I froze, profoundly aware of how dangerous she was, this wild, inhuman creature who was close enough to see the dried tears on my cheeks.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her lips curl into a beautiful smile, and she whispered, “Now would be a wonderful time to ask for that favor I promised you. For your tear.”
She drew back, leaving me quivering from her strangeness, and studied me—standing there with my chin raised up in something like courage.
I looked back at those depthless green eyes, trying to read any sort of emotion in them, any clues as to a right answer, but saw nothing but deeper and deeper. So I nodded and said, as if it had been my idea, “I’ll take that favor now, please.”
“I thought,” Una drew a circle in front of her with a finger, “you’d never ask.”
She beckoned me, and I edged closer, warily.
“You humans like humans, right?”
I wasn’t exactly sure how to answer that.
She drew the circle again, and this time it seemed to stay there after her finger had dropped. “Do you see him?”
I looked at the glowing edge of the circle, but all I saw within it was the gnarled oak tree on the other side. “No?”
Una made an exasperated noise. “Try using your eyes.” She drew the circle again, and this time the glow of the edge made me blink in pain; it was like the searing light of the sun, and it shimmered in a way that was wrong, that bent the edges of the forest within and the forest without.
And this time, I did see him. It was a man in his late thirties or early forties, his head covered in long, loose brown curls, reading a book in the middle of field. “Who is it?”
“Thomas Rhymer. One of Hers. A human. A man. Shall I get more specific?”
“I think that covers it.” I hoped she was going to explain the significance of the bouncy-haired man, because I had no idea how showing me a strange man reading a book was supposed to count as a favor.
“Look how human he is,” Una mused as the man turned a page. I wasn’t sure if this was a commentary on his appearance or on his page-turning ability. “I think you ought to have a little chat with him.”
“Where is he?”
“There.”
I once again fought against the desire to bitch-slap a faerie, and rephrased. “How do I get to there?” I hoped to God she didn’t say “walk,” because I really didn’t think I’d be able to stop my fist if she did.
“I forget how stupid you all are,” Una said brightly. She tugged the edge of the circle larger, so I could see that the man sat in the middle of the cow pasture near my house, the one where I’d seen the white rabbit. Then she popped her finger into her mouth as if the glow had burnt her, and turned to me. “Truly, the magnanimous nature of my favor surprises even me.”
Uh. “Thank you,” I said.
She spit through the circle and it vanished like smoke. “And here’s another suggestion, for nothing. Gratis. Drown the hound of the Hunter’s you’ve been keeping. You’ll have to hold it under for quite a few minutes.” She made a motion as if she were holding one of her hands under water. “Until the bubbles stop.”
I blinked at her.
She seemed oblivious to my horror, and instead said kindly, with obvious effort, “Would you like your tear back? You’ll need it.”
“No thanks. I think it looks better on you.”
Una grinned at me.
Sara was so clueless trying to get us home that she finally pulled over and let me drive instead. Even though I rarely get to practice driving, I was much better at finding our way back down the back roads. I was almost giddy. Being stolen away by the Faerie Queen and tortured was bad, but it was so much better than being dead. Dead was irreversible. Suddenly I was noticing details that I had missed before: just how gorgeous the day was, how loud the cicadas were, how the leaves of the trees were flipping up to reveal their pale undersides, promising a storm later on despite the brilliant blue sky. With my change of mood, I saw something on the way back that I hadn’t noticed before: Luke’s car.
I slammed on the brakes.
Sara screamed. “Holy crap! What are you doing?”
I backed her car up to the little dirt road where I’d seen Luke’s car.
“Sorry. I saw something. I’m just going to check it out, okay? Just—two seconds.”
She squinted out the windows and then reached into the back seat for a magazine. Apparently, she thought that my “two seconds” meant the same as hers. I left her reading and made my way over to where Luke’s car sat, pulled back into the mouth of an overgrown dirt road that was used to access the cornfield behind it. The angle of the car implied a certain haste, and in my head I imagined that Luke had somehow come riding to James’ rescue, pulling him from the car where James was pinned. It was a much better image than a bloodied James dragging himself out of his Pontiac onto the asphalt.
The Audi was unlocked, and though I felt a little foolish, I climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door behind me. Leaning back in Luke’s seat, I closed my eyes and let his smell trick me into thinking he was there in the car with me. Even though I’d only seen him the night before, I missed him unimaginably; the part of me that was in him felt as if it were a million miles away, in a place too distant to ever visit. When I was with him I felt loved, wanted, protected; now I felt like a little boat adrift in a strange dark sea.
I opened my eyes and it was dark; night surrounded the car like a close blanket. It took me a moment to realize that I was in a memory. I was Luke, sitting in the driver’s seat, my heart pounding with adrenaline. Urgency pumped through me—I had to get to the scene of the crash before They did. I swiveled in the seat, looking at a mason jar full of yellow-green paste lying on the passenger-side floor, and thinking I ought to put some of it on my shoes as protection. But no, there had to be enough for Dee and her parents, and I didn’t want to risk wasting it. Anyway, it wasn’t me They wanted; not until Dee was dead, anyway. Crap. I left it lying on the floor and jumped out of the car, hoping the kid was still alive.
The memory snapped to an end with the sound of the door opening. In real life, my life, the door was still closed, and I was still sitting firmly in the driver’s seat. I looked over to the passenger-side floor, and sure enough—sitting in the stark shadows cast by the noon sun shining through the windshield—a mason jar full of Granna’s concoction lay on its side. It looked like cat vomit.
So he had found it. I sighed, picked the jar up—oh nasty, it was a little warm, like it was living—and got out of the car. I wished I could think of an excuse, something to tell Sara so that I could take Bucephalus back home. Selfishly, I wanted the reminder of Luke close to me.
Movement caught my eye, something blocking the light in the sparse trees that bordered the cornfield. Before me, ten or fifteen feet in front of the car, walked a tall man with skin as brown as the dust of the road. Due to his height, he had to move slowly through the tree branches. He was absolutely naked, his muscles long and sinewy like a deer or a racehorse, and though my attention should have been drawn to his indecent exposure, all I could focus on was his tail. Long and whip-like, it ended in a tuft of hair like a goat’s. The faerie—because that’s what he had to be—paused, and turned his head slowly to look at me. His eyes were too close together, and his nose was too long and thin over his wide mouth to be human. It was the gaze of a feral thing, a creature that knew what I was and was both unafraid and disinterested. I waited long moments until he was out of sight, and then I bolted to Sara’s car and got in, cradling the jar carefully.
“What’s that?” Sara put her magazine down.
“It’s some sort of anti-faerie juice that my Granna made.”
“Whoa. Oh. Where’d you get it?”
I pointed. “Luke’s car.”
“Luke is that cute guy? Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Sara frowned. “I’m getting creeped out. This is totally starting to sound like a horror flick, and everybody knows the hot chick dies first. Let’s get out of here.”
We did, leaving the only evidence of Luke’s existence on the dusty road behind us.
seventeen
Why are you looking up ‘solstice’?”
Hunched over my father’s laptop computer, manically tapping in things like “solstice,” “gallowglass,” and “Thomas Rhymer” into search engines, I hadn’t even heard Delia approach.
“Holy crap!” I swallowed my racing heartbeat. This sneaking-up thing of hers was getting really annoying. I turned to look at her and found her next to my shoulder, holding a cup of coffee, staring down at me with her green eyes. God, she looked alive. It was as if she’d been a black and white photo, and now suddenly color was blooming into her. It scared the crap out of me. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad for putting the Granna concoction on my parents’ shoes and leaving hers unprotected.
Delia leaned over my shoulder and read the screen. It was a frilly website called “The Fairy Patch,” with lists of plants that would attract faeries to your garden. The part I was reading was talking about how the midsummer solstice thinned the veil between the human world and the faerie world. The site recommended putting out saucers of milk and burning thyme to encourage optimal faerie visitation. Without success, I had tried to imagine the goat-faerie—or better yet, Aodhan—lapping up milk like a tame kitten. Where did they come up with this crap?
Delia laughed. “What else have you got there?”
I contemplated making a run for it with the laptop, but instead I flinched away and let her reach over the top of my hand to click through the other open windows. Her eyes scanned the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer—stolen away by the Faerie Queen and given a tongue that could not lie—and then moved to the website with the definition of “gallowglass”: a hired mercenary in ancient Irish history. Her eyes reflected the square of the monitor as she read. When she’d finished, she stepped back.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s for a school project.”
I don’t know why that scared me so badly, but it did. It somehow stepped over the line of hinted-at strangeness to out-and-out malevolence. I considered my words carefully. “I think that would be like you telling me that you hadn’t met Luke before the music competition.”
Delia paused; it was her turn in this verbal chess match. “I think I have a promising search for your school project.” She leaned over me again, placed the cursor in the search engine box, and typed “how to free hostages.” She hit enter with a manicured nail.
I stared at the list of news articles and blog postings and remembered Delia handing me the phone earlier that day. She’d known what had happened to James, hadn’t she? And then she’d called his house to make sure I found out.
“He must be very badly hurt,” Delia said to the room in general. “I heard there was a tremendous amount of blood. If he’s still alive, he must not have much time.”
