“No.” Sullivan went to the window and heaved his shoulder against it. It creaked and then gave. He slid it up a few inches; cold air rushed in along with the song. It tugged at my bones, urging me to rise up and follow. It took all my willpower not to jump up and run outside. “Lots of people—well, not lots—many people hear him in October, up until Halloween.”
“Why?” Paul asked. “Why do I have to hear it?”
Sullivan shook his head. “I don’t know. He says different things to different people. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy.” Somehow, though, it wasn’t reassuring. He said it like being crazy might be a more appealing alternative. He went to his counter and got a notepad; he laid it down in front of Paul’s face.
Paul obediently picked up the pen from next to our papers. “What’s this for?”
Sullivan shifted the window open a bit more and looked at me again before he answered Paul. “I’d be very grateful if you’d write down the names he’s telling you.”
James
The lobby of Seward was an immensely safe sort of space, and I was definitely needing womb-like security in a major way by that point. It had four of the world’s most comfortable chairs, which is important in a safe space, and four squashy ottomans to go with each of them. It also had four alcoves in each of the corners, each containing a wonder of the world. North corner: a piano older than Moses, that sounded like a calliope. South corner: a reproduction of a Greek statue—some headless chick with perfect boobs. East corner: a bookshelf with every piece of Important Fiction That You’ll Never Read in Impressive Hardcover. West corner: vending machine (because sometimes Doritos were all the breakfast you were going to get).
It was two o’clock in the morning. Down the hall, Sullivan was behind his closed door, oblivious to my wandering. Somewhere on the fourth floor, Paul was snoring. I envied his ability to sleep. I felt like I ought to pace or scream or something; I couldn’t stop thinking about Halloween. Every time I did, my hair stood on end again and fresh goose bumps spread along my shoulders. Sleep was out of the question.
The lobby held its breath, silent and dark, tinted weirdly red-orange by the streetlights outside the front windows. The world’s most comfortable chairs cast shadows that stretched and grew to ten times the size of the chairs themselves. I crashed in one of them and sat there, so motionless that it felt like I had forgotten how to move.
I felt alone.
I didn’t have a pen. I took the worry stone out of my pocket and ran my thumb over it until the urge to mark my skin faded.
Nuala, are you here?
“I’m here,” she whispered from one of the other chairs; she sat on the very edge of it, as if ready to jump up and run if she had to. I don’t know why she bothered whispering if I was the only one who could hear her, but I was too glad to see her to tease her about it. I hadn’t seen her since the practice on the hill, and I’d almost thought she’d gone for good. Sort of half-standing, I dragged my chair across the wood floor until our chairs faced each other and our bare knees were touching.
I looked into Nuala’s face. I didn’t really want to ask her the question out loud. Do you really think we’re going to die, like Paul thinks? And do you think it’ll be Them that does it? I mean, not a freak dorm fire?
In the dim light, Nuala’s pale eyes were black and I could see dark circles beneath them. “They’re killing faeries. Solitary faeries, like me. The ones that have a lot of contact with humans. I saw the bodies. Maybe they think we’ll warn you of something. Not that they’ve told us shit.”
It was weird to think that she looked tired. She looked very human and vulnerable, dwarfed by the sheer size of the chair behind her. If it had been Dee, I’d have needed to comfort her or make a joke, but with Nuala, I didn’t have to pretend. She could already see what was inside my head, so there wasn’t any point in showing her anything but the truth.
And the truth was I was starting to feel like things were getting out of control. I dropped my face into my hands and rubbed my eyes until I saw sparks of color.
“Haven’t you already seen it, though? You’re supposed to be super-great-seer-guy.” Nuala’s voice was bitter, as if she thought I’d deliberately withheld tales of imminent death and destruction from her.
“Nuala, all of Paul’s revelations, you telling me there’s worse than you here, something weird going on with Dee—it’s all news to me. I’m just not a good psychic. I can tell when something’s not right, sometimes, but I can’t tell what it is, or when it is, or if I’m supposed to do anything about it. I’ve tried to make it make sense, but I can’t. It’s just feelings instead of words. And you want the honest-to-God truth? There’s so much weirdness going on I can’t even pick out what makes my hair stand on end. I’m just—” I stopped.
“ … overloaded,” Nuala finished for me, reading my thoughts. “Whatever’s happening has to be something big as hell.”
I jerked, thinking I heard sounds in the night. Both of us froze, sitting quietly, listening, until we were sure there was only the sound of trucks rushing distantly by on the highway and that it was just us.
Even though the dorm was silent, I didn’t speak out loud again. Instead, I rubbed my thumbs over Nuala’s slender, bare knees, tracing the lines of her bones and the place where her kneecaps pushed against my kneecaps. I stared at the shadows we cast on the floor. What the hell’s going on, Nuala? Why won’t They leave us alone? What could They possibly want from us?
She was silent a long moment, watching my lettered fingers on her skin. Her voice was a little uneven: “Power. She wants power. I think she’s made an alliance with the daoine sidhe.”
Those are the ones called by music, aren’t they? I thought they were enemies of the queen.
“Of the old queen. The one your not-girlfriend helpfully got killed in all her teen brilliance. That was back when the daoine sidhe could only appear on Solstice, or with awesome music. But something’s changed. It couldn’t be that way unless the new queen was allowing it. The faerie that—” Nuala stopped, tried again. “The faerie you saw—the swan a**hole—he was one of them. He shouldn’t have been able to dance unless it was Solstice.”
“I’d like to find him.” The words surprised me. Out loud, and angry.
Nuala looked at me, eyes dark and fierce, and her expression said: me too.
“You look tired,” I said. For some reason, I didn’t like to see her looking tired, just like I didn’t like to hear her falter when she described the swan faerie.
She didn’t even think before answering, which I was beginning to figure out meant she was lying. “No, I don’t.” She looked away from me and then said, abruptly, “I’ll find out what they’re doing. I don’t have anything to lose. I’ll be dead in a week and a half anyway.”
I sighed, and pressed my hands flat against the sides of her legs, waiting for my arms to race with goose bumps. Nothing happened. “You’ll rise again, though. Like a phoenix, right? From the ashes. So you won’t really die.”
Nuala made a harsh gesture toward her chest. “This girl will die. Everything that makes me who I am now will be gone. Just because another body climbs from the ashes doesn’t mean it’s me.”
I slid my hand along her thighs just far enough to take each of her hands where they were braced by her legs. I gathered them into my own and held them between us. She had such long, soft hands. Nothing like my square, blocky palms, with fingers muscled hard from so much piping. “I’d be freaking out if I were you. You’re so brave it makes me feel bad.”
“You’re brave,” Nuala said. “Stupidly so. It’s part of your charm.”
I shook my head. “This summer, before I had my car accident, I knew I was going to crash. I knew the moment I woke up that day to go to the gig. I knew it all day long. I just kept waiting for it to happen.” I laughed in a very unfunny way. “I was a wreck all day. And then, when it happened, all I could think was, so this is it.”
“You can’t read my mind.” Nuala’s hands were tense in mine. “I’m freaking out. You wouldn’t think I was so brave if you knew what I was thinking.”
I looked at her. “What are you thinking?”
She immediately dropped her eyes to our hands; our fingers had somehow knotted together. My rough, written-on fingers all tangled around her slender, unmarked ones. “How hard it is. How unfair. How much it’s going to hurt like a bitch to get burned alive.” She laughed, too, harsh and unhappy.
“Why do you go? If you know you’re going to die in a bonfire on Halloween, why not just lock yourself in a room somewhere? Then when they light the fires and ask you to come out, just tell them they can put their matches where the sun don’t shine.”
Nuala gave me the most scathing look in the history of scathing looks. “What a clever idea. I’ve never thought of that. And I’m sure all the previous versions of myself never did either. Idiot.”
“Okay, okay. Point taken. This will probably earn another scathing look, but are you sure?”
“Sure about what? You being an idiot?” Nuala laughed derisively, but her fingers were trembling in mine; I held her fingers tight to still them.
“Sure that you’re going to be burned.”
“Were you sure you were going to die in a car crash?”
She had me. I made a face.
“I just know, okay? Everyone else knows and a million faeries have told me, but even before that, I knew. I can’t even stand to be near a candle.” Nuala’s shoulders shivered; she clamped her arms to her sides to still them. “I thought for the past few years that it would be the dying that really hurt, because it’s not like I had anything worth remembering. Nothing I couldn’t do again, you know? But now it’s the forgetting. I don’t want to forget.”