Fiction River

by Fiction River

  We crossed over the curve of White Oak Bayou, the grass on its slopes waving in the wind, and the broad expanse of Interstate 10, widened to so many lanes that God himself ought to be able to drive on it. The day’s heat began to build and sweat poured freely from my scalp, trickling down the sides of my face and down the back of my neck.

  I followed Elise’s lead for a couple of more miles, until she slowed as we reached St. Thomas High School’s grand white campus at the intersection of Shepherd and Memorial Drive, its round, columned entrance and huge front lawn deserted this month, though it’d be besieged with students in September.

  On the other side of the street, a procession of oaks lined the grassy earth, a jogging trail winding alongside them. Beyond the trees, the land sloped down to a channel of muddy water that was Buffalo Bayou.

  Down there, the bayou had a wildness about it that could make you forget you were standing in the middle of the country’s fourth largest city. Not for long, I heard—the city planned to rip out the wild and bring in an army of landscapers. That felt wrong, somehow.

  The signal was against us, so Elise hopped off her bike and waited, and I did the same. She watched me from the corner of her eye, blinking away a drop of stinging sweat.

  “The city was built around this bayou,” Elise said. “It’s the last bayou to still have wild places. It’s one of the city’s beating hearts.”

  I had a heart, even if it was failing. Elise had a heart. The city was a thing, not a living being. “That’s a weird thing to say.”

  “There’s things in this world you know nothing about, Steve.”

  “Obviously.”

  The signal changed. We stepped off the curb and crossed, then headed downslope. The sunlight caught on the water for a moment, setting the surface sparkling like diamonds. I pulled off my helmet, set it on top of the bike’s seat, and shook the sweat from my hair. At the bottom of the bank, we turned east toward a copse of trees. Magnolias. Mulberries. The grass around them grew tall. Their branches reached out low over the water, as if they were waiting to receive something, or give something back.

  Entering those trees was like entering another world. Spirals of gnats flew from the grass as we stepped. The low, rhythmic song of toads crescendoed, and then died down again. The high-pitched whine of a mosquito tickled my ear. I reached to swat the insect away, but it’d already gone.

  I spotted one tree not like the others—a willow, the tips of whose branches swept the surface of the bayou. Elise stopped beneath it and leaned her bike against the trunk. I followed suit.

  “This is the place?” I asked.

  She pressed a finger to her lips.

  I tuned my voice to a whisper. “I need to know.”

  She kept her voice low. “Yes. Usually I come here at midnight, but this is a special circumstance.”

  “The hell?” This place, at midnight. This place, the spot where my problem was just going to disappear or otherwise be healed. More likely that we’d get snakebit or end up with heatstroke. “How does your mom not know you come here in the middle of the night?”

  “She knows,” Elise said. “She lets me.”

  “Mothers don’t do that.”

  “Mine does,” she said. “It was the price of her wish.”

  I started to ask her what she meant by that, but Elise held up a hand to stop me. “There are rules, and I’m breaking them by bringing you here. Number one, if you’re asked a direct question, give a direct answer. Don’t lie. Number two, if you say you’ll do a thing, you have to keep your word. Number three, tell no one about what happens here, and for sure don’t bring them here.”

  I tried to take all of that in. I tried to understand.

  She met my gaze. “You remember that fight we had?”

  The one fight. The one I’d thought of earlier. I nodded.

  “Because I didn’t want to hang out with you, and you didn’t understand,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I couldn’t spend time with you because I was trying to get over you,” she said.

  I couldn’t possibly have heard that right. “What?”

  “I couldn’t tell you because I knew if I did, you’d get even more upset. It’s no secret how we felt about each other. How you still feel about me.”

  Something broke open inside of me. Inside of my chest. I clenched my hands into fists, then let them open again. “How could you know that?”

  “How could I not?” she asked. “It’s not like you don’t have other friends. It’s not like you don’t have a life. You’ve spent your whole life making sure of that, and it was the right thing to do. You still make time for me. A lot of time. You still call every day. You still go out and do these missions with me when you could be doing something else. When you could be seeing someone else.”

  I reached for her hand. After a moment, she twined her fingers with mine.

  “Why did you have to get over me?” I asked. “Why couldn’t you have just said something? I mean, I never did because you never seemed—”

  “Because of the goddamn rules,” she said. “I couldn’t be with you and hide this huge part of who I am. If I told you, like I am now, it’d put us both in danger. So I did the best I could. I asked you to help without telling you anything. And you did.”

  “Because I love you,” I said. “And you’re saying all this now because you have no choice.”

  She nodded.

  I didn’t know how to feel about that—about any of this. I had a million questions, only one of which seemed immediately important. “Did you?” I asked. “Get over me?”

  She shook her head.

  I pulled her close and held her tight, breathing in the sweet scents of baby shampoo and lip balm. She was as sweaty as I was. I didn’t care.

  “Before we had that fight,” she said, “I had an accident. I fell down some stairs. It was stupid, but it was fatal.”

  I tried to loosen my grip, to look at her face, but she refused to let me.

  “I know what it’s like to die,” she said, “though I didn’t stay that way for long. My mother made a wish. She the kind of person who sees things—things the rest of us swear aren’t there or don’t exist.”

  I spoke softly in her ear. “Like what?”

  “Ghosts. Faeries.”

  That sounded crazy to me, but the last couple of years, and what Elise and I were doing now, left me no room to say so.

  “That’s how she knew I’d died,” Elise said. “She saw my ghost. She couldn’t let me go. So she made a wish.”

  “On a ghost?” I asked.

  Elise shook her head. “To a faery. She wished that I would live again. She said she’d give anything in return. The faery took me. I was the payment, the price for her wish. I do what the faery asks me to do.”

  “The Saturday missions. He never asks for anything bad?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “But it’s forever. It’s all the time. I can never beg off, never say no. If I do, then I’m a ghost again, and so is my mother. It’s hopeless.”

  “I don’t believe in hopeless.”

  “You believe me, don’t you?” she asked.

  I did. And I believed in her, too. “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  A rushing sound came from the water, as if something were climbing out of its depths. Elise drew back, planting a kiss at the hollow of my throat before she pulled away completely to look at who had come.

  I thought my heart would stop right then and there.

  A man rose from the center of the water—if you could call him a man, when he was made of light. Sparks fell from his fingertips. I couldn’t see his eyes or make out his clothes, but then he took a single step and in an instant, his feet settled on the land.

  The light resolved itself into colors and flesh and blood the way the white flakes in a shaken snow globe swirled and fell. He towered over us, at least seven feet tall. He had long, silver hair and silver dollar eyes that shone as if they were
lit from the inside. He wore a white tuxedo jacket and a pair of faded jeans. His feet were bare.

  His voice sounded like bells ringing—not the tiny, tinkly kind, but the big, booming kind. When he spoke, his lips didn’t move. The ringing didn’t disturb the air around us; I heard it inside of my head. It echoed through my body, shaking my foundations, trembling through my bones.

  He didn’t ask who I was or why Elise had brought me there. He didn’t need an explanation because when he looked at us, he looked through us. He saw into me in a way that no one else had, not even Elise, because she was human and he was not and never had been. He read the story of my life in my defective heart and he understood.

  In that moment, we were connected. Not just the faery and me, but Elise, too. The three of us.

  When he read Elise’s wish in her heart, I read it, too. She’d do anything, give anything, to save my life. She’d brought me here to make sure I lived, even if she had to sacrifice herself for me. Only she already gave what she had. Her life belonged to the faery. Forever, she’d said.

  How could I have been so stupid that I hadn’t realized what she’d done—what she was willing to do? She’d played her cards close to the vest all morning. She hadn’t said anything.

  But it’d been written all over her face. Her almost-tears. Her fear. What she’d said to me before the faery had come.

  I’d missed it because she’d meant me to. Because she loved me.

  I opened my mouth to say all of that, but I couldn’t push out the words. I saw clearly that the faery had already decided how to deal with us.

  Elise had nothing left to bargain with, nothing that was her own anymore—except me. So the faery would take me. I would become his, the same as Elise, working on whatever jobs or missions he gave me, forever.

  Elise had brought me here to save my life. She’d get her wish. I would live.

  The catch was that I would live far away from here, far away from her and everyone and everything I’d ever known. We would never see each other again. That was the price of breaking the rules by bringing me here.

  The thought of losing my family, my friends—of losing Elise—turned me cold all over. “You can’t do that.”

  As soon as the words rolled off my tongue, I knew that he could. He was a faery. He was powerful. I was only human.

  He trained his silver gaze on me. “It’s the only way.”

  I understood what he meant. I felt it. His plan was the only way to keep the deal he’d made. There were rules. Breaking them had to have consequences or the rules didn’t mean anything. But it was more than that, he had to operate within the rules because of what he was. He couldn’t break them. They were part of his DNA, if faeries had such a thing. I could see into him. I knew it was true.

  He was trapped by his nature, just like I was trapped by mine—by my defective heart.

  At the thought, pain seared my chest, radiating down my left arm. I fell to my knees, reaching out to grab the nearest thing—a branch of the willow tree. I tasted the leaves that my hand had stripped from the branch and crushed. I tasted salt in the air and car exhaust.

  The world grayed out as it’d done when I fell off my bike this afternoon. I could feel the flip over the handlebars, the roll of my stomach as I flew through the air, and the sick feeling of impact on the street. I blinked, and time slowed, the brush of my lashes seeming to take minutes rather than seconds. I caught sight of Elise’s face as she knelt beside me and leaned over, her face inches from mine, the sun crowning her head in a fiery halo.

  And then the vision—the feeling—vanished. There was nothing and no one but darkness. And Elise, because I hadn’t been able to let her go, and she hadn’t been able to give me up either.

  The pain in my chest subsided. I looked at Elise, locking my gaze with hers. And I understood what had happened after I’d gone over the handlebars, because of the connection among the faery, Elise, and me. I felt it.

  My heart had given out after I fell off the bike. Elise had told my ghost a story, afterward. She’d kept it together and told my ghost something I’d accept, something that would make me follow her here.

  “I died right then, didn’t I?” I asked.

  Elise shook her head. “Not yet. You’re in the hospital.”

  I didn’t have long.

  I looked at the faery. “I love her. Do you respect love?”

  He cocked his head. “I respect true love.”

  Because there were different kinds of love—or at least people talked about love as if there were. Mostly, people just talked. When it came down to doing, that’s when they faltered.

  I love you, but only if I don’t have to go out of my way, or if it doesn’t cost me too much. I love you, but really I love the idea of you. I love you like a friend—you’re my best friend—until something better comes along.

  That was what passed for love for a lot of people. But what I felt for Elise, I’d feel for her a hundred years from now—even if we grew up and grew apart, even if we both moved far away and lost track of each other. I knew it in my bones.

  If I had to give up everything I’d built—my whole life—for her, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

  If I had anything to offer the faery besides my life, which was already forfeit because of his rules, I had my broken heart.

  The faery floated closer, hovering over the edge of the bayou’s grassy bank. He blinked his silver dollar eyes and met my gaze. “Do you mean that?”

  My voice shook with everything I felt. “Yes, I do.”

  “True love heals,” the faery said.

  I couldn’t follow what he meant by that. His thoughts moved too fast.

  “The city,” he said. “The people.”

  The city was full of good people—and bad. People hurt each other because of pain and fear and greed. There was violence and blood, and when people took care of themselves without care for their neighbors, that made it all worse.

  “Would you do something to change that?” the faery asked.

  “Who wouldn’t, if they could?”

  “You can,” he said.

  “I’m seventeen.” I wasn’t a superhero. I was only human.

  “If you give your heart, you can do it,” he said.

  I stared at him. “And Elise?”

  “If you give your heart, she’s free,” he said. “Free of her obligation. Free to live.”

  She sucked in a breath.

  “And no punishment for breaking the rules?” I asked. “No more forever missions for her? How is that possible?”

  “True love is a rare thing. It’s the most precious thing above all others,” he said.

  The most valuable. The most powerful.

  The faery couldn’t break the rules, but he could bend them for something so important.

  Elise looked from the faery to me, and back again. “What happens to Steve if he says yes?”

  “He works for me in your stead.”

  “Way more dangerous missions,” she said. “He could still die.”

  The faery nodded.

  I didn’t care about the risk. I’d lived every day of my life so far with death riding on my shoulder. I was dying right now. Working for the faery would give me the chance to live. It’d give me the chance to help more people, and to love them.

  Like the faery—like all of us—love was defined by its nature. It couldn’t be tamed. It couldn’t be caged. It simply was. Everyone needed it. Everyone deserved it.

  I met the faery’s gaze. He read my answer in my eyes.

  The willow and the water and the sky and Elise’s face spun all around me and dissolved into the steady machine beep and disinfectant smell that said hospital. The air chilled the skin on my arms to goosebumps, the banishing weight of blankets warming my legs.

  Opening my eyes felt like opening a door that’d been sealed too long. The hinges were rusty and my sight was blurry. I had to blink several times to focus on the TV that hung from the ceiling and the Harry Potter movie pl
aying on the screen, on the empty corner chair whose seat still held the depression of my little brother’s butt, on the bedside table where my mother had left a glass of water and her silver-framed glasses. The curtains were drawn, but darkness slipped in at the seams. It was night, then. Or early morning.

  My mother and brother had left the room, but my father sat in the chair beside my bead, still wearing his dark blue mechanic’s uniform, his thick black hair mussed from combing his fingers through it.

  Tears clouded his clear tenor. “You’re awake.”

  I nodded. And came down with an instant headache.

  “I’ll get the nurse. I’ll get your mother.” He took my hand and squeezed, then hurried out the door, his black, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the tile floor.

  A moment after he left, Elise slipped inside. She had on the outfit she’d worn to go riding with me. Her eyes were wide, but they were happy. Happy eyes were good.

  I had to clear my throat to speak. “Is it still Saturday?”

  “Just,” she said.

  Then I’d made a quick and miraculous recovery. I asked her the first question I had to ask. “Was all of that real?”

  She nodded. “Every minute.”

  “I feel relieved,” I said.

  “I do, too, Steve. I didn’t want to lose you.” She walked slowly toward my bed. “You didn’t have to do what you did, you know.”

  “You’d have done the same for me,” I said.

  She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Yes.”

  I tried on a smile. It hurt, and I had a feeling that any second now I’d start to feel all the other things that hurt, too.

  “I’ll be your partner in crime,” she said. “For all the missions.”

  “It’ll be dangerous, like you said. It’ll be hard.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Things would be complicated, because we were seventeen. With luck, and magic, we had a lot of years ahead and a lot of living and neither of us knew what would happen, faery or no faery.

  “Steve?”

  I met her gaze.