Ballad (25 page)

James

This was hell.

Hell was waiting for her to scream. Hell was watching her fists ball, her hair singe, her mouth make the shape of tears even though the heat stole the drops before they could run down her face.

She fell to her knees.

I couldn’t move. I just stood there, my hands clenched at my sides, the fire searing my cheeks. I couldn’t stop shaking.

Hell was seeing that it was going to take a long time to burn Nuala to nothing.

Nuala

Human.

Human.

Human.

Please, please, human.

James

It took me too long to find my voice, and for a horrible second I thought I’d forgotten how to say her name, even though I’d just said it to her. However long ago that was. Seconds? Minutes? Hours?

“
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
,” I said. Softly. In case anyone was listening.

Nuala screamed.

Shit.

The scream trailed off, thin and wet-sounding, but I couldn’t stop hearing it. Worse, I couldn’t stop seeing the shape of her face when she did it. My brain just kept playing it over and over again, imposing it over her dark form in the flames, twisting and shaking.

I folded my arms over my chest, my fists white-knuckled against my body, and I said, “
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
.”

She screamed again.

Goose bumps burst along my skin. Maybe Eleanor could lie. Maybe she could bend the truth. I didn’t know what my words were doing to Nuala, but I was scared shitless to say her name a third time.

“Piper!”

I jerked at the sound of the voice. At first I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and then I realized it was coming from behind me. How far behind, I couldn’t tell. Somewhere out in that hungry darkness.

“Piper! James Morgan!”

I squinted into the blackness, relieved for the second’s rest from watching Nuala burn.

“Piper, if you love the cloverhand, you will come here.”

My stomach flipped over, unpleasantly, as I turned and saw a faerie crouched in the darkness, about forty feet from the bonfire. His skin was tinged greenish, making him look like a corpse in the moving firelight. “What do you want?”

“Didn’t the
leanan sidhe
tell you? To watch the cloverhand tonight?” The faerie stood up, a long, elegant gesture that somehow seemed inhuman. “They’re going to kill her, and make a new king of the dead from her heart, piper. He’ll control us and the dead, with the cloverhand’s powers. For us, it will be ignoble. For you and every other human, it will be hell.”

I looked over my shoulder at the bonfire. I could still see Nuala, a dark form in the voracious flames, and on the other side, the figures of dancing students.

“Why should I trust you?” I asked him, but really, what I wanted to know was why I should leave Nuala in those flames by herself when I promised her I would watch her and say her name. And now I had to start all over again —seven times uninterrupted, Eleanor had said, and watch her burn from beginning to end.

The faerie smiled a thin smile, white teeth in the darkness. “We saved your life once, don’t you remember, piper? When she asked us, we saved your life. She traded Luke Dillon’s life for yours.”

My heart stopped beating. I couldn’t breathe.

“I don’t think you understand, human. They’re taking her cloverhand powers. They’ll be able to go anywhere, do anything. And they’re
killing
her for it. I thought you loved her.”

Now I heard another scream, this time from beyond where the faerie stood, and I knew that voice too. It was too like her singing voice to be anyone else’s. The faerie didn’t flinch. “Piper, I would not be here talking to you if you were not what was needed.”

“I need—I need a second,” I demanded. I turned back to the bonfire. Nuala was on her knees, hands covering her face, her hair and fingertips black, her shoulders shaking. It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t she supposed to pass out—get some sort of mercy?

“
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
,” I said. Nuala shuddered, hard enough for me to see it. “
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
.” She balled up her broken fingers against her face. “
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
.” I whispered her name four more times, and each time, Nuala wailed, agonized and awful.

If only I could do both. How could it take so long for her to burn?

And behind me, another scream sounded, and this one echoed Nuala’s, full of pain. Dee’s voice. I had to decide.

In my head, I knew I had to try to save Dee. She was the more important. Even if she hadn’t been Dee, she was powerful and she could make the fey powerful. There wasn’t any question—this was why Eleanor had told me how to keep Nuala’s memories. Because she was betting that I would stay by Nuala’s side to watch her burn from beginning to end instead of interfering with whatever they were doing.

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.”

Eleanor looked away, her expression furious. “That was not a price I was willing to pay.”

“And this is?” Sullivan asked.

Eleanor looked back at him.

And then there was an unremarkable
pop
.

I didn’t understand what the
pop
meant until, behind Sullivan, I saw Delia, Dee’s damn, ever-present evil aunt, step over the two faerie bodies by the door. In her hand was a very small, fake-looking gun.

Sullivan very carefully laid a hand on his stomach, and then stumbled in slow-motion against one of the folding chairs. I closed my eyes, but I saw what happened anyway. He fell to his hands and knees and threw up, flowers and blood.

“I can’t believe I’m going to have to be the one with the backbone here,” Delia said. “I’ve been staying in a hotel for two weeks and spending every single evening up to my elbows in dead fey. Cut her heart out before I get pissed off.”