“You’re a long way from home, little elf girl,” the rogue says in his unliving voice, gravelly but wet, thick with blood and phlegm and viscera. The undead are known to eat their victims after killing them, Svvetlana remembers.
Something growls. Is it the rogue? She cannot see to know. Do the undead growl as well as laugh when they kill? She rolls onto her stomach to try to push herself up, and lightning strikes again. A black figure, lower to the ground even than she, leaps over her, knocking the rogue to the wet earth. Svvetlana squints against the still-falling rain and cannot believe her eyes, still foggy from the rogue’s blinding powder.
A striped cat has the rogue pinned on his back, and it strikes once, twice, three times with its claw, leaving long bloody marks on the face and chest of the forsaken rogue. Svvetlana sits up. This is no wild tiger and stroke of luck. This is Stebbins’s cat. She searches the horizon and finds a tall figure fifty yards out. She watches as the figure raises its weapon and lets loose a flurry of arrows, attack after attack. Each strikes the rogue expertly, filling him not only with physical damage and pain, but with the poisons and soul-destroying curses in which hunters specialize.
The rogue climbs to his feet, somehow, and runs off, using his preternatural speed. When he is a few yards away, he vanishes completely, near death. He’ll run a good distance off, Svvetlana knows, and bandage and heal. But with Stebbins and his pet with her now, she knows the rogue won’t try another attack.
Stebbins runs to her, his heavily booted feet sending up splashes of new puddles as he comes.
“Thank you,” Svvetlana says as she takes the hunter’s hand and climbs to her feet. “I was dead for sure.”
“I’m just glad I got here in time,” Stebbins says. He is standing close to her—too close, perhaps, but Svvetlana doesn’t back away.
“I owe you, I guess,” the priestess says, and she drops her gaze. If she stares too long into his big, golden eyes, she knows what could happen.
“No,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. His cat pushes between them, rubs its face against Svvetlana’s knees and thighs. Stebbins’s hand is on her cheek now. “You don’t owe me. You never owe me. I’d die a hundred deaths to save your life just one time, Svvet.”
“Stop,” she says, but her voice is quiet and shy. She knows he won’t stop—and she even hopes he won’t.
The hunter bends just a little, so their faces are closer still, and she gives in and looks up at him. He times the kiss just right, and their lips are together. She can taste the rain and his sweat and blood on their lips. His arms are around her. Hers hang limp at her sides.
“Svvet,” Stebbins says.
“I have to go,” says the priestess, cutting him off, and she turns and runs into the shadows of the wood. In a moment, she is gone.
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CHAPTER 20
LESH TUNGSTEN
Svetlana skipped lunch yesterday, I guess. She was probably feeling all awkward about it, since Wednesday’s lunch was a fiasco. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t exactly be fired up about the possibility of another clash with Fry either.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t show up on Thursday morning and do my best to keep Svetlana’s seat empty till she got there. A tiny part of me was relieved, I think, when she didn’t come. Wednesday afternoon at the mall had been an epiphany—that’s what she’d probably call it. I realized something, is the point, staring at Jelly and goofing off with the dirtbags I normally associate with: Svetlana is way, way better than me.
So I’m all kinds of shocked when, on Friday at lunch, I hear a little cough and look up to find a tray right at my eye level. It bears a bowl of brown rice under a heap of broccoli and sliced chicken and smelling of garlic and soy sauce. “You didn’t save me a seat,” she says, and she’s not vegetarian.
I pull my headphones off and push my seat back a little. “Oh, well. You didn’t show up yesterday,” I say. “I didn’t know …” I stop myself before I sound like a moron—right—and shove over a little from the corner, knocking my neighbor’s plastic chair a bit. He shuffles too to make room.
“Thanks,” Svetlana says, and she puts her tray next to mine and pulls a chair over from against the heater. She wields her chopsticks like it’s the most natural thing in the world and, after a mouthful of rice, says, “I took lunch in the library yesterday. It’s a thing I do, sometimes, to get some drawing done or to do some work.”
The drawing—I’d almost forgotten. It’s more evidence that she of talent and uniqueness and bright blond hair and eyes like deep wells of cool water, and I of dank attic bedroom strewn with metal magazines and mall trips of fast food and Jelly ogling and general misanthropy, are about the stupidest pair anyone could imagine. And that’s to say nothing of the fact I could never see myself choosing the library, and productivity, over the cafeteria for lunchtime.
“Did you come up with anything?” I ask. “Any new drawings?”
She nods as she shovels more rice into her mouth. This is the first time I’ve seen her enjoy food. It’s kind of startling. “Do you want to see?”
“Yes,” I say, and she’s already laying down her chopsticks, side by side, with their tips hanging over the edge of her tray. She leans to the tote bag beside her chair and pulls out a spiral notebook and flips past drawing after drawing—a blur of black and blue and red ink—so I can hardly catch a glimpse of each beast, elf, dragon, and so many other things I couldn’t possibly name, until she reaches the freshest ink close to the back of the book. She puts it on the table and turns it a little to give me a better look.
“Voilà,” she says, and not like your aunt says it either, unless your aunt is a sophisticated French actress from the 1960s whose breath makes you feel faint—in a good way. I’m not so sure I care at all that she’s better than me, as long as she keeps saying things in French.
But the picture. Today it’s a cat—a huge cat, but lithe and low to the ground. She’s given it swirling stripes and saber fangs, one immaculate and deadly, the other snapped and rough. “That’s amazing,” I say, tempted to run my fingers over the shining blue ink. I resist. I can only imagine her French-infused anger if my greasy fingers—fried chicken today, if you’re wondering—smudged this masterpiece. “It’s almost like it’s moving.”
“Really?” she says, completely pleased.
I nod. “Totally. I don’t know how you do that.”
She smiles as she turns the picture back toward herself, maybe to try to figure out for herself how she does that, and I have to admire the background—more of the icy landscape; they must be part of a series—from a funny angle. “Thanks,” she says, quiet and modest, and she tucks her hair behind her ear.
We’re quiet a minute as she puts away her notebook—“I’d die if any garlic sauce splattered on it”—and I just listen to the hum of the cafeteria as it rises and falls and watch Svetlana maneuver her chopsticks between the bowl and her mouth. She isn’t watching me; she’s looking around, half interested.
“I can’t imagine what’s keeping that red-eyed troll,” she says.
“Fry?”
She nods and hums as she finishes chewing a larger-than-average floret. “It’s weird to get through an entire lunch without him coming over here to bug us,” she says, and it’s like a switch flicks off. I’m hyperaware now of how vulgar it is to eat fried chicken with my hands, tearing the flesh from the bone with my teeth like a caveman. Every moment that ticks by, as though I can hear the whirring clock at the far end of the room, is a silent eternity in which I have nothing to say. It’s as if without Fry—without his boorish approach—I have no idea how to act with or what to say to this girl.
My epiphany is right: she’s better than me—better than us—and for the rest of lunch, though she tosses a couple comments at me, I can hardl
y think of a thing to say.
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CHAPTER 21
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
Well, that was weird.
This time two days ago, I was sure I’d seen the last of—or anyway, chatted the last with—Lesh Tungsten. (I managed to find out his last name. Oddly, there are no other Leshes at Central, and I bet that’s the only time anyone has pluralized “Lesh.”) Two days of Fry would have likely driven away better friends than he. Yet there he was, right in his spot, just where I’d left him. He hadn’t given up on me; why had I given up on him?
For that matter, why did I take Thursday off from the cafeteria? Was it anxiety at the possibility of discovering that Lesh would, upon seeing me exit the food line, recoil and quickly invite every random passerby to fill the plastic chairs within fifty yards of his person because that’s what it might take to keep me away from him?
Not to put too fine a point on it: yes.
Still. A half hour in the library with a four-color ballpoint and my notebooks was good for my soul. I made some decisions about the campaign—how I might edit it quickly so that our Gaming Club, such as it was, might still dive in, albeit with a smaller party.
I can’t believe I mentioned Fry, I think as I shrug my shoulder to keep my heavy tote from sliding off it. Well, I didn’t actually say his name. I called him a red-eyed troll. Lesh drew his own conclusions—and, of course, retreated into his black-brick wall. I can’t blame him. He probably hardly talks at all. I should be prepared to take it upon myself to initiate conversation. How hard can it be?
I reach Dr. Serrano’s room and find my seat. Class hasn’t started quite yet, but Serrano is already busy getting some key points on the board: “iambic pentameter” and “a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g.” Spoiler alert, Dr. Serrano. I dig into my tote bag, all ready to open to the next blank page in my poetry notebook and write “Shakespearean sonnets” at the top with the date, but my hand instead finds a different notebook—the one I showed Lesh at lunch today. I flip quickly to the newest drawing, of the prowling huntress, her stripes designed to hide her better in the swirling mist of the frigid mountains, and hunch over the notebook so no one else can see it. Is it as good as he said? Maybe it is.
My face warms again and my tummy twists, like they had in the cafeteria. I can picture his face—his eyes wide; they’re so often half closed—and his elbows anxious, propping him up and forward on the table beside me, to get a closer look. I must have blushed. I blush too easily. I’m probably blushing right now.
So I close the notebook quickly and, as the bell rings to start the class, swap it for my poetry notebook, with its swirling ocean scene on the cover. I wonder what Lesh would think of that drawing, and I suddenly want to show him all my drawings—every one, for every encounter and every campaign. I want to give him a copy of my bestiary just to watch him flip the pages.
“‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’” Dr. Serrano says at the front of the room, both hands on the windowsill, staring out over I-94. “‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’”
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CHAPTER 22
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
“Lana!”
I’m busy. It would help to say that out loud, you’re probably thinking, instead of muttering somewhere between my brain and my teeth, which are clamped tight in concentration because getting just the right gossamer glimmer in the black center of this giant eye is pretty tricky. I’m doing it by hand, with the skirt on my lap, and with a needle and shining thread, and I can’t be bothered right now by—
“Lana!” It’s Dad this time. First he sends Mom. Then he takes a crack. Next Henny will pitter-patter her way up here. But I’m not budging, I’m not peeping, I’m not answering—I’m not reacting at all to this beckon until the stitches I’m working on are done.
I can hear her little feet now, and you probably think I’m being unrealistically cold about this. They’re my family—two of them produced me from the fire in their loins. One of them carried me for thirty-nine weeks and was forcibly sliced open so I could stick my gawky neck out into the world and breathe its foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
And beautiful little Henny, whose mind has achieved more by age eight than I have in twice that plus.
But you’re wrong. Because it’s Saturday, and it’s not even ten, and the activity wheel at the bottom of my steps states quite clearly that on Saturday, from nine thirty till lunch, I do not wish to be disturbed. Because I am embroidering.
“Lana.” It’s Henny, and her stocking feet are in my room now, probably standing in the middle of my sun rug, right in the center, because that’s where she likes to stand. It’s bright yellow there, nearly orange, and then it glides gently into yellow, and canary, and pale, and white, and sky, and then deeper and dark blues. It’s handmade.
Not by me, mind you, though I think I’ll copy it someday.
Henny likes to scrunch her toes on the orange-yellow middle. She says it’s the softest part, but that’s crazy, since it’s all the same material. If it is the softest, it’s only because she’s been scrunching her toes on it for three years.
“You don’t have to answer,” she goes on, still scrunching; I can see the wiggling out of the corner of my eye, “but some flowers came for you.”
“Shark attack!” I say, because the needle has gotten my finger, and there’s a tiny bit of blood, so I drop my skirt to the floor and vow to kill whatever idiot has sent me flowers, because I’m going to have to tear out all the glimmering silver thread and start that bit over. Then, an instant later, I’m out of my chair and halfway down the main stairs, because it occurs to me that these might be from Lesh.
Mom and Dad are flanking the half-moon side table just inside the entryway, at the bottom of the main stairs, and they’re looking up with heavily smirked faces, their arms crossed, and I can’t imagine what these amused glares can mean, except maybe Is there something you’re not telling us? or When do we get to meet this suitor?
In the middle of the table, though, is what catches my interest, because it’s a bouquet—it’s lying there on its side, since there’s no vase—and it’s a perfect one. It’s not twelve predictable roses. It’s not a giant, flouncy show-offy bird-of-paradise or O’Keeffey iris. It’s not a delicate and stunning orchid, daring you to get too close. This is a perfectly eclectic bunch of wildflowers. They’re purple and orange and yellow and blue, with the tiniest, toughest little petals, and they’re bound in a silver ribbon and a golden ribbon with little baby branches of pussy willow. I shove between my parents and grab them up, and then check the tiny cream-colored card hanging from the ribbons.
I think about you standing in the rain.
“Well?” says Mom. She’s grinning at me, because if I’m honest, I don’t get a lot of flowers. I’ve never gotten flowers.
“It doesn’t say.” And I tear the little card from the ribbon and hand it to her. She and Dad start theorizing, questioning, interrogating, and I’m not listening, because—trust me—I’m more confused than they are. “I’m going to bring these upstairs.”
And I’m crossing the hall on the second floor, heading for my stairway, when my mom shouts after me, “I bet they’re from Fry! Put them in water!”
They hit the bright orange sun in the center of my rug, and though they look pretty there, even perfect, I hate them, because she’s probably right: these aren’t the flowers a boy like Lesh would choose. These are the flowers a boy who’s been at my heels for years would pick out.
A boy like Lesh would never pick out flowers at all. Maybe black ones made of iron.
“Yeah, I’d say y
ou’re right,” says Roan on the phone. I’m never quite used to Roan on the phone. I can picture her, in her shared bedroom, shifting and fidgeting in the corner of her bed, maybe sitting on the couch in the sunken family room in her tiny Cape Cod, with her foot tucked up and under her. “I’d say those are from Fry.”
I sigh. “I don’t want him to send me flowers.”
“I know,” she says. “You told him so. I mean, you made it pretty clear.”
I nod, though she can’t see me, but she knows I nodded.
“Hey,” she says, forcing some brightness into her voice. “Maybe they’re from Abraham.”
“Shut up,” I say, and she laughs—louder and wilder a laugh has she than her little form would suggest. It is all the colors of fall. It is big orange maple leaves skittering along the sidewalk in front of a sudden strong wind. It suits her.
“He still likes you, you know,” she says, and the brightness, though still in her voice, is just the tiniest trace now, a thin little membrane on a topic that doesn’t want it.
“Maybe,” I say, a mini admittance. I should have mentioned it earlier: Abraham and I have a certain failed history. He’s quite tall (Lesh’s height, I expect), and since high school began, four thousand years ago, I’ve spent more time with him (and Reggie and Cole and Roan) than anyone else, so it was bound to happen. Reggie is gay, after all, and very short, and didn’t take me to the winter carnival freshman year. Abraham did.
He didn’t bring me flowers, if you’re wondering, but he did pass on dancing, and he did leave me to sit with Roan and Reggie while he went to play a ripping game of Magic: The Gathering with his brother and his brother’s then-senior friends. They’ve gone on to college now, naturally, and I’d guess very good ones. They’re probably studying engineering or math or prehistoric warrior cultures.
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