Ballad

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Because I was not a real music student and because Sullivan sucked at organizational skills, we had to meet for my piano lesson in the old auditorium building. Turns out the practice rooms were filled to capacity at five o'clock on Fridays, by real piano players and real clarinet players and real cellists and all their real teachers and ensemble leaders.

So instead, I picked my way over to ugly Brigid Hall. To prove that Brigid was no longer a useful member of the ThornkingAsh environ, the grounds people had let the lawn between

Brigid and the other academic buildings get autumn crunchy and allowed the boxwoods and ivy to take over the dull, yellowbrick exterior. It was a message to all visiting parents: Do not take pictures of this part of the campus. This building has been deemed too ugly for academic use. Don't think we didn't notice.

On the walk over, my phone beeped in my pocket. Pulling it out, I saw a text message from Dee. When I opened it, the first words of text I saw were

James im so sorry and I felt sick to my stomach and deleted it without reading any further. I shoved the phone back into my pocket and headed around the side of Brigid Hall to the entry.

The door was coated in peeling red paint that seemed somehow significant. I didn't think there were any other red doors on campus. Like me, a loner. I punched my knuckles lightly against the door knob in solidarity. "You and me, buddy,"

I said under my breath. "One of a kind."

I let myself in. I had entered a long, thin room, populated by old folding chairs all pointed attentively toward a low stage at the other end of the building. It smelled like mold and the old wood of the floor and the ivy pressed up by the frosted glass windows. On the stage, recessed lights illuminated a grand piano that was as old and ugly as the building itself. The whole thing was a crash course in all that was best forgotten about

1950s architecture.

Sullivan sat at the piano, knobby figures toying with the keys.

Nothing mind-blowing, but he knew his way around the keyboard. And the piano, for what it was worth, didn't sound nearly as bad as it looked. I walked up through the folding chair audience, grabbing one of the front-row chairs and bringing it onto the stage with me.

"Salutations, sensei," I told him, and dropped my backpack onto the chair beside the piano. "What a lovely creation that piano is."

"Isn't it though? I don't think anybody remembers that this building is here." Sullivan played "Shave and a Haircut" before getting up from the bench. "Strange to think this used to be their auditorium. Ugly little place, isn't it?"

I noted the detachment. Not "our auditorium." Sullivan was frowning at me. "Feeling all right?"

"I didn't sleep much." A understatement of cosmic proportions.

I wanted nothing more than the day to be done so that I could fall into my bed.

"You mean, other than what you did in my class," Sullivan said.

"Some would argue that recumbent listening is the most effective."

He shook his head. "Right. I'll be looking for evidence of its efficacy on your next exam." He gestured to the bench. "Your throne."

I sat at the piano; the bench creaked and shifted precariously.

The piano was so old that the name of the maker was mostly worn away from above the keyboard. And it smelled. Like ground-up old ladies. Sullivan had put some sheet music up on the stand; something by Bach that I'm sure was meant to look simple but had way too many lines for pipe music.

Sullivan turned the folding chair around and sat on it backwards. His face was intent. "So you've never played piano before."

The memory of Nuala's fingers overlaying mine was somehow colored by the memory of last night; I tightened my fingers into a fist and released them to avoid shivering. "I tinkered with it once after we talked. Otherwise"--I ran my fingers over the keys and this time, struck by the memory of Nuala, I did shiver, just a tiny jerk--"we're virtually strangers."

"So you can't play that music up there on the stand."

I looked at it again. It was in a foreign language--like hell could I play it. I shrugged. "Greek to me."

Sullivan's voice changed; it was hard now. "How about the music you brought with you?"

"I don't follow."

Sullivan jerked his chin toward my arms, covered by the long sleeves of my black ROFLMAO T-shirt. "Am I wrong?"

I wanted to ask him how he knew. He could've guessed. The writing on my hands, equal parts words and music, disappeared beneath both sleeves. I might've had them pushed up earlier, in his class. I couldn't remember. "I can't play written music on the piano."

Sullivan stood up, gesturing me off the bench and taking my place. "But I can. Roll up your sleeves."

I stood in the yellow-orange stage lights and pushed them up.

Both of my arms were dark with my tiny printing, jagged strokes of musical notes on hurriedly drawn staffs. The notes went all the way around my arms, uglier and harder to read on my right arm where I'd had to use my left hand to write. I didn't say anything. Sullivan was looking at my arms with something like anger, or horror, or despair.

But the only thing he said was, "Where is the beginning?"

I had to search for a moment to find it, inside my left elbow, and I turned it toward him, my hand outstretched like I was asking him for something.

He began to play it. It was a lot older-sounding than I remembered it being when I'd sung and hummed it with Nuala.

All modal, dancing right between major and minor key. It kicked ass a lot more than I remembered too. It was secretive, beautiful, longing, dark, bright, low, high. An overture. A collection of all the themes that were to be worked into our play.

Sullivan got to the end of the music on my left arm and stopped. He pointed to his flat leather music case leaning against the piano leg. "Give me that."

I handed it to him and watched as he reached inside and pulled out the same tape recorder he'd brought to the hill that day. He set it on top of the piano and looked at it as if it contained the secrets of the world. Then he pressed play.

I heard my voice, small and tinny: "You weren't recording before now?"

Sullivan's voice, sounding very young and fierce when not attached to his body: "Didn't know if I'd have to."

A long silence, hissing tape, birds singing distantly.

Then, Nuala's voice: "Don't say anything." I didn't immediately realize what it meant, that I was hearing Nuala's voice coming out of the recorder. She continued. "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."

Sullivan reached up and hit stop.

"Tell me you didn't make the deal, James."

His voice was so grave and taut that I just said the truth. "I didn't."

"Are you just saying that? Tell me you didn't give her a single year of your life."

"I didn't give her anything." But I didn't know if that was true. It didn't feel true.

"I'd love to believe that," Sullivan said, and now his voice was furious. He grabbed my hand and wrenched it so that I was staring at my own skin, inches from my face. "But I have to tell you, they don't give you that for nothing. You're my student, and I want to know what or who you promised to get this, because it's my responsibility to keep stupid, brilliant kids like yourself from getting killed, and I'm going to have to clean things up now."

I should've had something to say. If not witty, than just something.

Sullivan released my hand. "Were you not good enough on your own? Best damn piper in the state and you had to strike a deal for more? I should've known it wouldn't be enough. Maybe you thought it would only affect you? It never affects just you."

I jerked down my sleeves. "You don't know what you're talking about. I didn't make a deal. You don't know."

But maybe he did know. I didn't know what the hell he knew.

Sullivan looked at the partially rubbed-off letters above the keyboard and clenched and unclenched his hand. "James, I know you think I'm just an idiot. A musician who sold out his teen dreams to become a junior-faculty foot-wipe at a posh high school. That's what you think I am, right?"

Nuala, who actually read my mind, would've been able to word it better, but he was still pretty close for a non-supernatural entity. I shrugged, figuring a non-verbal answer was really the best way to go.

He grimaced at the piano keys, running his fingers over them. "I know that because I was you, ten years ago. I was going to be somebody. Nobody was going to stand in my way, and I had a bunch of people at Juilliard who agreed with me. It was my life."

"I'm not a fan of morality tales," I told him.

"Oh, this one has a twist ending," Sullivan said, voice bitter.

"They ruined my life. I didn't even know They existed. I didn't even stand a chance. But you do. I'm telling you right now, they use people like us to get ahead. Because we want what They have to offer and we don't like the world the way it is. But what you have to understand, James, is just because we want what

They have and They want what we have, doesn't mean we end up with something we like. We don't."

He shoved back from the piano and got up from the bench.

"Now sit down."

I didn't know what else to say, so I gave him part of the truth. "I don't really want to play the piano."

"I didn't either," Sullivan said. "But at least it's not an instrument they particularly care for. So it's a good one for both of us to be playing. Sit down."

I sat down, but I didn't think Sullivan knew as much about Nuala as he thought he did.

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To:

James

U told me u were psychic once. I wish i could ask u what my future was. Am i always like this, on the outside looking in? Thats what i loved about luke. He made me feel like i belongd smewhere.

From:

Dee

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When I pulled the six-pack out of my backpack, Paul looked as if

I'd laid an egg. I set it down on the desk next to his bed and turned the chair around backwards before sitting on it.

"You still want to get drunk?"

Paul's eyes were twice as round as usual. "Man, how did you get that?"

I reached behind me to get a pen from the desk and wrote the list on it without quite knowing why. I felt better after I did.

"The archangel Michael came down from on high and I asked him, 'Lo, how can I getteth the stick from my friend Paul's ass?' and he said, 'This ought to go a long way.' And gave me a sixpack of Heineken. Don't ask me why Heineken."

"Is that enough to get me drunk?" Paul was still looking at the six-pack as if it were an H-bomb. "In the movies, they drink forever and never get drunk."

"A beer virgin like yourself won't." I was acutely pleased that I didn't have to worry about Paul vomiting, thanks to foresight on my part. I liked Paul a lot, but I didn't think I wanted to dedicate any of the minutes of my life to cleaning up his barf.

"And it's all for you."

Paul looked panicked at that. "You aren't drinking?"

"Anything that is mind-altering makes me nervous." I dumped the pencils and pens from the mug that served as our pencil can; they clattered and rolled every which way on the desk. I handed Paul the pencil can.

"That's because you always like to be in control of everything,"

Paul said, weirdly observant. He looked into the mug in his hands. "What is this for?"

"In case you're shy about drinking out of a bottle."

"Dude, there's like, pencil crap and who knows what in here."

I handed him a bottle of beer and turned back to the desk, picking up one of the markers that I'd dumped from the pencil can and finding a scrap piece of paper. I scrawled busily, filling the room with the scent of permanent marker. "Sorry to offend, princess. Bottom's up. The pizza should be here soon."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm ensuring our privacy." I showed him the sign I'd created.

Paul is feeling delicate. Please do not disturb his beauty sleep, xoxo Paul. I'd put a heart around his name too.

"You bastard," Paul said, as I stood up and opened the door long enough to tape it to the outside. Behind me, I heard the click of him opening the bottle. "Dude, this smells rank."

"Welcome to the world of beer, my friend." I crashed on my bed. "Like all vices, it comes with a warning that we usually ignore."

Paul rubbed at the condensation on the outside. "What happened to the labels?"

He didn't have to know how long it had taken me to remove all of the labels and swap the bottle caps. Labor of love, baby.

"You get them cheaper when you buy the ones that are mislabeled or the labels got damaged."

"Really? Good to know." Paul made a face and took a swig.

"How will I know I'm getting drunk?"

"You'll start getting as funny as me. Well, funnier than you usually are, anyway. Every little bit helps."

Paul threw the bottle cap at me.

"Drink one before the food comes," I said. "It works better on an empty stomach."

I watched Paul drink half the bottle and then I jumped up and went to the CD player I'd brought with me. "Where are your CDs, Paul? We need some music for the event."

Paul gulped down the other half, choking a bit on the last of it, and pointed vaguely under his bed. I handed him another bottle before laying on the floor next to his bed and preparing myself for the worst.

I bit back a swear word with a great force of will. Nuala's eyes crinkled into evil humor, inches away from mine, glowing from beneath Paul's bed.

"Surprise," she said.

You didn't surprise me, I thought.

"Yeah, I did. I can read your thoughts, remember?" She pointed to the bottom of the mattress. "That's pretty funny, what you're doing. Is that real beer?"

I lifted my finger to my lips and silently made my lips go shhh.

Nuala grinned.

"You're not a good person," she said. "I like that about you."

She pushed Paul's CD binder to me and rested her freckled cheek on her arms. "See you later."

I stood up with his CDs and looked over to see how he was faring. He seemed more chipper already. God bless vanishing inhibitions. "So what have you got in here?" I asked Paul, but I started paging through without waiting for his answer. "These are all dead guys, Paul."

"Beethoven's not really dead," Paul pointed at me with the bottle. "That's just a rumor. A cover-up. He's doing weddings in Vegas."

I grinned. "Too right. Ohhh, Paul. Paul. What the crap. You have a Kelly Clarkson CD in here. Tell me it's your sister's. Tell me you have a sister."

Paul was a little defensive. "Hey, she has a good voice."

"God, Paul!" I flipped through more of the CDs. "Your brain is like a cultural wasteland. One Republic? Maroon Five? Sheryl

Crow? Are you a little girl? I don't even know what to put on that won't make me develop breasts and start craving chocolate."

"Give it to me," Paul said. He took the CD case and pulled one out. "Get me another bottle while I put this on. I think it's working."

So that was how we happened to be listening to Britney Spears

"Hit Me Baby One More Time" when the pizza guy delivered our sausage-and-green-peppers, extra-cheese, extra-sauce, extra-calories, extra everything.

Pizza guy raised his eyebrows.

"My friend is having his period," I told the pizza guy, and handed him his tip. "He needs Britney and extra cheese to get him through it. I'm trying to be supportive."

Paul was singing along by the time I got the box open and ripped the pieces apart. I handed him a piece of pizza and took one for myself. "This is awesome, dude," he told me. "I can see why college kids do it."

"Britney Spears, or beer?"

"E-mail my heart," Paul sang at me.

I'd created a monster.

"Paul," I said. "I was thinking some more about this metaphor assignment."

Paul studied the string of cheese that led from his piece of pizza to his mouth. He spoke carefully to avoid breaking it. "How it sucks?"

"Right on. So I was thinking we could do something else.

Together."

"Dude, I looked them up online. They're like, forty-five dollars."

I lifted up the top layer of cheese on my slice of pizza and scraped some of the sauce off. "What are you talking about?"

Paul waved a hand at me. "Oh. I thought you were talking about buying one of those papers online. After Sullivan mentioned it, I looked it up. They're forty-five bucks to download."

I made a note to remind Sullivan that we students were young and impressionable. "I actually meant doing something entirely different for the assignment. Would you really buy a paper online?"

"Nah," Paul said sadly. "Even if I did have a credit card. It's a sad statement about my lack of balls, isn't it?"

"Balls isn't buying someone else's term paper," I assured him.

"When you're sober, I have something I want you to read. A play."

"Hamlet's a play," Paul observed. He held out his hand. "Lemme read it now."

I grabbed the notebook from my bed and tossed it to him.

Paul scanned the text of Ballad while singing along with Britney.

He paused just long enough to say, "This is some good shit, James."

"I don't have any other kind," I said.

"Sullivan!" Nuala warned from under the bed. I looked sharply in the direction of the bed and then headed to the door just as the knock came. I opened the door and stepped out into the hall, shutting the door behind myself.

Sullivan's expression was pointed. "James."

"Mr. Sullivan."

"Interesting choice of music you two have chosen for tonight."

I inclined my head slightly. "I like to believe that our time at

Thornking-Ash has invested in us a deep appreciation for all musical genres."

Inside the room, Paul hit a really high note. I think the kid had perfect pitch. He'd really missed his calling. He shouldn't be playing the oboe, he should be touring nationally with Mariah

Carey.

"Dear God," Sullivan said.

"Agreed. So what brings you to our fair floor?"

Sullivan craned his neck to see the sign I'd put on the door.

"Pizza. Delivery boy said it looked like one of you was drinking something that looked an awful lot like beer."

"See if I ever tip him again, if he's going to trill like a canary first time anyone looks at him funny."

Sullivan crossed his arms. "So is that why Paul is singing high E over C in there? I know you haven't been drinking. You don't smell like it and you are definitely just your usual charming self."

I smiled congenially at him. "I can tell you quite honestly that neither of us is drinking alcohol."

He narrowed his eyes. "What are you up to?"

I lifted my hands as if in surrender. "He wanted to get drunk. I wanted to see him loosen up. Three bottles of nonalcoholic beer later, and I think"--I paused, as Paul tried for another high note and failed miserably--"I think both of us are happy with the results while being, surprisingly, on this side of legal."

Sullivan's mouth worked. He wouldn't reward me with a smile.

"Shocking, considering the person who was the genesis of this plan. And how did you fool Paul?"

"The guy at the bar in town was kind enough to let me have a

Heineken box and some caps. I swapped out the caps on six non-alcoholic beers and stripped the labels with some story about discounts for Paul. I think the bartender was a very good sport. Like some of my teachers." I raised an eyebrow at him, waiting to see if he was going to rise to it.

"The machinations involved are incredible; it pains me to consider how much of your free time this involved. Well, far be it from me to destroy an evening based on camaraderie, deception, and fake beer." Sullivan looked at me and shook his head. "God help me, James, what the hell are your

I blinked back up at him. "Dying to get back in there and see if I can get Paul to wear his underwear on his head is what I am."

Sullivan wiped a smile off his face with his hand. "Good night, James. No hangovers, I trust."

I grinned at him and slid back into the room, shutting the door behind me. Thanks, Nuala.

"No problem," Nuala replied.

"Who was that at the door?" Paul asked.

"Your mom." I handed him a fourth bottle. "You're going to have to pee like a racehorse."

"Do you think racehorses pee more than other horses?" Paul asked. "It doesn't seem like they ought to, but otherwise, why isn't it just pee like a horse'?"

I took another piece of pizza and lay down on the floor next to his bed. It was several degrees cooler on the floor, and in the draft, I could smell Nuala's flowery summer breath strongly.

"Maybe they drink more water. Or maybe nobody gives a crap if other horses pee."

"Gives a crap about pee," echoed Paul with a laugh.

I laughed too, for an entirely different reason, and saw the line of Nuala's sarcastic smile underneath the edge of the bed. You could be anywhere and he couldn't see you. Why under the bed?

'"Cause I wanted to scare the shit out of you," Nuala said.

I offered her my piece of pizza, and she gave me a really weird, shocked look and then shook her head. It made me think about the old faerie tales, how if you ate any faerie food you were offered in faerieland you had to stay there forever. Except it could work in reverse, I guessed. Above us, the CD changer switched to the next CD, one of my Breaking Benjamin albums.

"Now this is real music," I told Paul.

On the bed above, Paul thumped his foot in time with the beat.

"Britney's real too, dude. But this is just a little more real." He paused. "Dude, I think you're the coolest friend I've ever had."

I felt a little twinge of guilt. Just a tiny one. "Because I got you beer?"

"No, man. Because you're just so, you know. So you. Not like anybody else." Paul paused and regrouped. "When I see you, I want that. To not be like anybody else. Even when you're an ass, you know, you're an ass just like you and nobody else, and everybody respects that."

Nuala was looking at me while he said that. Her eyes glowed at me, huge in her face, in the darkness a few inches from me.

Do you think that too?

"Especially the ass part," Nuala replied. She was still just looking at me, so intense, and I was just staring back at her.

I didn't know how to respond to Paul. All I could think of was how good Nuala smelled and the little spray pattern her freckles made across her cheeks. Without looking away from

Nuala, I said, "You flatter me."

"Shut up," Paul said. "Just take the compliment."

I grinned. "You think you'll still be this blunt when you're sober?"

"No way."

Somehow Nuala and I were holding hands. I couldn't remember how it happened; if I'd reached for her hand first, or if she'd stretched her hand out of the darkness toward mine. But I was holding her hand and she was holding it back and somehow her fingers were slowly whispering across the skin on my wrist and my fingers were rubbing over the back of her palm. And I didn't know what it meant--if it meant that we were just holding hands and this was just what you did with a psycho faerie girl, or if this feeling that was coursing through me was way more than my body telling me I was close to something supernatural.

"Plus, you know," Paul continued, "you're a freak too, and you're still cool. You know? You write all over your hands and you're like, totally obsessive, and still, every guy who knows you wants to be you." Paul's head thumped against the wall beside his bed. "It gives freaks like me hope."

Nuala's fingers on my skin seemed like my whole world. I wanted her to pull me underneath the bed and disappear into the darkness with me, but I managed, "You're not a freak."

"Oh, dude, you have no idea. You want to hear how messed up

I am? No way would I tell anyone this normally. This is good shit."

Nuala's breath was on my face and I'm sure my crap sausageand-green-peppers breath was on hers, but if she minded it she didn't show it. Her mouth was curled into a very innocent and beautiful sort of half-smile I'm sure she would've killed immediately if she'd been aware of it.

"Get this. Every night, I hear singing."

My fingers froze. Nuala's fingers froze. We were both still, mirror images of each other.

"Every night I hear singing, and it's like I'm dreaming. It's like in a dream where, you know, you know it's in a different language, but you can understand it? Anyway, this song is just a list. It's a list of names." Paul stopped, and I could hear him drink and drink and drink and drink. "And I just know when I hear the names, that it's a list of dead. People who are going to die. I just know it is, because what he says afterwards, always, is remember us, so sing the dead, lest we remember you."

I started to shiver. I hadn't realized before then that I hadn't been.

My voice sounded normal. "Who's on it?"

"Me," Paul said.

"You?"

"Yeah. And a bunch of names I don't recognize. And Sullivan.

And you. And--I didn't know her name before you told me, but she's on it. Dee. Deirdre Monaghan, right? Dude, I think we're all going to die. Soon." More drinking. "Do you think I'm crazy now?"

Nuala's hand was a fist inside my fingers. "I don't think you're crazy. You should've told me sooner. I believe you."

"I know you do," Paul said.

I shivered, hard.

"I know you do, because you go running every time he's about to sing. But if I'd told you, and you told me you heard it too, that'd make it real, you know?"

Nuala unfisted her fingers and used them to turn my hand slowly until words that I'd written on the back were visible to me: the list.

Shit, I thought.

"Yes," she whispered softly.

"I thought this crap would stop when I came here." Paul's voice was plaintive.

"I did too," I said.

I left Paul dozing on his bed in an imagined alcohol stupor and retreated to the fourth floor bathroom. I knew it was stupid to call her, because no way was I going to gain any comfort from it, but I felt weirded out by Paul's revelation. Pushed offbalance. It was one thing for me to be involved in some supernatural plot. It was another thing to hear Dee's name on a list of dead and think she was somehow up to her neck in something too.

"Dee?"

I picked a chip of lime green paint off the brick wall. The night was so black outside the little window beside my head that the glass acted like a mirror, reflecting an image of me with the cell phone pressed up to my ear.

"James?" Dee's voice was surprised. "It really is you."

For a moment I didn't say anything. For a moment, it hurt too badly to know that it was her on the other end of the phone, the memory of her words after the kiss choking me.

I had to say something. I said, "Yeah. Things wild and crazy over there?"

I heard a night bird call, loud and clear and very close. I couldn't tell if it was right outside my window or coming from Dees end of the conversation. Her voice was low. "We're just getting ready to go to sleep. That's our version of wild and crazy."

"Wow. You animals you." I bit my lip. Just ask her. "Dee, do you remember when we first ran into each other here? Do you remember what you first asked me?"

"You must think I have the brain of an elephant to remember that far back. Oh. Oh. That."

Yeah, that. When you asked me if I'd seen the faeries. "Have you seen any more?"

A long pause. Then: "What? No. No, definitely not. Why, have you?"

My skin still smelled like Nuala's summer rain and woodsmoke scent. I sighed. "No. Is--everything okay with you?

She laughed a little, cute, uncertain laugh. "Yeah, of course it is.

I mean. Um. Other than me being messed up. Right?"

"I dunno. I asked you."

"Then yeah. Everything's okay."

My voice was flat. "No faeries."

"Shhh."

"Why shhh?"

"Just because they're not around anymore doesn't mean I go around shouting the word from the rooftops," Dee said.

"Everything's fine."

I didn't say anything for a long moment. I wasn't sure what I'd expected. At least honesty. What was I going to do, call her out on it? I sighed and rested my head against the dingy wall. "I just wanted to make sure."

"Thanks," Dee said. "That means a lot to me."

I looked at my reflection in the old, narrow mirrors on the wall across from me. The James-in-the-mirror frowned back at me, the ugly scar as dark as his knitted eyebrows.

"I better go," Dee said.

"Okay."

"Bye."

I hung up. She hadn't asked me if I was okay.

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I was watching James sleep when I was summoned. For the moment when I was traveling, all I could think of was the last thing I'd been looking at: James in his own personal battleground that was sleep, arms wrapped tight around a pillow, arms scrawled with our handiwork. He was dreaming of

Ballad, all by himself, without any prodding on my part. He was dreaming of the main character, who was really a metaphor for himself, an egotistical magician in a world full of ordinary people. And he dreamt of a building to stage the play in, a low, flat yellow-brick building covered with ivy. And Eric was there, playing guitar, and whatshisface--Roundhead--Paul--was playing one of the characters in the play, his gestures exaggerated and face shocked.

Everything was so vividly painted, down to the musty smell of the building, that it was as if I, for once, was dreaming.

And then jerk

I was gone.

I materialized in a huff of crackling fall leaves, their edges cold and sharp on my skin, the October night frigid and still. I stood in a stand of night-black trees, but close by, the front lights of the dorms glowed softly.

Even after I smelled the bitter smell of thyme burning, it took me a moment to realize I'd been summoned. It wasn't like it was something that happened every day. No one needed to summon me.

"What are you?" snapped a voice, close by.

I frowned, turning toward the voice and the scent. A human stood there, an old, ugly one, at least forty. She had a match in one of her hands, the end still smoking, and a still-glowing sprig of thyme in her other. For a moment I couldn't think of what to say. I hadn't been summoned by a human in years.

"Something dangerous," I told her. She looked at my clothing with a raised eyebrow.

"You look human," she said, contemptuously, dropping both the match and the thyme to the ground and stomping them into the crackly leaves of the forest floor with the heel of her leather boot.

I scowled at her. She had a four-leaf clover hanging at her neck, its stem tied to a string--this was how she could see faeries. I realized suddenly that I had seen her before, in the hallway outside the practice rooms. The sniffing woman. I retorted, "You look human too. Why did you summon me?"

"I didn't need you in particular. I did a favor for your queen and I need some help with it now."

She didn't smell afraid, which irritated me. Humans were supposed to smell afraid. They also weren't supposed to know that burning thyme summoned us or that four-leaf clovers let them see us. And most of all, they weren't supposed to be standing there with one hand on their hip looking at me like well, so?

"I'm not a genie," I said stiffly.

The woman shook her head at me. "If you were a genie, I'd be back in my car by now and on my way back to my hotel.

Instead, we're arguing about whether or not you are one. Are you going to help me or not? They said I was supposed to get rid of the mess afterwards."

I was curious despite myself. Eleanor had humans doing favors for her and whatever the favors were, they left messes behind?

I invested my voice, however, with the maximum amount of disinterest that I could muster. "Fine. Whatever. Show me."

The human led me a few feet into the woods, and then she got a little white flashlight out of her purse and shone it at the ground.

There was a body. Somehow I'd known there was going to be one. I'd seen dead people, of course, but this was different.

It was a faerie. Not a beautiful one like me--in fact, quite the opposite. She was small and wizened, her white hair spread like straw over her green dress. One foot poked out of the bottom of the dress, toes webbed.

But she was like me, nonetheless, because she was a bean sidhe--a banshee. A solitary faerie with no one to speak for her, who lived alongside the humans, wailing to warn them of an impending death. And she was dead, flowers spread out all around her from her death throes. I had never seen a dead banshee before.

I thought of asking who killed her but I knew from a quick glance into the humans head that it had been her. She was an idiot, like most humans, so it was easy to get to the memory of her tracking the banshee by the sound of her wail. I saw her withdraw an iron bar from her purse, and then just--struggle.

Eleanor had asked a human to kill one of us?

"Clean it up yourself," I snapped. "I'm not a maggot."

She nudged the webbed foot with the square toe of her boots, lip curled distastefully. "I'm not doing it. Can't you just"--she made a vague hand gesture with a perfectly manicured hand-"magic it away?"

"I wouldn't know. I've never had to get rid of a faerie body before."

The human winced at the word faerie. "That's not what the other one said, yesterday. He just said he'd take care of it, and when I looked back, it was gone."

Wariness crept into my voice. "What was gone?"

"A bauchan. He didn't have any problems getting rid of it. He just did his ... thing." Again, the stupid hand gesture. I would've done something nasty to her, just for the stupidity of the gesture, but if Eleanor protected her, there'd be hell to pay.

A bauchan. Another solitary faerie known for human contact. I was starting to get freaked out. It was one thing to burn every sixteen years--when I burned, I came back. I didn't think I'd come back from an iron bar through my neck.

"I can't help you. Summon someone else." Before she could say anything else, I rushed away, halfway invisible, reaching out for the current of thoughts I felt coming from the dorms.

"Well, hell," I heard her say, surrounded in a swirl of dry leaves at my disappearance. And then I was gone.

I fled to the warm, moving darkness of the dorm, and perched at the end of James' bed. Across the room, Roundhead snored softly. I should've gone further away, so that I wasn't the closest faerie if that killing human tried to summon a faerie again, but I didn't want to be alone. The fact that I knew I didn't want to be alone scared me more than not wanting to be alone.

Invisible, I crawled next to James. Instead of wrapping my arms around his shoulders or stroking his hair, like I would've if I was sending him a dream, I curled up against his chest, like I was a human girl that he loved. Like I was Dee, who didn't deserve him, for all his fractured, self-involved asshole-ness.

Behind me, James shivered, his body warning him again of my strangeness. Stupidly, that made me want to cry again. Instead, I became visible, because he shivered less when I was. His sheets smelled like they hadn't been washed since he'd arrived, but he himself smelled good. Solid and real. Like the leather of his pipes.

Curled in the stolen circle of his body, I closed my eyes, but when I did, I saw the banshee's body. Then I saw a bauchan, red-coated, grinning from the woods at a human. Then, grinning from the leaves, staring at the sky with dead eyes. A length of iron rebar sticking out of his neck.

Behind me, lost in sleep, James was having a nightmare. He was walking through the woods, the dry leaves snapping beneath his feet. He was wearing his Looks & Brains T-shirt and it exposed his arms, written dark with music up to the edge of his short sleeves. Goose bumps twisted the musical notes written on top of them. The forest was empty, but he was looking for someone anyway. The woods stank of burning thyme and burning leaves, summoning spells and Halloween bonfires.

"O," he said in the dream, a short sound rather than a word. He crouched down in the leaves and put his face into his writtenupon hands, his shoulders shaped like mourning. He was a dark blot in a sea of dead leaves. Beside him, my body lay in the leaves. Just over James' shoulder, I could see more rebar jutting from the side of my face and my eyes staring at infinity.

The real James shivered--hard, body-wracking shudders, and all

I could think was, he's a seer. What if this is the future he's seeing?

I turned over and stared at his sleeping face, hardly visible in the dim light, wanting him to stop dreaming. He was close enough that his breath was warm on my lips. This close, I could see the ugly pucker of the scar above his ear and could see how big it must've been before they sewed him back together. It was amazing his brains hadn't fallen out. I frowned at him. I knew he needed to sleep because he'd been up all the night before, but I wanted him awake. I pinched his arm.

James didn't jerk or start, or even hesitate. His eyes just opened up and looked right into mine, an inch away.

When he spoke, it was barely audible; any sound was just to pretend that I needed him to talk aloud. "You're not dead." His thoughts were still cloudy, slow, sleep-drugged.

I shook my head, the sheet making a rustling noise against my ear. "Yet."

James' mouth moved, more breath than voice coming out.

"What do you want?"

It wasn't the same as before, though. Before, when he asked that question, "from me" was implied. Not tonight.

I pulled his arm from underneath his pillow, his skin tightening with cold as my fingers circled his wrist. He let me take his arm and drape it over my shoulders, so that the iron band around his wrist pressed against my upper arm. It made my head buzz a little with the contact, but unlike with other faeries, it didn't kill me. And it would make me immune to any more summoning spells.

James thought, why? But he didn't say anything.

I pressed his wrist against me, hard, so that the iron was making plenty of contact with my skin. "So that if someone tries to summon a faerie, it won't be me."

James still didn't say anything, just rolled his shoulders forward to make the position more comfortable.

"Don't kill me," he whispered. "I'm going back to sleep."

He did. And with the knobs of his iron bracelet fiery hot against my skin, I did too. I didn't even know that I could.

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To:

James

Luke wz here. @ first i didnt believe it wz him, be he lookd so weird. He wz 2 alive or something. 2 brite & awake. But it wz amazing 2 c him again. He kissd me & told me he missed me but i dont think he did. I thnk he wantd me now which isnt the same thing.

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Dee

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"James?"

I My face was nicely smashed into my pillow. Without moving, I pressed my phone against my ear. "Mmmm. Yeah. What."

"James, is that you?"

I rolled onto my back and stared at the pale morning light that striped across the ceiling. I readjusted the phone so that I didn't accidentally hang up. "Mom, why is it that every time you call my cell phone, you ask if it's really me? Are there hundreds of other misplaced calls that you're not telling me about, where you almost dial my number but it's not quite right and you get guys who are almost me but not quite right?"

"Your voice never sounds the same on the phone," Mom said.

"It sounds mushy or something. Are you hungover?"

I sighed heavily. I looked over at Paul's bed; he was still totally comatose on it. Drool on the pillow, arm hanging off the side, looking like he'd been dropped onto his bed from an airplane. I felt intense envy. "Mom. You do know it's a weekend, right?

Before ten o'clock? Before nine o'clock?"

"I'm sorry to call you so early," she said.

"No you're not."

"You're right, I'm not. I'm coming to see you, and I wanted you to be awake to come meet me at the bus station."

I sat up in a hurry, and then jumped a mile. "Holy shit!" Nuala sat at the end of my bed, knees pulled up to her chin and arms wrapped around them. I hadn't even felt her there. She looked dangerous and brooding and wretchedly hot.

"I know you didn't just swear."

I mouthed what the crap? at Nuala (who shrugged) and then said, to Mom, "I did, Mom. I said it just to spite you."

"You had plans more important than seeing your dear mother, who misses you intensely?"

"No, I just got stung by something. I'm very happy to see you.

As I always am. I am positively ecstatic to hear you're coming.

It's as if the clouds have opened up and, holding my hand out, I discover that it's not rain, but strawberry Jell-O."

"Your favorite," Mom observed. "My bus is supposed to be there by ten-fifteen. Can you make it there? Bring Dee. I have stuff from her mother for her."

"Maybe. She might be busy. People are very busy on weekends, you know. Sleeping and stuff." I looked warily at Nuala; she had an exquisitely evil expression on her face. She reached under the covers and grabbed my big toe. She started rolling it around in between her fingers like she was going to unscrew it. It tickled and hurt like hell. I kicked to dislodge her and drew my legs underneath me, out of her reach. I mouthed evil creature at her, and she looked flattered that I'd noticed.

"Someone with Terry Monaghan's genes could never sleep late on weekends. If poor Dee's busy, it's because she's tied up designing a bridge or taking over the world. I have to go now because I want to finish reading this novel before we get there.

Go get dressed. I'll buy you two lunch."

"Great. Wonderful. Charming. I'm going to get out of my nice, warm bed now. Bye. See you soon."

I'd like to say that I then called Dee and she picked me up and we went to meet my mom and everything was rosy between us, but in the real world--the world where James gets screwed over by anyone who can manage it-- that didn't happen. I didn't call Dee. I didn't even do like they do in movies, where they punch in the number and then snap the phone shut real quick before the other person can answer.

Instead, after I hung up with Mom, I stared at the imprinted pattern on the back of my phone until I decided that it was not really a meaningless marketing squiggle but rather a Satanic symbol meant to improve reception. I had a pen on the desk by my bed, inches away, and I used it to write 10:15 on my hand. A lot of the words had been scrubbed off by my shower the night before; the sight of half-finished words made me feel sick to my stomach. I completed the words that I could still salvage and used spit to rub off the illegible smudges that were too far gone. By the time I looked at the end of the bed again, Nuala had disappeared. Typical. When I might want her around, she was gone.

I opened and closed my phone several times, snapping it, just trying to get my brain back. It wasn't like I felt bad about not calling Dee, because I didn't think she would've picked up when she saw my number anyway. I just felt this raw gnawing somewhere in my stomach, or my head, like I was hungry even though I wasn't.

"Wake up, Paul." I kicked my blanket off; it crumpled in a soft heap where Nuala had been sitting. Leaves fluttered to the floor, dry and lifeless. "We're going to go get lunch with my mom."

Mom has an inability to be on time. This inability--nay, this essential property of her existence--is so powerful that even her bus wasn't on time. Couldn't be on time. So Paul and I sat outside the bus terminal on a bench, the fall sun bright on us but lacking any force.

"I don't get how you get this to work." Paul was trying to get a pen to write on his hand. It was one of those where you click the end to make the end come out, and he kept clicking and unclicking it and then shaking it, as if that would make it write better. He was making an army of dots on the back of his hand, but he hadn't yet managed any letters. "It's like I'm trying to write the alphabet with a hot dog."

Cars roared by, but no bus. Without looking away from the road, I held my hand out for the pen. "I will enlighten you.

Prepare to be dazzled."

He gave me the pen and pointed at the back of my hand.

"Write manlove' on there."

I hovered the pen over my skin. "Why, Paul, I had no idea you felt that way. I mean, I'm universally appealing, but still--"

Paul grinned big enough for me to see it out of the corner of my eye. "Dude, no. We had a, you know, what do you call it. A guest player. A guest oboe instructor. Anyway, she came in this week--and you know what her name was? Amanda Manlove."

I made an appreciative noise. "No way."

"Yeah, dude. That's what I said! I mean, seriously. She had to go through grade school with that name. Her parents must've hated her."

I wrote bonfire on my hand.

Paul made a spit-filled sound in the back of his throat. "Nuh-uh!

How did you get it to write? It didn't make dots on your hand. It really wrote."

"You've got to pull the skin tight, genius," I said, and demonstrated. I wrote my name, and then drew a circle around it.

He took the pen back from me and stretched his skin tight. He wrote bonfire on his hand too. "Why 'bonfire'?"

I didn't know. "I want to put a bonfire scene in Ballad," I lied.

"We'd have to make fake fire for onstage. That'll be either hard or corny. Except alcohol fire. Isn't alcohol fire invisible?" Paul looked at something past me. "Hey, incoming. It's the girl from your old school."

I froze and didn't turn to confirm. "Paul, you'd better not be kidding me. Do you think she's seen me?"

Paul's gaze lifted to above my head. "Um, yeah, pretty sure she has."

"Um, hi," Dee said, right behind my shoulder. Just her voice made me hear the words again: I was thinking of him when you kissed me.

I shot Paul a dark look that meant thanks for all the advance warning and stood up to face her. I shoved my hands in my pockets without saying anything.

"Hi, Paul," Dee looked around me at Paul, who was looking a little hunted. "Do you mind if I talk to James for a second?"

"I'm waiting for Mom," I said. My stomach jostled inside me; I couldn't think. Looking at her stung me.

"I know." Dee looked at the road. "My mom said she sent stuff with her. She called me--my mom did, not yours--and said she'd heard on the radio about traffic on 64, so I know she's not going to be here for a while. Your mom, not mine." She shrugged uncomfortably, and added, in a rush, "I came with the church bus into town and thought I'd warn you she'd be late, if you were here waiting." Everything about her face and voice was awkward, conciliatory, miserable.

Paul offered, "I'll wait here."

"Thanks, comrade." Only a little sarcasm crept through my voice. He could hand my ashes over to my mom after Dee fried what was left of my self-esteem. I wondered for a split second if I could say no. "Okay, let's go."

Paul made a little rueful face at me before I followed Dee down the sidewalk. She didn't say anything as we left the station behind, even after we'd followed the rising sidewalk into downtown Gallon. A block away, I saw Evans-Brown Music. I wondered if Bill the pipe instructor was still there or if he disappeared when I wasn't around to see him, like Nuala. I looked into the empty windows of abandoned shops as we walked, watching our reflections expanding and contracting.

Dee, arms crossed across her chest, biting her lip. Me, my hands in my pockets, shoulders hunched, an island she didn't have a boat to get to.

"I feel awful," Dee said, finally. It seemed like an unfair statement. Selfish. Dee must've thought so too, because she added, "About what I did to you. I just-every night, I just cry thinking about how I ruined everything between us."

I didn't say anything. We were passing a shop that advertised menswear, and had a bunch of mannequin heads wearing hats in the front window. My reflection put one of my heads into a derby for a split second.

"It was like-I don't even know why--I mean, I just am so sorry. I don't want everything to be over between us. I know I messed up. I'm just, like, broken. Something's wrong with me and I know I messed up." She wasn't crying yet, but there was a little catch in her voice just when she said "broken." I looked at the cracks on the sidewalk. Ants were marching in straight rows across them. Didn't that mean it was going to rain or something? I thought I remembered my mom telling me once that ants walked in straight lines to lay down scent trails to find their way back home. The closer they walked, the heavier the scent trail. The easier to find the way back home.

Dee grabbed my hand and stopped in her tracks, jerking me to a stop as well. "James, please say something. Please. This was... this was really hard to do. Please just say something."

There were words crowding in my head, but they weren't words to be spoken. They were stark characters, hundreds of letters making words that needed to be written down. So here I was, standing here in the middle of a sidewalk, Dee holding my hand tight enough to hurt, looking at me with too-bright eyes on the verge of tears, and here was me, my head stuffed full of words, and I couldn't say anything.

But I had to. When I finally said something, I was surprised at how even my voice was and how coherent the sentences. It was like an omniscient, unbiased narrator had broken into my body and was releasing a public safety announcement. "I don't know what to say, Dee. I don't know what you want from me."

Then, in a rush, I knew what to say, and the words were exploding in my head with my desire to say them: but you hurt me. It hurts like hell. Standing here with you holding my hand is killing me. Are you using me? How could you do that? Don't I mean any more to you than that? I'm just a damn placeholder, is that it?

I didn't say them.

But Dee just stared at me like I had, her eyes so wide that I had to think hard to make sure I really hadn't. She looked away, at the empty sidewalks around us, then at her feet, as if the sight of her Doc Martens gave her courage. "I did mean to tell you.

That I really liked him. Luke."

"You liked him." I echoed her words, and I heard my voice--the dull, disbelieving tone--but I didn't try to change it.

"Fine. I loved him. I didn't want to tell you. I felt guilty. Even though you and I were just friends." Dee hesitated for a long moment, but I didn't help her out. "And it's been really hard, since ... since he's been gone. I know I'll never see him again and I know I have to get over him and I feel like I'm climbing out of this big hole and I just grabbed onto the closest best thing I could find to get out, and it was you, and I was wrong to do that."

She looked up at me, and now, finally, there were tears, and I knew that I was going to do whatever it was she asked me to do, like always. "Please, James. My head is so screwed up right now. You are my best, best friend, and I can't lose you too."

"I don't think I can do that," I said. "Do this." It felt good, to tell the truth.

For a second she stared at me, letting the words sink in. Then she covered her face with her hand and half-turned away from me. She started crying in that way people do when they don't care who's watching, when they're so done they just can't give a damn who sees them sob.

I couldn't watch her do that.

I took her shoulder and pulled her into a hug. The familiar, bright smell of her shampoo was like a time machine, taking me back into unnumbered hugs over the years I'd known her, before Luke, when it was just me that she needed. I rested my forehead on her shoulder and stared at the reflection of us embracing in the window. Please don't be thinking of him right now.

"I'm not," Dee whispered, and pushed her face into my shoulder, tears dampening my T-shirt.

I didn't know if I was helping Dee climb out of her hole or if she was dragging me into it.

"I know I'm crazy." Her voice was quiet against my shirt. "Just stick with me, James. Okay? Until it's been longer, you know, since the summer--and maybe--maybe we can try again. And this time it will be right. Not messed up.

I didn't know if she meant trying to be friends or trying to kiss or trying to breathe, but right now, all of them seemed colored by the effort of me trying to believe her. I pressed my hand against her hair, holding her to me, filled with the certainty that she was going to hurt me again and that I didn't have the strength to push her away before she did.

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

When I look back at that afternoon, I think of all the ways I could've kept Eleanor from seeing how I felt about James. I imagine how I could've kept her from seeing me at all. Or, if I couldn't hide, there must've been a way to hide our association.

James was waiting at the bus stop with Roundhead. Stupid Dee had gone back to the school. Apparently, making James feel like shit took a lot out of her and she needed her beauty rest.

Roundhead knew some magic tricks--seemed he had hidden depth--and he was making paperclips appear in his hands and disappear. It was easy for me to see the sleight of hand he used to accomplish it, but I had to admit that he didn't suck at it. He presented his tricks in a sort of perfunctory, unaffected way, like so, of course magic exists.

And James was smiling at it in a sort of ironic way that I was beginning to get awfully attached to. He smiled because he knew magic existed and he knew also that what Roundhead was showing him was not magic, but he was still being fooled, and he liked the dichotomy.

I sat several yards away from them, in the grass, far enough away that James couldn't sense me but close enough that I could hear what they said. James burned from within, as usual, with a fierce gold, and for the first time in several months, I realized I was hungry.

It was the first moment I realized that not making a deal with someone before Halloween was probably going to be painful for me.

It was also the first moment I realized I didn't think I wanted to take any of James' years away from him, even if he'd said yes.

I felt like I was floating. I didn't know who I was anymore.

"Waiting for your bus?"

I didn't recognize the smooth, moss-green shoes that stood in front of me, but I recognized Eleanor's voice. I looked up from where I sat and saw Eleanor's nameless human consort at her side. He inclined slightly at the waist and held out his hand as if to help me up, but Eleanor slapped his fingers lightly and he withdrew them.

"Tsk. That's not a good idea, love. She's hungry and you, as you know, are delicious." Eleanor looked down at me and held out her hand instead. Each of her fingers had a ring on it, and some of them were linked together by long gold chains that hung in loops beneath her palm. I stayed sitting. Eleanor frowned at me, an expression of delicate and excruciating pity. "Do you not stand for your queen, dear? Or are you too faint?"

I looked up at her, and I knew my voice was petulant but I didn't try to hide it. "Why? Will you have me killed if I don't?"

Eleanor pursed her pale lips. "Oh, so you're the one who refused to help the other night. I told you before there were things we were doing here that we didn't need meddled with."

Her consort looked at me. His face said stand up in a very blank sort of way. His thoughts were still very hard for me to read, but I could see that he'd seen death recently and he didn't want to see it again.

I stood. "I'm not meddling with anything of yours." I didn't think

I was. I guess I didn't really know. I looked at James, and

Eleanor looked at him too. By the bus station, a woman was approaching him, arms already outstretched for a hug from several feet away. James' face was lit with genuine happiness. I didn't think I'd ever seen him happy before.

Eleanor started to laugh, and she laughed so hard that even the humans, yards away, shivered and glanced around and remarked on the storm that was supposed to arrive later.

Eleanor dabbed at her eyes--as if she could cry--and shook her head at me, smiling disbelievingly. "Oh, little leanan sidhe, is that your chosen, there?"

I didn't like her laugh, and I didn't like her looking at him.

"What an odd and appropriate choice you've made. I nearly killed him a few months ago, and the daoine sidhe brought him back to life for the cloverhand. And now you will finish him off.

It's got a lovely circular feel to it, doesn't it?"

I didn't say anything. I just crossed my arms and stood there watching James smile proudly at his mom hugging Roundhead, like he had invented both hugs and his mother.

"Oh." Eleanor's hand flew up to her mouth. She leaned toward her human and her delight was hard to bear. "Oh. Do you see that, lovely?" Her consort made a noise of consent. Eleanor said to me, "So that is why you tremble with desire, little whore?

Because you have been going without?"

Bullshit I was trembling. I was fine. It hadn't been that long since Steven. "It's none of your business."

"Everything is my business. I care deeply for all my subjects and

I hate to think of you wanting for anything."

"Is that so?" I sneered.

"You need only ask," Eleanor said. She turned toward James, smiling distantly, like she was remembering. "What's wrong?

He won't make a bargain with you? I can make him more pliable for you. He was very easy to break, the first time."

In her head I saw the memory of him, broken and gasping, so clearly that I knew she'd meant for me to. My voice was fierce.

"I don't want to make a bargain with him. My bargains are my own business. You have your business and I have mine. I don't meddle in yours and you don't meddle in mine."

I'd gone way too far, but that image of him had ripped something open inside me. I turned my head, waiting for her wrath.

But she just placed a hand on my shoulder and shook her head, clucking her tongue. "Save your strength. If you mean to last until the day of the dead without making a bargain, you'll need every bit of it."

I looked up into her face, and I saw that she was smiling. She was smiling in an awful way that told me she knew exactly how

I felt about James and she thought it was interesting. Eleanor, like all the court fey, liked to break interesting things, especially things she'd broken before.

I pushed her fingers off my shoulders, and when I turned to face her, she was gone.

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218/200

To:

James

U were right ok? Evrything isnt ok & i shouldv told u evrything. But i cant now. What if u told me 2 stop? What if u askd me if i really hadnt gotn ur txt? What if u askd me if i really knew what i wantd? I hate lying.

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Dee

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In most of my classes at good old TK-A, there were about eighteen students. With the teacher presiding at the front of the classroom, the rest of us had, over the weeks of class time, conveniently arranged ourselves by personality types. Front row: suck-ups and over-achievers like myself. Second row:

Friends of suck-ups and over-achievers. And wanna-be friends.

And wanna-be suck-ups who were too slow to grab a seat in the front row. Third row: People who were neither suck-ups nor screw-ups (latter parties belonged in the back row). Third row people didn't interest me. Or anyone else, I think. Too good to be bad and too bad to be good. Back row: as mentioned before, screw-ups, trouble-makers, and those who just didn't give a damn.

Funny how I really belonged in both the front and the back rows. Didn't seem like it ought to be possible.

Anyway, our normally cozy class structure was all shot to hell this morning, as Sullivan's class had been thrown together with

Linnet's dramatic literature section for some nefarious purpose undoubtedly to be revealed later on in the period.

So we'd taken over a larger, brilliantly sunny classroom down the hall that could accommodate the lot of us and suddenly we had to fight for our previous seat/personality assignments.

Which is how Paul and I found ourselves in the back row, a place I probably belonged and a place Paul could probably make himself belong by sheer virtue of hanging out with me.

What I didn't expect was to end up sitting next to Dee, who belonged in the back row about as much as I belonged at

Thornking-Ash in general. I didn't have a single class with her and it took me way too long to figure out that she was there because she was in Linnet's dramatic lit class.

I sat there for several moments, while the autumn breeze blew in the big windows on one side of the room and fluttered the papers on the desks, and thought of things to say to her that were all various stages of funny, informative, or questioning. In the end I just said, "So you really do take classes here."

Dee did me the favor of laughing, even though it was possibly my lamest line ever, and leaned across her desk to whisper to me, "I'm sorry I was so bawly yesterday."

On the other side of me, Paul took my hand so that he could write on it. I felt him carefully printing on my skin while I tried to think of something coherent to say to Dee. She was all largeeyed and beautiful as usual but I was missing some of that gnawing urgency to be funny and wanted, which I normally felt when I was around her.

I thought, maybe I can get over her after all. Maybe it doesn't have to hurt.

"Before we get started, I'm going to need you all to pass forward your composition outline," Linnet called from the front, sparing me from saying my second lamest line ever.

Linnet looked even smaller and more breakable from way back here in the loser-screw-up-don't-give-a-damn row. "I'm also collecting papers for Mr. Sullivan. I understand you have outlines due for him as well." There was no sign of Sullivan at the front; usually he was perched on top of the desk by now.

Beside me, Dee flipped open her notebook to pull out her outline and, as she did, I saw the piece of paper underneath it.

Some sort of exam. With a big red 42 on it, circled. And F written beside it, in case she'd missed the concept of 42 being a failing grade.

Straight-A front-row beautiful-lost Dee looked over at me as if she knew instinctively that I'd seen the exam and that I'd know right away what that 42 meant to her. Her eyes were wide and frightened and pleading for a second, and I just stared at her, not bothering to hide my shock. Dee laid her hand down on the exam, very carefully, to stop the breeze from catching the edge of the paper. Her fingers covered the grade.

But that didn't change the wrongness of it.

"Back row! Pass them up please," Linnet said, her voice unpleasant and hard around the edges.

We snapped out of it. Dee passed her paper to the desk in front of her and Paul and I sent our identical outlines for Ballad up our rows. I folded my hands back on my desk, and as I did, I saw

Paul's slanted handwriting standing out against my blocky, square printing on my skin. He'd managed to find room to squeeze in the words females hurt my brain on my left hand. I raised an eyebrow at him and he gave me a look like, well it's true, isn't it?

A 42. Damn. I didn't think I'd ever seen Dee get anything less than a B plus, and I remembered that one because she'd called me about it. She'd been programmed for technical perfection at birth; a grade like that had to be causing short-circuits and malfunctions across her system.

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

"I'd like for you to make your desks into groups of four," Linnet called from the front. "Both sections have just finished reading and watching Hamlet and I'd like you to discuss it in small groups. I'll be watching your participation and I'll let Mr.

Sullivan know how active you were in the discussion when he returns this afternoon." She started rambling on about discussion questions on the board and she'd be reading our outlines while we talked and whatever, just get on with it, so we just started dragging our desks into circles which completely drowned her out with scraping metallic legs on the floor.

We ended up in a group with Paul, me, and Dee from the back row, and a third-row student who looked less than pleased to have been assimilated into a greater-than-fifty-percent-backrow group.

The less-than-pleased student was a girl named Georgia (who played the trumpet--I tried not to hold that against her) and she decided to take charge by reading the first question off the board. "Okay. First question. Which character from Hamlet do you identify with the most?"

I looked at Dee, really hard--the sort of look that not only forces people into one spot but also burns holes into them big enough to stick pencils through--and said, "Ophelia, because no one told her what the hell was going on, so she killed herself."

Dee blinked.

Georgia blinked.

Paul started laughing.

Linnet, at the front of the room, looked suspicious, because let's face it, when it's five minutes into a discussion about a play where practically everyone starts out dead or ends up that way, hysterical laughter sort of draws attention.

"This is a time for discussion, not conversation," Linnet said, glaring at us. She drifted ominously in our direction, like a jellyfish. She kept trying to not look at my hands.

"We are discussing." I looked back to Dee, whose eyes darted between me and Linnet. "We were talking about the real-world implications of the lack of communication between Hamlet and

Ophelia and what an ass-face Hamlet was for keeping Ophelia in the dark about what he was thinking."

Sullivan would've appreciated my off-the-cuff analysis of the material--hey, at least I'd done the reading, right?-- but Linnet frowned at me. "I'd prefer if you didn't use that sort of language in my classroom."

I turned my attention to her and tried to sound like I cared. "I'll try and keep it PG-13 from now on."

"Do that. I'm sure Mr. Sullivan doesn't allow that in his class."

The way she said it had a distinct question mark on the end, as if she wasn't sure.

I smiled at her.

Linnet's frown deepened, and she jellyfish-drifted her tentacles toward another discussion group.

Georgia glared at me, tapped her pencil on her notebook, and said, "I think I identify most with Horatio, because--"

"Maybe Hamlet knew Ophelia wouldn't get it," Dee interrupted, and Georgia rolled her eyes in disgust. "Ophelia would've told

Hamlet right off that what he was doing was stupid, without knowing the context."

"You're assuming that Ophelia didn't know anything about what Hamlet was going through," I said. "But Ophelia was there the first time, remember? She knows what back-stabbing freaks

Gertrude and Claudius are. It's not her first time around

Denmark, Dee."

"Hello, what are we talking about here?" Georgia asked.

"Ophelia doesn't know anything about Gertrude and Claudius.

Hamlet only knows about Claudius murdering his father because of his father's ghost, and Hamlet's the only one the ghost spoke to. So Ophelia doesn't know anything."

I waved off Georgia and said to Dee, "Ophelia's only clueless because Hamlet doesn't trust Ophelia enough to confide in her.

Apparently, he thinks he can do everything himself, which wasn't true the first time and is definitely not true this time either. He should've let Ophelia help."

Dee's eyes were a little too bright; she blinked and they cleared. "Ophelia wasn't exactly a great judge of character. She should've just stayed away from Hamlet like Polonius told her to. People only got hurt by being close to Hamlet. Everybody died because of him. He was right to drive Ophelia away."

Georgia started to talk, but I leaned over my desk toward Dee and said, teeth gritted, "But Ophelia was in love with Hamlet."

Dee stared at me and I stared back at her, sort of shocked that

I'd said it, and then Paul broke the mood by saying, "I just figured it out. The whole gender-opposite metaphor was throwing me off. Sullivan must be Polonius. He's got that whole father-figure to Ophelia thing going on."

"Thank you, Captain Obvious," I told him, thumping back in my seat.

Georgia gestured at the board. "Does anyone want to talk about the second question?"

No one wanted to talk about the second question.

I crossed my arms over my chest. I felt a sort of beautiful detachment from the scene, a sort of objectivity that I never seemed to have when Dee was around. I was getting over her. I could actually be getting over her. "I just don't think Hamlet should be taking Ophelia's calls if he's only going to lie to her," I said. "Ophelia's slowly coming to grips with Hamlet tearing out her heart and being just friends, but even just friends don't lie to each other."

Georgia made a face and started to speak, but Paul put a finger to his lips and watched Dee.

Dee's voice was very quiet, and it wasn't her school voice anymore. You know how everyone has two voices--the voice they use in public and the voice that's just for you, the voice they use when you're alone with them and nobody else can hear. She used that one, the one from last summer, back when

I really believed we'd have summer upon summer without change. "Hamlet can't stand to see Ophelia get hurt again."

She looked at me. Not at my eyes, but at my scar above my ear.

"Oh," I said.

For some reason, I never realized until that moment-- when

Dee looked at my scar and used that old voice--that she really did love me too. All along, she'd loved me, just not the way I'd wanted her to.

Well, crap.

The autumn wind that came in the tall windows along the wall seemed colder, scented with incongruous odors: thyme and clover and the damp smell that appears when you turn over a rock. I sort of sat there and didn't say anything for way too long.

"Could James and Paul come up here and see me for a moment, please?" Linnet was at the front desk, face ominous. She looked much more teacherly than Sullivan did, sitting behind the desk instead of on it. I made a note to never sit behind a desk.

"Deirdre and Georgia, you two can keep discussing."

I stood up, but before I went up to the front with Paul, I touched the back of Dee's hand. I don't know if she knew what I meant, but I wanted her to understand that I--I don't know what I wanted her to understand. I guess I somehow wanted her to know that I finally got it. I didn't get to see her face after

I touched her hand, but I saw Georgia frowning after me and

Paul.

Up at the front of the classroom, Paul and I stood before

Linnet's desk like soldiers waiting to be knighted.

Well, I did, anyway. Paul fidgeted. I didn't think he'd ever been in trouble before.

"Are you two friends?" Linnet asked. She was a tiny bird behind the desk, her hair ruffling like blonde feathers. She blinked up at us, eyes dark and wary.

I was about to expound upon the near blood-bond between us when Paul said, "Roommates too."

"Well." Linnet spread our outlines out in front of her. "Then I don't understand. Is this some sort of cheating or plagiarism?

Or some sort of very unfunny practical joke? It's not my job to grade Mr. Sullivan's papers, but I couldn't help but notice that your outlines for the composition project are identical."

Paul looked at me. I looked at Linnet. "It's neither. Didn't you read them?"

Linnet made a vague hand gesture. "They were both gibberish to me." She pulled the title page of mine close and read it aloud:

"Ballad:

A Play in Three Acts, to rely heavily upon Metaphor, meaningful only to those who see the World as it really is."

She looked at us, an eyebrow arched. "I don't see how this fits into the assignment--isn't it a ten-page essay on metaphor?

And it doesn't explain why your outline is the same as Paul's."

"Sul--Mr. Sullivan will understand." I was tempted to take the outlines from her before she wrote something on them with the red pen lying inches away from her fingers. "It's a group project, and the play itself is our essay. We're writing and performing it together."

"Just the two of you? Like a skit?"

I didn't really see why I needed to explain this to her, when she wasn't going to be the one giving us our grade. She was bending the corner of one of the outlines back and forth, her eyes on us. I wanted to smack her fingers. "Me and Paul and some others. Like I said, Mr. Sullivan will be okay with it."

"Are others doing projects like this?" Linnet frowned at us and then at the creased corner on the outline, as if she couldn't figure out how the crease had gotten there. "It seems unfair to grade such a drastically different project on the same scale as other, more traditional compositions that followed the rules."

Oh, God, she was going to start talking about rules, and I wasn't going to be able to keep myself from saying something incredibly sarcastic and I would get Angel Paul into trouble by association. I bit the inside of my lip and tried not to glare.

"Mr. Sullivan is new to Thornking-Ash. Quite new to teaching as well. I don't think he understands the ramifications of allowing students to stray too far from the boundaries." Linnet stacked our outlines and reached for the red pen. I winced as she marked formatting/structure on the top of each of them. "I think I'll have a talk with him when he gets back. You will probably have to redo these outlines. I'm sorry if he let you think you could interpret his assignment so loosely."

I wanted to snap something really cutting back, like sorry you decided to interpret "looking female" so loosely or who died and made you God, sweetheart, but I just gave her a tight smile.

"Right. Anything else?"

She frowned at me, as if I really had said my choice phrases out loud. "I know about kids like you, Mr. Morgan. You think you're something special, but just wait until you're in the real world.

You're no more special than anyone else, and all your wit and disdain of authority will get you absolutely nowhere. Mr.

Sullivan might think you're a shooting star, but I assure you, I do not. I watch stars like you burn out in the atmosphere every day."

"Thanks for the tip," I said.

I was playing like crap. I was standing on top of my gorgeous hill in the middle of the gorgeous day and everything was supersaturated with fall colors and my pipes sounded great and the air felt perfect on my skin and I couldn't focus on a single thing.

Dee's big red F.

Paul's list of the dead.

Nuala's fingers on my wrist.

I closed my eyes and stopped playing. I exhaled slowly and tried to focus on that narrow part of myself that I retreated into during competitions, but it felt like an inaccessible crack that I was too unwieldy and strung out to fit into.

I opened my eyes again. The hill was still empty because everyone else was in ensemble classes or private lessons.

Good thing, too. Because it meant there was no one around to hear me suck. Maybe I was just a big shooting star like Linnet said, and I'd be a big nobody in a desk job when I got out of this place.

I gazed down at my shadow, blue-green and long across the trampled grass, and as I did, another long shadow appeared beside it.

"You suck today," Nuala observed from behind me.

"Thanks for making me feel better," I said.

"I'm not supposed to make you feel better." Nuala moved around to face me, and I swallowed when I saw her hip-huggers and clingy T-shirt that was every color of the ocean, like her eyes. "I'm supposed to make you play better. I brought you something."

She held out her fist toward me and opened her fingers for the great reveal.

"Nuala," I said, reaching out to take her gift. "It's a rock." I held it up to my face to look at it closer, but it really was just a rock.

About the length of my thumb, opaque white, and worn smooth by time.

Nuala snorted and snatched it out of my hand before I could stop her. "It's a worry stone," she said. "Look, stupid human."

She rested the rock in her palm and rubbed her thumb and forefinger over its surface.

"What's it supposed to do again?"

Nuala swapped the rock to her left hand and took my thumb in her right one, holding it the same way she'd just been holding the worry stone. "You rub it," she said, and one side of her mouth curled up, "To relax you." She ran her thumb and forefinger over my thumb, just as she'd done with the stone.

Her fingers grazed my skin, leaving behind invisible promises and oh freaking hell my knees went weak with it.

She grinned and slapped the stone into my hand. "Yeah. You get the idea. You rub the stone when you get anxious or need to think. I thought it might keep you from writing on your hands. Not that that will keep you from being a neurotic freak.

But it'll keep other people from being able to tell you're a neurotic freak, until it's too late."

I swallowed, again, but for a different reason this time. The worry stone was maybe the most thoughtful thing I'd ever gotten from someone. I couldn't remember the last time I hadn't had to fake gratitude for a gift, and now that I actually was grateful, thank you didn't seem to cut it.

It seemed wrong that the first thing that came to mind was a sarcastic response. Something to deflect this warm feeling in my cheeks and put me back in control of myself.

"You can thank me later." Nuala wiped her palms on her jeans, although there was nothing on the rock to dirty them. "Next time you forget to bring a pen with you."

"It-" I stopped because my voice sounded weird.

"I know," she said. "Now, are you going to play, or what? You can't just stop with that last jig. It was, like--"

"Absolute crap?" I suggested in a totally normal voice, pocketing the stone and readjusting my pipes.

"I was going to say something nicer, like... nah, you're right.

Absolute crap does it." She paused, and her face turned into something quite different. Almost innocent. "Can we play my tune?" She meant the one she'd sent me in the dream, the one

I'd played on the piano.

I sort of hated to tell her no. I felt I should reward her brief moments of lucidity and non-homicidal behavior. "Won't fit into the range of the pipes."

"We can change it."

I made a face. We could squash it to fit, but it would suck the life out of it. The joy of the tune was in the high bits, and those were beyond the reach of the pipes.

"It won't be bad. C'mon," Nuala said. She seemed to realize that she sounded sweet, because her eyebrows arched sharply and she added, "It can't be any worse than the jig you were just butchering."

"Ha. You wound me with your words like knives. Fine. Show me

I'm wrong."

I readjusted my pipes again and Nuala stood at my shoulder.

Our shadows became one blue-green shape on the grass below, two legs and four arms. I hesitated for just a moment before reaching behind me to catch one of her hands. I pulled it around me so that her fingers were stretched over the pipe chanter. Her hand looked small on the chanter, stretching to cover all the holes.

"You know that won't work," Nuala said softly.

Yeah, I knew it. Didn't mean I had to like it. I slid my hand underneath hers and covered the holes with my fingers, her hand still resting on mine. "Then we can pretend. Where's your other hand?"

She had to loop it between my arm and my body to keep from getting in the way of the bag, but she managed to get her fingers on top of my other hand. Her ridiculous giant cork heels made her tall enough to rest her chin on my shoulder.

My voice came out a little low. "Jig first, then your tune?"

"You're in charge," she said.

"Oh how I long for those days," I replied, and started to play.

No crap this time. It was like everything I'd been thinking about, except for the music and Nuala's arms wrapped around me, was gone. The jig felt light as a helium balloon, the high notes soaring off into the sky and the low notes tugging it down toward the ground before letting it bounce back up again. And my fingers--they were working again. Snapping up and down across the chanter like well-oiled pistons, every note perfect and even and clean. The tiny grace notes bubbled out like laughter between the huge round notes on the beat.

I silenced the pipes--absolutely silent, absolutely right--and grinned down the hill.

Nuala said, "Yeah, so now you're done showing off. Do you want my help or not?"

"I--what?" I tried to turn my head to see her, but her chin on my shoulder was too close to see her face. I struggled to remember if I could sense her lending her musely power to me, but all I could remember was the music and the feel of her fingertips on top of mine. And then nothing but the utter joy of the jig. "I thought you were."

"Whatever. Never mind. Can we just play?"

"You're in charge," I said sarcastically.

"Oh how I long for those days," she mocked me. I started the drones up, waiting for her to tell me what to do. This time I felt it--first, the sort of silence that trickled through me, and then the heat of golden inspiration coursing through me in long strands that came out my fingers. The tune I'd played on the piano became a tidy entity in my head, a little box that I could mentally turn this way and that to see how it was made and what made it beautiful and where I could eliminate notes and add others to make it suit the pipes.

Nuala's breath was hot on my neck and her fingers were tight on mine, as if she could force the pipes to play for her, and I let the tune out. I heard the riffs from before, the bulk of the melody, the way I could let the sustain of the pipes make up for the lack of the high notes. The tune ached and breathed and twisted and shone and it hurt just to play it because it was what the pipes had been made for. Maybe what I had been made for.

To play this tune with Nuala's summer-thick breath on my face and this stillness in my heart and nothing more important than this music right now.

I could almost hear Nuala's voice, humming the tune into my ear, and when I half-turned my head, I saw that her eyes were closed and she was smiling the most beautiful smile in the world, her face freckled and joyful.

This was the whole world, this moment. The wind beat the golden grass to the ground and back up again, and above us, the deep, pure blue of the sky was the only thing that pressed us to the earth. Without the weight of that clarion sky, we would've soared into the towering white clouds and away from this imperfect place.

Nuala dropped her arms from mine and stepped back.

I let the pipes sigh to a stop and turned to face her.

I was this close to saying, Please give me the deal. Don't let me say no. Don't let me be a shooting star burning out in a cubicle somewhere. But her expression stopped me cold.

"Don't ask me," she said. "I take it back. I won't make a deal with you."

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I was brilliant as a flame when I was first born, this time around.

I didn't quite remember my first pupil, but I remember that his paintings were huge and yellow, and that his death was violent and very fast.

The second guy lasted a little longer. I thought maybe almost six months, but maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better now, remembering. He had wanted me so badly; he had been so tormented by the dreams I sent him and the words I whispered in his ear, he'd not even waited for his body to give up on him. I just sort of felt--hungry--in the middle of the night, and when I found him, he was hanging like a dead pig in a butcher's.

And then there was the first one who I could remember really well. I had better control then, and I knew how to make them last. Jack Killian was his name, and he had been a brilliant fiddler. He made me think of James now, recalling how much he'd wanted more. He didn't even know what more was, he just knew he wanted to be more, that there must be more to life, that if he didn't find this more, life was only a terrible trick played on him by nature.

Two years. I made his fiddle sound so lovely that onlookers wept. The tunes he wrote had a stranglehold on tradition but reached out to grab what they needed from contemporary music. He was dynamite. Killian toured and toured and sold albums and wanted more more more more and I took more more more more until one day he looked at me and said, "Brianna"--I'd told him my name was Brianna--"I think I'm dying."

That was a long time ago. Now, I sat in the theater seat the way they told you not to at the beginning of every reel, my feet resting on the seat in front of me, trying not to think about it.

There weren't enough people in the theater to care about my feet being up; it was only a matinee in tiny Gallon, Virginia after all.

The movie was an action adventure that swept across three different continents. It bristled with action scenes and tension and all kinds of crap that should've held my attention, but all I could think about was James looking at me on the hill, about to beg me for the deal.

I closed my eyes, but I saw Killian's face. I thought I had forgotten it long ago. I thought I'd forgotten all of them long ago.

"Let's blow this place," said the ruggedly handsome hero on the big screen, and I opened my eyes. He had his finger on some sort of detonator; he didn't realize that somewhere offscreen, his dewy-eyed love interest was trapped inside the building he was about to blow up. She was calling him on his cell phone, and the camera angle showed that it was set on vibrate so that he didn't hear it over the legions of helicopters floating around him. Idiot. Morons like that deserved to die alone.

I wasn't supposed to care about my marks. How could I care about them and live?

In front of me, the Rugged-Faced Hero pushed the red button on the detonator. The screen filled with a giant fireball that took out two helicopters in an intensely unrealistic way.

If I'd been directing, I would've cut back to the heroine's face one second before the explosion, just as her muscles tensed, right when she realized I'm trapped. There's no way out of this.

I was so hungry. I'd never gone this long without making a deal before.

In my head, I thought of Killian again, looking at me, and I heard his voice--I thought I'd forgotten that too. But this time, when I saw the scene, it was me, and I was looking at James.

"James," I said, "I'm dying."

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"The inner sanctum," Paul said, voice reverent, as I knocked on the door to Sullivan's room.

I gave Paul a withering look but the truth was I was curious as hell. First of all, to find out what Sullivan wanted. And second, to see what a teacher's room looked like. I'd always sort of figured they came out during the day to teach classes and then got stored in shoe boxes under someone's bed until they were needed again.

"What do you think he wants?" Paul asked for the hundredth time since we'd gotten the note on our door.

"Whoever knows what Sullivan wants?" I replied.

Sullivan's voice sounded from inside. "It's unlocked."

Paul just looked at me, eyeballs round, so I pushed the door open and went in first.

Being in Sullivan's room was ... weird. Because it looked like our room. The same old, high ceilings painted in white-that-wasnot-really-white ("bird-poop white," Paul had called it, but I'd ignored him, because I was supposed to be the sarcastic one) and the little bunk with the drawers underneath it and the creaky, pitted wooden floors. One drafty window looked out on the parking area beside the dorm.

The biggest difference between our rooms was that Sullivan's had a tiny kitchen area tucked next to a bathroom all his own.

And unlike our room, which smelled sort of like Doritos and unwashed laundry and shoes, Sullivan's smelled like cinnamon from a candle on his nightstand (very Martha Stewart) and like flowers. There was a big vase of daisies sitting on his miniature kitchen table, which I guessed was the source of the floriferous odor.

Paul and I looked at the daisies and then at each other. Dude.

Flowers were awfully... pretty.

"Do you want an omelet?" Sullivan asked from the kitchen area.

It was weird to see him without his teacher uniform on. He was wearing a black hooded Juilliard sweatshirt and jeans that seemed suspiciously trendy for an authority figure, and he was holding a spatula. "I can't cook anything but omelets."

'"We just came from dinner," Paul said. He looked a little scared of Sullivan, as if discovering that he was a real person and not that much older than us was something terrifying.

I walked over and looked into the skillet. "It looks like scrambled eggs."

"It's an omelet," Sullivan insisted.

"It still looks like scrambled eggs. Smells like them too."

"I assure you, it's an omelet."

I pulled out one of the mismatched chairs at the round table and sat down. Paul hurried to follow my example. "You can assure me it's a suckling pig if you like," I said, "but I still think it's scrambled eggs."

Sullivan grimaced at me and performed the elaborate ritual necessary to transfer scrambled eggs to a pan while still allowing them to maintain an omelet shape. "Well, I'm going to eat while we talk, if that doesn't bother you guys."

"I would hate to see you wither away on our behalf. Are we in trouble?"

Sullivan dragged his desk chair into the kitchen and sat down with his eggs. "You are always in some kind of trouble, James.

Paul never is. How long is it until sundown, anyway?"

"Thirty-two minutes," said Paul, and Sullivan and I both looked at him. I realized in that moment that I'd never really looked at

Paul since the first time I'd seen him. I'd just sort of formed a first impression of him based upon round eyes behind round glasses and a round face on a round head, and just kept accessing that first round image every time I looked at him since then. It seemed strange that I hadn't really noticed how sharp the expression in his eyes was, or how worried the line of his mouth was, until we were sitting under a little florescent light at Sullivan's kitchen table, weeks after we'd spent every night in the same room. I wondered if he'd changed, or if I had.

"You're a regular meteorologist," I said, a little pissed at him for showing Sullivan he cared about when the sun went down, and also for somehow changing his round demeanor while I wasn't watching. "Or whoever it is who knows when the sunrise and sunset and moon phases are."

"No harm to being informed," Sullivan said, and shot me a look as if the statement was supposed to make me feel guilty. It didn't. He took a bite of eggs and spoke around them. "So I heard from Dr. Linnet today."

Paul and I snorted, and I said, "What's she a doctor of? Ugly?"

"Weak, James. She's got a PhD in some sort of English or psychology or something like that. All you need to know is that those three letters after her name--P. H. D.--mean that she has the power to make our lives excruciatingly difficult if she wants to, because I have only two letters after mine-- M. A. Which at this school, translates into 'low man on the totem pole.'"

Sullivan swallowed some more egg and pointed with his fork to a folder on the table. "She brought me your outlines.

Apparently they made a deep impression on her."

"Yeah. She shared some of her impressions with us during class." I opened the folder. Our duplicate outlines were tucked neatly inside, one of the corners still crinkly where Linnet had bent it back and forth. That still pissed me off.

"She brought up several... weighty points." Sullivan set his plate down on the table and rested his feet next to them. "First of all, she noted that your outline seemed to interpret my assignment rather loosely. She thought my approach to my class in general had been lax. And she also seemed to think that James showed quite a bit of attitude in her class."

I didn't say anything. It wasn't like any of her weighty points were particularly untrue.

"She recommended--let me see. Hand me that folder. I wrote them down, because I didn't want to forget them." Sullivan stretched out his hand and Paul gingerly placed the folder in it.

Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper from behind our outlines.

"Let's see. Recommendations. 'One.

Establish narrow rules for your assignments and be prepared to enforce them diligently, particularly with difficult students, of which you have at least one. Two. Maintain strict teacherstudent relationship to engender respect. Three. Be particularly unforgiving when grading difficult students; attitude problems arise from a lack of respect and excess of ego on their part.'"

Sullivan lowered the paper and looked from me to Paul. "Then she recommended that I tell you"--he nodded toward Paul--"to redo your outline, within the limits of the assignment, before

Monday's class for a chance to improve your grade from a C to an B, and to give you"--he looked at me--"a C and tell you to redo your outline before Monday to keep it from being an F."

Paul's mouth made a round shape that I'm sure he wasn't aware of. I crossed my arms across my chest and didn't say anything. Whatever Sullivan was going to do, he'd already made up his mind--a blind monkey could figure that out. And I wasn't about to beg for a better grade anyway. Screw that.

Sullivan slid the folder onto the table and crossed his arms, mirroring me. "So I have just one question, James."

"Go for it."

He jerked his chin toward the outlines. "Who do you have to play Blakeley's character? I think I would make an excellent

Blakeley."

Paul grinned and I let one side of my mouth smile. "So does this mean I'm not getting a C for the outline?"

Sullivan dropped his feet off the table. "It means I don't do well with rules. It means some bitter drama teacher isn't going to tell me how to teach my class. This play bums, guys.

Even in the outline, I can see it. It could be wickedly selfdeprecating satire and I don't see why you guys shouldn't do your best and get a grade for it. But you're going to have to work harder for it than the rest of the class--they only have to write a paper."

"We don't care," Paul said immediately. "This is way cooler."

"It is. Where are you going to rehearse?"

But neither of us answered right away, because in the distance, the antlered king began to sing, slow and entreating.

With some effort, I spoke over the top of the song. "Brigid

Hall."

"Interesting choice," Sullivan said. He slid his gaze over to Paul, who was drumming his fingers on the table in a manic, caffeineinspired way and blinking a lot. Paul wasn't out-and-out singing along with the king of the dead, but he might as well have put out a big neon sign saying "How's My Driving? Ask Me About

My Nerves: 1-800-WIG-N-OUT."

I glared at him.

"Something wrong, Paul?" Sullivan asked.

"He--" I started.

"I hear the king of the dead," Paul blurted out.

Well, that was just ace. I put my chin in my hand and tapped my fingers on the side of my face.

Sullivan glanced at me and back at Paul. "What'd he say?

"It's a list of the dead," Paul said. With just his fingertips, he held onto the edge of table, white knuckled. He squeezed his fingers like he was playing a tune on the table.

"Not the currently dead. The futurely dead. Do you think I'm, like, certifiable now?"

"No." Sullivan went to the window and heaved his shoulder against it. It creaked and then gave. He slid it up a few inches; cold air rushed in along with the song. It tugged at my bones, urging me to rise up and follow. It took all my willpower not to jump up and run outside. "Lots of people--well, not lots--many people hear him in October, up until Halloween."

"Why?" Paul asked. "Why do I have to hear it?"

Sullivan shook his head. "I don't know. He says different things to different people. It doesn't mean you're crazy." Somehow, though, it wasn't reassuring. He said it like being crazy might be a more appealing alternative. He went to his counter and got a notepad; he laid it down in front of Paul's face.

Paul obediently picked up the pen from next to our papers.

"What's this for?"

Sullivan shifted the window open a bit more and looked at me again before he answered Paul. "I'd be very grateful if you'd write down the names he's telling you."

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To:

James

Linnet caught me coming in from the faerie dance last nite.

I know she knew where id been & i wz scared cuz shes awful in class. She jst said dont let anyone else c u.

From: Dee

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The lobby of Seward was an immensely safe sort of space, and I was definitely needing womb-like security in a major way by that point. It had four of the world's most comfortable chairs, which is important in a safe space, and four squashy ottomans to go with each of them. It also had four alcoves in each of the corners, each containing a wonder of the world. North corner: a piano older than Moses, that sounded like a calliope. South corner: a reproduction of a Greek statue--some headless chick with perfect boobs. East corner: a bookshelf with every piece of

Important Fiction That You'll Never Read in Impressive Hardcover. West corner: vending machine (because sometimes Doritos were all the breakfast you were going to get).

It was two o'clock in the morning. Down the hall, Sullivan was behind his closed door, oblivious to my wandering. Somewhere on the fourth floor, Paul was snoring. I envied his ability to sleep. I felt like I ought to pace or scream or something; I couldn't stop thinking about Halloween. Every time I did, my hair stood on end again and fresh goose bumps spread along my shoulders. Sleep was out of the question.

The lobby held its breath, silent and dark, tinted weirdly redorange by the streetlights outside the front windows. The world's most comfortable chairs cast shadows that stretched and grew to ten times the size of the chairs themselves. I crashed in one of them and sat there, so motionless that it felt like I had forgotten how to move.

I felt alone.

I didn't have a pen. I took the worry stone out of my pocket and ran my thumb over it until the urge to mark my skin faded.

Nuala, are you here?

"I'm here," she whispered from one of the other chairs; she sat on the very edge of it, as if ready to jump up and run if she had to. I don't know why she bothered whispering if I was the only one who could hear her, but I was too glad to see her to tease her about it. I hadn't seen her since the practice on the hill, and

I'd almost thought she'd gone for good. Sort of half-standing, I dragged my chair across the wood floor until our chairs faced each other and our bare knees were touching.

I looked into Nuala's face. I didn't really want to ask her the question out loud. Do you really think we're going to die, like

Paul thinks? And do you think it'll be Them that does it? I mean, not a freak dorm fire?

In the dim light, Nuala's pale eyes were black and I could see dark circles beneath them. "They're killing faeries. Solitary faeries, like me. The ones that have a lot of contact with humans. I saw the bodies. Maybe they think we'll warn you of something. Not that they've told us shit."

It was weird to think that she looked tired. She looked very human and vulnerable, dwarfed by the sheer size of the chair behind her. If it had been Dee, I'd have needed to comfort her or make a joke, but with Nuala, I didn't have to pretend. She could already see what was inside my head, so there wasn't any point in showing her anything but the truth.

And the truth was I was starting to feel like things were getting out of control. I dropped my face into my hands and rubbed my eyes until I saw sparks of color.

"Haven't you already seen it, though? You're supposed to be super-great-seer-guy." Nuala's voice was bitter, as if she thought I'd deliberately withheld tales of imminent death and destruction from her.

"Nuala, all of Paul's revelations, you telling me there's worse than you here, something weird going on with Dee-- it's all news to me. I'm just not a good psychic. I can tell when something's not right, sometimes, but I can't tell what it is, or when it is, or if I'm supposed to do anything about it. I've tried to make it make sense, but I can't. It's just feelings instead of words. And you want the honest-to-God truth? There's so much weirdness going on I can't even pick out what makes my hair stand on end. I'm just--" I stopped.

"...overloaded," Nuala finished for me, reading my thoughts.

"Whatever's happening has to be something big as hell."

I jerked, thinking I heard sounds in the night. Both of us froze, sitting quietly, listening, until we were sure there was only the sound of trucks rushing distantly by on the highway and that it was just us.

Even though the dorm was silent, I didn't speak out loud again. Instead, I rubbed my thumbs over Nuala's slender, bare knees, tracing the lines of her bones and the place where her kneecaps pushed against my kneecaps. I stared at the shadows we cast on the floor. What the hell's going on, Nuala? Why won't They leave us alone? What could They possibly want from us?

She was silent a long moment, watching my lettered fingers on her skin. Her voice was a little uneven: "Power. She wants power. I think she's made an alliance with the daoine sidhe?

Those are the ones called by music, aren't they? I thought they were enemies of the queen.

"Of the old queen. The one your not-girlfriend helpfully got killed in all her teen brilliance. That was back when the daoine sidhe could only appear on Solstice, or with awesome music.

But something's changed. It couldn't be that way unless the new queen was allowing it. The faerie that--" Nuala stopped, tried again. "The faerie you saw--the swan asshole--he was one of them. He shouldn't have been able to dance unless it was

Solstice."

"I'd like to find him." The words surprised me. Out loud, and angry.

Nuala looked at me, eyes dark and fierce, and her expression said: me too.

"You look tired," I said. For some reason, I didn't like to see her looking tired, just like I didn't like to hear her falter when she described the swan faerie.

She didn't even think before answering, which I was beginning to figure out meant she was lying. "No, I don't." She looked away from me and then said, abruptly, "I'll find out what they're doing. I don't have anything to lose. I'll be dead in a week and a half anyway."

I sighed, and pressed my hands flat against the sides of her legs, waiting for my arms to race with goose bumps. Nothing happened. "You'll rise again, though. Like a phoenix, right?

From the ashes. So you won't really die."

Nuala made a harsh gesture toward her chest. "This girl will die.

Everything that makes me who I am now will be gone. Just because another body climbs from the ashes doesn't mean it's me."

I slid my hand along her thighs just far enough to take each of her hands where they were braced by her legs. I gathered them into my own and held them between us. She had such long, soft hands. Nothing like my square, blocky palms, with fingers muscled hard from so much piping. "I'd be freaking out if I were you. You're so brave it makes me feel bad."

"You're brave," Nuala said. "Stupidly so. It's part of your charm."

I shook my head. "This summer, before I had my car accident, I knew I was going to crash. I knew the moment I woke up that day to go to the gig. I knew it all day long. I just kept waiting for it to happen." I laughed in a very unfunny way. "I was a wreck all day. And then, when it happened, all I could think was, so this is it."

"You can't read my mind." Nuala's hands were tense in mine.

"I'm freaking out. You wouldn't think I was so brave if you knew what I was thinking."

I looked at her. "What are you thinking?"

She immediately dropped her eyes to our hands; our fingers had somehow knotted together. My rough, written-on fingers all tangled around her slender, unmarked ones. "How hard it is.

How unfair. How much it's going to hurt like a bitch to get burned alive." She laughed, too, harsh and unhappy.

"Why do you go? If you know you're going to die in a bonfire on

Halloween, why not just lock yourself in a room somewhere?

Then when they light the fires and ask you to come out, just tell them they can put their matches where the sun don't shine."

Nuala gave me the most scathing look in the history of scathing looks. "What a clever idea. I've never thought of that. And I'm sure all the previous versions of myself never did either. Idiot."

"Okay, okay. Point taken. This will probably earn another scathing look, but are you sure?"

"Sure about what? You being an idiot?" Nuala laughed derisively, but her fingers were trembling in mine; I held her fingers tight to still them.

"Sure that you're going to be burned."

"Were you sure you were going to die in a car crash?"

She had me. I made a face.

"I just know, okay? Everyone else knows and a million faeries have told me, but even before that, I knew. I can't even stand to be near a candle." Nuala's shoulders shivered; she clamped her arms to her sides to still them. "I thought for the past few years that it would be the dying that really hurt, because it's not like I had anything worth remembering. Nothing I couldn't do again, you know? But now it's the forgetting. I don't want to forget."

"What changed?"

Nuala stared at me, and her voice was furious. "You, you asshole! You ruined everything. You've made everything impossible."

When they say "my heart skipped a beat," they're full of crap.

Really, what they mean is, your heart sort of stutters and thinks about stopping for a second before it remembers that beating is good for it. Oh shit, no, Nuala. Not me. Not stupid, cocky me.

She jerked on my hands. "Shut up! I already know you're a prick."

"Well, that's a relief."

Nuala spared me from having to come up with something else to say, "I was thinking about attraction. I have this theory on it.

On love." She wouldn't look at me.

I swallowed, but managed, "This ought to be good."

Nuala shot me a hard look. "Shut up. I don't think love has anything to do with how the other person is. I mean, maybe a little. I think what really matters is you yourself. Like, you know, let's say you lo--really liked a self-involved ass. That doesn't matter. What matters is how that ass makes you feel. If you feel like the best person in the world when you're with him, that's what makes you like him. It really isn't about how nice a person he is at all."

I ran my tongue over my bottom lip. "I like it. It's like the selfish person's guide to love. It's not you, baby, it's me I'm in love with."

Nuala smiled self-consciously at nothing in particular. "I thought you'd see what I meant." She paused, and when she started again, it was like she couldn't stop, like the words just kept tumbling out of her. "I like what I look like now. I like what I act like. Everyone thinks I'm going to jump you and suck out your life because I want you so bad, because you're such a great piper. They don't think I can resist. But I can. Here you are and you look amazing and I haven't taken anything from you. I don't even want to. I mean, I do, I mean, it's killing me not to, but I don't want you to give up any of your life for me. I've never done that before. I'm--proud of myself. I'm not just a leech. I'm not just another faerie. I don't want to use you. I just want to be whoever it is that I am when I'm with you."

I didn't know how to answer. I didn't know how I felt. I didn't feel like writing anything on my hands. I didn't feel like jumping and running from the room. I didn't feel awkward or weirded out or freezing cold or hungry or anything. I just felt like sitting here with my knees touching her knees and with my forehead leaning against our collective ball of fingers.

"I don't want to forget this--that because I fell in love with you, I didn't kill you," Nuala said. Her voice was funny; it was hard for her to say what she was saying. "You don't have to say anything. I know you're in love with stupid, selfish Ungirlfriend and not me. That's okay. I just--"

I leaned forward and kissed her. I know I took her by surprise because her lips were still forming a word when my lips touched them. My skin tightened with cold, just a little, as I kissed her, but no goose bumps.

I leaned back into my own chair and closed my eyes. Opened them again. Sucked in my lower lip, that tasted all of summer and Nuala, and pushed it back out again.

Nuala looked back at me.

"Was that okay?" I asked.

Her voice was so incredibly casual that I knew she had to be working hard to make it so. "It was a good kiss. I mean, don't flatter yourself, it wasn't the best kiss the world has ever seen, but--"

"Was it okay to kiss you," I said. I said it really slowly and carefully, because I was trying to work it out for myself too.

Nuala just stared at me, and I stared back at her. Then she carefully unfolded my fingers from hers and pulled her knees away from my knees, and stood up. She stared at me some more from her vantage point above me, her blonde hair falling all around her face as she looked down on me like a killer angel.

I just looked back at her, and I was looking so hard that I forgot to think about what my expression was.

Nuala climbed very slowly into my chair and sat down on my lap, her smooth, summer-scented legs curled up on either side of me. Holy freaking hell. I was still trying to maintain some control over my brain when she reached out and picked up my arms, one at a time, and linked them around behind her body.

Finally, she leaned toward me with a private, wicked smile on her face that turned me on like nothing ever had.

And she kissed me.

I think you might go to hell for making out with a faerie.

I kissed her back.

I woke up a second before I heard her voice.

"Wake up!" Nuala's voice was right in my ear. "Someone's outside."

I opened my eyes. My right leg was asleep because Nuala was on top of it, smashed beside me in the most comfortable chair in the world. "Hell," I hissed at her. "My leg's all pins and needles."

Nuala slid from my lap, landing noiselessly beside the chair, and looked down at her hand, her face surprised when she realized

I still held her fingers. I used her weight to pull myself out of the chair and grimaced as my prickly foot hit the ground. I couldn't hear anything.

What are we doing?

Nuala's voice was barely audible. "I want to listen."

We walked hand in hand toward the back doors. Well, Nuala walked. I limped and felt stupid for it. We stopped just on the other side of the doors, cloaked in warm darkness, standing several feet apart but still holding hands tightly. Like we were playing Red Rover, waiting for something to bust through the door and try to break through our defenses.

Now I heard what Nuala had.

Sullivan.

There were two voices outside the door, and one of them was unmistakably Sullivan: precise and savage. "... want to know what business you have here. In the middle of the night right outside the dorms."

The other voice was lofty, female, and somehow very familiar.

"I was camping. I couldn't sleep so I decided to walk into town."

"Like hell you did. I saw you set the thyme on fire. I know what that does. You think I don't know something's going on here?"

Nuala leaned over swiftly to whisper right into my ear, her lips pressed up against my skin to keep her words from getting to anyone else. "I've heard her voice before. She's been killing solitary fey."

I didn't have time to wonder at the idea that both Nuala and I found her voice familiar; the conversation on the other side of the door was still going.

"I think you probably think you're a lot cleverer than you are," the female voice said. I could almost place it, just from the condescension that dripped from it. "But you don't really know anything. I think you should let go of my arm before I get really angry and decide to tell the cops something very unfavorable about you."

Nuala looked at me. "Human," she whispered.

"Oh, ma'am," Sullivan's voice was twenty degrees below zero.

"You do not want to threaten me. I have seen so much worse than you." A pause; scuffling. "You're not going anywhere until you tell me what you were doing summoning Them right behind my kids' dorm. Don't give me any bullshit about camping or herbal research, either. I know. I know."

"It's not any of your business. If you know anything about

Them, you know that you're better off if you don't put your nose where it might be cut off."

Delia, I thought suddenly, and Nuala frowned at me, not recognizing the name. Dee's aunt. I recognize her voice now.

The faeries saved her life a long time ago, and she's been helping Them ever since.

Nuala's eyebrows arched sharply.

"Don't tell me what I'm better off doing. I've given up the last two years of my life to make sure these kids don't have to go through what I did." Sullivan's voice was a growl. "But all that time, I never thought I'd have to worry about a human. Tell.

Me. Why are you here?"

Delia's voice was frigid. "Fine. I was just using the music here to help me summon one of the daoine sidhe. One of them owes me a favor."

"I must look extremely gullible to you."

"You look very fragile to me, actually." A long pause, and I wondered what filled it on the other side of the door. "You look like someone who has a lot to lose, and I know individuals who would be happy to help you lose it."

Sullivan sounded grim. "You are sadly mistaken. I am delightfully unhindered by the attachments and accumulated possessions of most humans, thanks to your friends. I can, however, make you extremely uncomfortable if you don't start telling me why you're here."

"I'm doing favors for the new queen," Delia snapped. "Their politics. Things they can't manage themselves."

"New queen?" Sullivan's voice sounded thin. "Eleanor?"

My heart stopped. Why did Sullivan know her name?

"Yes, Eleanor. I scratch her back and she scratches mine."

Sullivan's voice was strained. "Why is she here?"

Silence. Was there a nod or a head-shake in there that we couldn't see? Or just nothing?

Then Sullivan again, sounding uneasy. "There's a cloverhand here?"

Delia laughed. "And to think you 're supposed to be protecting these children! You don't know anything at all."

Sullivan demanded, "Who is it?"

There was quiet for a minute, and then Nuala and I both jumped back from the door as it rattled on its hinges.

I barely recognized Sullivan's voice as he snarled, "I've killed one of Them and I'm sure a human would be a lot easier. Don't screw with me."

Delia's voice was slow, level, and dripping with venom. "Boy, take your hands off me."

The door jumped again.

"This is all I'm going to say," Delia said, voice weirdly muffled.

"So you'd better listen: You want what They want. You want

Them out of the human world, and They want us out of Theirs.

I'm killing every faerie who deals with humans, and They're going to kill every human who deals with faeries. Yeah, some of your kids"--this said with contempt--"might die. But in the long run, you'd be an idiot to interfere."

Sullivan's voice was more like himself. "Why? Why now?

"If you know Eleanor, then you know you don't ask Them why,"

Delia said. "Now, do you hear Them coming? They won't like to see you hassling me. Yeah, I'd let go of me too."

"I don't want to see you anywhere on the school grounds again."

"Oh, you won't see me again."

There was silence, and Nuala and I backed away, into the shadows, waiting for Sullivan to come inside. But the doors stayed shut, Sullivan and his secrets behind it.

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To:

James

I dont belong here i belong w them. Theyr made of music

& so am i. I belong w luke. He told me last nite he loved me. I needd 2 hear that. Hes so strange & lite sometimes i hav 2 tell myself what he used 2 look like.

From:

Dee

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It turned out that Paul and I were the stupidest smart people ever invented, because we couldn't make the damn play work.

We had Megan there, and we had Eric too, lounging over the back of a chair waiting for his part in the script. I'd told Sullivan we didn't need him yet, which was good, because the only thing we were doing well was making total idiots of ourselves.

Megan, by the piano, frowned at her script. It was all rumpled in her hands, which drove me crazy, but I tried to focus and listen to her deliver her lines instead. She was addressing me, but she didn't look at me because she hadn't memorized any lines yet. She said them all flat and gave each word the same emphasis as the last one, so that it all droned together:

"ParlortricksLeonSleightofhandThat'sallitis."

I shifted my weight from shoe to shoe. "Why is the stage sticky?

It feels like someone drank a jug of honey and then got sick on the stage. And then maybe peed on it too."

"That's not your line!" Paul said.

"No shit," Eric said. He was peevish because we had yet to make it to the scene with either of his characters in it.

"Okay, the stupid piano is really bothering me," I said, looking past Megan at its bulk. "Do you think we can get it to the side of the stage when we have to? It's taking up way too much room."

"Why do you keep bothering about the piano?" Megan demanded.

"We don't need it front and center. It's only getting played in the scenes where Paul can't do the oboe thing. It's in the way."

"It doesn't matter," Megan said. She fluttered her rumpled script in her hands--God, that bothered me, why couldn't she have just kept it tidy?--and stared at me. "Are we ready to go on?"

Paul suggested, "Do your last line once more."

I thought she needed to do it about ten more times until it sounded more like a human and less like a female-shaped automaton, but once more was a start.

Megan flapped the damn script again and repeated her line.

"ParlortricksLeonSleightofhandThat'sallitis."

I didn't have to look at my lines but I felt stupid addressing

Megan's face, so I looked at the top of her head while she stared down at her crumpled papers. "I was there, Anna. I saw him do it. This sucks."

"That's not your line!" Paul said.

"No shit," Eric said. "It's the truth though."

"I'm hungry." Paul's voice was plaintive. I'd promised them all

Chinese take-out if they skipped dinner at the dining hall to practice.

I wanted to write automaton on my hand, but I reached into my pocket and got Nuala's stone instead. I worried it around in my fingers frenetically while I stared at the script and tried to figure out why it felt so colossally stupid doing this. "No food until Eric has his scene at least. This is only a half-hour play, for crying out loud."

The door creaked and we all looked up guiltily, as if we'd been caught doing something worse than badly acting a play filled with metaphor. I saw Paul mouth the words "scary hot" at me a moment before I realized that it was Nuala, letting herself in the red door at the back of the building.

Nuala strode down the center aisle between the folding chairs, looking like an Amazon in tight bell-bottoms and seemingly unconcerned by everyone staring at her. She climbed onto the stage, walked up to me, and snatched my script from me. Her long-sleeved yellow T-shirt showed a tantalizing bit of her belly; there was dark black print down the sleeves that said inyourhandsinyourhandsinyourhands.

I tried to keep my face normal, but for some reason a smile kept threatening to appear on it, so I just looked at the script in

Nuala's hands like I was reading it with her and said, "Guys, this is Nuala."

Nuala didn't look at them. "Hi," she said. "I'm here to make you not suck. Is that cool?"

"Very cool," whispered Paul.

Megan glared at Nuala. I think she was jealous. "Well, she could get over it. I already felt better with Nuala standing beside me.

"Okay, run through the first scene once so I can see," Nuala said. I expected someone to question her authority, but nobody did. I think the truth was we were all so glad to see somebody who seemed to know what they were doing, or at least acted like they did, that we didn't care who it was. She looked at me with one fiendish eyebrow raised, as if confirming that it was okay to take charge.

Like you've ever cared about asking my permission before, I thought, and she smirked. She lightly touched the back of one of my hands--a bit of skin without ink--and handed me the script again. That stupid smile kept wanting to come back again.

I sucked in my lower lip and stared at the script until I could control my face. "Everyone ready to try it again?"

Nuala crouched on the edge of the stage, looking predatory, and we ran through the first scene. We made it halfway through, feeling even more idiotic with Nuala watching, before she stopped us.

"Wow," she said, and took the script from me again. "You guys really do suck."

"Who are you again?" Megan asked.

Nuala held a hand up to her like shut up and frowned at the script. "Okay, first of all, James, you're all wrong as Leon. Ro-Paul should be Leon. Why do you have him playing Campbell?

Campbell is a misunderstood megalomaniac musician prodigy.

Clearly you're supposed to play him."

The others laughed.

"Is it that obvious?" I asked.

"Oh please," Nuala said. She waved the script. "This has the subtlety of the bubonic plague. Campbell, the brilliant misunderstood magician genius, and his reliable friend Leon, torn to pieces by a sheeplike society that fears real magic? Boy, I wonder who you might be talking about there.

But that's part of its charm." She pointed at Megan, who winced, like Nuala was about to shoot lasers from her fingertips. "I think you'll have an easier time delivering those lines to a Paul-Leon than a James-Leon. Because thinking of

James as Leon is like--ha--ha--" Apparently the idea was so implausible she couldn't even think of a cutting comparison.

"Anyway. Try it. And be Anna. Haven't you read the script?

Don't you remember what happens to her?"

"Well, nothing, in comparison to Leon and Campbell." Megan sniffed.

"That's because you're not reading it right." Nuala flipped through the script, careful to keep the pages crisp and neat-God, I was falling for her so bad--and pointed to a page. "See this here? Crisis of belief. You've got to deliver every single one of these lines building up to this part right here so that when you say this line, the audience gasps oh shit and feels the rug pulled out from under them, just like Anna does."

Megan rumpled through her script to the line. "I didn't think of it like that."

Nuala shrugged like well you wouldn't and looked at me. "So you, you do Paul's part at the beginning. You address the audience as Campbell. Do I have to tell you to believe in the role and make us believe it too?"

She didn't have to, and she knew it. I didn't have to take the script back from her because I had the first page memorized.

"Hold on," Nuala said, and she walked over to the light dimmer switch. She turned off the lights over the audience and turned on another set of lights on the stage, making it an island of light in a sea of darkness. Suddenly it was real.

"Now," she said, in a voice just for me, and pointed. "There's your mark."

I walked to the front edge of the stage--be Campbell-- and held my arms out on either side, like I was welcoming the audience or summoning down something from the skies. "Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Ian Everett Johan Campbell, the third and the last. I hope I can hold your attention. I must tell you that what you see tonight is completely real. It might not be amazing, it might not be shocking, it might not be scandalizing, but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt: it is real. For that--" I paused. "I am deeply sorry."

I lowered my arms to my side, bit my lip and looked at the stage, and then turned and walked off stage. Eric clapped in the audience as I joined Nuala by the edge of the stage.

"Thank God, that's better," Nuala whispered to me. She didn't have to say that, either. We watched Paul and Megan play Leon and Anna, and wonder of wonders, Paul was a way better Leon, and either him being Leon or Nuala's pep talk had made Megan a better Anna. They still had to glance at their scripts, but it actually looked... plausible.

"Parlor tricks, Leon. Sleight of hand," Megan said. She even shrugged. I mean, like a real person would. "That's all it is."

And Paul actually blustered. I mean--he was Leon. "I was there, Anna. I saw him do it. There was a woman crying in the audience. They thought it was real. They knew it was real."

I couldn't stop grinning.

Nuala pinched the skin of my arm and when I turned to look at her, I saw she was shining, too, with the joy of creation.

Something I'd taken for granted my whole life.

Thanks, Izzy Leopard, I thought.

"You needed it," Nuala said, but I could tell what she meant was thank you too.

Guys weren't allowed to bring girls into Seward Hall (under penalty of having your nuts chopped off and sent back to your parents via priority mail), so we waited for the Chinese delivery guy at the door and then dragged the world's most comfortable chairs from the lobby onto the brick patio.

It was an absolutely gorgeous evening--all yellows, golds, reds, blazing across the hills behind the dorm. A little too cool for bloodsucking insects and a little too warm for goose bumps.

Food had never tasted as good as the chicken fried rice eaten out of the box with a plastic fork, lounging on the world's most comfortable chair with Nuala sitting on the arm.

"I'm trying to tell you, there are people who are allergic to water." Paul spoke in between bites of something red and slimy looking.

"You can't be allergic to water," Megan protested. "The body is like, ninety percent water."

I interrupted. "Not ninety percent. Nobody's ninety percent water except for Mrs. Thieves. She practically sloshes when she walks."

Eric snorted and coughed up some rice.

"Oh, that's sexy," Megan said, watching Eric kick the rice off the bricks. "Anyway, no one can be allergic to water. It's like being allergic to--to--breathing."

Nuala cast a scathing look toward Megan before speaking, "It's true. There have been, like, two cases of it ever. I read about it.

It was so rare they didn't diagnose it forever and now those people have to do weird things to keep from killing themselves by living."

Paul gave Nuala a grateful glance and added, "It's like those people who are allergic to sunlight. They get super horrible burns when they're babies, and if they don't get kept out of the sun, they die of cancer. They have to stay inside with the blinds drawn all the time. Or they get, like, sick blisters all over."

"That must be horrible," Eric said. "It's like being allergic to yourself, or to living. Like you were born to die."

Nuala looked away, out over the hills. I circled her wrist with my fingers, and her attention jerked back to me. I offered her a forkful of rice. "Want to try some?"

She gave me a look, like are you kidding? But she was either intrigued by the concept, or didn't want to let me down, or wanted to look human for the rest of them, because she leaned toward me and opened her mouth. I managed to put the rice in there without spilling it completely down her front, which is not as easy as it sounds. Instead, just one stray grain stuck to her bottom lip, clinging perilously while she chewed and swallowed with a dubious expression on her face.

"You've got--there's just--" I gestured toward her mouth, reaching for a napkin and realizing Megan had them. Nuala could've knocked the rice off, but she leaned down right beside me instead, her hair smelling way too good as it hung down between us, and that was how I happened to be sucking

Nuala's lower lip into my mouth very gently when Dee joined us on the patio.

"Hi, Dee," Paul said. His eyes were very wide and he had a look on his face like whoa-someone-get-the-marshmallows-there'sgonna-be-a-barbecue-here.

Nuala slowly slid her lip out of my teeth and leaned back, and I swallowed before turning to look at Dee. I had the sudden, irrational desire to laugh.

How does it feel, Dee?

Dee's face, half-lit gold by the sunset, had gone stony. She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me. "Hi, James."

"Hey." Voice sounded good. Casual. Yeah, hi Dee. I was just here sharing rice with this super hot chick. How have you been?

A slow smile was spreading over Nuala's face. "So you guys ordered take-out?" Dee asked, though it was obvious.

"Nope," I said. "Paul stole a car. Turned out to be the delivery guy's from Fortune Garden. Talk about a twofer."

She didn't smile.

Nuala did.

"There's plenty here," Nuala said. She looked at me, and I knew her well enough to hear the edge in her voice. "Enough to share."

Dee looked at me and her voice was arctic. "I know Paul and

Megan. I don't think I know everyone else."

Eric was clearly not a part of the "everyone else" she was interested in, but I introduced him first anyway. "That's Eric.

He's a teaching assistant by day and fights crime by night." I looked at Nuala, who was looking at me in an intense way that I couldn't interpret. It made me want to get a pen out. It made me want to get the worry stone out. "This is Nuala." I thought about adding my girlfriend, just to see Dee's reaction, but instead I just looked at Nuala's freckles and her ocean eyes and thought about how different she was from Dee, now that they were both here in the same place.

I realized I'd been looking at Nuala too long. I looked back to

Dee to find that her expression had not changed. Her voice, however, had managed to drop a few more degrees. "Are you a student, Nuala?"

Nuala looked away from me to Dee, and I saw dislike burning fiercely in her eyes. It surprised me, somehow, because her gaze wasn't like Megan's jealous stare. It was... deeper. It was-like--protective. It should've scared the hell out of me, but it felt good.

"Of many things." Nuala smiled at Dee, a dangerous rack of teeth. "So you're a friend of James?"

Dee smiled the fake stage smile I recognized from our days back at our old school. "I've known him nine years."

Nuala rubbed her hand over the back of my head; I tried not to close my eyes at her touch. "That's a long time."

"We're very good friends," Dee said.

"Clearly."

Behind Dee's back, Paul made small hooks with his fingers and clawed the air. He mouthed meow.

"How long have you known him, Nuala?" asked Dee.

"Oh, a month or so."

Dee's smile froze into something colder. "That's not very long."

Nuala's smile disappeared as she delivered her closing volley.

Her fingers dropped off my hair to link in the back of my collar.

"Oh, it didn't take me long to figure out what I'd found. But I don't have to tell you, right? You've known him nine years."

Dee stared at Nuala's fingers on my collar and the way my whole body was sort of leaning toward Nuala's, and her eyebrows drew together a little.

"Yeah," Dee said. "Yeah, you don't have to tell me." Her eyes drifted across Megan and her two opened boxes of food, Eric and his guitar leaning against the wall, Paul and his round eyes, Nuala and her fingers on my neck, and finally to me. I knew how it looked. It looked like I was doing okay without her. It looked like I was sitting here with my friends laughing and eating take-out, totally okay with the way things were going. It looked like Nuala was sitting on the arm of my chair and that she was crazy about me and that we were a couple.

As Campbell said: "It might not be amazing it might not be shocking, it might not be scandalizing, but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt: It is real. For that, I am deeply sorry?

It was real. I was okay.

And I was deeply sorry.

Because I'd thought it would feel amazing to turn the tables on

Dee, but it didn't. I saw the expression on her face--or maybe the careful lack of expression--and I recognized it from my own, too many times before.

She mumbled some sort of line to get herself out of there, and even though I was sorry, it wasn't enough to make me go after her. Not because of Nuala. I felt certain that even though Nuala hated her, she wouldn't have stopped me from going after Dee and softening the blow.

But I was done softening the blow for Dee. When had she ever done the same for me? I was done.

I felt like kissing Nuala, for setting me free.

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I had taken over the world's most comfortable chairs, as James called them, as my personal kingdom. I was thinking about going out, to fulfill my promise to James to find out exactly what was going on around here, but a little before midnight, James snuck down to see me. He was barefoot, almost soundless, looking really cute in his T-shirt and sweatpants. I got up out of the chair to meet him halfway across the lobby, and closer, I could see that he not only looked really cute, he also looked really exhausted. Big bags under his eyes. I couldn't remember the last time he'd slept, now that I thought about it.

"Hi, crazy," he said, a little awkward now that we weren't trying to kill each other.

I stood there with my hands by my sides. "Hi, asshole."

And then we kissed. Not a crazy kiss, just a soft, tired touching of our lips together because we could. It felt weird, like we were two different people from the people we'd been earlier that day, when I'd been a badass director for the first time ever or when James had been biting my lip in front of his nongirlfriend. Not bad, just weird. For some reason, I hadn't thought James was capable of this brand of kissing.

Without any discussion, we climbed into one of the big plush chairs and curled up together, the pounding of his heart slow and comforting under my ear.

I heard his thoughts. He was thinking about asking me what are we doing? And he was thinking about Halloween, so close. And then he was remembering that I could hear his thoughts and was feeling guilty because he hadn't meant to remind me of how few days I had left.

Like I could forget.

"You were wicked at the rehearsal," James whispered, to keep from thinking about the end of the month.

"I know."

His words were muffled in my hair. "I know it wasn't directing the big screen or anything..."

"Shut up." I didn't know why, but I didn't want to talk about being really happy anymore than I wanted to talk about

Halloween.

His feelings were hurt. His thoughts drifted over the worry stone and how he'd wanted Ballad to be a gift for me, but he didn't say anything. James would never let on that something hurt him.

"Shut up," I said again, even though he hadn't said anything out loud. I had to work hard to make my voice seem normal. For some reason, my throat felt all gloppy and hard to talk past when I thought of what I was going to say. "You know I loved it.

You just want me to buff your ego a little more."

James seized on that. "That's exactly it. I just wanted to hear you tell me how wonderful I was. You're so intuitive, it's like you're reading my mind."

I pinched him. "You are such a jerk."

James made a little mmm-mmm noise like he was flattered.

He didn't say anything else, and neither did I, so we were just a knot together, eyes closed, listening to our breathing slowing down. Beauty and the Beast. Well, more like Beast and the Beast.

I didn't mean to fall asleep. I mean, except for that one other time, I had never slept in my life. I had known what words like fatigued and bored meant, but never sleepy or tired or aching with exhaustion. Not until now. Not until Halloween was just days away and I hadn't made any deals for months and my body wanted to give up on me. I'd meant to keep my word to

James and find out tonight what the faeries were doing here.

Or more specifically, what the students had to do with it.

But I slept. For three hours and twenty seven minutes.

It scared me to be tired. It made me think that I could close my eyes one of these nights and not open them again. And then-nothing. That's what they always said--faeries didn't have souls.

While I was sleeping, James had curled himself up tightly away from me, his hands fisted for his savage battle with sleep. His posture now let me slip slowly away without waking him, out of the chair and out of my body. In the moment I became invisible, I saw crisp, dry leaves scuttle across the floor and goose bumps shiver across James' skin.

I used to love seeing the swirl of leaves that accompanied my change of forms. Freedom. Floating on thoughts. Used to be, when I changed, that there were flowers and green summer leaves. Then the flowers were replaced with berries and seed pods and the leaves were yellow, then red. Now dry, old, dead leaves. No flowers. No seed pods.

I flew out of the dorm, over the hills, looking for the things I'd always avoided: other faeries.

I yawned. I was tired again already.

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

For the second time, I sought out the faerie dance behind

Thornking-Ash. The moment I stepped into the faerie ring, the sharp chill of the October night disappeared, replaced by the heat of dancing bodies and faerie lights. The driving music swept up my tired body at once, pulling me this way and that, wiping away every thought except this: dance.

As always, I moved toward the musicians, watching the patterns their bodies followed as they coaxed the melody out of fiddles, flutes, harps. I stood by them and swayed, letting the pounding drum give its beat to my heart, and turned to look out over the numberless faeries on the hill. It had seemed like such a good idea to come here, as dances loosened lips and encouraged bragging, but now that I was actually here, I was frozen by the sheer number of dancers and the enormity of the task.

A hand in my hand jerked me away from the musicians. I turned, stumbling, and found one of the daoine sidhe, face and hair brilliantly pale like the underside of a leaf. I tried to jerk out of his grip, my stomach tightening.

"Hold," he said, and a daoine sidhe girl appeared at his shoulder, wearing a ball gown that was torn at the bottom to reveal chain-covered cargo pants. The faerie holding my hand said, "I only wanted to see that it really was you. I thought you were dead."

I wrenched at his fingers with my free hand. "And why would that be?"

He leaned closer. "I thought you might have been killed too.

Because of your dealings with humans."

The girl behind him drew a finger across her neck in case I hadn't gotten the meaning of "killed."

I stopped trying to pull away. "Who are you?"

The girl said, "Una. And he's Brendan." And then she laughed, as if it was somehow funny.

I narrowed my eyes. "And what again is your interest in me?

Brendan glanced toward the other faeries.

"Dance with us," Una said, taking one of Brendan's hands and offering her other hand to me.

"You're holding my hand too tightly," Brendan snarled at her, but he released my wrist and flipped his hand over, so that it was an offering. When I hesitated, he added, "It's about the piper." I took his hand.

And we spun off into the dance, the three of us a circle within a circle, and Una let go of my hand just long enough to twirl a finger over the top of us. For a moment I saw a visible glowing circle in the air above us, like a light spiderweb, and it fell around us just as Una caught my hand again.

There was a curious sensation, like the sound of the music was squeezed out of my ears, becoming only a faint hum in the background.

"Wouldn't want anyone listening in," Una said. "Keep in step with everyone else, or they'll notice. Admire my cunning, leanan sidhe."

"It's awesome," I told her. "Now what about the piper?"

"It is not really about the piper," Brendan said. "She just said that to get you to come. It is really more about the dead."

"Which has something to do with the piper, because he will be dead," Una added, with a bright smile. "And so will you. So really, it is about you too."

"First, you have to tell us where your allegiance is," Brendan said. "Is it with your faerie side or your human side?"

"And don't be tricksy," Una told me.

Their hands felt tight in mine as we kept spinning and dancing; I felt trapped. I couldn't lie, but I couldn't tell the truth either.

What would these faeries do if they knew how I felt? My silence felt damning.

Brendan watched my face with a certain satisfaction. "Good. I was hoping that you were in love with the piper.

The daoine sidhe have no small fondness for humans, but we need them in this case. You are as close to human as a faerie can get, and your ties to him only make me more certain we can trust you to take their side."

My voice was harsh. "What is it you want from me? I'm already dying. I don't care to run errands."

"Our new queen"--there was considerable vitriol in Brendan's voice when he said it--"is restless with following the human cloverhand wherever the cloverhand cares to go. There are rumors that she means to ally with the dead to break the cloverhand's power, although I don't know what foul magic she intends to use to accomplish such a feat."

"But you can be sure it will involve blood," Una said. "Lots of it!"

"Yes," Brendan agreed. "Human blood. Human losses. Not daoine sidhe."

"Then what is your interest in this? If you have no small fondness for humans?" I demanded.

"It is one thing to be free," Brendan said. "And it is another thing entirely to trade one master for another. So, are we to trade the cloverhand for the antlered king, and lose our affiliation with humans, only to become no better than the lost souls and the dark fey that are already beneath him? It is hard enough indeed to follow Eleanor without following her into that dark place."

I couldn't disagree. "And what do you want from me?"

"Watch the cloverhand," Brendan said. "Keep her safe on

Halloween."

That was definitely what I wanted to do on my last day alive: babysit Dee.

"I'll be a little distracted," I snapped. "I'll be burning, remember?"

"That's what the piper's for," Brendan replied. "Tell him. He loves her."

I stumbled. Una pulled me back up. Around us, the dancers seemed to have sped up, the music feverish and insistent. As we spun, I caught a glimpse of Eleanor and her consort stepping into the circle, the air shivering with her beauty. Her consort glanced at Eleanor while she wasn't looking, and in that split second, he looked afraid.

I stumbled again.

"She's done dancing," Una told Brendan.

"I decide when I've had enough," I snapped. "No one knows me but me."

But they let go of my hands, and the sound of the music surged back into my ears, louder than before.

I spun away, lighter without them anyway. The dancers parted for me as I danced by myself. The beat pulsed through me, relentless, driving, the same beat as my heart. I let myself imagine, for a second, that James was here in the circle, and that he would dance with me. Once I had the thought, I couldn't let it go, and the idea of him, his summer-brown arms draped around my waist, his body confident and hot against me, his cheek bristly against my smooth one, filled me with such a fiery need that I could barely breathe.

It was like a waking dream. The drum thumped, promising endless dancing and eternal life, and I closed my eyes, giving into the daydream. James' fingers, pressed against the bate skin at the small of my back as we spun, setting me on fire. The leather-and-soap smell of him, his forehead against my forehead, his hips against my hips, our bodies moving like one seamless instrument, grinding, dropping, spinning. The music driving us, urgently, dance dance dance, and my body screaming at me, savagely, more more more.

I couldn't tell if the world was spinning or if I was.

I wanted it. I wanted him here, dancing with me, so badly, that I could almost hear his voice.

Nuala.

Nuala. Open your eyes.

The hill was getting dark; night was winning against the orbs of faerie light. The music was fading. I could only hear the drum, thumping like my heartbeat.

Damn it, Nuala.

I could see stars above me, and I could actually smell him, his pipes and his breath and his skin.

Nuala, just tell me what to do. I don't know what to do. Tell me how to help you.

All I could think was, if he'd come earlier, we could've danced.

Create Text Message

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To:

James

I still cant believe i killd someone. Im a murderer. Do u know what luke did? He shrugged. I hav been lying 2 myself all along. The real luke is gone & i wz jst trying 2 keep loving him anyway. He knew what would happn 2 me & he didnt stop it.

From:

Dee

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Create Text Message

73/200

To:

James

Omg all this time it wasnt luke it wz someone else. What am i going 2 do?

From:

Dee

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James

All along the persn i could confide in has been rite here.

Ive been writing him txt messages & not sending them.

Like this 1 that ill nvr send. Its 2 late now & i dont want u 2 hav 2 carry that w u. I can hear them coming now. I love u

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Dee

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It was so early that the daylight seemed fragile, like if you breathed too hard the light at the horizon would blow away and dissipate into the darkness. It was in this freezing cold halflight that I found Nuala on the steepest of the hills behind the school. My brown hoodie was nothing against the cold, and I'd only been kneeling beside her for a few minutes before I was shivering.

"Nuala," I said again, because I didn't know what else to say.

I was so used to her being powerful, kick-ass, all hard edges, that I couldn't stop looking at her in the grass. She looked like one of those police-body-chalk things, her arms sprawled out above her and her long, bare legs tangled together. She really was just a girl. Just a fragile body after all, looking a little like she was dressing up in someone else's clothes to look older.

Why won't you wake up? Her breaths were so slow, like it wouldn't take any effort at all for her just to skip one, and then the next one, and the next one.

I gritted my teeth, steeling myself against the cold, and then I pulled off my sweatshirt and lay it across her legs. I cupped one arm beneath her knees--God, her skin was frigid--and one beneath her neck, and I pulled her into my lap and held her against my body.

Goose bumps rippled across my skin, but not from her. From real cold. I cradled her head next to my chest, feeling how icy the skin of her cheek was through my T-shirt, and leaned down close to her. Her breath came out across my face and it didn't smell like anything at all. No flowers. Nothing.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked.

I couldn't feel sad, or angry, because I couldn't imagine why she wouldn't open her eyes. All I could think about was that I was sitting here in the middle of a field with a dying girl in my arms and my brain couldn't process anything but the shape her hair made on her face and the colorless dawn grass and the little bit of unraveling brown thread on the arm of my sweatshirt.

Suddenly, I became aware that there was someone else crouching in front of me--and it scared the crap out of me, because I couldn't think how they'd gotten there and I couldn't think how long they'd been there.

"Sentimentality is such a dangerous thing," said the other someone, and I realized, horribly, that I knew them.

"How do you figure?" I asked, pulling my arm out from under

Nuala's legs so that my iron bracelet was visible.

"Oh, don't worry, piper," said Eleanor. "I'm not here to kill you this time. I merely saw your distress and wished to see if I could be of service to one of my dying subjects."

She was terribly beautiful, in a sort of sweet, savage way that made my throat hurt. Kneeling in front of me, she reached her long fingers toward Nuala's forehead, but stopped short of touching her. "I really don't see how she could tolerate that iron, poor dear. How ironic that in the end, it'll be a human that kills her."

"How do you figure that?"

Eleanor sat back, her pale green dress spreading out around her like flower petals on the grass. "Well, she's a leanan sidhe, piper. Surely you know how it is she stays alive?"

She was right. I did. I just hadn't let myself think about it. "Life, right? Human life."

"Years, piper. She takes years off the life of those she graces with her inspiration. And she did not take any from you, did she?" Eleanor folded her hands gently in her lap and looked at them fondly, as if the arrangement of her fingers twined together pleased her greatly. "As I said, sentimentality is such a dangerous thing. So very human, too."

I shook, both with the frigid air and the proximity to Eleanor.

Everything in me screamed that she was an old, wild creature, and that I needed to get away. It took everything in me to not lift Nuala and get the hell out of there. "How much does she need?"

Eleanor lifted her face to me and smiled an awfully lovely row of pearly teeth, and I realized that she had been hoping I'd ask.

But I didn't care. I just wanted to know.

"I think two years would last her until Halloween," Eleanor said, and now she smiled again at her hands, a small, secret smile that made the grass shiver around us. "She must burn, you know. Her body only lasts sixteen years, even if she doesn't deprive herself of human life. That's why she goes willingly to burn every sixteen years. Poor creature realizes that if she doesn't toast herself"--Eleanor shrugged--"she'll die for good.

Of course, she's probably going to die now anyway."

I closed my eyes for just the briefest of moments. I wanted to close them for longer, to think, but the idea of not watching

Eleanor every second she was close seemed like one of the more terrible concepts ever invented. "How do I do it?"

Eleanor regarded me with a gentle gaze. "Do what, piper?"

I bit back a snarl with great effort. "Give her two of my years."

Two years wasn't long. When I became an old codger, I wouldn't care if I died two years early. Anything to warm

Nuala's clammy skin and put color back into her lips.

"But you know she'll only forget you after she burns." Eleanor's mouth was pursed now, like a lovely rose, but her eyes glimmered. She was like a little kid, bursting with a secret that she was begging to share.

"That's what I thought, before," I said. "But I'm guessing you can tell me a way that she won't."

In the rising dawn, her mouth spread into a wide line of pleasure that evoked memories of butterflies, flowers, sunshine, death, rot. "Truly," she breathed, "Don't let it be said that I am not a benevolent queen to my subjects. If she trusts you enough to give you her true name, piper, her true name that will grant you control over her, like the faerie that she is, you can save her memories. You must watch her burn from beginning to end, and while she does, you must say her true name seven times, uninterrupted, and when she rises from the ashes... she'll remember everything."

Suspicion prickled along my skin, but what Eleanor said had the ring of truth. Still, I had to ask. "Why do you want to help her?"

Eleanor spread out her hands, as if she were opening a book, and shrugged delicately. "Generosity of spirit. Now, you'd better hurry and kiss her, piper. Breathe two years into her, if you will." She stood and brushed her knees off with pale, pale hands. "Ta, ta."

And with a shuddering of the air around her and a tug through my limbs, she was gone. And the sun was rising and Nuala was setting.

I brushed her light hair away from her freckled face and lightly pressed my lips to her mouth. It didn't feel like kissing Nuala. It felt like kissing a corpse. Nothing was happening. I was kissing a dying girl and nothing was happening.

Two years, Nuala. It's not that long. I want to give it to you. Just take it. I kissed her again, and breathed into her mouth.

It didn't feel like anything was happening. Hell. Shouldn't she jump to life if it was working? I tried again--three times is the charm, right?--and tried to visualize my life flowing into her. I didn't care if she took two years. I didn't care if she took ten years. Her head rolled back and her skin covered with goose bumps. It looked dead and cold, like a frozen chicken.

"Damn it, Nuala!" My hands were shaking; every so often, my whole body shuddered. I shoved my fingers into my pocket and retrieved my cell phone. Flipping it open one-handed, I shut my eyes, trying to remember the shape of the numbers in my head.

I imagined them drawn on my skin and then I had them. I hit send.

The phone rang twice, and Sullivan's voice, thick with sleep, answered, "Hello?" He added, dutifully, "This is Patrick Sullivan of Thornking-Ash."

"I need you," I said. "I need your help."

The thick voice was a lot more awake all of a sudden. "James?

What's going on?"

I didn't know what to say to that. There's a girl dying in my arms. Because of me. "I'm--is anyone else up? I need to bring someone in. I need your help." I realized I was repeating myself and shut up.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm unlocking the back door. Assuming you didn't already."

"I'll be there in a few minutes," I said. Sullivan was still talking when I snapped the phone shut and shoved it back in my pocket. I clumsily got my arm under Nuala's armpit and around her knees. "C'mon, babe." I staggered to my feet. My sweatshirt dropped to the ground. Whatever. I'd get it later. I waded through the waist-high grass until I got to the edge of the school grounds, and then I skirted around the back of the dorm.

Sullivan was waiting by the back door in sweat pants. He silently held the door open for me as I maneuvered Nuala and myself through the doorway.

All he said was, "My door's open."

His room was still scented with cinnamon candle and daisies, though neither was in evidence, and there were papers inexplicably scattered all over the floor. Sullivan pointed to his bed, which was neatly made and illuminated by a square of cold sunlight from the window.

I should've laid her down carefully on the bed, but my arms were killing me and I sort of half-laid, half-dropped her.

Sullivan hung at my shoulder. "Is she a student?"

"No." I brushed her hair out of her face. "Fix her."

He laughed, a little helplessly. "You have such faith in me.

What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know. I think it's me." I didn't look at him. "She's a faerie. She's the muse."

"Jesus Christ, James!" Sullivan grabbed my upper arm and spun me toward him. "You told me you didn't make a deal with her!

What the hell is she doing on my bed?"

I stood there, his fingers gripped on my arm, staring at him, still shaking and hating that I was. "I didn't make a deal. That's why she's here. She hasn't taken anything from me and I think she's dying. Sullivan, please."

He stared back at me.

"Please."

My voice sounded strange to me. Thin. Desperate.

Sullivan let out a breath and released me. He rubbed his hand into his face for a long moment before he joined me again at the bed. "James, you've got to be wrong. The leanan sidhe fades when she's going without. She can't stay visible. This faerie--this girl--this is a human reaction."

"She's not human."

Sullivan lay a hand on Nuala's forehead; his eyes roamed over her body. "She's very thin," he observed. "When was the last time she's eaten?"

"What? I don't know. She doesn't eat food." But even as I said it, I remembered the grain of rice on her lip.

"Let's humor me. Cover her up. She's freezing."

He disappeared into the kitchen area and I heard the little fridge opening. I eased a blanket from under Nuala's legs and pulled it up around her. I ran a finger over her cold cheekbones; they did seem more prominent than when we'd first met. I traced the dark hollows under her closed eyes. Some sort of weird, miserable emotion made me want to curl up next to her and close my eyes too.

A fruity aroma accompanied Sullivan as he returned. "It's soda," he said, apologetically. His eyes paused for the briefest second on my fingers resting on Nuala's skin. "It was the most sugary thing I had on hand. I had honey, too, but that sounded sticky.

Prop her up. I hope she's conscious enough to swallow. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing."

She fit in the crook of my arm. Together, Sullivan and I did the crappy nursemaid thing. I supported her jaw and he tipped a bit of Mountain Dew into her mouth.

"Careful she doesn't choke."

I tipped her head back and ran a hand along her throat. I'd seen

Dee do it when she was trying to get her dog to swallow pills.

Nuala swallowed.

Rinse and repeat. We kept going until she had about a half a glass of soda down, and then she coughed. Coughing was good, right?

"More?" Sullivan asked. I didn't know who he was asking, because I sure didn't know.

Nuala opened her eyes. For a second, I could tell she wasn't really focused on anything, but then I saw her eyes slide slowly toward me, and then toward Sullivan, and then around the room.

And the words she said were just classic Nuala. "Oh, shit."

--from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

"Feeling any better?" James asked me. For some reason X he reminded me of an apple. His face was tanned from all his afternoons spent outside piping, and now that his hair was starting to grow out, it was even redder than before. Everything about him as he stood on the hill next to me, his fingers brushing the seed-tops of the golden grass, reminded me of apples. End-of-the-year fruits that waited for summer to be safely away before they showed themselves.

I crumpled and uncrumpled a granola bar wrapper in my hands.

"Anything's better than passed out, I guess, right? Why the hell does Sullivan want me on this hill? I'm not like some raccoon you found in your trash. You can't just put me back out into the wild and expect me to go away."

James smiled a half-smile at me, but I saw that his fingers were rubbing on the worry stone in his hand. "I don't think he expects you to disappear into the wild, my dear viper. Hopes for it, maybe. But I don't think he expects it. He said he wanted to talk."

"I can talk anywhere."

"Oh, that I know. But I see his point, don't you? Your... somewhat less-than-standard-issue appearance might draw some attention on campus. Especially in the boys' dorm."

The grass snapped behind me as I lay back on it, staring up at the deep blue sky. There wasn't a cloud in sight, and lying down, I couldn't see any of the brilliantly colored trees at the bottom of the hill. Still, everything about the day--the crisp bite to the air, the smell of woodsmoke, the swift wind that gusted around us--screamed that Halloween was almost here.

James towered over me, casting his shadow over my body; it was cold when the sun didn't touch me. "Are you okay?"

"Stop asking me that," I said. "I'm great. I'm rosy. I'm freakin' wonderful. I couldn't be happier. How did you find me?

"You were lying in the grass four feet away from me. It wasn't rocket science."

"Lie down so I can smack you," I told him, and he smiled a thin white smile. "I meant before. How did you find me on the hill after I passed out? It was still night, practically."

Oh my God, he blushed. I didn't even think James Morgan was capable of blushing. I knew I didn't imagine it. He looked away, as if that would hide his flushed cheeks, but I could still see his bright red ears. "I--uh--dreamt about you."

"You dreamed about me?" At first, all I could think was all the times he'd dreamt about Dee and not me. Then I realized what the blush might mean. "What sort of dream?"

James absently bit on the end of his worry stone before crossing his arms. "Ha. You know exactly what sort of dream it was."

I frowned at him for a moment, one eyebrow arched, before I realized that he meant I must be reading his mind. And then I realized I hadn't been.

Then I realized I couldn't.

I stared at him, trying to find the threads of thought I normally seized and interpreted, but there was nothing. I couldn't even remember how it was that I used to do it. It was like discovering you'd stopped breathing, and trying to remember how it was you used to inflate your lungs.

James raised his hands on either side of his face like he was surrendering. "Hey. I have no control over my subconscious.

You can't hold me accountable for somnolent fantasies. I seriously doubt I could even dance like that in real life."

While I was trying to catch his thoughts, it struck me. He wasn't golden anymore. When had I stopped seeing the music inside him? I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen it. I knew--I knew it wasn't him that had changed. It was me.

Lying flat out in the grass, I covered my face with my hands.

"This isn't about a dancing dream, is it." James didn't say it like a question. I heard him crush the grass down beside me. "Did something happen to you last night?"

"I can't hear your thoughts," I whispered from behind my hands.

James was silent. I didn't know if it was because he didn't know what to say or if it was because he realized immediately just how big of a deal it was for me. I took my hands from my face, because I had to see his face if I couldn't hear him. He was staring off into the distance, his eyes faraway. His thoughts totally out of my reach, as if they didn't even exist.

"Say something," I said miserably. "It's so quiet. Tell me what you're thinking."

"Welcome to my life," James said. "I have to guess what's going on in people's heads." He looked at my face and something he saw there made his voice soften. He shrugged. "I was wondering if this was just part of it. Part of getting closer to

Halloween. I saw Eleanor. She said that your body was wearing out and that you had to burn to keep from dying. Maybe this is just you, wearing out."

"I don't feel worn out. I feel--" I was afraid to say it.

James ran his fingers over the back of one of my hands, looking at it as if it was enormously important. "I know. Look--Nuala."

He hesitated. "Eleanor said something else. She said, if you wanted to keep your memories, there was a way."

My stomach lurched, like with nerves. "Why would she care? "

"I don't know. Can she lie?"

I shook my head; the grass rustled under my head. I thought about what Brendan and Una had told me. "No. But she can leave things out."

James made a face. "Yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought too. She said if I said your name seven times while you were burning, you'd keep your memories."

"My real name?" But what I was thinking was, my memories?

James nodded.

"Do you even know what that means?"

He said, "I have a vague idea that it's a really bad idea for your name to get out, right? Like people could use it to make you rob convenience stores, perform illicit sex acts, watch Steven

Seagal movies, and otherwise do things that you wouldn't ever do."

"Which is why I'd never tell anyone," I said.

He looked down at his hand again, his eyelashes hiding his eyes.

"Yeah, I know."

"Except you." I sat up so that my eyes were level with his. "But you have to promise me."

James' eyes were wide, either innocent or bewildered. I had never seen his face wear either expression. "Promise what?"

"Promise you won't make me... do those things."

"Nuala," James said, solemnly, "I would never make you watch

Steven Seagal movies."

He didn't know. How big of a deal this was. Nobody told a human their real name. Nobody. "Promise me you... promise me that..." I couldn't think of what to make him promise. As if the promise of a human meant anything anyway. They could lie with impunity.

James leaned in and I thought for a moment he was going to kiss me. Instead, he just wrapped his arms around me and lay the side of his face against my face. I could feel his heartbeat, slow and steady and warm, going at half the speed of mine, and his breath, uneven and short on my cheek. A kiss could never mean the same thing as this. "Nuala," he said, and his voice was low and funny--hoarse. "Don't be afraid of me. You don't have to tell me. But I-- I would do this for you, if you wanted. I know there has to be some sort of catch, but I'd try."

I closed my eyes. It was too much. The possibility of keeping my memories, the faeries' words at the dance last night, the danger of telling my name, the shape of his words in my ear. I had never meant it to go this far.

I squeezed my eyes shut so hard I saw flickering grayish lights behind my eyelids. "Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine."

I felt light-headed right after I said it. I'd really said it out loud.

I'd really done it.

James squeezed me tighter as if it would stop me from shaking.

He whispered, "Thank goodness. I thought you were going to say Izzy Leopard and then I would start laughing and then you would kill me."

"You are such a jerk," I said, but I was relieved. Scared totally out of my mind, but relieved.

James let me go. I hurriedly made sure I had full control of my facial expression before he did. He leaned back and repositioned his legs. "My butt's falling asleep. Do you think it would be really bad if I pronounced it wrong? I mean, it's not exactly an easy name like 'Jane Doe,' is it?"

"This is serious!" I sounded fiercer than I meant to. I shouldn't snap. I knew he cracked jokes even when he was serious, but it was hard to remember that when I didn't have his thoughts to back me up.

"I know it's serious, killer," he said. "Maybe the most serious thing I've ever done."

We both jerked when his phone rang, in his pocket. James pulled out it and frowned at the screen. "It's Sullivan."

He flipped it open and leaned close to me so that the phone was sandwiched between his ear and mine. "Yeah?"

James?

"Why does everyone ask that?" demanded James. "Yes, its me.

Sullivan's voice sounded far away. "Your voice sounds different on the phone. Is she still there?"

"Of course she is."

"Look. I'm sorry I'm taking so long to get up there. There's-damn. Hold on." A pause. "Sorry. Look, can you drive her into town? To the deli there? Get a table outside. One of the iron ones. Can she take that?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Okay. I'll see you there in, like, fifteen minutes." Sullivan hesitated again. "James--" Another pause, and then a sigh.

"James, don't tell any of the other students. Have you seen

Deirdre Monaghan lately?"

James

All around us, the birds sang and cars whirred past the deli and the day was beautiful.

I set my hands on the table, very carefully, and worried Nuala's stone between my fingers. I wanted so badly to write guilt on my skin that I could almost taste the letters in my mouth.

Bitter.

"It wasn't fair of Sullivan to tell you that," Nuala said. She glared at the waitress, who'd returned with our glasses of water.

"Yeah, fine, they're fine. Leave them there!" The last bit was addressed at the waitress, who was trying to catch my eye while she rearranged the water glasses on the table. "Seriously.

We're waiting for someone. Just--" Nuala made some gesture with her fingers like she was flicking water off them.

The waitress left.

I tried to imagine the last thing I'd said to Dee. Was it something horribly cruel? I hadn't seen her since I'd let Nuala just rip into her--but I couldn't remember how awful I'd been.

Somehow I seemed to remember that I'd said something awful.

Somehow her disappearance was my fault.

"Piper," snapped Nuala. "He didn't say there was anything wrong. He just asked you if you'd seen her. Obsessing doesn't do any good." She opened her mouth like she was going say something else, but instead leaned her chair back toward the table behind her and grabbed a pen that had been left with the check. She handed it to me. "Just do it."

Another thing to feel guilty about. My skin was almost bare of ink now, and here I was regressing.

She pressed the pen into my fingers. "Unless you want me to write something for you."

I felt relieved the second I pushed the tip of the pen to the back of my hand. I scratched river black onto my skin, clicked the pen, and sighed.

"What the hell does that mean?" Nuala asked.

I didn't know. It just felt good to get it out.

Nuala grabbed my pinky finger and pinched it. "I can't read your thoughts anymore. You have to talk to me."

"I don't know what it means," I said. "I didn't know what half the stuff on my hands meant when I met you."

She frowned at me but looked up as a harried-looking Sullivan stepped out of the deli onto the patio, meeting the waitress in the door. He leaned over and said something to her before joining us at the table.

He opened his mouth, but I said first, "Have they found Dee yet?"

Sullivan shook his head. "No." He fidgeted with his chair until he was happy with its distance from the table's edge. "But please don't obsess about it, James. I only told you because I knew she was a friend of yours and thought you might have heard from her. I was really hoping that you were going to tell me she'd called you. There are a thousand innocuous places she could be."

Nuala gave me a meaningful look, but what meaning, I couldn't tell.

"And a thousand not innocuous places," I countered.

"Which is true for any of us." Sullivan opened the menu but didn't look at it. "There are people looking for her, and we're only working on guesses. Right now my attention is entirely absorbed by the definite problem right in front of me.

"Me," Nuala said. When Sullivan looked at her, she added, "I get it. You hate me. Nothing personal."

Sullivan made a face. "Ehh. I don't hate you. I just don't trust you. And--it's not even you personally. I've just never met a harmless member of your race."

"You still haven't," Nuala said, with a smile like a growl. "But I would never hurt James."

He looked at me. "Anything to add, James?"

I shrugged. "I believe her. I told you before. We haven't made a deal. She hasn't taken anything from me." And she was an awesome kisser and she knew more about me than anyone else in the world. I left that part out.

Sullivan made a frown that put a wrinkle between his eyebrows, and then used two fingers to rub it, as if he was selfconscious of it. "You're going to give me an ulcer. Can you imagine how much easier life would've been for you if you'd just gone to your classes, learned to play the piano, and graduated with more Latin epithets after your name than

Cicero? You know, instead of befriending a homicidal faerie whose modus operandi is to suck the life from her victims? Can you try to see what it is that I'm struggling with here?"

"Waitress," Nuala warned in a mild voice.

We all shut up as the waitress appeared and asked for our orders. None of us had looked at our menus and Nuala didn't know what food tasted like anyway, so I just said, "Roast beef and chips for all of us."

"No mayonnaise for me," Sullivan said somberly, turning his iron ring around and around on his finger.

"Will I like chips?" Nuala asked me.

"Everyone likes chips. Even people who say they don't like chips like chips," I said.

Sullivan nodded. "That's true."

The waitress gave us a funny look and took the menus. After she'd gone, I said, "I want to know why Nuala has to eat now."

"Why are you looking at me?" Sullivan asked. Both of us were.

"Because I get this feeling that you are the most informed about faeries at this table," I said. "Which is pretty incredible, considering present company."

He sighed. "I spent seven years with Them, so I should be pretty informed. I was a consort to one of the queen's ladies."

There were plenty of faeries he could've meant, but somehow I only thought of one. Nuala and I were apparently on the same wavelength, because she said, "Eleanor."

"I don't want to know how you know," Sullivan said. "Tell me it's not because you saw me with her."

"No," Nuala replied. "Why, were you besotted?"

Sullivan rubbed harder at the wrinkle between his eyebrows.

He looked at me. "Anyway, in seven years you can learn a lot, if you're paying attention. I found out when I was with Eleanor that nobody was looking at me. So I got to pretty much look where I wanted to. And I didn't like what I saw. Them using humans to kill other humans. Black magic. Rituals that would make your toes curl. Humans losing themselves to just... just... soulless pleasure. Nothing had any meaning there, for me. No time. No consequence. No... the worst was what They did with human children."

He didn't shudder, exactly. He just sort of half-closed his eyes and looked away for a moment. Then he looked back at me, at my arm. "You have a mosquito on your arm."

I slapped in the direction of his gaze and checked my hand.

Nothing.

Sullivan's voice was tired. "That's what we are to Them, to the court fey--that's what I found out. We're not an equal race. Our suffering means nothing to Eleanor and the rest of them. We're nothing at all."

Nuala said, "The court fey, maybe. Not us solitary fey. Not me."

Sullivan raised an eyebrow. "Really? You didn't want to make a deal with James at all? You were just filled with the milk and honey of friendship?"

I wanted to defend her, even though I knew he was right. I'd been just another mark to Nuala when we met. But I was just as guilty, wasn't I? Because she'd only been another faerie to me.

Nuala just looked at him, lips jutted a little.

"Look," I said. "I realize that both of you could happily strangle each other across the table, but I don't think that's the most effective use of our time, and frankly, I don't think I have enough money to tip the waitress for that kind of clean-up. And look, here's lunch. Let's eat that instead of each other."

After the waitress had left the sandwiches and we'd rotated them looking for the one without mayo on it, I asked again, "So why does she need to eat now? If it's not because she's not taking anything from me--which is what you said before--then what is it?"

Sullivan picked the lettuce out of his sandwich with an unconsciously curled lip. "I'm just telling you that she ought to be fading--getting more invisible--if she's not taking anything from you. And if anything, she looks even less... ethereal than she did when I last saw her." Nuala looked about to protest, so he added quickly, "I saw your sister fading between victims, once."

Nuala shut up. She didn't just shut up, she went totally quiet.

Like a total absence of sound, movement, blinking, breathing.

She was a statue. And then she just said, real quiet, "My sister?"

"You didn't know you had--well, I guess you wouldn't, would you?" Sullivan worried the tomatoes out of his sandwich and laid them in a careful pile that didn't touch the lettuce. "Of course, she didn't look like you when I saw her--since you can look like anything. But she was a leanan sidhe as well. I wouldn't have thought you were related if Eleanor hadn't told me. Same father. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."

The last bit seemed a little incongruous with his previous attitude toward her. Maybe her struck silence had softened him.

"There are two of us?"

"Both called by the same names," Sullivan said. He looked at her as if this was supposed to mean something to her.

"Overhills. As in, the opposite of under hill. As in, human. It wasn't a nice term."

"Wait," I said. "So They called Nuala human?"

I didn't think I'd put any hopefulness in my voice, but Sullivan said quickly, "Not literally. Only because the leanan sidhe spent so much time with humans and often looked like them. Even picked up human habits."

I thought of Nuala sitting in the movie theater, imagining herself as a director. Very human.

I realized that Sullivan was staring at Nuala and turned to look at her. She had her eyes closed and one of her more wickedly pleased smiles on her face. In her hand was a half-eaten chip.

"I told you you'd like chips," I told her.

Nuala opened her eyes. "I could survive on nothing but diem."

"You'd be four hundred pounds in no time." Sullivan swallowed a bite of sandwich. "I've never seen one of Them eating human food. Well, there are stories of some of the diminutive sorts eating beans and things like that, though I've never seen it. But-when did you start eating human food? Do you remember the first time?"

The memory of sucking a grain of rice off Nuala's lip made my stomach kind of twist.

"James gave me some of his rice. A few days ago."

Sullivan narrowed his eyes and ate several more bites of sandwich to aid his thought process. "What if it's a reverse of what happens to humans in Faerie? It's pretty well known that if you eat food offered to you in Faerie, you'll be trapped there forever. I've never heard the reverse said for faeries and human food, but I can't think of many situations where a faerie would be in the position to accept food from a human anyway. Except, of course, for the lovely, ulcer-causing scenario you two have developed for me."

"I can't become human," Nuala said. Her voice was fierce, either with anger or despair.

Sullivan held up a defensive hand. "I didn't say that. But you have a dual nature anyway. Maybe you're just swaying toward one or the other. James."

I blinked, realizing he was addressing me. "What?"

"Paul already told us he hears Cernunnos every evening. You remained tactfully silent on the subject but I had my suspicions."

I put my sandwich down. "You totally can't give me grief for this one. I haven't made any deals or talked to Cernunnos or anything that you can possibly construe as detrimental to my health or anyone else's."

"Easy, easy. I just thought that if you heard or saw him, you could point your new friend here in his direction. I don't know what his nature is, but maybe he knows more about her situation." Sullivan glanced at the cars going by. "Eleanor hinted at a connection between Cernunnos and the leanan sidhe sisters."

"What if the connection is like the one between me and this sandwich?" I asked. "I don't really feel like sending

Nuala out to meet the king of the dead if she's losing all her bad-ass supernatural capabilities for one reason or another. It's not like she can just kick him in the nuts if things start to go badly."

Sullivan shrugged. "It's my best suggestion. "What else is there?

You said it was her sixteenth year, didn't you? So... for all we know she'll revert back to normal after she burns."

"If I burn," Nuala said. She looked down at her plate.

"What?" I demanded.

"Maybe I don't want to," she said.

There was silence at the table. Sullivan broke it, gently. "Nuala."

It was the first time he'd actually said her name. "I saw your sister burn, while I was in Faerie. She had to. I know you don't want to--it's horrible that you have to--but you'll die otherwise."

Nuala didn't look up from her plate. "Maybe I'd rather that than come back the way I was before." She balled her napkin up and put it on the table. "I think I have to go the bathroom." She flashed a fake smile at me. "First time for everything, right?"

She pushed away from the table and disappeared into the deli.

Sullivan sighed and pushed on one of his eyes with two fingers.

"This is a bit of bad work, James. Her sister is nowhere near as human as her. She didn't even seem to feel it when she was burning. Nuala--" He did the same eyes-half-shut gesture he'd done before, the almost cringe. "It'll be like burning a human alive."

I got out my worry stone and worried the hell out of it with my fingers. I concentrated on the shape of the circle my thumb made as it swiped the stone.

"You were right, okay? That's what I'm trying to say," Sullivan said. "She isn't like the others. You were still a complete idiot for not running like hell from her, but she is different."

"I'm going with her to see Cernunnos," I said. Sullivan opened his mouth. "You know you can't stop me. I know it's what you would do. Tell me how to make it safer. If there's anything."

"Jesus Christ," he said. "As your teacher and dorm resident advisor, I'm supposed to be keeping you out of trouble, not getting you into it."

"It was your idea. Some little part of you must've wanted me to go, or you wouldn't have said it in front of me."

"Don't try reverse psychology on me," Sullivan said. He smashed his fingers into the wrinkle between his eyes. "I would go with you, but I don't hear him this year. You don't go to him unless he calls you. That would be... insane. Shit, James. I don't know. "Wear red. Put salt in your pockets. That's always good advice."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this from a teacher," I said.

"I can't believe I'm a teacher telling you this."

I wrote red and salt on my hand just as Nuala came out of the deli. Whatever emotion she'd felt before she went in was gone, replaced by a certain fierceness in her eyes.

"Ready to go?" I asked.

If Nuala had still been able to read my thoughts, she would've killed me. Because I thought, as we waded through the long grass together, that she looked very human, despite her insistence that she couldn't become one. While we were in town, I'd bought her a sweater and some jeans (both of which she hated since they covered most of her skin--which was the idea) so that she wouldn't freeze to death while we were traversing the hills this evening.

And it wasn't like it was a bad thing that she looked human. It made the fact that I was holding her hand and going out to meet the king of the dead a little less scary. And it made the idea that maybe, just maybe, she'd remember me after

Halloween and we might have a future beyond making out in the dorm lobby just a little more plausible.

"It's cold as hell out here," Nuala snapped.

"It's almost like I knew what I was talking about when I said you were going to need a sweater," I told her.

"Shut up," she said. She was a dull brown silhouette against the staggering pink sky. Some of the trees at the base of the hills had already lost their leaves, and their bare black branches made it look like it was already winter. "You're scaring away the dead people. Do you hear the thorn king yet, or what?"

I didn't. I had spent so many nights pretending that I didn't that

I wondered if I still could. It seemed like it was late enough that he should be out here, doing his antlered thing, but the hills were silent. Except for us crashing through the tall grass. During the day, the sound of the grass had seemed minimal, masked by the gusts of wind, but now, with the wind reduced to a silent, icy breeze, our crashing progress sounded like a bunch of elephants. "Big fat nothing so far. Let's go out further, though, to where I saw him before."

"Walk more quietly," Nuala hissed.

"There isn't a way to walk more quietly. Anyway, you're talking-that's louder than us just walking."

She jerked at my hand. "Nothing in the world can be louder than you walking right now."

"Except for your strident voice, dear," I countered. "Like a harpy, its shr-oof."