Valiant (18 page)

“Maybe.”

“Even if he isn’t—it doesn’t matter. All we need to know is where she is.”

“But the Courts aren’t places humans are supposed to be, especially the Unseelie Court. Most faeries won’t even go there.”

“We have to go—we have to get Ravus’s heart. He’s going to die if we don’t.”

“What are we going to do? Go down there and ask for it?”

“Pretty much,” Val said. As she got up, she saw a tiny vial of Never lying beside asphodel and rose hips. She lifted it up.

“What’s that for?” Luis asked, although he must have known perfectly well.

Her thoughts strayed to Dave, but even his pallid skin and blackened mouth didn’t make her any less hungry for Never. She might need it. She needed it now. One pinch and all this pain would be gone.

But she stuffed it into her pack and fished out the return train tickets she’d bought weeks before, holding them out to Luis. The paper was so worn from riding around in her bag that it felt as soft as cloth between her fingers, but when Luis took his, the ticket sliced shallowly over her flesh. For a moment, her skin seemed so surprised that it forgot to bleed.

Immediately after the monsters, die the heroes.

—R
OBERTO
C
ALASSO
,
T
HE
M
ARRIAGE OF
C
ADMUS AND
H
ARMONY

Val perched in her seat for a few moments, then paced restlessly in the aisle. Each time the conductor passed her, she asked him what the next stop was, were they running late, could they go faster. He said they couldn’t. Glancing over at the sword swaddled in a dirty blanket and tied with shoelaces, he hurried on.

Val had had to show the hilt to prove that it was merely decorative when she boarded. It was only glass, after all. She’d explained that she was making a delivery.

Luis spoke softly into Val’s cell, his head turned against the window. He’d called all the hospitals he could think of before he thought to call Ruth’s phone and now that he’d gotten her, his body had relaxed, his fingers no longer digging into the canvas of Val’s backpack, jaw no longer clenched so tight that the muscles in his face jumped.

He clicked off the phone. “You only have a little power left.”

Val nodded. “What did she say?”

“Dave is in critical condition. Lolli fucked off. She couldn’t handle the hospital, hates the smell or something. They’re giving Ruth a hard time because she won’t tell them what Dave took, and, of course, they won’t let her in to see him, ‘cause she’s not family.”

Val fingered the torn edge of the plastic seat, nostrils flaring as she breathed hard. It was more fury, heaped on what already felt like too much fury to bear. “Maybe you—”

“Nothing I could do.” Luis looked out the window. “He’s not going to make it, is he?”

“He will,” Val said firmly. She could save Ravus. Ravus could save Dave. Like black dominoes, set up in winding rows, and the most important thing was that she didn’t tip over.

Looking at her own hands, splintered and smudged with dirt, it was hard to imagine that they would be the hands that saved anyone.

Her thoughts settled on the Never in her bag. It promised to sing down her veins, to make her swifter and stronger and finer than she was. She wouldn’t be stupid about it. She wouldn’t wind up like Dave. Not more than a pinch. Not more than once today. She just needed it now, to keep herself together, to face Mabry, to let all the rage and sorrow be swallowed up into something larger than herself.

Luis settled on the other side of the seat, lying down as much as he could, eyes closed, arms folded across his chest, head pillowed on her backpack and pushed up against the metal lip of the window. He wouldn’t know if she slipped into the bathroom.

Val stood, but something caught her eye. The cloth wrapping had slipped, revealing a little of the glass sword, ethereal in the sunlight. It made her think of icicles hanging from Ravus’s mother’s hair.

Balance. Like a well-made sword. Perfect balance.

She couldn’t trust herself with Never working inside of her, making her alternately formidable or distracted, dreamy or intense. Off balance. Unbalanced. She didn’t know how long she could keep herself from taking it, but she could keep putting it off for another moment. And maybe a moment after that. Val bit her lip and resumed her pacing.

Val and Luis got off at the Long Branch station, pushing onto the concrete platform as soon as the doors opened. A few taxis idled nearby, roofs crowned by yellow caps.

“What do we do now?” Luis asked. “Where the hell are we?”

“We’re going to my house,” Val said. Holding the sword by its hilt, she leaned the wrapped blade against her shoulder and started walking. “We need to borrow a car.”

The brick house looked smaller than Val remembered it. The grass was brown and leaf covered, the trees black and bare. Val’s mother’s red Miata sat in front, parked on the street even though she should have been at work. Balled-up tissues and empty coffee cups littered the dashboard. Val frowned. It wasn’t like her mother to be messy.

Val pulled open the screen door, feeling as if she were walking through a dream landscape. Everything was at once familiar and strange. The front door was unlocked, the television off in the living room. Despite the fact that it was past noon, the house was dark.

It was unnerving to be in the same place where she had seen Tom draped over her mother, but weirder still was how small the room seemed. Somehow it had grown in her mind until it was so vast that she couldn’t imagine crossing it to get back to her own bedroom.

Val swung the sword off her shoulder and dropped her backpack onto the couch. “Mom?” she called softly. There was no answer.

“Just find the keys,” Luis said. “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

Val half-turned her head to snap at him, but movement on the stairs stopped her.

“Val,” her mother said, rushing down the steps, only to stop at the lower landing. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face un–made up, and her hair wild. Val felt everything at once: guilt at making her mother so upset, serves-her-right satisfaction that her mother was suffering, and profound exhaustion. She wanted them both to stop feeling so miserable, but she had no idea how to make that happen.

Val’s mother walked the last few steps slowly and hugged her hard. Val leaned against her mother’s shoulder, smelling soap and faint perfume. Eyes burning with sudden emotion, she pulled away.

“I was so worried. I kept thinking you would come in, just like this, but you didn’t. For days and days you didn’t.” Her mother’s voice shrilled and broke.

“I’m here now,” Val said.

“Oh, honey.” Val’s mother reached out hesitantly to stroke her fingers across Val’s head. “You’re so thin. And your hair—”

Val twisted out from under her hand. “Leave it, Mom. I like my hair.”

Her mother blanched. “That’s not what I meant. You always look beautiful, Valerie. You just look so different.”

“I am different,” Val said.

“Val,” Luis warned. “The keys.”

She scowled at him, took a breath. “I need to borrow the car.”

“You’ve been gone for weeks.” Val’s mother looked at Luis for the first time. “You can’t be leaving again.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“No.” Val’s mother’s voice had a note of panic in it. “Valerie, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about everything. You don’t know how worried I’ve been about you, the things that I’ve been imagining. I kept waiting for the phone call that would say the police had found you dead in a ditch. You can’t put me through that again.”

“There’s something I have to do,” Val said. “And I don’t have much time. Look, I don’t understand about you and Tom. I don’t know what you were thinking or how it happened, but—”

“You must think that I—”

“But
I don’t care anymore.
”

“Then why—” she started.

“This isn’t about you and I can’t come home until it’s finished. Please.”

Her mother sighed. “You failed your driving test.”

“Can you drive?” Luis asked.

“I have my permit,” Val said to her mother, then glanced at Luis. “I can drive fine. I just can’t parallel park.”

Val’s mother padded into the kitchen and came back with a key and an alarm hanging from a key-chain with a rhinestone “R” on it. “I owe you some trust, Valerie, so here it is. Don’t make me regret it.”

“I won’t,” Val said.

Val’s mother dropped the keys into Val’s hand. “You promise you’ll be back tomorrow? Promise me.”

Val thought of the way her lips had burned when she hadn’t kept her promise to return to Ravus on time. She nodded. Luis opened the front door. Val turned toward it, not looking at her mother. “You’re still my mom,” Val said.

As Val walked down her front steps, she felt the sun on her face, and it seemed that at least one thing might be okay.

Val drove the car through the familiar roads, reminding herself to signal and watch her speed. She hoped that no one would pull them over.

“You know,” Luis said, “the last time I was in a car it was my grandma’s Bug and we were going to the store for something on a holiday—Thanksgiving, I think. She lived out on Long Island where you need cars to get around. I remember it because my dad had pulled me aside earlier to tell me that he could see goblins in the garden.”

Val said nothing. She was concentrating on the road.

She steered the Miata past the pillars that flanked the entrance of the graveyard, the brick of them covered by looping tendrils of leafless vines. The cemetery itself swelled into a hill, dotted with white stones and burial vaults. Despite the fact that it was late November, the grass there was still green.

“Do you see anything?” Val asked. “It just looks like any other cemetery to me.”

Luis didn’t answer at first. He stared out the window, one hand unconsciously coming up to touch the clouding glass. “That’s because you’re blind.”

Val stepped on the break, stopping them short. “What do you see?”

“They’re everywhere.” Luis put his hand on the door handle, his voice little more than breath.

“Luis?” Val turned off the car.

His voice sounded distant, as if he were speaking to himself. “God, look at them. Leathery wings. Black eyes. Long, clawed fingers.” Then he looked over at Val, like he’d suddenly remembered her. “Get down!”

She lunged over, throwing her head into his lap, feeling the warmth of his arms coming down on her as air whipped over the top of the car.

“What’s happening?” Val shouted over the keening of the wind. Something scratched at the leather roof of the car and the hood shook.

Then the air stilled, dropping away to nothing. As Val slowly lifted her head, it seemed to her that not even a leaf moved with a breeze. The whole graveyard had gone quiet.

“This whole car is fiberglass.” Luis looked up. “They could claw right through the roof if they wanted to.”

“Why don’t they?”

“I’m guessing they’re waiting to see if we’re here to dump some flowers on a grave.”

“They don’t need to do that. We’re coming out.” Leaning into the backseat, Val unwrapped the glass sword. Luis grabbed Val’s backpack and slung it over his shoulder.

Val closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her stomach churned, the way it did before a lacrosse game, but this was different. Her body felt distant, mechanical. Her senses narrowed to notice every sound, each shift in color and shape, but little else. Adrenaline called to her blood, chilling her fingers, speeding her heart.

Looking down at the sword, Val opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel. “I come in peace,” she said. “Take me to your leader.”

Invisible fingers closed on her skin, pinching the flesh, tearing at her hair, pushing and pulling her into the hill, where clumps of grass rose up and scampered away from the black dirt. She tried to scream as she fell forward, facedown in the earth, breathing the rich mineral smell as she choked on her shriek. Her arms pushed against the soil as she tried to lever herself up, but the dirt and rock and grass gave beneath her and she tumbled down into the root-wrapped darkness.

Val awoke in golden chains in a hall filled with faeries.

On a dais of dirt, a white-haired knight sat on a throne of braided birch, its bark as pale as bone. He leaned forward and beckoned to a green-skinned, winged girl who regarded Val with black, alien eyes. The winged faerie leaned down and spoke softly to the knight on the throne. His lips twisted into what might have been a smile.

Above her was the underside of the hill, hollow as a bowl, and hung with long roots that grasped and turned as though they were fingers that couldn’t quite reach what they desired.

All around Val a bevy of creatures whispered and winked and wondered at her. Some were tall and thin as sticks, others tiny creatures that flitted through the air like Needlenix had. Some had horns that twisted back from their brows like vines, some tossed back mottled green manes as thick as thread on a spool, and a few tripped along on strange and unlikely feet. Val flinched back from one girl with powdery wings and fingers that deepened in color from moonstone white to blue at the tips. There was no place she could look and see anything familiar. She was all the way down the rabbit hole now, right at the very bottom.

A shrunken man with long golden hair went down on one knee in front of the creature on the throne and then rose as nimbly as if he were a boy. He looked slyly in Val’s direction. “They found the entrance as easily as if they were directed, but who would direct a pair of humans? A conundrum for your pleasure and delight, my Lord Roiben.”