She’d done it. She’d found Helena. She was here with the faeries. Not just an image in a window this time. And she must be all right if these girls expected her to be inside wearing some fancy outfit. Relief and elation battled inside her. She could hardly believe it.
She tried to think of what Helena would say in a situation like this. “I wanted to see if there were any better parties around tonight. No sense in dressing up until you know the place to be!”
The two girls gave her an odd look, but they laughed, so she laughed, as if she’d meant to make a joke.
“You better get changed, the party’s already started,” the first girl said.
“You have to call it a ball,” the other girl whispered. “Corbin doesn’t like it when you call it a party.”
The girl waved a hand at Emma. “But she just —”
“She’s Corbin’s favorite, she can do what she wants,” the other girl hissed.
“Whatever, they’ve already started dancing,” the first girl said. “Wish I was in there instead of stuck out here with all of this.” She waved a hand at Marie’s brother and the line of people waiting behind him.
“Hey, so, uh, you think I can go in, too?” Marie’s brother asked, trying to win Emma over with the same smile that had failed on the two girls. “Since you know my little sister.”
“No way,” Emma said. “His sister’s a brat and so is he. I don’t want him at the party. Ball, I mean.” She might not be friends with Marie anymore, but she wasn’t about to let her brother dis-appear the way Helena had. Not now that she knew the faeries had something to do with it.
“Whatever,” one of the girls said. She dismissed Marie’s brother with another wave of her hand. His face turned red and Emma thought he was going to argue, but one look from the bouncer and he turned away.
“Thanks,” Emma said. “I’m going inside now. I’ll talk to you later. Bye!”
She brushed past them quickly.
Behind her, she heard shouts and then Chloe’s voice.
“Who’re you calling a pigeon? You’re the ones waddling around in those funny shoes, squawking at each other!”
There was her distraction.
Emma didn’t stop to listen. A set of sliding glass doors opened for her, leading into a wide, carpeted hall lit with candles. An orange streak shot past her legs, almost tripping her. She caught a hint of Cricket’s scent just as the cat turned down a hallway. She hoped the other cats had managed to get in, too.
“Hey! What was that?” the bouncer cried out, peering down the hallway. He spotted Emma. “Oh, Lady Helena — I thought I saw something run in here. Did you see where it went?”
“I didn’t see anything,” Emma lied.
The bouncer nodded. “Well, if you see anything, let someone from security know. No need to bother the lords and ladies if it’s just a squirrel. I’ve got bigger problems right now with that harpy outside anyway. Do you think it got out of the zoo? I’ll have someone check. They need locks on those things, I don’t care what anyone says.”
They have a zoo? Here? Emma thought. And then: Lady Helena?
But all she said was, “Yeah, you’re right.” Helena would know about a zoo. She had to keep a straight face.
As she walked away, the glass doors swished closed behind her, dulling the sound of people and traffic outside. Now Emma could hear the thump of bass somewhere ahead of her.
Jack poked his head out of the handbag, his one eye sparkling. He was in a good mood. “Not bad. You’re a pretty good liar, for a human. The cat part of you is clearly taking over.”
“Lie down,” Emma whispered. “We’re getting near the main room now.” She felt him settle and begin to purr at the bottom of the bag.
At the end of the hall were two arched wooden doors, open wide, and beyond them a huge room, filled with people talking and laughing and dancing, and dressed in clothes that were probably worth more than everything Emma owned. The floral scent of perfume choked her. It was obviously the ballroom. And somewhere in there was Helena.
“I think I’m underdressed,” she muttered into the bag.
“Why didn’t you think of that when you turned yourself into your sister?” Jack demanded. She could see his ears twitching inside the bag.
“I just didn’t, okay? Besides, it’s hard to imagine a dress on the spot.”
She scanned the hallway until she found a sign for bathrooms, and ducked in. Several girls stood in front of the half-size mirror above the sinks, applying makeup and making minute adjustments to their hair and dresses. Emma quickly went into the closest stall. She’d changed herself into a cat, right? This couldn’t be that hard.
“I’m going to give myself a purple dress like one of the girls by the mirror,” she whispered. Emma had never been very interested in clothes, so it was hard to imagine a dress in enough detail to make it look decent, or to know what it felt like or how it moved. She closed her eyes, felt the coolness of running water once more.
She waited until the other girls had left and the bathroom was empty. Then she checked herself out in a mirror. It looked like two dresses — one purple and one black, with completely different cuts — had been smashed together.
“How does it look?” she asked Jack.
“How should I know?” Jack said. “Only humans and faeries care about dresses.”
“I’m sure it’s good enough,” Emma said, though she felt a little worried. “It’s dark in there anyway, right? Maybe they won’t notice.” She looked at herself critically. The purple and black actually managed to look kind of cool, or so she hoped. “It’s fine,” she told him. “As long as I’m not wearing jeans.”
She went back out into the hallway leading to the ballroom. There was a press of people all pushing to get in now, and she soon found herself swept along with them into the ballroom itself.
The noise was deafening. People chattered and yelled and shouted, and four different DJs were spinning different songs on four different dance floors. Dim, hooded lights were set in the floor but the room was lit from above by a massive lamp made to look like the moon and which cast everything in pale blue light. There were stars, too — thousands of blue lights twinkling cold and bright all over the ceiling. Emma had never seen so many stars before, not even on the clearest winter night. For a moment she felt as though she were out in the desert, all alone beneath the sky with no city lights to dull their beauty.
Then she shook her head. She was a cat, not just a human. She could see through faerie magic. It’s all fake, she told herself. Just like those twigs at the Red Caboose.
Emma scanned the ballroom carefully. She thought she caught a glimpse of something orange stalking through the shadows against one wall, and another cat shadow as it darted up a speaker system that was taller than she was.
“Looks like at least some of the pride got in,” she whispered into the bag, though with the noise level, her whisper was really more of a shout. If Jack answered her, she couldn’t hear it.
Emma pushed through the crowd, toward the center of the ballroom. That was where the crowd seemed to be packed the tightest. She had to use her claws once or twice — just little jabs, that was all — to squeeze in closer and see what was going on. She hoped Jack didn’t accidentally get squished. She felt the bag wriggle.
Finally, the people wouldn’t move even when she scratched them. They stood, squeezed together and gazing up with delight. Emma followed their gaze . . . and saw the faeries.
CRAG FACT OF THE DAY:
“A recent survey of teen girls age thirteen to seventeen found that 62 percent list ‘meet a faerie in person’ as one of their life goals.”
CragWiki.org
The faeries sat on a wide, six-foot-high platform in the center of the main ballroom. It was the same circular stage Emma had seen in the ratterking’s mind. Only this time it wasn’t empty. Eight faeries, male and female, lounged on cushioned chairs. They were beautiful.
Most of them were tall and thin. But th
at wasn’t what made them beautiful. It was their perfect skin: Some were so pale they seemed to glow with moonlight, while others were a rich shining bronze, and a few almost as dark as the shadows. It was the way they moved, graceful and powerful even when they were merely dangling their legs over the sides of their chairs. It was their voices, clear and musical, cutting through the noise of the ballroom, each word more melodious, each phrase more harmonious, than any song Emma had ever heard.
A part of Emma wanted to talk to them, to look at them, to be around them for no other reason than that their presence seemed to fill the room with magic.
But at the same time, like a hazy double vision, like the sunlight on the window of the Red Caboose, she saw something else. Something not at all human. She stared, the realization creeping up on her. Cat magic could see through faerie magic — and it meant she could see through the faeries themselves. Their faeries’ beauty was a disguise. A veil of glamour. Their true forms were different. So different.
Underneath the veil of glamour, they were oddly proportioned. One was only a few feet tall, with a stick-thin body and a large, round head. Instead of hair, long willow leaves hung down in front of its face, and its skin was dark and rough like bark. Another seemed to be little more than a pile of leaves and ivy until it moved, walking on legs made of twigs and gesturing with hands of rosebuds and thorns.
Most disturbing of all, none of them had eyes. They had hands and legs, and seemed to have mouths — or must, somewhere under all the leaves and vines, or else how could they talk? A few even had noses, or gnarly things that looked like noses. But Emma couldn’t see a single set of eyes.
Faeries can make some people see what they want, Jack had said. They make themselves look beautiful, sound beautiful, smell beautiful. So of course humans fall in love with them.
She couldn’t read their faces, couldn’t guess what such creatures might be thinking. There was something otherworldly about them, stranger than any crag she’d encountered before. And yet she found that even without their disguise she didn’t want to look away. She watched them for a minute, as if mesmerized. It seemed that the longer she stared at any one of them, the more she saw. Small flowers bloomed among the vines even as she watched, petals falling unnoticed to the floor, only to bloom again. A spider spun a web between the twig-faerie’s ears, round and round without ever seeming to finish.
She felt she could lose herself watching them. The thought sent a shiver up her spine, and in that moment she pulled her gaze away. It was only the human part of her that was drawn to the faeries, she realized. The cat part could see through it all. She had to remember that.
She was a Pride-Heart with true cat magic, while all the faeries had were tricks and illusions. She could do this.
Emma tried to get closer, but there were guards around the platform keeping the crowd back. People yelled and shoved, trying to catch the faeries’ attention.
“I saw you in the park the other day. You smiled at me! Would you dance with me?”
“Ever since I heard you sing it’s all I can think about. I can’t listen to music, can’t play my guitar — none of it sounds right!”
“I sent you another poem! Did you have time to read it? Do you want me to read it to you now? I brought a copy just in case.”
“How about a contest?” the faerie with the spiderweb said. Her glamour disguise was a ghostly pale girl in a dress that glowed like moonlight. She laid her head in the arms of a wide-eyed human girl. “Don’t stare at me,” the faerie said softly to the girl. Even with all the noise it was impossible not to hear her. “You know you mustn’t.” The girl nodded quickly and looked away from the faerie, scanning the crowd slowly instead, meeting people’s eyes for a moment before moving on.
They’re using humans to see, Emma realized with a start. That was why they had humans with them on the stage. They’re looking through their eyes. Did the humans know they were being used like some kind of eye-puppets? Would they even care if they did?
One of the other faeries laughed. He seemed to be made of evergreens and honeysuckle and ivy. His glamour disguise, a dark-skinned man in black leather pants and a ruffled shirt unbuttoned to his chest, rolled its eyes. “You only want a contest because you always win. But all right. It’s a day of change, after all. But it must be someone new, not one of your usual admirers.” He turned his head toward the eager faces just beyond the platform, and made his choice. “You, boy with the black hair and silver shirt. Would you like to play a game with us?” he asked, though there was no doubt what the answer would be. “Let him through.”
The crowd reluctantly parted to allow an older boy through. He stared, bewildered, at the faeries. The spiderweb faerie motioned for him to come closer, and he did, though the guards didn’t let him up onto the platform itself.
“The game is very simple,” the spiderweb faerie explained. “You must pick which one of us you prefer. Me?”
“Or me?” the honeysuckle faerie said.
“This is boring,” the faerie with the willow-leaf hair complained, though even complaining her voice sounded like wind chimes and soft woodwind pipes. “Do I have to sit here and watch these two show off?” She spoke to the human next to her, a girl in a long ruffled skirt and glasses.
“Well, have you decided?” the spiderweb faerie said, her glamour grinning mischievously.
“I pick you, of course,” the boy said, his voice hoarse.
“Are you sure?” the honeysuckle faerie said, a teasing sort of pout in his voice.
“No! No, of course not,” the boy said as soon as he looked over at the other faerie. “I only have eyes for you.”
“What a perfect phrase,” the spiderweb faerie whispered. “It makes me sad to hear you say so to another.”
“I’m sorry! I don’t know why I said it. I was a fool, I —”
Emma realized the boy had tears running down his face, and a sheen of sweat made his forehead glisten. She wondered if she should do something, if she could help him somehow. It was like watching one of her own cats playing with some small rodent they happened to find.
“Helena?” said the willow-leaf faerie then.
Her human companion with the glasses was staring right at Emma.
“What are you doing down there?” said the faerie. “And where did you get that dress? Has Corbin seen it yet? I can’t wait to see his face when he finds out you didn’t wear the one he got you.” The girl with the glasses nodded slightly, as if this had been an order. “Join us! This is your special day. You should see and be seen — and enjoy it all while you can.”
Emma started to shake her head, then realized that would be a mistake. No one here would ever refuse a faerie request. Maybe she’d have been better off disguised as no one in particular and just waiting for Helena to show up. But she wouldn’t have got into the place then. Anyway, it was too late now.
“Come on, you’re almost family now,” the willow-leaf faerie said. “You’re allowed to sit with us even if Corbin is taking forever. Let her through, please!”
“Nissa, hush,” the spiderweb faerie said, before turning back to her game.
So Emma found herself pushed out of the crowd, past the miserable boy still trying to decide which faerie he preferred, past the guards, and up the short spiral stairs to the platform. She clutched the handbag close to her side.
“Are you okay in there?” she hissed into it.
“I would be if you’d stop squashing me,” Jack said. “What’s going on? I can hear that faerie. Be careful.”
She didn’t have time to reply. Two of the human girls on the platform stole quick glances at her as she walked past.
“I heard Corbin’s in love with her, and that’s why he’s taking her to the twenty-seventh floor,” one of them whispered.
“I wish Corbin was in love with me,” one of the girls sighed. “She hasn’t even been here that long, it’s not fair. What does she have that I don’t?”
“Maybe she’s not as lucky
as you think. I’ve heard stories about the twenty-seventh floor. Jen says that there’s a way into the Deep Forest from it, and that they do all sorts of magic there, magic no one’s supposed to know about.”
The Deep Forest? Emma had never heard anyone refer to Old Downtown that way. But maybe she was talking about something else, some kind of faerie place.
“Well, if no one’s supposed to know about it, how does Jen know?” the other girl whispered. “She’s such a liar.”
“You weren’t here this time last year. It’s always the same day. High Spring, of course. Or Ostara, or whatever they call it. Hilary went up, and Liz and Greg. Where are they now?”
“How should I know? I’m not them. They get bored with people, you know they do. Sometimes I worry Miv is getting bored with me . . . I don’t even think he’s looking through me right now.” She gazed longingly at the dark-skinned faerie.
“Come, sit here,” the willow-leaf faerie called Nissa said, motioning at Emma with hands of reed and bramble while her beautiful illusory self waved elegantly at a spot on the floor beside her.
Emma sat, not sure what was expected of her, and balanced Jack-in-the-bag on her knees. Did Helena stay quiet like all the other humans here? She had a hard time believing that. Helena had never been one to sit quiet for anything.
“So how are you feeling?” Nissa said. “Not frightened, I hope? There’s nothing to be frightened of, you’ll do just fine.”
“I’m sure it’ll be great,” Emma said nervously. The girl with the glasses was staring at her intently.
Nissa leaned closer and grinned. Not with the version of herself Emma was supposed to see, but with her real mouth, a mouth filled with glistening rose thorns.
Emma recoiled. She couldn’t help it.
The girl with the glasses frowned, but the faerie only grinned wider.
“I knew there was something wrong with you!” Nissa hissed, and the sound was like a distant waterfall. “You can see me, can’t you? I thought I felt something strange about you. Ha! Just wait until Corbin finds out . . . oh, this is going to be fun, I think.”
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