Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie (Page 34)

And then

jerk

I was gone.

I materialized in a huff of crackling fall leaves, their edges cold and sharp on my skin, the October night frigid and still. I stood in a stand of night-black trees, but close by, the front lights of the dorms glowed softly.

Even after I smelled the bitter smell of thyme burning, it took me a moment to realize I’d been summoned. It wasn’t like it was something that happened every day. No one needed to summon me.

“What are you?” snapped a voice, close by.

I frowned, turning toward the voice and the scent. A human stood there, an old, ugly one, at least forty. She had a match in one of her hands, the end still smoking, and a still-glowing sprig of thyme in her other. For a moment I couldn’t think of what to say. I hadn’t been summoned by a human in years.

“Something dangerous,” I told her. She looked at my clothing with a raised eyebrow.

“You look human,” she said, contemptuously, dropping both the match and the thyme to the ground and stomping them into the crackly leaves of the forest floor with the heel of her leather boot.

I scowled at her. She had a four-leaf clover hanging at her neck, its stem tied to a string—this was how she could see faeries. I realized suddenly that I had seen her before, in the hallway outside the practice rooms. The sniffing woman. I retorted, “You look human too. Why did you summon me?”

“I didn’t need you in particular. I did a favor for your queen and I need some help with it now.”

She didn’t smell afraid, which irritated me. Humans were supposed to smell afraid. They also weren’t supposed to know that burning thyme summoned us or that four-leaf clovers let them see us. And most of all, they weren’t supposed to be standing there with one hand on their hip looking at me like well, so?

“I’m not a genie,” I said stiffly.

The woman shook her head at me. “If you were a genie, I’d be back in my car by now and on my way back to my hotel. Instead, we’re arguing about whether or not you are one. Are you going to help me or not? They said I was supposed to get rid of the mess afterwards.”

I was curious despite myself. Eleanor had humans doing favors for her and whatever the favors were, they left messes behind? I invested my voice, however, with the maximum amount of disinterest that I could muster. “Fine. Whatever. Show me.”

The human led me a few feet into the woods, and then she got a little white flashlight out of her purse and shone it at the ground.

There was a body. Somehow I’d known there was going to be one. I’d seen dead people, of course, but this was different.

It was a faerie. Not a beautiful one like me—in fact, quite the opposite. She was small and wizened, her white hair spread like straw over her green dress. One foot poked out of the bottom of the dress, toes webbed.

But she was like me, nonetheless, because she was a bean sidhe—a banshee. A solitary faerie with no one to speak for her, who lived alongside the humans, wailing to warn them of an impending death. And she was dead, flowers spread out all around her from her death throes. I had never seen a dead banshee before.

I thought of asking who killed her but I knew from a quick glance into the human’s head that it had been her. She was an idiot, like most humans, so it was easy to get to the memory of her tracking the banshee by the sound of her wail. I saw her withdraw an iron bar from her purse, and then just—struggle.

Eleanor had asked a human to kill one of us?

“Clean it up yourself,” I snapped. “I’m not a maggot.”

She nudged the webbed foot with the square toe of her boots, lip curled distastefully. “I’m not doing it. Can’t you just”—she made a vague hand gesture with a perfectly manicured hand—“magic it away?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had to get rid of a faerie body before.”

The human winced at the word faerie. “That’s not what the other one said, yesterday. He just said he’d take care of it, and when I looked back, it was gone.”

Wariness crept into my voice. “What was gone?”

“A bauchan. He didn’t have any problems getting rid of it. He just did his … thing.” Again, the stupid hand gesture. I would’ve done something nasty to her, just for the stupidity of the gesture, but if Eleanor protected her, there’d be hell to pay.

A bauchan. Another solitary faerie known for human contact. I was starting to get freaked out. It was one thing to burn every sixteen years—when I burned, I came back. I didn’t think I’d come back from an iron bar through my neck.

“I can’t help you. Summon someone else.” Before she could say anything else, I rushed away, halfway invisible, reaching out for the current of thoughts I felt coming from the dorms.

“Well, hell,” I heard her say, surrounded in a swirl of dry leaves at my disappearance. And then I was gone.

I fled to the warm, moving darkness of the dorm, and perched at the end of James’ bed. Across the room, Roundhead snored softly. I should’ve gone further away, so that I wasn’t the closest faerie if that killing human tried to summon a faerie again, but I didn’t want to be alone. The fact that I knew I didn’t want to be alone scared me more than not wanting to be alone.

Invisible, I crawled next to James. Instead of wrapping my arms around his shoulders or stroking his hair, like I would’ve if I was sending him a dream, I curled up against his chest, like I was a human girl that he loved. Like I was Dee, who didn’t deserve him, for all his fractured, self-involved ass**le-ness.

Behind me, James shivered, his body warning him again of my strangeness. Stupidly, that made me want to cry again. Instead, I became visible, because he shivered less when I was. His sheets smelled like they hadn’t been washed since he’d arrived, but he himself smelled good. Solid and real. Like the leather of his pipes.

Curled in the stolen circle of his body, I closed my eyes, but when I did, I saw the banshee’s body. Then I saw a bauchan, red-coated, grinning from the woods at a human. Then, grinning from the leaves, staring at the sky with dead eyes. A length of iron rebar sticking out of his neck.

Behind me, lost in sleep, James was having a nightmare. He was walking through the woods, the dry leaves snapping beneath his feet. He was wearing his Looks & Brains T-shirt and it exposed his arms, written dark with music up to the edge of his short sleeves. Goose bumps twisted the musical notes written on top of them. The forest was empty, but he was looking for someone anyway. The woods stank of burning thyme and burning leaves, summoning spells and Halloween bonfires.