by Dawn Metcalf
Joy ran her fingers along his ankle, over the swell of carved bones and muscle, running her nails along the cuff of his jeans, pinching the denim where the seams met. She lifted the scalpel and held it up between them, eyebrows raised. Ink raised his eyebrows right back, curious. Joy tugged his jeans and touched the scalpel there. A single yellow stitch popped undone. They kept their eyes locked on one another, an unspoken question, a silent dare. Joy did it again: pop. Then another. Pop. And another. And a third. Pop. Pop. Pop. Joy unzipped the seam of his jeans in a slow, upward stroke, eyes on his, slicing the thick fabric neatly in half. Her hand slid up his leg, gaining access, feeling his calf and the slope of his shin. He didn’t move. She spread her hand over the crest of his knee. His bare skin under the denim felt hot to the touch.
Ink stared at her with something like hunger or thirst—his eyes, deep and dark, swallowed her whole. She leaned forward, touching the side of his thigh, and kissed him, but not just a kiss.
Their lips met, tongues touching. He groaned a soft sound in her mouth, and Joy felt it hum deep inside herself. He could feel her. She could feel him. Her hand tightened on his thigh. He leaned closer, grabbing her shoulder, squeezing encouragement, pulling her nearer.
“Joy? You in here?”
Joy froze. Stef! Ink closed his eyes and turned his face toward the wall, breathing ragged. Joy’s hand stuck between tight denim and skin. Her brother was in the hallway, and Joy’s door was ajar. She couldn’t quite think, her body tingling and feverish, a part of her brain wondering whether she should quickly get up and sprint for the door or stay still and pretend her hand wasn’t pressed inside Ink’s invisible thigh.
“Joy?” Stef said as he pushed her door open wide. Joy tried to look innocent as if she had been painting her nails or had some other reason for sitting shoeless on the floor.
She tried to smile and breathe normally. “Hey, Stef...”
Her brother’s face darkened, and his arm blocked the door.
“What’s this guy doing in your room?”
EIGHT
JOY GAPED AT Stef. Ink glanced up, surprised. The color drained from her brother’s face.
“Joy!” Stef screamed, and Joy turned, half expecting something like Hasp to be crawling through her window. She felt Stef grab her wrist and yank her to her feet, pulling her down the hall and into the kitchen before she knew it.
“Stef?” Joy gasped. “What...?”
“Trust me!” He grabbed the carton of Morton Salt and, popping the spout, poured it over the floor, turning in place while holding Joy’s hand in his fist.
She struggled, confused. “What are you doing?”
“Sit down,” Stef said, pushing her shoulder. Grabbing a steak knife from the butcher block, he sliced the tip of his finger as Ink rounded the corner.
Joy screamed, “Stef!”
A thick drop of his blood sank into the salt. He whispered something and the ring around them lit with crystalline flame. Ink slammed against it, knocking himself back into the fridge.
“Ink!” Joy cried and tried to get up, but Stef clamped his hand over her arm, smearing her wrist with blood. Ink stood up warily, hands raised, one pant leg hanging as loose as a skirt.
“You stay back!” Stef warned Ink, his words cracking like a whip. “Get out of here! Leave her alone!”
“Stef, you don’t understand...” Joy tugged at his arm. “He’s—”
“He’s not real,” Stef said bitterly. “Stay in the circle.”
“You can... You can see him?” Joy stopped yanking. She felt cold. Icy prickles bubbled over her body as she stared at her brother. “You have the Sight?”
“Stay in the circle!” Stef shouted and licked his bloody fingertip, angry and confused. “Wait. You know what he is?” he asked warily, his eyes on Ink. “He’s not wearing a glamour?”
Ink spoke up. “No,” he said. “She has the Sight.” Ink added, “Just like you.”
Stef blanched and shook his head. “No. That’s not possible,” he said, pointing the knife at Ink. “I don’t know what you’ve done to her, but it stops now! This is my home and my kin and under the Accords, I have discovered you trespassing and you will dismiss yourself immediately!”
Joy sputtered. What was Stef talking about? Ink glanced between them.
“My wards are all that protect her here,” Ink said.
“Really? Is that what you’ve been telling her? That you could ‘save’ her from whatever’s out there?” Stef said, waving the knife at his homemade ward, a circle of salt and blood. “And I thought that your kind could not tell lies.”
Ink weighed Stef’s words carefully and took three steps back.
“I cannot tell lies,” he said. “And I have no wish to harm her.” Ink turned to Joy and tucked his hands behind his back; Joy knew it was to remove one of the blades from his wallet, but he did not want to seem a threat.
“Talk to him,” Ink said to Joy. “I will return. Later. After I speak with Graus Claude.”
He bowed to Stefan, swept his arm in a half arc and, with a flash off the straight razor, disappeared.
Joy sagged against her brother. Her arm hurt where he held it.
“You know about the Bailiwick?” Stef said.
“Dammit, Stef!” Joy stood up, eyes stinging. “You’ve had the Sight all this time and you didn’t tell me?” she screamed at him. “AGAIN?”
“Hey,” he shot back. “I’m not the only one! You have the Sight?”
Joy yanked her arm out of his grip. “Yes!”
“Since when?”
Joy had to think about it. “Since February. About five months ago.”
Stef wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He looked damaged, lost. His hair was a mess, his face blotchy with emotion; a smear of red stood out on one cheek.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “You can’t... Did something happen? Did someone...? Oh.” Stef sank to his knees inside his salt circle and pinched the bridge of his nose. “The E.R. visit. You told me—a scratched cornea, right? I never put it together...” He sighed and gestured with a bleeding hand. “The boyfriend.”
“You lied to me, Stef!” Joy shouted past the fear in her voice. “You knew about this and you knew about Mom and you knew you were gay and what else don’t I know?”
“Whoa, whoa. One conniption fit at a time,” he said, placing the knife on the floor and sucking his cut. “Damn, that stings.”
“How long, Stef?” Joy asked.
“How long have I been seeing them?” he said around his finger. “Since I was five.”
Joy stared at him. “Five?”
“Yeah. That’s how I know you couldn’t have had the Sight long. You would have seen things way before now, and you can’t really hide that sort of thing when you’re a kid,” he said. “Besides, I think if you’d seen Mr. Buggles for real, you would’ve said something.”
“Mr. Buggles?” Joy said, barely remembering the name. “That was...?”
“My rabbit. My imaginary friend,” Stef said. “Except he was real. Mr. Buggles is a phooka, but they were all real. Lime Slime, the Toothless Fairy, Dmitri, all of them. Especially Dmitri.” His face flickered through many emotions, none of them easy. “They were all real.” He glanced back toward the fridge. “Or at least as real as that guy. What did you call him?”
“Ink,” she said. “His name’s Indelible Ink.”
Stef’s lips were a tight, pale line. “And that’s why you couldn’t tell Dad? Because he’s an Other Than?”
“A what?”
“A nonhuman,” Stef said. “One of them.”
“Yeah,” Joy said. “That and the fact that he’s invisible.”
Stef grimaced at the cut that still leaked blood. “Few of them are actually invisible—they just don’t
like to be noticed. Especially by humans—humans like us.” He rubbed his palm against his knee. “Other Thans don’t take kindly to being seen without permission.”
“Yeah, I got that.” Joy shifted her shoulders, trying to keep from the crackling line of energy. She’d had bad experiences with wards. “So...are you a wizard?”
“What? No!” Stef said and adjusted his glasses. “Who told you about wizards?”
“Inq,” she said.
“Indelible Ink?” he asked.
“No. His sister, Invisible Inq,” she said, making a breath of the q.
Stef shrugged. “Hard to hear the difference.”
“Trust me—they’re not at all alike,” Joy said, lowering her head as if they’d be caught whispering. “Does Dad have the Sight?”
“No.”
A pause. “Mom?”
Stef sighed. “No. But her mother’s mother did.”
“Great-Grandma Caroline,” Joy said. “That’s why they locked her up?” She’d known her great-grandmother had been put into an asylum by her family shortly after arriving in America. Joy had had a childhood fear that she could have inherited some mental disorder and be locked away like her great-grandmother, and that was before she’d started seeing strange stuff on her own. She tucked her hands against her gut. “But she wasn’t crazy! She had the Sight!”
“Well, she wasn’t exactly sane,” Stef said. “I used to visit her with Grandma. But as soon as she spoke to me, she knew that I could see them, too.” He shook his head and wiped his finger on his jeans. “She’d been in the institution for a long time—almost forty years. They’d given her drugs, shock treatments. I think her formal diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenic. By the time we talked, she wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, but she insisted I not tell anyone about the Other Thans. I think she wanted to protect me from...ending up like her.” Stef’s voice trailed off as he saw the look on Joy’s face. He played with the threads of his frayed friendship bracelet. “She told me what she knew about the Accords and the Council and how to protect myself from getting my eyes gouged out.” Stef looked at Joy through his rectangular lenses. “I guess you weren’t so lucky.”
Joy picked at her thumbnail. “I’ve kept both my eyes,” she said. “But how did you do it?”
“I shielded them,” Stef said and removed his glasses, pointing at the joint. There was a tiny row of glyphs scratched into the finish. What she’d taken for damage she now recognized as runes. Stef sighed. “Dmitri said when he met me, he thought my glasses were wards and that he couldn’t pierce them. He was too young to know, but it gave me the idea, and I managed to trade for some protective glyphs until I could handle things on my own.” He rubbed his clotting finger and thumb together, making small rolls of sticky blood. “Other Thans are sticklers for rules, and messing with order tends to drive them nuts.” He tugged at his shirt. “Wearing clothes backward or inside out is physically repulsive to them,” he said. “So is the color red. Sometimes green. And things that defy the natural order of things, like a solid rock with a hole in it or trick candles that won’t blow out.” He held up his wrist. The ratty red bracelet was held together with a dark metal bead. “And cold iron can burn them.” He dropped his hand. “I started trading for knowledge in fourth grade. I wanted to protect myself, and I did.” Stef touched the knife with a finger. “Now they leave me alone.”
Joy felt a cold rush like a cupful of water poured down her back. She knew something about trades in the Twixt. “What did you trade, Stef?”
He smiled the way he did when she’d nailed a routine on the mats. “You’re smart,” he said. “Luckily, so am I. We are something valuable, Joy. Rare. We have the Sight. We’re born with a little extra, like the sort of magic that still lives in the Twixt. It’s in our blood,” he said, gesturing to the crystalline ward. “Not everything Great-Grandma Caroline said made sense, but she knew what worked.” Stef adjusted his seat on the tile floor. “When I met her, she’d been blind for over sixty years. They’d come for her right after she was married—she must have been close to your age.” Stef rapped his knuckles on the floor tile. “Maybe that’s when she started seeing things, too. Maybe it happens later for girls.”
Joy shrugged. “Maybe.” The idea of getting married at sixteen was almost as frightening as being able to see monsters. Or losing both eyes. She watched the ward shimmer, remembering Aniseed’s trigger-traps. “Maybe they just like to be cruel.”
“Yes, they do,” Stef said, pinching his lip. “So you have the Sight?”
“Yes.”
“And your boyfriend’s one of them?”
Annoyance colored her voice. “Yes.”
Stef sighed and hung his head for a moment before he straightened, the ward flickering behind him, reflecting off his glasses. “Listen, I know what it’s like. What you think you’re feeling. They’re...unreal. Powerful. Beautiful, even. And I know how it feels to have all of that attention focused on you, fascinated by you.”
Joy snapped, “You don’t—”
“It feels like drowning.”
Joy swallowed her next words. That was exactly what it felt like when she looked into Ink’s eyes.
“I know,” he said. “It happened to me, too.”
It was one of those fragile soap-bubble moments that Joy so rarely had with her family, a moment that pressed against her chest and made it hard to breathe. Her mother and Stef were the ones that talked about feelings—they were the ones who made her laugh the hardest, scream the loudest or cry the longest because they knew where she hung her heart away from prying eyes—but they also made Joy uncomfortable. She was more used to things going unsaid. Still, she had to ask.
“What happened, Stef?”
He pinched his lip again and then crossed his arms protectively. “What happened is that I forgot that they aren’t human,” Stef said. “None of them are. And that no matter what they look like or how hard they try, they aren’t anything like us.” His voice hardened. Veins stood out on his wrists.
“Is that bad?” Joy asked.
“They’re not good or bad, Joy,” he said. “They are so different that it’s impossible to explain what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ means to them. We want to match feelings to what they look like they’re feeling, or guess their motivations and reasons to what is really more like a whim. We’d like to have them make sense—but it’s an illusion, Joy, like camouflage. They only look like people, but they’re not,” Stef emphasized. “It isn’t real. It took a long time before I understood what they are capable and not capable of.”
Having stood on Aniseed’s burning floor, Joy was under no illusions. “But it’s not like that,” she said. “Ink’s not like that.”
Stef wore a strange expression. “They never are, until they are.”
Joy frowned. “Hence, the ward?”
“Hence the ward,” he said, glancing at his fingertips. “It was a fair trade.”
Joy made a face as understanding dawned. “You traded your blood?”
“No,” Stef said. “Well, once. But that was an extreme circumstance.” He clearly didn’t want to say more and licked his cut again. “Mostly, I traded tears.”
“Tears?”
“They’re valuable,” he said. “Blood is nastier, more basic. It’s how I can make a ward so quickly without glyphs.”
Joy watched the salt sparkle, throwing fissures of light. “How?”
Stef shrugged. “You saw the quick and dirty version—a salt circle, a drop of blood, a word to seal the deal. That’s it.” He scraped a line through the salt with the steak knife. The scintillating fire collapsed and disappeared. “It’s not much, but it’s enough to keep your boyfriend out.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said as he went to the kitchen sink to wash up. “You don’t even know him.”
Stef t
ook his time cleaning the knife. “You think you know what you’re doing,” he said, shutting off the water. “You think you know him, but you don’t. You can’t. And while I don’t expect you to drop him on my say-so, I want you to at least think about the fact that I know something about this, about them, and that I’m your brother.” He slid the knife back in the butcher block. “You know that I care about you.”
Joy felt grit grind across the tile as she stepped through the salt.
“Ink loves me.”
Stef took out the broom. “Of course he does,” he said in the way only big brothers could.
He tossed her the dustpan. Joy held it against the floor as the stiff bristles scraped salt onto the plastic scoop. She dumped it into the trash, letting the salt slide in. A single red-brown bead stippled in crystals rolled out last.
“They’re dangerous, Joy,” Stef said. “To everything and everyone they touch.”
Joy stared at her brother, wanting him to say more, wanting him to tell her why, but her phone rang. It was the fifth call in a row from a number she didn’t recognize. She moved her thumb to answer it. Stef put his hand over the phone.
“I want you to be safe,” he said. “And if this guy really loved you, he’d want you to be safe, too.”
Joy pulled free and answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Joy?” A resonant voice said her name. “This is Enrique. We need your help, honey. Ilhami’s in trouble. Can you meet us outside?”
* * *
This was clearly the opposite of safe.
Joy felt danger hum in her arms as she sat in the sports car with a black backpack tucked between her knees, twisting the straps around her fingers as Enrique explained again what she needed to do to get Ilhami out of New York.
“His name is Ladybird,” Enrique said from the driver’s seat. “He and Ilhami go way back, but Ilhami got careless and bound himself to the locale. He’s been stuck at Ladybird’s for over a month.”
“Which is a problem,” she guessed.
Enrique sighed. “Which is a problem.”
