Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception

“Go out,” I whispered. But the fire kept burning, and the dove opened its beak and stared at the sky, eyes frozen and empty with the pain. I had to concentrate, to focus on the problem. What made fire go out? Lack of oxygen, right? I imagined the air sucking away from the flames, fleeing from the heat, leaving nothing but emptiness for the fire to feed on.

The fire flickered and diminished on one of the wings, and the ache in my own heart flickered in response.

“No,” gasped Luke, and I opened my eyes to see him shaking his head. “No, don’t do it. Just leave me alone.”

“Why?”

“She’ll know.” Beneath my hand, his heartbeat crashed convulsively. “She’ll—know what you can do. She’s—only —guessing—now.”

I could see the pain written on every muscle in his body. “I can’t just watch you like this.”

“I—lied to her. Told her you—weren’t—a threat.” He turned his face away, bitten lip bleeding. “Please—Dee—don’t.”

I didn’t know what to do. I was so afraid that he would die there on the kitchen floor, lying next to the pot lid on the tile. If he could die; after seeing the knife blade stuck in his chest, I wasn’t so sure he could. But I knew he could feel pain, and watching him writhing on the floor was harder for me to bear than physical pain of my own.

I lay down on the cold tile beside him and curled my body next to his, wrapping my arms around his shuddering muscles and burying my face in his neck. And lying like that, together, him growing hotter and hotter and me squeezing tighter and tighter, I waited until he stopped shivering and finally lay still, breathing hard. Knowing, the whole time, that I could have stopped it. I think it was the hardest decision I had ever made.

Luke opened his eyes and lay a hand on my cheek, his words barely loud enough to be heard, “Thank you.”

Maybe he hadn’t even said it out loud.

fifteen

I didn’t want to go to the party. It had seemed pointless to go in light of Granna’s condition; now, after watching Luke tortured in the kitchen, it seemed downright idiotic. I had a horrible sense that time was precious and that entertaining a bunch of rich lawyers was a waste of it.

“Life has to go on,” Luke said when I told him I wanted to blow the party off. “You can’t just stop. What else would you do?”

Spend it with you. Lie on my bed with you and memorize your smell and the sound of your voice so no one could ever take it away from me.

“Dee.” He ran a hand down my arm, twining his fingers in mine. “You’ve got to go on as normal. If you don’t—They’ll come in to finish my job for me.”

So we packed my harp in the car and went on our way to the Warshaws. As Luke had promised earlier, the sky was clear and fresh, the only signs of the storm already disappearing behind the trees. While Luke drove, lost in his thoughts, I slouched in the passenger seat and typed an epic text message to James—confessing all, like we always used to do. For as long as we’d been friends, we’d relied on the written (well, typed) word to convey thoughts that seemed too embarrassing or serious to talk about in person. I remembered getting a long text from James about guardian angels and whether or not everyone had one, and another one about whether I thought being an introvert was a mental illness, and I remembered sending a long one about how I thought I’d never fit in and another about music as a possible time-traveling device—so long that it took an hour to punch in all the letters on the cumbersome keypad. This one was a bit shorter than that.

james, i should’ve been honest with u from the start, but i was afraid of hurting ur feelings or ruining our friendship. i’ve been spending a lot of time w luke & i think i’m falling in love w him. i know it’s crazy and too soon but i can’t help it. somehow he’s in this faerie thing, but i don’t know how yet. i read his mind that’s one of the new freaky things i can do i guess & i found out he’d killed a lot of people. i know this will sound messed up but i think he was forced to do it. he’s supposed to kill me too but he won’t & now i’m afraid whoever’s behind it is going to do something awful to him. i don’t know what to do. maybe i’m supposed to save him. plz dont be angry w me i need ur help.

I sighed and deleted the message without sending it. Closing the phone, I turned toward Luke. “What are you thinking about?”

“Whether they’ll write my life story as a tragedy or an epic fantasy.” He had pulled himself out of his thoughts with effort, and it seemed he’d lightened them a lot for my benefit.

I laughed. “And whether or not they’ll get a cute guy to play your part?”

“No, I was wondering if it was going to be a kiss at the end, or sad music and a sweeping camera shot over the fields I once roamed freely.” He glanced over and brushed the top of my hand with his fingers before looking back to the road. “I’m hoping for the kiss, but expecting the sweeping camera shot.”

I frowned. “Can you tell me who did that to you, back in the kitchen?”

Luke paused, as if trying out the idea. “Someone … who started out like you.”

“Oh, that’s specific.”

“I can’t be specific.”

I squinted in the dying evening light and tried to think of what I was like. “Shy? Ruled by an iron-fisted mother? Musical?”

Luke groaned at all of my choices. “Think basic.”

“Female? Human?”

“Ding! Give the girl a prize!” Squinting in the evening light, he put on a pair of sunglasses; they made him look almost unbearably cool. It really wasn’t fair that he had so many Deirdre-felling weapons in his arsenal. “So theoretically, if she’s like you, I can talk about you and you’ll learn about her and I won’t get in trouble.”

“That makes my head hurt, but I think I’m with you.”

Luke warmed to the idea. “Okay. Let’s talk about your gift. It can’t change who you are. It’s like—” he struggled for the words. “It’s like being drunk. Getting sloshed doesn’t change who you are—it just takes away all your inhibitions. It makes you more you. So if you’ve got a nasty streak, you’re a mean drunk. If you’re a nice person, you’re one of those amiable drunks. You’re a crazy talented girl with an amazing force of will, and this gift just takes that and explodes it.”

“You’ve already won me. You don’t have to compliment me.”

Luke made a vague motion. “It just comes naturally to me. I can’t seem to stop. You have an amazingly cute ponytail; it makes me want to touch it. See, that one just slipped out.”

“If you make me blush, I am going to hit you.” I was thrown off-balance by his sudden lightness of mood—this was the Luke who had flirted with me at the competition, not the Luke shedding tears of blood in a tomb or the Luke lost in memories in the kitchen. I’d missed him.

He glanced over at me and rewarded me with a brief, shining smile.

I bit my lip and blushed anyway. “So, go on with the gift bit. I assume that this someone else who might be a lot like me, but isn’t, wasn’t a nice person who became an über-nice person after they found out about their gift.” My emphasis on the word “gift” was decidedly sarcastic; the jury was still out on whether or not I agreed with Luke’s terminology.

“No. Someone who might be like you and might have something to do with my condition was a nasty, paranoid-schizo girl who loved telling people what to do. And when she grew into her gift, she was a nasty, paranoid-schizo girl who told people what to do and hurt them if they didn’t do it. A lot of people.”

I contemplated this. “And where do you come into it?”

“I think that might be where the hurting comes into it. If I try and tell you, I mean.” His glance toward the torc was almost imperceptible.

“Then where do I come into it?”

“The paranoid part.”

“She’s afraid of harpists?”

“Your brain, Dee. Use it. What were we just talking about?”

It dawned on me. “My telekinesis. That’s what you meant back in the kitchen, when you told her I wasn’t a threat.” I thought further, and burst out, “But that’s so stupid. If I hadn’t been messed with at the competition and had four-leaf clovers hurled at me by perv freaks, I would’ve never even known faeries existed. The only people I would’ve been a threat to would’ve been the ones between me and the bathroom when I got nervous.”

Luke grinned at me; I’d never seen him so cheerful. “That’s where the paranoid-schizo part comes in.”

“But I can’t be the only one like me—oh.” Suddenly, the pile of bodies in Luke’s memory was starting to make sense. “So, that’s why—oh.” All the overheard conversations were starting to make sense, too. “So, she makes you do it. Why you?”

Luke answered with another question. “Why not Eleanor?”

I saw Eleanor in my mind, her elegant fingers jerking back from me and the key around my neck. “The iron …Eleanor can’t touch it. But can’t the Queen touch it? She’s human.”

“Not quite, not anymore.”

I shook my head. “But I saw you—I saw how you felt about all this. How can she make you do it?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

I thought of Luke plunging the knife into his heart, trying to destroy himself. And of him sitting in the tomb, plaintively asking me if I would ever forgive him. Whatever it was that compelled him to kill those people must have been pretty awful. A horrible idea occurred to me. “You don’t go into a trance, do you? Does she do some sort of voodoo remote mind control?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m utterly conscious for the whole thing. But you came along and fascinated me, and that was the end of it all.” He grinned suddenly, surprising me. “I’m so damn giddy. Is this what love is?” Before I could answer, he braked hard. “Is this the place?”

I looked up. “Yep.”

The Warshaws’ enormous brick house sat well back from the road, its columned facade dominating the massive sloping lawn in front of it. Luke drove Bucephalus up the steep driveway, peering at the immaculate grounds. “I don’t see any cars. Are you sure we’re here at the right time?”

“It’s seven thirty, isn’t it?” A glance at his car’s clock confirmed the time. “This should be right. Mrs. Warshaw said the party started at eight but to just go around back and set up in the rotunda. I’ve been here before, for her daughter’s reception; they’re friends with Mom.”

“Your mother has friends?”

“Be nice!”

Luke grinned and parked the car near the house. He took my harp, I took his backpack, and then he came closer and clasped my hand tightly. Together, we walked around the back of the huge brick house, past bushes sculpted in spirals and a stone fountain in the shape of a little boy peeing into a puddle. I hoped that if I ever got rich and famous, I wouldn’t be so warped by my gobs of money that I thought little peeing boys counted as acceptable lawn ornaments.