The waitress left.
I tried to imagine the last thing I’d said to Dee. Was it something horribly cruel? I hadn’t seen her since I’d let Nuala just rip into her—but I couldn’t remember how awful I’d been. Somehow I seemed to remember that I’d said something awful. Somehow her disappearance was my fault.
“Piper,” snapped Nuala. “He didn’t say there was anything wrong. He just asked you if you’d seen her. Obsessing doesn’t do any good.” She opened her mouth like she was going say something else, but instead leaned her chair back toward the table behind her and grabbed a pen that had been left with the check. She handed it to me. “Just do it.”
Another thing to feel guilty about. My skin was almost bare of ink now, and here I was regressing.
She pressed the pen into my fingers. “Unless you want me to write something for you.”
I felt relieved the second I pushed the tip of the pen to the back of my hand. I scratched river black onto my skin, clicked the pen, and sighed.
“What the hell does that mean?” Nuala asked.
I didn’t know. It just felt good to get it out.
Nuala grabbed my pinky finger and pinched it. “I can’t read your thoughts anymore. You have to talk to me.”
“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “I didn’t know what half the stuff on my hands meant when I met you.”
She frowned at me but looked up as a harried-looking Sullivan stepped out of the deli onto the patio, meeting the waitress in the door. He leaned over and said something to her before joining us at the table.
He opened his mouth, but I said first, “Have they found Dee yet?”
Sullivan shook his head. “No.” He fidgeted with his chair until he was happy with its distance from the table’s edge. “But please don’t obsess about it, James. I only told you because I knew she was a friend of yours and thought you might have heard from her. I was really hoping that you were going to tell me she’d called you. There are a thousand innocuous places she could be.”
Nuala gave me a meaningful look, but what meaning, I couldn’t tell.
“And a thousand not innocuous places,” I countered.
“Which is true for any of us.” Sullivan opened the menu but didn’t look at it. “There are people looking for her, and we’re only working on guesses. Right now my attention is entirely absorbed by the definite problem right in front of me.”
“Me,” Nuala said. When Sullivan looked at her, she added, “I get it. You hate me. Nothing personal.”
Sullivan made a face. “Ehh. I don’t hate you. I just don’t trust you. And—it’s not even you personally. I’ve just never met a harmless member of your race.”
“You still haven’t,” Nuala said, with a smile like a growl. “But I would never hurt James.”
He looked at me. “Anything to add, James?”
I shrugged. “I believe her. I told you before. We haven’t made a deal. She hasn’t taken anything from me.” And she was an awesome kisser and she knew more about me than anyone else in the world. I left that part out.
Sullivan made a frown that put a wrinkle between his eyebrows, and then used two fingers to rub it, as if he was self-conscious of it. “You’re going to give me an ulcer. Can you imagine how much easier life would’ve been for you if you’d just gone to your classes, learned to play the piano, and graduated with more Latin epithets after your name than Cicero? You know, instead of befriending a homicidal faerie whose modus operandi is to suck the life from her victims? Can you try to see what it is that I’m struggling with here?”
“Waitress,” Nuala warned in a mild voice.
We all shut up as the waitress appeared and asked for our orders. None of us had looked at our menus and Nuala didn’t know what food tasted like anyway, so I just said, “Roast beef and chips for all of us.”
“No mayonnaise for me,” Sullivan said somberly, turning his iron ring around and around on his finger.
“Will I like chips?” Nuala asked me.
“Everyone likes chips. Even people who say they don’t like chips like chips,” I said.
Sullivan nodded. “That’s true.”
The waitress gave us a funny look and took the menus.
After she’d gone, I said, “I want to know why Nuala has to eat now.”
“Why are you looking at me?” Sullivan asked. Both of us were.
“Because I get this feeling that you are the most informed about faeries at this table,” I said. “Which is pretty incredible, considering present company.”
He sighed. “I spent seven years with Them, so I should be pretty informed. I was a consort to one of the queen’s ladies.”
There were plenty of faeries he could’ve meant, but somehow I only thought of one. Nuala and I were apparently on the same wavelength, because she said, “Eleanor.”
“I don’t want to know how you know,” Sullivan said. “Tell me it’s not because you saw me with her.”
“No,” Nuala replied. “Why, were you besotted?”
Sullivan rubbed harder at the wrinkle between his eyebrows. He looked at me. “Anyway, in seven years you can learn a lot, if you’re paying attention. I found out when I was with Eleanor that nobody was looking at me. So I got to pretty much look where I wanted to. And I didn’t like what I saw. Them using humans to kill other humans. Black magic. Rituals that would make your toes curl. Humans losing themselves to just … just … soulless pleasure. Nothing had any meaning there, for me. No time. No consequence. No … the worst was what They did with human children.”
He didn’t shudder, exactly. He just sort of half-closed his eyes and looked away for a moment. Then he looked back at me, at my arm. “You have a mosquito on your arm.”
I slapped in the direction of his gaze and checked my hand. Nothing.
Sullivan’s voice was tired. “That’s what we are to Them, to the court fey—that’s what I found out. We’re not an equal race. Our suffering means nothing to Eleanor and the rest of them. We’re nothing at all.”
Nuala said, “The court fey, maybe. Not us solitary fey. Not me.”
Sullivan raised an eyebrow. “Really? You didn’t want to make a deal with James at all? You were just filled with the milk and honey of friendship?”
I wanted to defend her, even though I knew he was right. I’d been just another mark to Nuala when we met. But I was just as guilty, wasn’t I? Because she’d only been another faerie to me.
Nuala just looked at him, lips jutted a little.
“Look,” I said. “I realize that both of you could happily strangle each other across the table, but I don’t think that’s the most effective use of our time, and frankly, I don’t think I have enough money to tip the waitress for that kind of clean-up. And look, here’s lunch. Let’s eat that instead of each other.”
After the waitress had left the sandwiches and we’d rotated them looking for the one without mayo on it, I asked again, “So why does she need to eat now? If it’s not because she’s not taking anything from me—which is what you said before—then what is it?”
Sullivan picked the lettuce out of his sandwich with an unconsciously curled lip. “I’m just telling you that she ought to be fading—getting more invisible—if she’s not taking anything from you. And if anything, she looks even less … ethereal than she did when I last saw her.” Nuala looked about to protest, so he added quickly, “I saw your sister fading between victims, once.”
Nuala shut up. She didn’t just shut up, she went totally quiet. Like a total absence of sound, movement, blinking, breathing. She was a statue. And then she just said, real quiet, “My sister?”
“You didn’t know you had—well, I guess you wouldn’t, would you?” Sullivan worried the tomatoes out of his sandwich and laid them in a careful pile that didn’t touch the lettuce. “Of cour
se, she didn’t look like you when I saw her—since you can look like anything. But she was a leanan sidhe as well. I wouldn’t have thought you were related if Eleanor hadn’t told me. Same father. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
The last bit seemed a little incongruous with his previous attitude toward her. Maybe her struck silence had softened him.
“There are two of us?”
“Both called by the same names,” Sullivan said. He looked at her as if this was supposed to mean something to her. “Overhills. As in, the opposite of under hill. As in, human. It wasn’t a nice term.”
“Wait,” I said. “So They called Nuala human?”
I didn’t think I’d put any hopefulness in my voice, but Sullivan said quickly, “Not literally. Only because the leanan sidhe spent so much time with humans and often looked like them. Even picked up human habits.”
I thought of Nuala sitting in the movie theater, imagining herself as a director. Very human.
I realized that Sullivan was staring at Nuala and turned to look at her. She had her eyes closed and one of her more wickedly pleased smiles on her face. In her hand was a half-eaten chip.
“I told you you’d like chips,” I told her.
Nuala opened her eyes. “I could survive on nothing but them.”
“You’d be four hundred pounds in no time.” Sullivan swallowed a bite of sandwich. “I’ve never seen one of Them eating human food. Well, there are stories of some of the diminutive sorts eating beans and things like that, though I’ve never seen it. But—when did you start eating human food? Do you remember the first time?”
The memory of sucking a grain of rice off Nuala’s lip made my stomach kind of twist.
“James gave me some of his rice. A few days ago.”
Sullivan narrowed his eyes and ate several more bites of sandwich to aid his thought process. “What if it’s a reverse of what happens to humans in Faerie? It’s pretty well known that if you eat food offered to you in Faerie, you’ll be trapped there forever. I’ve never heard the reverse said for faeries and human food, but I can’t think of many situations where a faerie would be in the position to accept food from a human anyway. Except, of course, for the lovely, ulcer-causing scenario you two have developed for me.”
“I can’t become human,” Nuala said. Her voice was fierce, either with anger or despair.
Sullivan held up a defensive hand. “I didn’t say that. But you have a dual nature anyway. Maybe you’re just swaying toward one or the other. James.”
I blinked, realizing he was addressing me. “What?”
“Paul already told us he hears Cernunnos every evening. You remained tactfully silent on the subject but I had my suspicions.”
I put my sandwich down. “You totally can’t give me grief for this one. I haven’t made any deals or talked to Cernunnos or anything that you can possibly construe as detrimental to my health or anyone else’s.”
“Easy, easy. I just thought that if you heard or saw him, you could point your new friend here in his direction. I don’t know what his nature is, but maybe he knows more about her situation.” Sullivan glanced at the cars going by. “Eleanor hinted at a connection between Cernunnos and the leanan sidhe sisters.”
“What if the connection is like the one between me and this sandwich?” I asked. “I don’t really feel like sending Nuala out to meet the king of the dead if she’s losing all her bad-ass supernatural capabilities for one reason or another. It’s not like she can just kick him in the nuts if things start to go badly.”
Sullivan shrugged. “It’s my best suggestion. What else is there? You said it was her sixteenth year, didn’t you? So … for all we know she’ll revert back to normal after she burns.”
“If I burn,” Nuala said. She looked down at her plate.
“What?” I demanded.
“Maybe I don’t want to,” she said.
There was silence at the table. Sullivan broke it, gently. “Nuala.” It was the first time he’d actually said her name. “I saw your sister burn, while I was in Faerie. She had to. I know you don’t want to—it’s horrible that you have to—but you’ll die otherwise.”
Nuala didn’t look up from her plate. “Maybe I’d rather that than come back the way I was before.” She balled her napkin up and put it on the table. “I think I have to go the bathroom.” She flashed a fake smile at me. “First time for everything, right?”
She pushed away from the table and disappeared into the deli.
Sullivan sighed and pushed on one of his eyes with two fingers. “This is a bit of bad work, James. Her sister is nowhere near as human as her. She didn’t even seem to feel it when she was burning. Nuala—” He did the same eyes-half-shut gesture he’d done before, the almost cringe. “It’ll be like burning a human alive.”
I got out my worry stone and worried the hell out of it with my fingers. I concentrated on the shape of the circle my thumb made as it swiped the stone.
“You were right, okay? That’s what I’m trying to say,” Sullivan said. “She isn’t like the others. You were still a complete idiot for not running like hell from her, but she is different.”
“I’m going with her to see Cernunnos,” I said. Sullivan opened his mouth. “You know you can’t stop me. I know it’s what you would do. Tell me how to make it safer. If there’s anything.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “As your teacher and dorm resident advisor, I’m supposed to be keeping you out of trouble, not getting you into it.”
“It was your idea. Some little part of you must’ve wanted me to go, or you wouldn’t have said it in front of me.”
“Don’t try reverse psychology on me,” Sullivan said. He smashed his fingers into the wrinkle between his eyes. “I would go with you, but I don’t hear him this year. You don’t go to him unless he calls you. That would be … insane. Shit, James. I don’t know. Wear red. Put salt in your pockets. That’s always good advice.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from a teacher,” I said.
“I can’t believe I’m a teacher telling you this.”
I wrote red and salt on my hand just as Nuala came out of the deli. Whatever emotion she’d felt before she went in was gone, replaced by a certain fierceness in her eyes.
“Ready to go?” I asked.
James
If Nuala had still been able to read my thoughts, she would’ve killed me. Because I thought, as we waded through the long grass together, that she looked very human, despite her insistence that she couldn’t become one. While we were in town, I’d bought her a sweater and some jeans (both of which she hated since they covered most of her skin—which was the idea) so that she wouldn’t freeze to death while we were traversing the hills this evening.
And it wasn’t like it was a bad thing that she looked human. It made the fact that I was holding her hand and going out to meet the king of the dead a little less scary. And it made the idea that maybe, just maybe, she’d remember me after Halloween and we might have a future beyond making out in the dorm lobby just a little more plausible.
“It’s cold as hell out here,” Nuala snapped.
“It’s almost like I knew what I was talking about when I said you were going to need a sweater,” I told her.
“Shut up,” she said. She was a dull brown silhouette against the staggering pink sky. Some of the trees at the base of the hills had already lost their leaves, and their bare black branches made it look like it was already winter. “You’re scaring away the dead people. Do you hear the thorn king yet, or what?”
I didn’t. I had spent so many nights pretending that I didn’t that I wondered if I still could. It seemed like it was late enough that he should be out here, doing his antlered thing, but the hills were silent. Except for us crashing through the tall grass. During the day, the sound of the
grass had seemed minimal, masked by the gusts of wind, but now, with the wind reduced to a silent, icy breeze, our crashing progress sounded like a bunch of elephants. “Big fat nothing so far. Let’s go out further, though, to where I saw him before.”
“Walk more quietly,” Nuala hissed.
“There isn’t a way to walk more quietly. Anyway, you’re talking—that’s louder than us just walking.”
She jerked at my hand. “Nothing in the world can be louder than you walking right now.”
“Except for your strident voice, dear,” I countered. “Like a harpy, its shr–oof.”
I stopped walking so fast that Nuala’s hand twisted out of mine and she stumbled.
“What?” Nuala rubbed the skin on her hand and returned to my side.
“Sorry,” I said, without feeling. I looked down. “I ran into something.”
At my feet was a pile of something. A pile of someone. It was sprawled in a sort of strung-out way that I didn’t think a living someone could manage. For one-fourth of a breath, my brain thought: Dee. But then I realized it was a guy. In a tunic jacket, leggings, and leather bootie-things. Either a very lost reenactor or someone who’d been messing around with fairies.
Nuala gave the shoulder an experimental shove with her foot, and the body slumped wetly onto its back.
“Oh, vomit,” I said, to keep from actually throwing up.
Nuala gave a little sigh. “Eleanor’s consort. He was at the dance last night.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
She touched the hilt still sticking out of his heart with her toe. “This is a bone dagger. It was Them. I’ve seen Eleanor carry these around all the time. He told me he was going to be a king when I first met him. King of corpses, maybe.”
Ballad Page 21
