Welcome to Bordertown (31 page)

T
his story begins with Analise’s screams, with a silver knife and blood dripping into a silver bowl—

No.

It begins with the promise Analise and I made, four years ago now, a promise between two best friends about our future—

That’s not right, either.

Papá and Mamá would say it began sixteen years ago, with a desert crossing beneath a blazing sun, a baby—me, Miranda—in their arms. My first border crossing, though I don’t remember it.

Where does any story begin?

Let’s say this one began here, with me and Analise—two Soho newbies whose clothes dripped water, gasping and laughing from the crazy moment when the dry desert washes we’d followed from home flash flooded with rusty Mad River water.

We weren’t stupid. We’d known enough to keep our heads above the surface, to make sure we didn’t swallow a single drop as we half ran, half swam for shore. Like all newbies—like
you
—we arrived here with a dream and what we thought was a plan.

We
were
stupid. That first border crossing nearly killed my parents and me.

Why did I expect this one to be any different?

*   *   *

Analise was the brave one. You need to understand that. We’d barely caught our breath when she walked up to an elf with hair dyed the chalky green of a paloverde tree and asked her, straight out, “Where do we find the vampires?”

The elf girl laughed, but she didn’t walk away, so I whispered to Analise, “And the werewolves. Don’t forget the werewolves.”

The elf heard, and she looked down at me with the sort of perfect disdain the World reserves for cheerleaders in bad teen movies. “What wolf would don your crude human form, given a choice?” My face grew hot, though it was freezing here compared to home, especially with our clothes still wet. The elf went on, “Yet vampires—I have heard talk of such, and not only in the deranged babble of wharf rats. Vampires are the ones with the unnatural interest in human blood, yes? You come here seeking such?”

“We do.” Analise really was a cheerleader, not that you could tell from her black T-shirt and leggings and the smudged black eye shadow that made her skin seem elfin pale.

“Truly?” The green vines tattooed around the elf’s wrists swayed in the breeze. “I thought only Hill-bred humans took an interest in Lankin and his bloodletting.”

“You thought wrong,” Analise informed her, though she had no more idea who Lankin was than I did. She didn’t tell the elf that the bloodletting was entirely secondary, that it was true love we were after, because that was nobody’s business but our own.

“Well, if you choose to tangle with our latest visitor from Aldon House, I’m sure that’s no concern of mine. What is your human
phrase? Ah, yes: It is your funeral.” The elf’s scornful silver eyes made me feel small and grubby in my wet jeans and fleece and faded University of Arizona T-shirt, my dripping school backpack slung over my shoulders. “Ye Olde Unicorn Trolley will take you there if you desire it dearly enough,” she said. “Likely let
you
ride for free.”

I didn’t know what she meant by that, and she turned away before I could ask—no. I need to tell this story true. I simply lacked the courage to ask. Unlike Analise I wasn’t brave, not even a little bit.

Analise didn’t mind my being a coward. She didn’t mind any of the ways we were different, like how she liked vampires and I liked werewolves, or how she thought dark chocolate was the best thing in the whole world but I thought no chocolate could compete with a raze-your-taste-buds chili-pepper burn. We were best friends anyway, and had been since the fourth grade, back when we realized we loved the exact same horse book. If you’re from the World, you know the one, about that wild stallion no one thinks can be tamed except for the one girl who believes in him. In fifth grade Analise and I loved the same dog book, the one where the dog doesn’t die for once. Sixth grade was our unicorn year; we loved the book where everyone’s sure there’s only one unicorn left in the world, except of course they’re all wrong.

Seventh grade was different. Analise fell in love with vampire books, especially the one where the vampire turns the girl into a vampire, too, because he loves her that much. I fell in love with werewolf books, most of all the one where the werewolf turns human and leaves his pack for the girl
he
loves. But even those stories aren’t all that different—they’re both about falling into true love and staying there, forever and ever.

True love sounded pretty good in the seventh grade, with both
our parents fighting so much that year. Analise’s parents got divorced in the end—it was months before she believed me when I said it wasn’t her fault—but my parents were mostly fighting about money, not about whether they were in love. It was getting harder for Papá and Mamá to find work without
la migra
asking questions about whether we belonged in Arizona. Later, when the fighting eased and I talked to them, I understood what it really meant to have been born in Mexico before crossing the desert, and not in Tucson like my little brothers.

But before then, Analise and I came up with our plan: one day she would marry a vampire, and I would marry a werewolf, and
we
would live happily ever after, no matter what happened to our parents or anyone else. I’m guessing you know as well as I do how hard happy endings are to come by in the World, but we figured with magic, everything would be different. Not perfect—I mean, probably the vampire and the werewolf would hate each other at first, because they always did, but eventually they’d come to a grudging mutual respect. They’d have no choice, because Analise and I had also made a promise: that we would always be friends, and the vampire and the werewolf would just have to accept that.

Of course, not everyone believed in magic by then, with the Way to the Borderlands gone for so many years, but Analise and I believed: Bordertown was real, and so were all those undocumented elves and halfies you heard about stranded out in the World, their magic and their home so far out of reach they might as well have crossed a desert of their own. Analise and I read books about elves and faeries sometimes, though none of those ever became our favorites. If elves were real, the rest of it could be real, too. There were many kinds of magic, and one day, Analise and I decided, we would find ours.

*   *   *

When the green-haired elf wouldn’t answer any more of Analise’s vampire questions, we made our way through Soho, looking for someone who would. The streets around us echoed with people shouting, motorcycles revving, singers belting out their songs. On one corner, a pale-skinned boy with feathered Luke Skywalker hair sang a long, slow ballad about a human stolen away by the queen of the Realm. The boy was decked out in so much leather it looked like the eighties had stolen
him
away. Across the street, a girl with brown skin and flyaway elf-white hair rapped about a woman who stood up to that same elfin queen, winning her boyfriend back and telling the queen off quite thoroughly in the process.

The rapper wore bright scarves in clashing colors, Day-Glo pink and forest green and bloodred and more shades of purple than I knew existed. Tiny silver acorns sewn along her fringes jangled as she sang. She and Leather Boy glared at each other between verses, raising their voices louder and louder, while passersby dropped trinkets into the boy’s blue baseball cap and the girl’s purple felted cowboy hat.

Smells wafted through the air around us: roasting meat, spicy curries, melted cheese—I followed that last to a boarded-up storefront that looked more like a car dealership than a restaurant. The scent of chilies and melted
queso
wafting out was real enough, though, and it reminded me how far we’d walked and how little we’d eaten along the way. “Lunch,” I announced as I saw the restaurant’s name: Taco Hell. I knew that place—it was right out of
The Tough Guide to Bordertown.

Analise set her hands on her hips and tried to look severe. “Miranda, how can you even
think
about food at a time like this?” As she spoke her stomach grumbled, and we both burst into
giggles. “All right,” she said. We headed inside arm in arm, not caring if we looked like total dorks. We found a free table in a corner and stashed our damp backpacks beneath it. My drying jeans felt clammy against the wooden chair; things dried faster back home. From what must have been the kitchen I heard shouting and clanking. I picked out a little bit of Spanish, a little bit of what might have been O’odham, and a lot of something I didn’t know.

A kid barely old enough to be in middle school came to take our orders. His black hair was streaked blue and pulled back; his denim jacket seemed larger than he was. “Water, tea, or beer?” the kid asked.

“Beer!” we agreed, and laughed some more. The
Tough Guide
hadn’t told us there was no drinking age in Bordertown.

“And to eat?” The boy sounded like he was trying hard to seem properly bored.

“Two Meltdown Burritos,” I said, because that was the only thing I remembered from the
Guide.

The boy nodded and slouched away, returning to place two bottles on our table. Analise and I grinned as we raised them.

“To true love,” she said.

“To—” I hesitated. “To belonging somewhere.”

Analise reached out and squeezed my hand. She knew my werewolf dreams weren’t the only reason I’d asked her to come here with me, after I found
The Tough Guide to Bordertown
in the library, nestled between her favorite book and mine the day after the hearing.

“To Bordertown,” we said, and clinked our bottles together.

*   *   *

The beer was cold and about as good as beer ever was—that is, not very. I drank it anyway. I wasn’t about to miss my first drink in Bordertown just because I didn’t like the taste, and besides, my
throat was parched. We’d run out of water long before the Mad River flooded the washes, even the small salty bottle of holy water I’d taken with me from church.

A couple walked in and plopped down at the table next to us—the singers from outside. They didn’t look like they hated each other now, not with the way their fingers were entwined. True love, or just hooking up? It should have been easier to tell in Bordertown than in the World—no. I wanted it to be easier, that was all.

“A pound of coffee beans and a copy of the
Stick Figure
steampunk special.” Scarf Girl set a drawstring bag triumphantly down on the table; she was wearing her hat now. “I
owned
this round.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Leather Boy put his half-full cap beside the bag. “I’m still ahead of you thanks to scoring that locket made by Lillet’s great-niece last summer.”

“It was a fake! You know it was!”

He pulled a comb from his back pocket and ran it through his hair,
just
like in the eighties. “A fake that bought us three months’ groceries.” The
Guide
had told me about this, how Bordertown worked by trading things, not just money.

Our waiter slid two burritos onto our table, and Analise and I both turned to eating them. Melted cheese slid down my throat, along with the burn of—
cayenne
? Seriously? Might as well just sprinkle on some black pepper and be done with it if you’re going to ruin them anyway.

At least the cheese was good. I reached into my wet pack and pulled out my sketchbook. Water had swollen the pages, blurring my colored-pencil sketches of wolves and vampires—okay, mostly of wolves, though I’d tried a few vampires for Analise’s sake. It didn’t matter; they were all ruined, and I’d have to start over. Maybe this time I’d figure out how to make werewolf fur look as
soft as I hoped it would feel, when I held a real wolf in my arms at last. Analise helped smooth the pages as our waiter brought two more beers for Scarf Girl and Leather Boy.