The doors click unlocked as the truck rolled to a stop and she made a decision. Turning toward the open window, she smiled and said, "What makes you think I'm not one of the dangerous people?"
"I'm sure you're dangerous," said the driver, all smiles and insinuation.
"What if I told you that I just cut off some chick's hand?" Val said.
"What?" The blond guy looked at her in confusion.
"No, really. See?" Val pitched the mannequin hand through the window. It landed in the driver's lap.
The truck swerved and the blond yelped.
Val took off across the street, sprinting toward the restaurant.
"Fucking freak," the blond shouted as they pulled away from the curb, tires squealing.
Val's heart was beating double time as she walked into the safe heat of Dojo. Sitting down at a table with a sigh of relief, she ordered a huge bowl of steaming miso soup, cold sesame noodles dripping with peanut glaze, and ginger fried chicken that she ate with her fingers. When she was done, she thought she would fall asleep again, right at the table.
But she had one more delivery to do.
The street looked mostly unused and the sides of it were strewn with trash—broken glass, dried condoms, a ripped pair of pantyhose. Still, the smell of dew on the pavement, on the rust of the fence and the sparse grass, along with the empty streets made Williamsburg seem far away from Manhattan.
She ducked under a chain-link fence. The lot was empty, but she could see a ditch between the cracked concrete and the small hills. She stepped into it, using it like a path to walk out to where black rocks marked the space between the beach and the river.
Something was there. At first Val thought it was a lump of drying seaweed, a stray plastic bag, but as she got closer she realized it was a woman with green hair, lying facedown on the rocks, half in and half out of the water. Rushing over, Val saw the flies buzzing around the woman's torso and her tail drifting with the current, scales catching the streetlights to shine like silver.
It was the corpse of a mermaid.
Chapter 7
To these I turn, in these I trust—Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
—Siegfried Sassoon,
The Old Huntsman and Other Poems
The first time Val saw anything dead was at the mall by her dad's house when she was twelve. She'd tossed a penny into the fountain by the food court and wished for a pair of running shoes. A few minutes later, she reconsidered and rushed back to try and find her coin and do the wish over. But what she saw, floating on the still water, was the limp body of a sparrow. She'd reached in and lifted it up and water had poured out of its tiny beak like from a cup. It smelled awful, like meat left in the refrigerator to defrost and forgotten. She had stared at it a moment before she realized it was dead.
As Val ran through the streets and over the Manhattan Bridge, breath gusting into the air, she thought of the little drowned bird. Now she'd seen two dead things.
The magical doorway under the bridge opened the same way that it had last time, but as she stepped onto the dark landing, she saw she wasn't alone. Someone was heading down the steps, and it was only when the candle he cradled made the silver loops through his lip and nose glitter and the white of his eyes shine that she realized it was Luis. He looked as startled as she was and in that uncertain light, exhausted.
"Luis?" Val asked.
"I hoped that you were long gone." Luis's voice was soft and remorseless. "I hoped that you ran back to Mommy and Daddy in the suburbs. That's all you bridge-and-tunnel girls know—running away when things get tough. Run to the big bad city and then run home."
"Fuck you," Val said. "You know nothing about me."
"Well, you don't know shit about me, either. You think I've been a dick to you, but I've done you nothing but favors."
"What is your problem with me? You hated me the minute I showed up!"
"Any friend of Lolli's is going to stir shit up, and that's just what you did. And here I am, getting interrogated by an angry troll because of you two bitches. What do you think my problem is?"
Anger made Val's face hot, even in the cold stairwell. "I think this: The only thing special about you is that you have the Sight. You talk shit about faeries, but you love that you're the one who can see them. That's why you're disgustingly jealous of anyone else that so much as talks to one."
Luis gaped at her as if he'd been slapped.
Words fell from Val's mouth before she even realized what she was about to say. "And I think something else, too. Rats might be able to chew their way through copper or whatever, but the only reason they survive is because there are bazillions of them. That's what's so special about rats—they fuck all the time and have a million rat babies."