The Urban Fantasy Anthology (Peter S. Beagle) (Kitty Norville 1.50)

“Oh, Christ,” I said. When I didn’t add to that, he went on into the kitchen.

I don’t know what I believed. But after a while I realised that I hadn’t seen Lisa go by in a long time. And she didn’t know what I knew, or almost knew. So I crawled up off the floor and went looking for her.

Not in the front room, not in the kitchen, and if she was in the milling people who were still hanging out on State Street, I’d never find her anyway. I went out to the back steps, to see if she was in the parking lot.

Yes, sort of. They stood in the deep shadow where Orpheus’s back wall joined the jutting flank of the next building. Her red-gold hair was a dim cascade of lighter colour in the dark. The white streak in his was like a white bird, flying nowhere. And the pale skin of her face and arms, his pale face and white shirt, sorted out the rest of it for me. Lisa was so small and light-boned, he’d lifted her off her feet entirely. No work at all for him. Her arms were around his neck. One of his hands was closed over her shoulder—I could see his long fingers against her dark blouse—and the gesture was so intense, so hungry, that it seemed as if that one hand alone could consume her. I turned and went back into Orpheus, cold, frightened, and helpless.

Lisa didn’t come back until a little before closing, several hours later. I know; I was keeping watch. She darted in the back door and snatched her shoulder bag from the kitchen. Her eyes were the only colour in her face: grey, rimmed with red. “Lisa!” I called.

She stopped with her back to me. “What?”

I didn’t know how to start. Or finish. “It’s about Willy.”

“Then I don’t want to hear it.”

“But—”

“John, it’s none of your business. And it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

She shot me one miserable, intolerable look before she darted out the back door and was gone. She could look like that and tell me it was none of my business?

I’d helped Steve clean up and lock up, and pretended that I was going home. But at three in the morning I was sitting on the back steps, watching a newborn breeze ruffle a little heap of debris caught against the doorsill: a crushed paper cup, a bit of old newspaper, and one of the flyers for the march. When I looked up from it Willy was standing at the bottom of the steps.

“I thought you’d be back tonight,” I said.

“Maybe that’s why I came back. Because you thought it so hard.” He didn’t smile, but he was relaxed and cheerful. After making music with him almost every day for a month, I could tell. He dropped loose-limbed onto the bottom step and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“So. Have you told her? What you are?”

He looked over his shoulder at me with a sort of stunned disbelief. “Do you mean Lisa? Of course not.”

“Why not?” All my words sounded to me like little lead fishing weights hitting the water: plunk, plunk.

“Why should I? Either she’d believe me or she wouldn’t. Either one is about equally tedious.”

“Tedious.”

He smiled, that wicked, charming, conspiratorial smile. “John, you can’t think I care if Lisa believes in fairies.”

“What do you care about?”

“John…” he began, wary and a little irritable.

“Do you care about her?”

And for the second time, I saw it: his temper on a leash. “What the hell does it matter to you?” He leaned back on his elbows and exhaled loudly. “Oh, right. You want her for yourself.

But you’re too scared to do anything about it.”

That hurt. I said, a little too quickly, “It matters to me that she’s happy. I just want to know if she’s going to be happy with you.”

“No,” he snapped. “And whether she’s going to be happy without me is entirely her lookout. Rowan and Thorn, John, I’m tired of her. And if you’re not careful, I’ll be tired of you, too.”

I looked down at his scornful face, and remembered Lisa’s: pale, red-eyed. I described Willy Silver, aloud, with words my father had forbidden in his house.

He unfolded from the step, his eyes narrowed. “Explain to me, before I paint the back of the building with you. I’ve always been nice to you. Isn’t that enough?” He said “nice” through his teeth.

“Why are you nice to me?”