The Boy with the Hidden Name (13 page)

“Unlock this door,” I command.

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to my room, obviously. I can’t stay here

with you.”

“I need to keep you safe. I can’t do it if you’re not with me.”

“Oh, all of a sudden, you’re worried again about keeping

me safe?”

“When did I stop worrying about that?”

I am amazed he is asking me this question. I have never

before realized how
annoying
it is that he’s a faerie. “When you left me!”

“I have left you plenty of times before. We have never spent

every moment together, you and I. Why, now, does my leav-

ing you mean that I’m not keeping you safe?”

“Because I asked you not to leave, Ben,” I snap at him.

He sits up on the bed, which I am glad about, because at

least now it seems like he’s taking this seriously. “You asked me not to leave. I disagreed with that. We never had a conversation about keeping you safe and whether I ought to worry

about it anymore. You made that decision all on your own.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You almost died in the dragon pit. Did you not wonder why,

all of a sudden, you could fall to your death if you didn’t want to? My mother put her
hand
on you and you couldn’t stop it.”

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I already know the answer to that. “Because you took the

enchantment off me.”

“Because you fought it off. I didn’t take it off you— you

wouldn’t let me keep it on you. You’re lucky you fell in the

dragon pit where I could get to you.”

“If you hadn’t left,” I point out hotly, “I wouldn’t have been

anywhere
near
the dragon pit. Not without you, at least.”

Ben sighs and falls back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling.

“How did you know I was in danger in the dragon pit?”

“You’re carrying my talisman,” he says dully, not looking at

me. “You’ve broken the spell, but the talisman links us. You

were in distress, and I felt it.”

“I’m in
constant
distress.”

“Not like that.”

I think of the blind panic I’d been in as I fell in the dragon

pit and consider that I have not been that panicked before,

not even in Park Street, because then I had options, escape

routes I was planning. In the dragon pit, I had given up hope,

and maybe that had been distress enough to reach out for

Ben, even though I hadn’t known I was doing it.

I let silence fall for a moment. My hand is still on the door-

knob, still ready to leave, but I’ve realized there’s so much I

don’t know and so much Ben does know. I need to ask him, I

need to make myself ask him, here, now, because if I walk out

of this room, I don’t know if I’ll ever have enough courage to

face him this way again.

“Is everyone else in danger?” I ask.

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“These are dangerous times. Everyone’s in danger,” he says

to the ceiling.

“I mean Kelsey and Safford and Will.”

“They’re fine. They won’t be harmed. They have nothing to

do with the prophecy.”

“The Unseelies tried to kill me at the dragon pit.”

“How did you fall into the pit?”

“The bridge disappeared.”

“Ah. The spell functions by itself. There isn’t an Unseelie

paying attention to it and deciding who should cross and

who should not. It senses threats and it breaks of its own

accord. It’s an automatic reaction.”

“Oh, great,” I say, throwing up my hands. “Automatic reac-

tion. That’s fine then. Don’t trouble yourself too much over

the fact that I was almost eaten by a dragon.”

Ben sits up again. “Of course I’m troubled over it, Selkie,”

he snaps at me. “But I’ve been trying to keep you safe, and

you keep trying your hardest to thwart me at every turn, so

I don’t know what you want me to say here. Am I troubled

that you were almost eaten by a dragon? Yes! Of course I am!

But you shouldn’t have been anywhere near the dragon! You

should have been home! In Boston! Where it’s safe!”

“It isn’t safe in Boston!” I shout back. “How can you

possibly think that? The Seelies are trying to get through

the enchantment.”

“The Seelies have been trying to get through that enchant-

ment for centuries!”

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“But they’re succeeding now! The
sun
went out! And the

clocks stopped and then they started back up again and now

it’s almost twelve o’clock!”

Ben stares at me. “Is that true?”

“Yes!”

“Then we’re running out of time!”

“Exactly! And it’s all nice for you— you found your mom

and she made you your childhood room and wants you to

stay here with her forever— but in the meantime, the world

out there is falling apart and you’re not
helping
.”

“I didn’t know,” Ben says. “I thought there’d be time.”

“You would’ve known if you hadn’t
left
,” I point out.

Ben, for once, doesn’t have any kind of smart retort to that.

Which I guess is as close to an apology as I’m ever going to get.

“You’d also know if faeries had thought to enchant cell

phones into being at any point,” I mumble and sit at Ben’s

desk, because I’m feeling exhausted suddenly, like if I don’t

sit, I might collapse.

“We’ll get the information from my mother at the feast,”

Ben says.

I don’t know what to say to that. Like, great, Ben thinks it’s

going to just be
that
easy
. I thought it would just be
that
easy
too, and then I met his mother and she wasn’t like that at all.

There’s a coat draped over the back of the chair I’m sitting

in. A black coat, with feathered epaulets and spangled over

with threads of silver and gold. I run my hand over it. I can

think of nothing less Ben- like.

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“Where did you get this?” I ask.

“My mother. That’s the coat she was talking about.”

“Well.” I stare at the coat and try to come up with some-

thing nice to say about it. I settle on, “It was nice of her to

give you a gift.”

“It’s hideous,” he says flatly.

“Well, it is— ”

“It’s
undignified
,” he interrupts me.

“Ben,” I point out, “you just rode a giant corgi. Hasn’t the

indignity boat sailed?”

He flops back onto the bed with a huff. “Corgis are royal

forms of transportation,” he protests.

“Were the corgis we would see on Boston Common some-

times faerie dogs?”

“Don’t be absurd. Those are pygmy corgis.”

“They’re miniature corgis, like miniature Great Danes.”

“No, they’re ridden by pygmies,” he responds matter- of-

factly, as if this makes perfect sense.

It’s the kind of conversation I feel like we could have had

before, on the Common, watching dogs and their owners go

back and forth, sipping lemonade that Ben has made. We

wouldn’t have talked about faeries— I didn’t know there were

faeries to talk about back then— but we would have talked

about something silly and innocuous like this. I would be

worrying about the prom, and whether I wanted to go, and

whether I could get Ben to ask me. Such a
silly, stupid
thing to worry about. I had been such a
silly, stupid girl
. When I 110

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should have been worrying about my world being destroyed,

about my aunts and my father in a Boston that’s going to

pieces, about a prophecy I am baffled by at every turn.

And I am crying. Hard. I can’t get myself to stop. I put my

face in my hands and try to stifle my sobs so Ben won’t know,

because the whole thing is humiliating.

As if he’s somehow going to not notice this inelegant,

embarrassing, sniveling display.

“You’re crying,” he says from his bed.

I cry harder and bury my face harder in my hands, trying

to catch my breath.

“You
never
cry,” he says. He sounds amazed that this

is happening.

It’s true. I don’t cry very much. It’s probably why I feel like

I’m so bad at it, like now that I’ve started crying I’ll never

stop, that I will cry for the rest of my life, here in this underground castle that makes me feel claustrophobic, enchanted

window notwithstanding.

Ben’s touch on the crown of my head is feather- light, and

I jerk away, but he tugs me closer, and I shouldn’t but I stop

fighting and cry messily into his neck. The only thing worse

than crying is crying
alone
, with no one there to comfort you. I need him and I can’t even be hard on myself for that.

Ben pulls me off the chair and we land in a heap on the dirt

floor. He lets me cuddle into his lap and sob, and he holds me

closer, silent and patient.

“I’m so tired,” I manage in hiccupping, bursting gasps.

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“I’m
exhausted
. I am exhausted from being part of some

stupid prophecy that everyone wants me to fulfill— but

nobody knows how I should fulfill it— and everyone expects

me to know how. But every time I try to do something—

anything— it turns out wrong. I brought everyone here—

because I thought your mother would help— but it doesn’t

seem like she’s going to help— and meanwhile I don’t know

where my family is— and faeries keep getting named in the

Otherworld— and it’s all falling apart.”

“Shh, shh, shh,” Ben murmurs and strokes at my hair. It’s

not telling me anything useful, but it doesn’t matter. It liter-

ally feels like the best thing he could do for me right now.

I do not cry forever. I reach the end of it eventually and

find myself sniffling instead of sobbing, my head against

his shoulder and my nose nudging at his collarbone. “This

doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you,” I tell him and sniffle again.

“Selkie Stewart,” he breathes, fluttering across my skin. He

chases my name with a barely there brush of his lips. And

then he says, “Your face is
wet
.”

And I actually laugh against him.

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T here is a bathroom attached to Ben’s room, through a

door in the wall that is hidden until he calls it into being.

There is a shower in the bathroom, and I have never seen

anything more beautiful in my life. We can’t do anything

until after the feast anyway, so I let myself take a shower. I

stand directly under the flow of the water, letting it course

through my hair and over my face, and my fingertips wrinkle

into prunes and I don’t care. The water is hot and comfort-

ing; with my eyes closed, I could be home. I know that I am

not, but I feel that the feast ahead of me is not going to be

fun, and taking a shower feels like such a wonderfully normal

thing to do. I don’t think of my aunts and my father and all

the people that I am helpless to protect right now. I focus on

the water, beating down on me, flowing over me, and just

don’t let myself
think
.

I have no idea how long I stand in the shower before some-

one knocks on the door. It’s probably Ben, and I know that,

but I still get tense under the spray of the water, opening my

eyes and looking at the gleaming, metallic tiles on the wall in

front of me. They don’t look like normal human tiles, which

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is why closing my eyes is necessary to keep up the illusion of

being home.

“Who is it?” I call cautiously, although what am I going to

do if it isn’t Ben?

“Me,” Ben calls back. “Can I come in?”

I’ve locked the door, but that, of course, means nothing

at all to Ben. The shower curtain is dark and metallic, like

the tiles around me, and there is no way Ben is going to see

anything, and I trust him not to try to look anyway. It’s not

like Ben has displayed much of a tendency to try to take

advantage of me. “Yes,” I assent.

I hear the door open immediately, as if it was never locked

at all.

“It’s wet in here,” Ben says. I can
hear
his nose wrinkling with disapproval.

“I’m showering,” I point out. “Water is involved.”

“It’s time for the feast.”

I sigh. “I figured.”

“My mother brought you some clothing.”

“Is it a dress with little bells?”

“No, the Unseelies don’t like bells.”

“Is it a sparkly black coat?”

“No. It’s just a dress. I’ll leave it here for you. And now I

have to close this door. It’s entirely too unpleasant in here.”

He does so immediately, ducking away from the humidity.

I take a deep breath and turn the shower off and step out

into the bathroom, drying off. I towel- dry my hair as best as

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