Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception

Page 18

I sat in the far corner, the marble wall cold against my back, and watched Luke take a handful of nails from his pocket. He laid them carefully in a straight line across the mouth of the monument, all pointing in the same slanted direction, before sitting in the opposite corner from me.
“Why?” I asked.
“The direction of the gate. The nails will move if someone tries to come through by force. If They come through such a narrow hole, their—essence—will push the ends around.”
I stared at the nails, unmoving on the marble. “I thought you said They couldn’t go under the archway.”
Luke’s face was pale. “Most of Them.”
I didn’t want to think about that. I whispered, “Do you still want to do this?”
He jerked his chin in another nod. “What do I have to do?”
I bit my lip, feeling suddenly doubtful. What if I’d been wrong about what happened at the Sticky Pig? Maybe I couldn’t really read minds. Maybe it had been a delusion. Maybe we’d braved a midnight journey with something following us just to sit in a cold marble tomb and stare at each other.
“Dee,” Luke said softly. “What do I have to do?”
I looked up; his pale eyes glinted in the chilly darkness. “Let me look at your eyes.”
He sighed and pulled his knees up to his chest, linking his arms around them. His voice was small. “Don’t think less of me.”
Then he fixed his eyes on me. For a moment I could focus on nothing but how nice it was to just be able to unabashedly stare at his face, looking at the straight, narrow line of his nose, the uncertain line of his lips, and the pale eyebrows lowered over his ice-flecked eyes.
A brilliant white bird flapped over his head, startling me. As I jumped, it vanished like smoke in the wind.
Luke was already on his feet. “What?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I saw a bird. It surprised me.”
He grinned, a little nervous. “I was thinking of a bird.”
We returned to our positions, and I began again. “Try something else.”
Even though I knew to expect something, I still started when the clover dropped to the floor between us.
“Clover?” I asked.
Luke nodded.
But I wanted more. Not twenty questions. I wanted the whole enchilada. “Think of nothing.”
He looked uneasy. “Nature abhors a vacuum.” But he nodded to show he was ready.
This time, I began to feel the sensation of seeing into his mind. My forehead between my eyes felt warm as I began to focus, and as the shimmering medium grew in the space between us, I felt a bit of pressure; hesitation. Luke was letting me in, but only barely.
A low, breathy note sounded, but this time I didn’t jump. I could tell now that it was coming from within the shimmer that was Luke’s mind. The flute continued, wending a familiar march around the image of a broad green plain studded with boulders the size of men. The image swept away like grains of sand and in its place was a dark bar, musicians packed elbow to elbow, the frenzied music pounding out some sort of eternal heartbeat. Faster than before, that image was gone, replaced with a set of car keys jangling into the door of a car. Just as fast, another image appeared: me, walking into my first day of high school. Another: a young man with a streak of gold in his dark hair, clapping Luke on the shoulder.
I felt Luke shiver, leaning against the opposite wall. Images kept flashing before my eyes. Luke curled in a small dark space, shuddering with cold. A fiddler playing a reel, Luke’s familiar flute finding counterpoint. A beautiful woman grasping Luke by the back of his neck as he fell to his knees. White lines flying beneath the tires of a car.
And faster still, a slide show on high speed. A wickedly beautiful knife. A young man, falling onto his face in a wet street, a knife jutting from his side.
Another man, in strange clothing, his neck warm and pulsing life between Luke’s hands, gasping and falling. A searing pain in Luke’s chest.
A woman, her shrill cry cut off as a blade sliced her white skin. Hands gripping three iron nails until they left red in his palm.
Another young man, his neck stabbed as neatly as the big cat’s. A girl my age, life gasping out with each breath, crimson around her.
The savage knife ripping shred after shred in Luke’s arm, cutting at the golden band. Lying in a pool of blood and self-destruction. A white bird flapping in blood. Rising out of the blood. Another body. Another. Hands covered with red.
All I could see before my eyes was red, rising with increasing vertigo. I collapsed onto the cold marble, my breaths too slow and far apart. The wounds on my arm stung.
“Enough.” Luke’s voice, barely audible, came from across the floor. He was slumped against the wall, paler than white. His face, colorless and miserable, turned away, and I saw a single tear made of blood drip down his cheek, leaving a red stain behind it.
I knew then that I had done more than read his mind.
twelve
I lay on the marble forever while the gravestones outside marked time, the moon’s shadow moving around them, lighting the other side of their worn surfaces and illuminating Christian names that hadn’t been used in decades. Cold crept through me, passing from the marble into my veins. Every moment that I lay on the cold stone, hoping and dreading that Luke would pull me from the ground, images of death flew through my head. No. Not just death. Murder.
I didn’t know what to think, so my brain just stopped. Then I could sit up. I looked across the dark tomb to where Luke made a light shape on the marble, a strange pale character in an alphabet I didn’t know. His cheek lay against the wall as he stared out into the night, eyes dull. There was still a dried blood trail where the single strange tear had traced its way along his cheekbone and found a path along the edge of his jaw. I followed his gaze out to the headstones and watched the mist, ever thickening, creep around their bases.
Graves. How appropriate.
I thought about asking him if he’d really killed all those people. But then I remembered him saying, Do I scare you?
He’d really killed them.
So he wasn’t a faerie. He was a murderer.
I looked back at him, huddled there so miserable and regretful. Anger boiled in my throat, sudden and hard to swallow. I wondered what twisted logic let him look so torn up over the deaths, now—and then would let him do it again.
“So, that’s your secret?” I snapped. Luke’s head didn’t turn. “You’re not a faerie—you’re just a serial killer?” I should have said “one of Them” instead, but I didn’t care at that point. Supernatural beings seemed the least of my problems.
Luke was perfectly still, just another marble statue in the monument.
Somehow his silence just made me angrier. I found I could get to my feet, and I did, staring down at him from across the ever-widening space between us. “Were you going to kill me, is that what it was? Save me from Them so you could stab me in peace and quiet?”
He still didn’t move. But he asked, his voice dead, “Aren’t you afraid?”
“No! I’m pissed.”
Finally, he looked at me, and his eyes silently begged for understanding. But how could there be understanding for this? It wasn’t wild sex or drugs or a mammoth collection of Britney Spears posters that I’d uncovered in his mind. It was a trail of bodies. Real people, the life cut out of them as quickly as that wild cat’s. It was maybe the one thing I couldn’t forgive. I’d opened up my tightly sealed armor and let him in—and now it hurt.
“So, all those times you asked me if I thought you were sketchy or whatever—it’s because you’re a killer? A murderer?”
His voice was flat. “It’s not like that.”
I hugged my arms around myself. “Oh, how is it, then? They just accidentally got stuck on your knife? Let me guess. It was self-defense. That girl I saw, she was going to kick your ass.”
He shook his head.
He wasn’t even denying it. “How many? How many have you killed?” As if that mattered. As if it were like a math test, where the number of wrong answers affected your score. He was a killer, no matter how many bodies he’d left behind.
“Don’t make me remember.”
“Why? Does it hurt? Don’t you think it hurt them more?” Luke looked like my words cut him, but he had no right to mercy. “How many?” I snapped.
“Don’t make me remember.”
My anger shook my voice, which was wild and out of control. “You asshole. You let me believe you were the good guy. You made me trust you!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t friggin’ cut it! You killed people. Not soldiers. Innocent people. I saw them. They weren’t hurting you! You’re just—you’re just—a monster.” The images were still flashing through my head, the violence perfectly preserved at the moment of death. I wanted to throw up, to somehow get the poison out of my system, but for once, I couldn’t. He hadn’t just killed them—he’d burdened me with the memories of their deaths. As if I’d done it.
I swiped a tear—a real tear, not a weird, bloody one—from my cheek and sank back down onto the floor. My anger was gone as quickly as it had come. I didn’t want to feel anything at all.
“Can you forgive me?” Luke whispered.
I wiped another tear before it had a chance to fall. I wanted him to hurt as badly as I did. I looked at him, shaking my head, wondering how he could even ask.
“How could I?” His eyes held me, begging me to change my mind, pleading for forgiveness. I shook my head again. “No.”
There was a long silence. Years passed before he spoke again.
His voice was barely there. “I didn’t think so.” He slowly stood up, and then he reached out a hand to me. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
I stared at his hand. Did he really think I was going to take it? Those fingers, that strangled a man? That gripped a knife and carved a fine deadly line across a girl’s throat? He must have seen my thoughts in my face, because he dropped his hand. The miserable line of his mouth would have broken my heart if I’d let myself forget all the blood he’d spilled.
I stood up without his hand and lifted my chin. If I’d learned anything from my mother, it was how to look like you were all right when you weren’t. When nothing would be all right again. I turned my expression on him, emotions carefully packed away under ice, and said, “Okay, let’s go.”
I should have been afraid; I knew from his memories that he could kill me before I even knew to run. I even knew where he still kept that wicked dagger, in a scabbard underneath the leg of his jeans. But my fear was locked away with everything else, and I didn’t think I was going to open that box for a long time. Maybe not ever.
Luke sighed and retrieved his three nails from the entrance of the monument. “For what it’s worth—I’m not going to hurt you. I can’t.”
I eyed him frostily. “The same way you ‘can’t’ tell me anything about yourself?”
He shook his head, not looking at me. His eyes scanned the graveyard, though nothing was visible through the cloying mist. “Not that way at all. Come on. Before They come out.”