Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

Page 39

And she was right. I wanted Nuala. God, I wanted Nuala. It made my stupid crush on Dee so inane in comparison. But to have Nuala, I had to stay until the last bit of Nuala was gone. And by then it would be too late for Dee.
Save Nuala or save the world?
If only I’d just been screwing myself over, instead of me and Nuala.
The worst part was that the last thing I saw Nuala do was take her hands down from her face. Just in time to see me leave her behind.
James
In the movies, they have a plan. They know the odds are terrible, but they also know where they’re going, they have large guns with lots of bullets, and they have an insane plan that involves martial arts and a pulley system. In real life, you have a sick feeling in your stomach, a pile of adrenalin, and a general idea of where shit is going down. And the universe is laughing and saying well, go to it, bucko.
Life sucked.
The faerie at the bonfire had looked back in the direction of Brigid Hall, so that was where I ran. Words were starting to crowd in my head, begging to be written down on my hands—fire and betrayal and go back to her—but I pushed them away and tried to concentrate on the rasp of my breath as I sucked in the cold night air.
I found Sullivan by the bonfire they’d built in the parking lot beside Yancey. He was tying some little twigs together with red ribbon by the orange light of the flames. Sparks spat out toward us. “James. I thought you were with—” He stopped, which made me eternally grateful to him.
I was badly out of breath. “I—you—have—to—come— with me.”
He didn’t ask. “Where are we going?”
I gulped air. “Brigid. Something’s going down in Brigid.”
“Brigid’s empty.” Sullivan gestured at it. The windows were dark; the building was beyond the reach of any of the bonfires. It looked even more shabby and desolate behind its shaggy, unmowed grass. “They lock it every Halloween night.”
I shook my head. “I have it on the word of someone green. Do you know if They can make kings of the dead?”
Sullivan stared at me for a long, blank moment, and then he said, “Let’s go.”
He shoved the twigs into my hand and started to run, coat flapping out behind him. I took off after him, feet pounding on the sidewalk and then on the autumn-crisp mowed grass as we left the bonfires behind. I felt the exact second that we outstripped the light of the bonfire. The air froze around us and the ground shifted out of our way.
“It’s a ward, don’t drop it!” Sullivan shouted back at me, and I realized he meant the twigs. “Hurry up!”
I pelted into the unmowed grass. Close beside me, something screamed, and I saw huge, velvety black eyes rising before me. I sort of shook the twigs at it and it screamed again, sounding a lot like Nuala, before shrinking away. In front of me, I saw shapes of bodies dancing around Sullivan, bobbing toward him and then away.
I was a few feet from the building when a form loomed right up in front of me, forcing me to wheel my arms back to keep my balance. It was small, light, hungry.
Linnet.
“God,” I said, staggering back. “You’re dead.”
She was hovering just off the ground. Looking at her again, after the first shock of discovery, I don’t know how I had known it was Linnet. Because she didn’t really look at all like herself. She was a cloud of pale, noxious gas, grasping and foul.
“Stay back from things you don’t understand,” hissed Linnet. “Go back to the bonfires. Leave this to those who know.”
This from the woman who wanted to fail me in English. “You’re pissing me off,” I said, and stretched out the ward.
She had no real face, not anymore, but she made a sound like a derisive laugh. “You’re just a pretender.”
Sullivan jerked my shoulder around and pushed me under his coat. “But I’m not. This explains a lot, Linnet. I sincerely hope you rot in hell.” He pushed me the last few feet to the door and gestured toward his coat. “You’re supposed to be wearing black, James.”
The building still seemed unoccupied—dark and silent. We stood before the red door. The only red door on campus. And for some reason, I was transported back to that movie theater with Nuala, where she told me that every red item in The Sixth Sense warned of a supernatural presence in the scene.
I shook off the edge of Sullivan’s coat and put my hand on the door. My skin tightened with goose bumps.
I pushed the door open.
“James,” Eleanor called out. “I’m very disappointed to see you here. I was hoping true love would prevail.”
It took me a moment to find her in the room; it was full of faeries. The folding chairs had been knocked into disarray, and there were piles of flowers along one of the walls. Two bodies lay in front of us, hands and face tinted green. Eleanor stood next to the stage in a dress made of peacock feathers. She smiled pleasantly at me. Her sleeves were rolled up; thick red rivulets ran down one of her arms from her hand, staining the edge of her cuff.
In her hand was a heart.
And it was beating.
I forgot that Sullivan was behind me. I forgot everything but the sound of Dee’s scream.
“If that’s Dee’s heart,” I said, stepping over one of the green bodies, “I’m going to be very upset.” The faeries, several of them wearing bone knives at their waists, parted for me as I walked up the aisle, watching me with curious eyes. Some of them smiled at me and exchanged looks with each other.
“Don’t be silly,” Eleanor said. “It’s his.” She made a flippant gesture to the stage behind her. On it, her consort —the dead one—lay in the middle of a dark, dusty-looking circle on the stage, moaning and arcing his back. A gaping wound in the center of his chest oozed black-blood.
I wasn’t going to give Eleanor the satisfaction of showing my disgust, so I just set my jaw and looked back at her. “Yeah. He looks like he’s having a great time. Where’s Dee?”
Eleanor smiled so prettily that the edge of my vision shimmered a little. She brushed her pale hair from her face, leaving a red smear on her cheek, and pointed to her feet. I recognized the curl of Dee’s shoulders and her clunky shoes. Eleanor shrugged. “We’re really doing her a favor. She doesn’t handle stress very well, does she? Right after Siobhan took out Karre’s heart, Deirdre threw up all over my shoes”—Eleanor gestured with the heart to a pair of green slippers piled underneath a chair—“and I’m afraid I had to have Padraic knock her on the head to calm her down a little.”
A faerie with white curls all over her head looked at me and said, “Do I kill him now, my queen?”
“Siobhan, so bloodthirsty. We are a gentle race,” Eleanor said. She turned her attention toward me. A bit of blood bubbled out of the heart in her hand. “My dear piper, why don’t you go back to the bonfire and be with your love? I am very eager to see how that works out for you.”
“Me too,” I said. “Just as soon as I have Dee, that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
On stage, her consort made a sound of excruciating pain. His bloody fingers covered his face.
“It’ll be over soon, lovely. Cernunnos will be here soon,” Eleanor told him. To me, she said, “If you’ll wait a moment, I’m nearly done with her. Siobhan, I need that knife again.”
At her feet, Dee groaned and rolled onto her back, putting her hand to her head. Eleanor, heart in one hand, knife in the other, nodded toward Siobhan, and the white-headed faerie placed a foot on one of Dee’s shoulders.
I lunged to the faerie next to me, grabbing the knife from the sheath at his side. Before Siobhan had time to react, I was beside Eleanor, the knife pressed against her throat. My skin rippled painfully with goose bumps.
“That was stupid,” Eleanor said. “What are you going to do now?”
The faeries whispered to each other, low, melodic songs beneath their breaths.
“Better question is”—I held the knife as steady as I could as I started to shiver—“what are you going to do now?”
“I’m trying to decide if I should kill you quickly or kill you slowly,” Eleanor hissed. “I’d prefer the latter, but I really don’t have much time to cut out lovely Deirdre’s heart before Cernunnos arrives. So I think the first.”
There was a weird, sucking feeling happening in my throat that made me think she wasn’t bluffing.
“And if I ask that you spare him?”
Every single faerie in the room became silent. Eleanor looked toward the door as Sullivan walked up the aisle and halted a few yards away from us. Took him long enough.
When Sullivan had told us he’d been Eleanor’s consort, I’d always assumed he’d escaped from her. I never thought she might have let him go.
“Patrick,” Eleanor said, and her voice had completely changed. “Please leave.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. As annoying as James is, I’m loath to watch him die.”
“He is annoying,” admitted Eleanor. It was as if I didn’t have a knife stuck at her throat. As if her current consort—was he still current if he had a hole in his chest?—weren’t writhing on the stage. “And very cocky.”
Sullivan inclined his head in agreement. “That being said, I’ll need my other student as well.”
Eleanor frowned gently; the most beautiful frown the world had ever seen. My chest heaved with the pain of it. “Do not ask me for her. I will give you this idiot. And I’ll let you leave. But do not ask me for things I can’t give.”
“Won’t give,” Sullivan said, and his voice had changed too. “It’s always won’t, not can’t. It’s priorities.”
It was like Eleanor and Sullivan were the only ones in the room. “My subjects come first. Don’t tell me you don’t understand, Patrick Sullivan. Because you came storming in here not for you, but for your students. I will have freedom for my fey.”
“Cheap at the price of two humans,” Sullivan said mildly.
Eleanor’s voice crackled with ice. “You cannot preach at me. Did you think twice about the two bodies you stepped over to stand before me? I think not—because they were only fey, yes?”
I looked down at Dee. She lay on her back, a bruise darkening her right cheek, and her eyes were on me. Totally unfathomable. I knew what she was capable of. She could blast us out of here, if she wanted.
“If I think that way, Eleanor, it was only because I learned from the best,” Sullivan said. “For an endangered species, you are very casual about killing your own.”
“They are not the easiest race to govern,” snapped Eleanor. “I would like to see you try it.”
“As I recall, I had some suggestions that worked nicely.”
Eleanor backed away from my knife to better glare at Sullivan. “Would have worked nicely. If I’d had an extra set of hands to implement them.”
“I was more than willing to fill that role. I knew the dangers.”