Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie
Page 21

Invisible, I crawled next to James. Instead of wrapping my arms around his shoulders or stroking his hair, like I would’ve if I was sending him a dream, I curled up against his chest, like I was a human girl that he loved. Like I was Dee, who didn’t deserve him, for all his fractured, self-involved asshole-ness.
Behind me, James shivered, his body warning him again of my strangeness. Stupidly, that made me want to cry again. Instead, I became visible, because he shivered less when I was. His sheets smelled like they hadn’t been washed since he’d arrived, but he himself smelled good. Solid and real. Like the leather of his pipes.
Curled in the stolen circle of his body, I closed my eyes, but when I did, I saw the banshee’s body. Then I saw a bauchan, red-coated, grinning from the woods at a human. Then, grinning from the leaves, staring at the sky with dead eyes. A length of iron rebar sticking out of his neck.
Behind me, lost in sleep, James was having a nightmare. He was walking through the woods, the dry leaves snapping beneath his feet. He was wearing his Looks & Brains T-shirt and it exposed his arms, written dark with music up to the edge of his short sleeves. Goose bumps twisted the musical notes written on top of them. The forest was empty, but he was looking for someone anyway. The woods stank of burning thyme and burning leaves, summoning spells and Halloween bonfires.
“O,” he said in the dream, a short sound rather than a word. He crouched down in the leaves and put his face into his written-upon hands, his shoulders shaped like mourning. He was a dark blot in a sea of dead leaves. Beside him, my body lay in the leaves. Just over James’ shoulder, I could see more rebar jutting from the side of my face and my eyes staring at infinity.
The real James shivered—hard, body-wracking shudders, and all I could think was, he’s a seer. What if this is the future he’s seeing?
I turned over and stared at his sleeping face, hardly visible in the dim light, wanting him to stop dreaming. He was close enough that his breath was warm on my lips. This close, I could see the ugly pucker of the scar above his ear and could see how big it must’ve been before they sewed him back together. It was amazing his brains hadn’t fallen out. I frowned at him. I knew he needed to sleep because he’d been up all the night before, but I wanted him awake.
I pinched his arm.
James didn’t jerk or start, or even hesitate. His eyes just opened up and looked right into mine, an inch away.
When he spoke, it was barely audible; any sound was just to pretend that I needed him to talk aloud. “You’re not dead.” His thoughts were still cloudy, slow, sleep-drugged.
I shook my head, the sheet making a rustling noise against my ear. “Yet.”
James’ mouth moved, more breath than voice coming out. “What do you want?”
It wasn’t the same as before, though. Before, when he asked that question, “from me” was implied. Not tonight.
I pulled his arm from underneath his pillow, his skin tightening with cold as my fingers circled his wrist. He let me take his arm and drape it over my shoulders, so that the iron band around his wrist pressed against my upper arm. It made my head buzz a little with the contact, but unlike with other faeries, it didn’t kill me. And it would make me immune to any more summoning spells.
James thought, why? But he didn’t say anything.
I pressed his wrist against me, hard, so that the iron was making plenty of contact with my skin. “So that if someone tries to summon a faerie, it won’t be me.”
James still didn’t say anything, just rolled his shoulders forward to make the position more comfortable.
“Don’t kill me,” he whispered. “I’m going back to sleep.”
He did. And with the knobs of his iron bracelet fiery hot against my skin, I did too. I didn’t even know that I could.
James
“James?”
My face was nicely smashed into my pillow. Without moving, I pressed my phone against my ear. “Mmmm. Yeah. What.”
“James, is that you?”
I rolled onto my back and stared at the pale morning light that striped across the ceiling. I readjusted the phone so that I didn’t accidentally hang up. “Mom, why is it that every time you call my cell phone, you ask if it’s really me? Are there hundreds of other misplaced calls that you’re not telling me about, where you almost dial my number but it’s not quite right and you get guys who are almost me but not quite right?”
“Your voice never sounds the same on the phone,” Mom said. “It sounds mushy or something. Are you hungover?”
I sighed heavily. I looked over at Paul’s bed; he was still totally comatose on it. Drool on the pillow, arm hanging off the side, looking like he’d been dropped onto his bed from an airplane. I felt intense envy. “Mom. You do know it’s a weekend, right? Before ten o’clock? Before nine o’clock?”
“I’m sorry to call you so early,” she said.
“No you’re not.”
“You’re right, I’m not. I’m coming to see you, and I wanted you to be awake to come meet me at the bus station.”
I sat up in a hurry, and then jumped a mile. “Holy shit!” Nuala sat at the end of my bed, knees pulled up to her chin and arms wrapped around them. I hadn’t even felt her there. She looked dangerous and brooding and wretchedly hot.
“I know you didn’t just swear.”
I mouthed what the crap? at Nuala (who shrugged) and then said, to Mom, “I did, Mom. I said it just to spite you.”
“You had plans more important than seeing your dear mother, who misses you intensely?”
“No, I just got stung by something. I’m very happy to see you. As I always am. I am positively ecstatic to hear you’re coming. It’s as if the clouds have opened up and, holding my hand out, I discover that it’s not rain, but strawberry Jell-O.”
“Your favorite,” Mom observed. “My bus is supposed to be there by ten-fifteen. Can you make it there? Bring Dee. I have stuff from her mother for her.”
“Maybe. She might be busy. People are very busy on weekends, you know. Sleeping and stuff.” I looked warily at Nuala; she had an exquisitely evil expression on her face. She reached under the covers and grabbed my big toe. She started rolling it around in between her fingers like she was going to unscrew it. It tickled and hurt like hell. I kicked to dislodge her and drew my legs underneath me, out of her reach. I mouthed evil creature at her, and she looked flattered that I’d noticed.
“Someone with Terry Monaghan’s genes could never sleep late on weekends. If poor Dee’s busy, it’s because she’s tied up designing a bridge or taking over the world. I have to go now because I want to finish reading this novel before we get there. Go get dressed. I’ll buy you two lunch.”
“Great. Wonderful. Charming. I’m going to get out of my nice, warm bed now. Bye. See you soon.”
I’d like to say that I then called Dee and she picked me up and we went to meet my mom and everything was rosy between us, but in the real world—the world where James gets screwed over by anyone who can manage it—that didn’t happen. I didn’t call Dee. I didn’t even do like they do in movies, where they punch in the number and then snap the phone shut real quick before the other person can answer.
Instead, after I hung up with Mom, I stared at the imprinted pattern on the back of my phone until I decided that it was not really a meaningless marketing squiggle but rather a Satanic symbol meant to improve reception. I had a pen on the desk by my bed, inches away, and I used it to write 10:15 on my hand. A lot of the words had been scrubbed off by my shower the night before; the sight of half-finished words made me feel sick to my stomach. I completed the words that I could still salvage and used spit to rub off the illegible smudges that were too far gone. By the time I looked at the end of the bed again, Nuala had disappeared. Typical. When I might want her around, she was gone.
I opened and closed my phone several times, snapping it, just trying to get my brain back. It wasn’t like I felt bad about not calling Dee, because I didn’t think she would’ve picked up when she saw my number anyway. I just felt this raw gnawing somewhere in my stomach, or my head, like I was hungry even though I wasn’t.
“Wake up, Paul.” I kicked my blanket off; it crumpled in a soft heap where Nuala had been sitting. Leaves fluttered to the floor, dry and lifeless. “We’re going to go get lunch with my mom.”
Mom has an inability to be on time. This inability—nay, this essential property of her existence—is so powerful that even her bus wasn’t on time. Couldn’t be on time. So Paul and I sat outside the bus terminal on a bench, the fall sun bright on us but lacking any force.
“I don’t get how you get this to work.” Paul was trying to get a pen to write on his hand. It was one of those where you click the end to make the end come out, and he kept clicking and unclicking it and then shaking it, as if that would make it write better. He was making an army of dots on the back of his hand, but he hadn’t yet managed any letters. “It’s like I’m trying to write the alphabet with a hot dog.”
Cars roared by, but no bus. Without looking away from the road, I held my hand out for the pen. “I will enlighten you. Prepare to be dazzled.”
He gave me the pen and pointed at the back of my hand. “Write ‘manlove’ on there.”
I hovered the pen over my skin. “Why, Paul, I had no idea you felt that way. I mean, I’m universally appealing, but still—”
Paul grinned big enough for me to see it out of the corner of my eye. “Dude, no. We had a, you know, what do you call it. A guest player. A guest oboe instructor. Anyway, she came in this week—and you know what her name was? Amanda Manlove.”
I made an appreciative noise. “No way.”
“Yeah, dude. That’s what I said! I mean, seriously. She had to go through grade school with that name. Her parents must’ve hated her.”
I wrote bonfire on my hand.
Paul made a spit-filled sound in the back of his throat. “Nuh-uh! How did you get it to write? It didn’t make dots on your hand. It really wrote.”
“You’ve got to pull the skin tight, genius,” I said, and demonstrated. I wrote my name, and then drew a circle around it.
He took the pen back from me and stretched his skin tight. He wrote bonfire on his hand too. “Why ‘bonfire’?”
I didn’t know. “I want to put a bonfire scene in Ballad,” I lied.
“We’d have to make fake fire for onstage. That’ll be either hard or corny. Except alcohol fire. Isn’t alcohol fire invisible?” Paul looked at something past me. “Hey, incoming. It’s the girl from your old school.”
I froze and didn’t turn to confirm. “Paul, you’d better not be kidding me. Do you think she’s seen me?”
Paul’s gaze lifted to above my head. “Um, yeah, pretty sure she has.”
“Um, hi,” Dee said, right behind my shoulder. Just her voice made me hear the words again: I was thinking of him when you kissed me.