Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception

I jerked my head up, looking at the windows, trying to see what could have been watching us.

Luke, seeing my gesture, forced out, “For—what I told—Eleanor.” He groaned, and curled his body tightly around his clenched fists.

I remembered Eleanor’s face then, the puzzlement on her face when she asked Luke why he couldn’t kill me, just a girl. Faerie bitch! I wasn’t just a girl. I was a girl with freakdom off the charts. I reached into the tangle of limbs and pressed my hand against Luke’s chest, feeling the thump of his heart, slow and labored, each lethargic beat slamming against his ribs.

I closed my eyes, trying to think about the feeling I got when I was moving clovers across tables. In my head, I saw the fire in Luke’s chest, burning brightly across the wings of a frantic dove. The flames, reflected orange and white in the dove’s black eye, ate one feather after another, curling them black and useless.

“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.”