Fairy Circle (34 page)

“
I thought you were a fried-chicken virgin!” Coco was completely indignant. She looked Saffron up and down, up and down, not knowing, for once, what to say or do.

“
I am.”

Coco’s hands went to her hips. “Well, what does that mean?”

“
It means stop giving me your Goddamned, unasked-for sexual advice…I obviously don’t need it.” Saffron picked up a feather duster and made for the cereal aisle.

Coco stood rooted to the spot. She looked down and considered her crotch and the space to her knees. Her eyebrows rose. She smiled and looked at Saffron again.

From the aisle, Saffron gave a cool smile in return. “Tomorrow, everything will be better.”

Coco’s smile fell. “Yeah, that’s not creepy.” Being somewhat of a B movie aficionado, Coco was quite sure that there was the possibility that Saffron’s mind had been taken over. How else would squeamish little Saffron utter the spew she just poured into Coco’s ear? What Saffron had just told her, it was like, archaic or something, something that chimps might do. A new feeling started to gel in Coco’s blood. She felt helpless. She stood by her friend throughout the shift and wished for the night to be over.

***

When Saffron got into her mother’s car at midnight, Audrey tossed the hank of hair into her lap. Saffron jumped as if it was a ferret, then quickly settled back into her gloomy glass-eyed mode. “So you know.”

“
Yes, I know you cut your hair off, Saffron. And it’s only hair; it’s no big deal. But I’d like to know why you did it. Why did you sneak out this morning?”

Saffron shrugged her shoulders with a look of complete disinterest.

Her mother let the silent seconds go by, then gave one curt nod. “Well, it turns out this was a good thing. I have been in contact with some people who can help me find other people who will turn this into a wig or wigs for cancer patients. It’s way more than ten inches, and that’s what they need.”

With an ice pick jab of shame, Saffron realized she should have thought of that herself. It was just last year that the “hair drive” was the big thing in town with half the girls she knew going into the salon and getting their hair cut off. They were doing it for some cancer drive, for wigs for little kids. At the time, Saffron had considered jumping on the bandwagon but quickly decided there was no way she could cut her hair off. Where would she hide? When things got really embarrassing or hard to handle there would be no sheet of hair to hide her face behind.

Wasn’t she telling herself she was going to become a vampire to
help
people? She wasn’t helping anyone today. She was living in such a bubble she couldn’t even see what was going on around her. When she was a vampire, everything would become clear. It was one of the vampire gifts – clarity - something most humans could never grasp. Jethin said it would most certainly happen. Her mind would become sharp, her senses keen, and she would be one hundred times stronger. When she was a vampire, she would help people all of the time, kind of like a superhero; she would make sure only good prevailed.

That night, Jethin didn’t come.

No fairies came.

There was only the ghost on the cliff and her strangled cries that disappeared into the waves like rain.

Chapter 22

T
he next morning, Saffron took her cup of coffee out onto the farmer’s porch to be free of her mother’s prying eyes, and Grandmother’s instability, and Derek’s crabbing.

She planted her butt on the steps and hunched over the steaming mug. She was so lost within herself that she didn’t notice Mr. and Mrs. Gnome until they were standing below, looking up at her and waiting for her to notice them. She pulled back with a start and eyed them wearily. Then she relaxed. She didn’t care what he did to her today. Nothing on earth could make her feel worse than she did right now. She watched as Mrs. Gnome stepped up behind the Mr. and shoved him in the back. He tripped forward, then glared back at his ample-bodied wife. The miniature woman set her jaw firmly and lowered her brows; she jutted her finger at Saffron and commanded him forward. He released his arms from behind his back and Saffron was startled yet again when she saw him awkwardly climbing the stairs, one by one, with a wilted daisy in his sweaty, hairy, little hand. When he got to the step just below her, he offered up the flower. She didn’t take it right away; she just stared at it for a moment in dumb wonder. The gnome’s cheeks flared red; he had never been so emasculated, so humiliated. Then he saw it - one tear formed in Saffron’s right eye and threatened to drip over. The little gnome immediately curbed his emotions and shook his hand at her, the daisy flopping this way and that.

Saffron took the flower as her tears started flowing freely. “It’s a truce,” she whispered and the man nodded. She continued to weep. The gnomes left quietly.

The thick, sweet scent of lilacs hung in the still air. Saffron had always loved the heady scent of lilacs in bloom. The smell calmed her and brought memories of past summers. Would she still be able to smell lilacs as a vampire? Would they smell the same, evoke the same feeling? Saffron felt her body preparing to heave. She fled inside the house and ran up to her room.

She padded quietly around her room, looking at her things, then she sat before her mirror and arranged her new ‘do. It felt so awkward, the way it fell against her neck and brushed just the very tips of her exposed shoulders. It felt so light. Should she put her hair up for Jethin so he wouldn’t get a mouthful of hair when he bit her neck? Did they really do it like that? Like the movies? Tiny rivers of unease began to flow through her at the thought of it. She took a deep, jagged breath and tried to force herself to calm down. She cleared her mind again. She would not panic, not now.

The ring of the phone shot shrilly through the air. Saffron flinched and reached to read the caller ID. It was Markis. That was the fourth time this morning. Last night, she saw Coco jump on the phone as soon as she had left. So, it must have been Markis she called. Saffron felt guilty. Coco did look shook-up over her. But it didn’t matter now. Saffron meant to protect Coco, too. As a future dancer and owner of a strip joint, Saffron felt pretty sure Coco was going to need protecting. Saffron shut off the phone. Her hours as a human were numbered. She would get through them as best she could.

She flopped on her bed and was suddenly aware that she was not alone. The fear she didn’t want to live with anymore charged under her skin and made every hair stand painfully on end. In her peripheral vision, she caught movement and knew there was someone in the room with her. The shadow came nearer. Saffron jerked her head painfully to the side and took in an eyeful, up close, of the ghost who threw herself from the cliff every night. She had been across the room but was now making her jerky way toward Saffron. The long gown left a trail of wet on the wood floor like a slug. She stopped her advance, looked at the panda in the chair, then sat on it. The ghost folded her hands in her lap and stared out with her milky, unblinking eyes.

Saffron just lay there, breathing low and shallow, and ignoring the pains that started in her hip and leg from holding herself immobile. The ghost stayed where she was. Saffron stayed where she was, wishing the thing away. There was a soft knock on the door.

Saffron reached for the doorknob, as if she could open it from ten feet across the room. Her mouth opened and closed without a sound but the light smack of her tongue on the roof of her dry mouth. She heard her mother walk away.

The ghost stood. She started toward Saffron. The blood rushed to Saffron’s ears; her bladder gave out. She made a small keening in the back of her throat, a noise so high-pitched it hardly carried across the room, never mind to someone outside. Saffron held her hands out to tell the thing to stop. But still the entity kept coming, her head wound glistening, her right arm hanging.

Saffron moaned. Tangled up in her sheets, she lifted her butt and did the crab walk until her head was jammed up against the headboard. She started flailing as the ghost moved right in front of her face. The ghost leaned close enough for her rotted nose to touch Saffron’s nose. Then it moved closer still, her face into Saffron’s face, her shoulders into Saffron’s, her breasts into Saffron’s, her hips into Saffron’s…until her entire body disappeared inside Saffron. Saffron’s eyes popped so wide they could have easily left her head and rolled around on the floor. She reached out one more time before she seized up and went completely still. Her eyes were open and unseeing as they reflected the slow swirl of the ceiling fan blades. Swirling went all through her head. Swirls of sun and blue sky and green field on a summer day.

The ghost woman searched the field. Her hair was shining, her skull was perfectly formed. The woman called out a man’s name and felt the tall grasses at her fingertips as she kept walking.

Saffron swam somewhere above the woman as she roamed. Calling and calling and calling. The woman stopped abruptly and screamed, as if there were a snake at her feet. Saffron floated over to where the woman stood in a patch of swaying daisies and wild lavender.

Saffron saw what the ghost woman saw.

There below them, in a circle of crushed grass, was another woman. She was clad in nothing but sun-kissed skin and long, long, flaming-red hair. She sat atop a man and writhed. He smiled up at her with beautiful white teeth, his black hair curling softly around his temples. His deep blue eyes shone like a little boy’s. He bucked one more time while he watched the ghost woman watching them.

Saffron stared at the naked girl’s body, too stunned to look anywhere else. She forced her eyes up to the girl’s face…and saw her own face. Her own smirking face, there, looking up and mocking the pain of the woman above her. The ghost woman turned and ran screaming to the other side of the field. Straight to the edge. And straight over the side. Her screams scattered the gulls.

Saffron came to with a harsh intake of air. She dug her fists into her eyes as she cried. “Oh, God, tell me that wasn’t true. Tell me I wasn’t like that.” No one answered.

***

The sea swallowed the sun. Saffron prepared for Jethin’s arrival. A thought crossed her mind; about how this night should go…. She dug through Grandmother’s closet and went out into the twilight gloom.

Jethin appeared. With no forewarning of cracking twigs or swishing grass, he came from the forest and now stood perfect and pressed in a gray-blue button down shirt, butt-hugging jeans, and ostrich cowboy boots. A smile lush with wry amusement caught up the lower half of his face. “Saffron, what are you doing?” He leaned over her.

She was laying poker-straight on a cold, flat rock out in the field. The ocean wind blew the gown of ivory lace that lay flat against the peaks and valleys of her rigid form. The nightgown, lacy and beautiful as it was, looked like it might belong to her Grandmother. It did belong to her Grandmother. She had stolen it out of Grandmother’s closet that afternoon. She removed it from a yellowed box full of yellowed tissue paper and snuck it into her own room

Jethin covered his mouth to hide his glee while he took in her petrified limbs and startled eyes. He cleared his throat and contorted his facial features to resemble compassion, then sat beside her. There wasn’t enough room, so he nudged at her with his hip until she relinquished some space.

By small measure, she began to release her stiffened body. Now she felt stupid. What was she doing anyway? Out here in the dark, stretched out on this rock like a sacrificial offering. An hour ago, she wasn’t sure how to greet Jethin on this, the last day of her human existence. How did you go to your vampire death? Shouldn’t there be some kind of ceremony? This was, like, a big deal.

Jethin kept his arms held tight around his bent knees and rocked on the stone. “You look…beautiful.”

“
Oh, shut up.” She backhanded him in the thigh (but not
too
hard.) “I’ve been waiting for you every night. You wouldn’t believe the scenarios that have been going through my head. Tonight,” she indicated the dress and her alien-autopsy presentation, “you get this.”

“
Oh, my God, you have to chill. Listen; when I change you I won’t be killing you. Your life is not ending, you know. You’ll still be Saffron, Saffron on a diet that you want to be on…till later.” He brushed her cheek with one very hot finger.

Saffron looked up at him. “You know what happened to me this afternoon? I just found out I caused this woman’s death...suicide…she found me with her husband and jumped off a cliff…. I was smiling
at her when she found us….” The deep breath she expelled came out rushed and jagged.

“
Oooo. Not nice! Tsk, tsk. You should forgive yourself, Saffron.” He chuckled. “Now c’mon; you’re such a creepy girl sitting out here performing your sacrificial-lamb gig.” He stood up. “Let’s get you back inside, you to your room and me to my perch, so we can have a sense of normalcy.”

His gaze fell to her mouth. His pupils dilated wide, then snapped to pinpoints. Her blue blood showed underneath the thin skin of her lips. He would never have blue blood again.

After tonight, neither would she.

“
Let’s go, get up,” he grumbled and stalked off. She popped up behind him and ran through the wet grass. The lace caught like froth between her pistoning legs.

They walked without speaking.

At the corner of the great gabled farmhouse, he made off to the right to climb up to the roof of the farmer’s porch. She went around the back of the house to enter through the kitchen door, being careful to guide it back slowly to lessen the squeals of the springs. The door was just about closed when Jethin suddenly appeared on the other side of the screen. Saffron gave a ‘yipe’ and jumped back, causing the door to slap.