Mercy (13 page)

Chapter 14
Waterfall

Maeva ran her fingers along smooth ivory piano keys in the choir room. She tapped out a few notes with her right hand, the beginning of an old song covered by Bon Iver. It was almost four, and her duet partner, Charlotte Rountree, hadn’t shown up yet. Charlotte lived with her grandma in one of the rougher houses on sixth. In elementary she was the girl with the best homemade chocolate chip cookies. Charlotte became eccentric last year, and it wasn’t one of those gradual transitions either. She used to have really pretty light brown downy hair, freckle-spattered cheeks and soft blue eyes, now she had green cat eye contacts and bright pink streaks.

They were supposed to be practicing a Cyndi Lauper song,
Time After Time
, trading off the solos while the rest of the choir carried the a capella background. She put her left hand on the notes making a C chord, then shifted her fingers, picking up the tempo and launching into the full piano solo of the Bon Iver song stuck in her head,
I can’t make you love me
. She had been playing it on her iPhone on repeat for the past couple of weeks. Sure, it wasn’t the original version but she liked the lead singer’s voice. There was something special about the way men sang soprano. She took a breath as she reached the first verse and sang. Cool, easy notes flowed off her tongue, sounding nothing like the male voice she loved, but everything like her own voice, crisp, melodic, and innocent.

She sang, pausing to let the piano swell. Her foot tapped the pedals, making the notes linger. Her fingers memorized the chords but she forgot some of the lyrics. She listened in her head for a moment, and picked it up at the chorus. She choked, her voice cutting out, her heart constricting. Her fingers fumbled over the keys and she lost the tune, slamming her hands on the keys, a loud unmusical sound echoing through the room. She sighed and pushed the bench back, resting her head on the keys. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to regulate her breathing.

Michael came to class, sat beside her, didn’t speak a word, and waited until she left before moving a muscle. For weeks since he first showed up in her Photography class he ignored her. Her original theory about him wanting to hurt her seemed absurd, and later assumptions of him disliking her seemed dead on. She didn’t know what to think of him anymore. He moved with the lithe gracefulness of a predatory animal, but he also did things to draw less attention to himself.

When the temperature dropped he added a black leather jacket to his ensemble. When it dropped again he added a scarf. He wore nothing but black. Boots, pants, shirts, all of them black. The only thing that stood out about him was his sapphire blue eyes and ghostly white skin. Sometimes she noticed a blush in his lips from the cold. Sometimes that blush tickled the tips of his ears, but otherwise he was a blank slate. His attitude towards her was dead pan and lifeless, his presence next to her warmed her, but didn’t seem to have an effect on him whatsoever. Then again, she didn’t consider herself a pretty girl. She had unruly black curls and caramel colored eyes, which resembled prisms of fractured light, shards of yellow, green, and brown twisting into the coal colored irises. She wasn’t athletic, tall, or tan. Her skin rejected the sun, and in the summer she used SPF60 to avoid peeling.

Steph was the pretty one, straight strawberry blonde hair, perfect tan, and skinny limbs. Plus, she played volleyball. Steph didn’t have to plot to get Tait’s attention, he made the move on her, some obscene gesture involving a lot of limbs, and one poor freshmen whose hand got caught in the slamming crossfire of a locker door. Apparently there was kissing. Maeva thought she’d hear every detail from Steph but by the time she commandeered the living room computer, Steph had already spilled to Emily in London and was heading to bed.

Adding insult to injury was the embarrassment of showing up at her house the day after the epic kissing incident only to find Tait in his F150 stationed outside her house. There were moments Maeva wished she could rewind and do over because they were unavoidable pits of pure humiliation. She pulled around Tait, pretending it was on her way, and waited for an exorbitant amount of time at the awkward intersection. Tait honked and she narrowly cut someone off, nearly destroying the Sundance.

Her iPhone buzzed and she stood, pulling it off the piano and checking the messages. Orange plastic chairs were arranged in a semi-circle around the piano, skeletons of metal music stands in front of them. She turned to the wall behind her, reaching for the lights while reading the one text message from her mom. She sighed, realizing Charlotte stood her up. She wandered the halls to her locker and absently twirled the lock, knowing the combination so well she didn’t really need to look at the numbers. Opening it, she wrapped her black, white and gray scarf around her neck, added a zip up black hoodie, thick black parka and thin finger gloves. She left the thicker gloves in her car for the canoeing part. Sure, the lake would be frozen soon but in the meantime it was evil. Strong winds rocked the boat, and Maeva had that horrible stomach-dropping-might-get-tossed-from-the-canoe feeling more than a few times.

She closed her locker and frowned, noticing the note taped to the front of it. She glanced self-consciously up and down the halls, wondering if the culprit was still in sight, but the halls were empty by this time of day. She looked at the note. It was a bunch of numbers—coordinates. A little thrill raced through her as she snatched the note and stuffed it into her pocket. She knew roughly where those coordinates would take her, and didn’t need a canoe to get there. She slung her heavy backpack over her shoulders and slid her iPhone into her pocket, threading the ear buds through her jacket and her hoodie. She clicked shuffle and headed to her car.

She cringed against the cold as she stepped outside. The first snowfall had been on Halloween, not that it really mattered anymore. She was too old to go out trick or treating, and she was too unpopular to be invited to any house parties. She gratefully stayed inside and read the latest installment of her favorite series, about a Winter Prince from the Unseelie Court and a human girl who was really a Summer Princess, and daughter of Oberon. She didn’t like him much.

She stood at the top of the steps and scanned the parking lot for her car, feeling her heart sink when she recalled her dad telling her he was getting the winter tires put on the Sundance so regretfully, she would need to get a ride home. Charlotte was supposed to be that ride, but she never showed so she officially had an hour-long walk to the harbor. She pulled on the hood of her winter coat and buttoned it up. She knew she looked like an Eskimo but she really didn’t care. The cold was an unforgiving monster and she’d do anything to feel warm.

Shriveled up autumn leaves crunched underfoot as she trudged past Main Street and all the way down eighth, her legs feeling stiff and archaic by the time she reached the McDonald’s. She contemplated a hot chocolate, but in the growing dark she decided to skip it. She hated winter. The sun faded behind the horizon before six, and it only got worse until Winter Solstice, when it was dark the moment the bell rang for last period. Street lamps illuminated frost covered sidewalks as she walked, rubbing her hands along her legs trying to get warmth into them.

By the time she stepped onto the harbor she was an icicle. Her breath created little clouds of fog as she trekked across the parking lot and stared at the choppy water. Her stomach flip-flopped, knowing it was too dangerous to canoe. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to check the time, her fingers brushing the note stuck to her locker. Almost six, her dad wouldn’t finish work until seven, making it seven thirty before she could get a ride in the motor boat. She scuffed the pavement with her boot and slid the phone back into her pocket, trading it for the coordinates. Her eyes scanned the page and she glanced at the gray sky.

She had to know.

No matter how stupid, reckless and potentially insane it was, curiosity won out over practicality. She punched the coordinates into her iPhone app and crossed the parking lot.

O O O

Krishani blew a breath into his hands as Maeva trampled down the path, flashlight app on her iPhone darting back and forth, sending patches of light into the shadows. He felt like a margay, a lupine sleek predator, leading its prey into a trap. He followed at a safe distance, stealthily stalking her. She wasn’t careful, and half the time she was clumsy. Her boots crunched leaves, broke twigs and slipped on tiny patches of ice as the path dipped. She crested a shallow hill and pulled herself over a bed of rocks, the iPhone clutched in her right hand.

Krishani found himself lost in her peculiar wonder. She had too many nervous habits, twirling her pen, twisting her hair, chewing her fingernails, tapping her foot to an imaginary beat. Every class they shared together was another uncomfortable opportunity to observe her patterns. The way she threaded a strand of hair into her mouth and bit down on it, the way she huddled over her notebook scratching notes on loose leaf. She often hid her face behind that curtain of hair, but every few classes she’d peek at his pages full of ancient symbols. Some days he wrote in Chinese, other days Hieroglyphs or Greek. One day he got bold and began writing in the ancient tongue of Avristar. She frowned at the pages but didn’t seem to discern the symbols as anything more than unreadable.

She didn’t ask questions, but her facial expressions spoke volumes. Most of the time she was perplexed or confused, sometimes she’d scoff in disbelief when he’d draw a well know glyph on the page. She’d tilt her binder over the ledge of the desk and scrunch down in her seat, scribbling more notes. Mr. Weir was insane when it came to camera technology. He wasn’t a hands-on teacher. In a couple of weeks they were supposed to do their first assignment with an actual camera. Krishani thought the eight weeks of lead-time to being able to touch the camera was enough to make him strangle the man. The only interesting thing about the class was Maeva, the way she shuffled to her desk, the way she hugged her binder to chest when class was over. She hummed tunes to herself when Mr. Weir was on a tangent, using his classroom as a launch pad for his personal memoirs.

Krishani couldn’t help it, everything about her fascinated him. He thought about it for a long time, and every day after school he went to the forest, searching for something that had to exist among the rocks and lakes. He taped the coordinates to her locker but didn’t expect her to show up. He hadn’t anticipated the sun setting so soon, and the added bonus of the dark only ignited him.

The iPhone slipped out of her grip as she fell on her knees, a surprised cry escaping her lips. The light reached the end of his boots and Krishani ducked into the brush, out of sight, out of mind. He watched her pull herself to her feet, retrieving the iPhone, readjusting the scarf around her mouth. She rubbed her upper thighs and shone the iPhone in a perfect arc, marking where she was. She tugged the glove off her hand and tapped the iPhone face, double-checking the coordinates. He knew her well enough to know her eyes lit up when she found out she was close.

She hurried down the path and Krishani followed, his heart thrumming. He didn’t know what to expect when she found the end point, but it was something he had to see. He’d watched her for so long in a setting so foreign to him it was laughable. The forest, this was where he felt at home. Some days he feigned knowing the modern world and all its gadgets, contraptions and buildings, but discomfort lived in his bones. Things like iPhones were weird. He couldn’t begin to figure them out. Elwen laughed at him when he tried to use a laptop, pressing random buttons until a blue screen appeared and the thing shut off. Elwen was good at mocking him. He thrived in the community, knowing how to manipulate people to get what he wanted.

He thought it was insane, but ever since Krishani decided to stay and watch Kaliel, as opposed to executing her, Elwen had become serious about building a resort. He was gone a lot of the time, and when he was there, paperwork stretched from one end of the kitchen island to the other. Krishani drowned out his ancestor’s mocking tone with the sounds of Call of Duty, gun shots and explosions lighting up the screen. Being human for so long took away the gnawing hunger and replaced it with rage, grief, and restlessness. He couldn’t sleep for more than four hours, pain interrupting any type of reverie he almost found.

Maeva moved out of sight and Krishani stepped up his gait, his boot hitting a jagged rock below him. He swayed but found his balance, stepping into a bed of wet, gnarled leaves. Maeva was on the other side of the hill, descending rocks carefully, iPhone between her lips. He grimaced and waited until she was at the base of the ravine before following. His boot scraped along a rock and he winced, hoping she was too distracted by the faint sound in the distance. In the winter it was probably frozen, the way everything else was. He closed his eyes, remembering the pressure of her lips on his, warm, trembling, terrified.

She ran.

He looked up and saw her racing across the rocks. The stream was frozen, along with the water trailing over rocks, creating a scant waterfall. It was nothing that spectacular, but the way Maeva shrieked in awe made his chest constrict with longing.

She ran the flashlight app over the clear frozen water, moving it up to the thick jaundiced icicle, veins of water flowing over top. She crouched, running her fingers over the ice, gasping at the cold. Her voice cut through the air, a haunting melody echoing off the ravine walls. It wasn’t a song Krishani knew, the only lyrics being,
“Roam, roam, where do I roam? From where do I roam?”
She finished singing after one verse and moved as close as she could to the waterfall, reaching out to touch it. Krishani frowned and stepped out of the bushes behind her, his dagger clutched in his right hand. He playfully rocked the hilt back and forth in his palm, the edge of the knife swinging like a pendulum. He shook his head, nickering.

“You make it too easy,” he crooned, disappointment coloring his tone.