Ballad

Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

To my mom, who showed me faeries in the woods.

I was used to being the hunter. If I saw something I wanted, I stalked it, smelled it, made it mine. By "it" I mean "him," of course. I liked them young, talented, male. The more handsome the better. Sweetened the deal. I had to look at them until they died, so they might as well be pretty.

I wasn't cruel. I was generous. Every one of them begged me for what I gave him: beauty, inspiration, death. I turned their ordinary lives into something extraordinary. I was the best thing that ever happened to every single one of them.

Really, I wasn't so much hunter as benefactor.

But today, in this autumn wood, I was neither. Someone had summoned me, pulled me from my intangible form into a real body. I didn't see anybody here, but I could still smell the remnants of a spell. I could hear my footfalls on the dry leaves, and the sound made me uneasy. I felt vulnerable in this bloodred wood, noisy and exposed in my form as a human girl, and I wasn't used to it. All around me smelled of burning thyme and burning leaves, summoning spells and fall bonfires. As soon as I found a bit of human thought to ride on, I was getting out of here.

"Hello, faerie."

I turned around, just in time to see the iron rebar shoved through my face.

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James

R u still psychic? Can u see what our future is at TA? I feel like everything from last summer is still following us. I thought it was over.

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Dee

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Music is my life.

I read all the brochures for the Thornking-Ash School of Music before I applied. The brochures said the school would nurture our already promising musical abilities. They promised to challenge us academically. The brochures whispered tales of us emerging from high school as multitalented super-teens sporting academic skills, who would slay Ivy League applications with a single thrust of our extracurriculars.

At the time, I thought--cool. And plus, Deirdre was going, so I had to.

But that was before I actually went. Once I got there, I found out that school is school is school, as Margaret Thatcher would say. Six or half a dozen. Of course, I'd only been at Thornking-Ash for seven days, so maybe I wasn't giving it enough time. But patience was not really my strong suit. And frankly, I just didn't see how taking a few music theory classes and sleeping in a dorm room was supposed to make us any different from regular high-schoolers.

I'd probably have felt differently if I played the damn cello or something, because then I could be in one of the eight million performance groups on campus. When people said "musician," they never seemed to mean "bagpiper." If I heard the phrase "folk musician" one more time, I was going to hit someone.

Anyway, on days one through six, we (my fellow class men and I) got "orientated." We learned where all our classes were, the names of our teachers, when meals were served in the dining hall, and that the door to the fourth floor of my dorm stuck. By day five, I knew what I was doing. By day six, it was second nature.

By day seven, I was bored. On that seventh evening, I sat in my brother's car and listened to music served angry with a side dish of longing. I had read somewhere that scientists had done a study where they played rock music and classical music to two different sets of rats. I don't remember the details, but after a couple weeks of the study, the classical music rats were peacefully climbing the corporate ladder and wearing

Birkenstocks and the rock music rats had gone cannibal and torn each other to bits. Without knowing what band the rock rats had to listen to, I'm not sure what the study was supposed to prove. All I know is, if I had to listen to Pearl Jam for two weeks solid, I'd eat my roommate too.

Anyway, I knew it was the seventh evening because I had seven marks on the back of my right hand. Six upright marks and one slash sideways to make the seven. I sat there in my own little world with its gray interior and turned the bass up so high I felt it in my butt cheeks. There were strict sound limits in the dorms, especially when students could be practicing, so it was hard to find a place to listen to music. That's irony, baby.

I watched the sun sear a red path behind my dorm building.

Unlike the rest of the academic buildings, which were stately, column-fronted Georgians, the dorms had no pretensions. They were square boxes with a thousand unblinking eyes for windows.

In the car, the music was loud enough that I didn't hear the tapping on my window at first. When I did finally, the face looking in at me surprised me for some reason: round, ordinary, unsure. My roommate, Paul. He was an oboe player. I think the school thought we would get along together because both our instruments had reeds or something, because we certainly didn't have anything else in common. I rolled down the window.

"Do you want fries with that?" I asked.

Paul laughed, way harder than my words had warranted, and then looked proud of his own daring. I think I scared him.

"Dude, that's funny."

"Just one of the services I offer. What's up?"

"I was heading up to the room to work on, you know, the…" -he waved a notebook at me as if it would mean something-"…calculus homework. You still want to work on it?"

"Want? No. Need? Yes." I turned down the radio. I was suddenly aware that I had goose bumps across my arms, despite the heat of the day. I pulled my arm into the car. My psychic subconscious was whispering at me in some language I didn't understand, flooding cold through me in a subtle warning: something weird is afoot here. It was a feeling I thought I'd left behind, something I hadn't felt since this summer. I managed to look back at Paul. "Yeah, sure."

Paul's face split into relief, as if he'd expected me to say something else, and he started to chatter about our calculus teacher and the kids in the class. Even if I hadn't been somewhat preoccupied by the iciness trickling along my skin, I wouldn't have listened. People talk too much, and generally if you listen to the first thing they say and the last, the middle will take care of itself.

A sudden phrase pulled my attention back to Paul, like a single voice rising out of many, and I spun the knob on the radio all the way, switching it off.

"Did you say, 'So sing the dead'?"

Paul frowned. "Huh?"

"So sing the dead. Did you say it?"

He shook his head firmly. "No, I said, 'To sing today.' I had sightsinging. With--"

I opened the car door, nodding before he'd even finished his sentence. Even without the radio on, I heard music. And it pulled at me, important in a way that Paul would never be. I had to work to pull a sentence together for him. "Hey, let's congeal at the room in a few minutes, okay? Just a couple of minutes."

It was as if that misheard phrase--so sing the dead--had unlocked a door, and now I could hear music through it. Urgent, insistent music: a lilting, minor-key melody with a lot of weird, archaic accidentals. Sung by a low, male voice that somehow reminded me of everything beyond my reach.

Paul stammered out an agreement as I got out and slammed the car door shut, locking it.

"I've got to run," I said.

"I didn't know you ran," Paul said, but I was already gone.

I sprinted across the parking lot, past the square dorms, past

Yancey Hall with its buttercream columns and Seward Hall with its laughing satyr fountain out front. My sneakers slapped the brick walk as I followed the song, giving into its tug.

The music grew in intensity, mingling with the music that was always in my mind anyway--the psychic fabric that gave me my bearings, that told me where I was in the world. The brick walk ended but I kept running, stumbling on the uneven, overgrown grass. I felt like I was jumping off the edge of the world. The evening autumn sun blazed across the hills, and all I could think was I'm too late.

But there he walked, whoever he was--faraway on the hills, nearly out of my sight. He was little more than a silhouette, a dark figure of uncertain height on an endless hill of dazzling gold. His hands reached out to either side of him, pressing downwards in a gesture that seemed to urge the earth to stay still. Right before he moved too far away for me to discern him from the dark trees far behind him, he stopped.

The music kept on, loud in the way that music in headphones is--sounding like it was made by my brain for my brain alone.

But I knew now, somehow, that it wasn't for me. It was for someone or something else, and I just had the misfortune to hear it as well.

I was devastated.

The figure turned toward me. For a long moment, he stood facing me. I was held, anchored to the ground--not by his music, which still called and pushed against the music already in my head and said grow rise follow--but by his strangeness. By his fingers, spread over the ground, holding something into the earth; by his shoulders, squared in a way that spoke of strength and unknowability; and most of all, by the great, thorny antlers that grew from his head, spanning the sky like branches.

Then he was gone, and I missed his going in the instant that the sun fell off the edge of the hill, abandoning the world to twilight. I was left standing, a little out of breath, feeling my pulse in the scar above my left ear. I stared after when he had been. I couldn't decide if I wished I had never seen the antlered figure, so that I could just go on as before, or if I wished I had gotten here sooner, so I could figure out why I was seeing creatures like him again.

I turned to go back to the school but before I could, I was hit by something solid, right in my gut. It pushed me off balance; I fought to stay upright.

The owner of the body gasped, "Oh my God, I'm sorry!"

The voice stung, familiar. Deirdre. My best friend. Could I still call her that? I gasped, "It's okay. I only need just the one kidney."

Deirdre spun, her face flushed, and her expression changed so quickly I couldn't tell what it had been originally. I couldn't stop staring at her face. I had seen her--gray eyes dominating the slender shape of her pale face--so many times with my eyes shut that it seemed strange to see her with them open.

"James. James! Did you see Them? They had to have come right by you!"

I struggled to pull myself together. "Who's 'Them'?"

She stepped away from me to look over the hill, eyes narrowed, squinting into the oncoming darkness. "The faeries. I don't know--four of them? Five?"

She was seriously freaking me out; she moved so quickly that her choppy dark ponytail swung in small circles. "Okay, look, Dee, stop moving. You're making me seasick. Now what-faeries? Again?"

Deirdre closed her eyes for a minute. When she opened them again, she looked more like herself. Less frantic. "So stupid. I'm just weirded out, I guess. It's like I'm seeing them everywhere."

I didn't know what to say. It kind of hurt just to look at her, in a way I'd forgotten. Sort of like a splinter--not when you first get it under your skin, but the slow ache after it has been taken out.

She shook her head. "Can I be any more stupid? Seriously, it's been forever since I've seen you and I'm already whining in the first five minutes. I should be jumping out of my skin with happiness. I'm--I'm sorry I haven't gotten a chance to see you yet."

For a moment I'd thought that "I'm sorry" would be followed by something else. Something intensely meaningful that would show some recognition that she'd hurt me. When it didn't come, I really wanted to pout and make her feel bad, but I didn't have the balls. Instead, I rescued her, like the gallant, punishment-loving idiot that I am. "Well, the brochure did say that the campus was more than fifteen acres. It could've been years before we ran into each other."

Deirdre bit her lip. "I had no idea how crazy the class schedule would be. But--wow. It's so good to see you."

There was a long, awkward moment where a hug would've usually happened, before last summer. Before Luke, and way before that text message I'd sent--the one neither of us could forget.

"You're very tanned," I said. A lie; Dee didn't tan.

Dee sort of smiled. "And you cut your hair."

I ran a hand over my head, let my fingers worry over the new scar above my ear. "They had to shave it to put the stitches in. I just shaved all of it to match. I wanted to shave my initials in it, but--this will come as a shock to you--I just now realized that my initials spell JAM. It was kind of humiliating."

Dee laughed. I was absurdly pleased that she did. "It sort of suits you," she said, but her eyes were on my hands and the scribbled words that covered both of them up to the wrist.

More ink than skin.

I wanted to ask her how she was, about the faeries, about the text, but I couldn't seem to say anything important. "Better than it would you."

She laughed again. It wasn't a real laugh, but that was okay, because I hadn't really meant it to be funny. I just needed something to say.

"What are you doing here?"

Both Dee and I spun and found ourselves facing one of the teachers: Eve Linnet. Dramatic Lit. She was a small, pale ghost in the dim light. Her face might've been pretty if she hadn't been scowling. "This isn't school grounds."

Something nagged me as wrong, though it took me a second to realize what. She'd come from the hills, not from the school.

Linnet craned her neck as if she'd just noticed Deirdre; Dee's face was red as if we'd been caught doing something. Linnet's voice was sharp. "I don't know what sort of schools you two came from, but we don't allow any of that sort of behavior here."

Before last summer, I would've made some joke about Dee and

I--about how it wasn't like that, how I was her bound love slave since birth, or how nothing had happened because Dee was repulsed by a certain chemical component in my skin. But instead I just said, "It wasn't like that."

I knew it sounded guilty, and she must've thought so too, because she said, "Oh, it wasn't? Then why were you all the way out here?"

I had it. I looked past her, toward the hills, and her eyes darted along my line of vision. "We were waiting for you."

Dee looked at me sharply, but not in the way Linnet did. Linnet looked angry, or afraid. For a long moment she didn't say anything at all, and then, finally, she said, "I don't think any of us should be here right now. Let's go back to the dorms, and I'll just forget this whole thing ever happened. It's a terrible way to begin a school year, anyway. In trouble."

As Linnet turned to lead us back to the school, Dee cast an admiring glance in my direction, and then rolled her eyes toward Linnet, thoughts plain: she's crazy! I shrugged and allowed Dee half a grin. I didn't think there was anything wrong with Linnet's sanity, though. I think that I wasn't the only one who had gone running out to meet that music.

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James

Last nite wz weird. I miss talking like we used 2. Not that u would want 2 hear about this stuff i'm thinking. Like luke. I know what heartache means now. I feel like puking when i think of him.

From:

Dee

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Day eleven (11) (onze), according to the ticks on my left hand.

The first week--all coy introductions in class and fluffy assignments--was over, and the second week was showing its teeth. Out came the giant homework assignments, the writingupon of boards, and the general rending of garments that go with high school. It was funny--I'd really thought in the back of my head that a school filled with music geeks would be different from a regular high school, but really the only thing that was different was that we played our roles according to where we sat in the orchestra. Brass players: jerks. Woodwinds: snobby cliques. Strings: overachievers with their hands up all the time. Percussion: class clowns.

Bagpipers: me.

The only class that didn't change much the second week was

Mr. Sullivan's English class: first period, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. Bring your own caffeine. He let us drink coffee in class. It would've been hypocritical for him not to.

Anyway, Sullivan had started out the school year sitting on his desk and playing music on the stereo as he taught. While the other teachers buttoned down and buttoned up and got serious in week two, Sullivan stayed the same, a young, knobby diplomat for Shakespeare and his ilk. He'd assigned us murderous reading assignments in the first week, and those didn't change either. We might've cared more about the murderous reading assignments if we hadn't been allowed caffeine and to shift our desks around as we liked and to swear when needed.

"We're going to be studying Hamlet," Sullivan announced on day eleven. He had a huge travel cup in his hand; it made the whole room smell like coffee. I'd never seen him without coffee. As a junior faculty member, he lived on campus and doubled as our dorm's resident advisor--his wife, rumor had it, had left him for a CEO of a company that made crap like My

Little Ponies or something. The hall by his room always smelled like a shrine to caffeine. "How many of you have read it?"

It was a small class, even by Thornking-Ash standards: eight kids. No hands went up.

"Heathens," Sullivan said pleasantly. "Well, it's better if you're all Hamlet-virgins, I suppose. Surely you've at least heard of it."

There were mumbling noises of assent. I hadn't read Hamlet, but I was on good terms with Shakespeare. From the moment I heard, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," I'd been okay with Shakespeare. No fanboy stuff or secret handshakes or anything like that. But if we passed each other in the hall, we'd probably nod at each other.

Sullivan pressed on. "Well, let's start there. What do you guys think of when you hear 'Hamlet'? No, Paul. No hands. Just call it out."

"A small village," said Eric. Eric technically wasn't a student. I think he was supposed to be a teaching assistant but damned if

I'd ever seen him assist Sullivan with anything. "Right? Like a tiny hamlet in the Swiss alps or something."

This was such a stupid answer that the rest of the class immediately relaxed. The bar had been set low enough that we could shout out just about anything.

"Ghosts," Megan said. She was a vocalist. Vocalists irritated me because they were hard to classify into orchestral personality groupings in my head.

"To be or not to be!" shouted Wesley, whose name was also

Paul and so had adopted his last name in the interests of clarity.

It was nice of him to offer, considering that my roommate

Paul's last name was Schleiermacher and I couldn't begin to spell it, much less say it.

"Everybody dies," Paul added. Somehow, that made me think of the antlered figure behind the school.

"Suicide," I said, "and Mel Gibson."

"Mel Gibson?" Eric demanded from behind me.

Sullivan pointed at me. "So you should've raised your hand, Mr.

Morgan. You are familiar with Hamlet."

"That's not what you asked," I said. "You asked if we'd read it. I saw part of the movie on TV. I thought Mel Gibson acted better when he was wearing a kilt."

"Which is an excellent segue. The movie part, not the kilt comment. We'll be watching the movie first--not the Mel version, sorry, James--and then reading the play." Sullivan pointed to a television screen behind him. "Which is why I brought this in. Only--"

He looked around the room, at our desks pulled into a circle around him, all of us waiting for wisdom to flow from his mouth. "Only I fear your butts will get flat from watching a movie in those chairs. We need something better. Who's got good arm muscles?"

So we got the two sofas from the second-floor lounge. It only took four people per sofa to carry them down the hall, past the closed doors of the other classrooms, and into our room.

Sullivan helped us shove them against the wall and draw the blinds so we wouldn't get glare on the screen. It turned the room dark, so the fact that it was morning didn't seem as important.

We piled onto the sofas and Sullivan turned a chair around backwards and sat next to us. We watched the first quarter of

Hamlet (who took himself way too seriously) and Sullivan let us crack jokes about the more melodramatic bits (which was all of it) and for the first time since I'd arrived, I felt like I sort of belonged.

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James

When i saw the faeries i thought i might see luke 2. But they weren't real. Its just weird being here at TA. It's like thinking ur going 2 heaven but when u get there it turns out 2 be Cleveland.

From:

Dee

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Another painfully beautiful fall day in the land of hyphenated schools; the trees were still green in the basin, but on some of the north faces of the hills and mountains surrounding, the leaves were beginning to burn red and orange. The combination made it look fake, like a model train layout. I had the car stereo set to "obnoxiously loud," which was probably why I didn't hear my phone ring; it was only when I caught the glow out of the corner of my eye that I realized someone was calling.

Maybe Dee, finally.

I grabbed it from the passenger seat and looked at the number.

Mom. Sigh. Putting the phone on speaker, I set it on the dash.

"Yeah."

James?

"Yeah."

"Who is this?"

"Your darling son. Fruit of your womb. Sprung from Dad's loins after twinkling in his eye for God knows how lo-"

Mom cut me off. "It sounds like you're in a wind tunnel."

"I'm driving."

"In a wind tunnel?"

I leaned forward and slid the phone closer. "You're on speaker phone. Better?"

"Not hardly. Why are you driving? It's during the school day, isn't it?"

I wedged the phone into the sun visor. It was probably still a little noisy, but it was the best she was going to get. "If you knew, why did you call?"

"Are you cutting?"

I squinted at the street signs. There was a small sign that said, "Historic Downtown Gallon, VA" (I thought the VA was redundant, as any visitor who had gotten this far should remember what state they're in) and had an arrow pointing to the left. "No, Mom. Cutting is for losers who go to jail after being unable to get a job."

Mom paused, recognizing her own words, especially since I'd delivered them in a high-pitched voice and her faintly Scottish accent. "That's true," she admitted. "So what are you doing?"

Peering at the picturesque but economically deficient main street of Gallon, I answered, "Going to my lesson. Before you ask, it's a piping lesson. Before you ask, no, Thornking-Ash doesn't have a resident piping instructor. Before you ask, I have no idea why they'd give scholarship money to a kid whose main instrument was the pipes, considering the answer to unasked question number two." My peers at Thornking-Ash and I were required to take two credits of Musical Performance in order to flex the musical muscles we'd need to successfully woo universities. Hence, piping lessons.

"Well, who is this guy? Is he any good?" Mom's voice was doubtful.

"Mom. I don't want to think about it. It's going to be hugely depressing and you know I like to project a fearless and happy face to the world."

"Remind me again why you're there, if not for the piping?"

She knew darn well why, but she wanted me to say it. Ha.

Double ha. Fat chance of that. "Use your motherly intuition.

Hey. I think I just found the place. I've got to go."

"Call me," Mom said. "Later. When you're not so glib."

I parallel-parked in front of Evans-Brown Music. I was beginning to think giving places hyphenated names was a tradition in this town. "Right. I'll schedule a call when I'm thirty, then, shall I?"

"Shut up." Mom's voice was fond, and for a moment I felt a tremendous, childish sensation of homesickness. "We miss you.

Be careful. And call me later. Not when you're thirty."

I agreed and hung up. Getting my pipe case out of the back seat, I headed into the music store. Despite the sickly green exterior, the inside was warm and inviting, with dark brown carpet and golden-brown paneling on the walls behind rows of guitars. An old guy who looked like he'd not done too well with the '60s sat behind a counter reading a copy of Rolling Stone.

When he looked up at me, I saw that his silver hair was braided tightly in the back, into a tiny pigtail.

"I'm here for a lesson," I told him.

He looked at something on the counter; while he did, I studied the tattoos on his arms, the largest of which was a quote from one of John Lennon's more radical songs. He asked, "What time?"

I pointed to my hand. He squinted until he saw the bit of writing that pertained.

"Three o'clock? You're right on time."

I looked at the clock on the wall behind him, which was surrounded by fliers and postcards. It said two minutes to three. I was peeved that my earliness was being rounded up to the closest hour, but I didn't say anything.

"Upstairs." Old Hippie Guy pointed toward the back of the shop. "Whichever lesson room Bill's in. He's the only instructor here right now."

"Thanks, comrade," I said, and Old Hippie Guy smiled at me. I climbed the creaking, carpet-covered steps to the second floor, which was hotter than Hades and smelled like sweat and nerves. There were three doors on the dark, narrow corridor, and Bill was behind door number two. I pushed the door open a little wider, taking in the acoustic tiles on the walls, the old wooden chairs that looked like they'd been used as scratching posts by baby tigers, and the dusty-haired man sitting in one of them.

He looked an awful lot like George Clooney. I thought about telling him, but decided it would be too forward. "Hola. I'm

James."

He didn't stand up, but he smiled in a friendly enough way, shook my hand, and gestured to the chair opposite. "I'm Bill.

How about you get your chanter out and you play me something so I know where you're at? Unless you're nervous-we can talk a bit, but a half hour is a pretty short lesson if we talk much."

I set my case down and knelt next to it, snapping open the latches. "Nope, sounds good to me." While I dug next to my pipes for my practice chanter, I glanced up at Bill. He had his head turned slightly to the side, reading the bumper stickers plastered all over my case. While he read Be Careful Around

Dragons, For You Are Crunchy & Good with Ketchup, I gave him the once-over. His chanter lay next to his chair, shiny and clean; mine was battered, with multicolored electrician's tape partially covering some of the holes to make it perfectly in tune. His shoulders were straight; one of mine was always a little higher than the other from playing the pipes so often. His case was still almost-new looking; mine looked like it had been through hell a few times. I was beginning to get the idea that this was a waste of time, especially when his eyes widened at my practice chanter.

I set the chanter back down in my case. The humble practice chanter is a slender plastic version of the chanter on the fullsized pipes, and its primary virtue is that it's one thousand times quieter than the actual pipes--making you one thousand times less likely to be stoned to death while practicing indoors.

It's also a heck of a lot easier to play, physically--none of that huffing-puffing-blow-your-bag-in thing. It also sounds like a dying goose; for sheer impressiveness, you really need the actual pipes. So that's what I reached for now. "Um. Do you mind if I play a tune on my pipes, instead? It's hard to find a place to practice on campus, and it feels like it's been ages since they were out of this box."

Bill looked a little surprised, but shrugged. "Sure, there's no other students right now. Whatever you're most comfortable with. What are you going to play?"

"Not sure yet." I took my pipes out; the smell of leather and wood was as familiar to me as my own. The drones fit neatly onto my shoulder as I filled the bag; the moment the drones began to sound, I realized just how loud they were going to be in this tiny room. Should've brought my ear plugs.

Bill watched me tune for about twenty seconds, observing my posture, listening to how even I kept the tone while I tuned. My original plan had been to start off slow and then end with a tune so transcendent he kissed my shoes, but the pipes were so loud in the room that I just wanted to get it over with. I ripped into one of my favorite reels, an impossible, finger-twisting, minor-key thing that I could've played in my sleep. Fast. Clean.

Perfect.

Bill's face was blank. Like, no expression whatsoever. Like I had blown his expression away with the sheer decibel level of the pipes. I took the pipes from my shoulder.

"I have nothing to teach you." He shook his head. "But you knew that when you came here, didn't you? There couldn't possibly be anyone in this entire county that could teach you anything. Maybe not in the state. Do you compete?"

"Up until this summer."

"Why'd you stop?"

I shrugged. For some reason, it gave me no pleasure to tell him.

"Hit the top. Seemed boring after that."

Bill shook his head again. His eyes were studying my face, and I could guess what he was thinking, because it was what they always thought: you're so young (and I'm so old). His voice was flat. "I'll get in touch with the school, I guess. Let them know so they can figure out what to do. But they knew all this before they took you on, didn't they?"

I lowered my pipes to my side. "Yeah."

"You ought to apply to Carnegie Mellon. They have a piping program."

"I never thought of that," I said. He missed my sarcasm.

"You should consider it, after you're done here." Bill watched me put my pipes away. "It's a waste for you to just go to a conservatory."

I nodded thoughtfully and let him make more intelligent remarks, and then I shook his hand and left the room behind. I felt disappointed, though really, I shouldn't be. I'd gotten just what I'd expected.

There was a girl sitting on the curb when I emerged from the music store. In my fairly foul mood, I wouldn't have given her a second thought if she hadn't been sitting two inches from my car. Even with her back to me, everything about her groaned bored.

I put my pipes in the backseat with much noise and scuffle, thinking she'd get the picture--you know, that I'd drive over her if she didn't move by the time I tried to leave my parking spot.

But she hadn't moved by the time I'd finished my scuffling, so I came around the car and stood in front of her. She was still sitting motionless, chin tilted up, her eyes closed against the afternoon sun, pretending not to notice that I was standing there.

Maybe she was from one of my classes and I was supposed to recognize her. If she was a student, she was definitely not within the dress code--she wore a skin-tight shirt with cursive handwriting printed all over it and bell-bottomed jeans with giant platform clogs poking out from the cuffs. Still, her hair was very distinctive: sort of crumpled, or curly, blonde hair that was long in the front but cut short and edgy in the back.

"M'dear," I said in a cordial way, "Your butt's blocking my bumper. Do you think you might move your loitering five feet to the south and let me leave?"

Her eyes flicked open.

It was like I was drowning in icy water. Goose bumps immediately rippled along every bit of my skin and my head sang with an eerie melody of not normal. The events of last summer came rushing into my head unbidden.

The girl--if that was even what she was--flicked her incandescent blue eyes, made even more brilliant by the dusky shadows beneath them, toward my face, looking intensely bored. "I've been waiting for you forever."

When she spoke, the smell of her breath clouded around me, all drowsy nodding wildflowers and recent rain and distant wood smoke. Danger prickled softly around the region of my belly button. I hazarded a question. "'Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began?"

"Don't flatter yourself," she said, and stood up, brushing the dust off her hands on her butt. She was enormously tall with the platform heels on; she looked right into my eyes. This close, I could almost fall into the smell of her. "Only a half hour, though it felt like several hundred years. Come on."

"Whoa. What?"

"Give me a ride to the school."

Okay. So maybe I did know her. Somehow. I tried to picture her in a class, any class, anywhere on campus, and failed miserably.

I pictured her frolicking in a forest glade around some guy she'd just sacrificed to a heathen god. That image worked way better.

"Uh. Thornking-Ash?"

She gave me a withering look.

I looked pointedly at her bell bottoms. "I just don't remember seeing a fascinating creature such as yourself amongst the student body."

The girl smiled at the word "creature" and tugged open the passenger-side door. "No shit. Come on."

I stared at the car as she slammed the door shut after herself. I was used to being the brazen one who caught people off guard.

The girl made an impatient gesture at me through the window.

I considered whether getting in the car with her was a bad idea.

After a summer of intrigue, car crashes, and faeries, it probably was.

I got in.

The radio hummed to life as soon as I started the ignition, and the girl made a face. "Wow. You listen to crap." She punched one of the preset buttons and some sort of dizzyingly fast reel came on. The radios dim display read 113.7. I'm not a rocket scientist (only because rockets don't interest me), but I didn't think radios were supposed to do that.

"Okay," I said finally, pulling away from the curb. "So you go to

Thornking-Ash. What's your name?"

"I didn't say that," she pointed out. She put her bare feet up on the dashboard; her clogs stayed down on the floor. "I only asked you to take me there."

"How silly of me. Of course. What's your name?"

The girl looked at my hands on the wheel, as if she might find the answer to the question in my handwriting. She screwed her face up thoughtfully. "Nuala. No--Elenora. No--Polly--no, wait. I liked Nuala the best. Yeah, let's go with Nuala."

She said it like it had a lot of Os in it: Noooooola. She was halfsmiling in the smug sort of way that I liked better on my face.

"Are you sure you want to stick with that one?" She studied her fingernails and bit at one. "It's a woman's prerogative to change her mind."

"Are you a woman?" I asked.

Nuala shot a dark look at me. "Haven't you heard that it's rude to ask?"

"Right. How thoughtless of me. So, have we met?"

Nuala waved a hand at me. "Shut up, would you? I'm trying to listen." She adjusted her seat way back and stared at the ceiling a second before closing her eyes. I had this horrible idea that she wasn't listening to the music on the radio, but to some faraway music that only she could hear. I kept driving, silent, but I kept an eye on her. The afternoon sunlight came in through the side of the car and highlighted a galaxy of freckles on her cheeks. The freckles seemed incongruous, somehow:

Very innocent. Very human. Then she opened her eyes and said, "So you're a piper."

This didn't have to be a supernatural observation. Anybody who'd been on the sidewalk when I played for Bill would've been able to hear. Still, I couldn't help but imagine a subtext beneath her statement. "Yes. An awesome one."

Nuala shrugged. "You're all right."

I glanced at her; she was smiling, in a very pointy way. "You're just trying to make me angry."

"I'm just saying I've heard better." Nuala turned her face to me and the smile vanished. "I listened to your conversation, piper.

They've got nothing for you here. Would you like to be better at what you do?"

The prick of danger increased to a stab. "That's a stupid question. You already know the answer, or you wouldn't have asked."

"I could help you."

I narrowed my eyes, trying to choose my words. "How do you figure?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her sit up straight and then, a moment later, I felt her breath in my ear. "By whispering secrets into your ear that would change your life."

I leaned my head away from her before the scent of her breath could capture me. My goose bumps had goose bumps. "And you'd do this selflessly, I'm sure."

"You know, I'd get hardly anything out of it, in comparison. You wouldn't even notice. You'd become the best piper to ever live."

"Right." All sorts of warning stories of deals with devils and the like were running through my head, and now I was definitely rethinking my decision to get into the car with her. "Well, I'm flattered. But no." We were getting close to the school now. I wondered what she'd do when we got there. "I'm happy with my level of awesomeness. Happy enough to work my way up on my own, anyway. Unless you have, like, a free, no-obligation trial subscription that I can cancel after thirty days without owing anything or giving you a credit card number."

She showed me her teeth in a kind of grimace or snarl. "It's very rude to turn down help from someone like me. Self-involved jerks such as yourself rarely get such offers."

I protested. "I was nice about turning you down, though. You have to admit that, at least."

"You didn't even think about it."

"I did. Now, did you hear that pause there? Just a second ago?

That was me, thinking about it again. And the answer's still no."

She growled and shoved her feet into her giant clogs. "Stop the car. I'll get out here."

"What about school?"

Nuala's fingers were claws on the door handle. "Don't push me, James Morgan. Let me out and I won't pop your head off."

There was a ferocity to her voice that made me believe her. I stopped the car by the side of the road, trees close in on either side. Nuala fumbled with the door handle and then snapped at me, "Locks, you idiot!"

The doors had auto-locked. I hit the unlock button and she pushed the door open. Turning back to me, she fixed her blue eyes on me again. Her voice was scornful. "I think you lack the capacity to learn what I could teach you, anyway. Smug bastard."

She slammed the door and I hit the gas before she could change her mind. I glanced in the rearview mirror, but all I saw was a whirl of dry leaves spinning up from the road.

-from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

For some reason, the memory of that afternoon, the first day anyone had ever told me "no," stuck in my head with excruciating detail. I could remember everything about it for the rest of my life. The too-hot interior of James' car and the way that the worn cloth seat felt downy against the palm of my hand. The leaves outside the car, brilliant in their gaudy colors: the red-brown of the oaks was the same red-brown of his hair.

The thick feeling in the back of my throat--anger. Real anger. It had been forever since I'd been angry.

It had been forever since I hadn't gotten something I wanted.

I sulked until the sun blazed red just above the trees and the students returned to the dorms in knots of two, threes, fours.

There were several that walked alone, hands shoved in pockets or gripping backpack straps, eyes on the ground. They would've been easy marks; being away from their family and friends was hard and these little lonely souls had only their music for company. They glowed faintly to me, blues and aquamarines and watery greens, all the color of my eyes. Maybe if it hadn't been so soon after the last one, I would've been tempted. But I still felt strong, alive, invincible.

And there James was, in a group of four kids, which was all wrong. My marks never had friends--music was their life.

Someone like him shouldn't have had such an easy way with people. Shouldn't have even wanted it. I would've doubted that it was him, despite his short-cropped auburn hair and his cocky bastard walk, but the fierce splash of yellow-- my favorite color, for the record--that glowed inside him screamed music music music.

It was all I could do not to go rushing down there and make him want to take my deal. Or hurt him. Very badly. I had a couple of ideas that would take quite awhile to finish.

Patience. Get a grip.

So, instead, I fell into step behind his group of friends, unseen. I guess I could've been seen if anyone had thought to look really hard in the right way, but no one did. No one ever did, these days, though I'd heard from other faeries that it hadn't always been this way. The few kids that felt something of me now and glanced up saw only a whirl of fall leaves racing along the edge of the sidewalk, climbing into the air before spiraling back down to the ground. That was me, always, the invisible shiver at twilight, the intangible lump in the back of your throat, the unbidden tear at thoughts long forgotten.

As the kids walked past the dorm buildings, the group dwindled to two as the girls disappeared into their dorm. I could get closer then, close enough that the glow of him reflected on my twilight skin and made me want to touch him and pull bright strings of music out of his head. If only he'd said yes.

James and the remaining boy were talking about vending machines. One of them, a boy whose chief characteristic was an innocent, smiling face, was quoting statistics about how many people get killed by vending machines tipping over on them.

"I don't think they pulled the machines onto themselves,"

James was saying.

"They showed video," the round kid said.

"No, I think there's probably an avenging vending machine angel that pushes them onto grabby bastards who are bad sports about losing their money." James made a pushing motion, a panicked expression, and a squashing sound in quick succession. "Lesson learned, bucko. Next time, just accept that you've lost your fifty cents."

Round-o: "Except there wouldn't be a next time."

"How right you are. Dying would prohibit one from acting upon the lesson they'd learned. Scratch that. Let the record show that vending machine tragedies are not morality tales but a form of natural selection."

Round kid laughed, then looked past James at something. "Hey, man, there's a chick staring at you."

"Is there ever not?" James asked, but he turned to look anyway, past me at someone else. The yellow inside him flashed, twisted, flared toward me as if begging for me to turn it into something else. But his eyes didn't find me; they instead rested on a pale girl. Black hair, face washed out in the artificial light of a streetlight, fingers plucking anxiously at her backpack strap.

There was something missing from James' voice when he told

Round-o, "Hey, I'll be up in a second, okay? She's from my old school."

Round-head duly dispatched, James made his way through the circles of streetlight to where the girl stood. She had faint threads of orange glow running through her, like neon taffy, making me think that she would've made a good pupil if I hadn't liked mine young, handsome, and male.

James' voice was very brave, all funny and strong, even though the thoughts I could catch of his were chaotic. "Hey, crazy, what's up?"

She smiled back at him, annoyingly pretty--I didn't really care for attractive members of my own gender--and made a weird, crumpled, rueful face. Again, annoyingly cute. "Just getting ready to go up to my room. I came over this way because I always, um, never, because I never saw the fountain when it was lit up. And I wanted to."

Yeah, whatever. So you came over to see him and don't want to say it. Right. Stop being coy. I glared at her. James half-cocked his head in my direction, as if listening, and I skirted a few feet away from them. But at my sudden movement, the girl's eyes lifted abruptly, following me, frowning as if she saw me. Crap. I leaned down as if I was tying my shoe, like I was a real student and I was actually visible to everyone. Her eyes didn't focus on me after I'd bent down--she couldn't quite see me. She must have some of the second sight. That annoyed me too.

"Dee," James said. "Earth to Dee. Calling planet Dee. Houston, our communication lines seem to be down. Dee, Dee, do you read me?"

Dee pulled her eyes away from me and back to James. She blinked, hard. "Um. Yes. Sorry about that. I didn't get enough sleep last night." She had a very beautiful voice. I thought she must be quite a good singer. I finished fake-tying my shoe and started to walk very slowly toward the fountain, to hide myself in the water. Behind me, I heard James say something and Dee laugh, a relieved laugh, as if it had been awhile since she'd heard something funny and she was glad humor still existed.

I lay down in the fountain--invisible, I couldn't feel the wetness-and looked up at the darkening sky, the water rippling over my vision. I felt safe in the water, utterly invisible, utterly protected.

Dee and James walked to the edge of the satyr fountain and stood directly over the top of me, close to each other but not touching, separated by some invisible barrier they had constructed before I'd arrived on the scene. James cracked jokes the whole time, one meaningless, funny line after another, making her laugh again and again so that they didn't have to talk. His agony would've made a gorgeous song. I had to find a way to make him take my deal.

Dee and James stared at the satyr, who grinned back at them, permanently dancing upon a tiny oak leaf in the middle of the water. "I've heard you practicing," Dee said.

"Stunned by my magnificence?"

"Actually, I do think you've gotten better since the last time I heard you. Is that possible?"

"Entirely possible. The world is a wonderful and strange place."

He hesitated. Lying in the water, I could read his thoughts more easily. I saw his brain form the question, how are you holding up here? But instead he said, "It's getting colder at night."

"Friggin' freezing in our room sometimes!" Dee's voice was too enthusiastic, glad of an easy conversation. "When do they turn on the heat, anyway?"

"It's probably a good thing they haven't. If they turned on the heat now, it'd be hot enough to toast marshmallows in the rooms during the day."

"That's true. It's still really warm in the afternoon, isn't it? I guess it's the mountains."

I saw James struggle with his words before he said them, the first deeply sincere statement he'd made since finding her underneath the streetlight. "The mountains are gorgeous, aren't they? They kind of make me sad for some reason, looking at them."

Dee didn't reply or react. It was like if he wasn't saying something funny, he wasn't speaking at all.

She moved away from him, around the edge of the fountain. He didn't follow. Dipping her hand in the water, close to my feet, she said, "This fountain's really weird. Why is he smiling like that?"

James reached over and patted the satyr's butt. "Because he's naked."

"I'm just glad he's in front of your dorm instead of the girls'. I think he's a nasty little piece of work."

"I'll deface him for you, if you like," James offered.

She laughed. I could almost imagine her singing when she laughed. "That's okay. But I'd better get inside. Don't want to be caught by that crazy teacher again, after curfew."

He reached a hand toward her like he was going to take her hand, or her backpack, or touch her arm. He said, "I'll walk you back."

"It's okay. I'm going to run," Dee said. "I'll see you tomorrow?"

The line of his shoulders seemed tired all of a sudden and his hand went into his pocket. "Indubitably."

Dee flashed a smile at him and pelted back toward the girls' dorm, backpack flapping against her body as she ran. James stayed by the fountain long after she'd disappeared, motionless as the satyr, his close-cut hair turning redder in the sunset light and his eyes half shut. I lay in the water and waited.

Long minutes passed, the sun slowly burning down toward the trees, and I kept looking at that gold glow that flickered inside him, the promise of creative greatness. Why hadn't he said yes?

Was it only because he'd turned me down that I now wanted him so badly? I could make him incredible. He could make me warm, alive, awake.

I'd give him a dream. That's what I'd do. I'd show him just a little of what I could do, and next time he saw me, he wouldn't be able to say no.

Above me, James started. He had his head cocked, listening like when he'd sensed me before, only now he heard something else.

The thorn king. I heard the melody begin to ripple across the hills as he began his journey across them. My ears had barely registered the sound, but when I blinked, James was gone. I hurriedly pushed myself out of the water--the surface moved in slow concentric waves around me--and I saw James, a dim figure in the darkness, running flat out like his life depended on it. Running toward the antlered king and his slow song for the dead. Who ran to meet death?

Long after James had traded the hills behind Thornking-Ash for his dorm room, I made my own way to the hills. I wasn't interested in the antlered king's music, though. It was faerie music that drew me now--it sounded like a dance, as improbable as that was.

I had never liked the dances. If there was one thing in the history of the world that had been invented to make me feel like a complete outsider, it was the dances the faeries held inside faerie rings. And this dance, on the biggest hill behind

Thornking-Ash School, was no different--but it was ten times bigger than any dance I had ever seen. And no faerie, with the exception of myself, of course, could touch iron; mere proximity to it drove most faeries far under the hills and into isolated stretches of countryside. So no matter how tempting the music of the Thornking-Ash School might be to my kind, the invisible iron that reinforced it and the shimmering cars in the parking lots should've rendered it a faerie no-fly zone.

But there were hundreds of faeries of every size and shape, from the tall, lovely court fey, who I expected to see, to the short, ugly hobmen, who I didn't--they rarely ventured out from their holes and their drudgery to come to the dances. They all danced in twos and threes, touching each other's hair, moving their bodies as one, all beautiful while dancing.

Hanging back a few dozen feet, up to my waist in the dry field grass, I brushed my palms over the seed tops and sighed. I wasn't thrilled to see any of them. I had been hoping to have

Thornking-Ash to myself.

But their music called to me, pulling at my body, irresistible.

The longer I stayed there, listening to its pulsing rhythm, the more I knew that I had to go and feel it for myself.

The dancers didn't interest me, with the impossible shapes they made of their bodies and the sensuality of skin touching skin. It was the musicians I headed toward. A lithe, beautiful boy faerie was all wrapped around a skin drum on his lap and it was he who gave the dance its hypnotic, primal heartbeat. There was a haunting fiddler who scratched and wailed on his fiddle, another faerie who shook a tambourine in perfect counterpoint to the booming drum, and a flutist who called us to dance with frightening, frantic urgency. But that drummer--the one who could make his drum sound like water dropping into a bucket or like the footfalls of a giant or like rain scattering on a roof--he was the one to watch. He was the one who could make you forget yourself.

"Dance, lovely?" a big-footed trow with a face like a shovel caught my hand. No sooner had he touched my fingers than he released them.

I sneered at him. "Yeah, I didn't think you wanted any of that."

The trow leaned toward another near him and said in his slow trow way, "It's a leanan sidhe."

And just like that, I had been announced. As insidious as the fast, primitive beat, the words were passed from dancer to dancer, and I felt eyes on me as I moved through the crowd. I was not just any solitary fey, I was the leanan sidhe. Lowest of the low. Nearly human.

"I didn't know dancing was one of your talents," called a faerie as she whirled by me. She and her friends were no taller than my hip, and their laughter stung like bees. I watched them spin for a moment, their feet falling unerringly with the driving drumbeat, until I saw her tail peek from under her gauzy green dress.

My smile was a snarl. "I didn't realize talking was one of your talents. I didn't think monkeys could speak."

She jerked her dress down with a scowl in my direction and tugged the others away from me. I grimaced after them and kept making my way through the crowd. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for--maybe just someplace where the music would finally pull me into its spell and make me forget the rest of this.

Someone grabbed my butt as I walked; by the time I spun, however, there was nothing but a row of grinning faces looking at me. It wasn't that I couldn't pick out the one who didn't look innocent. More that I couldn't find one who didn't look guilty.

"Go screw yourselves," I told them, and they all laughed.

"We'd like to, slut," said one of them, and made a rude gesture.

"Will you help?"

No point getting into a fight tonight. I just spit in their general direction and whirled away, putting as much distance between me and the butt-grabbers as I could.

The drum begged my feet to dance, but I didn't. The music was gorgeous, and any other night I would've given into it. But tonight, all I could think about was what James and his pipes could do with the tune the musicians played now. I wasn't sure why I'd bothered to come. I was a motionless island in the middle of a swirling sea of dancers. They didn't bother to hide their stares as they rippled, spun, swayed with the music and with each other. There was laughter all around me.

"Are you lost, cailín?"

I'll admit I was shocked shitless by both the kindness in the voice and the innocuous title--simply "girl" in Irish. I turned and found a man smiling down at me, dressed in court finery, his tunic buttoned with shell-shaped buttons all the way up his neck.

A human. He glowed vaguely golden, enough to make me hungry but not enough to really tempt me. Besides, though he was handsome enough, with his laugh-lined eyes and crooked nose, he was neither beautiful enough nor fair enough to be a changeling, stolen away by the faeries as a child. Between that and his court clothing, I would have bet my curls he was the queen's new human consort. Even I, on the fringe as I was, had heard whispers of him.

I eyed him, wary, and said loftily, "Do I look lost, human?"

His eyes took in my jean skirt with the ripped bottom, my lowcut peasant top, and my impossibly tall cork heels. His mouth made a shape as if he had tried a lemon and found it sort of appealing. "It's hard to imagine you anywhere you didn't intend to be," he admitted.

I curled my mouth into a smile.

"You have an extremely wicked smile," he said.

"That's because I am extremely wicked. Haven't you heard?"

The consort's eyes returned to my face and his already smilethin eyes narrowed more. His voice was light, playful. "Should I have, human?"

I laughed out loud at his mistake. At least I knew now why he'd approached me--he thought I was one of his kind. Did I look that bad? "Far be it from me to disillusion you," I replied. "You'll find out soon enough. For now I'm enjoying your ignorance, to tell you the truth."

"The truth is all anyone can speak around here," the consort countered.

My mouth curled into a smile.

"I see conversing with you takes me only in circles," he said, and he held out a hand. "Would you dance, instead? Just one dance?"

I didn't like to dance with faeries, but he wasn't one. My teeth were a thin white line. "There is no such thing as one dance inside this circle."

"Indeed. So we dance until you say stop, and then--we stop?

I paused. Dancing with Eleanor's consort without begging for the privilege first seemed like a bad idea. Which added slightly to the appeal. "Where is my dear queen?"

"She is attending to other matters." For half a second, I thought

I saw something--relief, maybe--flicker across his face, and then it was gone. His hand was still outstretched toward me, and I put my hand in it.

And the music took us. My feet fell into the beat, and his feet were already in it, and we spun into the crowd. There was night somewhere out there, but it seemed far away from this hill, brilliantly lit by orbs and by the dust hanging in the air.

We were watched as we danced, his hands holding mine tightly, as if he held me up, and I heard voices as we danced past, snatches of conversation.

"--the leanan sidhe--"

"--if the queen knew--"

"--why does she dance with--"

"--he will be a king before--"

My fingers tightened on the consort's. "So you will be a king; that's why you are here."

His eyes were bright. Like all humans, he was half-drunk with the music once he started to dance. "It is not a secret."

I thought about saying it was from me, but I didn't want to look like an idiot. "You're only a human."

"But I can dance," he protested. And he could. Quite well for a human, the drum beat pushing his body this way and that, his feet making intricate patterns on the stamped-down grass.

"And I will have magic, later, when I am king." He spun me.

"How do you figure that, human?"

"The queen has promised me and I believe her; she can't lie."

He laughed, wildly, and I saw that he was ravished by the music, thrilled with the dance, so very vulnerable to us. "She is very beautiful. It hurts me, cailín, how beautiful she is."

That the queen's beauty hurt him was no surprise to me.

The queen's beauty pained everyone who saw her. "Magic doesn't just float around, human."

He laughed again, as if what I had said was funny. "Of course not! It moves from body to body, right? So I suppose it shall come from another somebody."

I considered myself a sinister creature but his statement sounded sinister, even to me. "Another magical somebody, hmm? One wonders how they would find another somebody like this. And what that would do to that somebody."

"The queen is very cunning."

I thought of the way she'd silently worked behind the old queen's back, carefully making sure that when the old queen's crown fell from her head, she--Eleanor--would rise up wearing it. "Oh, yes, she is very cunning. But it sounds to me like it's going to be extremely painful to somebody else."

The consort made a face of disbelief. "My queen is not cruel."

I just looked at him. Surely he didn't believe that. Not unless he'd been dropped on his head as a kid or something. But he didn't take it back. So I said, "Not everyone can hold magic even when they can manage to find it."

"Halloween, cailín. Day of the dead. Magic is more volatile then. And--she would not grant me something I could not carry.

She knows my weaknesses. I am not afraid; I believe I will be one of you soon enough."

"Stop," I snarled, and I stopped so suddenly that he jerked my arm, twisting my shoulder uncomfortably. "I don't think you know what you say."

He dropped my hand and stood, arms slack by his sides.

The dancers around us spun to stare at both of us. Their voices rose in murmurs and whispers.

"I wouldn't hurry to throw away my humanness so quickly," I told him, widening the space between us. "Until you see what being faerie really means."

My words were wasted. He just stared at me.

I left the consort standing there in the circle of faeries. Before

I'd even gone halfway invisible, a tall, red-haired faerie had taken his hand, and by the time I had abandoned physical form entirely, riding up and up on human thoughts and dreams, the consort had been pulled into the dance once again. From overhead, I couldn't tell him from the faeries, and I also couldn't tell what emotion was burning in my chest. But I left them all behind, glad to be rid of them; I had a dream to bestow.

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To:

James

I saw more faeries. The ensembles music called them.

They danced on the spare chairs. No one else could see them so i pretended i couldn't either. They were beautiful i saw music under their skin.

From:

Dee

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I dreamt of music. A song, intoxicating and viral, from someplace far away, beautiful and unattainable.

I wanted it, this gray song of desire. It was real in a way no dream had ever been.

I knew this was Nuala's doing, this song so beautiful that it hurt.

I woke up.

When I woke up, my mouth was stuffed with golden music. It was like having a song stuck in my head, but with taste and color and sensation attached to it. It was all wood smoke and beads of rain on oak leaves and shining gold strands choking me. It reminded me of wanting Dee, wanting to be a better piper, wanting to... just wanting.

"Hey, James. Wake up." Paul's voice pushed back the weight of the song, freeing my chest; I could breathe again. "It's seven forty."

I sucked in a deep breath of air that was comforting in its normalcy: vaguely unwashed laundry, stale Doritos, and old wood flooring. I had never properly appreciated the smell of

Doritos--so human. I clung tightly to the human-ness around me, a lifeboat in a sea of song. Paul's words seemed vastly unimportant.

"Seven forty-one," Paul said. His voice was accompanied by a zipper sound. His backpack, maybe. It pulled me further out of my dream; I tried not to resent him. "Are you awake?"

I was awake. It was just taking me a long time to claw my way out of sleep. I tried my voice and was a little surprised when it worked. "There is no way on God's green earth that it's seven forty. What happened to the alarm?"

"It happened fifteen minutes ago. Snooze button too. You didn't even move."

"I was dead," I said, and sat up. My sheets were damp with sweat. "Dead people don't move. Are you sure the alarm went off?"

I realized now he was fully dressed. He'd even had time to slick down his black hair with water, making him look like an Italian gangster. "It woke me up." He peered at me, eyes round behind his glasses. "Are you sick?"

"Sick in the head, my friend." I got out of bed; it felt like I was tearing myself out of a gauzy cobweb of dreams. Now that I was awake, I thought my bed smelled disconcertingly like

Nuala's breath had when I met her--all autumn and rain and wanting. Or maybe it was me, my skin. The thought was something like unpleasant. I wrenched my attention back to

Paul. "But not ill in the conventional sense, I'm afraid. Do you think I can go to class like this?" I gestured to my T-shirt and boxers.

"Man, even I don't want to see you like that. Are you coming to breakfast? You'll have to hurry."

I dug around on the floor for a cleanish pair of pants while Paul hovered by the door, unwilling to leave without me. I jerked on some clothing and scratched my hair into universal messiness.

"Yes, I'm coming. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, dear Paul. I wouldn't miss it for the world. Do you think anyone will notice that I wore these yesterday?" Paul didn't answer, wisely understanding the question to be rhetorical.

"I'm ready. Let's go--Wait."

I knelt down and pulled my duffle bag from under the bed.

Rummaging through the odds and ends in the bottom of it, I felt like I was answering an exam question.

Multiple choice #1: What in James duffle bag will help him ward off a supernatural menace with a very fine set of boobs? a) a watch that doesn't keep proper time b) a novel--some horrible-looking space thriller--that his mother sent along, not realizing he would be spending every waking moment reading something some teacher had stuffed into his prone hands c) a handful of granola bars, brought along in case of a nuclear holocaust and a subsequent lack of fresh food d) an iron band that did absolutely jack-shit for him over the summer but seemed to work out for other people.

My fingers closed on the iron band--thin, uneven, with knobs on each end. I pulled it out. Paul wordlessly watched me as I fit the band around my wrist.

It had been weeks since the stain it left on my wrist had finally disappeared. I felt better with the iron against my skin.

Protected, invincible.

I had always been an ace liar, even to myself.

I squeezed the knobs together until they pinched my skin. "Now

I'm ready."

Breakfast was as it always was. A bunch of music geeks collecting in the dining hall too early in the morning. "Whoever had designed the dining hall had been clever, though; tall windows stretched from floor to ceiling on the east side. The morning sun flooded the room, illuminating the scratched wooden tops of the tables and the faded murals on the walls.

At any other time of the day, the dining hall was mundane, dingy even. But first thing in the morning, blasted with first light, it was a friggin' cathedral.

Conversation was muted and mostly drowned out by spoons in cereal bowls, forks moving through rubbery eggs. I stirred my cereal until it turned to paste, my mouth still full of the taste of the music in my dream.

"James, can I talk to you for a second? If you're done eating?"

The voice was Sullivan's. Most of the teachers who lived on campus ate later in a separate faculty room, away from us performing monkeys, but Sullivan often ate breakfast with the students. Since his class was first period, it made sense for him to be here at oh-dark-thirty. Plus, who else did he have to eat breakfast with, if not us?

"I'm holding court at present," I told him.

Sullivan peered over his bowl of cereal at my table-mates. The usual suspects: Megan, Eric, Wesley, Paul. Everyone but the person I wanted. Couldn't she even sit at my table anymore?

Sullivan said, "Can you minions spare James for a moment?"

"Is he in trouble?" Megan had been babbling about British swear words, but she broke off to observe us.

"No more than usual." Sullivan didn't wait for an answer; he took my cereal and headed back toward an empty table, as if certain I would follow my breakfast.

"It appears my presence is desired by an authority figure." I shrugged. I didn't think they'd miss me; I was being terrible company anyway. "See you guys in class."

I joined Sullivan and sat across from him. I wasn't about to eat my pasty cereal, so I watched him carefully pick the nuts out of his. He had very long fingers with knobby joints. He was a very long person in general, with a rumpled appearance like he'd been thrown in the drier and then worn without ironing. This close, I could see that he was quite young. Thirties, tops.

"I heard about your piping instructor," Sullivan said. The neat pile of nuts on his napkin toppled as he added another. "Or should I say, 'ex-piping instructor'?" He lifted an eyebrow but didn't look up from his careful sorting.

"Probably more appropriate," I agreed.

"So, how are you liking Thornking-Ash?" He finally took a spoonful of cereal and began to eat. I could hear him crunching from where I sat; there wasn't any milk in his bowl.

"Beats Chinese water torture." Inexplicably, my eyes focused on the hand he held the spoon with. On one of his knobby fingers was a wide metallic ring, scratched with shapes. Ugly and dull, like the band on my wrist.

Sullivan caught my gaze. His eyes dropped briefly to my wrist and then back to his own ring. "Would you like to see it closer?"

He put down his spoon and began twisting his ring, working it over a knuckle.

A sick, uncertain melody sang in my ears, and in front of me

Sullivan fell to the floor, then pushed himself onto his hands and knees, vomiting flowers and blood.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a second and then opened them.

Sullivan was still working the ring off.

I shook my head. "No. Actually, I'd rather not. Please leave it on."

The words were out before I could think of whether they sounded normal. In retrospect, they sounded like I was a head case, but Sullivan didn't seem to notice. In any case, he kept the ring on.

"Well, you're not an idiot," Sullivan said. "I'm sure you know why I called you over here. We're a music school, and you've basically graduated with honors before you've started. I looked up your stats. You had to know that we couldn't possibly have an instructor of your level here."

If I hadn't confessed to my own flesh and blood why I'd come here, I wasn't about to try it out on a random teacher. "Maybe I am an idiot."

Sullivan shook his head. "I've seen enough to know what they look like."

I wanted to grin. Sullivan was all right.

"Okay, so let's assume I'm not an idiot." I pushed my cereal out of the way and leaned on my arms. "Let's assume I knew that I wasn't going to find the piping equivalent of Obi-Wan here.

Let's also assume, for convenience's sake, that I'm not going to tell you why I came, assuming I even had a good reason."

"Let's do that." Sullivan glanced at the clock and then back at me. He had an intensity to his eyes that I was unfamiliar with in teachers; he wasn't just another runner on the giant treadmill of adult life. "I've asked Bill what he thought I should do with you."

It took me a moment to remember that Bill was the piping instructor.

"He thought I should just leave you be. You know, let you practice whenever you'd normally be taking your lesson, and leave it at that. But I think that sort of perverts the whole idea of having you come to a music school. Do you concur?"

"It does seem vaguely wrong," I agreed. "I don't know if I'd go so far as to say perverts--"

Sullivan interrupted. "So I thought we'd set you up with some other sort of instrument. Nothing woodwind or reedlike. You'd pick that up too fast. Guitar maybe, or piano. Something that will take you longer than five minutes to master."

"In the interests of full disclosure," I said, "I play some guitar."

"In the interests of full disclosure," Sullivan echoed my words, "so do I. But I'm better at piano. Do you play that at all?"

"I'll be taking lessons from you?"

"The real piano teachers have the lesson slots more than filled with real pianists. But because I don't want to see you wasting your time here, I'll find some time between grading horrendous

English essays to give you lessons. And it can count toward your music credit. If that is agreeable to you.

People being nice for no apparent reason always made me suspicious. People being nice to me with no apparent reason made me even more suspicious. "I can't help but feel that I'm some sort of science experiment or penance."

"Yes," Sullivan said, standing up with his mostly empty bowl of rabbit food. "You're fulfilling my 'helping students who remind me of myself when I was young and stupid' quota. Thanks for that. I'd like to start this week but we've got the D.C. trip, so I'll see you next Friday at five in the practice rooms. Oh, and unless you need it to feel comfortable, you can leave your ego in your room; you won't be needing it."

He smiled pleasantly at me and inclined his head like those people who nod their heads when they say good-bye. The

Japanese?

I pulled a pen out of my pocket and wrote fri 5 piano on my hand, so that I wouldn't forget. But I didn't think I would.

The practice rooms that filled Chance Hall felt like holding cells.

They were tiny, perfectly square rooms just big enough to hold an upright piano and two music stands and smelled like one thousand years of body odor. I cast a scornful look at the music stands--pipers memorize everything--and set my pipe case down by the piano bench. I took out my practice chanter and sat down; the bench creaked like a fart.

My piano lesson wasn't for days, but I hadn't been to the practice rooms before, and I wanted to see what they were like before Friday.

It wasn't exactly a room built for inspiration. A practice chanter doesn't have a beautiful tone to start with--the words "dying goose" come to mind--and I didn't expect that the crap acoustics of the room would improve it.

I looked at the door. It had one of those little twist locks on the doorknob so that you could lock yourself in--I suppose so you wouldn't have people barging in all the time while you were practicing. It occurred to me, randomly, that the practice rooms would be a great place to commit suicide. Everyone would just assume you were inside practicing until you started to smell.

I locked the door.

I sat back down on the very end of the bench and held my chanter to my lips. I didn't quite want to begin playing, because

I could feel the song from my dream still lurking right at the edge of my consciousness and I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to stop it falling from my fingers if I started to play. And it would be amazing. The half-remembered song begged me to play it, to discover just how beautiful it would sound released into the air--but I was afraid that by giving in, I might be saying yes to something I didn't want to say yes to.

I debated, my back to the door. I don't know how long I'd sat there, unmoving, when I felt a tug in my head, a prickle of something, and watched goose bumps rise along the skin of my arms. And I knew that something was in the room with me, though the door had made no sound and I'd heard no footfalls.

I inhaled silently, wondering if it was worse to look or worse to not know. I looked.

The door was closed. Still locked. I was frigid, my sixth sense screaming at me something's not right; you're not alone. I fingered the iron band on my wrist, superstitious, and the action focused me. Close to me--very close--I smelled a weird smell, like ozone. Like just after a lightning bolt.

"Nuala?" I guessed.

There was no answer, but I felt a touch, like a weight, against my back and shoulder, from behind me. After a few seconds it was more than just weight: it was warmth, with shoulder blades against my shoulder blades, ribs against my ribs, hair against my neck. Nuala--if it was Nuala--said nothing, just sat silently behind me on the bench, her back leaning against my back. My skin prickled with goose bumps, cleared, and then prickled all over again, as if it couldn't get used to her presence.

"I'm wearing iron," I said--very quietly.

The body against mine didn't shift. I imagined I could feel the thump of a heartbeat against my skin. "I spotted that."

I let out the air in my lungs, very slowly through my teeth, relieved because it was Nuala's voice. Yes, Nuala was bad--but an unidentified creature leaning against me, matching me breath for breath, would've been worse.

"It's very uncomfortable," I said, intensely aware of how speaking tightened my chest and created friction between her back and mine. The sensation was simultaneously terrifying and sensual. "The iron, I mean. It seems like such a waste of discomfort. I only put it on for you."

"Should I be flattered?" Nuala's voice was taunting. "There's worse than me about."

"Comforting thought. How bad are you, while we're being friendly?"

Nuala made a little sound as if she were about to say something but thought better of it. Silence hung, fat and ugly, between us.

Finally, she said, "I was only coming to listen to you."

"You could've knocked. I had the door locked for a reason."

"You weren't to know I was here. What are you--a seer or something? A psychic?"

"Or something."

Nuala shifted away from me, turning toward the piano. The loss of her touch was heartbreaking; my chest ached with abstract longing. "Play something."

"Holy crap, creature." I shifted toward the piano so that I could look at her, and shook my head to clear the agony. "You're difficult."

She leaned forward, across the keys, to see what my face looked like while I spoke. Her own hair fell in front of her face as she did so; she had to push the choppy pale bits back behind an ear. "That feeling only means you want to be more than you are. It only means you should've said yes instead of no."

I was sure she meant her words to be convincing, but they had the opposite effect. "If I get somewhere in this life, it's going to be because of me, bucko. No cheating."

Nuala made a terrible face behind her freckles. "You're being quite ungrateful. You haven't even tried the song I helped you with. It's not cheating. You would've written it eventually. Like, if you'd lived to be three thousand or something."

"I'm not saying yes," I told her.

"I wasn't doing it in exchange for yes," Nuala snapped. "I was doing it to show you what we could be together. Your damned thirty-day free trial period. Could you just take advantage of it?

No, of course not! Have to question! Have to over-analyze.

Sometimes I hate all of you stupid humans."

My head hurt with her anger. "Nuala, seriously. Shut up for a second. You're giving me a splitting headache."

"Don't tell me to shut up," she said, but she did.

"Don't take this the wrong way," I said, "But I don't exactly trust you."

I set my chanter down--it felt like a weapon that Nuala could use against me--and laid my fingers on the cool keys of the piano instead. Unlike my chanter, which was familiar and pregnant with possibilities under my fingers, the smooth piano keys were meaningless and innocent. I looked at Nuala, and unspeaking, she looked back at me. Her eyes were so wrong--so dazzlingly not human--when I really looked at them, but she was right. When I looked into her eyes, I saw myself looking back. A me that wanted more than what I was. A me that knew there was so much brilliance out there to find but that I would never begin to discover.

Nuala climbed off the bench, very carefully so that it didn't make a fart-creak, and ducked between me and the piano, my arms forming a cage on either side of her. She pressed back against me, forcing me back on the bench so that she had an edge to sit on, and then she found my hands where they were spread artlessly on the piano keys.

She lay her fingers on top of my fingers. "I can't play any instrument."

It was weirdly intimate, her sitting in the framework of my arms, her body perfectly mimicking the shape of mine, long fingers fitting exactly on top of mine. I would've given one of my lungs to sit with Dee like this. "What do you mean?"

Nuala turned her head just enough for me to get a good whiff of her breath, all summer and promises. "I can't play anything. I can only help others. It wouldn't matter if I thought of the best song in the world--I couldn't play it."

"You physically can't?"

She turned her face back away from me. "I just can't. Music doesn't happen for me."

Something stuck in my throat, uncomfortable. "Show me."

She slid one hand off mine, pressed a key down with her finger.

I watched the key depress--one time, two times, five times, ten times--but nothing happened. Just the small, muffled sound of the piano key being depressed. She took my hand and dragged it to the same key. Pressed my finger down, once. The piano rang out, a sullen bell that stopped as soon as she lifted my finger back up again.

She didn't say anything else. Did she have to? The memory of that single note was still singing in my head.

Nuala whispered, "Just give me one song. I won't take anything from you."

I should've said no. If I'd known how badly it would hurt, later, I would've said no.

Maybe.

Instead, I just said, "Promise. Your word."

"My word. I'll take nothing from you."

I nodded. It occurred to me that she couldn't see it, but she seemed to know, anyway, because she rested her fingers on mine and leaned her head back against me, her hair scented with clover. What was she waiting for? Me to play? I couldn't play the damn piano.

Nuala pointed to a key. "Start there."

Awkward, her body between me and the piano and her whatever the hell it was between me and my brain, I pressed the key and recognized it as the first note of the song that had been occupying my brain since I woke up. I stumbled, clumsy, to the next note, hitting several wrong ones on the way--the piano was a foreign language that felt wrong in my mouth.

Then the next one, guessing a little faster. The next one, only getting one wrong. The next one, right on the first try. And then

I was playing the melody, and I joined in with my other hand, hesitantly picking out the bass line that sang in my head.

It was clunky, amateurish, beautiful. And it was mine. It didn't sound like a song I'd stolen from Nuala. I recognized a scrap of tune that I'd played with on and off over the years, an ascending bass line I'd admired on an Audio-slave album, and a riff I'd toyed with on my guitar. It was mine, but intensified, focused, polished.

I stopped playing and stared at the piano. I couldn't say anything because I wanted it so badly. I wanted what she had to offer and it stung because I had to say no. I squeezed my eyes shut.

"Say something," Nuala said.

I opened my eyes. "Shit. I told Sullivan I didn't know how to play the piano."

-from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I didn't really know what I was feeling. The song that James had just played swelled in my head, and it was so beautiful I felt drunk with it. I'd almost forgotten how good it felt to have my inspirations made flesh, even without taking any energy from

James in return. Suddenly wearing my human skin exhausted me.

"I'm leaving," I told James, ducking out from under his arms and standing up.

He was still staring at the keyboard, his shoulders stiff. "Did you hear what I said?" I said. "I'm leaving." James looked up, finally, and the hostility in his eyes surprised me for some reason. "Do me a favor," he said. "And don't come back."

For a long moment, I looked at him, and I really thought about blinding him, to punish him. I knew it was within my power. I'd seen a faerie do it before; he'd spat in a man's eyes when he noticed that the man was able to see him walking down the street. It had only taken a second. And James was looking right at me.

But then I looked at James' hazel eyes and imagined him staring out on the world with wide, unseeing pupils like the blinded man.

And I couldn't do it.

I didn't know why.

So I just left, stumbling a little on my way out into the hall, going invisible before I closed the door behind me. Once out of the practice room, I was in such a hurry to get outside that I nearly ran into a woman coming into the hallway. I ducked against the wall and she turned her head, her pink-nailed fingers lifting like claws. I swear she was sniffing in my direction, which was the sort of bizarre behavior I'd come to expect from faeries, not humans.

I was ready for this weird day to be over. I spun out of her reach and into the autumn evening, trying to forget James' eyes looking at me and to pretend that it hadn't hurt when he asked me not to come back.

James

I had a love-hate relationship with the dorms. They were independence: the freedom to leave your crap on the floor and eat Oreos for breakfast three days in a row (which isn't a good idea--you always end up with black chunks in your teeth during your first few classes). They were also camaraderie: seventyfive guys thrown into one building together meant you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a musician with balls.

But they were also brutal, claustrophobic, exhausting. There was no space to get away, to be by yourself, to be who you were when no one was watching, to escape whoever the masses had pegged you to be.

This afternoon, it was raining, which was the worst-- no one in class, no one outside. The dorm was screaming with sound. Our room was full of people. "I miss home," Eric said.

"You live five miles from here. You're not entitled to miss home," I said. I was multitasking. Talking with Paul and Eric, reading Hamlet, and doing my geometry homework. Eric was non-tasking: lying on his face on the floor distracting us from homework. Teachers' assistants lived on campus and did double duty as resident assistants, keeping students in line, but the idea of Eric as an authority figure was fairly hilarious; he wasn't any more responsible than the rest of us.

"There's microwave macaroni at home," Eric replied. "But if I go back for it, I'll have to put gas in my car."

"People like you deserve to starve." I turned to the next page in

Hamlet. "Microwave macaroni is too good for sluggards like yourself." I missed my mom's macaroni. She put about eight pounds of cheese in it and a pig's worth of bacon on it. I knew it was probably an evil plan to clog my arteries at a young age, but I missed it anyway.

"Does it say that in there?" Paul asked from his bed. He too was wrestling with Hamlet. "It sounds very Hamlet. You know, you are not well, my lord, ay, and all that, you are naught but a sluggard.' "

Eric said, "Hamlet rocks."

"Your mom rocks," I told him. Outside our open door, I saw a bunch of guys run down the hall with swim trunks on, yelling. I didn't even want to know.

"Dude, I just want to know why they can't just say what they mean," Paul said. He read a passage out loud. "What. The. Hell." Then he added, feelingly, "The only part I get is this:

'Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us.' Because that's just how I feel when I have to see my sister-in-law."

"That part's not that bad," I said. "At least you can tell what they mean is 'Horatio says we've been smoking mushrooms, but he'll change his mind when he too craps his pants after seeing the ghost.' It's not like this 'colleagued-with-the-dreamof-his-advantage' stuff here. I mean, he just goes on, doesn't he? Can you really blame Ophelia for killing herself after five acts of this? She just wanted the voices to shut up."

Actually, I just wanted the voices to shut up. The swim-trunk guys were making laps up and down the hall, and on the floor above us someone was pounding their feet in time to inaudible music. Down the hall, some idiot was practicing his violin. Really high. Really catlike. My head was throbbing with it.

Paul groaned. "Man, I hate this book. Play. Whatever. Why couldn't Sullivan just assign The Grapes of Wrath or something else in plain English?"

I shook my head and dropped my thick volume of Hamlet on the floor. There was a shout from the floor below, and a thump under my feet as someone threw something at their ceiling. "At least Hamlet is short. I'm going to go down to the lobby for a sec. Right back."

I left Paul frowning at Hamlet and Eric frowning at the floor and went downstairs. The lobby was still noisy--some idiot who played piano worse than me was pounding on the old upright down there--so I pushed out the back door. The back of the dorm was covered with a high-ceilinged portico, held up with massive creamy columns. The rain was coming down hard, but not hard enough to blow water under the roof.

But it was cold. I pulled my sleeves over my hands, balled the edges in my fingers to keep the chill from getting in, and spent a long moment staring at the hills behind the dorm. The rain had bleached the color from everything, filled the dips between the hills with mist, and brought the sky down to the ground.

The landscape before me was old, unchanging, beautiful, and it hurt in a way that made me want to have my pipes in my hands.

I wondered if Nuala was watching me. Close, invisible, dangerous. In the library, I'd looked online for a stronger ward against faeries than the iron, and found one that I'd written down on my hand, on the base of my pinky finger: thorn, ash, oak, red. This ward would have to stay just words until I figured out what the hell an ash tree looked like.

I stepped away from the door and moved toward the end of the portico that had the least water on the bricks. Crap. Double crap. So much for being alone.

A small, dark form crouched against the wall of the dorm, arms huddled around body, hood pulled up. I would've turned and gone back inside, but the way the hand was turned against the hidden face looked a lot like crying, and something about the shape of the body indicated femininity. Not something we saw a lot of here in Seward, the guy dorm.

The girl didn't look up as I approached, but I recognized the shoes as I got closer. Scuffed black Doc Martens. I crouched beside her and lifted the edge of her hood with one finger. Dee looked up at me and dropped her hand. There were no tears on her face, but they'd left evidence of themselves in her red eyes.

"Psycho babe," I said softly, "What are you doing here in this fearful country that is the men's dorm?"

Dee reached up to her eye again, as if to stop a tear that I couldn't see. She rubbed it and held out her index finger to me.

"Want an eyelash?"

I looked at the lonely little eyelash that stuck to the end of her fingertip. "I read that you only have a finite number of eyelashes. If you pull them all out now, you won't have any more."

She frowned at the eyelash. "I think you made that up."

I shuffled around to put my back to the wall and settled next to her, wrapping my arms around my legs. The bricks were cold on my butt. "If I was going to make something up, it'd be a hell of a lot more interesting than that. They were all like 'teen girls are pulling out their eyelashes to relieve stress and now they're hideously bald.' I wouldn't make that up."

"I'll put it back, if it makes you feel better," Dee offered. She poked at her eye, reminding me again of its redness. I hated that she'd been crying. "My harp teacher is an ogre. How is your piping person?"

"I killed and ate him. They're making me learn piano to punish me for it."

Dee's eyebrows pulled together in her cute worried way. "I can't picture you playing the piano."

I thought of earlier that day, Nuala's fingers on mine and the piano keys beneath. "I can't picture a harp teacher as an ogre. I thought all you harpists were supposed to be, I dunno, ephemeral."

"Forty-point word."

"At least fifty. Have you ever tried spelling it?"

Dee shook her head. "But she is an ogre. She keeps on telling me to hold my elbows out and I don't want to and she goes on and on about how I'm doing everything all wrong and that I've learned from idiot folk musicians. What if I don't want to play classical? What if I just want to play Irish stuff? I don't think you have to hold your elbows out to be a good harpist." Her mouth made a terrible shape, very close to tears. But there was no way something like a jerk teacher would send Dee to tears--she was a lot stronger than she looked. There had to be something else bothering her.

Dee bit her lower lip, as if to straighten her mouth out. "And the stupid dorms are so awful when it rains, you know? There's no place to get away."

I couldn't ask her what was really wrong. Funny, now that I thought about it, I'd never really been able to--so I just sighed and stretched one of my arms over her head, an invitation. She didn't even hesitate before edging closer and resting her cheek against my chest. I heard her sigh, deeper than mine, weightier.

I wrapped my arms around her shoulder and leaned my head back against the wall. Dee in my arms was warm, substantial, surreal. It felt like it had been a thousand years since I'd hugged her.

I closed my eyes and thought about what someone would think if they came out onto the portico and saw us. That we were boyfriend and girlfriend? That Dee loved me and had snuck over from her dorm to meet me back here? Or would they see the truth--that it meant nothing. I'd thought we had something, until this summer, until Luke. But I'd been stupid.

It was killing me, the wanting. The wanting for this-- her in my arms, her tears on my T-shirt--to mean the same thing for her that it meant for me. If it had, if she'd really been my girlfriend, I would've asked her why she was crying. Why she was sitting under the columns of my dorm instead of hers. If she'd seen

Nuala. If it was her fault that Nuala was here in the first place.

But I couldn't ask her anything.

"Talk," Dee said, her voice muffled against my T-shirt.

I thought I'd misunderstood her. I opened my eyes, watched the gray clouds roll in sheets to the ground. "What?"

"Just say something, James. I just want to hear you talk. Be funny. Just talk."

I didn't feel like being funny. "I'm always funny."

"Then be what you are always."

I asked, "Why were you crying?"

But she didn't answer, because I hadn't said it out loud.

The truth was that I was too grateful for her presence here at all to push my luck by asking questions that might frighten her away. So I babbled to her about my classes and the foibles of

Paul and Doritos as alarm clocks, and I was completely flippant and funny and even as she began to laugh, I was dying with wanting.

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

Watching James come out to rescue Dee behind the W dorm put me in a bad mood. I got tired of watching her boohoo-ness really fast, and decided to go to the movie theater instead. If I was going to be witness to that amount of melodrama, I wanted it to be delivered by a highly paid and beautiful head on a big screen. On the walk over to the theater, I thought of the multitude of things I didn't like about Dee. While I waited in line for a ticket--not that I really needed a ticket--I wondered if she practiced her sad faces in a mirror. Or if she was just a natural at invoking sympathy in male types. Not something I really had talent for myself.

The kid at the ticket counter looked bored. "Which movie?"

"Surprise me," I told him, and waved money at him. It took him a moment to figure out what I meant. "Seriously?"

"Serious as death."

He raised his eyebrows, punched something into the computer, and then gave me an evil grin that made me think fondly on the human race in general. He handed me a ticket, face down. "Go right. Second theater. Have fun."

I rewarded him with a smile and headed down the dim carpeted hall. It smelled of popcorn butter, carpet cleaner, and that other odor that always seemed to invade theaters-anticipation, or something. In such familiar surroundings, my brain returned to its previous preoccupation: things that I hated about Dee.

One, her eyes were too big. She looked like an alien.

I counted the doors to the second theater and resisted the temptation to look up at the sign above the door to see what movie Ticket-Boy had chosen for me.

Two, her voice was pretty at first, but it got annoying fast. If I wanted to hear singing, I'd get a CD.

Inside the theater, it was quiet and fairly empty--only two or three other couples. Maybe that wicked grin from Ticket-Boy was because he had sent me to a dud.

Three, she used James to make herself feel better. It was the sort of attribute I only liked for me to have.

I chose a seat in the dead center of the theater and put my feet up on the chair in front of me. It was the perfect seat. If anyone came in and sat in front of me, I'd kill them.

Four, she fit in James' arms too perfectly. Like she'd been there before. Like she was claiming him.

The trailers boomed to life in front of me. Normally I would've basked in them, enjoyed the promise of movies to come, but I couldn't focus on them tonight. For starters, I wouldn't be around for any of the movies they were advertising--they were all for the Christmas season and next year--and plus, I was rehearsing dialogue in my head for next time I saw James.

"Unrequited love," I'd say. He'd look at me sideways in that cunning way he did and say, "What about it?" and I'd reply, "It's just not your color." Pithy. Just to show him that I'd noticed. Or maybe I'd show myself to her and say, "Guess I'm not the only one who uses humans around here." And then I'd summon some of Owain's hounds to chew off the bottom bits of her legs. Then she wouldn't fit just right into his arms. She'd be too short. It'd be like hugging a midget.

I grinned in the theater.

The movie began with a sweeping rock ballad from the '70s and a helicopter shot of New York City. The guitar work was inspired--I wondered if I'd had anything to do with it. It quickly became apparent that Ticket-Boy had sent me to a romantic comedy. Not really my thing, but at least it would take my mind off James and the song he'd played for me earlier. It was unbearable to think I might never hear it played out loud again.

I was getting a crush on it.

For a half hour, I tried to get into the movie but I couldn't. It was cutesy, and they kissed, and there was lovey music. And I started thinking how I would fit into James' arms, if my head would fit just right under his chin like Dee's had. And then I started thinking about his car, how it had smelled like him, and I imagined that smell clinging to my skin.

Crap.

I got up and pushed my way out of the theater. I didn't stop to talk to Ticket-Boy, although I felt his eyes on me. He probably thought I hated the movie. Maybe I had. I walked straight out into the twilight. The rain had stopped; thunder growled far away. I headed down the rain-slicked sidewalk, fast, as if I could put space between me and my thoughts.

It wasn't like there hadn't been tension of the sexual variety between me and my pupils before--the guys, poor little lambs, almost always wanted to get my clothing off, which just made them work harder and sound all the more beautiful.

But it wasn't supposed to happen to me. I wasn't human.

I was so caught up in myself that I didn't realize I wasn't alone until the street lights flickered around me, guttering and flickering like candles before shining brightly again. Whoever-whatever--it was, it wouldn't do to look cowed, so I kept walking along the sidewalk as if I hadn't noticed. Maybe it was only a solitary faerie who would leave me alone.

My hopes disappeared when I heard voices, distantly, and saw two faeries approaching me on the sidewalk. My stomach flopped over in a hollow kind of way, an unfamiliar sensation.

Nerves.

It was the queen.

Before she had been queen--before the previous queen had been ripped into pieces--Eleanor always wore white. The white had lent her pale gold hair more color. Now that she was queen, Eleanor wore green according to the oldest traditions, and her long hair looked nearly white under the streetlights.

Tonight's dress was of course a thing of freakin beauty, deep green-black with golden rings and spangles stitched into the sleeves and into the high collar that covered her long neck and framed her chin. Some sort of jewels glittered at me from her train, which dragged on the sidewalk behind her. Unlike the previous queen, Eleanor didn't wear a crown--only a small circlet of pearls that shone dully like baby teeth.

She was so beautiful that it ached. Was this what James felt when he saw me?

Eleanor saw me and laughed, terrible and lovely. The person beside her was not a faerie, as I'd first thought, but rather her consort, the man from the dance. He smiled at me with one corner of his mouth and looked back at Eleanor. He was very human; fragile and stolen and in love.

"Ah, little whore," Eleanor said, pleasantly. "By what name are you called this time?"

I'd heard the word too many times before to flinch. I tilted my chin up, defiant. "You'd ask me to say my name where anyone could have it?" After I said it, I regretted it. I waited for the obvious comeback, heard a thousand times before: Anyone could have the rest of you.

But Eleanor just smiled at me, benevolent; with wonder, I thought perhaps she hadn't meant "whore" as an insult, merely as a tide. Then she spoke. "Not your true name, faerie. What does your current boy call you?"

James had said no to me, so saying "Nuala" was technically a lie. I couldn't lie any more than Eleanor could, so I was forced into telling the truth. "I don't have anyone at the moment."

Eleanor's pity burned like a slap. "Feeling quite weak, are you, poor dear?"

"I'm fine. He only died a few months ago."

Her consort frowned, his thoughts drifting toward me, wondering if he should be politely expressing grief. Eleanor inclined her head gently toward him and explained. "She needs them to stay alive, you know. Their creativity. The poor creatures die of course, eventually, but I'm sure the sex was worth it. Don't worry, lovely, I won't let her have you. He's a poet."

I realized that the last bit was directed at me and looked at the human again; he returned my gaze steadily and without judgment. His thoughts were easier for me to read now, without the cacophony of the faerie dance around us. I probed gently in them for his name but met resolute silence--he protected it as well as a faerie. So he wasn't a complete idiot, despite his questionable taste in women.

"So you are looking for a new friend?" Eleanor asked, and I realized that she had known all along that I had no one. "I would just ask you to be mindful of my court, lovely, as you're choosing your next... pupil. There are goings-on that we don't need meddling with. This will be a Samhain to remember."

It took me a moment to remember that Samhain was

Halloween. I jerked my chin toward her consort. "Because of him? I hear there's king-making going on."

I had probably said too much, but there was no taking it back now. Besides, Eleanor was just gazing at me as if I were a pile of puppies. "Truly there are no secrets amongst my people, are there?"

The consort, for just a moment, looked a little sick to his stomach--regretting, I imagined, his loose tongue.

The queen stroked his hand with her fingers as if she sensed his unease. "It's all right, darling, no one thinks ill of you for becoming a king." She looked to me again. "You will of course remain quiet on this subject with your pupils, won't you, little muse? Just because all of Faerie knows of our plans doesn't mean that the humans need to."

"Quiet as flowers," I said sarcastically. "What do the humans have to do with it?"

Eleanor laughed with painful delight, and her consort stumbled from the force of it. "Oh, lovely, I forget how little you know. A human--the cloverhand--is what pulls us here to this place. We follow her, as always, against our will. But after this Samhain, we will choose our own path. And we will become more fey, more powerful, for it." She paused. "Except for you, of course.

You will always be tied to them, poor creature."

I just looked at her, resentful, hating either her or myself.

Eleanor's lips curved up at my expression. "I forget how sulky you young ones can be. Tell me, how many summers have you seen?"

I stared at her, sure that she knew the answer to this question and was just baiting me, trying to push me to tears or anger. In my head, flames licked at my skin, hungry, both recollection and premonition. It had been years since my body had last burnt to a cinder, but the memory of the pain never went away--even though all other memories did. "Sixteen."

The new queen stepped very, very close to me, and she ran a finger up my throat to my chin, lifting my face toward hers.

"Yours is a very strange immortality, isn't it? I am surprised you don't plead at my feet for freedom from your fate."

I couldn't even see her feet underneath her sweeping green dress, and I couldn't imagine pleading at them even if I could. I stepped back from her touch, hands fisted. "I know better.

There's no avoiding it. I am not afraid."

Eleanor smiled, thin and mysterious. "And I thought my people couldn't lie. Truly you are the most human of us." She shook her head. "Remember what I said, dear. Don't get in the way of our work here and perhaps I myself will find time to watch your burning this year."

I sneered at her. "Your presence would be truly an honor," I spat.

"I know," replied Eleanor, and between one breath and the next, she and her consort were gone.

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James

Now u & me talk about nothing when i have so much i want 2 say 2 u. I feel lost here. We're all music geeks but nobody is like me. They're all baroque or rock or jazz. It shouldn't matter but it does.

From:

Dee

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I scrambled up into the corner of my bed, jerking from sleep, and pulled spiderweb strings of music from my face. They clung to my features, lovely, perilous strands of melody, and I scraped at them until I realized that they were nothing and that I was ruining my boyish good looks with my fingernails. Nothing.

Music from a dream. Music from Nuala. I leaned the back of my head against the wall with a brain-cell killing thunk.

I was beginning to hate mornings.

And the phone was ringing, sending an army of militant miniature dwarves with hammers to work on the inside of my head. I hated the phone at that moment - not just the phone in my room, but all phones that had ever rung before noon.

I fell out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. Paul's bed was empty.

I smashed my hand over my face, still caught by the music, by sleep, by sheer friggin' exhaustion, and relented. "Hello?"

"James?" The voice was pleasant and ominously familiar.

My stomach prickled with the feeling of imminent humiliation.

I shoved the phone between my ear and my shoulder and started to lace up my shoes. "As always."

"This is Mr. Sullivan." I heard laughter in the background. "I'm calling from English class."

Crap shit hell etc. I looked at the alarm clock, which said it was a little after nine. It was a lying bastard, because Paul wouldn't have gone to class without me. "Very logical," I said, jerking on my other shoe in a hurry, "Seeing as you're an English teacher."

Sullivan's voice was still very pleasant. "I thought so. So, the rest of the class and I were wondering if you were going to join us?" More laughter behind his voice.

"Am I on speaker phone?"

"Yes."

"Paul, you're a treacherous bastard!" I shouted. To Sullivan, I added, "I was just putting on my mascara. Time must've gotten away from me. I'll be down momentarily."

"You said to go without you!" Paul shouted in the background. I didn't remember saying any such thing, but it sounded like me.

"I'm glad to hear it," Sullivan said. "I was planning on having the class heckle you until you agreed to come, but this is much easier."

"I wouldn't miss your fascinating class for all the tea in China," I assured him. I stood up, spun, trying to find where the smell of flowers was coming from. "Your lectures and bright smile are the highlight of my days here at Thornking-Ash, if you don't mind me saying so."

"I never tire of hearing it. See you soon. Say bye to James, class."

The class shouted bye at me and I hung up.

I turned once more, still feeling that I wasn't alone in the room.

"Nuala." I waited. "Nuala, are you still in here?"

Silence. There was nothing as silent as the dorms when we were all supposed to be in class. I didn't know if she was there or not, but I spoke anyway. "If you are here, I want you to listen to me. Get the hell out of my head. I don't want your dreams. I don't want what you have to offer. Get out of here."

There was no answer, but the scent of summer roses lingered, out of place in our untidy room, as if maybe she knew I was lying. I grabbed a pen from the top of the dresser, found a bare spot of skin on the base of my thumb, and wrote exorcism and showed it to the room, so she would see it and so I wouldn't forget. Then I grabbed my backpack and left the smell of Nuala behind me.

"James," Sullivan said pleasantly as I slid into my desk. "I trust you slept well?"

"Like fleets of angels were singing me to slumber," I assured him, pulling out my notebook.

"You look well for it," he replied, his eyes already on the chalkboard. "We were just getting ready to talk about our first real writing assignment, James. Metaphor. We've spent the first half of the class discussing metaphor. Familiar with the concept?"

I wrote metaphor on my hand. "My teacher was like a god."

"That's a simile," Sullivan said. He wrote like/as on the board.

"Simile is a comparison that uses 'like' or as.' Metaphor would be, 'my teacher was a god.'"

"And he is," called out Megan from my right. She giggled and turned red.

"Thank you, Megan," Sullivan said, without turning around. He wrote metaphor in Hamlet on the board. "I prefer demi-god, however, until I finish my PhD. So. Ten pages. Metaphor in

Hamlet. That's the assignment. Outline due in two weeks."

There were eight groans.

"Don't be infants," Sullivan said. "It will be pitifully easy. Gradeschoolers could write papers on metaphor. Preschoolers could write papers on metaphor."

I underlined the word metaphor on my hand. Metaphor in

Hamlet was possibly the most boring topic ever invented. Note to self: slash wrists.

"James, you look, if possible, less thrilled than your classmates.

Is that merely an excess of sleep on your features, or is it really palpable disgust?" Sullivan asked me.

"It's not my idea of a wild and crazy time, no," I replied. "But it's not as if an English assignment is going to be."

Sullivan crossed his arms. "I tell you what, James. And this goes for all of you. If you can think of a wilder and crazier time that you can do for this assignment--that has something to do with

Hamlet and/or metaphor--I'm happy to look at outlines for it.

The point is for you to learn something in this class. And if you really hate a topic, all you're going to do is go online and buy a paper anyway."

"You can do that?" Paul breathed.

Sullivan gave him a look. "On that note, get out of here. Start thinking about those outlines and keep up on the reading. We'll be discussing it next class."

The rest of the students packed up and left with impunity, but as I figured, Sullivan called me aside as I was getting ready to go. He waited until all of the other students had exited, and then he closed the door behind them and sat on the edge of his desk. His expression was earnest, sympathetic. The morning light that came in the window behind him backlit his dusty brown hair to white-gold, making him look like a tired angel in a stained-glass window, one of those who's not so much playing their divine trumpet as listlessly dragging it out of a sense of duty.

"Do your worst," I said.

"I could give you a demerit for being late." Sullivan said, and as soon as he said it I knew that he wasn't going to. "But I think I'll just slap your wrist this time. If it happens again..."

"--I'll hang," I finished.

He nodded.

It would've been a good place to say "thanks," but the word seemed unfamiliar in my mouth. I couldn't remember the last time I'd said it. I had never thought of myself as an ingrate before.

Sullivan's eyes dropped to my hands; I saw them flicking up and down, trying to make sense of the words on my skin. They were all in English, but it was a language only I spoke.

"I know you're not just the average kid," Sullivan said. He frowned, as if that wasn't really what he had meant to say. "I know there's more to you than you let on." He looked at the iron band on my wrist.

I tried out various sentences in my head: I have unusual depth or The number of rooms in the house that is my personality is many or It's about time someone noticed. But none of them seemed right, so I said nothing.

Sullivan shrugged. "There's more to us teachers than we let on too. If you need someone to talk to, don't be afraid to talk to one of us."

I looked him straight in the eye. I was reminded once again, vividly, of the image of him falling to his knees, throwing up blood and flowers. "Talk about what?"

He laughed, short and humorless. "About my favorite casserole recipes. About whatever's freaking your roommate out. About why you look like hell right now. One of those."

I kept looking at him, kept seeing that image of him, dying, in his own pupil, and waited for him to look away. He didn't. "I do want a good recipe for lasagna. That is a casserole, isn't it?"

His mouth made a rueful shape that was a cunning impersonation of a smile. "Go to your next class, James. You know where to find me if you need me."

I looked at the broad iron ring on his finger and back up to his face. "What were you when you weren't an English teacher, Mr.

Sullivan?"

He just nodded, slow, sucking in his lower lip pensively before releasing it. "Good question, James. Good question." But he didn't answer, and I didn't ask again.

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James

The music u listen 2 tells everyone what kind of persn u r.

My rmmate ingrid is a mozart persn. Shes homesick but she cant talk 2 me abt it be im a trad irish grl & we don't speak the same language.

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Dee

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The hill where I normally practiced was strategically placed: far enough from the dorms and classrooms to keep everyone in school from knowing what reel I was playing, and close enough that if it started to rain or rabid badgers decided to attack, I could hoof it back to the school before I got soaked or eaten.

It was a gorgeous fall afternoon, the sort companies like to print on glossy paper, and my vantage point on the hill seemed to exacerbate its beauty like one of those convex mirror cameras they have at malls to watch for shoplifters. The afternoon was all scudding clouds and woodsmoke-scented wind and a brilliant blue sky so huge it closed the hill in its own cerulean bubble.

I felt like I could be anywhere in the world. Anywhere in the universe. This hill was its own planet.

Playing the pipes is a multidisciplinary activity: equal parts music, physical education, puzzle-solving, and memory training.

The pipes are a study in numbers, too. Three drones, one bass, and two tenors. One chanter, eight holes, one reed in the chanter, two flaps on the reed that vibrated against each other to create a pitch. One bag, one mouthpiece to fill it, endless blow-job-joke possibilities. I took my pipes out of the case and squeezed the reed to correct the pitch before I pushed the chanter into the bag and threw them on my shoulder.

I tuned for a bit and did a few warm-up marches before I started to acquire my usual audience. Eric sitting on the edge of the hill with one of his excruciatingly thick masters thesis books in a foreign language. Megan, novel in hand. Two other students I didn't recognize, sitting at a safe distance, backs to me, homework in hand. Paul, of course, for solidarity as much as anything else. And Sullivan. That was new. He strode up the hill, his long limbs looking like a preying mantis, and stood in front of me. His eyes dropped momentarily to my T-shirt (which read The Voices Are Telling Me Not To Trust You), and then returned to my face.

I dropped the mouthpiece of my pipes from my lips and raised an eyebrow.

Sullivan regarded me with his usual amiable smile. The wind caught the back of his hair and blew it up backwards. With his hair all screwed up and without his Official Teacher Jacket, it wouldn't have been hard to mistake him for one of us students.

The CEO his wife left him for must've been either pretty damn hot or pretty damn rich for her to abandon Sullivan to his own devices.

"Am I putting you off your game?" Sullivan asked pleasantly.

If he meant, was I weirded out by him joining my retinue on the hill, yeah. But out loud I said, "You wound me greatly."

"Do I?" Sullivan sat down, cross-legged, in a single tidy maneuver. "I wouldn't want to interfere with your practice."

"Well, that's a patent untruth. I'm quite sure you're here to interfere," I said, and Sullivan grinned. "So what is this, a reconnaissance mission?"

Sullivan made a big show of wiggling into the grass and making himself at home before pulling out a small tape recorder and setting it on the ground between him and my shoes. "Just want to see what the best piper in Virginia sounds like. You know, to me, pipers always sound like they're playing the same march over and over again. What's the famous one? 'Scotland the

Brave'? All the tunes sound like that one to me."

I awarded him a thin line of teeth, equal parts smile and grimace. "Mr. Sullivan," I said reproachfully. "I thought I was the funny one."

He looked back at me, mouth quirked. I stepped away to fill up the bag with air and wondered what it would take to wipe the smirk off his face. Something fast? Something aching? He'd be expecting sheer technical brilliance from my competition stats, so finger-twistingly difficult wasn't the way to go. Something to make him remember the angst of his wifely betrayal, then.

I checked my tuning and then began to play "Cronan," which is, for the record, possibly the most pathetic and miserable tune ever written for the pipes and even in the hands of a lesser piper would drive Hitler to tears. So really Sullivan didn't stand a chance.

And I threw everything I had into it too. I had plenty of angst to make the song real. Dee, who should've been on this hill but wasn't; my beautiful car, which should've been in the parking lot instead of smashed up over the summer, leaving me with my brother's car; and the fact that I was a friggin' island in the middle of a thousand people and that sometimes the weight of being the last of an endangered species crushed the breath out of my lungs.

I stopped.

The students clapped. Paul pretended to wipe a tear from his face and drop it on the grass. Sullivan pressed record on his machine.

"You weren't recording before now?" I asked him.

"Didn't know if I'd have to."

I frowned at him, and he frowned back and then I realized that my arm hair was prickling its warning.

"Don't say anything." I heard Nuala's voice a second before I saw her, walking past Eric and Paul and Sullivan to stand next to me. "You're the only one who can see me right now, so if you talk to me, you're going to look like you were retained in the birth canal without oxygen or something."

I wanted to say something like "thanks for the hot tip," but it's damn difficult to be snarky when you can't say anything. Plus, even though I thought she was the scariest thing around, hell, she was hot today. All sun-drenched streaks in her hair and freckled sharp nose and sarcastic mouth. Tight black T-shirt with just the word grudge on it and jeans riding low enough on her hips for me to see a shiny scar across one of her hip bones, right where her shirt met her jeans.

I must've been ogling or she must've been reading my mind, because Nuala said, "I'll admit, for once, I actually like what I look like. Normally, you tragically talented musicians prefer me to look all wishy-washy and delicate." She knelt next to my pipe case and looked inside without touching anything. "But you want me to look kick-ass, and I like it."

I knelt and pretended to twiddle with my pipe reed, turning my back to my audience. I still couldn't say anything without them hearing, but I could at least not look like an idiot staring off into space.

Nuala sat back on her haunches, knees poking through her jeans, and grinned at me. "Don't tell me you don't like the way I look."

She looked good enough to eat, but that was totally besides the point. It was vaguely creepy that she was dressing just to turn me on.

"Not just dressing," Nuala said. I realized, with an unpleasant jolt, that she didn't cast a shadow. "My face. I only look like this because it's what you want me to look like. Someone like you-when I get close to you, I change, to become more appealing to you. I can't do anything about it. And believe me, sometimes it's really awful what musicians fantasize about. For once, though, I actually feel like I look on the outside like I look on the inside."

But I didn't want her to look like anything. I just wanted her to get the hell off my hill.

"You really want me here, or I wouldn't keep coming back."

Nuala's smile looked like a snarl.

"Nerves, James?" Sullivan called.

"Don't flatter yourself!" I called back. I shoved my chanter back into my pipes and stood up, turning my back on Nuala. I was afraid that she was right--that I was so obsessed with, my music that I would eventually break down and beg for her help.

I shouldered my pipes and played a strathspey difficult enough to take my mind off Nuala. My E doublings were crap today; at the end of the tune I strung a bunch of them together until they sounded crisper.

"They sound fine. You're obsessing. You're friggin brilliant, like you are every other day," Nuala said. She was right by my ear; I held very still as she blew her flowery breath across my face while she spoke. "Here's a free tip for you, asshole. Ask Eric to go get his guitar. That's not cheating, is it? Just a little suggestion. Take it or leave it."

I hesitated. I watched the white clouds race over the top of the hill, massive, towering secret countries made of white and pale blue, and with my eyes I followed the shadows they cast on the endless hills. It wasn't cheating. It wasn't saying yes.

"Eric," I said, and Nuala's mouth made a shape like pleasure.

"Why don't you get your guitar?"

Eric looked up from his book, and the pleasure on his face was a much simpler and more innocent brand than Nuala's. "Yeah, man. Hold on!"

He jumped up and headed back to the school, and while he was gone I struck into a set of jigs so happy and never-ending that

Nuala couldn't say anything else, just glower at me for silencing her.

Then I saw Eric slowly climbing the hill, guitar case in hand, and beside him, a girl carrying an amp. The grin threatening to spread across my face forced me to stop playing. Nuala was wrong. If she really looked like what I wanted, she'd look just like the girl who was climbing the hill with Eric.

Dee, cheeks red from sun and the climb, grinned at me and said, a little out of breath, "Think you could maybe practice a little closer to the school next time?"

That evening, when I ran out onto the hills in search of the antlered figure's song, I got closer than I ever had been before. I got close enough that I could see each individual thorn on his antlers silhouetted against a violently red sunset. Close enough to see the dark material of his cape flattening the grass behind him. Close enough to hear the melody of the song better than ever, in all its agonizing beauty.

I could hear every word he sang, too, though I still couldn't understand what it meant.

I just knew I wanted it.

It took me a long time to go back to the dorms after he'd gone.

In the ordinary night he'd left behind, I sat on the hill, the wind whispering through the long grass that surrounded me. I stared at the stars and wanted more than what I was and more than what the world was and just--wanted.

After Sullivan had failed to give me a demerit for sleeping in, I thought that I'd escaped further retribution, but apparently I was wrong. The next day, before class, he caught my arm in the hall just before I went into the classroom.

"I'm giving you a pass today, James," he said.

The smell of coffee wafted from inside the room. "I'll miss

Hamlet."

"You weren't worried about that last class."

"Oh, God, is this still about last class?"

Sullivan gave me a look that would fry eggs and released my arm. "Only indirectly. You're getting a pass today because you're going to go meet with Gregory Normandy."

The last time I had seen the name "Gregory Normandy" it was on the bottom of a business card in my Thornking-Ash acceptance packet, with the word "President" underneath it. I felt like a cat presented with a full bathtub. "Can't I just write out 'I will never again miss class' one million times?"

Sullivan shook his head. "What a waste of your highly trained fingers, James. Go find Normandy. He's expecting you. In the admin offices. Try and keep your vitriol to a manageable low.

He's on your side."

I had actually been looking forward to Hamlet as a low-stress introduction to the morning. I thought it was pretty unfair of

Sullivan to deliver me to an authority figure before lunch.

I found Gregory Normandy in McComas Hall, a small, octagonshaped building with windows on every single side. Inside, my sneakers squeaked on the wood floors of the octagon-shaped entry hall. Eight men and women with varying degrees of frowning and baldness looked down at me from portraits on each wall. Possibly founders of this proud institution. The whole place smelled of flowers and mint, though I couldn't see evidence of either.

I checked the brown plastic nameplates on each of the seven doors until I found Normandy's name. I knocked.

"Its open."

I pushed the door open and blinked in the sunlight; Normandy's office faced east, and the morning sun was blinding through the wall of windows behind his desk. When my eyes adjusted, I found Gregory Normandy sitting behind a desk adorned with stacks of paper and two vases of daisies. I was a little surprised, especially given the daisies, to see that his head was shaved close and that his arm and chest muscles looked like he could kick my ass without breaking a sweat. Even with a dress shirt and tie on, he didn't exactly look presidential, unless we were talking president of Fight Club.

Normandy's eyes lingered just above my ear; it took me a moment to realize he was looking at the scar. "You must be

James Morgan. It's nice to meet you in person. Have a seat."

I took a seat across from him and promptly sank two inches into the plush cushion. Out the window, behind Normandy, I could see the satyr fountain. "Thanks," I said, cautious.

"How are you doing here at Thornking-Ash?"

"I'm very much enjoying the ability to order take-out every night," I replied.

Normandy made a face that I wasn't sure I liked. It was a knowing face, like either Sullivan had warned him I was a smart-ass or that I was otherwise fulfilling some expectation he had of me as a smart-ass. I didn't quite care for it.

"So you've discovered that our piping instructor wasn't up to par," he said.

I contemplated several answers, and in the end just sort of shrugged.

Normandy unscrewed the top of a Coke bottle and took a swig before placing the bottle on his desk. "Which of course has you wondering why we bothered inviting you to Thornking-Ash."

I felt my eyes narrowing without meaning for them to. "As a matter of fact, I was wondering that very thing. Not that I'm not flattered."

"How do you think your friend Deirdre is doing here?"

My arms erupted into goose bumps, and my voice was sharper than I intended. "Is she why I'm here?"

Normandy used his middle fingers to push some of his papers back and forth on his desk; it was a strangely delicate-looking gesture. "What sort of a school do you think we are, James?"

"Music school," I said, knowing as I said it that it wasn't the right answer.

He kept pushing the papers around, not looking at me. "We're interested in music in the way that doctors are interested in fevers. When they see a fever, they're pretty sure there's an infection. When we see kids with outstanding musical talent, we're pretty sure there's..."

Normandy looked up at me, waiting for me to finish the sentence.

I just held his gaze. It was hard to imagine that he was really talking about what I thought he was talking about. What was it Sullivan had said--there was more to the teachers than it seemed?

"What do you expect me to say?" I said.

Normandy answered with another question. "Who gave you that scar? It's a beauty by any standards. Your accident' was in the newspaper. I have the clipping in your application file."

I swallowed, and when I spoke, I was surprised to hear that I sounded guarded. "What do you want?"

"I want you to tell me if you see anything strange. I want you especially to tell me if Deirdre Monaghan sees anything strange. We're here"--he stabbed his finger on his desk emphatically when he said here--"for a reason. And we want to make sure kids like you and Deirdre make it successfully to college. Without... interference."

I rubbed my palms over my goose bumps. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Mr. Sullivan heard you play. He thinks you're good enough to attract the wrong sort of attention. And I already heard Deirdre play, so I know how good she is."

It was weird hearing him call her Deirdre so much, instead of

Dee. How could someone who didn't even know to call her Dee know anything about her problems? "I'll let you know," I said.

There was a long pause. "Is that all?"

Normandy sort of nodded, and I stood up. He looked up. "I know you don't want to talk about Them. And you shouldn't. I don't have to tell you it's bad to mention Them out loud. But please, tell Patrick--Mr. Sullivan--if you see him."

I didn't tell him what I was thinking. Which was not that I didn't trust him, but that I didn't trust him to be useful. The adults who had known about the faeries this summer hadn't done anything, except possibly make things worse.

"Thanks for your concern," I said politely.

That was the first and only time I went to his office.

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

James slept a lot. It didn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that he slept when he was bored or unhappy or convincing himself that he wasn't unhappy. He slept at stupid times of the day, too, like halfway through a morning class or really late in the afternoon so that he ended up wide awake when the rest of the world was sleeping. His casual sleep-any-old-time attitude had his silly roommate Roundhead firmly convinced of James' confidence, but I knew James' self-screwing for what it really was.

It was the end of a cool day and James was sleeping now, tightly curled on his bed while Roundhead was off doing something having to do with an oboe. I sat at the end of James' bed and watched him sleep. James slept like he did everything else: totally intense, like it was a competition and he couldn't let down his guard for a minute. His scribbled hands were pulled up to his face, his wrists turned to face each other in a sort of weird, beautiful knot. His knuckles were white.

I slid a little closer and hovered one of my hands a few inches above his bare arm. Beneath my fingers, goose bumps raised on his skin in response to my presence, and my teeth appeared from behind my lips, a smile despite myself.

James shivered but didn't wake up. He was having some sort of dream about flying--typical. Didn't dreaming about flying mean you were a self-loving little shit? I thought I remembered reading something about that somewhere.

Well. I could give him a dream he wouldn't forget. I shifted to the other side of the bed, dancing on the line between invisibility and visibility so that I wouldn't wake him, and looked into his frowning face. Really what I wanted to do was give him a dream about accidentally crapping himself in front of a lot people or something equally weenie-shrinking, but the truth was, I had no talent for causing embarrassing dreams. It was easiest for me to send an agonizingly beautiful dream -something so breathtaking that the dreamer was absolutely bereft upon waking. I'd learned the hard way that a little went a long way--one of my early pupils had killed himself after waking from one of my creations. Seriously. Some people had absolutely no capacity for suffering.

I laid my hands carefully on James' head and began to stroke his hair. He shivered under my touch, whether from cold or because he knew what was coming, I didn't know. I inserted myself into his dream, looking, as I had been lately, revoltingly gorgeous, and called his name.

In his dream, James jerked. "Dee?" His voice was plaintive.

I was really beginning to hate that girl.

I stopped stroking his hair and smacked his head instead, becoming visible so fast that my head pounded. "Wake up, maggot."

James winced under my hand. Without opening his eyes, he said, "Nuala."

I glared at him. "Otherwise known as the only female who will ever be in your bed, loser."

He flopped his hands over his face. "God have mercy, my head feels like hell. Kill me now, evil creature, and put me out of my mercy."

I pressed a finger against his windpipe, just hard enough that he'd have to ask me for a hall pass to be able to swallow. "Don't tempt me."

James rolled out from under my finger, shoving his face into his blue-checked pillow. His voice was muffled. "You have such a winning way about you, Nuala. Tell me, how long have you been gracing God's green earth with your positively incandescent personality?" In his head, I saw him guessing one hundred years, two hundred years, a thousand years. He thought I was like the rest of them.

"Sixteen," I snapped. "Didn't you ever hear it wasn't nice to ask?"

James turned his face so that he could look at me. He was frowning. "I'm not a very nice person. Sixteen doesn't seem very long to me. We are talking years, right, not centuries?"

I didn't have to tell him anything, but I did anyway. Scornfully, I said, "Not centuries."

James rubbed his face on his pillow as if he could rub drowsiness off. He glanced back at me and raised an eyebrow.

He kept his eyes on my face, but his expression was distinctly suggestive when he spoke. "Faeries must, um, develop a lot faster than humans."

I slid off the bed and crouched beside it so that we were eye to eye, inches apart. "Would you like to hear a charming bedtime story, human?"

"Is it free?"

I hissed at him, teeth clenched.

He yawned and made a hand gesture to indicate that he didn't care either way what I did with myself.

"Once upon a time, sixteen years ago, a faerie appeared in

Virginia. Fully developed and fully aware, but with shit-forbrains. She couldn't remember anything about how she got there except for something about fire. She went on her merry way, met other faeries, and figured out pretty fast that, like other faeries, she was vaguely eternal. And that unlike other faeries, every sixteen years on Halloween, she somehow gets the crap burnt out of her and then she oh-so-magically reappears again, no memories, brand new, for another sixteen years, rinse and repeat. The fricking end."

I turned my face away from him. I hadn't meant to say so much.

James was silent a long moment, and then he said, "You called them 'faeries.'"

I don't know what I'd expected, but that wasn't it. "So?"

"So I thought They--you--hated to be called that." James sat up.

"I thought we were supposed to refer to you by delightful euphemisms like 'the good folk' and 'he who must not be named.' Shit. I think I'm getting my folklore mixed up."

I jumped up and stormed restlessly around the small dorm room, looking for something heavy or pointy to hurl at his head.

"Well, I'm not exactly one of Them, am I? Whatever. Whatever.

I don't know why I told you. You're too totally self-involved to give a rat's smelly ass about anything except yourself."

"Nuala." James didn't raise his voice, but the intensity of it changed in such a way that he might as well have shouted. "Let me tell you a charming bedtime story. It's been barely two months since I got out of the hospital. I spent my summer getting my head nailed back together and my lungs stitched up." My eyes went to the scar above his ear, new and barely disguised in his hair, and my mind thought of the meaningless scar on my hipbone--not meaningless to James, or it wouldn't be there.

James continued. "They crushed my car, my amazing car that I spent every summer of my teenage life fixing until it was perfect. They ruined my best friend's life, they damn near killed me, and we've got nothing to show for it but scars and you sitting next to my bed."

I stared at him.

He stood up, looked me straight in the eye, and crossed his arms. He was so tragically brave; the gold sparks inside him were so bright that I almost stumbled with wanting.

"So yeah. Tell me, Nuala, why I should give a rat's smelly ass' about anything other than myself right now?"

I didn't have an answer.

He turned around and grabbed a brown hoodie from the end of his bed, a dismissive gesture.

I blurted out, "Because I can see Them and you can't."

James stopped moving. Just like that. He didn't jerk or react in anyway: he just stopped. A long, long pause. By the time he turned around to face me, tugging the hoodie over his head, he was himself again. "One of your many talents. I think I've seen enough of y'all to last a lifetime. No offense to you and your"-he gestured toward me--"developments."

My lip curled. "I'd argue the opposite. Where is it you're running to so fast?"

James jammed on his sneakers, his face rueful. We both knew he was running out to see the thorn king.

"I don't know what you want from me." James brushed past me as if I was nothing. Like I was just one of the other people in his life. He didn't care about any of them but stupid Dee, who didn't give a crap about him. "I'm never going to say yes."

He opened the door and pulled it shut behind him. Softly. I would've slammed it. I wanted to slam it now. For several long minutes I stood in his room, imagining him following his nightly routine of sneaking out through one of the first floor windows so that he didn't have to pass by Sullivan's room.

I could give up. I could find some other boy who glowed with golden promise and steal life from him, but what good would it do? I only had until Halloween anyway. Even if I didn't find another boy, I probably wouldn't die before then; it hadn't been that long since the last one, right? The fact was, I had absolutely nothing to lose. The fact was, I wanted him.

I whirled out the window into the dark blue sky, floated along on the abstract thoughts of humans, and found James, a small warm glow crouching in the dry golden grass of the hills. He must've felt me as I knelt quietly beside him, but he didn't say anything as I slowly became visible, the cold evening air biting at my skin as I did.

Angrily, I ripped up a big handful of grass and began to tear the blades into small pieces. I had once watched a faerie pull a human apart, back when I was younger. Or newer, anyway. The human had drained a marsh behind his house and inadvertently killed the faeries who lived in the water. The faerie who lived in his well had come out long enough to drag the human to the old marsh and tear him apart. I'd asked what his crime was, if he hadn't known the faeries were in the marshes? Ignorance is no defense for a crime, the faerie had hissed at me, all gills and hair. That was when I first realized that I was different from other faeries.

Mercy, that was what they called it, what I had and other faeries didn't. It was the beginning of a long list.

I threw down the rest of the grass. "Can I even ask why you bother coming out here every night? Don't you have some sort of, you know, self-shrine you can be building in this time instead?"

James grunted. Very distantly, I heard the first few notes of the song begin. He closed his eyes as if the sound itself caused him physical pain. His voice was barely above a whisper and was deeply sarcastic. "I find the daring of sneaking out every night physically thrilling. I am seriously titillated right now. Feel my nipples. Hard as rocks."

I winced. "As long as its good for you."

"Oh baby." His eyes were on the horizon, waiting for the antlered head to appear.

"You do know this isn't safe, right?" I asked. "You remember when I said there was worse than me about? This is one of the worse things I was talking about. Are you dumber than a dog pile?"

James didn't answer, but I knew the danger was part of the appeal.

I saw the massive dark spread of thorns a second before James did, and I grabbed him, pulling him down farther into the grass until both of us were huddled, concealed. We were curled into small balls beside each other, knees tucked up to chin, my arm against his arm, my head against his head. I felt him shivering again and again with my strangeness, his strange seer's body warning him of my presence, but he didn't move.

I whispered in his ear, my mouth right against it, "Cernunnos.

Gwyn ap Nudd. Hades. Hermes. King of the dead."

The song was loud, now, wailing, keening, and I felt James fighting against the pull of it. He whispered to me, not even audible, maybe realizing finally that I read his thoughts as much as his words, "What is he singing?"

I translated--voice quiet, for his ears only:

I keep the dead and the dead keep me.

We are cold and dark, we are one and we are many, we wait and we wait, so sing the dead.

So sing I: grow, rise, follow.

So sing I: those not of heaven, those not of hell, grow, rise, follow.

Unbaptized and unblessed, come to me from where you flutter in the branches of the oaks.

Wretched half-demons who lay curled in the dirt, trapped by my power, rise up and follow.

Your day is coming.

Hear my voice. Prepare to feast.

James shivered, hard, drawing his head down, covering it with his hands. He stayed that way, knuckles white on the back of his head, until the thorn king's song had died and the sun had disappeared, leaving us in blackness. He slowly sat up, and the way he looked at me made me realize that something had changed between us, but for once, I didn't know what.

"Do you ever get the feeling something awful might happen?"

James asked me, but it wasn't really a question.

I sat up. "I'm the awful thing that happens."

James pulled up his hood and stood up. Then--small miracles-he held out his hand to help me up, as if I was a human. His voice was rough. "Like you said. Something worse than you."

Create Text Message

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To:

James

Theyr the daoine sidhe. The ones luke lives with. I know be i recognized 1, brendan. I dont know what he wants. They were waiting 4 me outside of class. He asked me do u want 2 c luke again?

From:

Dee

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Washington, D.C. was one thousand miles away from

Thornking-Ash. Okay, not really. But it felt that way. It felt as if the bus that we'd rode in to get to the Marion Theater was a spaceship that had taken us from a remote planet covered in fall leaves to a concrete-covered moon punctuated by purposeful decorative trees and populated entirely by aliens in business suits.

Paul sat in the seat beside me, by the window so he wouldn't puke, while I took pens apart and balanced the pieces on a notebook on my lap. Somewhere, in the front of the bus, was

Deirdre. Most of my brain was up there with her.

Outside the window, afternoon light slanted between the tall buildings of D.C, snaking a stripe of sun in here and there where it could manage. Where it kissed the tops of the buildings, it glowed blood-red. There were hundreds of people on the sidewalk--tourists, businessmen, poor people whose eyes seemed to look into the bus with hunger or resentment or exhaustion. They all looked lonely to me. All alone in a sea of people.

Beside me, Paul said heavily, "I need to get drunk." He said lots of things in that ponderous, heavy way, but this was a change from his usual repertoire. Usually when you pulled the string on

Paul's back, he said something like, "I do not get what he's trying to say here," while staring at an open book or stack of notes. Or, "I'm tired of no one noticing the nuances of the oboe, man." Very few people notice the nuances of the bagpipes either, and I would've had a sympathetic conversation with him about it if the oboe didn't suck so bad as an instrument.

I looked away from the people outside to the pens on my notebook, parallel parked bits of pen. They jiggled a little when the bus pulled away from a light. "Drunk sounds so crass.

'Soused' or 'blitzed' is a bit more romantic."

"Man, if I don't get drunk soon, I might never get the chance."

Paul eyed my lap. He handed me his pen from his backpack and

I took it apart as well, adding its innards to the collection.

"When will I have this sort of opportunity again? No parents? A mostly unsupervised dorm?"

"Uhh, I don't know, maybe that little event they call college. I'm told it comes after high school for highly privileged white kids like ourselves." I began to screw the pens back together, mixing the pieces up to create three Franken-pens.

"I could die before then. Then what, I'm dead and I never got drunk? So, what, I'd arrive at the pearly gates a sober virgin?"

That struck a chord with me. I used one of the pens to write sainted on the back of my hand. "I think a lot of people would argue that's the only way to get to the pearly gates. Why the sudden push for getting sloshed?"

Paul shrugged and looked out the window. "I dunno."

I suppose if I'd been a responsible adult, I'd have told him that he didn't need to get drunk to be self-actualized or whatever.

But I was bored and generally irresponsible by nature or by choice, so I told him, "I'll get it for you."

"What?"

"Beer, Paul. Focus. That's what you want, right? Alcohol?"

Paul's eyes became even rounder behind his glasses. "Are you serious? How--"

"Shh, don't bother your head about my mysterious methods.

That's what makes me me. Have you had beer before?" I wrote beer on the side of my index finger, since I'd run out of room on my hand.

Paul laughed. "Ha. Ha. Ha. My parents say beer defiles the soul."

I grinned at him. Even better. This was going to be insanely entertaining. Things were looking up.

"What are you grinning at, James?" Sullivan, a few seats ahead of us, had turned around and was peering at me suspiciously.

"It's vaguely sinister."

I sealed my teeth behind my lips but kept smiling at him. I wondered how long he'd been listening. Not that it mattered.

My evil plans could go on with or without his knowledge.

Sullivan observed my closed-lipped smile with a raised eyebrow. He had to speak loudly to be heard over the sound of the bus. "Better, but still ominous. I can't shake the idea that you're planning something only marginally ethical, like the takeover of a small Latin country."

I grinned at him again. Of all the teachers, Sullivan spoke my language. "Not this week."

Sullivan grimaced at Paul and back at me. "Well, I hope it's legal."

Paul blinked rapidly, but I shrugged, indifferent. "In most countries."

Sullivan's crooked mouth made a rueful smile. "This country?"

He read me better than anyone I knew, a fact that was both inconvenient and comforting.

"My dear professor, your skills are wasted on such deductive reasoning. Don't you have some English poetry you should be reading?"

He looked like he wanted to continue with the previous line of questioning, but instead just pointed a finger at me. "Watching you, Mr. Morgan." He dropped his finger to my scribbled-on hands and said, "Make a note of that." He turned back around in his seat.

But there was no room left on my skin, so I didn't bother.

Around me, the students' voices got louder with excitement as the bus pulled into a huge gray parking lot.

"What are we going to see again?" Megan asked from a seat somewhere near Sullivan.

"The Raleigh-Botts Ensemble," he said. A third hyphenated name. I regarded it as an insidious sign. I was keeping an eye open for rains of blood and locusts next. Sullivan added, "A most excellent chamber group who will be performing a wide range of pieces that I'm sure Mrs. Thieves will be testing you on later this year."

"I will be!" Mrs. Thieves called from the front of the bus. "So make sure you keep your program!"

The bus pulled into a spot and Sullivan and Mrs. Thieves shepherded the busful of students into the parking lot and toward the theater. I saw Sullivan's lips moving silently as he did a head-count of the milling students.

"Forty-six. Thirty-four," I said to him, without much enthusiasm.

"Shut up, James," he replied pleasantly. "It's not working."

Through considerable magic on Sullivan and Mrs. Thieves' part, we made it into the lobby of the theater building. It was freezing cold, smelled like evergreens, and was carpeted from wall to wall with deep burgundy carpet. All of the wood was stark white and covered with carved scrolls. There was another group of students already filing down the hall. College students.

We looked like babies beside them. The college girls tossed their hair and giggled heee heee heee, two years closer to minivans and soccer practices and Botox than the girls from my bus. I wished I hadn't come.

"Hi," said Dee. She smiled up at me, one side a little higher than the other, clutching her notebook to her chest. Study in red, black, and white: the carpet, her hair, her face. "Want to be my friend?"

"No, I find you quite unlikable," I said.

Dee grinned and linked her arm in mine. She leaned her head on my arm. "Good. Sit next to me. Is that allowed?"

Sullivan wasn't nearby to tell me no. I slid toward the front of the group, toward the darkened theater. Nobody would know who was who once we were inside; from out here I could see that only the small stage was lit at the front of the room. "We'll make it allowed. We are young and independent Americans. No one tells us what to do."

"Right." Dee laughed and pinched the loose skin on my elbow. I swallowed at her touch.

In the small theater, we sat as far away from the college students as possible; all around us was the noise of students chattering in fake whispers. In this little room, it was even colder. Between Dee, so close beside me, and the frigid temperature, I felt off-balance, disconnected from some part of myself. Dee reached over and took my hand. She whispered in my ear, "It's freezing in here. At least your hand is warm."

I leaned my head toward her and whispered back, "The ensemble is comprised entirely of penguins. I read in the program that they refuse to play unless the temperature is below fifty degrees Fahrenheit. If it's any higher, they begin to sweat and their flippers lose traction on the strings of the instruments."

Dee laughed and then slapped her other hand over her mouth, guiltily. "James," she hissed furiously, "you're going to make

Thieves yell at me. She can be awful."

I held her hand tightly, warming her fingers with mine. "She's probably menopausal. Don't take it personally."

"I wouldn't be surprised. What is taking so friggin' long?" Dee craned her neck around as if there would be a clue to the delay in the darkness around us. "Seriously, we'll all freeze to death before they even start. Maybe you're right about the penguins.

It probably takes a long time for them to warm up." She snorted. "Oh, get it? Warm up?"

"Truly you're a comic genius."

She slapped my arm, lightly, with the hand I wasn't holding.

"Shut up. I'm happy with you being the funny one."

The lights on stage brightened, then, and whatever lights there had been in the rest of the room dimmed; the students went quiet. The ensemble marched out and took their places on the stage, just eight of them.

Beside me, Dee barely suppressed a giggle. I leaned toward her; she was biting her knuckle to keep from laughing. She whispered, helplessly, "Penguins."

The ensemble was all dressed very smartly in tuxedos; each had black hair in some stage of slicked-downedness. The resemblance to penguins was undeniable. Dee's giggles disappeared, however, when they started to play. I don't even know what the first piece was; I couldn't bring myself to look away from them to the program. Beside me, Dee had gone quiet and still as the handful of strings moaned and crooned, sweet and melodic. I sighed, some essential part of me going still for once, and listened.

There was nothing I was conscious of except the music and the fact that Dee's hand was in mine.

When the piece was done, she left her fingers in my hand and we clapped, stupid and silly, using one of her hands and one of mine. The ensemble played two more pieces, neither as d'ohworthy as the first but both making me shiver, and then Dee pulled her hand from mine and whispered, "Bathroom."

She slid silently out of her seat and left me there, my hand missing the weight of hers, cool with her sweat drying against the air conditioning.

I listened to two more short pieces, distracted, until I couldn't stop thinking about the sweat on her hand and wondering if she'd left because of something other than having to pee. It was so cold that I couldn't tell if the goose bumps on my arms were from the freezing temperature or the arrival of something supernatural. I felt blind.

I slid hastily from my seat and out the back of the theater, not bothering to see if anyone was watching me go. Out in the main building I glimpsed an official dude standing by the door, looking uncomfortable in a flying-monkey costume. I asked him where the bathrooms were. And then, with a flash of insight, I asked him if he'd seen Dee go by. "Dark hair, really revoltingly pretty, about this tall."

Recognition flashed in his eyes. "She said she needed some air.

She looked sick. I told her to go up to the balcony."

He pointed up the burgundy-clad stairs to the second floor.

"Thanks, Jeeves," I told him, and jogged up the stairs. I followed the narrow hallway, trying doors, until I found one that opened onto a little balcony with a view of the ugly alley behind the theater and the backs of several shops, and, to our left, a narrow view of the street teeming with cars. I stepped into the welcome heat and shut the door behind me.

Sitting on the floor against the wall, Dee looked up when the door clicked shut.

For maybe the first time in my life, I said exactly what I was thinking to her. "Are you all right?"

Dee looked very small sitting there against the white-painted stone wall. She reached out an arm toward me, plaintive, an unconscious or conscious mimicry of the action I'd done last time I'd found her sitting by herself, behind my dorm.

I sat down beside her and she leaned against me. Down below, a horn blared, a motorcycle engine roared, and some sort of construction equipment rattled. For the second time in my life, I said exactly what I was thinking to her, although I didn't mean it the way she probably thought I did. "I missed you.

"I was cold. I should've brought a sweater. See how I fall to absolute pieces without Mom around to tell me exactly what to do?" Her voice was ironic.

"You're a mess," I agreed. I had my arm around her. My heart was pounding hard as I worked up the guts to say for the third time what I was really thinking to her. I closed my eyes and swallowed. And I did it. "Dee, why did you really leave? What's wrong?"

I'd really said it out loud.

But it didn't matter, because she didn't answer. She pulled out of my arms and stood up, walking over to the railing. She stood there so long, watching the cars like they were the only important thing, that I was afraid someone would miss us and come looking. I stood up and joined her at the railing, silently watching the world.

Dee looked at me. I felt her eyes on me, examining my face, my hair, my shoulders, as if she were somehow analyzing me, sizing me up. Seeing how I'd turned out after nine years of being friends.

"Do you want to kiss me?" she asked.

I took a breath.

"James," she said again. "I just want to know. Do you want to kiss me?"

I turned to face her. I didn't know what to say.

She made a strange, uncertain face, mouth pulled out straight on either side. "If you want to... you can."

Finally, I spoke, and when I did, my voice sounded weird to me.

Not mine. "That's a funny way to ask someone to kiss you."

Dee bit her lip. "I just thought--I just wanted to see --if you don't want to, I mean, I don't want to ruin, I mean..."

This wasn't how it was supposed to happen, and I just didn't know what to say. I closed my eyes for a second, and then I took her hand. Goose bumps raced along my arms in an instant, and I closed my eyes for another second. I had the completely obsessive desire to find a pen and to write something on my hands. If I could just write kiss or WTF or mouthwash on my skin, I'd be able to sort this out.

A car alarm went off, far away. I leaned forward and very softly kissed her lips. It wouldn't change the world. There weren't any choirs of angels that descended to attend our kiss. But my heart stopped and I didn't think I'd ever breathe again.

Dee's eyes were closed. She said, "Try again."

I cupped my hands around the back of her neck like I'd imagined doing one thousand times. Her skin was warm against my palms, sticky with the heat, smelling of flowers and shampoo. I kissed her again, so careful. There was a long, long pause, and then she kissed me back. I was freezing cold in the hot D.C. day, her mouth on mine and her arms finally coming around my back, holding me tight as I kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. We stumbled into the back corner of the balcony, still kissing, and then I pulled away to rest my face against her hair and try to figure out what the hell was happening.

We stood in the shadows there, her wrapped up in my arms, for a long time, and then she started to cry. At first I just felt her shaking, and then I stepped back a little to see her face, and found it streaked and wet.

Dee looked up at me, her face a mess of tears, eyes desperately sad, and bit her lip. "It made me think of Luke. I thought of him kissing me. When you were kissing me."

I didn't move. I think she thought I was--I think she thought I was a better person than I was. More... selfless. More... something. I dropped her hands and took a step back.

"James," she said.

I was dead inside; her voice didn't affect me at all. Another step back took me to the door to the balcony; I fumbled with the handle. All around me, I smelled clover and thyme and flowers.

My sixth sense was whispering to me, but I just wanted out.

"James, please. James. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say it." Dee's voice broke, but she just kept saying my name. I finally got the damn door open; cold air blasted me. Dee started to cry like

I've never heard her cry. "Oh, God, James, I'm so sorry. James."

I went straight down the hallway, down the stairs, past the flying-monkey guy, through the door, into the parking lot, and out between the cars to where the bus was parked.

Nuala was waiting on the curb when I got there, but she didn't say anything when I sat down beside her. Which was good, because I didn't have any words inside me. No music either. I was nothing.

I crossed my arms on my legs and put my head down on my arms.

Finally, Nuala asked, "Are They here for you or for her?"

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I left James alone after the D.C. trip. Well, not entirely. I didn't talk to him or send him any dreams, but I still followed him. I was waiting for him to play my song again. Waiting for him to play any music again. I spent the evenings outside his dorm, sitting on the back portico where he'd found Dee that first night and listening to the sounds of human life inside. Radio Voyeur.

A few nights after the D.C. trip, well after the sun had gone down, I heard sounds of a different sort, from outside the dorm instead of inside. The faeries, singing and dancing again on the same hill behind the school. This time I didn't approach Them, just stood under the back columns of James' dorm and listened, my arms hugged around myself. It was the daoine sidhe--the faeries that were made of and called by music. They shouldn't have been able to appear when it wasn't Solstice, but there

They were, unmistakable with their wailing pipes and fiddles.

Was this part of what Eleanor spoke of, when she said that we were going to get stronger? The reappearance of the previously weak daoine sidhe?

A touch on my shoulder made me start, halfway to invisible before I could figure out what was going on.

"Shhh." The voice was mostly laugh. "Shh, little lovely."

The laugh pissed me off first, then the pet name cinched the deal. I spun and crossed my arms. A faerie, tinted green as all the daoine sidhe when They were in the human world, smiled down at me, his hand held out toward me.

"What do you want?" I asked crossly.

His smile didn't falter and he kept his hand outstretched. He smelled like a faerie, all clover and dusky sunsets and music.

Nothing like James' faint scent of shaving cream and leather from his pipes. "You needn't be out here all alone. There's music and we mean to dance until morning."

I looked behind me at the distant glow of the faeries on the hill.

I knew the words to describe a faerie dance, because Steven, one of my pupils, had written most of them as I'd whispered them in his ear: cacophony, beautiful, sugar, laughing, exhaustion, breathless, lust, numb. I turned back to the lovely green faerie in front of me. "Don't you know who I am?"

"You're the leanan sidhe," he said, surprising me because he knew and had asked me to dance anyway. His eyes roved over me. "And you're beautiful. Dance. We're stronger all the time and the dancing is better than ever. Come away with me and dance. It's what we're here for."

I looked at his outstretched hand without taking it. "It's what you're here for," I told him. "I'm here for something else entirely."

"Don't be foolish, little thing," the faerie said, and he took my hand, pulling it from where it hung by my side. "We are all here for pleasure."

I pulled on my hand; he kept it. "Didn't you hear? I'm dying. No fun dancing with a dying faerie."

He pulled my hand to his lips and kissed it, then turned it over and kissed the delicate skin of my wrist too, equal parts lick and bite. "You're not dead yet."

I jerked my hand again, but now he held my wrist, and he was strong--much stronger than a daoine sidhe should've been, this close to humans and iron and everything modern. "Let the hell go or I won't be the only faerie dying around here."

"So you'll only dance with humans, is it?" His voice was gentle, as if he weren't holding me tight, as if I hadn't used the word "faerie." He used my wrist to pull me closer and he said into my ear, "They say that when the leanan sidhe kisses a man, he will see heaven."

I could kill him if I had his name. I was bad at fighting, but I was good at killing. A faerie wouldn't give me his name, though, especially one of the fragile daoine sidhe that kept so much of our magic. "Do they?"

"They do. They also say"--and his lips pressed right against my ear, promising, as all faeries did, eternal life and thoughtless joy--"that if the leanan sidhe lies with a man, it is pleasure like none other found on earth." He reached down between us and caught my other wrist in a hot hold.

So it was to be rape. Only the faeries never called it that. They said "ravished" and "seduced" and "overcome by desire." It was a very human thing, to be taken by a faerie against your will. A proper faerie had rights; a proper faerie would never have had this daoine sidhe's lips on her neck and music humming through her because the queen wouldn't have allowed it. But I was neither faerie nor human, so no one cared what happened to me but me.

I thought about all this and I thought about the way his fingers on my wrist felt unpleasant, like the touch of a milkweed, and I thought about the way the fall moon was brilliantly white as it rose above the columned-dorm like a rack of smiling teeth, while his hand rummaged over the body James had made beautiful.

One of his hands held the back of my neck, his fingers so long that they came most of the way around it. Just enough force behind the grip to tell me what he could do. He tipped my chin up, like he was a proper lover and I had flown into his grasp willingly. "I would very much like to see heaven."

I spat on him. The spit glistened on his cheek, brighter than his dark eyes in the dim light, and he smiled like I had just given him the best gift in the world. I hated him and I hated every other faerie for their damn condescension. I could have screamed, but it occurred to me then, in a way that it never had before, that there wasn't a single soul in the world who would hear me and do something about it, no matter where I was on the earth.

"Tears? You are very human," the faerie remarked, though he was lying, because I never cried. "Don't weep, lovely, it ruins your beauty." The faerie reached inside my shirt. I jerked violently, struggling, for the second time in my life totally unable to get what I wanted.

With my free hand, I made a fist--a familiar, easy gesture--and I slammed it into his nose. I'd read somewhere that you could shove the bridge of someone's nose into their brain and kill them if you hit them just right.

He was dizzyingly fast; he turned his face so my fist glanced off his jawbone and then grabbed for my arm. I was faster, though, and I raked claws along his forehead and cheek, leaving nail marks, pale white for a second and then full of rising red. It had to have hurt, but he was eternally smiling.

The faerie still held my wrist in his hand, gripping so tight now that I gasped, twisting against the pressure of his fingertips on my skin, the feel of him crushing my bones together.

I struggled, kicking, shoving, twisting in his grip, as if it would make any difference, but he was strong. Solstice-strong. Way too strong for a daoine sidhe right next to a human building.

I wanted my mind to tear away, to disappear into a dream of agonizing beauty, but everything I'd given to others, all the transcendent brilliance and otherworldly dreams, was out of my reach. He was taking it for himself.

I was awake, skin prickling, eyes peeled wide open. I was awake like I'd never been, so awake that it hurt. The room was black as a butt crack and I knew without looking that the clock glowed 3:04. I knew because my dream was still burnt on my eyes--a dream of waking a second before I actually did.

I sat up, grabbed a shirt from the end of the bed, jerked on my jeans, and thought about grabbing my shoes. No time. There wasn't any time.

Across the small room, Paul groaned, an invisible, dark lump in his bed, turning and grabbing his pillow. He had kicked off his blankets; he must be hot, even though I was shivering.

I slid out the door and into the hallway, holding my breath, trying to be fast, trying to be silent. I didn't even know where the hell I was going. Or why I was hurrying.

Dull greenish light in the hallway vaguely illuminated the closed doors of the other rooms. I padded down the hallway, into the dim stairwell that smelled of sweat and the middle of the night.

I paused by the window I normally snuck out of to see the antlered king, but that wasn't what I'd seen in my dream. It was the back door I needed.

I crept into the main hallway of the ground floor, past Sullivan's room. I imagined the door opening up and Sullivan springing out like a knobby jack-in-the-box, but it stayed shut and I made it through the lobby to the back door. I turned the lock to make sure I'd be able to get back in, and then, shuddering with the cold, I pushed the door open and stood on the back porch.

I saw Nuala.

She was curled against the side of the dorm, body unnaturally twisted, arms stretched sort of above her and out, like she was crucified. She had her face half-turned toward me, tears streaked down her cheeks, and she was kicking in front of her.

It seemed to take forever for her to notice me, standing there, staring at her, and when she did, I saw some weird, unidentified emotion in her eyes. In that long moment, her body jerked in a weird way, and I finally figured it out.

Because I can see Them and you can't.

"Don't just stand there," Nuala snarled. Not nasty, though. Like a trapped wild animal.

I grabbed at my iron bracelet, working the knobs loose from my wrist, and I lunged toward her. Nuala's arms dropped, released, and she pointed me toward her invisible attacker. Too late to be useful to me.

Something struck me, hard, electric, inhuman, and I staggered and swung with the iron bracelet. I was blind, but I wasn't stupid. An invisible body thumped hard against one of the columns, and I charged at the column with the iron outstretched in front of me like a sword. I punched again, and this time the faerie appeared, green-tinted, beautiful, and alien.

"Hello, piper," he hissed at me.

And then he was a swan, as if he had never been anything else, and he winged through the columns and away. I watched the white blot disappear into the dark sky, and then I turned back to Nuala. She was crouched on the bricks, ineffectually pulling at her hair like she was trying to make it look presentable, and she was still crying. Not like a human, though. Her tears streamed silently down her face, one after another, and she didn't even seem to notice them as she jerked at her shirt and sucked at some sort of cut on her wrist.

"Was he the only one?" I asked.

"Bastard," Nuala said. She spoke as if her tears didn't change her voice. "Bastard faeries. I hate Them. I hate Them."

I dropped down in front of her, not sure what I was supposed to be doing or feeling. The bricks were cold and prickly through the knees of my jeans. I didn't know what to say. Was I supposed to say "are you okay?" I didn't even know what had happened. Had she been raped? Was there such a thing as almost raped? Her clothing was all messed up and she was crying--the psychotic creature was crying--so I mean, that couldn't be good. I mean, it had to have been something bad.

I felt like maybe I should give her a hug, or something, even though she'd never indicated that she was the sort that would appreciate fond human contact. Unless it was the brush of your skin against her fingertips as she stuck a knife between your ribs.

"Just shut up." Nuala pressed her hand over her face. "Hell, James. Just shut up."

I realized that she meant my thoughts at the same moment that Nuala realized there were tears on her face. Standing up, she pulled her wet palm away from her face and stared at it, looking absolutely stricken and very human. She moved her fingers slightly, watching the tears glisten in the faint light.

Looking at them made more silent tears streak from her eyes, one after another, as if they would never end, as if the worst thing in the world was that she had discovered she was crying.

I felt disoriented. We had roles that we played when we were around each other, and now Nuala was letting me down. I didn't know who I was supposed to be around her anymore.

Nuala scrubbed her hands against her short jean skirt, wiping the tears off in an angry movement, and then jerked down the bottom of the skirt, straightening it out. I reached behind her to knock the crap off the back of her shirt. She flinched at my touch. I didn't know what to do about that so I pretended not to notice.

"So now you know." Nuala didn't look at me, just kept busy flicking invisible pieces of lint off her clothing.

This was easier than silence. "Now I know what?"

"How it is. With me."

I blinked. Clearly, from the expression on her face and the ragged edge to her voice, this was supposed to be a statement pregnant with meaning. I ran back over the scene in my mind and everything she'd said. "Nuala, you're the one who reads minds, not me."

Nuala looked back at me and her stance said so clearly no, never mind that I almost thought she'd said it out loud. But instead she said, "I'm one of the solitary fey. You know what that means?"

She paused as if she really did expect me to answer.

"Means I'm a freak, James."

I didn't remember her ever calling me by my name before, and it had a really weird effect on me, like I couldn't trust anything I thought about her anymore. I had a pen in my jeans, and I wanted to get it out. I could already see the shape of the letters

I would write: call by name.

"I don't care if you do," Nuala said. She jerked her chin toward the pocket where my pen was. "Don't you get it? I'm a bigger freak than you are."

I crossed my arms tightly across my chest. I should've said something sarcastic to lighten the mood, but I didn't want to. I wanted her to finish saying what she was going to say.

"And nobody vouches for me. You don't know how lucky you are. You have human laws and school rules and you have your parents and Sullivan and even Paul, and they all keep the world from you. I'm just me, nobody to nobody. Is it so stupid that it's taken me this long to figure out that I'm jealous of you?" She laughed, wild and unhappy. "You, who were supposed to be my asshole free ride until I got torched this year and forgot about everything."

I sighed. If she'd been Dee, I would've waited a second longer, to let her completely implode, but she wasn't Dee, and I didn't think Nuala worked quite the same way. I thought about what I had wanted to write on my hand, so that I wouldn't forget to do it.

"Nuala," I said.

She looked at me.

"Nuala, can we just have, like, a cease-fire? I mean, you can go back to calling me an ass and trying to lure me to my death tomorrow and I'll go back to treating you like a psychotic bitch and researching ways to exorcize you in the morning, but seriously, can we just have a cease-fire for tonight? 'Cause, seriously, trying to think about this is making my head hurt, and--can we just go somewhere and get some food or something? Is there even someplace that has food at this time of night?"

Her face was unreadable. "I just keep thinking that at some point, I'm going to stop being surprised by how stupidly ballsy you are. Were you ever afraid of me?"

I said, truthfully, "You scare the shit out of me."

She started to laugh then, crazy, real laughing, like I was the funniest thing in the world. When she laughed like that, it made her either the scariest girl or the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen, and I couldn't decide if the feeling inside me was because

I wanted to make her do it again or because I wanted to run away.

I was sitting in a movie theater at 4:13 in the morning, with a faerie muse who had vaguely psychic vampire tendencies, watching The Sixth Sense.

At this point in my life I'd had some pretty freaky, surreal experiences already, such as (1) watching my best friend move things with her mind, (2) being dragged from my wrecked car by a soulless faerie assassin, and (3) feeling the inexorable pull of the king of the dead's nightly song. And really, sitting with Nuala and watching a crazy little boy tell Bruce Willis that he saw dead people should've been included amongst them. But it felt almost normal.

Okay, so maybe Nuala had gone a little overboard with the butter on the popcorn, but hell, I didn't know how to really use one of those movie theater popcorn machines either. And was there really such a thing as too much butter on popcorn?

"Look," Nuala ordered. She wasn't eating the popcorn. It occurred to me that maybe she didn't eat food, period. I knew humans weren't supposed to eat faerie food because it would trap them in Faerie. Did it work the same way for faeries and human food? Nuala swatted my arm to get my attention.

"Look, see? Every time something supernatural is about to happen, the director gives you a clue. The red. See the red there?"

I didn't bother to comment on the irony of Nuala pointing that out to me. "Yeah." I'd been sitting in the seat so long that my butt was going to sleep. I shifted, propping my feet up on the seat in front of me. Nuala's eyes were still fastened on the screen in front of us; the light of the movie flickered across her face. Her pupils dilated and contracted with every change of light. So much like a human while still being three thousand miles away from being one.

"How many movies have you seen?" I asked. It wasn't that I wasn't interested in the movie, just that I'd seen the ending, like, fourteen times, and I was more interested in why Nuala was sitting in a movie theater and why, of all the movies in the world that she'd wanted to watch, she'd picked this one.

She slouched down in the seat beside me. "Thousands, I guess. I don't know. Before I figured it out, I thought I would be a director."

I was a little tired; it took me a moment to figure out what she meant. I didn't have time to comment before Nuala gave me a withering look and said, "You can't really get to be a director in sixteen years, you know? And like, what's the point?"

It seemed like a stupid question to me. "The same point as anyone else wanting to be a director. You really want to be a director? Like, movies?"

"Yeah, like movies. All of those lives played out, with music in the background. It's like living a thousand lives without ever leaving yours." Nuala smiled lazily at the movie screen. "I even thought of the name I'd use: 'Izzy Leopard.'"

I started to laugh.

Nuala slapped me, raising goose bumps. "Shut up!"

I covered my face with an arm and kept laughing. "God, woman, how'd you come up with that name? It sounds like a drunk guy asking if someone's got leprosy."

Nuala slapped my arm again. "Shut up. It's distinctive. People would remember it. You know, they'd be, 'Oh, Izzy Leopard did this film.' 'Oh yeah?' 'She's brilliant.'"

"And a leper."

Nuala's expression was fierce. "I could kill you."

"Oh, if I had a dime for every time someone's told me that. Oh, if I had a dime for every time you've told me that."

She took the popcorn bucket from me and set it on the seat on the other side of her. "I can't believe I gave you popcorn. I should make you drink popcorn butter for mocking my director name."

I grinned at her. "Truly, a fate worse than death." I thought of what she'd said, about living one thousand lives without leaving her own. Living one thousand human lives. It seemed like an important distinction. "But, you know, sixteen years is a long time. You could've been a director."

Nuala turned in her seat to face me, eyebrows pulled down very low over her eyes, and spoke to be heard over the suspenseful music of the final scene. "Seriously, you are special ed, aren't you? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out."

People who made excuses always pissed me off. "What, because it's not enough time? You could've at least tried.

Sixteen years is enough time to try."

She hissed through her teeth and shook her head. "You are stupid, piper! Don't you remember what happened with the piano? Well, I can't write any words, either. If I had to create anything new while I was directing, it--it just-- wouldn't happen."

"Difficult. But not crushing," I observed.

Her eyes didn't so much narrow as tighten around the edges.

"Okay then. What happens when I change appearances between movies?"

I grinned at her crookedly. "Madonna did that her whole career."

Nuala raised her hands and fisted them, as if imagining them around my neck. "Yeah. Whatever. Okay, how about this? I'm like all faeries. I have to go wherever the strongest cloverhand takes us. So what happens if the cloverhand decides to move across country just as I've gotten settled? Don't you get it? I can't have a normal life at all, much less think about doing something like having a real career. It's not about trying or not trying."

I got the subtext: just human enough to be miserable as a faerie and just faerie enough to ruin everything good about being human. But I just said, "You lost me at the cloverhand bit."

Nuala waved a hand at the movie screen without looking at it.

It went dark, instantly throwing us into utter black. After a few seconds, my eyes started to adjust to the light of the dim runner lights along the aisles, but still, all I could see was

Nuala's giant blue eyes in front of me. Even without any other facial features visible, I could see the disbelieving expression in them.

"Your girlfriend-who-isn't? It only took me two seconds to figure it out. How can you know all about the faeries and all about her and not know what a cloverhand is?"

At the mention of Dee, a weight clenched in my stomach. I didn't want to be there anymore, sitting in a sticky movie theater seat. I wanted to be standing, pacing, moving. I wanted to be punching my fist through a wall.

Nuala's eyes dropped to my hands as if she imagined them punching through a wall, too. "The last queen was a cloverhand. She's dead. So now your fake girlfriend is here, and she's the strongest cloverhand. So we're here too."

"Stop calling her that."

Her eyes made a grinning shape as she willfully misunderstood me. "It's just what it's called. Someone who attracts the faeries.

We have to stay near them. Wherever they are is Faerie."

I remembered what Dee had said, that first night we ran into each other at the school. Did you see Them? The faeries?

I was tired of trying to see in the dark and tired of having my eyes open, so I closed them and rested my forehead on my fists. "So she's always going to have Them around her." I didn't know if Dee was strong enough for that.

"Until there's a stronger cloverhand." Nuala's voice was closer to me than before, but I didn't open my eyes. I felt her breath on the skin of my arm. "Why do you have dead written on your hand?"

"I don't remember."

"I don't believe you. What were you thinking when you wrote it?"

"I don't remember."

"Do you love her?"

"Nuala, leave me alone. Seriously."

She was insistent. "It's a yes-or-no question. And it's not even like I'm a real person. It's like you're just telling yourself."

The pressure of my knuckles against my closed eyelids was starting to make colorful patterns in the darkness, light violet and green dancing in nonsensical, falling patterns. "I asked really nicely for you to leave it, Nuala. It's not secret man-code for 'keep asking me until I change my answer.' It means I really don't want to talk about it. With you or anybody. It's not personal."

Nuala grabbed my fists in her hands, sending chills through my arms. "Why haven't you played any music since you kissed her?"

Leave me alone. I didn't say anything. Even if I wanted to answer her, what would I say? That stupid things like music and breathing hadn't seemed important since then? That there was so much white noise in my head ever since I'd kissed Dee that I couldn't find a single note to hold onto?

"That's a start," Nuala said. Reading my thoughts again. Maybe she couldn't stop.

I didn't feel like adding anything more to my thoughts on Dee. I changed the subject. Sort of. "I think maybe you're lucky."

"Me?"

"Yeah." I turned my head on my fists to look at her; it made one of her hands lie against my cheek. The skin of my face tightened with the strangeness of her. "Immortality would be awful in our screwed-up world if you were the only one who had it. You'd have to remember all those years of everyone else disappearing. At least you don't have to watch everyone you know get old and die while you live forever."

Nuala frowned at her fingers on my skin. "Other faeries get to remember."

"You just said you weren't like other faeries. They don't feel properly. But you have to be more human, right? To be able to catch us."

She was silent.

"How human are you?" Right after I asked the question, I wasn't sure how I meant it. But I didn't take it back.

She was quiet so long I thought she wasn't going to answer.

Finally, she took her hand from my cheek and said, "Too much.

I didn't think I was very human at all, but I guess I was wrong.

Or maybe I'm just dying. Maybe this always happens. How would I know? Sixteen years doesn't seem very long when you're at the end of it."

I sat back. I didn't like how I was feeling, so I said, "Stop feeling sorry for yourself."

Her voice was petulant. "I will when you do."

I looked down at my hands. In the faint light, I could just pick out some of the words on them: dead, valkyrie, following them down. "Let's write something, together."

Nuala looked at me, her face sort of frowning.

I said, "Don't give me that what the hell do you mean look. I mean, let's write something."

"You mean, you want me to help you write something."

"No, I mean we use both our brains and just my hands to write something."

"Write what?"

"I don't know. Music? A play?"

Nuala looked like she was trying really hard not to look pleased.

"You don't write plays."

"If we wrote a play, with music, you could direct it. We're supposed to do some creative project for Sullivan's class, something having to do with metaphor. I mean, it's not a movie, but hell, we can only do so much before Halloween, right?"

She was looking at me really intensely then, in the sort of way that I had always wanted Dee to look at me. I kind of thought she was going to kiss me, for some reason, because she was looking at my mouth. I had a horrible idea that she would, and then I would think of Dee while she was, and then she would kill me in a long, slow, painful process that would be hard to explain to insurance people.

Nuala looked from my mouth to my eyes. "Get your pen out," she said.

I did. I had no paper, but that didn't matter. "What should we call it?"

Without hesitation, Nuala climbed into the seat behind me so that she could wrap her arms around my shoulders. The sixth sense in me told me she was cold, but a totally different sense blazed hot when she rested her cheek against mine, the side of her mouth just touching my cheek.

I clicked the end of the pen so the nib came out, rested it against my palm for a second while I listened to her silence, and then wrote: Ballad.

Create Text Message

185/200

To:

James

Ive ruined evrything w us be im an idiot. I jst want something so bad but i dont know what it is. I thought it might b u. But u really meant the kiss. I dont know what to do about that.

From:

Dee

Send your message? y/n