Flicker (17 page)

“Are you going to knock, or should I?” Filo asked.

Lee hugged herself with one arm. “I don’t know.”

“You’re hopeless.
Do it now, or let’s go.”

“Shut up. Give me a minute.”

Then the door
on one side of the duplex
swung open, and
the choice
was made for her.

A woman in her
early
twenties st
epped onto the
cement
porch. Her blond
hair was drawn into a high ponytail and her brown eyes were rimmed with green shadow. She w
ore black leggings, a red minidress
, and cherry-colored flats. A large purse was hooked around her elbow. She walked to her car, then bent beside the driver’s-side door, fussing with her keys.

Lee recognized Kendall in an instant. Her eyes were just as Lee remembered them. It could be no one else.

Suddenly, that last day rushed back to her with dreadf
ul clarity. It was as if she were
back in Kendall’s bedroom, hearing everything again: that Lee wasn’t living in the real world. That she needed to grow up. That she was different, and that that was bad.

In her mind’s eye, Lee sa
w herself. Leaving Kendall’s house
. Kissing her
mom
goodbye. Wandering off the path of reality and into a dream world.

Som
ething ignited inside of Lee
. Rage welled up in her like boiling water. Lee swallowed hard, then submitted to the fire that scorched her insides.

“Hey, Kendall!” Lee shouted, forcing all of her anger up into her voice. The words scraped the inside of her throat.
Her hands were shaking.

Kendall’s head snapped up and around. Her gaze found Lee, and she straightened slowly, her keys falling from her fingers. She dropped her purse. It landed on the concrete driveway with a clatter,
contents spilling
everywhere
,
but Kendall didn’t seem to notice.

“How long did it take you to throw out all my drawings? To forget all about me
so you could ‘grow up
’?
” Lee’s throat was raw and aching, her voice quivering. Her eyes burned, and she couldn’t see straight. “You better not have played any of your songs at my funeral, Kendall, or acted like you gave a damn either way. It would have been a lie.”

“Lee?” Kendall whispered. All the color had drained from her face. That was probably a normal reaction, Lee supposed. After all, Kendall was looking at a dead girl. “Is that you?”

The fire was extinguished. Lee felt like her guts had turned to slush.
In that instant,
she
understood: The seven years that had passed for Kendall and not for Lee
had created a chasm
, one Lee couldn’t hope to traverse
. Not now
. She couldn’t stay here another moment.

Lee spun around and dashed down the sidewalk, as quickly as her legs could take her. She hurtled around the corner, ignoring Kendall’s shouts and
the sharp footfalls just
behind her.

“Where are we going?” Filo called.

Lee didn’t answer. She just ran. The
cold wind felt good on her
face.

She ran for blocks and blocks, as fast as she could, cutting across backyards,
side streets
and convenience store parking lots. She ran more than halfway across town, until her legs went numb and she simply couldn’t run anymore.

Finally, she stopped in the vacant lot near Kendall’s old house. Exhausted, she dropped into the tall, dead grass, hugging her knees and gulping air. Sharp pains shot through her lungs with each breath.

A moment later, Filo was there, looking baffled. He dropped his bag and sat
down
.
“What was that all about?
I thought you wanted to talk to her.”

“I didn’t want to talk to her!”

“Then why did we bother to—”

“I don’t know!” Lee swiped at her eyes, brushing away frustrated tears. She was shivering violently, but not because of the cold. “I thought that maybe if I saw her we could talk. But I’m such a coward I can’t even do that.”

Filo didn’t say anything. He just nodded a little and stared at her.

“I should be twenty-
three
,” Lee continued, looking down. She felt as helpless as a pile of sun-bleached bones. “But I’m not. I should be doing something with my life. But I can’t. I pulled some sort of twisted Rip Van Winkle and now everybody thinks I’m
dead
. How could they have found a body?” she muttered. “I’m
right here.
There was no body to find.”

“Stock,” Filo answered simply. “When
faeries
take someone
, they almost always leave something behind. Sometimes it’s one of their own, a changeling, but it’s usually an object enchanted to look like the stole
n person—a piece of wood, a stone
.”

“Stock,” she echoed softly.

He nodded. “Sometimes it’s made to look dead. Other times, it appears alive, then sickens and dies after a few days. By the time the enchantment wears off, the stock’s already been bu
ried.” As he spoke, she
imagine
d
a jogger stumbling across a piece of wood on the side of the road, or mourners weeping over a coffin that held only a
rock
. The image was almost comical, but she couldn’t bring herself to laugh.

“After you entered that revel,” Filo said, “someone decided to leave stock enchanted to look
like you in those woods
.
Th
at was the body they found. That’s what
they buried.
”

For a long while, the only sound was the wind rustling in the grass.

Lee grabbed a fistful of dead grass and tore it up by the roots, throwing it angrily, as hard as she could. Filo watched silently as she ripped up more grass and threw it, along with small, sharp rocks she picked out of the dirt. When her arm felt too heavy to keep flinging out, she drew her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She laid her forehead against her knees, taking slow, deep breaths, trying not to cry.

“It’s not so bad,” Filo said eventually. His voice was soft, almost kind. “Being ‘dead,’ I mean. It gets less weird. Sometimes you even forget about it.”

She looked up. “What do you mean?”

Filo paused for a moment, then shook his head. “Nothing.”

Chapter Six:

The
Good Neighbors

When Lee followed Filo off the
train
,
still feeling strangely numb,
the sun
was dipping lower in the sky. She
remembered how short the days were this time of year.
This time of year. Autumn. Not summer, not anymore.
It felt all wrong, but she knew it was true. There could be no more doubt.

They
walked in silence
. Filo didn’t even loo
k at her. She wondered if he
was thinking about what had passed between them after they left her old house. She certainly hadn’t stopped thinking about it. Filo hadn’t hurt her, but she was still shaken by the experience. No one had ever
grabbed her that way before.
She’d had such a comfortable, easy life.

Had.

“Where are we going, anyway?” she asked him after a while.

“Ladders. I have to make delivery to the owners. It’s a restaurant for the magical community,” he added, in response to her questioning look. “Everyone goes there—faeries, vampires, werecreatures, shape-shifters, Seers. Everybody.”

“Seers?”

“
Humans
like Nasser and me. We do magic,
work with supernatural creatures,
help normals with magical problems,
stuff like that. It’s our job.”

“Like wizards or something?”

He wrinkled his nose in distaste. “No, like
Seers.
”

“
Okay, o
kay. Seer
s. I can go with that
.
”
Still, she had a brief mental image
of Filo wearing a wizard’s robes and holding a gnarled staff
, and had to pretend to sneeze to cover her snicker
. “What’s it like having magic?
”

“I don’t know.
” He looked almost uncomfortable.
“
It is what it is.”

“Come on,” she pressed, nudging him with her elbow
and hoping for some comforting thought to lessen the blow that magic had already dealt her
. Her mind was filled with visions of dishes that washed themselves and books that turned their own pages. “
Tell me.
I bet it makes things easier.
”

“Some things, I guess
.
Magical folk do live longer than normals. Once we hit adulthood, we age slower
. That’s not nothing.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

He
lifted one shoulder in a shrug
. “Magic comes with all these trappings, things you didn’t ask for and wouldn’t take if you had the choice—like the Sight. Magic complicates things. You wouldn’t understand.”

No, she didn’t
. That nagged at her.
“What’s the Sight?”
she asked.

“Oh, you know,” Filo said, gesturing vaguel
y with his hand
s
. “True Sight. Second Sight. The ability to see into the Invisible World.”

She stared blankly at him. He sighed.

“The Sight is a physical manifestati
on of the magic in a person.
It lets
you
see through magical illusions, or ‘glamours,’ and resist
enchantment.
The Sight usually develops naturally,
but there are ways to give yourself artificial Sight. It’s f
lawed, but it works
.”

“And you have
the
Sight because you have magic?”

“I have
the
Sight because I have a
lot
of magic,” Filo corrected her. “So much that it
manifested
externally. It’s the same with Nasser, but not with everyone. Some people have magic
, but not the
Sight, like Jason.”

“Nasser’s brother has magic, too?”

Filo nodded. “It must run in their family. Jason doesn’t have enough magic for Sight, but he has enough to work spells, and to have so
me talent in other areas. Magical humans
usually have
some
sort of talent, even if it’s not Sight. It’s usually s
omething artistic, like music or art.”

A few minutes later, they reached Ladders.
The building was small and nondescript: red brick, like just about every other building in Bridgestone, with a plain wooden door and long, narrow windows.
Filo pushed the door open, and Lee glimpsed a small, brightly-lit diner filled with customers and bustling servers.
They al
l looked perfectly normal
. Was this place really a magical hub?

But as
she stepped over the threshold
after Filo
,
Lee felt
as if she were underwater, her movements thick and slow.
She stumbled a little, and when she looked up, it was as if the view she had glimpsed from the sidewalk had melted away, revealing a different scene entirely.

The interior of Ladders was much larger than its exterior made it seem. Gone were the plastic-seated booths and white tile floor. The restaurant
was dimly lit by la
rge brass lamps that lined
the walls, capped by glass lampshades that turned the light am
ber or green. The floor, tables
and chairs were all made of rich, dark wood. Low couches and armchairs were scattered about, all of them dark green, burgundy, or
chocolate brown
. Multiple ladders were attached to the walls, stretching from floor to ceiling.

Eyes wide, Lee
stood just inside the door
.
A man with the head of a coyote sat at a nearby table, puffing on a pungent cigar. He was speaking seriously to a fox-headed man in a tweed suit. At the next table, a man with blue skin and webbed fingers ate raw fish with a knife and fork.

Lee’s pulse quickened; a
pale
man sitting in one of the armchairs glanced up from his newspaper at her. He ran his tongue over his thin lips, his eyes flashing dark red. She hurried away from him with a shudder, looking for Filo.