Tithe (22 page)

“Look for your friends,” he yelled. She nodded as he set off in the direction of a tall woman with thick lips and maroon hair. The woman stopped dancing and began shouting at him, arms waving wildly when he got close. Then the woman turned, as if to run, and he grabbed her arm.

Kaye left them still arguing and waded through the crowd. If there was just the one
faerie and Roiben had already found her, then maybe there was nothing to be nervous about here. In the crush of bouncing dancers, it seemed impossible that there would be anything dangerous and unworldly. Kaye found herself relaxing.

Kenny was on the pier dancing with Fatima and Janet. Fatima had on three different layers of long skirts and a scarf over her head with big hoops in her ears, looking like a Gypsy or a pirate. Janet was wearing all black with whiskers drawn on her face in eyeliner. The whiskers reminded Kaye more of a mouse than a cat.

Kaye took a deep breath. “Hey.”

Fatima raised her eyebrows, and Kenny stared at her as though she didn’t have the glamour on at all.

“Hi,” Janet said. Not for the first time, Kaye wondered why Janet had invited her. Was it to teach Kenny a lesson? From the way he’d paled when she came up to them, Kaye decided that it was probably working.

Kaye bounced with the music. There was little room to wave her arms unless they were directly above her head.

“Getting some water,” Kenny shouted.

He walked off toward the inside of the building.

“I’ll be right back,” Kaye said to Janet, who tried to say something to her as she turned to follow Kenny.

She found him waiting in line for the men’s bathroom.

“I’m sorry.”

His eyes narrowed. He didn’t answer.

She took a breath. Her mind was spinning from all the worry, and she found that she had nothing to say to him and nothing she needed to hear from him. It was enough that she knew he was all right, eyes clear and free of any enchantment.

“See you back over there,” Kaye said, feeling foolish at having trailed him all the way across the club for nothing. She began to dance her way back to Janet and Fatima.

Then the music changed.

It was still the spacey, disjointed sound of trance music, but there were unusual instruments in the background, strange reedy sounds and whispers.
Dance
. Kaye’s body complied unthinkingly, spinning her into the thick crush of bodies.

Everyone was dancing. People bobbed against one another, arms waving in the air, heads nodding with the music. No one sat against the wall. No one stood in line or smoked a cigarette along the water’s edge. Everyone danced—sweaty bodies packed tight, drunk with sound.

At first, it was a gentle compulsion, slipping into Kaye’s mind easily. Then she began to notice the fey.

A freckle-faced faerie with flame-red hair that rose up into a Dr. Seuss curl was the first one that she saw. He was dancing like the others, but when he saw her stare, he winked. Looking quickly around, she noticed more, winged sprites with tiny silver hoops piercing the points of their ears, goblins the size of dogs drinking bottled water off the top of the bar, a green-skinned pixie boy with a blue glow stick lighting up the inside of his mouth. And other fey, dim shadows at the edges of the club, flashes of glittering scales, luring dancers into the empty bathrooms and out onto the pier.

Beside Janet danced a disturbingly familiar dark-skinned boy. Kaye pushed brutally through the crowd, knocking people aside with her elbows just in time to see Janet smile up at the kelpie and let him lead her off the edge of the pier.

“Janet!” Kaye screamed, pushing her way to the water.

But when she got there, there were only ribbons of red curls sinking below the waves. She stared for a moment, until desperation rose up in her and she jumped. Bone-cold black water closed over her head.

Her muscles clenched with shock as she went under once and then bobbed up, teeth chattering, spitting out briny water. Her flailing hands caught strands of hair and she pulled, cruelly, desperately. Her legs kicked automatically, treading water.

Her hand came up empty save for a clump of tangled red hair.

“Janet!” she cried as a wave broke almost on top of her, pushing her into the pilings beneath the pier. Taking a deep breath, she dove down, opening her eyes as she went, desperately hoping for a single flash of red hair, casting her hands like claws.

She bobbed up from the water again, out of breath and coughing. It had been too dark to see anything, and the reach of her arms had found nothing.

“Janet!” Kaye screamed, one hand slapping the top of the water, sending a spray of it showering down around her. She was treading water violently, raging at Janet, at herself, and especially at the frigid, black, unfeeling sea that swallowed Janet up.

Then, rising above the waves like a magnificent statue, there was the kelpie itself, nostrils flaring and clouds of hot breath rising from them.

“Where is Janet?” Kaye shouted.

“Oh no, now you are in my element. No demands.”

“A deal then, please. Just let her go.” It was hard to speak through chattering teeth. Her body was slowly adjusting, numbing to the temperature of the ocean.

Kaye looked into the softly glowing eyes, their whiteness reflecting in the black sea like distant moons. “Please.”

“No need for deals and bargains. I am done. You may have the rest of it if you like.”

A body bobbed to the surface beside the black horse, red hair tangled with seaweed, facedown, arms floating beneath the surface.

Kaye swam to her and tipped back her head, pushing aside hair to see the sightless eyes, smears of drawn whiskers still staining her cheeks, blue lips and open mouth, full to the teeth with water.

“She thrashed beautifully,” the kelpie said.

“No, no, no, no.” Kaye hugged the body to her, trying desperately to tip up the head. Water spilled out of Janet’s mouth as though it were a decanter.

“Why so sad? She was only going to die anyway.”

“Not tonight!” Kaye yelled, swallowing most of a wave she tried to bob above. “She wouldn’t have died tonight.”

“One day is much like another.”

“Tell that to Nicnevin. Someday you’re going to know how Janet felt. Everything dies, kelpie, and that includes me and you, faeries or not.”

The kelpie looked strangely subdued. It let out a huff of warm air. Then it sank down, leaving her alone in the sea, treading water, holding Janet’s body. Another swell came, pushing Janet’s body toward the beach. Kaye took one of Janet’s hands, no more chill than
her own but frighteningly pliant, and scissored her legs toward the shore. As she swam closer, the waves grew larger and more violent, breaking over her. Janet’s body was pulled from her grip and tossed up on the beach.

She saw Roiben running toward the edge of the waves. He bent to look at Janet while Kaye struggled to her feet in the shallow water, the pull of receding waves still strong enough to nearly knock her off her feet. She coughed and spat out a mixture of saliva and sand.

“Do you seek out peril? One would think that years of being a mortal would have made you more aware of mortality.” He was shouting.

And that had too much of the echo of her previous conversation in it.

He opened his coat and closed it around her, heedless of the wet clothes that dampened his own. Sirens wailed, and she could see flashing lights.

“No.” His hand cupped the back of her head before she could turn. “Don’t look. We have to go.”

Kaye pulled away. “I need to see her. To say good-bye.”

Ten steps across the wet sand and she dropped to her knees beside the body, ignoring the edges of waves that sucked at the sand around her knees. Janet had washed up like a piece of rubbish, and her limbs were thrown at
odd angles. Kaye smoothed them out so that Janet was lying on her back, arms at her side.

Kaye stroked back red hair, touching Janet’s cold face with cold fingers. And in that moment it seemed that the whole world had gone cold and that she would never be warm again.

“
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell as dark as night.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet CXLVII

Kaye woke on the mattress in her bedroom, tangled in the covers, wearing only her under-pants and the T-shirt that Roiben had borrowed the day before. Her head was pillowed on his bare chest, and for a moment she could not remember why her hair was stiff and her eye-lashes were crusted together with a thin layer of salt. When she did remember, she pulled herself out of bed with a groan.

Janet was dead, drowned. Lungs filled with water.
Dead
. The word echoed in her head as though its repetition held some clue to its reversal.

Vague memories of the night before, of Roiben bringing her home, of him enchanting her grandmother to stop yelling as he led Kaye up the stairs. She’d screamed at him for doing
that, screamed and cried and finally fell asleep.

Kaye padded to the mirror. She looked haggard. Her head felt heavy from crying, and her eyes were swollen with sleep. There were dark smudges the color of bruises under her eyes, and even her lips looked pale and chapped. She licked them. They tasted like salt.

Janet was dead. All Kaye’s fault. If only she hadn’t followed Kenny. If only she hadn’t made Janet jealous, she might never have gone off with the kelpie in the first place. If only.

And Corny was still gone.

Closing her eyes, she tore the glamour she was wearing and let it disperse into the air. What she saw was worse. Her hair was still stiff with salt, her lips were still chapped, and, if anything, the severe faerie features exaggerated how tired she looked.

In the mirror, she saw the reflection of the shirt she was wearing and blearily remembered being stripped down a few blocks from the boardwalk, when no amount of huddling under Roiben’s coat could make her teeth stop chattering. The catsuit apparently hadn’t been enough like a second skin, trapping water inside it. He’d helped her out of the outfit and then wrapped her in both his shirt and his coat.

Summoning magic to her fingers, she tried to lessen the darkness around her eyes and to shift her hair into magazine-smooth locks. It was easy, and a small, amazed smile tugged at
the corner of her mouth when she applied eye-liner with a pass of her nail and dabbed her eyes to be a bright blue. She touched them again and they became a deep violet.

Looking down, she glamoured herself to be dressed in a ball gown and it appeared, ruby silk and puffy crinolines, the whole thing encrusted with gemstones. It looked oddly familiar, and then she realized where the image had come from—it was an illustration from “The Frog Prince” in an old storybook she had. Then, with a pass of her hand, she was wearing an emerald Renaissance frock coat over green fishnet stockings, a modified version of the prince in the same story.

Roiben shifted on the mattress, blinking up at her. He was unglamoured, his hair bright as a dime where the light hit it. Lutie was lying on the same pillow, wrapped in a silver tress as if it were a coverlet.

“I can’t go downstairs,” Kaye said. She couldn’t face her grandmother, not after last night, and Kaye very much doubted that her mother had come home yet. Kaye’s memories of the last time she’d gone to the New York Halloween parade were a mass of feathers and glitter and men on stilts. That time, Ellen had drunk so much three-dollar champagne that she’d completely forgotten how to get where they were staying, and they had wound up sleeping the night in the subway.

“We could go out the window,” Roiben said easily, and she wondered whether he was teasing her or whether he really had accepted her odd stricture so easily. She couldn’t remember much of what she’d said the night before—maybe it had been so awful and irrational that more of the same didn’t surprise him.

“How are we going to get to the orchard? It’s in Colt’s Neck.”

He ran fingers through his hair, hand-combing it, and then turned toward Lutie. “You tied knots in my hair.”

Lutie giggled in a way that sounded a little like panic.

Sighing, he looked back at Kaye. “There are ways,” he said, “but you would mislike most of them.”

Somehow, she didn’t doubt that.

“Let’s take Corny’s car,” she said.

Roiben raised both eyebrows.

“I know where it is and I know where his keys are.”

Roiben got up off the mattress and sat on the boxspring as though it was the couch she had once hoped to make it into. “Cars are made entirely of steel. In case you’d forgotten.”

Kaye stood a moment and began rummaging through the drifts of black garbage bags. After a little searching, she held up a pair of orange mittens triumphantly, ignoring his look of disbelief.

“There’s steel in my boots,” she said, pushing her feet into them as she spoke, “but the leather keeps it from touching me … I can barely feel it.”

“Would you like a cigarette to go with that?” Roiben asked dryly.

“I think I liked you better before you acquired a sense of humor.”

His voice was guarded. “And I thought you liked me not at all.”

Kaye brushed back her now-silky hair and rubbed her temples. She should say something, do something, but she was sure that if she stopped to sort out the swirling thoughts in her head, she would fall apart. Was this about the night before? She could barely remember what she had yelled at him now; it was all a blur of grief and rage. But everything was different between them this morning, and she didn’t know how to make it right again.

She reached her hand out, touching him lightly just below his collarbone, opening her mouth to speak … then closing it again. She shook her head slightly, hoping that somehow he’d understand that she was sorry, that she was grateful, that she liked him too much.

She shook her head again, harder, stepping back.

Corny first. All other things afterward.

They went out the window, Roiben climbing down the tree easily, Lutie flying, and Kaye
managing an ungainly cross between jumping and gliding. She stumbled when she landed.

“Flying!” Lutie said.

Kaye glared at her and put on the mittens. Looking down, she realized she was still glamoured in the frock coat. Roiben was wearing all black, head to foot, and mostly leather. Lutie’s wings shimmered iridescent rainbows over them both as she looped in the air like a demented dragonfly.