Lament: The Faerie Queens Deception

by Maggie Stiefvater

Page 23

 

  I was still shaking from standing up to her, and shocked at my outburst. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, yelling at my Mom over Granna’s body. Her fingers hesitated on the cell phone—I think she was as excited about calling Delia as I was about riding in Delia’s car.

  “No. I’ll call Luke. He can probably give me a ride. ” I took out my phone and punched in his number, willing him to pick up, needing him to pick up. I just wanted out of this room and away from my family. Even away from James, who was standing in the doorway trying to look as if he hadn’t noticed our argument. I wanted away from everything that was my life right now.

  “Hello?” The effect of Luke’s voice was slightly distilled by the distortion of the phone, but it still made me ache to be near him.

  “Luke?”

  At Luke’s name, James looked away.

  But Luke’s voice pulled me away from the image. “I’ve been thinking about you. ”

  I thought about the dead bodies in the ditch. “Me too. ” I couldn’t say much more in front of my unsympathetic audience. “Um. I’m at the hospital. Can I ask a favor?”

  Luke agreed immediately and promised to see me soon. James mumbled some sort of goodbye and escaped from the room before I could think of what to say to him. And Mom just stood there, arms crossed, studying me.

  I braced myself. “Okay, what, Mom?”

  “Wear your blue cardigan set. ”

  I had been standing by the hospital entrance for twenty minutes when I saw Bucephalus cut through the pouring rain, a dark mass in a gray, formless world. I shivered, part nerves, part anticipation, part sheer relief, and watched the old Audi pull up under the concrete overhang, dripping water onto the slick-dark asphalt.

  As I ran to the car, lightning flashed, brilliant and overwhelming, and a second later, thunder beat the air, momentarily deafening me. I slid in and slammed the door on the storm.

  As the car started to move, a curious feeling of release overcame me, like a release from pain that I hadn’t known I’d had. I couldn’t help but let out a huge sigh.

  “Sorry it took me so long. ”

  The moment I heard his voice, right there with me, I didn’t care how wrong he was for me. I was just so glad to be in the car with him that it was hard to imagine anything else mattered. I knew it was selfish, but I didn’t care.

  I turned my face toward him. He looked back at me, unsmiling, with dark circles beneath his eyes—his battle scars from the night before. “Hi, pretty girl. ”

  I told the truth. “I’m really glad to see you. ”

  “You don’t know how much I needed to hear that. ” He sighed deep enough to match mine. “Where to?”

  “Home for my harp first. And my friggin’ blue cardigan set. ”

  “Brought you a present,” Luke said. Without looking away from the road, he reached into his pocket and dropped Granna’s ring into my hand.

  “You got it out of the sink?!” I slid it back onto my finger; now that I knew how useful it was, it wasn’t nearly as ugly. Still running my finger absently along its edge, I looked out at the rain. Wind buffeted the car. Light filled it, brief and brilliant, and I cringed a second before the thunder boomed. “Great night for a party. ”

  Luke glanced in the rearview mirror, though there was nothing behind us but a wall of gray. “It’ll be over in time for the party. All this lightning, though. ” His face darkened. “Puts a lot of energy in the atmosphere. ”

  I guessed what he was thinking. “Like the sort Eleanor could use to pull another vanishing act?”

  “It’s not the vanishing I’m worried about,” he said ruefully. “It’s the appearing. ”

  Was that why he kept glancing in the rearview mirror? The thought kept me glancing in the passenger-door mirror the entire way to the house, though there was nothing to see but the spray from the tires.

  We pulled into the driveway. “Do you want to wait out here while I get the harp and change?”

  Luke peered over my shoulder at the empty house, barely visible through the sheet of rain. “I don’t want you to be by yourself. I’ll come with. ”

  We jumped out of the car and ran to the back door, where I fumbled with keys, rain pouring over my fingers, and got us inside as quickly as possible. Sliding into the kitchen, I looked over at Luke and groaned.

  He looked down at his soaked shirt and said, his voice mild, “Well, you did take three years to unlock the door, so what did you expect? Where’s the dryer? I’ll throw it in while you get changed. ”

  The idea of him shirtless stuck my tongue to the bottom of my mouth, so I just pointed toward the laundry room and retreated to my room, where I rejected the frumpy blue cardigan Mom would have worn in favor of a fitted white button-down and a khaki skirt. I liked to think it was an outfit that said professional but sexy. As opposed to Mom’s blue cardigan set, which said something more like frigid puritan music geek.

  I returned downstairs, picking my way carefully in the rain-gray darkness. It was weird to be home without the rest of my family. Without the hum of the TV, or Delia’s loud voice, or the constant whir of Mom’s standing mixer, the house seemed very still and empty; the only sound of life was the slow, rhythmic pulsing of the dryer in the kitchen. I thought of Luke standing down there, waiting for me, and the same thrill of nerves I got before playing in public trembled down my arms.

  I didn’t trust myself with him.

  I moved into the dim kitchen and picked out Luke’s pale form. He was leaning his hands on the counter, looking out the window. Without his shirt, I could see how his body truly was—how every inch was muscle, a perfectly tuned, deadly machine. Shallow scars traced a mysterious map across his shoulders, leading my eye to the enigmatic gleam of the gold band around his biceps. I knew he heard me come in by the subtle tilt of his head, but he stared out into the rain for a few seconds longer before turning.

  “That was fast. ” When he turned, I saw the largest scar of them all; a huge, white, amorphous shape near his heart. I didn’t bother to disguise my curiosity and closed the space between us; my eyes narrowed when I saw just how large the wound must have originally been.

  “What’s that from?”

  He didn’t reply, but his eyes wore the same dead expression they’d had after I’d read his mind. I reached out with careful fingers and touched the raised, uneven scar tissue, felt the shiny skin. As I did, I fell into a memory.

  It was one I’d seen before, back in the tomb. But this time I got a longer look. His back to an old wooden building, Luke held his wicked dagger point against the skin on his shoulder, lightly tracing a careful line down to the torc, as if trying its strength. Beads of blood raised up in its wake and I shuddered at the expression in his eyes—like there was nothing behind them. The next cut was stronger but still unflinching, slicing into his skin and skipping over the torc. And the next was stronger still. But of course it was madness. If he was trying to rid himself of the torc, it was a fool’s errand; the torc itself wasn’t affected by the knife. It stayed solidly around his biceps as he tore his arm to ribbons, a viscous blanket of red obscuring each new slash and covering the gold of the armband.

  Finally, Luke lowered the knife, hand trembling, and I sighed with relief. But too soon. Fast as a viper strike, he dug the blade into his own chest, twisting it viciously. His hands slid from the grip at last, and his head fell back against the building, his body twisting and arching.

  I gasped, pulling myself free of the memory with effort and blinking my wet eyes. “You tried to kill yourself. ” Saying it out loud made the memory real. I stared at him, repeating, “You tried to kill yourself?”

  Luke swallowed, still as a statue beneath my fingers.

  Trying to put this piece into his puzzle, I traced the pale lines that coursed over his torc. “Why would you do that to yourself?”

  “You saw. ” He looked into my eyes, unflinching. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Sixte
en years of Catholic church filled my mouth with answers, but they all tasted like paste and I was silent. Suddenly it occurred to me that I didn’t have to have an answer—that I didn’t want to speak. Instead, I hugged him, throwing my arms around his lean frame and pressing my cheek against the scar on his shoulder where he’d first traced the blade.

  Luke lay his head on top of mine, his breaths counting the minutes, my heartbeat slowing to fall in step with his. Then I felt his mouth, his breath hot on my cool skin, push against my neck, at once tender and insistent. Part of me urged me to stop him while I still had my senses, but the better part of me wanted it too badly—wanted to feel him lay a path of kisses up my neck, under my ear, along my jaw, until his mouth found mine and stole my breath. I couldn’t think, with the musky smell of his skin pressed so close to me and the feel of his fingers tangled in my ponytail. My brain screamed too far! but my body moved on its own accord, pressing closer to him.

  A sudden, stabbing pain in my heart forced a gasp out of me, and I felt Luke’s body stiffen. He pushed away, his hand moving up to his chest, his fingers against his skin, his eyes darkening. As the pain flamed through my chest again, Luke shuddered, squeezing his eyes shut.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered. But the finger of fire dragged across my heart again, and this time, Luke’s body spasmed and he crashed against the counter, sending a pot lid clattering to the floor. He reached a shaking hand toward the counter before collapsing down next to the pot lid on the tile. The torc glowed white hot on his arm, illuminated by some sort of fearsome magic.

  It was only then I figured it out. This wasn’t my pain—it was his. What I was feeling was only a shadow, some sort of sympathetic pain caused by the weird magic I’d performed on us in the graveyard. I dropped down next to him as he shivered in time with the waves of fire that rolled through my chest.

  “Luke. ” I touched his face, and he focused his eyes on me, biting his lip. “What’s happening to you?”

  It was worse than I could have imagined, feeling his body shaking underneath my hand and seeing him work so hard not to cry out. His voice was tight. “I’m—being—punished. ”

  I jerked my head up, looking at the windows, trying to see what could have been watching us.

  Luke, seeing my gesture, forced out, “For—what I told—Eleanor. ” He groaned, and curled his body tightly around his clenched fists.

  I remembered Eleanor’s face then, the puzzlement on her face when she asked Luke why he couldn’t kill me, just a girl. Faerie bitch! I wasn’t just a girl. I was a girl with freakdom off the charts. I reached into the tangle of limbs and pressed my hand against Luke’s chest, feeling the thump of his heart, slow and labored, each lethargic beat slamming against his ribs.

  I closed my eyes, trying to think about the feeling I got when I was moving clovers across tables. In my head, I saw the fire in Luke’s chest, burning brightly across the wings of a frantic dove. The flames, reflected orange and white in the dove’s black eye, ate one feather after another, curling them black and useless.