Velveteen (22 page)

Kipper settled Luisa and Logan onto the ground and held out his hand to shake Nick’s. “I’m Kipper. Gary Kipness is my real name. You Velvet’s latest conquest?”

Oh, my God
, she thought.
Really?

The boy made it sound like Velvet had picked Nick up at some sleazy bar. Which probably would have suited Nick fine, but it totally wasn’t her style. She’d never even been in a bar.

“Yeah, I guess,” Nick agreed nervously, losing his hand in the guy’s massive grip. It fit around Nick’s like a baseball glove, thick and padded and enormous. The shaking was long, forceful, and rolled up Nick’s arm like Kipper had snapped a whip.

“Number fifty-seven.” Kipper shook his head as though he couldn’t quite believe he was meeting Nick. “Congratulations, Velv.”

“Uh … thanks?” she said.

“People keep saying that,” Nick said. “Though why it’s important, I don’t know.”

Kipper waved the comment off. “Just a number. Ain’t nothin’ else. But …” He leaned in close. “Happens to be the highest number of souls retrieved by a single Salvage team leader, so it’s kind of a big deal. Velvet’s sort of a hero, and she’s still young, so she’s all set for an amazing record. Major-league shit. She’ll be completely excruciating to be around now.”

Nick rubbed his hand. “Well, that’s a relief. People been saying ‘fifty-seven’ so much, I figured it was a nickname I’d have to get used to.”

Kipper laughed, a great booming laugh. “You got an actual name, Fifty-Seven?”

“Nick Russell.”

“Well, tell you what, Nick. As new as you are, and looking like you do, you’re gonna be girl food.”

“Jesus,” Velvet sighed, but as she scanned the room, she noticed a pack of girls prowling near the stage, alternating between chatting and looking over their shoulders at the
two boys. Or rather at Nick, as if
he
needed a bigger head on his shoulders.

“I guess that’s a good thing.” Nick smiled and waved in their direction.

Kipper shrugged. “Could be. Those ones bite, but they’re nothing compared to Isadora and her group.” He pointed out the girl, standing, of course, with Shandie.

Isadora’s eyes locked onto Nick’s and didn’t blink, and a sinister smirk curled on her perfectly painted lips, as if she were picking him out of the pastry case, a piece of cheesecake or something. That the devil of the Collector set would have eyes for Nick was a given.

“You gotta be careful with that one,” Kipper said.

“She’s pretty hot,” Nick agreed.

Velvet rolled her eyes. “Jesus,” she said again.

Kipper nailed it. “Not what I meant. She’s psycho. This guy I know, Graham Polosian, went out with her one time and came back completely messed up.”

Nick nodded his head. “She looks like the type to mess with a guy’s head.”

“That ain’t it. He came back all made up like a living guy. White skin, lipstick. Hell, even eyeliner. He was like Thirty Seconds to Mantyhose.”

Nick chuckled but didn’t quite seem to catch Kipper’s emo slur.

“Mantyhose?” Velvet added, butting into the conversation. “Those skinny jeans they make the boys wear are like shackles.” She glowered in Isadora’s direction. “Oh, yeah. I agree one hundred percent. Isadora is a piece of work. Master
Emasculator if there ever was one. Probably carries around a collection of balls in her purse.”

Nick ventured another look at the girl, and shivered.

Velvet’s eyes were set on Isadora’s friend.

Quentin had emerged from the darkness and was striding, quite deliberately, toward the girl. The distraction of Nick’s appearance having been quickly discarded, Shandie had gone back to chatting with Isadora, her face scrunched up a bit in judgment as Quentin stepped up to them and began to speak. Velvet wished she could hear what Quentin was saying. She suspected some of the words came out stuttered, fast, probably rambled. But she was so proud of him.

And to Velvet’s surprise, Shandie was smiling. She touched her neck, the international symbol for being interested.

Nick nudged her slightly, and Velvet gave in and gave him an appreciative nod. It certainly appeared that Quentin was a go. They weren’t the only ones spying. Kipper pumped his fist in the air while Logan’s mouth lolled open with surprise. Luisa wore a wan, hopeful expression and clasped her hands over her heart in a wholly girlish attitude, belying her viciousness.

The sound of people gasping brought Velvet’s attention back to Quentin and the girl. In fact, the crowd of souls were backing away. She rushed forward. Had the girl slapped him or something? Quentin wasn’t the kind of guy to ever be a complete douche. He didn’t even have those words in him, unless he was repeating something Kipper had told him.

Velvet darted the short distance to see what was going on.

When she broke through the throng, she stopped dead.

Her heart sank. Nick stumbled up behind her and touched his hand to her arm, likely to hold himself up. If his knees were as shaky as hers, they’d both need the support soon enough.

Quentin lay on the crooked cobblestones, his legs splayed out like a discarded rag doll, his head in Kipper’s lap. Shandie had retreated a few feet away and sobbed quietly into Isadora’s shoulder.

“Go on, Quentin. It’s your time. You’re the man.” Kipper’s voice was choked with tears. “You’re the man.”

Quentin’s skin flickered. He glanced at Velvet and Nick and smiled the briefest of smiles before the glow beneath the thin layer of ash flashed brightly and then dimmed. The light behind his eyes died out. Kipper lifted the boy’s head and slid from underneath him, setting him gently back onto the cold stone ground.

He backed away, as did everyone else nearby. Velvet felt a hand slipping into hers and looked down to see Luisa, her expression a confused mix of pride and grief. Velvet reached out for Nick and pulled him backward.

As though a dark fire had been set within Quentin’s prone form, his skin began to crackle and expand, puffing out where it wasn’t constricted by clothing. It dimpled and shed like dandruff, falling off in chunks and exploding into ash against the cobblestone, spilling into the indentations between. And then, as if a jetty of wind swirled about the corpse, ash curled from Quentin’s exposed flesh in big flakes and floated around him. The depressions caved, creating sinkholes on his cheeks, in the hollow of his throat. His
clothes caught fire and were consumed in an instant. When all was said and done, all that was left of the boy was a pile of ash, as gray as a storm front.

Velvet shivered, her body suddenly a hollow shell.

Remainders were silent mysterious, things. No one knew what exactly anchored them to purgatory’s ashen shore. She had suspicions—everyone did—and often figured hers had to do with feelings, or the lack of them. The confusion of emotion. And really, if she thought about it at all, that quiet moment in the Shattered Hall, huddled over Nick, wrapping him in the warm solidity of the woolen peacoat, could very well have been her cue to flash burn and turn to ash.

You just never knew. Quentin had learned everything he’d needed to, and there was no reason to be sad about that, she supposed. At least, that was what the Council of Station Agents told them to believe.

Velvet turned to Nick.

Hurt clouded his face. A feeling weighed at the corners of his mouth, heavy and funereal. His eyelids sagged and the light in his eyes turned to shadowy eclipses.

It was guilt. Nick was mourning.

She felt an unfamiliar twinge and for a moment thought she was experiencing guilt over her friend’s passing, too. But that wasn’t it. It wasn’t guilt at all. It was jealousy. The realization bit into her like the jaws of some black creature, grim and nightmarish. And she shook it away.

And thankfully, it fell.

If she could count on her particular affliction for anything, it was the rapid sloughing of unwanted and unexpected feelings. Accessing the ones she needed was the issue.

Which brought her back to the boy in front of her.

She wanted to be able to reach back into their history and recapture the moment in the Shattered Hall, but she couldn’t. It floated between them like a dust mote caught in a slant of light.

She should hold him, she decided. But she didn’t.

“It’s fine. It’s a natural thing,” Velvet found herself saying. “Just follow my lead.”

She touched Nick’s arm to slip past, her hip brushing his. Nick tensed, and for a second, Velvet thought he would wrap her up in his arms and never let go; to cover her face with kisses.

But he didn’t.

Velvet squatted beside the pile of Quentin’s ashes and dug her hand deep into it, rubbing the gray powder on her face and neck before moving on. The residents of the dorms had formed a loose line, and each in turn did as Velvet had, spreading a small handful of Quentin’s remains on their skin.

“It’s an act of respect,” she muttered to Nick, who held back and watched.

Miss Antonia was the next to last to pay her respects. She sidestepped the line and guided Nick to the dwindling pile of ash. “The rest is for the pots; just take a small handful.”

He did as he was told, hands shaking as his fingers sank into the pile. He rubbed the ash into his cheeks in stiff strokes, where it crumbled and rained down the yoke of his dress shirt.

V
elvet crouched in the corner of her room, her fingers wound in the cording of the drapes. Everything around her was deflated, as though made of sagging, half-empty balloons. Her bed, dresser, even the wardrobes, sagged into slick plastic piles, punctured by Mr. Fassbinder’s spiky nest of monk parakeets, which hung from the ceiling like the world’s scariest nursery mobile. The prickly globe kept getting bigger and bigger, like a set of lungs filling up with air, heaving in and expanding until there was more room inside than out. The needles scraped the walls with a horrible grating sound, nearly shutting out the chirping of the hundred birds in their cells. Velvet threw her arms up and clinched her eyes shut as the spikes pressed closer.

Moments later, Velvet was staring into a soul-streaked sky. She noticed one thing immediately: she wasn’t alone. Bonesaw
crouched beside her, his face placid, slack. His black eyes bored into her mind.

Don’t ever leave me
.

The words hissed through her head, splitting her brain open until there was nothing but pain and the killer’s sad longing inside her. She tried to push away, but they were both trapped in a parakeet’s cell, nestled among strips of finely shredded paper. She pulled them around her and stuffed them into her ears, even as she heard his next plea …

Love me
.

His face so close.

His waxy lips puckered.

His eyes full of need.

Velvet sat bolt upright in her bed. A shimmer of gaslight filtered through her window, over a collection of origami birds from the Paper Aviary, and settled on the peaks of the tussled blanket like a dry layer of snow.

She stared into the shadows and tried to calm herself. The silence helped. The dorms were asleep at that hour, and normally she’d take the opportunity to slip out and check on Bonesaw, watch him as he stared at his new acquisition and whispered horrible things to her until she screamed back. Velvet didn’t have the stomach for it just then. She needed to recharge. The previous hours had worn her down more than she’d realized. Bonesaw, Nick, Quentin—the dream had been proof of that.

No.

Velvet rested her head back into the soft, pulpy pillow and closed her eyes. She began to pray that she wouldn’t dream of her killer, but it was too late. The memories were flooding back.

The shed was cold in those first two days.

Dead insects drifted into the corners and accumulated like snowbanks, and the dust hung in the air like a million constellations of rancid, stinky stars. She’d tried to escape, but the ropes and rubber tubing had dug into her flesh like fingers tightening.

She’d screamed and screamed, but nothing had ever answered except the incessant rain pounding schizophrenic melodies on the tin roof.

Then there was Bonesaw.

His waxy face close to hers, his clammy fingers on her skin, his whispers.

Tell me you love me
.

Velvet shook her head, rubbed her eyes. She wished the memories were bound up in fishing line and rubber tubing as well.

She sat back up in bed and listened to the sleeping dorm.

Soft sobs echoed through her open bedroom door from the darkened courtyard below. Or at least she thought that was what they were.

“What now?” she moaned, and tore the comforter aside and crammed her feet into her boots. She hung over the balustrade outside her room and glared into the darkness, watching for movement, listening for the mysterious weeper.

There was nothing for precious seconds, but then she heard it again.

A sharp intake of breath.

A quiet moan.

Velvet trod quietly down the uneven stairs—no easy task in the heavy boots—and, upon reaching the courtyard floor, squinted. A pair of glowing eyes blinked at her from the front door alcove.

“All right. Who’s down there?” she whispered.

A rare girly moment passed with Velvet fantasizing that it was Shandie, mourning the loss of a really great guy who was never going to be pining away for her again. But when the figure shifted, wavy gray hair, not the girl’s teased-out puffs, poked into a dim column of gaslight.

“Nick?” Velvet crossed the courtyard and crouched beside him, her fingertips digging into the grooves between the stones to hold her upright. The boy’s legs were splayed out before him, as loose and limber as a rag doll’s. Pale white tears fell from under his lids, stripping ash off his cheeks in thin rivulets. The glare from his skin spilled out and cast an odd glow between them.

“Oh, crap,” Velvet said uneasily.

Nick winced. “Figures it’s you. Couldn’t have been someone nice.”

“I’ll let you have that one, because you’re … incapacitated and probably missing your family. But watch it from now on, okay?”

He nodded, and Velvet reached out to catch a gray teardrop from his chin. It clung to her fingertip like a dirty pearl, and she stared at it a bit before rubbing it off on the boy’s sleeve.