Haffling (The Haffling series)

by Caleb James

  Changeling Mom was at my side. “Help me across,” she said. She didn’t wait for me to tell her what a horrible idea I thought this was, but she was up and over. I did the same for her, and as she neared the safety of the knoll, Jerod grabbed her by the legs and eased her to the ground.

  Then it was my turn. The trick seemed to be in pressing your body as tight to the fence as possible, once over. I shinnied down the branch, gripped the belt-and-shirt rope, and dropped. It was terrifying, hanging there, nothing below but a hundred-foot drop. I felt Lance’s shirt strain under my weight. Stitches popped; it started to tear. I kicked at the fence and swung back… and then forward. The toe of my sneaker gripped an iron bar. The backward momentum nearly made me lose it, but I hung fast and kicked my other foot into the slat next to it. I bent my knees and pulled my body in tight. I stared at the fence, and with the subtle back-and-forward swing of my hands on the rope, I waited for the forward surge and grabbed with my right hand. My fingers scrambled over rust and chipped paint. I gripped tight, feeling it rip my skin. I pulled in with my knees, and in a single movement, let go of the rope and shot my left hand to the bars. I caught my breath and clung tight. Now it was just a matter of going slat by slat.

  “You got it,” Jerod encouraged. “Go slow.”

  Lance croaked, and Nimby chattered, “Don’t fall, Alex.”

  I moved right foot, left foot, right hand, and then left hand. Slat by slat. Jerod’s fingers touched my leg. “Two more to go,” he urged. And then he was behind me. I hung tight to the fence, now over safe ground. I dropped back against him, on safe ground, in strong arms.

  Lance croaked and hopped away down the steep embankment.

  “You okay?” Jerod whispered. His breath tickled the back of my neck.

  “Yeah.” His closeness was distracting.

  “I know this is bad timing…. I want you so bad,” he said.

  “Same,” I gasped, just wishing we could stay there, me nestled in his arms.

  “Let’s get Alice, get her somewhere safe… then I want….”

  It felt amazing to be held. I ignored the voice inside—the one that warned me to trust no one. It was my mantra. At best, people let you down; at worst they deliberately hurt you. “Shut up.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not you… me.” I turned into him.

  There was an insistent ribbit from a ways away.

  “Just tell me you feel this too,” he said. The moon glowed on his cheeks, his expression serious.

  “You’re not alone….” I so wanted to say it, just three words… “I love you.” I didn’t.

  Lance let out a sustained croak, like a foghorn. Then a string of them, loud and insistent.

  “We have to go,” changeling Mom said.

  Reluctantly, we disentangled. My skin tingled where our arms had touched. As we climbed down the embankment, the highway getting louder, Mom called back, “She never told us how she got tricked.”

  “No.” Remembering Katye’s promise, I held back, waiting for Jerod to get around a dangerous patch of loose dirt and rocks. My thoughts pulled in different directions. Find Alice, stay safe, kiss Jerod…. I guess that was the order I needed to keep. “It might have been important…. May used her older sister’s trust to trick her into the mist. It was something similar with Katye. Something to do with love… with Lance. In the poem, the Lady of Shallot looked into her mirror, saw Lancelot, and fell in love. Only there, when she crosses from one world to another to be with him, she dies, and he never knows how much she loved him.”

  “She still has some magic,” Jerod said. “If that girl’s boyfriend really gets shingles and like what she did with those cops.”

  “It wasn’t enough to keep her Lancelot from croaking.”

  He punched me gently in the shoulder. “Joke is losing its steam.”

  “Yeah.” We bumped shoulders, me not wanting to think how wrecked I’d be if anything bad happened to him. We looked across at the Henry Hudson Highway, and beyond that at the river.

  “Come on,” he said. We zigged and zagged through underbrush and loose rock. “So what’s May’s weakness?”

  “Her hunger,” I said. “It’s like a poker player’s tell.” We were stopped by a chain-link fence that cut us off from the highway.

  Between the roar of outbound traffic, I heard Lance’s croak to our left. The ground sparkled with moonlight and lamplight in thousands of broken bottles.

  “So much for don’t drink and drive,” Jerod said.

  “People are idiots,” I said, realizing that most of this glass was from beer and liquor bottles tossed from the highway. Lance’s croaking was nonstop. I saw something move about thirty yards away.

  “He’s on the ramp,” Jerod said, and we jogged toward a break in the fence.

  The frog waited at the curb. He flicked his tongue like a red, flashing arrow. He hopped into the road.

  “No! Wait!” I shouted. “Let me.” And he stilled as I bent down and cradled him in my hands.

  Dodging three lanes of northbound traffic, we made it to the divider. To our left was the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan, to our right the Parkway and the Bronx. I held my hands out, palms open, and watched the frog. His thick legs repositioned, and he faced the river. His tongue flicked.

  “He’s like a compass,” Jerod said.

  “Amphibious GPS….”

  We darted across the inbound lanes and hopped the guardrail on the other side. We ran across the biking and jogging path of Riverside Park, which even at this hour had people pushing babies in strollers and a trio of skateboarders practicing tricks. Lance wriggled in my cupped hands. His head poked between my fingers. His tongue shot out. I looked around, opened my hands, and he hopped off. He headed for the river.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” My heart sank. What the hell was I thinking? That this was some magic frog… that it was in fact Lance? What a moron; it was a frog that wanted to get to the water, nothing more.

  Jerod was at my right, changeling Mom on my left. “He’s just a frog,” I said. A wave of despair rose inside of me. “Alice….”

  “Ssh!” Mom touched my arm. Her gaze was intent on the frog’s progress as it disappeared over the concrete breakwater. There was a splash and a loud croak.

  “Come on,” Jerod said.

  I didn’t want to infect him with this feeling of hopelessness. Alice.… Whoever had taken Alice…. My gut twisted as I pictured her. I knew too well what could happen to little blonde girls. I’d been inside that monster, and I’d killed it.

  “Something’s coming,” changeling Mom said.

  We stood on the breakwater, the river stretching before us, Jersey on the other shore. A swath of moonlight was like a glittering road on the water.

  “Yes.” Nimby darted out over the river. Her pink wings sparkled. “Something’s coming.”

  Twenty-Four

  MY EYES strained to pull shapes from the dark water. I heard the night sounds—traffic behind us, lapping waves, a frog croaked… another answered, and a third and a fourth.

  Nimby flitted between Jerod and me, her jeweled wings blurred like a hummingbird’s. Changeling Mom gazed on the river. “It’s coming,” she said.

  Before I could ask for clarification, there was movement on the river. Something dark pushed up through the surface. It headed toward us. It came fast.

  Jerod stared as the weird and impossible thing leapt from the depths of the river. “It’s a horse!”

  “It’s a nightmare… a pooka,” Nimby said. Her tiny teeth chattered, and she moaned, “Nooooooo! Bad, bad, bad. You ride its back, and it drags you down. Down, down, down. You drown, drown, drown.”

  There was no denying its shape, but unlike any horse I’d seen or imagined. Its coat was an oily black, its mane pure silver, and its eyes blood red. It galloped across the river’s surface and stopped not two yards from us. It reared back on its hind legs and came crashing down. I expected a wave of water to rush over us—there was no s
plash. It skittered at the water’s edge, snorted, and tossed its massive head. Its red eyes stared at me. The message was clear… at least to me. I was supposed to get on.

  It pawed at the river.

  I inched toward the edge of the breakwater. No idea how deep the water was…. I was a decent enough swimmer, but as any New Yorker would tell you, a dip in the Hudson is a bad idea.

  “No!” Nimby cried. “Alex, no! It’s death.”

  I stared at the horse. It grew still. Images flickered in its fiery eyes. Like I was seeing things the horse had seen, places it had been under the water. I saw schools of dull brown and silver fish, dense seaweed, a rusting can, the hull of a small boat.

  “What’s happening?” Jerod asked next to me.

  “It’s like watching TV.” I didn’t know if he could see this or not. The images in the horse’s eyes shifted. I saw a bog with cattails and water lilies. There was an island, like a volcano rising from the mucky water. On the highest point, a fire burned and figures danced.… With the image came music, but not from instruments… frogs.

  The horse snorted, and its eyes turned back to red.

  “In Katye’s book,” I said. “Queen May fails when she tries to take over Alice’s body. What stops her?”

  “She’s human,” Jerod says. “It doesn’t work. Queen May loses all her magic and is captured and thrown back into Fey. So Alice is saved.”

  “But because my sister, Alice, is a haffling, May thinks it will work. That’s what this is about. It’s why Katherine Summer didn’t write the second book… because it’s happening now.”

  The horse was still, tiny rivulets streaming at its hooves.

  “This is a trap. I know that.” And there was something more that I would not voice. May had been pretty clear that I’d be an acceptable choice—just give her my name. I reached my hand over the water, and the horse lowered its head. Its mane was slick like algae. My fingers sought purchase, and a stench washed over me, like something baking in a New York dumpster on a hot summer’s day. Nausea choked in my throat as I grabbed hold.

  Nimby shrieked.

  Jerod shouted, “Alex, no!”

  I gripped something solid, like braided rope in the middle of the slime. As I did, the horse flicked her head, and my feet flew out from under me. It’s like I weighed nothing as she whipped me onto her back.

  Nimby screamed, “Noooooo!”

  I heard someone jump into the water, but couldn’t turn as the horse broke into a gallop… over the surface of the Hudson. My thighs dug into to the beast’s flank, and gross as it was, I pressed my head against her slimy neck. The smell was rotting eggs and sewer gas. My eyes teared and I gagged. And then she dove. I took a final gasp of rotted air as the river washed over us. Deeper and deeper she plunged, my body pressed tight, my eyes shut. The pressure as we dove hurt my ears. My lungs ached. My thoughts raced, calculating how deep we’d gone and if we’d passed the point of no safe return. Nimby’s voice echoed in my head, “Down, down, down. Drown, drown, drown.”

  A calm overtook me. I was going to die. I was going to drown in the Hudson. All of my fighting, my constant struggle to keep things under control… none of it mattered. Memories flashed to mind as the ache in my lungs turned to numbness. I saw Mom before she got sick, and then again at her disability hearing. I pictured the neighborhood thugs trying to shake us down, and Alice in the Chinese bakery as she enchanted the proprietress…. I had to save Alice. I could die another day, but today I had to save my sister. And something else… a pair of brown eyes and the smile that came with them. I am not going to die, I thought. Because I love Jerod, and I need to do something about that. Fear battered at my thoughts…. I’ve been down too long. Just hang on.

  Something lurched beneath the horse’s hooves. We’d hit the riverbed. She wasn’t stopping. I felt sand and debris against my cheek, and then a thick mud around my legs and closing over my body. She was running into the riverbed, burying us. Bubbles of gas brushed against my face, and then… I felt… air.

  I cracked my eyes open. They hurt. I blinked against the sting. We weren’t under water, and we weren’t buried in the ground. This had to be a hallucination. I gasped, expecting to take in a lungful of water. It was air, and it reeked of filth and slime; it was the best breath I’d ever had.

  My eyes burned, and my arms and legs were still wrapped tight around the beast’s neck. Cautiously, I rose up, swallowing eager breaths of putrid air. It got better the further from the horse’s flesh I rose. I cracked my eyes and then shut them fast against the burning sun.

  I tried to get my bearings. Warmth from the sun—how was that possible? It was near midnight when I went into the river. I cracked my eyes again; it was blindingly bright… and green.

  “Alex.” A man’s voice from off to my right. “Open your eyes. Get off the horse now.”

  I knew that voice…. Maybe I’d drowned, and this was the tunnel on the way to whatever came next. In which case, heaven or hell smelled awful. I eased onto my belly and slid down the horse’s ooze-covered flank. I tumbled to the ground. Grass and weeds cushioned my fall. Under the shadow of the horse, it was easier to open my eyes. The first thing I saw….

  “No… Jerod!”

  Panic took hold. He wasn’t moving, his body drenched, his hands overhead clutched to the horse’s tail.

  “Jerod. Please….” I crawled to his side, his arms like lead pipes, the muscles frozen. His face turned to the ground. “Jerod!” I eased my fingers into his, trying to get them to release. Clumps of the nightmare’s tail ripped away in his rigid fists. “Jerod!” I got him free, and he fell to the ground.

  He wasn’t breathing. I turned him onto his back. “Jerod.” Nothing. Terror ran through me like a knife. I pried his clenched jaw open and clamped my mouth over his cold lips. I forced my breath into him, once, twice, and a third time. I checked his neck for a pulse. Nothing. Not allowing myself to think, I positioned the palm of my right hand on his sternum, braced with my left, and started chest compressions. I breathed again and again. I pressed my body against his as the nightmare danced off a ways to chew at a mound of pink clover. “Jerod, please….” I pushed my breath over and over into his mouth. I counted off the compressions. “I love you,” I cried. Knowing it was true and that it was too late.

  “Alex.”

  My head turned at the sound of the man’s voice. Backlit by the burning sun stood Cedric, and behind him, Liam. “Help him. Please….”

  Liam shook his head, his violet eyes and downturned mouth telling me things I did not want to hear.

  “Jerod, breathe!” My lips over his. My fingers at the crook in his neck where I should have felt a pulse. “Please…. I need you. Clay needs you. Don’t leave.” I willed my breath into his lungs. Feeling it travel down his throat, feeling his chest expand as I pressed tight. “Please.” Fighting back despair. “Please.” Tears streaming. “Please.” It was hard to catch my breath. “Please.”

  Jerod twitched. For a moment I thought I’d made him move, and then a gush of brackish water entered his throat and flooded my mouth. I spat it out and rolled him on his side.

  Liam sank down next to me. “Tell me what to do,” he said.

  “Hold him steady.” And I thumped Jerod’s back. My fingers again at his neck. “He’s got a pulse!”

  Jerod coughed and spewed water. He retched and vomited. His body convulsed, and I wrapped myself around his back, wanting to warm him, to feel my life flow into his. I was shaking, realizing what he had done… for me. He’d leapt in after me, grabbed the horse’s tail, and nearly died. Why? Why would he do that?

  I couldn’t stop trembling. I pressed my chin over his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I’m so sorry.”

  He was breathing on his own, giant gasps that shook his body.

  “He’s breathing,” Liam said. He looked at Cedric. “I thought he was dead.”

  I wanted to punch him.

  Liam reached a hand out and rested it on my cheek. I
flinched. I didn’t want him anywhere near me or Jerod.

  “You said that you loved him,” he said.

  I pulled Jerod tight. He was awake and obviously hearing all of this.

  “Yes.” And like jumping off a cliff, I said it again. “I love Jerod.”

  To which Jerod choked and coughed. “What?” He twisted in my arms, and gasping for breath, he repositioned himself across from me.

  His knees bumped against mine. His eyes were open, his face smeared with green muck, his lips parted. He was beautiful, the most beautiful boy I could imagine. I knew without doubt it was true; I loved Jerod, was in love with him, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. And now I’d told him… and he wasn’t saying anything.

  He smiled. I watched, fascinated, as the dimples popped in his cheeks. His lips twisted as he pulled a strand of algae from his hair. Our eyes locked. And then he spoke. “Jerod loves Alex.”

  “Thank you.” The only thing I could say. I mean, there was more, but really….

  Jerod took my hand, and our lips found each other’s. I suppose it should have been gross; we reeked and were covered in slime. It was amazing, the sun warm on our backs, the smell of wildflowers, birdsong, the croaking of frogs, but mostly him. His cool lips pressed against mine. His solid body in my arms, alive and saying that he loved me. It wasn’t just that he’d said it.… He’d nearly died for me. And in the warped world of Alex Nevus, actions spoke louder than words.

  “Boys.” Cedric’s voice. “We can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”

  Maybe not safe, I thought, but wonderful. Our foreheads touched.

  Jerod whispered, “I had a crush on you for the longest time, this is amazing.”

  “Boys!” Cedric said. “We need to move, now.”

  Jerod sighed. “So we’re back in Narnia.”

  I didn’t want to add what I was thinking, but somehow the normal filter that kept my brain away from my mouth had been derailed—“Or we died getting there.”