Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  This werewolf didn’t look very dangerous, though. He mostly looked interested in the slice of mushroom pizza he was digging into with his gleaming fangs. Weren’t werewolves supposed to be carnivores? I realized I was staring and turned away. He had better things to do than talk to me, I was sure.

  “Oh, no you don’t.” Sometimes Analise knew me a little too well. She turned me around and pushed me back toward that werewolf. I tripped over the uneven pavement and bumped right into him. His pizza fell cheese-side down on the pavement.

  “Sorry!” I said, even as the werewolf stepped back, holding up his hands in apology, like he didn’t know his lost pizza was entirely my fault. Or maybe when you were a wolf it was better to apologize anyway, so that people knew you weren’t going to eat them. Definitely not a dangerous wolf, then.

  I looked up into his golden eyes. “Umm, hi.” My hand strayed toward his fur, and I pulled it back before I could pet him without thinking.

  The wolf nodded politely, walked past me, and kept walking.

  “Wait!” I ran after him. “You’re—” I had trouble getting words out, but I couldn’t blow this chance. “You’re a—”

  The wolf sighed and turned back to me. He looked less polite than before—not I’m-a-werewolf-about-to-go-on-a-killing-rampage impolite, but more like seriously-now-not-again impolite, which made no sense since we’d only just met. He pulled a small square of paper out of his pocket.

  I read it.

  Sorry. Not a shape-shifter. Welcome to Bordertown.

  Was he in denial? That happened sometimes in stories. Pretty hard to deny all that fur, though. “So, umm, want to—do something?” My voice squeaked. “Like—a movie?” Stupid, stupid, stupid. I knew there were no movies in Bordertown, unless you counted the Magic Lantern, which the Guide didn’t.

  He handed me another square of paper. Also, I have a girlfriend.

  My face burned. I wasn’t sure how I kept speaking. “Well, do you—have a brother? Maybe?”

  The werewolf rolled his eyes, and I didn’t need a square of paper to read that. I looked down before he could hand me another piece of paper anyway, one telling me just how much of a loser I was. When I looked up again, the wolf was a full block away, walking fast.

  “I am an idiot,” I announced to Analise.

  “We should stalk him,” my best friend said helpfully. “I can do the talking this time, if you want.”

  I would sooner have died than face him again. “Let’s find your vampire.”

  Just because I’d blown it with the wolf didn’t mean Analise shouldn’t still have her chance at true love, right? That’s what I told myself then.

  Now I tell myself that even Analise would agree werewolves are better than vampires after all.

  * * *

  We followed Ho Street east past the bars and music clubs and through blocks of derelict buildings turned to squats. Eventually, the crumbling apartment buildings gave way to the ruins of old stone mansions, which meant we must be getting close. Beyond them, the old city wall was crumbling as well, the sun growing low behind it.

  Analise rubbed at her calves. “Why would a vampire live here?”

  My legs ached, too, by then, and I felt the cobblestones through the thin soles of my sneakers. I scanned the cracked masonry and broken glass around us.

  Wait—over there. Something flickered against the old city wall, like the bright spots left behind after you look at the sun. The air wavered, and a grand old mansion came into focus, peaked towers and wraparound balcony and all.

  “Magic,” I whispered as the sky settled into the deep blue-green it takes on before full dark.

  “That’s it,” Analise whispered back, her voice sounding as awed as the time she’d learned the author of her vampire book had written a sequel. “It has to be.”

  Because I’m telling this true, I’ll admit it: I felt a twinge of jealousy, imagining the long flowing dresses and grand balls that went with such a mansion. Werewolves weren’t much into parties and pretty clothes; they were too busy hunting down game and getting leaves tangled in their fur.

  We walked up the path to the mansion together, crosses hidden beneath our shirts, holding hands like little kids. The stones beneath us glittered in the failing light as we climbed the stairs. The faintest of winds rippled over us, raising goose bumps beneath my fleece and T-shirt, and the door blew open, as if it were light as paper. This is too easy. I pushed the thought aside, afraid of letting my jealousy get in the way of Analise’s happiness. Just because I’d messed up with the werewolf, did I want the vampire to be hard, too?

  Analise released my hand at last and strode through that doorway, head held high, as if she were born to this. Not like me—what had I ever been born to, except for dangerous journeys to places that could never really be home in the end? I hurried after my best friend, past the statues of giant hounds on either side of the door and into a huge marble hall. A chandelier filled with lit candles hung from the ceiling, and more glitter sparkled in the air around us. Several tall elves stood guard along the walls, so still I couldn’t tell if they were real or only more statues.

  I didn’t belong in a place like this. Analise grabbed my hand again, and I wondered if she felt it, too, even though she mostly did belong in the place she’d grown up, and maybe would have stayed there if not for me.

  I pulled away first, afraid of holding her back. “Go on. You’re better at this than I am.”

  Analise lifted her head and walked up to one of the elves. “I’m looking for Lankin.” Her voice didn’t squeak, not even a little.

  The elf didn’t move, but from the center of the room a soft velvet voice said, “And so you have found him.”

  I flinched; I hadn’t heard him enter the room. But there he stood beneath the chandelier, an elf in a black velvet jacket, tight leather pants, and a frilled silk shirt. Silver hair fell loose over his shoulders. He looked exactly like the vampire in a story should look, complete with the faintest glimpse of fang showing over his lower lip. I hadn’t known elves could be vampires the way humans could.

  Analise caught her breath. Even I wondered—just for a second or two—what it would be like to run my hands through that hair. Then I caught his silver eyes regarding me with the same amused curiosity a cat regards a rolled-up ball of paper, and I stepped back. I’d stick to werewolves after all.

  Analise’s eyes were bright. “You’re a vampire, aren’t you?”

  “Indeed.” He held out his hand. “Will you come?”

  Analise walked the distance between them. “I will.” She took his hand—the cross beneath her shirt didn’t seem to trouble him—and together they strode across the room.

  “Wait!” My voice echoed after them. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to—what? Wander off together with Analise’s future vampire lover? How did I expect this story to go?

  Lankin turned gracefully around, his fingers wrapped around Analise’s. Analise gazed up at him, as if there were nothing else in all the universe, as if she’d gotten glitter dust in her eyes. True love was supposed to be like that, wasn’t it?

  “You barely know each other,” I sputtered. “Maybe you should—go to a movie first.”

  Lankin laughed, the sound at once musical and harsh. “A movie. How very … human.”

  “Go find your wolf, Miranda.” Analise’s voice sounded far away. Together she and Lankin glided from the room, disappearing through another door at its far end, one that slowly swung shut behind them.

  How could she leave me here alone? Magic, I thought. Maybe it was only vampire magic making Analise forget her best friend. I shivered beneath the flickering chandelier. What if that wasn’t true? What if Analise understood, better than I did, how this story was supposed to end?

  “You may leave now,” one of the elves said. He wasn’t a statue after all.

  I ignored him, walked up to the door, and turned the glass knob. Its bright surface reflected my dark hair and dark eyes back
up at me, but the door didn’t budge.

  “You are not permitted to pass that way,” a second elf said, his voice identical to the first. “Not unless you’re prepared to offer the master your blood.”

  I didn’t want to offer up my blood. Just then, I didn’t want the warmth of a wolf’s fur, either, or not only that. I wanted my best friend back. Tears stung at the corners of my eyes, and the room blurred the way my sketches had. I blinked hard, and the room disappeared entirely, leaving me alone on a deserted city street, one hand on the ruined wall where a door had been.

  The guard elves had disappeared with the rest of the mansion—none of it was real. Maybe that meant Lankin wasn’t real, either. Maybe any second Analise would come back, laughing at how she’d fallen for some stupid illusion, and together we’d go back down Ho Street, find a place to crash, and continue searching for true love in the morning.

  From beyond the wall, Analise screamed, a wild, animal sound. That was real. Fear shivered down my spine. I heard a muffled sob, then silence. I tried to move, but my feet were frozen to the ground, and not by magic. My hands trembled, my chest pounded, and I wasn’t sure I had the courage to take a single step.

  But I did. It sounds like a small thing, when I say it like that, but that’s only because there was no magic for this, no instant when everything changed. First I stood alone on the street, too frightened to move. Then somehow I was making my way through the broken city wall. I searched the rough stones, found a gap among them, and—I crawled through. Not right away, but eventually. I just did, okay? I can’t explain any better than that.

  There were ruins on the other side of the wall, cracked stones surrounding a circle of bare dirt. At its center Analise lay on a gray slab, her shirt torn, her arms tied to her sides and her ankles bound. Lankin knelt beside her, next to a guttering oil lamp, but it wasn’t vampire fangs that pierced her shoulder—it was the small silver knife he held. Analise’s blood flowed slowly down a narrow channel in the stone and dripped from there into a silver bowl on the floor. Her eyes met mine, begging me to do something. She must have forgotten I was a coward.

  That meant I had no choice but to forget it, too—no, that isn’t right. My hands still shook, my stomach heaved—I didn’t forget at all. I was afraid, but I didn’t let that stop me from walking toward them.

  Lankin laid the knife gently on Analise’s chest, where her tied arms couldn’t reach, then stood and turned to face me. His silk shirt and velvet jacket seemed out of place among the broken rocks. “May I help you, human?”

  “Let her go.” My whisper barely squeaked out into the air.

  Lankin laughed, and as if in response, the space around us shimmered. A bedroom with black silk draperies came into focus. Candles were set on the floor all around us, and a canopy bed stood where the stone slab had been. Its hangings were drawn aside so that I could still see Analise, lying in a satin nightgown on crimson sheets. The blood was gone now, and the ropes as well. My best friend smiled, and I knew Lankin’s magic had taken hold of her once more. I remembered how the Tough Guide said magic was unreliable in Bordertown. No one could make an illusion work here all the time.

  Lankin shrugged, an eloquent gesture. “She came to me of her own will, looking, as all humans are looking, for a story—in her case about love and vampires and thirsting for blood, all of which have grown quite trendy in your Bordertown. I gave her what she asked for, nothing more.”

  “But your story isn’t true.” Even his being a vampire was an illusion; real vampires didn’t need knives to draw blood.

  “All stories are lies, outside the One True Realm.” The tips of his unreal fangs glinted in the candlelight. “No human wants a story that tells the truth.”

  “Analise and I do.” We’d come here looking for true love, not illusions and lies.

  “Do you believe so?” He smiled, and I wished I’d brought a stake instead of my useless silver cross. You didn’t have to be a vampire to die of a stake through the heart. “How much are you willing to risk for that, human girl?”

  Candles flickered around us. I’d risk everything for Analise, just like she would risk everything for me. I didn’t say that, though. I feared if I offered Lankin everything, everything was what he would take. I lifted my chin to meet the elf’s silver eyes, pretending I was like Analise after all. “What are you asking for?”

  Lankin smoothed his velvet cuffs. “A true story, nothing more. I will tell your friend my story, and then you will tell her yours, and she will choose between them.”

  “That’s all?”

  The wall hangings rustled at some breeze I couldn’t feel. “That is not all. If she chooses your story, I will let her go. If she chooses mine, I will take your blood as well. That is fair, is it not?”

  A shudder ran through me. Vampires needed blood to keep them alive. “What do you need blood for?”

  “Accept this offer, or leave this place. Consider yourself fortunate. I offer you a choice.” Lankin knelt and stroked Analise’s cheek. She shivered, with pleasure or fear, I couldn’t tell.

  I wouldn’t leave her. “I accept.”

  “Very well.” Lankin brushed his lips against Analise’s, and when he drew away her lips seemed a deeper shade of red. “Long ago and far away, there lived a girl who dreamed of escaping her dreary human life, of finding a place where true love was real, where her lover could see beyond the surfaces humans are limited to, through to all the thoughts and longings that lay hidden beneath her skin.” His voice grew soft as wind over silk. “The girl knew she would pay any price for this thing, and when the chance came, she seized it, wasting no time on hesitation or regret, human failings she had little use for. And so she lived happily ever after, beautiful and young, loved and in love for all her days. You like that story, do you not?”

  “Yes.” Analise’s dreamy smile reminded me of when she was rereading her vampire book. But even in her vampire book there was hesitation—the vampire waited to turn the girl, after all. And my werewolf book had regrets—the boy missed being a wolf sometimes, though never enough to try to change back. I had hesitations and regrets, too, when I ran away and left my parents nothing but a note, beneath another batch of brownies, saying I loved them.

  “Go on.” Lankin stepped back. “Tell her your pitiful human story.”

  Stories weren’t pitiful for their hesitations and regrets. That was part of what made them true. Even true love wasn’t perfect—but Analise wouldn’t want to hear that now. How could I possibly compete with Lankin’s story? It would be like trying to compete with Analise’s vampire book. Until we’d come here, Analise hadn’t cared about anything more than that book.

  No—that was the least true thing of all. There was something Analise cared about more than vampires, just like there was something I cared about more than werewolves. We’d known it the day we came up with our plan. I knew it still, but what about Analise?

  “Hey, Lise.” I drew a deep breath as I moved to her side. “Want to hear a story?”

  “Is it the one about the werewolf?” Analise giggled. “That one’s not as good as the vampire one, you know.”

  “No. This is a different story.” I squeezed her hand, feeling what I couldn’t see, the ropes that bound her. “Not so long ago and not so far away, there were two best friends, and they were both afraid. One was afraid that if not for her, her parents would never have fought and would still be in love. The other one knew that wasn’t true, and she kept saying so until the first friend believed her. Today that first friend isn’t scared of anything.”

  Analise furrowed her brow, and I couldn’t tell if she remembered or not. “What happened to the second friend?”

  Who could blame Analise if she didn’t want to remember this story? “The second friend was afraid, too, because everywhere she went, someone told her she didn’t belong.” My throat tightened around the words. “She wondered deep down if maybe they were right, if something was wrong with her after all. It was the first friend
who told her that wasn’t true.”

  Analise nodded slowly. “And so the second friend also found her courage, right?”

  The candles dimmed, leaving us in a shrinking circle of light. “No. The second one never became brave. But her friend’s words were still a comfort to her, because she knew what they really meant: that they would always be friends, forever and ever.”

  “Forever and ever …” Analise’s eyes searched my face, looking for—I don’t know what she was looking for, and it’s too late to ask now. But her gaze focused on me, and her eyes filled with tears. “Miranda?” she said.

  “Yeah, Lise.”

  “Miranda, you are the bravest person I know.”

  I meant to explain she was wrong about that, too, only then the illusion around us melted away, and I saw my best friend, shirt torn, blood trickling from her shoulder and staining her lips, the little bowl beside her half full. The silver knife lay on her chest where Lankin had left it. I used it to cut her bonds, one by one, and the elf didn’t try to stop me.

  Fear crept back into Analise’s eyes as I drew her to her feet. It’d been years since I’d seen her afraid. “Where are we?”

  “Together,” I said. “Just like always.”

  “You have made an enemy this day.” Lankin’s silken voice remained soft. “Not only of me, but of all my house. We will meet again, human child.”

  His words sounded exactly like what someone in a story would say. Did that make them less true, or more? I urged Analise across the room. She stumbled, whispering my name. “Miranda. Oh god, Miranda.”

  I led her through the shattered stones, back to the cobbled Soho streets and into the Bordertown night.

  * * *

  We’d gone only a few blocks down Ho Street before Analise tripped, fell, and wouldn’t get up. I sat beside her, using Lankin’s knife to cut strips from my fleece to bind her shoulder, terrified all the while he’d find us there. Somehow I got Analise sitting up. She was dizzy from losing all that blood, but I still had my backpack, and I fed her brownies until her dizziness eased.