Welcome to Bordertown (27 page)

Peya stands on her toes and kisses him.

He has never done this before, but something in him quickens at her touch, and he recalls why she longed to animate him in the first place. “Shall we do it here?” he asks.

“On the Green?” She looks around, sees that everyone is gone. She shrugs. “Why not?”

The spells—both hers and Rabbit’s—have cleansed and remade him. There’s no more pigeon shit on his shoulders, no more mud on his legs. The grief inside him has drained away. As he lowers Peya to the grass, as he gently removes her clothes and watches in wonder as she removes his, he wishes more than anything to see his beloved. But the grief passes clean through.

He thinks only of Peya when they make love.

*   *   *

I lie in the grass, my hand entwined with his plaster-pale one. He’s warm, which you wouldn’t expect from how he looks. I am languid and content and contemplative.

But I’m not in love.

“There’s one last spell,” I say, looking up at the sky. There are lights in it, pinks and blues and purples, not quite like fireworks and not quite like stars. I wonder if Rabbit’s thirteenth day means something more than just my deflowering. I wonder if something is happening to Bordertown.

“Spell?” Prince says softly.

“Like the teeth I used to talk to you. It’s a conjure wand, supposedly. Would you like it?” I ask.

“I could call up anything I like?”

“You could try.”

Prince sucks in air and blows it out noisily, like someone still amazed they have a breathing passage. His breath smells like the inside of a limestone cave, of damp and cool stone. “I would like that very much,” he says.

I slip my shirt back on as I walk to my bag. The wand looks as silly now as it did when I pulled it out of the bucket, but Prince takes it reverently. He’s just as beautiful naked. His clothes look like plaster casts that fell on the grass, but when I touch them, I can feel the embroidery, the fraying hemlines.

Magic is a funny thing.

“Thank you, Peya,” he says. “And thank Rabbit, too.”

“Prince, what are you—”

“I conjure death,” he says.

A woman rises from the earth.

*   *   *

His beloved had a terrible voice, but she would sing sometimes when they were alone together. Dirty songs that she overheard in the harbor market or old Irish ballads that her mother had taught her. She sings one now, and her voice is still terrible, and her voice breaks his heart.

“The pipes, the pipes are calling,”
she croaks.

To his surprise, however, a stronger voice joins hers, catching the stumbles, bearing up the song.

“From glen to glen, and down the mountainside.”

He doesn’t know why his beloved sings, only that it seems she has come for him. He cries tears of sediment and lime; he has longed for this since that summer behind the velvet drape, since the wails upstairs told him she was dead. “Please, please, please,” he says as she folds him in her arms.

She cries, too. Eventually her voice stops altogether, leaving only Peya’s.

His beloved lifts his living chin, stares deep into his weeping eyes, kisses his soft lips. She feels more solid with every passing second. Peya’s voice fades. He last hears “
’tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,”
and then it’s only the voice of his beloved
in that place where the dead go when they have lived enough to die.

*   *   *

Plaster dust cakes the grass and slides between my toes. I don’t mind. I’m crying, at least half from happiness. My plaster man has found
her.
His beloved.

The lights in the sky are growing brighter. Even from this deep in the deserted park, I can hear the growing rumble of confusion and alarm that’s gripping the city.

In thirteen days, you’ll lose your virginity and fall in love.

In thirteen days, you’ll kill your prince.

In thirteen days, your home will never be the same.

I tie my skirt more securely around my waist and go hunting for my shoes. I find them upside down on Cash’s mural.

I wonder if it’s a play on words. No longer “LIVES” the verb, but “LIVES” the noun.

“Did you find your way here, Cash?” I ask to the empty air.

The streets are mad by the time I find my way back home. Shouting in the street. Screaming and muffled sobs. I want to know what has happened, and I don’t.

Mama is crying on the porch, rocking back and forth with Rabbit in her arms. Grandmama is talking to someone in the kitchen. He’s eating a plate of biscuits, which means he’s important. I can only see the back of his tight afro, a smear of red paint forgotten behind his right ear.

My stomach feels like the sky, popping with blues and reds that burn and then linger.

“Thirteen years,” Grandmama says, like she’s repeating something.

“Yes, ma’am,” says the boy.

His voice is deep, but I can tell it likes to laugh.

“So you must be one of the first to get through,” she says.

He shrugs. “I’ve tried every year for the last ten,” he says. “Your granddaughter helped me out.”

“Cash?” I hear myself saying. My throat feels too warm, the air too thin.

They turn—even Grandmama didn’t hear me come in. He has paint under his fingernails and a gap between his front teeth.

In thirteen days
, Rabbit said, with that look on her face.

“Sit down, honey,” says Grandmama. “There’s news.”

Mama picks herself up, and she and Rabbit take the other two stools and the rest of the biscuits. They tell me what I’ve already half guessed.

Thirteen days here with the Way in and out of Borderland closed meant thirteen years out in the World. Cash was six years old when he first scrawled that childish “Bordertown LIVES” in front of my plaster man.

“When you gave me your name,” he says, “I looked you up. There are message boards on the Internet—I mean, anyway, this thing where people ask for information about friends and loved ones who got stuck on the wrong side of the Border. I found a request posted almost a decade ago from a Derek Thompson in Andalusia, Alabama, asking for any information about his daughter Peya and her mother, Althea. It fit.”

Mama starts crying again. Cash looks down at the table, his Adam’s apple bobbing. I think I know where this is headed, but I can’t ask; I can barely feel my own skin.

He pulls something out of his pocket and pushes it across the table. A photo of a man I’ve never seen but recognize anyway. His arm is around a smiling woman and a smiling little girl. “This is his family,” Cash says softly. “His wife sent me the photo when I tracked her down. Turns out Derek Thompson died last year. A heart attack. The girl in that photo is about twenty now.”

Mama gets up from the table so abruptly that her stool falls with a clatter.

“And why the hell didn’t that damn fool come here when he promised? When the Way here was wide open and all I wanted was him to walk it? He had to go and start some
other
family?” She storms upstairs.

I half stand to follow her, but Grandmama just shakes her head and Rabbit puts her head on my shoulder.

“It’s okay, honey. Leave her for now.”

Cash swallows again. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you all this.”

“No,” Grandmama says firmly. “We’re glad to have you, and we’re grateful for the news. You want some tea? Rabbit, fetch him some tea. I’ll see if that arugula isn’t ready yet in the garden. You look like you’d fall over if someone pushed you.”

Cash and I stare at the table, awkward and suddenly alone.

“What did all that mean?” I ask, daring a glance up at him. “ ‘Bordertown lives’?”

He blushes, or at least I’m pretty sure he does. “It’s an underground thing. After a while, people thought Bordertown had disappeared forever, gone back into Faerie, you know. People who didn’t think so would scrawl that on the sides of buildings. I wondered if my stuff was somehow showing up in Bordertown.… That paint was so
weird
, but I wasn’t sure until I got your message.”

“That mural is amazing, you know,” I say. “How did you find all those faces?”

“Message boards. People who’d been here would put up drawings, poems, stories about what they’d seen here. I just collected it.”

I shake my head. “And I thought I didn’t understand the World before.”

“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s nothing important.”

I lean into the ivy on the table and look up at him. My heart feels strange, like someone’s pumped it full of helium and stabbed it through.

“You wanna go dancing?” I ask, at the same time he says, “Sorry about your dad.”

“I never knew him,” I say. “Mama thinks he was a good guy, probably was, but he never came to find us. It’s … weird. That’s all.”

“I’d love to dance, Peya,” he says, very formally, and for a moment he reminds me of my plaster man.

Rabbit wanders back in with the tea as we’re standing to leave.

“Grandmama says to give you this,” she says, and hands me a condom. Cash’s eyes get a little round, but to his credit he doesn’t say anything when I stuff it into the deep pocket in my skirt.

“Thanks, bunny,” I say.

But Rabbit looks at me a little sadly. “Did he say goodbye?” she asks.

I nod. “And he thanked you. It all worked, in the end.”

Her grin could light the sky. “I liked Prince. I’m glad.”

“I liked him, too.”

Cash looks slantwise at me when we step into the street. “What was that about?”

I take a deep breath: honeysuckle and dirt and our neighbors’ twenty-four-hour stew. Home.

“Oh, just thirteen years,” I say.

He may know the World, but I know this city. I take his hand; we go dancing.

I
t’s strange putting claws to keyboard again. It wasn’t that I planned to stop writing. It just happened. After I told the story of how a curse turned me into Bordertown’s resident teen wolf, Sparks and I had true love and our very own bookstore. I thought we were in Happily Ever After.

But the Sequel had already begun at our Now Under New (Mis)Management Party. Mickey was happy about giving Elsewhere to us so she could teach at the University Without Floors, the Wild Hunt was playing in the middle of Mock Avenue, all my friends in B-town were dancing in the street, and Sparks looked great with rainbow-colored hair. I’d taken a break to make sure everything was okay in the store when Milo Chevrolet came up beside me.

I nodded and gave him a big grin, but my eyes stayed on Sparks. She was dancing like so many girls who think they’re ugly, like no one could possibly be watching her so she might as well dance as if she were all alone, as if she were dancing with the universe. I was thinking I could watch her all my life when Milo said, “Wolfboy.”

I signed, “Yeah?”

He held up a book. Milo with a book is so common that if anyone makes a statue of him, he’ll be carrying a book or standing on a pile of ’em. It was easy to forget he’s one of B-town’s major magicians. Except for the ears, which said one of his parents was an elf, he looked like a human kid who needed to get out in the sun more. He said, “Would you buy this?”

He’s a friend, so I didn’t even look. I signed, “Sure,” and started to walk over to dance with Sparks.

Milo said, “It’s valuable.”

“How valuable?”

“Uh, valuable enough to let me have one book of my choice each week?”

“Magic dude, if you want to take a book each week, take it. Friends look out for friends, right?”

He blushed, which made me realize the most amazing thing about most of my friends is they don’t know how amazing they are. Then he said, “Okay, it’s a deal.” And he pushed the book into my furry hands.

It was your quintessential Old Book, bound in dark leather with faint lettering you had to study closely to read. The pages were filled with tiny letters from an alphabet I didn’t know. I signed, “Elfin?”

Milo said, “Late middle period. Just before Faerie left the World.”

“Title?”

“The Secrets of Seven Sages.”

Before I could ask him more questions, Mickey and Goldy dragged him into the dance. So I put the book up on the shelf over the front window labeled “Collectible! Maybe even Readable!” I didn’t exactly forget about it after that, but it wasn’t a priority. I figure books find their owners eventually.

*   *   *

The next months were my kind of perfect. I was running a bookstore with Sparks in Soho, the Bordertown neighborhood that’s got everything I love: music, poetry slams, art shows, movies (and sometimes live shows) at the Magic Lantern, and cheap places to eat that serve every cuisine from the World and a few that may be telling the truth when they say they serve Faerie food.

Elsewhere itself was definitely funky, meaning the shelves didn’t match, and the floor creaked, and I really couldn’t guess what color the ceiling originally was, and it had that used-book shop smell of old paper and leather, but to me, it was beautiful. The apartment upstairs was too cold in the winter, too warm in the summer, too small all the time, and exactly as funky as the store, even with the decorations we’d scavenged and made and been given. I loved it as much as the store. As long as Sparks was with me, I had all I wanted from life.

That changed one cool, sunny afternoon when Sparks and I went walking up Dragon’s Tooth Hill. Most of the homes amused us. Whether human mansions or elfin palaces, they were enormous and ornate, the kinds of places people buy to impress themselves.

Then we passed a house that was small compared to most homes on the Hill. It had a faded red door and ivy on its bricks and a turret that would be perfect for a library on one floor and an art room on another. It was run-down and nowhere near the poshest parts of the Hill, but the view from the turret had to be amazing. Sparks squeezed my hand and said, “When I was a foster kid, I dreamed of having a house of my own like that one.”