Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception (24 page)

“Thomas Rhymer. One of Hers. A human. A man. Shall I get more specific?”

“I think that covers it.” I hoped she was going to explain the significance of the bouncy-haired man, because I had no idea how showing me a strange man reading a book was supposed to count as a favor.

“Look how human he is,” Una mused as the man turned a page. I wasn’t sure if this was a commentary on his appearance or on his page-turning ability. “I think you ought to have a little chat with him.”

“Where is he?”

“There.”

I once again fought against the desire to bitch-slap a faerie, and rephrased. “How do I
get
to there?” I hoped to God she didn’t say “walk,” because I really didn’t think I’d be able to stop my fist if she did.

“I forget how stupid you all are,” Una said brightly. She tugged the edge of the circle larger, so I could see that the man sat in the middle of the cow pasture near my house, the one where I’d seen the white rabbit. Then she popped her finger into her mouth as if the glow had burnt her, and turned to me. “Truly, the magnanimous nature of my favor surprises even me.”

Uh. “Thank you,” I said.

She spit through the circle and it vanished like smoke. “And here’s another suggestion, for nothing.
Gratis
. Drown the hound of the Hunter’s you’ve been keeping. You’ll have to hold it under for quite a few minutes.” She made a motion as if she were holding one of her hands under water. “Until the bubbles stop.”

I blinked at her.

She seemed oblivious to my horror, and instead said kindly, with obvious effort, “Would you like your tear back? You’ll need it.”

“No thanks. I think it looks better on you.”

Una grinned at me.

Sara was so clueless trying to get us home that she finally pulled over and let me drive instead. Even though I rarely get to practice driving, I was much better at finding our way back down the back roads. I was almost giddy. Being stolen away by the Faerie Queen and tortured was bad, but it was so much better than being
dead
. Dead was irreversible. Suddenly I was noticing details that I had missed before: just how gorgeous the day was, how loud the cicadas were, how the leaves of the trees were flipping up to reveal their pale undersides, promising a storm later on despite the brilliant blue sky. With my change of mood, I saw something on the way back that I hadn’t noticed before: Luke’s car.

I slammed on the brakes.

Sara screamed. “Holy crap! What are you doing?”

I backed her car up to the little dirt road where I’d seen Luke’s car.

“Sorry. I saw something. I’m just going to check it out, okay? Just—two seconds.”

She squinted out the windows and then reached into the back seat for a magazine. Apparently, she thought that my “two seconds” meant the same as hers. I left her reading and made my way over to where Luke’s car sat, pulled back into the mouth of an overgrown dirt road that was used to access the cornfield behind it. The angle of the car implied a certain haste, and in my head I imagined that Luke had somehow come riding to James’ rescue, pulling him from the car where James was pinned. It was a much better image than a bloodied James dragging himself out of his Pontiac onto the asphalt.

The Audi was unlocked, and though I felt a little foolish, I climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door behind me. Leaning back in Luke’s seat, I closed my eyes and let his smell trick me into thinking he was there in the car with me. Even though I’d only seen him the night before, I missed him unimaginably; the part of me that was in him felt as if it were a million miles away, in a place too distant to ever visit. When I was with him I felt loved, wanted, protected; now I felt like a little boat adrift in a strange dark sea.

I opened my eyes and it was dark; night surrounded the car like a close blanket. It took me a moment to realize that I was in a memory. I was Luke, sitting in the driver’s seat, my heart pounding with adrenaline. Urgency pumped through me—I had to get to the scene of the crash before They did. I swiveled in the seat, looking at a mason jar full of yellow-green paste lying on the passenger-side floor, and thinking I ought to put some of it on my shoes as protection. But no, there had to be enough for Dee and her parents, and I didn’t want to risk wasting it. Anyway, it wasn’t me They wanted; not until Dee was dead, anyway. Crap. I left it lying on the floor and jumped out of the car, hoping the kid was still alive.

The memory snapped to an end with the sound of the door opening. In real life,
my
life, the door was still closed, and I was still sitting firmly in the driver’s seat. I looked over to the passenger-side floor, and sure enough—sitting in the stark shadows cast by the noon sun shining through the windshield—a mason jar full of Granna’s concoction lay on its side. It looked like cat vomit.

So he had found it. I sighed, picked the jar up—oh
nasty
, it was a little warm, like it was living—and got out of the car. I wished I could think of an excuse, something to tell Sara so that I could take Bucephalus back home. Selfishly, I wanted the reminder of Luke close to me.

Movement caught my eye, something blocking the light in the sparse trees that bordered the cornfield. Before me, ten or fifteen feet in front of the car, walked a tall man with skin as brown as the dust of the road. Due to his height, he had to move slowly through the tree branches. He was absolutely naked, his muscles long and sinewy like a deer or a racehorse, and though my attention should have been drawn to his indecent exposure, all I could focus on was his tail. Long and whip-like, it ended in a tuft of hair like a goat’s. The faerie—because that’s what he had to be—paused, and turned his head slowly to look at me. His eyes were too close together, and his nose was too long and thin over his wide mouth to be human. It was the gaze of a feral thing, a creature that knew what I was and was both unafraid and disinterested. I waited long moments until he was out of sight, and then I bolted to Sara’s car and got in, cradling the jar carefully.

“What’s that?” Sara put her magazine down.

“It’s some sort of anti-faerie juice that my Granna made.”

“Whoa. Oh. Where’d you get it?”

I pointed. “Luke’s car.”

“Luke is that cute guy? Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Sara frowned. “I’m getting creeped out. This is totally starting to sound like a horror flick, and everybody knows the hot chick dies first. Let’s get out of here.”

We did, leaving the only evidence of Luke’s existence on the dusty road behind us.

seventeen

W
hy are you looking up ‘solstice’?”

Hunched over my father’s laptop computer, manically tapping in things like “solstice,” “gallowglass,” and “Thomas Rhymer” into search engines, I hadn’t even heard Delia approach.

“Holy crap!” I swallowed my racing heartbeat. This sneaking-up thing of hers was getting really annoying. I turned to look at her and found her next to my shoulder, holding a cup of coffee, staring down at me with her green eyes. God, she looked
alive
. It was as if she’d been a black and white photo, and now suddenly color was blooming into her. It scared the crap out of me. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad for putting the Granna concoction on my parents’ shoes and leaving hers unprotected.

Delia leaned over my shoulder and read the screen. It was a frilly website called “The Fairy Patch,” with lists of plants that would attract faeries to your garden. The part I was reading was talking about how the midsummer solstice thinned the veil between the human world and the faerie world. The site recommended putting out saucers of milk and burning thyme to encourage optimal faerie visitation. Without success, I had tried to imagine the goat-faerie—or better yet, Aodhan—lapping up milk like a tame kitten. Where did they come up with this crap?

Delia laughed. “What else have you got there?”

I contemplated making a run for it with the laptop, but instead I flinched away and let her reach over the top of my hand to click through the other open windows. Her eyes scanned the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer—stolen away by the Faerie Queen and given a tongue that could not lie—and then moved to the website with the definition of “gallowglass”: a hired mercenary in ancient Irish history. Her eyes reflected the square of the monitor as she read. When she’d finished, she stepped back.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s for a school project.”

I don’t know why that scared me so badly, but it did. It somehow stepped over the line of hinted-at strangeness to out-and-out malevolence. I considered my words carefully. “I think that would be like you telling me that you hadn’t met Luke before the music competition.”

Delia paused; it was her turn in this verbal chess match. “I think I have a promising search for your school project.” She leaned over me again, placed the cursor in the search engine box, and typed “how to free hostages.” She hit
enter
with a manicured nail.

I stared at the list of news articles and blog postings and remembered Delia handing me the phone earlier that day. She’d known what had happened to James, hadn’t she? And then she’d called his house to make sure
I
found out.

“He must be very badly hurt,” Delia said to the room in general. “I heard there was a tremendous amount of blood. If he’s still alive, he must not have much time.”

I wanted to close my eyes and ears, shut out her voice, pretend that in my increasingly weird life at least the diva aunt stayed the same. “What are you saying?”

Delia held out her hand. “Why don’t you give me Granna’s ring?”

I blinked up at her, jolted out of my bewilderment by the request. “No, I don’t think so. Granna wanted me to have it.”

“And it belongs with her now.”

“I said
no
.”

Delia’s hand snaked out and grabbed my wrist with surprising force; I gasped with pain as she gripped the ring with her other hand and ripped it off, tugging the skin up with it. She threw my wrist away from her and shoved the ring in her pocket. I stared up at her, the presence of Luke’s key burning against my skin, hidden by the collar of the light sweater I wore, afraid that she would somehow divine its existence and rip it from me as well.

“Now, you’re going for a walk,” she said, gesturing to the door that lead outside.

“Are you out of your mind?” I jumped up and retreated toward the living room, regretting that I’d chosen Dad’s study for my research. I guess I should have run faster, but I couldn’t shake the image of her as just my bossy aunt. “Mom!”

Delia grabbed my arm again, her fingers iron clamps. “She can’t hear you.”

I twisted and writhed, my skin burning under her grasp. “What do you get out of this?”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re that stupid.” Delia dragged me unceremoniously toward the French doors. I should have been able to escape from her grasp, but her body was wiry and unyielding beneath her pink velour armor. It reminded me of the endless
Cops
episodes I’d watched at Granna’s, where they’d said people on highs had inhuman strength. “You’ve put everything else together, haven’t you?”

And just like that, everything snapped neatly into place. The room in Granna’s house where Delia had nearly died. The wet feet on Mom’s bed. Rye, the faerie hound, who had been in the family before I was born. This had started a long, long time before me. “Your life. They saved your life.”

“Don’t forget the best part,” Delia said, and she sang a perfect scale in the pristine voice that had netted her a record deal. “Do you think this voice was mine?”

I whispered, “It was Mom’s, wasn’t it?”

She shoved me hard, reaching for the door handle, and I moved to brace myself against the glass. Too late, I saw that the glass door was already open, and that she’d been reaching for the screen door handle instead. She’d shoved me so hard that I felt the screen give way and tear beneath my weight. I crashed down onto the brick patio, my head striking the ground. My vision throbbed and I gasped, “What do you want from me?”

Delia stared down at me, her eyes hard and glittering. “I just want you gone.”

She slammed the glass door; I heard the lock
snick
shut. I groaned, sitting up slowly, pulling my bare feet close to my body. As I did, I saw a little metal plate by the door. A twisted bit of black lay on it, still smoking.
Thyme!
She’d burnt thyme and then she’d thrown me outside.

I barely had time to think
my friggin’ aunt betrayed me
when I saw a brown-and-gold-haired faerie striding up through the back yard. A hundred Rye-dogs milled about his ankles—some lean as greyhounds, some huge as mastiffs, but all the same color as Rye.

Casting no shadow in the afternoon sun, the faerie was curiously difficult to see with the trees as a backdrop. He wore odd, tight-fitting clothing in varying colors of green and brown. The body of the jerkin and his leggings were made of leather, and the sleeves were made of something like suede or moss. Dried braids of grass were tied on the outside of each leg and hung in loose bunches at the cuff of each sleeve, like the frills on a Victorian costume or stuffing hanging from a scarecrow. He looked as if he had been made from the earth and could return to it just as easily, but his features had the same fearful symmetry as Freckle Freak and Eleanor, lending him otherworldly beauty.

His head was turning from side to side—he hadn’t seen me yet. I could have tried the door to the house, but I saw Delia on the other side, a massive malevolent presence. I hesitated a bare moment, and then leapt up and began to run. As I bolted across the yard, legs pumping, I was reminded of something Granna had once said:
dogs only chase cats that run
. But it was a little late to change my mind now.

When I cut across our yard into our neighbors’, darting around the maze of terra-cotta pots that dotted their yard, I heard a long, thin wail. It was a terrible sound even without knowing that it meant the hounds had begun their chase. A second later, white bodies burst through the brush, and I heard the shattering of pots. By then I was already into the hayfield beyond our neighbors’ yard, cool blades of grass crushing beneath my feet, the sight of the tree-lined road beyond the field giving me newfound speed.

The sun burned me as I scrambled through the waist-high timothy grass, casting a shadow that was pursued by one hundred bodies with none. That high-pitched wail came again, long and reedy, more bird-like than hound-like, and the bigger mastiff hounds began to cry low and melodic behind it. I tore my sweater off as I ran, feeling faster because of it.

But the hounds were gaining on me. There was no way I was going to make it to the road, much less to the cow pasture, before they caught me. I heard hay being crushed to the ground, close behind me.

I’m faster
, I thought fiercely.
Hounds are fast, but I’m faster.

And I was. I cleared the tangled brush in the ditch by the field and leapt onto the dappled road on the other side. The hounds were still behind me, not on top of me. My breath was beginning to tear at my lungs, and my knees were aching. My feet slapped hard against the asphalt, and I stole glances over at the cow pasture on my right, looking for anything I’d recognize from Una’s glowing vision of Thomas Rhymer. Up ahead was where I’d found Luke in his car that day; it had to be somewhere along here.

I glanced behind me and wished I hadn’t; a wall of white dogs filled the width of the road like an oncoming wave, and behind them, walking calmly, was that green-clad Hunter with the two-toned hair.

Please be there. Thomas Rhymer, be there.
There was nothing saying that things would be all right once I found him in the cow pasture, but they
would
be. They had to be. Because I’d seen how close Una could get to the key, and I didn’t want to think of what one hundred hounds could do with their newfound midsummer power.

Gasping, I ran to the edge of the cow pasture, hoping at least for some iron barbed wire that would slow the hounds down, but there was only a board fence. Damn our county codes for not allowing ugly fences. I clambered over the fence, more slowly than I would have liked, and suddenly, I saw the gentle slope of the cow pasture—the top of the hill from Una’s vision.

Behind me, hounds hit boards and some of the lighter ones cleared it in a single leap. In my head, I repeated again, firmly:
I’m faster. I’m going to find Thomas. I’ll be safe then.

Up the hill I went, muscles groaning, and the hounds streamed after me. I just had time to see that there was a lumpy ring of mushrooms growing at the top of the hill before paws brushed against my leg.
This is it
.

I jumped into the ring, and there was silence.

No, not quite silence. It was as if I had just stuck a pair of earplugs in; the frustrated howl of the hounds had not gone away, it had just grown muffled and distant. I looked behind me, beyond the circle of mushrooms, and saw nothing but the broad field sloping gently down toward the road. If I squinted toward where I knew the hounds ought to be, I thought I could see vague smears of light and dark, imperfections in my vision.

“You certainly know how to make an entrance, don’t you?
She
has quite a retinue as well, though they’re a good deal less hairy than yours.”

I knew who I’d see before I turned. As in Una’s vision, Thomas the Rhymer had long, curly hair and eyes surrounded by laugh lines. He was long and skinny and wore a multicolored tunic, with dozens of buttons up the front, over a pair of close-fitting leather leggings. He looked up at me from his cross-legged perch on the ground, casting a long, long afternoon shadow that fell outside the mushroom circle.

I panted, relieved. “You’re
here
.”

He smiled at me, puzzled. “Of course I am.
You
are.”

“You know who I am?”

“Deirdre Monaghan. We all know your name now.” It was hard to imagine any harm coming from him. His words formed around broad Scottish vowels. “Even if I didn’t know your face, your ability to do
that
—” he gestured to the nearly invisible hounds circling the mushroom ring, “tells me who you are.”

I didn’t want to look stupid by asking him to clarify. I think he meant the fact that the hounds couldn’t pass into the circle. Or maybe he just meant the fact that I was being chased by a hundred of them. That was probably it.

“Is it true you can’t lie?”

“Yes. But, you know I’d say that if I
could
lie.” He shrugged and watched my long shadow; its edges shimmered as invisible bodies passed over the top of it, outside the circle. “Of course, I’ll let you look in my head if you like.”

It was tempting, but I didn’t feel like potentially adding the memories of a curly-haired prophet with a Scottish brogue to the ones I already had juggling around in my head. “I’ll take your word for it. Una—one of the
Daoine Sidhe—
told me I should talk to you, and showed me this place.”