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Two seconds actually meant twenty minutes, but Sara did come. She stopped at the end of the driveway like I’d told her to, and I ran out to her old Ford Taurus before my parents could realize she was there. We stopped a few miles away and consulted a stained map book from the back seat, tracing the crooked back roads we’d have to take to get to the scene of the accident.
“That’s the middle of super-nowhere. What the crap was he doing back there?” Sara asked, but I didn’t have an answer. In awkward silence we headed out of town and drove down endless identical Virginia back roads: narrow, twisting paths dappled by the hidden sun. What short glimpses of the sky I saw revealed brilliant blue, broken by perfectly white clouds. I couldn’t believe anything bad could happen on such a beautiful day.
I hunched in the passenger seat, scrolling through every option on my phone. Received calls, missed calls, dialed calls. Voice mail, text messages. The letters blurred in front of my eyes, meaningless strings of words to my churning mind. Then my fingers stopped and I gazed dully at the message I’d unconsciously surfed to.
d. i love you.
I blinked my eyes dry. I had to keep my cool.
“Thanks for taking me,” I said finally, breaking the silence.
Sara seemed relieved that I had spoken. “Oh, yeah, no problem. I mean, seriously, what was your parents’ problem anyway?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess … my grandmother died last night, too. ”
“Wow. That’s crap timing. ” Sara stopped at a stop sign and craned her neck to look both ways.
I swallowed, the lump still stuck in my throat. I didn’t know what to say.
“I think it’s nice that you’re sad about her,” Sara said.
I looked at her, eyebrow raised, quizzical. I wasn’t offended, but it seemed like such a stupid thing to say.
“My grandmother—the one I have left, I mean—she’s invisible. ” Sara shrugged. “It’s like she’s from another planet. She doesn’t watch movies, she doesn’t know any of the music I listen to. We talk about the weather and stupid shit like that, ’cause I can’t think of anything else she notices. The other day I thought about her and I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing she’d ever worn. How awful is that? I feel bad that I don’t feel anything about her, but it’s just like she’s—like she’s already dead. The world changed and left her behind. ”
It was the most personal exchange we’d ever had, and it was weird. I felt like I ought to say something to clinch the moment, to forever lock us in the bond of friendship. But I couldn’t think of anything. Too late, I said, “Makes you afraid to get old, doesn’t it?”
“And ugly. Like, when I get too ugly to wear a mini-skirt, just shoot me. ”
I sort of laughed. She sort of did, too.
Then I saw a sign up ahead and said, “I think this is it. ” Sara blew past the street and had to make a U-turn to drive down a narrow, dark road marked Dun Lane.
We drove out of the dappled sun into complete darkness, the tight-knit tree canopy looming high overhead like a massive green temple. I didn’t know where James’ gig had been, but I couldn’t think of any reason why he would have been on such an out-of-the-way road.
“I guess they’ll have towed the car. We’ll have to look for the place where the wreck was. ”
That was the longest minute of my life, scanning the green-brown darkness for a glimpse of destruction, looking for any sign that everything I’d known was gone forever. And when Sara stopped next to a tree that looked like any other of the massive oaks that lined the road, I couldn’t tell what she’d seen to mark the spot.
She turned off the ignition. “Do you mind if I stay in the car? Blood totally makes me pass out. ”
I nodded. “That’s okay. ”
I got out of the car. Standing out on the crumbling edge of the road, the smell of wet leaves and forest filling my nose, and almost cold in the perpetual shade of the trees, I saw what had made her stop: the bark stripped from the near side of the closest oak tree, and, lying on the leafy ground beside it, a driver’s side mirror the tow company had missed when they took the car. And then I saw the dark stain on the road, the sort of stain you see after a deer has been hit and taken away by the state crews. Only this wasn’t from a deer.
It was a horrible shape, too; the smudged line of blood spelled struggle.
I closed my eyes and shut out the blood. I wasn’t going to think about James. I was just going to do the job.
I went to the base of the tree. I thought about picking up the driver’s side mirror and taking it with me, but stopped myself just before I picked it up. It wasn’t important. James was important. Leaving the tree behind, I slowly made my way through the ferns and leaves. Everything became formless in this still, everlasting dimness. The only sound was the muffled calls of birds in the canopy overhead. My progress was painstakingly slow—I wouldn’t miss a clue beneath the ferns.
About fifty feet from the crash site, my Doc Martens scuffed against something hard in the soft undergrowth. I knelt down, squinting, and saw a white object glowing in the darkness.
I gingerly picked it up, and my stomach squeezed. It was an unmarked bottle of eye drops. When I opened it, the sweet smell of clover drifted out. A thousand new memories, all run together—of Luke putting the drops in his eyes, Luke laboriously making the drops, Luke shoving the bottle into his pocket—clicked through my mind like a slide projector.
I bit my lip and took out my cell phone, hesitated a long moment, then dialed Luke’s number.
In my ear, quiet and thin, it began to ring. And then—a few feet away—it rang as well, a weird, modern sound in this ancient quiet.
I wanted to slap my phone shut and pretend I hadn’t heard it, but it was too late for that. I followed the sound and, sure enough, a dirty cell phone lay half-buried in a tangle of trampled thorns. I reached down to pick it up. And saw the red spatter on the leaves around it.
My breath somehow got stuck in my lungs, and my legs gently refused to hold me. I pressed a hand to my mouth, holding my tears in, willing myself strong, willing myself not to jump to conclusions, but the tears escaped anyway. First two at a time, silently sliding down my cheeks, and then three and four and five until they all ran together and gasped out of me. Folded in the ferns, thorns caught into my jeans, I stared at the single drop of red on the cell phone and sobbed for Granna, James, and Luke.
As the tears subsided, I slowly became aware that my limbs were trembling, like they did when I tried to move something with telekinesis during the daytime. Energy was funneling out of me. I remembered that feeling from before—and I looked up quickly, bracing myself for Eleanor or worse.
But it was Una I saw, crouching on a log a few feet away from me, bent into an impossible shape as she licked her fingers like a cat that has just finished a meal. In the green light of the forest, her pale skin looked less green than it had before, though she still couldn’t pass as human. Her bizarre outfit immediately drew my attention: some sort of overcoat that looked like an eighteenth-century military jacket with more than a dozen buttons leading up to its high collar, and beneath it, a frilly white skirt. The weird combination was sort of ultra-chic thrift-store, equal parts masculine and feminine.
She wrinkled her nose at me, observing my tears. “You’re doing that again?”
I smudged my palm across my cheek, and, remembering what Luke told me, stood before answering. “I’ve just finished. ”
Una smiled brilliantly at me. “Behold my cleverness, human. ” Her delicate features puckered into a frown, eyebrows drawn together into instant sorrow, and as her lips trembled into a pout, a single tear—my single tear—ran down her chalk-white cheek. The teardrop glistened on her jaw and, just as it fell, Una’s hand darted out and caught it, folding it away for later. Her smile returned as quickly as it had gone, and she laughed, high and wild. “Isn’t it perfect?”
I sniffed, my n
ose stuffed up from crying. “Better than a human. ” I was sure her nose wasn’t stuffed up.
She leapt from her perch with alarming suddenness, fluttering around me like a bird, so close that I caught a whiff of her scent: musky and sweet at once, the smell of a wild thing. She whispered in my ear, “I know what you’re looking for. ”
I carefully avoided looking at the blood-spattered cell phone, and swallowed. “And do you know where ‘it’ is?”
She laughed and jumped back onto the fallen log, skimming along it before twirling back the way she’d come. “It’s all dreadfully poetic. I cannot wait to sing it. A minor key, I think. ”
I wanted to strangle her; couldn’t she just out and tell me? With great force of will, I managed to stuff my impatience away someplace and sound gracious. “Will you sing it for me now?”
Una smiled a secret smile at the ground. “Will you come live with me forever?”
It was too easy to forget that she was as dangerous as Freckle Freak. Politely, I declined. “That sounds lovely, but I don’t think so. Is it the only way you’ll sing it for me?”
She looked at me and then said in a fond voice, “No, stupid human. I’ll give it to you for free, because it will vex Brendan when he finds out. ” Two long steps brought her back to my side, and she half-sang, half-whispered in my ear:
Away into the oaks, away beneath the earth
the piper’s blood spills
the gallowglass’ blood falls
in pools that tell their futures
She bids the gallowglass to
kill his lover;
She bids the piper,
“kill thy love. ”
The melody and her voice caught me where I stood, cradling me tightly in that moment. I could not think to speak.
Una clucked disapprovingly and snapped her fingers in front of my face. “The slightest tune dazzles thee, lovely. How do you expect to recover your lovers if you don’t guard your senses? You are going to disappoint me, aren’t you?”
I blinked, still slightly dazed by the spell of her voice. “They’re not both my lovers. I mean, neither are my lovers. I mean—” Her song slowly ceased to be magic and began instead to form meaning in my head. “Do you mean they’re not dead?”
Una shrugged and leapt away from me, long ballet-leaps over the bracken, and then turned back, bowing as if she’d done something very impressive. “Not yet!”
I could breathe again. In some way, I felt like I hadn’t filled my lungs since I’d seen Luke’s phone and the drops of blood. Now, for the first time in many minutes, I took a deep breath and let it out. Inside me, a little voice sang, they’re alive, they’re alive.
“She has them, then. The Queen, I mean. ”
Una danced over to me, slow and prancing, and stopped a bare inch in front of me. Her fingers stretched out and hovered over my iron key, closer, closer, until they were as close as they could get without touching it. She leaned forward and spoke into my ear, so near that her face touched my hair; her voice was balanced between glee and seriousness. “Solstice draws near; see how strong we grow? Soon the Hunter will be able to touch you himself; soon Aodhan, foulest of the foul, will be able to defile you as he defiles everything his fingers reach. They could take your songs and keep them so deep inside themselves you’d never know you lost them. They will play with you until you smile and welcome Death into you. ”