air bubbles percolated through her disappearing flesh.

“What? What happened when she became mortal?”

Helped her
. . .
showed her
. . .
the way
. . . The green eyes swiveled in the goo, then slid sideways, but they remained focused on me.
Help me
. . .
now!

“How? How can I help you?”

Catch me!
She hissed, her flesh sizzling on the rock.
Bring me
. . .
back!

“Catch you? But how?” Her flesh was dissolving fast now, pooling into a depression in the rock and oozing toward a crack on the sea side. If she spilled into the salt water of the bay, I feared she would be lost forever. I looked around frantically and spotted a plastic bottle wedged between the rocks. I dived for it and brought up a plastic Poland Spring bottle, half-full and still capped. The bane of environmentalists everywhere—but I was glad to see it. I spilled out the old water, shaking out the last drops.
At least it’s spring water,
I thought as I made my way around the rock to the seaward side. I placed the bottle beneath the crack.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m going to catch you. You can . . .” I struggled for the right word.
Deliquesce
leapt to mind out of some old SAT study guide, but I didn’t use it. “You can let go. I’ve got you.”

After I capped the bottle that held what remained of Melusine—daughter of Elinas and Pressina, Queen of Columbiers and Poitou, Banshee of Lusignan—I stood up and looked around
me. I was on a rock outcropping not far from a paved walkway. Beyond the walkway loomed brick buildings, dark against the skyline of Manhattan. I’d been to Governors Island on a school trip and knew that it had once been a military base, but was now a national monument. The buildings were abandoned, which was a good thing because I was stark naked.

There must be security guards, though, patrolling the island. One would come by eventually and see me. Then I’d have to come up with a reason for being naked on Governors Island, which I now remembered was closed for the season. They would assume I was a failed suicide, or crazy, or both. I’d probably end up in the psych ward at Bellevue.

And then I would be powerless to stop John Dee.

No doubt that’s what he intended by flushing Melusine and me out of his lair once he saw I didn’t buy his claims of innocence. Which I didn’t, did I?

I shook the thought aside. I had no time for doubt. I had to get off this island somehow without getting myself arrested or committed.

I walked inland, clutching the water bottle that held what remained of Melusine. On the other side of the paved pathways was a lawn leading up to a brick house. The grass felt good on my bare feet after the wet rocks, but I was still freezing. If I didn’t find some way to warm up soon, I’d get hypothermia. Could I break into one of the houses? Find some old curtains to wrap myself in? An image of an old Carol Burnett skit, which Jay had shown me on YouTube, of the comedian as Scarlett O’Hara dressed in full curtain plus curtain-rod regalia popped into my head. Laughter bubbled up from my aching stomach, as improbable as everything else that had
happened to me, and somehow irresistible. I doubled over from it and sank down on the lawn in the shelter of a towering pine tree. Jay would love that I was laughing at this. Remembering Jay, I recalled what Dee had said about Jay being fragile,
suicidal even
. Was he lying? Was Jay in danger of killing himself?

I shook my head, spraying cold water over my shoulders. It was no use thinking about that now. I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them to stop my teeth from chattering. If only I could get warm, I could think straight. . . . But I could. Oberon had taught me that trick. I brought my fingers together, but my hand was shaking too much to snap them. I tried again and again, focusing on the little bit of heat left in my flesh, until a spark appeared. The flame wavered . . . and went out. I had nothing to light with it.

I ran back down to the shore for driftwood. I gathered up armfuls and carried them back to the lawn, near the pine, but not so close that a fire would catch in its boughs. My hands shaking from the cold, I piled them up and then ran back down to the rocks to collect whatever stray paper I could find. Then I crouched in front of my pyre, snapped my fingers, and using a sheet from the
Wall Street Journal
stock pages, lit my bonfire. The flame snapped and crackled and then spread to the wood. Only when the flames leapt higher than my head did I realize the fire was bound to bring park security.

But Oberon had taught me one other trick, although not intentionally. I snapped my fingers again and seared a pattern into the grass: an eye surrounded by a spiral. The design glowed red-gold against the grass and then turned silver. I got up and drew three more in a square around my bonfire. When I was done, a silver pyramid formed over the fire. I noticed that a
trail of smoke snaked out a hole in the top of the pyramid, but I just had to hope no one would notice it. I sat down again and rubbed my hands in front of the fire.

At least now I wouldn’t die of hypothermia, but I was no closer to finding my way home. I sat for a while, watching the smoke from my fire trace a spiral path into the night sky above me. If only I could follow it, but I didn’t think I could fly without Ariel, just as I didn’t think I could turn myself into water again without Melusine. Even if I could have, the idea of entering that state again after watching Melusine melt made me shudder. No, I wanted warmth, and not just the warmth from a fire, but the comfort of warm flesh.

The answer was there, but I kept circling around it. Will Hughes. He had shown me how to call him. But should I? I heard Dee’s accusations—
Once he’s contaminated your blood, you long for more. He’s gotten you hooked—
as clearly as if Dee sat beside me. It was true that I’d acted like a possessed woman last night. Had that been Will’s plan? Was he using me to get to the box? Did I want to call him now because he had enslaved me with that first bite?

I ran my thumb over my fingers again and again, debating whether to call him. A voice kept repeating in my head,
What other choice do you have?
It was Will’s voice and I knew it might be lying to me . . . no, I didn’t really have any choice, but that wasn’t the reason I’d call him. It was desire, pure and simple, that finally made me snap my fingers together.

The flame leapt higher than before, startling me. I must have stoked it by running my thumb across my fingertips for so long—or maybe it was my desire that fed it. I blew on it and it shot into the sky through the smoke hole, beyond the barrier of my pyramid, where it exploded in a burst of fireworks. My
desire writ large across the night sky for all the world to see. I might as well have posted it on Twitter.

There was nothing to do now but wait, which I did with agonizing impatience as minutes passed by. Maybe he wouldn’t see it. Maybe he’d see it and not come. . . .

I felt something stir the night air. A shadow moved under the boughs of the pine tree. A dark shape separated from the shadow the tree cast on the lawn. Will, in a long black overcoat that billowed behind him like a cape, walked toward me, a dark figure that remained dark as he approached the fire without catching any reflection of the light. Was he made up of such dark stuff that not even the light could touch him? But then I realized the firelight didn’t touch him because of the screen I’d erected. He scanned the lawn, his pale face tense and alert, without seeing me. Well, at least I didn’t have to be embarrassed that I was naked.

“Garet?” he called at last.

“I’m here.”

His head swung around and he looked directly at me—he had the senses of a tracking animal. He looked directly into my eyes—I felt sure he saw me—but then he looked an inch to the right and his mouth twisted into a smile. “Ah, you’ve mastered the spell of misdirection,” he said. “You’re learning fast.”

I thought I detected a trace of bitterness in his voice. Was he afraid I’d learned enough not to trust him? All of Dee’s warnings came back to me.

“Not fast enough to get me out of here. . . . Um . . . would you mind lending me your coat?”

“My coat? Ah, you must have met Melusine and learned the trick of turning into water.” He took off his long black overcoat
and ran his hand across the fabric. “Hm . . . I’m afraid this will feel rough against your delicate skin. Here.” He unbuttoned his white dress shirt and took it off. His skin was as white as the fabric and gleamed like cold marble in the starlight. “You’ll have to say something again so I’ll know where you are,” he said.

“Marco.”

“Polo,” he replied, grinning as he dropped the shirt an inch from the barrier of the dome.

I reached out of the dome and took the shirt. I saw his eyes widen as it must have disappeared in front of him. The fine polished cotton slid over my arms like cool water. My hands were shaking as I did the buttons, but I wasn’t as cold anymore.

“Are you going to invite me into your parlor?”

“I’m not sure I know how to do that,” I said, equivocating. What I really wasn’t sure about was whether I
should
do it.

“You simply have to give me your hand.”

I stood up. He was standing only a few inches from me, but he couldn’t see me. I looked into the wide silver eyes and followed the chiseled line of his cheekbone down to his jaw, his collarbones, the sweep of his broad chest, the sculpted ridges of his abdominal muscles . . . he didn’t look like a creature who had been dead for four hundred years. He looked alive . . . and dangerous. Was it really a good idea to invite him into my . . .
parlor,
as he called it. But then I had called him here and I still needed his help.

I extended my hand outside the silver wall of the dome. His eyes lit on it as soon as it appeared, but instead of taking it right away he bowed. “Thank you, my lady,” he said. Then he laid his hand in mine and stepped across the silver screen.

As soon as he was inside the dome his skin, which had been
white a moment ago, turned gold in the glow of the fire. I could feel warmth radiating off him.

“You’re warm,” I said, stepping back and sitting down by the fire. “Does that mean . . . ?”

“Yes, it means I’ve fed recently.” He sat down beside me, leaving a few inches between us. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

“I see. So I have nothing you want.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” He lifted his hand to my face, but I turned my head away from him before he touched me.

“You want the box, don’t you?” I asked.

His hand froze in the air. “Did Dee tell you that?”

“He said that you want the box to free you from immortality. Is that true? Does the box have the power to make you”—I turned my head toward him so I could see his face—“human.”

He flinched. A flash of red moved across his silver eyes, like a streak of sunset across the horizon, then subsided. “Yes, that part’s true. Dee used the box to summon the demon who turned me into . . .
this
. But Marguerite also used the box to summon the creature that turned her into a mortal. I believe that the box might lead me back to that creature . . . or at least to the place where it dwells. Can you blame me for wanting to be human again when you look at me like that . . . as if I were a monster?”

“I don’t see you as a monster. But perhaps you see me as a means for finding the box.”

“I confess when you first showed up at my apartment and told me that you had found the box, I wondered if you were the incarnation of Marguerite come back to save me. But then when I saw your horror at what I was, I wondered if you hadn’t been sent to torture me. It feels like torture, to be offered a
chance to be with you, but to know I can’t take it. If you did find the box, if you did take it from Dee . . . would you blame me for wanting to use it to become human again?” He sighed and his hand, still balanced in the air like a hummingbird, lit on my face. A vision sparked under his touch—like the vision I’d seen earlier of Marguerite and her sister Melusine. I recognized Marguerite from the earlier vision, only she was older. She stood on the shore of a lake—the same lake beside the tower I’d seen in my dream of the two swans. She held the silver box in her hands. She was calling something from the lake, the creature that could turn her into a mortal. She was frightened, but she was doing it so that she would be with Will. I could feel the love she had for him in every cell of my body, as if it had been encoded there with my DNA. I leaned into his touch. He slipped his hand under my chin, tilted my face up, and touched his lips to the edge of my jaw. “Would you blame me for wanting to be with you like this?” he murmured into my skin. I waited for his mouth to slide down my neck, but instead he found my mouth.

His lips pressed against mine, opening them. I melted into the warmth of his mouth and felt the heat of his skin as it touched mine.
A heat that came from feeding on someone else’s blood.
I pulled back and traced the vein on his throat with my finger. “Can we . . . ?” I began, feeling the blood rush to my face. “Can we be together without . . . ?”