All I could think was, if he’d come earlier, we could’ve danced.
James
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 half-light 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.”