Serpent's Kiss
Page 8

"A little," he said. He put the bags down as she crossed the room and sat at the end of one of the beds. "Some of those girls won't leave me alone. I wanted to make sure none of them was out there."
Buster scuffled over to Freya, and she kneeled down and pet him, then tickled his snout. "I thought you liked all the attention. Don't tell me you're here alone. What happened to the harem?" She observed him with genuine concern and wondered if her twin had truly lost it. He looked a real mess: tousled hair, dirty pajamas, unshaven. He shouldn't be living this way. She looked around and noticed the computer on his desk.
"Ooh, you have a Mac!" she said, sauntering over to inspect it.
"Don't touch it!"
"It's not a bomb!" "It kind of is," he retorted. He moved the grocery bags on the desk, put a hand on the laptop protectively.
"You're acting so weird," she said, squinting her eyes at him. "Are you going to tell me what's going on?"
"All right." He sighed. He realized he was dying to tell Freya, so it all gushed out: the social media sites and how he'd met someone special - a girl named Hilly Liman. After that he couldn't say her name enough times.
As Freya listened, she finally understood how Freddie had kept his loneliness at bay. He'd obviously gone delusional. She was reluctant to burst his bubble about this Hilly girl, who was probably just some slutty college chick, not that there was any other kind, and not that there was anything wrong with that. Freya, of all people, understood the need to experiment, the desire to see just exactly how much fun one could have when one was beautiful and young.
However, this whole Freddie-in-love thing was too much. She'd grown weary of his whole situation - the motel, the accusations, the sloth.
Freddie sat on the armchair, legs extended. "She's the one, Freya. I'm telling you. It's for real this time." He smiled.
"Yeah, right. Every week you fall for someone new, and you haven't even met this ..."
"Hilly Liman."
"Yeah. I should really know her name by now. You say it enough." Freya pushed a hand through her hair. "Look, I'm tired, and I can't do this. I can't find that thing you're convinced Killian stole from you, that will prove he did it, and we really need to move on. I'm going to let the family know you're back. Mother will be so happy!"
Freddie jumped from his seat, his face flushed. "You can't do that, Freya. No one can know! If the Valkyries know where I am ... they'll ... they'll drag me back. I can't go back to Limbo! You don't know what it's like there! I need to prove I wasn't the one who destroyed the bridge!" Freddie made a frustrated gesture, then fell back into the armchair, deflated. His head fell. When he looked back up at her, tears welled in his eyes. "I can't go back. You have to help me, Freya. Please." His voice broke.
Freya shook her head, staring ruefully at her twin. "Oh, Freddie, stop," she said. But her voice was cracking, too.
Chapter eleven
The Gang's All Here
A shaft of light poured through the attic gable, illuminating particles of dust. On the floor, leading through the sundry pieces of furniture, was a Hansel and Gretel - like trail of candy wrappers, paper clips, glitter, DayGlo-colored mini Post-its, and childhood costumes.
Ingrid had come up to search for a book she couldn't find in Joanna's study. She glared at the odd trail. When she had last set foot here after returning from Freya's Manhattan apartment, she had placed those costumes back in the box and set it upright. Tyler couldn't have done it because Gracella had yet to return after the other day. Was it Freya maybe? Her sister was certainly the messiest of them, but what would she be doing digging through old costumes? Ingrid set about straightening up, picking up a pink tutu here, a plastic glass slipper there, a black leather mask - hmm, that didn't look like a child's costume but like something from Freya's closet - and when she arrived at the end of the trail, she was standing before Joanna's large steamer trunk. Was that really cigarette smoke? She sniffed at the air.
She hovered over the trunk and noticed the latches were undone. When she lifted the top, she stared down at five small heads tucked between five pairs of grungy knees. The heads looked up, and she immediately recognized the pixies. They had glitter all over their dirty faces: three boys and two girls.
Well, it wouldn't be accurate to say they were children, although Ingrid thought of them as such. They were adult in years but had childlike bodies and childlike minds, as well as mischievous spirits. With their blackened faces, they reminded her of the chimney sweeps of Victorian England, although they were quite the opposite of those poor abused children who had the maturity and jaded attitudes of adults, drinking ale, smoking pipes, and shooting the breeze at the inn after work. The pixies had taken to cheap booze and smoking in mid-world - that much Ingrid had observed at the motel where she'd first met them - but there was something rather naive about these creatures.
"Well, look what we have here," she said, thinking she sounded a bit like Hudson right then.
"Don't hate on us, Erda!" said Kelda with her tiny rosebud lips. She lifted a hand in a ragged fingerless glove to protect her face as if Ingrid might smack her.
"I see you've picked up the local slang. Isn't that just fantastic!" returned Ingrid as all five of the pixies sheepishly rose and stepped out of the trunk. The clever ones, Tyler had called them. Clever boy.
Their clothes were an array of grimy hues, from dark army olive to black: skinny jeans, ripped T-shirts, frayed sweaters, safety pins, wool caps, and heavy black boots. Ingrid could not have determined what kind of look they were aiming for - punk, grunge, grebo, or crusty. All those rebellious styles looked the same to her no matter the decade; only the year and the label changed. The pixies looked as if they had just returned from war, and they had grown quite odiferous since the last time she'd seen them.
There was Kelda and Nyph, the two female pixies, petite and small boned like teenage ballerina rebels with their tough clothes and heavy dark eyeliner. While Kelda was fair, with white-blond hair and pale-blue eyes, her skin as nacreous and white as pearl, offset by arresting crimson lips, a tiny bloom, and her ruddy cheeks, Nyph was her opposite with a darker complexion - sleek black hair, olive skin, huge liquid-brown eyes tilting up at the corners, puffy lips. The boys huddled behind the girls of course. There was scruffy, dark-haired Sven with green eyes, whom Ingrid thought of as a grumpy old man, always with the five o'clock shadow and apathetic manner; Val, who had a spiky fire-engine-red Mohawk, who was a perpetual nervous wreck; and finally Irdick, with his tousled head of flaxen hair and round boyish, rosy-cheeked face. He was wearing a T-shirt that read HUGS NOT DRUGS.
The thing about pixies, both male and female, was they were rather comely creatures, their features refined, delicate, as if carefully carved out of ivory. But at this particular moment, it was difficult for Ingrid to tell exactly what any of them truly looked like because they were so damned filthy.
"Will you tell me what is going on here before I cast a spell on you and turn you all into frogs?" she said. Although it was more a reproof than an actual threat.
"Please don't do that!" Irdick yelped. There was something so vulnerable and sweet about Irdick that he made Ingrid feel guilty for scolding them. Also, the T-shirt was hilarious.
Val moved forward from the huddle, speaking so fast that Ingrid could barely make out the jumbled words of his endless run-on sentence, which turned staccato whenever he ran into a word that began with an s. She did, however, catch a phrase here and there, getting the overall gist.
From what she could tell, they had tried to fulfill the promise they'd made to her to return home following her instructions to follow the yellow brick road - a real path that led between the worlds. At the motel where they had been staying, Ingrid had showed them where the path was in the seam, but when they had set out on it, the path faded, and besides, they could no longer remember where home was, or even what it was. So after they'd failed, they'd caught Ingrid's scent and followed her home, where they had taken shelter in Joanna's attic.
"It's nice here!"
"There are pies!"
"Yummy!"
"Don't make us leave! Erda, please!" Kelda donned the black leather mask and began doing fast cartwheels across the room, which made Ingrid dizzy.
"Did we mention there are pies?" said Val.
"We promise to stay out of the way!" said Kelda, landing on her feet.
"Hush!" yelled Ingrid. "I can't think with all of you shouting and moving around like that!"
The pixies instantly quieted and stood still.
"Okay," said Ingrid, crossing her arms. "I'm going to let you stay, for now, but you have to promise to be quiet and stay hidden and not make such horrible messes. Also, you guys stink and you need to bathe. Do it when Joanna is out of the house, of course, and leave the bathroom as you found it. We'll do this until I can figure out where home is and what's wrong with the yellow brick road. But if you don't behave yourselves, I'll put a curse on you!"
The pixies were delighted and thanked Ingrid, who tried not to breathe so she wouldn't smell them. Sven, however, stood off by himself, his arms crossed over his chest, a sour look on his face.
Ingrid gently shrugged the pixies off and rearranged her clothes.
"Thank you, Erda, thank you," they kept saying.
"It's all right. You're welcome," she said.
Kelda spun around on the heel of her combat boot. "We stole something for you." Her clear blue eyes, white eyelashes batting, peered up at Ingrid through the mask while she reached into the pocket of her pants. "A little thank-you gift."
"That's another thing," Ingrid said. "No more stealing! You can't use money, which I think says something about where you guys are from. But absolutely no more stealing. I'll bring you food."
"What about cigarettes?" asked Sven in his gruff voice. He sounded as if he had had been smoking and hitting the hooch for years, although when Ingrid stared at him long enough, she could tell that he didn't look that old. It was all in the jaded attitude and cooler-than-thou posture. "I've been jonesing for a cig. Could you buy me a carton of those wicked Kool Smooths that taste like thin mints, Miss Erda?" He smirked.
Ingrid was flustered again. The pixies had completely lost their funny accents and were speaking like the local teen derelicts now, some of whom, she had noted at the library, were quite erudite despite all their street jargon. "No, no smoking in here!" she said. "You could start a fire! Sven, I'm serious. Besides, I don't know about pixie physiology but I'm sure it's bad for you."
He lifted an eyebrow at her while Kelda shoved something in her hand.
"What's this?" asked Ingrid, holding the crumpled piece of paper.
"Our gift!" said Kelda.
Ingrid set about flattening it. Nyph came and stood at Ingrid's other side to watch.
On the scrap, torn from a small, rectangular spiral notebook, was the name "Maggie" followed by a phone number. Ingrid stared at it, perplexed.
Her work with blueprints had endowed her with an adept eye for analyzing idiosyncratic longhand styles. She often had to match the unsigned notes on sketchpads and working drawings to the handwriting on blueprints. In this case, the writing on the scrap of paper tilted ever so slightly to the left (backhand, it was called), indicating a left-handed person, and then there was the distinctive M with its two pointy peaks and the a that resembled the numeral 2 with a loop. She had seen this M and a before.
Ma ...
Matt Noble. These were exactly the same letters she had seen him use to sign his name on the credit card slip at the bar. Not only that but there was also the fact that Ingrid had immediately noticed that Matt was a lefty when he had begun to scribble in his note pad, a small spiral notebook inside a leather cover. The paper was the same light green - lined one she was now holding. There was no doubt in her mind that Matt had written this woman's name, this Maggie's number on this scrap of paper. Ingrid's heart fell, and her stomach twisted. Maybe this was the reason their date had ended so badly, because Matt had his mind set on someone else.
She immediately crumpled it back up and threw it away, to the consternation of her pixie friends.
Chapter twelve
I Get a Kick out of You
Two daughters?" asked Harold.
"Two daughters and one son," said Joanna, then immediately regretted complicating things. She couldn't explain that her son was in Limbo for an eternity or why; it was just that of course he was never far from her thoughts, and it had slipped out. "Do you have other children, Harold?"
"What you see is what you got!" said Harold, smiling. "Just my daughter."
"She's darling, really. I know her from the hospital. She was great with Tyler when he was ill."
They were sitting in a private alcove facing the ocean at the swanky new French restaurant in town, and so far everything was going smoothly. They were halfway through their entrees - grilled salmon in a triple-citrus glaze for her and a duck confit with blackberry drizzle for him - and the evening had been very pleasant. They made a striking couple: Joanna elegant in a gray cashmere sweater and dark skirt, her silver hair in a loose updo, showing off her pearl earrings; Harold, impeccably groomed, in one of his signature three-piece suits, black with pin-stripes, a crisp white shirt, and red tie. He had entrancing navy-blue eyes, raven hair with thick white streaks (Joanna had noted the ironic widow's peak). His face was what one might call strong but at the same time refined - emphatic cheekbones, nose, and jaw. He was courtly but didn't fuss or act slavishly attentive. He exuded just the right amount of care, so as not to make her feel claustrophobic. He was well-read but not pretentious, eloquent but not glib, and cultured but not in an Olympian way. Harold and his late wife had traveled abroad nearly every summer of their professional lives, going as far as Southeast Asia. Traveling and sailing had been one of their passions, he reminisced, before Joanna delicately steered him away from further talk of his wife.