Sullivan picked the lettuce out of his sandwich with an unconsciously curled lip. “I’m just telling you that she ought to be fading—getting more invisible—if she’s not taking anything from you. And if anything, she looks even less … ethereal than she did when I last saw her.” Nuala looked about to protest, so he added quickly, “I saw your sister fading between victims, once.”
Nuala shut up. She didn’t just shut up, she went totally quiet. Like a total absence of sound, movement, blinking, breathing. She was a statue. And then she just said, real quiet, “My sister?”
“You didn’t know you had—well, I guess you wouldn’t, would you?” Sullivan worried the tomatoes out of his sandwich and laid them in a careful pile that didn’t touch the lettuce. “Of course, she didn’t look like you when I saw her—since you can look like anything. But she was a leanan sidhe as well. I wouldn’t have thought you were related if Eleanor hadn’t told me. Same father. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
The last bit seemed a little incongruous with his previous attitude toward her. Maybe her struck silence had softened him.
“There are two of us?”
“Both called by the same names,” Sullivan said. He looked at her as if this was supposed to mean something to her. “Overhills. As in, the opposite of under hill. As in, human. It wasn’t a nice term.”
“Wait,” I said. “So They called Nuala human?”
I didn’t think I’d put any hopefulness in my voice, but Sullivan said quickly, “Not literally. Only because the leanan sidhe spent so much time with humans and often looked like them. Even picked up human habits.”
I thought of Nuala sitting in the movie theater, imagining herself as a director. Very human.
I realized that Sullivan was staring at Nuala and turned to look at her. She had her eyes closed and one of her more wickedly pleased smiles on her face. In her hand was a half-eaten chip.
“I told you you’d like chips,” I told her.
Nuala opened her eyes. “I could survive on nothing but them.”
“You’d be four hundred pounds in no time.” Sullivan swallowed a bite of sandwich. “I’ve never seen one of Them eating human food. Well, there are stories of some of the diminutive sorts eating beans and things like that, though I’ve never seen it. But—when did you start eating human food? Do you remember the first time?”
The memory of sucking a grain of rice off Nuala’s lip made my stomach kind of twist.
“James gave me some of his rice. A few days ago.”
Sullivan narrowed his eyes and ate several more bites of sandwich to aid his thought process. “What if it’s a reverse of what happens to humans in Faerie? It’s pretty well known that if you eat food offered to you in Faerie, you’ll be trapped there forever. I’ve never heard the reverse said for faeries and human food, but I can’t think of many situations where a faerie would be in the position to accept food from a human anyway. Except, of course, for the lovely, ulcer-causing scenario you two have developed for me.”
“I can’t become human,” Nuala said. Her voice was fierce, either with anger or despair.
Sullivan held up a defensive hand. “I didn’t say that. But you have a dual nature anyway. Maybe you’re just swaying toward one or the other. James.”
I blinked, realizing he was addressing me. “What?”
“Paul already told us he hears Cernunnos every evening. You remained tactfully silent on the subject but I had my suspicions.”
I put my sandwich down. “You totally can’t give me grief for this one. I haven’t made any deals or talked to Cernunnos or anything that you can possibly construe as detrimental to my health or anyone else’s.”
“Easy, easy. I just thought that if you heard or saw him, you could point your new friend here in his direction. I don’t know what his nature is, but maybe he knows more about her situation.” Sullivan glanced at the cars going by. “Eleanor hinted at a connection between Cernunnos and the leanan sidhe sisters.”
“What if the connection is like the one between me and this sandwich?” I asked. “I don’t really feel like sending Nuala out to meet the king of the dead if she’s losing all her bad-ass supernatural capabilities for one reason or another. It’s not like she can just kick him in the nuts if things start to go badly.”
Sullivan shrugged. “It’s my best suggestion. What else is there? You said it was her sixteenth year, didn’t you? So … for all we know she’ll revert back to normal after she burns.”
“If I burn,” Nuala said. She looked down at her plate.
“What?” I demanded.
“Maybe I don’t want to,” she said.
There was silence at the table. Sullivan broke it, gently. “Nuala.” It was the first time he’d actually said her name. “I saw your sister burn, while I was in Faerie. She had to. I know you don’t want to—it’s horrible that you have to—but you’ll die otherwise.”
Nuala didn’t look up from her plate. “Maybe I’d rather that than come back the way I was before.” She balled her napkin up and put it on the table. “I think I have to go the bathroom.” She flashed a fake smile at me. “First time for everything, right?”
She pushed away from the table and disappeared into the deli.
Sullivan sighed and pushed on one of his eyes with two fingers. “This is a bit of bad work, James. Her sister is nowhere near as human as her. She didn’t even seem to feel it when she was burning. Nuala—” He did the same eyes-half-shut gesture he’d done before, the almost cringe. “It’ll be like burning a human alive.”
I got out my worry stone and worried the hell out of it with my fingers. I concentrated on the shape of the circle my thumb made as it swiped the stone.
“You were right, okay? That’s what I’m trying to say,” Sullivan said. “She isn’t like the others. You were still a complete idiot for not running like hell from her, but she is different.”
“I’m going with her to see Cernunnos,” I said. Sullivan opened his mouth. “You know you can’t stop me. I know it’s what you would do. Tell me how to make it safer. If there’s anything.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “As your teacher and dorm resident advisor, I’m supposed to be keeping you out of trouble, not getting you into it.”
“It was your idea. Some little part of you must’ve wanted me to go, or you wouldn’t have said it in front of me.”
“Don’t try reverse psychology on me,” Sullivan said. He smashed his fingers into the wrinkle between his eyes. “I would go with you, but I don’t hear him this year. You don’t go to him unless he calls you. That would be … insane. Shit, James. I don’t know. Wear red. Put salt in your pockets. That’s always good advice.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from a teacher,” I said.
“I can’t believe I’m a teacher telling you this.”
I wrote red and salt on my hand just as Nuala came out of the deli. Whatever emotion she’d felt before she went in was gone, replaced by a certain fierceness in her eyes.
“Ready to go?” I asked.
James
If Nuala had still been able to read my thoughts, she would’ve killed me. Because I thought, as we waded through the long grass together, that she looked very human, despite her insistence that she couldn’t become one. While we were in town, I’d bought her a sweater and some jeans (both of which she hated since they covered most of her skin—which was the idea) so that she wouldn’t freeze to death while we were traversing the hills this evening.
And it wasn’t like it was a bad thing that she looked human. It made the fact that I was holding her hand and going out to meet the king of the dead a little less scary. And it made the idea that maybe, just maybe, she’d remember me after Halloween and we might have a future beyond making out in the dorm lobby just a little more plausible.
“It’s cold as hell out here,” Nuala snapped.
“It’s almost like I knew what I was talking about when I said you were going to need a sweater,” I told her.
“Shut up,” she said. She was a dull brown silhouette against the staggering pink sky. Some of the trees at the base of the hills had already lost their leaves, and their bare black branches made it look like it was already winter. “You’re scaring away the dead people. Do you hear the thorn king yet, or what?”
I didn’t. I had spent so many nights pretending that I didn’t that I wondered if I still could. It seemed like it was late enough that he should be out here, doing his antlered thing, but the hills were silent. Except for us crashing through the tall grass. During the day, the sound of the grass had seemed minimal, masked by the gusts of wind, but now, with the wind reduced to a silent, icy breeze, our crashing progress sounded like a bunch of elephants. “Big fat nothing so far. Let’s go out further, though, to where I saw him before.”
“Walk more quietly,” Nuala hissed.
“There isn’t a way to walk more quietly. Anyway, you’re talking—that’s louder than us just walking.”
She jerked at my hand. “Nothing in the world can be louder than you walking right now.”
“Except for your strident voice, dear,” I countered. “Like a harpy, its shr–oof.”
I stopped walking so fast that Nuala’s hand twisted out of mine and she stumbled.
“What?” Nuala rubbed the skin on her hand and returned to my side.
“Sorry,” I said, without feeling. I looked down. “I ran into something.”
At my feet was a pile of something. A pile of someone. It was sprawled in a sort of strung-out way that I didn’t think a living someone could manage. For one-fourth of a breath, my brain thought: Dee. But then I realized it was a guy. In a tunic jacket, leggings, and leather bootie-things. Either a very lost reenactor or someone who’d been messing around with fairies.