I turned my head to see her a few feet away, just as I felt Luke step behind me, wrapping his arms protectively around my body. His voice was amiable, despite his firm grip around me. “Not that I don’t trust you, Una.”
Una smiled and spun in the grass. “Aw, Brendan, look how he holds her.”
Brendan, unsmiling, studied us. “So this is Deirdre, is it? I’ve heard rumors whispered around Tir na Nog, about Luke Dillon and his disobedience. How the man who has no love for anyone now suffers in its grasp.”
Luke’s voice was pensive. “It’s true.”
Brendan’s face mirrored Luke’s. “Defiance is a trait we prize, but I do not think it’s one that will serve you. The Queen is a jealous monarch.” He looked at me. “Do you know what fate awaits him for sparing your life?”
“She didn’t ask me to,” Luke snapped.
Una came close, seeming to be less affected by the iron than her companion. Her eyes locked on mine and I felt disconcerted, falling into their ageless green depths. Then wrinkles formed around them as she grinned and asked, “Do you love him?”
Luke went very still behind me. There were a million reasons why I should’ve said no, but there was only one answer that was true, even though it seemed completely irrational, even to me.
I nodded.
Luke let out a deep breath.
In the thorn trees, face half-lit by the fading sunlight, Brendan’s eyebrows knitted. “How interesting. It’s very difficult to understand humans—even you, Luke Dillon, and you so like us.”
Una swirled back to Brendan, running her hands around his chest and back as she circled him. “Didn’t you hear their music, my friend? Have you ever heard humans make music like that before? That must be what love is.”
Behind me, Luke’s voice was sympathetic. “It’s just what it sounds like.”
“A symptom,” Brendan said, as if love were a disease only humans could catch. But there was something like fondness or respect in his voice. “You’re both fools.”
I stepped out of Luke’s hold. “Tell me why. Please, can you tell me about Luke, since he can’t?” I felt three pairs of surprised eyes on me, but I pressed on. “I want to know who controls him, and what keeps him from doing whatever he wants to do. I know you must know.” I remembered that faeries liked politeness, and added, “Please.”
Una looked at Brendan, her face eternally smiling. “Oh, Brendan, do.” She said Brendan with a bit of sarcasm, mocking the names Luke had given them. “They might stand a chance if she knows. And that would please me.”
Brendan frowned petulantly in her direction. “I’ve not seen anything please you in four hundred years.”
“This will. Look at Luke Dillon, how he stands beside her though the Queen—”
“Shut up,” Brendan said, so modern that I almost laughed. “Don’t give it away for nothing.” He regarded me. “What will you give me if I tell you the story?”
Una laughed and spun away from Brendan, dancing in the grass again to get a closer look at us.
I was taken aback. I didn’t know what a faerie would be interested in, but I doubted it would be anything I’d be willing to give. Luke’s lips brushed my ear as he whispered, “A tune.”
“Cheater,” Una said reproachfully.
“Shut up.” Brendan turned toward her, and Una smiled brightly at his annoyance. “Do you never shut up?”
I addressed him. “I’ll give you a song. Not just any song. I wrote it myself.”
Brendan pretended to consider, but even in his strangeness, I could see that he was sold. “Fair. Begin.”
I looked to Luke, and he nodded. I sat at the harp, fingers trembling a bit with nerves that I didn’t otherwise feel, and played the most difficult song I had ever written—fast, complex, and beautiful, and I played it perfectly because it had to be. When I was done, I got back to my feet and looked at Brendan, waiting.
“I am envious,” he said. His face looked like he really meant it, and I remembered Luke saying that some of Them would kill for the prize of a voice. I believed it.
“You’re also tall,” laughed Una, and she whirled around the rotunda and back to his side. “Neither is likely to change.”
Brendan ignored her and spoke to me, though he looked at Luke. “Shall I tell you the entire story?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “About a brilliant young man, the only son of a king who refused to kill his father’s enemies on the battlefield? Whose soul wandered while he dreamt? Who played music to make the faeries envious? Who had golden hair and a face to tempt the Faerie Queen?”
“Very poetic,” Luke growled.
Brendan smiled for the first time. “Very well. How about a young human named Luke Dillon who walked out into the solstice when he shouldn’t have, and was stolen by the thing that calls herself the Faerie Queen? ‘Come hither,’ she told him—”
“‘And kiss me!’” shrieked Una. “‘Love me! I shrivel in my self-made prison!’”
“Shut up,” Brendan said. “She demanded he court her, and he denied her as no one ever had.” Una swept up her skin drum from the ground and played an ominous drum roll with the palm of her hand. Brendan spoke over her. “And so, inspired by his soul’s dreamy wandering, she ripped it from him and caged it far from his body.”
In my head, I saw the memory of it; of the hand clutching the back of Luke’s neck and him falling to his knees, the breath from his mouth forming a dove.
“And she bade the man who wouldn’t kill to be her assassin, because it pleased her to watch him suffer. And kill he would, or she would hand over his caged soul to the minions of hell. And so he killed. All the faeries in creation knew his legend; how she used him to overcome our intolerance of iron; how her enemies fell under his knife.”
Luke looked away, face pained.
Brendan continued, taking pleasure in his story-telling. “He begged her to release him, but our vicious Queen has no mercy and no forgiveness, and she remembered his refusal of her as vividly as on the day that it happened, so she denied him. And so he killed for her. He was the Queen’s hound; he hunted as no faerie has ever hunted—never dying, but never living, either, until the killing destroyed him and he turned on himself. But would the she-witch let her toy die, especially a death he’d chosen for himself?”
“Never!” cried Una. Luke closed his eyes.
Brendan shot her a look. “There are whispers—that the Queen used her only daughter in a dark rite to resurrect her favored assassin. However it was accomplished, he didn’t die. And he killed again and again for her, while his soul languished in a far-away cage. Until he was set upon a girl who shared the Queen’s name—only this Deirdre he loved, and Luke Dillon did not kill her.”
Brendan went silent.
“Yet,” Una added. She looked at Luke’s pants leg, as if she could see the dagger underneath the fabric.
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to take Luke’s hand, but he stood a few feet from me, his arms clasped around himself, looking out toward where the sun lay on the edge of the trees. “You’re willing to risk going to hell for me?”
“There’s no ‘risking’ about it,” Brendan answered for him. “The Queen will not forgive this betrayal.”
Luke’s voice was flat. “I don’t care.”
Una sighed. “Is he not noble?”
Brendan took a step out of the thorns, far enough that his face was again in the light. “You don’t care only because you don’t know hell. I’ve—”
Luke turned toward him and snarled, “Don’t tell me that. I’ve lived in hell for the past thousand years. I spent a thousand years wishing I’d never been born.” He thrust a finger toward me. “She’s the only thing that’s made my life worth living and if that’s all I get, a few months with her—a few days, it’s more than I’ve ever hoped for. Do you really think God would forgive me for the blood on my hands, even if my soul was free? I’m going to hell no matter what happens. Let me have my pathetic hopeless love while I can. Just—let me pretend it will turn out all right.”
I put my hand to my face, covering my tears.
Una, outside the rotunda, watched the tears sliding through my fingers with interest. “May I have one?”
I bit my lip and looked at her. “What will you give me for it?” I managed to say.
“A favor,” Una said immediately. “And you need all of those you can get.”
I wiped my face and held my arm out of the rotunda. A tear dripped from my fingertip, and Una, only inches away, caught it in her outstretched palm. Then she darted away to the thorns, smiling as ever. I looked away from her to Luke, who was watching me with a hollow expression.
“Kiss me,” I told him. When he didn’t move, I begged, “Please.”
He stepped closer and crushed me against him, face buried in my neck. I held him tightly, and we stood motionless for a long minute. Then he lifted his face to mine and kissed me softly on the lips; I tasted blood from where he had bitten his lip earlier.
“Deirdre?”
We broke apart from each other at the voice, and I blinked in the twilight, trying to make out the form. Brendan and Una were nowhere to be seen. Anyway, this newcomer was twice as large as either of them.
“Mrs. Warshaw?”
“Yes! What are you doing here?” She peered at us, clearly puzzled.
Feeling oddly disconcerted, pulled so abruptly back into the real world, I gestured feebly toward the harp. “For the party.”
Mrs. Warshaw put a hand to her mouth. “Have you been here since seven thirty?! My goodness, Deirdre. The party is next week!”
Oh.
I pulled myself together. “My mother told me it was tonight! The tables—?”
“Oh, dear, no! We had a wedding reception last night. The party’s not until next week. My goodness. Were you waiting all this time? With— ?”
“Luke,” I said, and immediately added, “My boyfriend.” My supernatural, doomed, gorgeous, killer boyfriend.
“Well—come inside and have something to eat, anyway. Dear me, I can’t believe you’ve been waiting all this time. We just got back from D.C. and heard voices out back.”
“That’s kind of you,” I said, “but we really ought to go. My grandmother’s in the hospital; that’s why my mom got the date wrong—”
And then Mrs. Warshaw blustered into sympathy and hurried us both through the opulent house, pressing a bag of cookies made by their private chef (private chef!) into my hands and begging us to have Mom call with news before walking us out to Bucephalus. We climbed into the darkness of the car and sat for a long moment in silence.
Luke sighed deeply.
“Well.” I looked at him. “I kinda liked Una.”
Luke smiled wryly. “She liked you, too.”
As we drove back from the party that wasn’t, I stared out the window at the night and thought about how this night looked like every other summer night I’d ever lived and how it wasn’t like any of them. Halos of white-green light, buzzing with insects, surrounded the streetlights on the main drag through town, illuminating the quiet, empty sidewalks. In this place, life shut down after the sun went down. It felt like Luke and I were the only ones awake in a town of sleepers.