by Melissa Marr
“Why?” she demanded, and I let that pulse beat a little stronger, but she just stared back at me like she hadn’t even felt it.
“Your ignorance is truly astounding, even for a human.” I leaned toward her until she scooted back against her door, finally properly intimidated. “This is Niederwald. Do you know of another place name that sounds like Neiderwald?”
She blinked. Then she blinked again, and I could practically see her connecting the dots, though her confusion never quite cleared. “The Netherworld? Is that really what Niederwald means?”
I shrugged. “In German, it means ‘woodlands,’ or something like that. But I think that’s just a coincidence, because they aren’t German.” I nodded toward the line of vehicles as their doors started opening. “They aren’t human, either.”
Em glanced at the people getting out of their cars, openly watching us. “Start the car, Sabine.” Her voice was dark and even, but her tense grip on the door handle ruined the calm facade. She knew just enough about my world to know she should be scared.
“Just relax and sit still—this’ll only take a few minutes.”
“What are we doing here? I should never have let you come with me!” she barked through clenched teeth.
“Now you’re learning. . . .” I reached for the door handle, but her hand closed around my arm.
“What is this place—really?”
I considered not answering, but Emma was stubborn enough that if she thought she was alone and didn’t understand the danger, she might actually get out of the car, just to spite me.
“There are a few places where the barrier between our world and the Netherworld is very thin. Thin enough to be an easy pass-through for some things that normally can’t cross over on their own.” She started to interrupt, but I cut her off. “And before you ask, I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is.”
“Niederwald is one of those places?” Emma crossed her arms over her chest, and I could actually see the goose bumps forming. “So, hellions can . . . ?”
“No,” I said. “Hellions can’t cross over, barrier or no barrier. But a lot of other things can.” I nodded toward the small group now forming in front of the store. “They’re here to keep us on this side, and everyone else on the other side.”
“Like border patrol,” Em said.
“Yeah. I guess.” I twisted the small silver hoop in the cartilage of my right ear. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Stay in the car. And in case you’re tempted to do something stupid, take a look.” I nodded over her shoulder at the locals.
Tall, thin, and angular, they’d probably pass as human at a glance. Or at a distance. But up close, they were disproportionate enough to terrify someone like Emma, whose knowledge of the supernatural world included only the censored bits her bean sidhe best friend deemed psychologically safe.
The eyes watching us were too small and round. A woman sitting on the hood of her car—Nea—tapped fingers that were too long and pointy. Almost like claws. Her shoulders were too broad and her neck too thin. Humanity was a thin disguise on her, and one she wouldn’t mind shedding, should the need arise.
“What are they?” Emma whispered, and I had to respect the curiosity that ran almost as thick in her voice as the appetizing tremor of her fear. Some humans freak out when they realize they’re not alone in the world, but so far, she’d shown some pretty decent backbone.
“Harpies,” I said, but her blank look spoke volumes and added to my frustration. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you like Kaylee does, so pay attention. Niederwald is the largest harpy settlement in the western hemisphere. They’ve been guarding this thin spot in the barrier for a couple hundred years, and for the most part, people leave them alone, ’cause they’re creepy as hell even if you don’t know they’re not human.”
“No shit.” Emma frowned, openly staring at them now. “What do they . . . do—harpies?” she asked, sneaking another peek at them.
“Not as much as you’d think. They can cross into the Netherworld at will and they have an unfortunate affinity for raw foods.” And I wasn’t talking almonds and broccoli. “Other than that, they like to snatch things.”
Her pale brows rose in what may have been amusement. Or skepticism. “Like, kleptomania?”
“Kinda. Only they don’t hit stores. See how they’re all wearing jackets, even though it’s seventy-five degrees?” I didn’t bother trying to watch them subtly. Our stares were both open and mutual. “That’s to hide their wings.”
She studied the backs of the two girls facing away from us, but with the bulky cut of their jackets, she wouldn’t find any noticeable lumps. “Actual wings? Like, angel or butterfly?”
“Like harpy,” I snapped. “Think giant bats.”
“What do they snatch?”
“Whatever catches their interest,” I said, pushing back the urge to take just a taste of her fear. “Jewelry, coins, clothes, dolls, pewter Lord of the Rings figurines.” Dismembered body parts . . . “But they don’t mess with humans.” Usually. “That would draw too much attention. You should stay in the car, just in case, though.”
“I’m not staying here alone!”
“I’ll be back, and you’ll be fine. Just stay put and try not to freak out on me, okay?”
“No promises,” she whispered, as I got out of the car. When I closed the door, she leaned over the driver’s seat and slapped the lock, then sat with her purse in her lap while I rounded the front of her car toward the flock of harpies watching my approach.
“Sabine Campbell,” Nea said, stepping to the front of the group.
“Yeah. My name hasn’t changed.”
“Neither has anything else. . . .” Nea’s brother, Troy, eyed me up and down, like he’d just invented the whole visual invasion thing. Troy hadn’t changed either.
“Including my standards.” I flipped him off with both hands, then turned back to Nea. “I’m here to see Syrie. I need to ask her something.”
“You still looking for that guy? That bean sidhe?” Troy said, but his grin was more malicious than amused. “Don’t give up easy, do you?”
“I never give up. But I already found him.”
“Then what’s this about?”
“That’s none of your business,” Nea said, glaring up at her brother, and I was pretty sure that if male harpies weren’t rare to the point of mythological obscurity, she and her flock would have eaten the jackass alive years ago.
Desi, the skinnier girl harpy, tossed long brown hair over her shoulder to reveal a wickedly pointed ear, pierced with a tiny bone—she’d once told me it was a human fingertip—near the top of the cartilage. “Can you pay?”
“If not, I know how you could work off your debt,” Troy suggested, ever eager to flaunt his utter lack of originality.
“What, they’re paying people to neuter harpies now?” I said, both brows raised in challenge, and he hissed, an oddly feline sound coming from someone with wings. “Relax, your balls are safe for the moment.” I slid one hand into my hip pocket and pulled out a plastic test tube I’d taken from the school’s chemistry lab. I held it up to the light flickering overhead, and the harpies leaned forward for a better look at the dark, greenish liquid.
“What is that?” Nea reached for the tube, and I pulled it away.
“Nothing you wanna touch. At least, not at full strength.” I’d kept it in a glass vial at first, until it started eating through the tube. “This is hair from Invidia, a hellion of envy.”
“Hair?” Troy frowned. “That’s a liquid.”
“Congratulations, you’ve mastered at least one state of matter.” I tilted the vial, and the residue it left on the side of the plastic looked even greener and murkier than the bulk sloshing at the bottom. “Invidia’s hair is liquid. Like her follicles secrete pure liquid envy—toxic, caustic, and a real bitch to scrub out of leather. I’ve asked around, and everyone says a vial this size is worth way more than a single audience with Syrie. So why don’t you scurr
y back there and tell her I’m here.”
Troy stared at me for a minute, then gestured for me to follow him until Nea put one arm up to stop us both. “Where did you get hair from a hellion? How do we know that’s not just river water and food coloring?”
“You want a sample?” I gripped the stopper, like I was ready to pull it out. “Fine. But I gotta warn you, this shit sizzles like acid. Plastic is the only thing I’ve found that’ll hold it.”
Nea frowned, a sharp look of frustration on her angular features, but the others all seemed interested. I’d just dangled a very fat carrot—an exotic addition to their collection of . . . stuff—in front of several hungry rabbits. Rabbits with claws, and wings, and teeth that could strip flesh to the bone, no matter what they looked like on this side of the world barrier. I’d seen them on the other side, and without that mask of humanity, harpies were a very scary—and ugly—species.
I slid the vial carefully into my pocket and backed toward the corner of the convenience store, shooting a glance at Emma as I passed her car. “Are you going to take me to Syrie, or do I get to wander back there on my own?”
“That wouldn’t be very smart,” Nea warned.
“Yeah, well, I’m not known for my brains.” I stepped past the corner of the building and could see the house behind it, a hulking outline against the darker patch of woods beyond.
“What’s this you brought with you?” Troy asked, and I looked up to find him running the long, sharp nails of his left hand over the hood, eyeing Emma through her windshield while she stared boldly back at him. “Food or plaything? Or both?”
“Neither. She’s a friend.” For lack of a more accurate description. “And she’s human.” Which meant she was off limits for the harpies. At least, for those playing by the rules. They got to live on our side of the divide on the condition that they only hunt on the other side, to keep from decimating the local population. Or drawing the attention of the human authorities.
“You never let me have any fun,” Troy complained, trailing his fingers over the hood one more time toward the edge of the building.
I shoved him around the corner ahead of me. “And I’m not gonna start now.”
“You get twenty minutes, whether she talks or not,” Nea said, one hand on the front doorknob of the house behind the Sac-N-Pac. “If you don’t come out on your own, I’ll let Troy drag you out.”
Troy grinned at me from the steps, a joyless note of anticipation stretched over long, harsh features.
“Come near me and I’ll rip your wings off and beat you with them.”
“I had a feeling you like it rough,” he taunted as his sister pulled the door open.
The hinges creaked and the floorboards groaned beneath my feet, but the old house was a lot sturdier than it looked. It predated the gas station by several decades and was the oldest— and at one point had been the only—building in Niederwald.
“Try not to upset her this time,” Nea said, crossing the dim, sparsely furnished living room toward a closed door on the right. “Last time she wouldn’t eat for days.”
I reached for the doorknob, but Nea stuck out one bony hand, palm up. I gave her the test tube, then brushed past her into Syrie’s room, where the first part of my business in Niederwald would be conducted.
“Syrie?” I bent to unzip the top left pocket of my cargo pants as Nea closed the door behind me. “It’s Sabine. I have something for you.”
What most people don’t realize when they come to see the oracle is that what you pay Nea only covers access to her. If you want Syrie to talk to you, well . . . she doesn’t take payment in the traditional sense of the word, but a little kindness goes a long way.
A floor lamp stood in one corner, its dim, naked bulb shedding just enough light to outline shapes among the shadows. But as my eyes adjusted, I began to pick out more detail, in the room and on the walls.
“I brought you some pencils.” I saw no sign of her among the old, scarred furniture—a low twin bed, a dresser, and a three-legged table with two folding chairs. But as far as I knew, she’d rarely left the room, and her years of solitude were documented in the massive mural her walls had become. All of the walls.
Every inch of wall space she could reach was covered, charcoal sketches blending seamlessly into oil paintings so intricately detailed I was half convinced I could step right into them. But most of the images were done in plain old number 2 graphite or black ballpoint ink. Because the harpies were cheap bastards, and they wouldn’t spend money if they didn’t have to.
Most of the color had come from supplicants—a good deal of it from me. Crayon drawings near the floorboards showed an eye for perspective and proportion before she’d even been out of diapers—long before I’d discovered Syrie and her glimpses into the future. Eerie collages of faces, places, and events marked the maturity of her ability, which had prompted the harpies to start charging for her time. But the occasional sketches of her own face were the most haunting. And the most puzzling.
To my knowledge, Syrie hadn’t seen her own face since she was a toddler. Her attached bathroom—also claimed by her art—had no mirrors. Yet there the self-portraits were, sprinkled among the other bits of genius at odd intervals. Some were achingly realistic, while others showed an understanding of cubism and surrealism she’d surely never been exposed to. But all of them—every last one—defined her scars in meticulous detail.
Left eyelid, slashed and left to heal crooked. Skin shrunken and puckered around the pale red tissue inside her empty eye socket. Troy said she’d tried to dig both eyes out of her face when she was little, to make the visions stop. That was her first and only trip to a human doctor, but even the doc couldn’t save her left eye. And the visions had only gotten stronger.
Sometimes I wondered what those self-portraits said about her self-awareness. Like maybe she actually had some. More likely, hers was just one of the many faces in her visions. She might not even know who it belonged to.
“Syrie,” I tried again, still staring at the art, which stopped about five feet from the floor—as high up as she could reach. “I brought paper too.”
The sudden shuffle behind her dresser said I’d made contact, and I headed for the table, careful not to step on the images that had begun to trail across the floor since the last time I’d been here. The footpath was clear—she’d obviously learned that art couldn’t survive the traffic—and a second after I set the mini notebook on the table, Syrie slid into her folding chair, without even glancing at me.
I sat across from her and put the twelve-pack of colored pencils next to the notebook. Syrie snatched them, setting the whole box on her lap with one hand while the other flipped the notebook open.
Her long, slim fingers were stained with ink and smudged with charcoal, but they were definitely bigger than the last time I’d seen them. She was bigger. Her hair was past her waist now, hanging over her face in hopeless tangles, in some dark color that might once have been auburn, but was now just . . . dirty. She was growing, in spite of the lack of sunlight, questionable diet, and minimalist hygiene philosophy.
“Syrie, I need to ask you something,” I said, and a rare pang of guilt clanged around in parts of my mind I seldom found use for. I felt bad using her like everyone else did, but not bad enough to leave without what I’d come for. I would absolve myself later with the understanding that if people stopped paying for Syrie’s time, the harpies would have no use for her, and I didn’t want to think about what would happen to her then.
She didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. But her plum-colored pencil flew over the inside cover of the notebook—she wasted no surface—sketching something that looked vaguely human in shape.
“Do you remember what you showed me last time?” I asked, and her hand never paused. “I asked you to show me what I’d lost.” The only person I’d ever loved, and the other half of my heart he’d taken with him, when his family moved away while I was in state custody at Holser House.
&n
bsp; I had no idea if Syrie understood me, or if she’d understood what she was doing the night she’d drawn Nash, sitting on the end of a pier in a letter jacket with a big green E on one side and the number nine on the other. It had taken me weeks to find him, based on only that jacket, and months after that to get myself placed with a foster mom in his school zone. And on my first day at Eastlake, I’d discovered what hadn’t been obvious in Syrie’s sketch. Nash had stopped looking for me. He’d found Kaylee Cavanaugh instead.
But I knew what neither of them seemed to understand: Kaylee wasn’t right for him. She wanted to “fix” him—to drive out every dark impulse that didn’t fit into her romantic ideal. She was sterilizing him, bit by bit, excising the pieces she didn’t like, as if love were a buffet you could pick and choose from. She didn’t understand that those dark bits were an important part of him. Those were the bits of his soul that recognized the darkness in mine. The parts that let him see me as more than a born predator.
“I need to know one more thing, Syrie.” I took a deep breath, silently stamping down my own nerves. “I need to know if I’m ever going to get him back.”
The only indication that she’d even heard me was the smooth slide of her pencil from the inside cover of the notebook to the first page, where her fingers moved almost too fast for me to follow. Syrie was talking to me the only way she knew how—by showing me what she saw.
My heart pounded as the drawing took shape, beautifully detailed, yet frustratingly incomplete. Syrie wasn’t sketching now, content to fill in the details later. She started on the image and drew her way across the surface so that what she’d finished was unmistakable, but the rest of the page was blank.
The wait was agonizing, but the payoff was . . . unreal.
When she’d finished and moved back to the inside cover, I stared at the image on the first page, rendered all in plum, but expertly shaded, with particular attention to depth and a set of eyes that would be bright blue in life. Kaylee.
