Tithe (21 page)

“I’ll see you, okay?” Kaye said.

“Sure. Whatever. ‘Bye.”

She hung up.

“Who was that?” Roiben asked.

“Janet’s brother is still under the hill … with Nephamael.”

Nephamael’s name made Roiben stop in his place. “More secrets?”

She winced. “Corny. He was with me that night … when I was a pixie.”

“You
are
a pixie.”

“He was there that night—the one when you didn’t know it was me—and when I left, he … met … Nephamael.”

Roiben’s eyebrows shot up at that.

“Corny was totally out of his head. Nephamael hurt him, and he … liked it. He wanted to go back.”

“You left a friend—a mortal—under the hill … alone?” He sounded incredulous. “Are you completely heartless? You saw what you were leaving him to.”

“You made me leave! I couldn’t get back in. I tried.”

“I thought we were going to be honest with one another. What manner of honesty is this?”

She felt completely miserable.

“Do you know who Nephamael is?”

She shook her head, dread creeping over limbs, making her feel heavy, making her want to sink to the floor. “He … he’s the one that put the enchantment on me and who took it off.”

“He was once the best knight in the Unseelie Court—that is, before he was sent to the Seelie Court as part of the price for a truce. He was sent there, and I was sent to Nicnevin.”

Kaye just stood, stunned, thinking about the conversation she had overheard between Nicnevin and Nephamael. Why hadn’t she deduced that? What other meaning could there have been? “So Nephamael still serves Nicnevin?”

“Perhaps. It seems more likely that he serves only himself. Kaye, do you know who concocted the plan to sabotage the Tithe?”

“You think it was Nephamael?”

“I don’t know. Tell me, how did your friends become aware you were a pixie when not even the Queen of the Unseelie Court could see through your glamour?”

“The Thistlewitch said she remembered when I got switched.”

“Now, how is it that they know Nephamael?”

“I don’t know.”

“We lack some piece of information, Kaye.”

“Why would Nephamael want to make trouble for Nicnevin?”

“Perhaps he sought revenge for being sent away. I doubt he found the Seelie Court to his taste.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know’. I have to get Corny.”

“Kaye, if what you say is true, you know that he may well no longer be alive.”

She took a sharp, shallow breath. “He’s fine,” she said.

“And for those masks who linger on
To feast at night upon the pure sea!”

—ARTHUR RIMBAUD, “Does She Dance”

She’d only ever brought one other person to the Glass Swamp. The summer when she was nine and Janet had taken to constantly teasing her about her imaginary friends, Kaye had decided that she was going to prove they were real once and for all. Janet had stepped on a half moon of bottle glass, cutting through her sneaker and jabbing into her foot on the way to the swamp. They’d never even made it down the ridge.

It had not occurred to her until now to suspect that Lutie or Spike or even poor, dead Gristle had something to do with that.

Darting lights were easily visible from the street, and shouts carried through the still air. She couldn’t hear the voices well enough to discern whether they were about to stumble
down into a bunch of kids drinking beer or into something else.

Roiben was all in black—jeans and T-shirt and long coat that all must have been conjured up from moonbeams and cobwebs because she was sure they didn’t come from any of the closets in her grandmother’s house. He had pulled the top part of his hair back, but the shock of white somehow made him seem even more inhuman when he was dressed in modern clothes.

She wondered if she looked inhuman too. Was there something about her that warned people off? Kaye had always assumed that she was just weird, no more explanation necessary. Looking at him, she wondered.

He glanced toward her without turning his head and raised his eyebrows in a silent query.

“Just looking at you,” she said.

“Looking at me?”

“I … I was wondering how you did that—the clothes.”

“Oh.” He looked down, as though he’d only then given a thought to what he was wearing. “It’s glamour.”

“So what are you really wearing?” The words left her mouth before she could consider them. She winced.

He didn’t seem to mind; in fact, he flashed her one of his brief smiles. “And if I said nothing at all?”

“Then I would point out that sometimes, if you look at something out of the corner of your eye, you can see right through glamour,” she returned.

That brought surprised laughter. “What a relief to us both then that I am actually wearing exactly what you saw me in this afternoon. Although one might point out that in that outfit, your last concern should be my modesty.”

“You don’t like it?” She looked down at the purple vinyl catsuit. There had been no reason for her not to put it on immediately. After all, it was still Halloween.

“Now, that’s the sort of question I begin to expect from you. One to which there is no good answer.”

Kaye grinned, and she could tell that the grin was likely to stay on her face for a long time. They could do this. They could figure this out. Everything was going to be fine.

“Down here?” he asked, and she nodded.

“Indiscreet,” was all he said before he hooked his boots in the muddy ledge and carefully walked down the ridge.

Kaye followed him, stumbling along at more or less her own pace.

Green women and men were half immersed in the deeper parts of the stream, androgynous forms rough with bark and shimmery lights.

A few of the creatures saw Roiben and
slithered into the pool or back up the bank. There was some whispering.

“Kaye,” a voice rasped, and she spun around.

It was the Thistlewitch, sitting on a log. She patted the place beside her. “Things did not go well under the hill.”

“No,” Kaye said, sitting down. She wanted to put more anger in her voice, but she couldn’t. “I almost died.”

“Nicnevin’s knight saved you, did he not?”

Kaye nodded, looking up to see him, half in shadows, his hands in the pockets of his coat, glowering impressively. It made her want to grin at him, although she was afraid he might grin back and ruin his furious demeanor.

“Why have you brought him among us?”

“If it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead.”

The Thistlewitch looked in the direction of the knight and then back at Kaye. “Do you know of the things he has done?”

“Don’t you understand? She made him do them!”

“I have no desire to be welcome among you, old mother,” Roiben said, kneeling down on one knee in the soft earth. “I only wanted to know whether you were aware of the price of your freedom. There are trolls and worse that are delighted to be without any master but their own desires.”

“And if there are, what of it?” Spike asked,
coming up behind them. “Let the mortals suffer as we have suffered.”

Kaye was astonished. She thought back to Lutie’s disdain for mortal girls. They were only her friends because of what she was, and not for any better reason than that. Her fingers brushed over the purple plastic covering her legs, letting her nails cut little lines in the vinyl. She had wanted them to be better than people, but they weren’t, and she didn’t know what they were anymore. She’d been flung back and forth through too many emotions over the past few days, she was hungover from adrenaline, she was worried about Corny and worried about Janet.

“So it’s us against them now? I’m not talking about the Unseelie Court, here. Since when are mortals the enemies of the solitary fey?” Kaye said, anger bleeding into her voice, making it rough. She looked at Roiben again, drawing confidence from his proximity, and that worried her too. How had he gone from being someone she half despised to being the one person she was relying on, in the space of mere hours?

Roiben’s hand touched her shoulder lightly, a comforting gesture. It amused her how wide Spike’s eyes got. She wondered exactly what Spike imagined had passed between them.

“You think like a mortal,” Spike said.

“Well, gosh, I did spend every week of my life except the last thinking I was one.”

Spike’s thick brows furrowed, and he tilted his head to the side, black eyes glittering. “You don’t know anything about Faery. You don’t know where your loyalties should be.”

“If I don’t understand, it’s because you didn’t tell me. You kept me in the dark, and you used me.”

“You agreed to help us. You saw the importance of what we were doing.”

“We have to tell the solitary fey that Nicnevin was innocent of the sacrifice. This has to stop, Spike.”

“I won’t go back to being a slave. Not for any mortal. Not for anything.”

“But the Unseelie Queen is dead.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s always another, worse than the last. Don’t you dare try to undo this. Don’t you dare go around telling tales.”

“Or you’ll what?” Roiben said softly.

“It’s not her place,” Spike protested, twisting the long hairs of one eyebrow nervously between his fingers.

“The Tithe was not completed. The reason matters little. The result is the same. For seven years the solitary fey in Nicnevin’s lands are free.”

“Unless they enter into a new compact.”

“Why would they do that?” Spike demanded. “Rumor has it that the Seelie Queen is coming down from the north, bringing practically the whole court, from what I hear.”

Roiben froze at that. “Why is she coming?” he breathed.

Spike shrugged. “Probably to see what she can claim before the Unseelie Court gets on its feet again. Bad time to be making deals with anyone.”

“Do you think Nephamael’ll bring Corny to the Seelie Court?” Kaye asked Roiben.

He nodded once. “He’ll have to if he intends to keep him.” The assumption that if Nephamael didn’t intend to keep Corny, he was already dead, went unspoken.

“Do you know where they’re going to camp?” Kaye asked Spike.

“It’s an orchard,” Spike said. “A place where people pick their own apples. They should be there by tomorrow’s dawn.”

Kaye knew where that was. She’d gone there on a school trip and a couple of times with her grandmother. Delicious Orchards.

“Wait, I want to come with you,” Lutie said, flying to Kaye’s shoulder. Kaye felt a sharp tug on her hair as Lutie caught a strand.

“Sorry,” the little faerie said contritely.

“Roiben, this is Lutie-loo. Lutie-loo, Roiben.”

Kaye loved it when he grinned. She really did.

“It is my distinct pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Roiben said, touching the tiny hand with two fingers.

***

Kaye walked down the boardwalk, as she had done not even a week before. Tonight, the moon was on the wane, distorted-looking, and the brine off the sea clung to her skin and hair in a fine mist. The tiny specks of silver glittered in the stretchy purple vinyl of Liz’s catsuit as she moved.

Helplessness in the face of not knowing where Corny was had made her restless. She wanted to go everywhere, anywhere Nephamael might have taken him, but she didn’t know where any of those places might be. Finally, she decided go to the rave after all. Kaye was worried about Corny, worried about Janet, so worried that she needed to
do
something, no matter whether it needed doing.

The pounding of music inside the abandoned building was loud enough that she could feel the bass beating through the wooden slats of the boardwalk. Once called Galaxia, the club sat half on the street and half on what remained of the pier. Several years ago part of the pier had burned down, wrecking game booths, a water slide, and a haunted house. The remaining blackened shell was used only to set off the city’s annual fireworks. Galaxia had once been a typical Jersey Shore bar and dance club—the airbrushed sign still hung over the doorway, although it was grayed and the edges were abraded from wind-tossed sand.

Tonight she could see glow sticks and bright clothes pulsing with each flash of a strobe light through the window. Kaye wasn’t sure if the place had been rented or just broken into. A large crowd was gathered around the door, some costumed for Halloween in masks and face paint, others wearing their normal baggy jeans and T-shirts. A girl with her hair in hundreds of bright braids bounced in place, a teddy bear tethered to her belt loop with a fluorescent yellow cord.

Before they got too close, Roiben picked up two leaves from the gutter. In his hands they became crisp bills that he folded quickly into the pockets of his coat. Lutie peeked her head out and ducked back down.

“I have to work on this glamour thing, don’t I?” Kaye said, but he only smiled.

At the entrance, a girl with a blue beehive wig, blue lipstick, and a blue lip ring made change for him.

“Nice outfit,” the girl said to Kaye, her gaze flicking enviously over the catsuit. Kaye smiled her thanks, and then they were inside.

Bodies were pressed against one another, undulating like a great wave, dancers having room only to hop in place. A clown was dancing on the bar, his makeup done with neon paint that glowed under the black light. Two girls dressed as cats, both in white leotards with pin-on tails, danced beside him. The music was
so loud that Kaye didn’t even try to talk to Roiben; she just slipped her hand inside his and pulled him along through the crowd. He let her lead him toward the back where double doors opened onto the blackened boardwalk that was being used as an impromptu dance floor for those that couldn’t fit inside the club.

It was as packed as inside, bodies jammed together so that even those that were sitting along the walls were touching.

“See anything?” she yelled.

He shook his head.

Two ends of a horse shouldered by them, holding water bottles. She thought she saw Doughboy in the crowd, not dressed as any-thing, but she wasn’t sure.

“Kaye,” Roiben yelled into her ear. “There. Look.”

She followed the quick flick of his hand with her gaze, but she didn’t see anything. She shrugged, knowing that would be easier to understand than speech.