Welcome to Bordertown (47 page)

Gladstone hefted Beti back to her feet. Beti started toward me. “See, Damy?” she cried out. “It’s all ri—”

Gladstone reached me first, grabbed the front of my blouse, yanked me to her. “It’s been you the whole time, hasn’t it?”

“Wha-at?” I squeaked. We were being buffeted about by revelers. No one to notice the drama going down in their midst.

Beti said, “Gladstone, what are you doing? Come and dance with me.”

But Gladstone only had eyes for me.

“Dowsabelle just got all withdrawn,” she said. “I started fighting more and more with her. Trying to get some reaction from her, I guess. Hated myself. Couldn’t stop. But who’d been whispering warnings in her ear every day, scaring her half to death?”

I drew myself up tall. “You
are
scary, damn it!” I tried to yank my blouse out of her hand. She held on.

“I got murder-drunk the night Lottie left me,” she continued.
“
After
I came home and found she had moved out. Couldn’t find out for days what had happened. Where did she go, Damiana?”

I squeaked, “You were going to blow any minute. I could feel it.” Daddy Juju had let me put Lottie and her stuff up for a few days in a room above his shop, until she’d found her own place. When the juju weather headaches of Gladstone’s ire had faded, I’d told Lottie it was safe to move.

“And now you’re trying to frighten Beti away.”

“She doesn’t frighten me,” Beti answered. “You don’t frighten me. What’s coming frightens me, but it has to come”—she burst into tears—“and then you and Damiana both will turn your faces from me!”

We turned to her, startled. “Oh, Beti,” said Gladstone, bending and folding her into a hug. “We would never turn away from you.”

We. Did I deserve that “we”? Had I been minimizing the damage Gladstone could do when she was out of control, or had I been causing it?

It happened so quickly. A voice shouted something in a language I didn’t understand. An arm pushed me out of the way and grabbed Beti’s shoulder. A hand peeled Beti away from Gladstone as easily as peeling the skin from a ripe banana. Beti turned, saw who it was, and angrily spat out more words I didn’t understand. A young black man slipped in front of Beti, between her and Gladstone. He tried to shove Gladstone away, but Gladstone held her ground. “Fuck I will,” she said. “Get away from my girlfriend.”

“Go away!” Beti cried out, backing away. But I couldn’t tell whether she was talking to the youth or to Gladstone.

The young man was a sturdy tumpa of a thing, short and muscled and pretty. He wore his jeans and T-shirt as though they were a costume. His eyes were sad, longing. They were Beti’s eyes. He
reached for Beti again, same time as Gladstone lurched at him. Magic smell filled up my nostrils.

“No!” Beti shouted. Quicker than thought, she slapped Gladstone’s hand away from her brother’s. He must be the brother come to take her home, right?

That blow had some serious power behind it. Gladstone grimaced in pain, covered her wrist with her other hand, pulled her hands in close to her chest. “But I love you,” she said to Beti.

Beti slung her arm through the crook that Gladstone’s made. “I know,” she replied sadly, pulling Gladstone away from her brother.

He followed them. Beti stopped, said something to him that sounded like a plea. He snapped angry-sounding words at her, reached for her hand. She pulled it away. She looked scared. Gladstone tried to reach around her. Beti grabbed Gladstone’s sleeve. “No!” she shouted. Little as she was, she was strong. She was holding Gladstone off with one arm and the weight of her body, backing them both away from her brother and arguing with him same time. I started forward.

Stick lifted a warding hand in front of me. “Stay out of this,” he muttered. He called out something in the language that Beti and her brother were speaking. The two of them turned, looking startled.

And then I saw something I never thought I would. Stick bowed the knee to them both.

Gladstone said, “What the hell?”

Stick raised his head and asked Beti and her brother a question.

Beti replied, pointed at her brother and Gladstone.

Her brother cut her off with sharp words.

She responded to him with sad, pleading ones.

He begged, scolded.

Stick stood. He shouted angrily at them both. He gestured at the crowd.

I sneezed, then slapped my hands to either side of my head as an eyeball-melting migraine hit me. Like a friction charge, some deep juju was building up between
Beti and her brother.

Stick’s eyes went wide with alarm. He snapped an order, pointed a finger northward, in the direction of the Border.
Go
, he was saying to Beti and her brother.
Go back now.

Beti protested.

Stick turned in a panicked circle. (Stick never panicked!) There were people thronging all around. “Run!” He yelled to the crowd. “Get the fuck out of here!” One or two people started backing away, looking confused, but most didn’t even notice him.

Then the old snake charmer elf was by Stick’s side. Lubin sniffed curiously in the direction of his snake. The snake benignly tasted her air. The Trubie said something to Stick, turned, and began urging people to move away from Beti and her brother.

Stick yelled at Gladstone, “Let her go! Now!”

Gladstone shook her head, swung a protective arm around Beti’s shoulder. Beti shrugged it off.

I saw the hurt on Gladstone’s face, smelled the juju tide come rolling down. Blinding headache or no, I kicked off my shoes and ran toward my friend. “Gladstone, no!”

Beti turned sorrowing eyes on Gladstone, blew her a kiss. “It’s time,” she said.

Beti’s brother reached his hands out. Beti stepped forward and clasped them with both of hers.

Gladstone reached their sides, grabbed his forearm in one hand, Beti’s in the other.

Beti shouted, her voice so large and gonging that it exceeded sound. All the Jou’vert action went still with the shock of it.

Beti and her brother exploded into shards of prismed light …

I was still running, still screaming Gladstone’s name, though all around me was only painful brightness and I couldn’t feel my body, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see.

 … and coalesced again. Not as a thick-bodied black boy and his sister, but as one faceless something. A something tall as a tree. A something cone-shaped with many-colored tendrils that flared out from it as it spun. A something that made a sound like monsoon winds through the branches of a dead tree. Like the whistle through the air of withies just before they struck bare flesh. But loud, so loud. People fell to their knees, those that weren’t running. Even Stick stepped back.

Not me, for I couldn’t see Gladstone anywhere. I ran right up to the thing. “Beti!” I screamed.

It kept spinning, whistling, clacking.

The old elf ran to stand between it and the crowd. He held up warding hands. The thing began to move away, but one of its flying tendrils whipped across the snake charmer’s face. He convulsed and fell, his snake with him. He was frozen in rigor by the time he hit the ground. Oh god; death had come to Jou’vert for true.

I planted myself in the path of the thing. It came on toward me. “Ti’Bet, stop it!”

It hesitated.

“Where’s Gladstone?” I screamed at it. “What you did to her?” The thing dithered from side to side in front of me. I howled, “Bring them back!”

Gladstone, the snake charmer; they couldn’t just be gone.

The tip of the thing leaned its deadly self toward me. I didn’t give a damn. I done dead already, just like Stick said. Whether now or later, who cared? I’d meddled in my friend’s life, and now two sweet beings were gone.

The Beti-thing’s body smelled like dry rot, like carrion. It smelled like Granny’s perfume, like my old dog Glower’s breath, like grief and regret and resignation and goodbye.

And finally, it smelled like peace. It pulled back. It moved away, and there where it had been lay Gladstone, only Gladstone. Her clothes were torn, there was blood coming from her nose, and half her hair had been singed off. I dropped to my knees, felt her neck for a pulse. She was still alive. “Gladstone?” I said. No answer.

“Lemme see to her, sweetness.” It was Screaming Lord Neville, dressed in the tiered plantation gown and madras cotton head wrap of La Diablesse, the devil woman. “I know a few little things,” he said. He folded his long length down to sit beside us. Below the hem of his gown peeked one red sequined pump and one hoof. He saw me staring at it and smoothed the gown over his feet.

The pitchy-patchy thing spun away, in the direction of the Nevernever. People tried to reach the old snake charmer. His snake had coiled itself protectively around his body and wouldn’t let anyone near. Please God I never again hear a snake scream in grief. And I won’t, for it wasn’t a snake. It drew itself up to man-height, howled that terrible howl once more, and became a searing red flame of wings with a dragon mask of loss. In seconds, it and the dead elf were only ash, dissipating on the breeze.

For the next few minutes, as my headache faded, I dithered around Miss Nell. She checked Gladstone for injuries we couldn’t see. Stick brought water. People offered cloaks to keep Gladstone warm and tore costumes into bandages for her. When she opened her eyes, it was like somebody had turned the sun back on.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were coming to hurt her.”

She smiled weakly. “Truth? I might have.” Gently, she touched my chin. “Thank you for keeping me from being an ass even when I’m too stubborn to ask for help.”

“What was she?”

“A rainfly, I think.”

Gladstone had never seen rainflies, but I’d described their life cycle to her. How joyfully they danced in the air before a rainstorm. How when the pounding rain came it drove them to the ground and pulled off their wings. How they wriggled and wriggled and then crawled away, metamorphosed into their adult forms.

Beti had been doing her last dance as a child. She and her brother had needed each other in order to move on to the next stage of their development. No wonder she confused the word for “brother” with the word meaning “two who will become one.”

“So she was really from beyond the Border?” I asked Gladstone. “Some kind of egungun for true?”

“Some kind of what?” Gladstone was staring longingly in the direction of the forest.

Lord Neville said, “Whatever she was, doux-doux, she knew she couldn’t hide it forever. Brave, proud child. You two did right to care for her.”

He slid his platform shoe off one foot and massaged his toes. He kept the other foot concealed beneath his gown.