She was getting sick of listening to Corny's sighs.
She bet that Roiben's name would be a fair price. After all, this thing was probably not part of any court, being tied to the stream here. She bet that he would be counted as a fair price indeed. And it wouldn't change the fact that she knew the name too.
It would be a fine revenge on him for killing Gristle.
But then, she imagined that the kelpie would just order him to bring people for it to drown. And he would do it.
What else was there to bargain with that a kelpie might like?
She thought about the dolls in her room, but all she could picture was a little girl following a trail of them to the shore of the stream. Ditto with any musical instrument. She had to think about something that the kelpie could enjoy alone… clothing? Food?
Then she thought of it… a companion. A companion that it could never drown. Something that it could talk to and admire. The merry-go-round horse.
"Oh, Corny," Kaye said, "I know just the thing."
Getting back in the car was the last thing that Kaye wanted to do, but she did, sliding into the backseat, pressing her shirt over her mouth as though the fabric could filter the iron out of the air.
"You know where you're going, right?" she asked, wondering if he could understand the words, muffled as they were by the cloth.
"Yeah."
She let her head slide down to the plastic seat, one wing twitched just out of her vision, sending scattered luminescent rainbows through the thin membrane to dance on her leg under each passed light. Everything narrowed to those rainbows. There was no Corny in the front seat, no scratchy radio song, no passing cars, no houses, no malls, no real things to protect her from the glittering patterns on her grass-green thighs.
There were no words for what she felt, no sounds, nothing. There was no word for what she was, no explanation that would keep back the numb, dumb dark. She felt the dizziness threaten to overwhelm her.
"Can you please open your window?" she asked. "I can't breathe."
"What's wrong with yours?"
She crouched on the edge of the seat and reached her hands into the front of the car, palms up like a supplicant. "Every time I touch the handle, it burns. Look." She held her hand out to him, and he could see that part of it was flushed. Her fingers wiggled. "That's from the door handle."
"Shit." Corny took a breath, but he could not seem to let it go. He rolled down his window.
The salt in the air cleaned her throat with each lungful from the open window, but it wasn't enough to battle the rising nausea. "I have to get out of this car."
"We're almost there." Corny stopped at the red light.
Corny parked the car outside the big building. It was strange to see it in the daytime. The overcast sky made the outside of the building look even dingier.
"Are you okay?" Corny asked, and turned his head to see her in the backseat.
Kaye shook her head. She was going to vomit, right there, right on top of the empty soda cans and mashed fast-food boxes. She put her hand in the pocket of the sweatshirt and opened the door.
"Kaye! What are you doing?"
Kaye half fell, half crawled onto the asphalt of the parking lot and dragged herself to the edge of the grass before she started vomiting. There was little in her stomach, and most of what she coughed up was stomach acid and spittle.
"Jesus!" Corny crouched down next to her.
"I'm okay," Kaye said, rising dizzily to her feet. "It's all the metal."
He nodded, looking back at the car and then looking around skeptically. "Maybe we should forget about this."
Kaye took a deep breath. "No. Come on."
She ran around the back, following the path she had walked with Janet. "Give me your jacket," she said. "There's glass."
Everything was different in daylight.