Welcome to Bordertown (35 page)

Translator’s note: This night song is clearly modeled after some of the human lullabies that threaten rather than console howling children. We know it to be sung by an elfin mother because of the chorus, which is made up of elfin nonsense words common in other songs. How the singer and her partner hooked up we cannot know from the words, but her reference to jewels may be one of two things: either she is a fairy princess wooed by a human who ran off with the family’s fortune, or the jewels are a false glamour and must be sold before dawn comes to turn them back into pebbles or acorns or a handful of sand.

—Durocher, L.,
Songs of the Borderlands
New York: Random & Rowling

A
llie Land cursed at her phone as she stood in the gathering dark at the end of a cul-de-sac lined by feral houses. She had only a knapsack stuffed with clothes (and under the clothes some other things), an acoustic guitar in a case that got heavier every block, a phone that was failing her, and a growing ball of worry in her gut.

Her phone was kick-ass, bought with her last crappy retail job paycheck instead of paying her rent, and it was supposed to make her life easier, but instead it had gotten her lost—in a place where getting lost was a Bad Idea. She was
supposed
to be outside The Dancing Ferret, which was the traditional first stop for new arrivals to Bordertown, but instead she was alone on a dead-end street looking at houses so covered in vines and ivy that they might have been the ruins of some ancient jungle city founded by sentient gorillas. There were no streetlights here, just one old wooden utility pole with rotting-into-whiteness pumpkins impaled on every step-spike. The sight was at once sinister and sort of pretty.

Allie slid her thumb across the map on her phone’s screen, trying to find out where she’d gone wrong, though with the built-in
GPS, getting lost should have been impossible. The BorderMap Project was an application developed from the frequently contradictory guides to Bordertown that circulated through independent bookstores, ’zine shops, and cafés in the World, with cartography based on an aggregate approximation of the most plausible accounts from those who’d returned from the Border and talked about it coherently. When Allie first heard rumors that the Way to the Border was open again after more than a dozen years, she’d downloaded the map pack (the developers had suddenly started charging for it, natch, but it was only a couple of bucks) and hit the road. She was sorry to leave the rest of her band: moody guitarist Steve; dreamy-eyed bass player Rodge; and her percussionist Pete, a grizzled guy with a ponytail who’d been around during the birth of the New York antifolk scene in the eighties, a good seven or eight years before Allie was even born. Their loss. None of them were willing to take this kind of risk, so they’d never be stars anyway.

Now that she was finally here, the map was about as much good as a 20-watt amp at Madison Square Garden. The quiet guy in the prismatically painted pickup who’d given her a ride through the dusty scrubland just outside the city had looked at her strangely when she asked to be let off a few streets away from here, but she’d just waved the phone at him and told him she had it covered. She’d heard technology could be hinky at the Border, but she’d figured the phone would just stop
working
, not that it would work
wrong.

Though maybe the geography of the city had changed in the years since those maps were made. There was magic here, right? She had to get used to the idea.

But for right now, she needed to get away from the increasingly dark, no doubt increasingly cold, and definitely increasingly creepy Land of Feral Houses.

“You look lost.” The voice, right in her ear, was as smooth as river stones, and Allie stiffened.
Borderland is dangerous
—she’d heard that plenty of times, but had she listened? Had she, hell.

Allie threw her elbow back hard and pivoted on her heel at the same time, wishing she’d signed up for a self-defense class at some point—all she knew about fighting was seeing her mom and dad beat on each other before the one died and the other went to jail, and they weren’t exactly fancy moves she could imitate.

Turned out she wasn’t a natural, either. Her elbow whiffed through nothing, and she wound up doing an ungainly pirouette instead. On the bright side, there wasn’t a leering crackhead—or, wait, the junkies here did water from some magical river, right? That must be nice, way cheaper—standing behind her with a knife. Instead there was a—

“Holy shit, you’re an elf,” she said.

The man—the
elf
—wasn’t even close to her. He was leaning against a sagging tree a good ten feet away, next to what had once been a driveway and was now more or less a wildflower garden with some chunks of asphalt among the stems. “And
you
are new here. We don’t … care for that term. Elves are a human idea. We are simply Truebloods.”

Pointy ears, silvery hair—long and feathered, no less.
If it looks like an elf, I say it’s an elf.
There’s a really popular TV show about vampires called
True Blood.
You might want to rethink your branding
.

Allie knew better than to assume she could read an elf’s expression—she wasn’t totally stupid; she’d read some books before she came here and knew they weren’t human, despite how sorta human they looked—but if she’d had to guess, she would have said annoyance. But that was swiftly replaced by a look of wise serenity that just had to be 89 percent bullshit.

“You speak of matters in the False Lands beyond the City of Illusions—what you would call the World. That World matters not to my kind. You are on the Border now.” Allie could hear the capital letters dripping off what seemed like every other word. “Though it might be wise to fear vampires. I have never encountered one here, but among these fallen houses, who knows what dark things dwell?”

“Eh, I’m so over vampire stories. These days they either wear tight pants and try to integrate with humanity, or they star in tween abstinence porn and sparkle in the sunlight. I bet you wish you sparkled, don’t you?” Allie thought about toning down the bitchy, but this guy—elf, whatever—had seen her spin around and fling her elbow at nothing like a moron, and that was embarrassing, and when she got embarrassed, she got a little mean.

“Why do you speak of stories, when you are here, where stories are
lived
? In a place suffused with possibility? You must leave the World and its fripperies behind.”

Fripperies?
“Oh. Then I guess you don’t care about the World’s opinion regarding your jacket?”

He smiled, running his thumbs down the red faux leather. “You like it?” The jacket had a high collar with a black stripe around it and was festooned with countless zippers running at random angles.

Allie let a beat go by, then said, “You know Michael Jackson’s dead, right? And his
Thriller
-era look died with him. At least you aren’t wearing a sequined glove.” He
was
wearing a faded black T-shirt and artfully shredded acid-washed jeans, looking pretty much like a refugee from the kind of eighties music videos that had found new life on YouTube.

Now the elf just looked confused, like he was a toddler and she was a childproof cap. “What? I don’t …” He rallied, smiling
and showing perfectly straight white teeth. “Perhaps you’d like to come with me to my home. We can drink spiced wine, and I will build a fire and tell you tales of war and romance from beyond the Wall.”

“That’s a big ‘no thanks.’ I didn’t come all this way to get date-raped by an elf.”

He frowned. “I told you. I am a Trueblood, and a knight of the Realm. I am captivated by your beauty. Allow me to compose an ode to your cheekbones—”

“Sorry, I’m not interested. But if you’ve got a hot elf— Sorry, not intentionally being a dick, just forgot. If you’ve got a hot
Trueblood
sister, feel free to hook me up.”

He brushed a chunk of that glam-rock hair out of his face and pouted. He was pretty enough to be a girl, maybe, but he couldn’t have passed for one. He had what Allie—who really hated all that woo-woo new age vibrations and auras shit—could only think to call a “very masculine energy.”

“A sister? Do you mean—”

“Yep, I mean nice to meet you, I’m Allie Land, lesbian future rock star for hire. But since you’re done hitting on me, maybe you can point me to The Dancing Ferret? I hear they give away free beers there.”

He approached her, and Allie started thinking about her options if he got nasty. Fight, flight, scream in fright? But he stopped a few feet away, head cocked, and said in this low, syrupy voice, “Surely you’d reconsider your orientation. For me?”

“You’re not the first guy who thought he could bring me over to the other team, but I got all my second thoughts out of my system before I was done with junior high. Sorry, no. Now, about those directions …?”

He slumped, and some of the glamour—or, who knows, maybe
literally Glamour—seemed to go out of him. “You don’t feel any … particular interest in me?”

“Uh, I mean, I’ve never met a Trueblood before, so that’s interesting, but if you mean like romantic interest, you’re just not equipped. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s getting boring, and I’m about to start walking, so if you won’t help me, take care.”

“You’re one of the newcomers,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps new arrivals have some kind of … but, no, that doesn’t make sense, I don’t …” He shook himself, his zippers jingling, and said, “It’s dangerous to wander here if you don’t know the safe paths.”

“Is that a threat or an offer to escort me where I need to go?” She kept her voice level and reached for her key ring. Not a great weapon, but she was pretty sure sticking a house key in his eye would make an impression.