I scrambled away from him, back toward the center of the stage, thinking only that I needed more room to maneuver. Aodhan followed my progress with a mild smile on his freckled face. “I asked Luke if he’d share you after She had punished him for his disobedience. I’m pretty sure what he said was ‘yes.’”
“Asshole.”
Aodhan chewed his thumbnail and then jerked his hand toward the stage behind me. “Watch your step, lovely.”
I jerked to look behind me. Oh crap oh crap oh crap. There, lying in a pile of broken lumber jutted with nails and set debris painted an ugly green, was a shirtless body. Though I didn’t want to see more, I took a closer look at the dark, stained jeans, the smeared chest, James’ bruised face under a mop of hair. I swallowed vomit.
“I think he punctured a lung, poor thing,” said a bright, clear voice above me. “He stopped breathing just as I brought him in here.”
I looked up at Eleanor’s beautiful features. She gazed down benevolently at me. Blood was smeared all over her elegant white dress, and she examined a spattered nail before licking her finger clean. My world swayed.
“Oh,” she said, voice so lovely I wanted to cry, looking down at the pile of James. “There he goes again. He is a fighter, don’t you think, Aodhan?”
Beside me, James took a shuddering breath, and then, too far apart, another one.
“Bitch!” I burst out. I wished I knew a worse word.
Eleanor gave a lovely, perturbed frown and exchanged a look with Aodhan. “I always forget how angry they get.”
Rage boiled inside me, swelling and mixing with the night already in my heart. I felt as if my skin would burst with the enormity of my anger. Freckle Freak reached to touch me again, and I exploded upward, striking out with my hand and everything inside me. He literally blew across the stage and into the orchestra pit; I didn’t hear him moving, but I was sure he wasn’t dead.
Eleanor covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh. Ah ha. That was not very nice.” She shook her head at me. “Oh dear, that won’t please her at all. She’s going to stop all our fun early if you provoke her.”
Fun. I couldn’t even begin to speak. How could I reason with creatures who thought this was fun?
“Deirdre Monaghan,” Eleanor tried the words out; they sounded elegant in her mouth. “I’m sorry that you don’t seem to be enjoying this.”
“I’m not here to enjoy myself,” I muttered.
“Oh, right,” Eleanor laughed delicately and the fine hairs on my arm stood up, very slowly. “You’re here to rescue your friend from our clutches. And free Luke Dillon from Her clutches.” Her smile was winning. “I knew right when I saw you that you were a very ambitious girl.”
She stepped closer and ran a finger through the air next to my cheek, so close that I could almost feel her. “But I don’t think you’ve quite thought it through. Would you like me to help you wrap your mind around your—your conundrum?”
“Not really.”
Eleanor laughed as if I were very funny, and then she stepped into the spotlight. Holding her arms out, looking like a crucified beauty queen with the red stain on her dress, she said grandly, “All the world’s a stage. It seems a shame to waste this one, doesn’t it? Let’s put on a little production. Aodhan, get up, we need you.”
Aodhan, however, needed no prompting—he was already climbing the stairs to the stage. My explosive attack on him didn’t seem to have misplaced even one of his fashionably spiked hairs.
“Look now,” Eleanor said. “We even have props. Lights, please!” She clapped her hands. The sound resonated through the room, and small, twinkling lights like fireflies dropped from between her palms. She breathed on them, sending them whirling to the back corner of the stage.
My harp. I was unexpectedly floored by the appearance of it. They’d been in my house. They’d taken my harp. I imagined Delia smiling and opening the door for them.
“No play is complete without good props.” Eleanor held a hand out to me, gesturing for me to sit at the harp. “Will you play, Deirdre?”
I spoke through gritted teeth. “I’d rather watch.”
“Very well. I’ll be Deirdre.” She put her palm to her chest and I felt a gasp of energy pulled from me. And before me stood another Deirdre, but with Eleanor’s voice coming from it. “Aodhan, will you play the unfortunate and doomed Luke Dillon?”
“I’m too handsome for the part. But—” and he looked at me— “being Luke Dillon has its uses.” I knew enough to steel myself against the energy drain this time, but as Aodhan’s features melted into Luke’s, I saw James jerk on his pile of rubble.
Eleanor frowned, her pout achingly pretty even on my face. “Oh, now, that was selfish. You could spare it far more than him.” She cast her eyes around the stage. “And as you won’t play, and everyone else is out enjoying Solstice, I suppose we’ll just have the corpse play the piper.” She gestured casually toward James. “He’s doing a good job, anyway.”
She clapped her hands again. “Music, I think!” My harp began to play, of its own accord, my arrangement of “The Faerie Girl’s Lament.” Eleanor sang,
The sun shines through the window
And the sun shines through your hair
It seems like you’re beside me
But I know you’re not there.
You would sit beside this window
Run your fingers through my hair
You were always there beside me
But I know that you’re not there.
She paused on the stage and held her fingers to her chest. “Oh, dearest Luke, I love you so.”
Aodhan laughed derisively. It was so bizarre on Luke’s face that I looked away. “And I you, my lovely.”
“I would free you from your chains.”
Aodhan stepped closer to Eleanor. “And I would free you from your clothes.”
Eleanor smiled. “Truly, it is destiny, is it not? We will run away together.”
“We’ll do something together.” Aodhan reached for Eleanor’s hand, but she pulled it away and held it under her chin in a mockery of deep thought.
“But what of my rejected lover? The piper lies dying.” Eleanor wandered over to James’ body and looked down upon it, her sorrow almost convincing. “Ah, but I know. I’ll take him to a doctor for repair.”
“What God has made, let not Fey eviscerate,” Aodhan noted.
Eleanor reached toward James and began to lift one of his arms; the horrible gasp he made had me halfway across the stage toward him before Eleanor held up her hand to stop me. She dropped his arm back onto the rubble and turned sadly to Aodhan. “It’s no use, Luke, my love. The piper is beyond human help. Let’s leave him and run away.”
She rubbed her palms together as if working hand cream into them, and then worked them slowly apart. In between her fingers was now a specter of a dirty pigeon. “I have found your soul. I will free you.”
Aodhan stepped forward dramatically and thrust his chest forward. “Let’s get it on.”
Eleanor pressed the ghostly pigeon into Aodhan’s chest and began to sing again.
To the haunting tune of the harp
For the price I paid when you died that day
I paid that day with my heart
Fro and to in my dreams to you
With the breaking of my heart
Ne’er more again will I sing this song
Ne’er more will I hear the harp.
Under her fingers, Aodhan smiled large, and then his face turned to ash. With a crash, he hit the stage and closed his eyes. Eleanor pretended to wipe a tear away as she faced an imaginary audience. “Dear audience, you may find this turn of events … shocking. Why should my love lie dead when I have freed him? Oh, but you forget how old the gallowglass is. And how can a thousand-year-old boy live once he is whole again?”
She turned to me, and as she did, her face melted once more into her own. “Do you see what a fool’s errand you’ve come on now? He cannot be freed, no matter how noble your intentions. Either tonight or a thousand nights from now, his soul is going to hell. I have seen his life, and believe me, he has earned it.”
I stared, frozen, at Aodhan-turned-Luke lying on the stage. I couldn’t move until Aodhan stripped himself of Luke’s form and stood up again, watching my reaction with evident pleasure.
And it was then, when I thought I couldn’t get any lower, that I felt all sound and light sucked from my eyes and ears. The curtains dropped behind me, cascading to the ground in velvety piles. Then sound came roaring back into my ears and the light returned. The curtains trembled, rising.
The Queen stepped out from the velvet and thrust the curtains behind her, chin lifted high. There was no doubt as to her identity; she reeked of power and age, though her face was as young as mine. Delicate blond hair shone on either side of her cheeks, held flat on her head by a beaten gold circlet that bore an eerie resemblance to Luke’s torc. She was one of those beautiful girls that made you despise looking in a mirror, no matter how pleased you’d been with yourself before you’d met her. Then her eyelids flicked open and two ancient eyes stared back at me. I was repulsed; it was as if I’d peeked in a baby carriage and found a snake looking back at me.
Eleanor and Aodhan bowed low, their cheeks touching the stage.
The Queen’s eyes drifted over the scene: my harp, James in the rubble, me standing mere feet away from her.
“Why isn’t she dead yet?” To my surprise, her voice sounded weary, a bit reminiscent of Luke’s—maybe that was how a human body became after one thousand years.
Aodhan grinned at me. “We were just having a bit of sport.”
“There will be more sport when she is dead.” The Queen looked at me and said, disbelieving, “And you are Deirdre? I thought, when I saw you, I would understand why Luke Dillon wouldn’t do as he was told. But you’re—” she shrugged, obviously bemused. “You’re so ordinary.”
The words were so human that they at least gave me the courage to speak. “You were ordinary once yourself.”
The Queen looked at me incredulously. “You compare the value of your life to mine? You’re nothing. And I am everything. Is that why you won’t die? You thought you were worth something? Your story has been written a thousand times, and in every version, you and your lover die.”
She stepped toward me, power seeping from her, and I stumbled back from the sheer drowning force of it. Was it true? Was I living “The Faerie Girl’s Lament”?
Suddenly I felt a tug on my ankle, and a second later my leg was pulled out from under me, so fast that my breath abandoned me. In a blink, I was hanging upside down by an ankle, my iron key hanging precariously below my face. I jerked my hands upward toward the rope, but I was snared securely in the most obvious trap ever.
Aodhan’s laugh carried across the stage and he clapped his hands, ignoring the Queen’s dark expression. He strode over and stood face-to-face with me, his face right side up and mine upside down, the key hanging between us. “I thought you would never step into that.”
