Lament - Мэгги Стифватер

"Maybe I can help you out of that later." He looked over his shoulder, at the sun blazing in the sky. "Very soon, I think."

"Creep," muttered Sara. "Get out or I'll call the cops on your ass."

He seemed unfazed by the threat. From an empty palm, he dropped a line of clover onto the counter. They flapped their butterfly wings, taking flight as beautiful swallowtails before crumbling to the floor--wilted clovers after all. His smile rose goose bumps on my skin. "I can show you some things Luke can't, lovely," he murmured.

"I can show you some things he can't, as well." James let the shop door close behind him.

"Lovely. "James' attire was a bit strange--he had accessorized a T-shirt that read You: Off My Planet with an iron fireplace ash scoop, which he held over his shoulder like a rifle. The combination was oddly appropriate.

Freckle Freak smiled, all teeth, and slid off the counter, flicking his tongue at James. "Maybe you'll play as well?" He leaned back toward me and sniffed. "Although she smells better. Good enough to swallow whole."

James lowered the shovel and matter-of-factly approached Freak. "Get. Out."

Freckle Freak let himself be guided by the iron until he was by the door, then looked back at me and made a rude gesture.

James growled and swung the shovel at Freak's head. The shovel never made contact with his scalp--Freak jerked violently away from the iron, slamming his skull into the door with enough force to rattle the glass. Then he smacked down onto the floor, hard.

James spit on him. The faerie opened his eyes when the saliva landed on his cheek, and smiled.

"So this is how we're playing the game."

I had a sudden, vivid image of Luke, holding the Freak against a wall, his dagger nearly touching his neck, and Freak grinning and saying, "So, it will be a good game."

Then I looked back to the door, where James stood over empty floor. Outside the door, a white rabbit hopped across the pavement.

James and I watched the rabbit until it disappeared in the scrubby brush beyond the parking lot, and then exchanged a glance. "Rodent problem?" he asked.

"Weasel, I think." I let out a deep breath I'd been holding without realizing it. "Why are you here?"

James shouldered the shovel, glancing out the window as thunder boomed, but Sara interrupted from her spot beside the milkshake machine. "What the hell just happened?"

I wasn't sure how to answer. James shrugged. "Homicidal faeries."

Sara stared out the window into the parking lot where the rabbit had been. The girl who could never shut up when there was nothing to talk about had nothing to say when there was.

I looked at the clock. "I'm going to lock the back door. I think it's time to get out of here." Sara still hadn't moved. She was chewing her lip, lost in thought, her face transformed by the introspection.

"Good idea," James said. "I'll take you to see Granna after you're done. And I'll walk Sara to her car."

I went through my closing routine, locking the back door and closing up containers of sprinkles and cookie crumbs. Sara went through hers, mechanically wiping down the milkshake machine and the counter. Her silence made me uncomfortable, like I ought to say something just to make her speak. I suddenly wondered if that was why she normally babbled all the time--maybe she'd been trying to get me to break my pensive quiet.

We emerged from our uncomfortable female bonding session to find James stacking the last of the chairs on the tables. He retrieved his shovel from beside the door. "We should go before it rains."

My phone rang in my pocket, and I pulled it out. This time I knew who the number belonged to, and I opened it halfway through the ring. "Luke?"

I could barely hear him say, "I saw Granna. It was Them."

FOURTEEN

 Lightning glowed inside the towering thunderheads as they crowded out the last of the blue sky.

A second later, the boom of thunder was loud enough to shake the windows on James' old Pontiac. I slouched down inside the car, turning my head into the familiar camel-colored leather of the seat. The smell of this car, old leather and carpet, would forever be associated in my head with James. In a way, this car was James. He'd spent so many hours rebuilding it from the chassis up, it might as well have been a part of him.

He turned down the Audioslave album we'd been listening to and seemed about to say something before thinking better of it. The quiet built between us, strange only in contrast to our usual banter, and for a moment I couldn't think of anything to say. Then: "How did you know Granna was in trouble? What was it like?"

James drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, making himself busy staring at the road. "She told me. Your grandmother. I started to feel sick, and for some reason I thought about her in her workshop. So I called you, and somewhere in between all those calls I was making to you, she told me." He let out a noisy breath. "Man, Dee. I'm almost as big of a freak as you. Soon you'll see me on TV with my crystal ball and my 900 number."

I frowned at him as lightning flashed one side of his face pale and featureless. "You'd have to change your name to something more foreign sounding, I think. No one would believe a domestic psychic."

"Esmeralda is pretty," James mused.

Thunder cracked, so loudly that my ears hummed afterward, and shifted my mind to another, more immediate subject. "I just can't believe They did something to her. That's what Luke told me."

"I know." James's eyes flitted over to me. "She told me that, too. She called it 'elf shot.'" It sounded so innocent, like "love sick." Elf shot. I wondered what I was going to find when I got to the hospital; the thought made me shift anxiously in my seat. "It's just so hard to believe.

Error. Resubmit. Cannot compute."

"Oh, there's more," James assured me. "I've been doing some research on Thornking-Ash--do you remember them?"

"Duh. They keep calling, trying to get me to send in an application."

"I got a letter from them, too." James slowed at a sign advertising the hospital and turned down a tree-lined road. Even through the lush green canopy overhead, purple-black clouds were still visible. Cars in the hospital parking lots glinted on the other side of the trees; my stomach squeezed, thinking about Granna inside. "Apparently, they're a freak school."

"I thought they were a conservatory. A what-do-you-call-it? Charter school?"

"Yeah, I did too. But I started looking up some grads and they all seemed sort of peculiar. Then I started calling the grads, and they were sort of peculiar. Apparently, musical genius, such as we possess, is strongly associated with being freaks, such as we are."

"Do huh?"

James found a parking spot among a sea of cars; they all seemed to be silver, reflecting dull purple back at the sky. He turned the car off and swivelled in his seat to face me. "I finally got ahold of the recruiter you talked to, Gregory Normandy--he's the head honcho, did you know?

Anyway. I pinned him down. He told me psychic ability was linked to musical ability, and that good musicians frequently had what he called 'gifts.' What you and I call 'freakdom.' He claimed to be able to tell whether or not a musician had freakdom just by listening to them."

"No way!"

"Yes way. He knew I was psychic. Luke was something else--I can't remember what he called it. Astral something? And he said you were freakdom off the charts." I felt oddly flattered.

"I think that's why They're after you, Dee. Not they, the Thornking-Ash people. They, like capital 'T' They. I mean, it seems like an awfully big coincidence that you should be a major freak and They should want you this bad." His red-brown eyebrows furrowed. "Maybe They can hear your freakdom in your music. Didn't this all start at the competition?

It started with Luke.

I put my hand on the door handle. "So, why do they want people like us at the school?

Lowercase 'T' they."

James opened his door. A rush of humid air, smelling of rain, flooded into the car. "Apparently a lot of people like us get really messed up in life. Normandy's kid was a concert violinist at age fifteen, and he killed himself. They set up this school to help us deal with it, I guess."

I shook my head. Of all the things I'd heard this week, this turned out to be the one thing that was too big and distant to really comprehend. A freak school for the musically talented.

"I can't process this right now. Let's go before we get soaked."

Together, we hurried across the silver parking lot into the ugly, flat hospital. It looked like a giant white box that someone had squished down in the center of an equally ugly concrete parking lot. A vaguely artistic soul had painted the doors and window frames bright teal, but it didn't make the hospital any less flat or ugly.

Inside, it smelled like antiseptic and old people. The low ceilings and chemical smell seemed to squash all thoughts out of me, making me aware of only the smallest, most inane details. The short squeak of my shoes on the tile. The hum of a fax machine. The whistle of air from the vent overhead. The tinny laugh of an actor on the waiting-room television.

"How can I help you two?" The receptionist behind the counter smiled brightly at us. I stared at the bright pattern on her uniform; it was like one of those hidden picture images where, eventually, if I stared long enough, I ought to see a sphinx or a farmhouse.

James kicked me. "What's your Granna's real name?"

"Uh. We're here to see Jane Reilly."

The receptionist tapped efficiently on the keyboard and puckered her lips as she read the information on the monitor. "She's not allowed to see any visitors but family."

"I'm her granddaughter."

The receptionist eyed James.

"I'm her pool boy," James said. He crossed his fingers and showed them to her. "We're like this.

Very close. Like family."

The receptionist laughed and told us the room number. We headed down the hall, sneakers still squeaking, vents still whistling, looking for Room 313. We followed the door numbers past motivational photographs plastered along the walls, and then Mom's hissed voice announced Granna's room. I froze in the hall, and James hesitated behind me.

"This is not normal." I had to strain to hear her voice, but Delia's voice was clearly audible.

"She fell. What's not normal about that?"

"No. This is all wrong. This is like--like--" Delia's voice was taunting. "Like what, Terry? Like the dreams you used to have? Back when you wet the bed?"

"I didn't wet the bed," Mom hissed furiously. "That was where their feet were. They always had wet feet."

"Right. I thought you said back then they were dreams."

" You said they were dreams. Mom said they were dreams, I never said that."

Delia laughed. It wasn't a pleasant sound. "I didn't tell you they were dreams, Terry. I was dying, remember?"

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