Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie (Books of Faerie 2)

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 killingme 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.”