Troll Or Derby, A Fairy Wicked Tale (29 page)

The old man laughed. “Oh, no, son. There’s a prophecy about this—greatest secret ever kept from Jag, more than likely. We’re all getting out of here, the entire dungeon lot. And you’re leading the charge. You can try and change it, but there’s going to be a major jailbreak soon—and the choice will be up to you. Somehow or another, Jag is going to make you choose—Deb’s life, or your own.”

“This prophecy stuff is bullshit! I have survived plenty of time without worrying about anyone’s prophecies, and I’m not going to start buying into this prison mythology today, Pops. Sorry, but no thanks.”

Othello just smiled. Bless the son of a bitch, but he smiled at me.

“Son, have you heard what I’ve been telling you? Believe me, please—if there were any way this could
not
be true, I would tell you. Some things, though, are written in the stone tablets of time. You can’t change them—but if you know about them, Harlow, you can use them.”

I considered what he’d said.

I took a deep breath. “So, you’re telling me that we have knowledge that Jag doesn’t?”

“Correct, son.”

“Just like he knew something about me that I didn’t?”

“Well, about Debra, he did,” Othello said.

“Debra is my wife, Dad,” I said. “That makes us one and the same, for better or for worse. And, frankly, I’ve let Jag keep her long enough.”

I was so thirsty, but there was nothing to eat or drink in the cell. My throat was blazing hot, scratchy. I thought of Biggie Smalls and felt myself warm from the inside out, felt the dungeon cell heat around me.

Then I realized—if Biggie’s magic could do what I thought, perhaps all wasn’t lost, just yet. I leaned back and closed my eyes, and envisioned magic I’d never seen before.

“What’s going on, son?”

I was too busy concentrating to answer.

“Harlow? Buddy?” It was Holly, forlorn and confused.

And then I felt it. The warm sprinkle of rain, barely landing on my face before it disappeared. I raised my hand to my face, and water shot out my fingers, cold and pure as springwater.

I opened my eyes.

“Guards!” I yelled. “Guards! I want to see Jag, now!”

Chapter Thirty-Four

The Dream Police

Deb

April walked me back to the bench, and when I sat, I felt blood rushing to my mouth.

“Baby, are you okay?” she asked.

I opened my mouth to speak, and spit a mouthful of blood, instead. The sockets Harlow had opened when he took my teeth were gushing.
Harlow
.

I gagged, and then I must have fainted. The next thing I knew, I was on the bus, April’s arms around me.

“What were you dreaming about, honey?” April’s voice purred in my ear. “That stupid gypsy again? You want a drink?” She reached for a bottle of spiced rum and tilted it to my lips. It stung my throat, and my heart filled with an urgency to keep April with me, no matter what the cost.

“Did we win?” I asked.

She smirked. “Of course we won. Well—Daddy did, anyway. That’s what counts.” She reached down and brushed something from her shirt. It was reddish brown, flaky.

“Is that blood?”

She laughed again. “Yeah. Yours.” She took a thick swallow of the rum and offered the bottle to me again. I shook my head. “And maybe a little of the kid’s.” She jerked her head pointedly toward the seat behind us.

I sat up, but it hurt. I was sore as hell, and I wasn’t clear whether I’d hurt myself from the bout, or if this was just how it felt after skating so hard, with such intensity. Maybe it was the blood loss, maybe it was the rum, but I was so dizzy, the bus seemed to sway and rock like it might flip. Finally, I managed to turn my body all the way around.

Derek sat behind us, his eyes glued to the ceiling.

“Derek!” I said. He didn’t look at me. “Derek! Snap out of it!” He grinned at me—a silly, spacey grin.

April erupted into laughter. “It never gets old,” she said. She took a small digital camera out of her jacket and snapped his photo. “Look, look,” she said, holding the camera in front of my face. Then she mocked him, making a face just like his. “It’s the faeth,” she said. “Makes asses of them all.”

“Faith?” I said.

“Fae meth,” she said. “Faeth. It was originally for High Fae only—not even trolls, but Daddy finally figured out how to cut it weak enough that even the English could use it without killing themselves. Found out the hard way that giving it to them full strength only killed off his customer base.” She laughed again, and took another drink. “Whatever. Business schmizness. Come here, bitch.” She gestured to me, like she wanted me to climb onto her lap.

I shook my head. “Too tired,” I said.

My jaw ached, and again I thought of Harlow. I wondered where he was, whether it was so smart of me to have left him at all. I’d been so afraid of him, unable to trust him, but yet here I’d ended up with a woman whose father was a some kind of Troll Mafia Don.

I’d been skating, I’d been distracted. I’d fallen for April without realizing that as beautiful as she was on the outside, she was terrifically ugly on the inside. I’d fallen in love with roller derby—fairy rules, banked track, flat-track, no difference.

And worst of all, I’d forgotten about my sister. Was she lying somewhere zonked out of her mind on faeth? I didn’t really give a crap about seeing Mom again, but Gennifer was innocent in all of this—it was if she were some kind of bait Jag was using to lure me into a trap.

I guess I was silent too long, because April sighed and stuck her tongue out at me. “You’re no fun,” she said, before hopping over the back of the seat to show her photos to the girls. Peals of laughter erupted and I cringed at the sound of April’s cruel voice. My mouth filled with blood again and I spit it onto the floor. How could I not have seen her for what she was?

We were back at the Bingo Hall in moments, the clumsy bus rocking to a stop. April crashed into me, her arms around Juwanna Kiss. Juwanna laughed throatily, and April pushed her camera and helmet into my arms.

“Take these back to my room, bitch,” she said, still laughing. She was completely drunk. For a second I felt jealous, then disgusted—not just with her, but with myself. How could I have fallen so hard for this creep in glitter and spandex?

“Sure thing,” I said. I averted my eyes.

I wanted to throw her stuff right back at her, but I realized it probably wasn’t the time for an outburst. I was tired, beat up from the bout, and I had the uneasy feeling that I was waking up from some kind of trance. The last thing I wanted was for April to feed me more of whatever she’d hooked me on.

I had no idea how long I’d been lost in her crazy world of roller derby, gambling, and feed store merchandise, but I knew that I didn’t have any time to waste if I was going to save Gennifer and get back to … Who was I getting back to, exactly? Me, I guess. My own life. A life away from her.

I pocketed the camera and caught Derek as he stumbled from the bus. “Easy, buddy,” I said. He made eye contact with me and burst into silent tears. They’d probably have eaten him alive if they’d heard him crying. Poor Derek. God only knew what he’d been through.

Suddenly I felt more lucid than I had in ages. How long had I been with the Godsmackers? Weeks? Months? I didn’t know. But I was done.

Derek was thin as a pencil from head to toe. I wondered if they’d fed him anything but faeth. He stumbled at my side until we reached my room. I expected April to join me any minute, but I began to wonder if that was really how it had been. Had we been together at all? A few nights, I was sure—but there was no telling. My memories were a fog and she seemed to have rounds to make among the other girls on the team. My heart both longed for her and ached for its own stupidity, at the same time.

I closed the door behind us and after I deposited Derek on my small bed, I shoved my trunk of roller derby gear in front of the door. April must have given me a dozen pair of skates, and the trunk was extremely heavy. Funny—for some reason I’d stuck to the skates Coach had given me.
Coach
. I’d let him down, too.

For some reason, I was pretty sure she wasn’t coming back to my room that night—but just in case, I didn’t want to be caught. Maybe that trunk wouldn’t stop her from coming in for long, but that extra few seconds could buy me time to figure something out, right?

Derek was comfortable enough, dozing on my pillow. I didn’t even stop to take off my nasty clothes—I just pulled the digital camera from my pocket and flipped through the photos April had taken.

The zombie photo of Derek staring into the ceiling of the bus was preceed by an entire photo shoot of me. I scrolled through them in backward order.

In the first photo I was completely passed out, and April posed suggestively with me. My mouth was hanging open, just like Derek’s had been. Is this what her drugs were doing to me? Something hung from my mouth, and a hand pointed to it. A hand wearing a skull ring, silver with ruby eyes.

I felt sick.

Another photo. April looking over her shoulder, laughing. She stood inside a bathroom stall. Was this at the bout? I didn’t remember going to the bathroom there.

Another photo. April supporting me, my face awash in stupor, and Juwanna Kiss holding me up on the other side. I wondered who took the photo.

Another photo. April posing next to the tampon dispenser.

Suddenly I felt so sick, I threw up. The closest receptacle was April’s helmet, but I didn’t care. She didn’t deserve my care.

“I’m sorry, Deb.” Derek’s voice was weak. “I didn’t want to take those photos. I asked them to stop, but they don’t listen to me.” He burst into tears, burying his face into the pillow. “I want to go home,” he said, his muffled sobs barely understandable. “I want my mom.”

Mom. Not the person I wanted to see, necessarily, but someone I thought owed me answers. I was going to get those answers, and be done with her, if it was the last thing I did. “Do you know where Gennifer is?” I said.

“I do,” he said. “I did, anyway. They move her.”

“They move her around the casino?”

He nodded, wiping tears away.

“We’ve got to get her out of here, Derek. If April did this to me, what are they doing to Gennifer?” I fought it, but finally, I cried—for the first time in months, maybe in years, I cried. I tried to keep it quiet—the last thing I needed was for someone to hear me, for April to find out I knew what she was doing to me.

“We’ll never get out of here, Deb. You’re a Wheeler. They’re going to use you until they’re done with you, then they’re going to kill you. They can’t afford to let you out of here alive … and I am worthless.” Derek looked like he had aged twenty years, his sad face utterly hopeless.

“We’ll see about that,” I said. I picked the camera up and flipped through the rest of the photos. More of me, more of Derek, and then the very last—the first one April had taken—was of Gennifer.

She lay still as a corpse on a pristine bed. A green satin comforter spread out beneath her, and she grasped a single lily in her hands. She looked like a stiff fresh from the funeral home.

“Sleeping Beauty,” Derek said. “That’s what they call her.”

“Do you know where she is now?” I asked.

“This place is a labyrinth, Deb,” Derek said. “They move her around—I think they’re afraid someone will find her. I think they’re afraid you’ll find her. You’re her Protector, you know. McJagger ordained it, himself. He can’t break the spell, but he can keep you from finding her for as long as he can.”

“You’re speaking mumbo jumbo. What happens when I find her?”

Derek shrugged and huddled deeper into the bed. “Don’t know,” he said. “I’ve only picked up bits and pieces—but it must be important to them that you don’t ever take her back to her mom. They talk about it often enough.”

“They?” I asked.

“McJagger, Dave, and April,” he said. “The three in charge.”

Chapter 34.5

Take Me to the River

Harlow

“I understand you wanted to see me,” Jag said. He leaned casually against the wall next to the grate that separated us, lazily picking his teeth with a pixie bone.