Ballad (21 page)

Nuala

He does not so much bite as nibble, my friend Death

Wearing me down to the size of a child

Soon I am small enough to nestle in his hand

Gone in one swallow, behind his gentle smile
.

—
from
Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

“Feeling any better?” James asked me. For some reason he reminded me of an apple. His face was tanned from all his afternoons spent outside piping, and now that his hair was starting to grow out, it was even redder than before. Everything about him as he stood on the hill next to me, his fingers brushing the seed-tops of the golden grass, reminded me of apples. End-of-the-year fruits that waited for summer to be safely away before they showed themselves.

I crumpled and uncrumpled a granola bar wrapper in my hands. “Anything’s better than passed out, I guess, right? Why the hell does Sullivan want me on this hill? I’m not like some raccoon you found in your trash. You can’t just put me back out into the wild and expect me to go away.”

James smiled a half-smile at me, but I saw that his fingers were rubbing on the worry stone in his hand. “I don’t think he expects you to disappear into the wild, my dear viper. Hopes for it, maybe. But I don’t think he expects it. He said he wanted to talk.”

“I can talk anywhere.”

“Oh,
that
I know. But I see his point, don’t you? Your … somewhat less-than-standard-issue appearance might draw some attention on campus. Especially in the boys’ dorm.”

The grass snapped behind me as I lay back on it, staring up at the deep blue sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, and lying down, I couldn’t see any of the brilliantly colored trees at the bottom of the hill. Still, everything about the day—the crisp bite to the air, the smell of woodsmoke, the swift wind that gusted around us—screamed that Halloween was almost here.

James towered over me, casting his shadow over my body; it was cold when the sun didn’t touch me. “Are you okay?”

“Stop asking me that,” I said. “I’m great. I’m rosy. I’m freakin’ wonderful. I couldn’t be happier. How did you find me?”

“You were lying in the grass four feet away from me. It wasn’t rocket science.”

“Lie down so I can smack you,” I told him, and he smiled a thin white smile. “I meant before. How did you find me on the hill after I passed out? It was still night, practically.”

Oh my God, he blushed. I didn’t even think James Morgan was capable of blushing. I knew I didn’t imagine it. He looked away, as if that would hide his flushed cheeks, but I could still see his bright red ears. “I—uh—dreamt about you.”

“You dreamed about me?” At first, all I could think was all the times he’d dreamt about Dee and not me. Then I realized what the blush might mean. “What
sort
of dream?”

James absently bit on the end of his worry stone before crossing his arms. “Ha. You know exactly what sort of dream it was.”

I frowned at him for a moment, one eyebrow arched, before I realized that he meant I must be reading his mind. And then I realized I hadn’t been.

Then I realized I couldn’t.

I stared at him, trying to find the threads of thought I normally seized and interpreted, but there was nothing. I couldn’t even remember how it was that I used to do it. It was like discovering you’d stopped breathing, and trying to remember how it was you used to inflate your lungs.

James raised his hands on either side of his face like he was surrendering. “Hey. I have no control over my subconscious. You can’t hold me accountable for somnolent fantasies. I seriously doubt I could even dance like that in real life.”

While I was trying to catch his thoughts, it struck me. He wasn’t golden anymore. When had I stopped seeing the music inside him? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it. I knew—I
knew
it wasn’t him that had changed. It was me.

Lying flat out in the grass, I covered my face with my hands.

“This isn’t about a dancing dream, is it.” James didn’t say it like a question. I heard him crush the grass down beside me. “Did something happen to you last night?”

“I can’t hear your thoughts,” I whispered from behind my hands.

James was silent. I didn’t know if it was because he didn’t know what to say or if it was because he realized immediately just how big of a deal it was for me. I took my hands from my face, because I had to see his face if I couldn’t hear him. He was staring off into the distance, his eyes faraway. His thoughts totally out of my reach, as if they didn’t even exist.

“Say something,” I said miserably. “It’s so quiet. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Welcome to my life,” James said. “I have to guess what’s going on in people’s heads.” He looked at my face and something he saw there made his voice soften. He shrugged. “I was wondering if this was just part of it. Part of getting closer to Halloween. I saw Eleanor. She said that your body was wearing out and that you had to burn to keep from dying. Maybe this is just you, wearing out.”

“I don’t feel worn out. I feel—” I was afraid to say it.

James ran his fingers over the back of one of my hands, looking at it as if it was enormously important. “I know. Look—Nuala.” He hesitated. “Eleanor said something else. She said, if you wanted to keep your memories, there was a way.”

My stomach lurched, like with nerves. “Why would she care?”

“I don’t know. Can she lie?”

I shook my head; the grass rustled under my head. I thought about what Brendan and Una had told me. “No. But she can leave things out.”

James made a face. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I thought too. She said if I said your name seven times while you were burning, you’d keep your memories.”

“My
real
name?” But what I was thinking was,
my memories
?

James nodded.

“Do you even know what that means?”

He said, “I have a vague idea that it’s a really bad idea for your name to get out, right? Like people could use it to make you rob convenience stores, perform illicit sex acts, watch Steven Seagal movies, and otherwise do things that you wouldn’t ever do.”

“Which is why I’d never tell anyone,” I said.

He looked down at his hand again, his eyelashes hiding his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

“Except you.” I sat up so that my eyes were level with his. “But you have to promise me.”

James’ eyes were wide, either innocent or bewildered. I had never seen his face wear either expression. “Promise what?”

“Promise you won’t make me … do those things.”

“Nuala,” James said, solemnly, “I would never make you watch Steven Seagal movies.”

He didn’t know. How big of a deal this was. Nobody told a human their real name. Nobody. “Promise me you … promise me that … ” I couldn’t think of what to make him promise. As if the promise of a human meant anything anyway. They could lie with impunity.

James leaned in and I thought for a moment he was going to kiss me. Instead, he just wrapped his arms around me and lay the side of his face against my face. I could feel his heartbeat, slow and steady and warm, going at half the speed of mine, and his breath, uneven and short on my cheek. A kiss could never mean the same thing as this. “Nuala,” he said, and his voice was low and funny—hoarse. “Don’t be afraid of me. You don’t have to tell me. But I—
I would do this for you, if you wanted. I know there has to be some sort of catch, but I’d try.”

I closed my eyes. It was too much. The possibility of keeping my memories, the faeries’ words at the dance last night, the danger of telling my name, the shape of his words in my ear. I had never meant it to go this far.

I squeezed my eyes shut so hard I saw flickering grayish lights behind my eyelids. “
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
.”

I felt light-headed right after I said it. I’d really said it out loud. I’d really done it.

James squeezed me tighter as if it would stop me from shaking. He whispered, “Thank goodness. I thought you were going to say
Izzy Leopard
and then I would start laughing and then you would kill me.”

“You are such a jerk,” I said, but I was relieved. Scared totally out of my mind, but relieved.

James let me go. I hurriedly made sure I had full control of my facial expression before he did. He leaned back and repositioned his legs. “My butt’s falling asleep. Do you think it would be really bad if I pronounced it wrong? I mean, it’s not exactly an easy name like ‘Jane Doe,’ is it?”

“This is serious!” I sounded fiercer than I meant to. I shouldn’t snap. I
knew
he cracked jokes even when he was serious, but it was hard to remember that when I didn’t have his thoughts to back me up.

“I know it’s serious, killer,” he said. “Maybe the most serious thing I’ve ever done.”

We both jerked when his phone rang, in his pocket. James pulled out it and frowned at the screen. “It’s Sullivan.”

He flipped it open and leaned close to me so that the phone was sandwiched between his ear and mine. “Yeah?”

“James?”

“Why does everyone
ask
that?” demanded James. “Yes, it’s me.”

Sullivan’s voice sounded far away. “Your voice sounds different on the phone. Is she still there?”

“Of course she is.”

“Look. I’m sorry I’m taking so long to get up there. There’s—damn. Hold on.” A pause. “Sorry. Look, can you drive her into town? To the deli there? Get a table outside. One of the iron ones. Can she take that?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll see you there in, like, fifteen minutes.” Sullivan hesitated again. “James—” Another pause, and then a sigh. “James, don’t tell any of the other students. Have you seen Deirdre Monaghan lately?”

James

All around us, the birds sang and cars whirred past the deli and the day was beautiful.

I set my hands on the table, very carefully, and worried Nuala’s stone between my fingers. I wanted so badly to write
guilt
on my skin that I could almost taste the letters in my mouth. Bitter.

“It wasn’t fair of Sullivan to tell you that,” Nuala said. She glared at the waitress, who’d returned with our glasses of water. “Yeah, fine, they’re fine. Leave them there!” The last bit was addressed at the waitress, who was trying to catch my eye while she rearranged the water glasses on the table. “Seriously. We’re waiting for someone. Just—” Nuala made some gesture with her fingers like she was flicking water off them.

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 course, 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.”