Мэгги Стифватер - Lament

'"And kiss me!'" shrieked Una. '"Love me! I shrivel in my self-made prison!'" "Shut up" Brendan said. "She demanded he court her, and he denied her as no one ever had."

Una swept up her skin drum from the ground and played an ominous drum roll with the palm of her hand. Brendan spoke over her. "And so, inspired by his soul's dreamy wandering, she ripped it from him and caged it far from his body."

In my head, I saw the memory of it; of the hand clutching the back of Luke's neck and him falling to his knees, the breath from his mouth forming a dove.

"And she bade the man who wouldn't kill to be her assassin, because it pleased her to watch him suffer. And kill he would, or she would hand over his caged soul to the minions of hell. And so he killed. All the faeries in creation knew his legend; how she used him to overcome our intolerance of iron; how her enemies fell under his knife."

Luke looked away, face pained.

Brendan continued, taking pleasure in his story-telling. "He begged her to release him, but our vicious Queen has no mercy and no forgiveness, and she remembered his refusal of her as vividly as on the day that it happened, so she denied him. And so he killed for her. He was the Queen's hound; he hunted as no faerie has ever hunted--never dying, but never living, either, until the killing destroyed him and he turned on himself. But would the she-witch let her toy die, especially a death he'd chosen for himself?"

"Never!" cried Una. Luke closed his eyes.

Brendan shot her a look. "There are whispers--that the Queen used her only daughter in a dark rite to resurrect her favored assassin. However it was accomplished, he didn't die. And he killed again and again for her, while his soul languished in a far-away cage. Until he was set upon a girl who shared the Queen's name--only this Deirdre he loved, and Luke Dillon did not kill her."

Brendan went silent.

"Yet," Una added. She looked at Luke's pants leg, as if she could see the dagger underneath the fabric.

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to take Luke's hand, but he stood a few feet from me, his arms clasped around himself, looking out toward where the sun lay on the edge of the trees.

"You're willing to risk going to hell for me?"

"There's no 'risking' about it," Brendan answered for him. "The Queen will not forgive this betrayal."

Luke's voice was flat. "I don't care."

Una sighed. "Is he not noble?"

Brendan took a step out of the thorns, far enough that his face was again in the light. "You don't care only because you don't know hell. I've--" Luke turned toward him and snarled, "Don't tell me that. I've lived in hell for the past thousand years. I spent a thousand years wishing I'd never been born." He thrust a finger toward me. "She's the only thing that's made my life worth living and if that's all I get, a few months with her--a few days, it's more than I've ever hoped for. Do you really think God would forgive me for the blood on my hands, even if my soul was free? I'm going to hell no matter what happens. Let me have my pathetic hopeless love while I can. Just-let me pretend it will turn out all right."

I put my hand to my face, covering my tears.

Una, outside the rotunda, watched the tears sliding through my fingers with interest. "May I have one?"

I bit my lip and looked at her. "What will you give me for it?" I managed to say.

"A favor," Una said immediately. "And you need all of those you can get."

I wiped my face and held my arm out of the rotunda. A tear dripped from my fingertip, and Una, only inches away, caught it in her outstretched palm. Then she darted away to the thorns, smiling as ever. I looked away from her to Luke, who was watching me with a hollow expression.

"Kiss me," I told him. When he didn't move, I begged, "Please."

He stepped closer and crushed me against him, face buried in my neck. I held him tightly, and we stood motionless for a long minute. Then he lifted his face to mine and kissed me softly on the lips; I tasted blood from where he had bitten his lip earlier.

"Deirdre?"

We broke apart from each other at the voice, and I blinked in the twilight, trying to make out the form. Brendan and Una were nowhere to be seen. Anyway, this newcomer was twice as large as either of them.

"Mrs. Warshaw?"

"Yes! What are you doing here?" She peered at us, clearly puzzled.

Feeling oddly disconcerted, pulled so abruptly back into the real world, I gestured feebly toward the harp. "For the party."

Mrs. Warshaw put a hand to her mouth. "Have you been here since seven thirty?! My goodness, Deirdre. The party is next week!"

Oh.

I pulled myself together. "My mother told me it was tonight! The tables--?"

"Oh, dear, no! We had a wedding reception last night. The party's not until next week. My goodness. Were you waiting all this time? With-- ?"

"Luke," I said, and immediately added, "My boyfriend." My supernatural, doomed, gorgeous, killer boyfriend.

"Well--come inside and have something to eat, anyway. Dear me, I can't believe you've been waiting all this time. We just got back from D.C. and heard voices out back."

"That's kind of you," I said, "but we really ought to go. My grandmother's in the hospital; that's why my mom got the date wrong--" And then Mrs. Warshaw blustered into sympathy and hurried us both through the opulent house, pressing a bag of cookies made by their private chef (private chef!) into my hands and begging us to have Mom call with news before walking us out to Bucephalus. We climbed into the darkness of the car and sat for a long moment in silence. Luke sighed deeply.

"Well." I looked at him. "I kinda liked Una." Luke smiled wryly. "She liked you, too."

As we drove back from the party that wasn't, I stared out the window at the night and thought about how this night looked like every other summer night I'd ever lived and how it wasn't like any of them. Halos of white-green light, buzzing with insects, surrounded the streetlights on the main drag through town, illuminating the quiet, empty sidewalks. In this place, life shut down after the sun went down. It felt like Luke and I were the only ones awake in a town of sleepers.

I was starving. Normally after a late gig, my designated driver and I would head to the Sticky Pig to grab some quick fries and a sandwich, paid for with my brand-new bucks. This time there was no gig, and I'd forgotten my money. Stupidly, after everything we'd been through, I didn't want to ask Luke to buy me dinner. And I didn't want to ask him to stop and let me get the privatechef cookies out of the trunk, because that would be like a sneaky way of asking him to buy me dinner.

So I just sat in the passenger seat, stomach silently pinching, thinking about how Mom had gotten the date of the party wrong. The more I thought about it, the more troubling it seemed; Mom, the human computer, failing at an easy sum. Other people's parents messed up on details. Mom lived for them.

Both of us jumped when music sang through the car; I realized after a second that it was my stupid phone. Probably Mom. But the number was unfamiliar. The name above it, however, wasn't: Sara Madison.

I looked over at Luke. "It's Sara." I opened it gingerly and held it to my ear. "Hello?"

"Deirdre? This is Deirdre's phone, right?"

She was really loud. Somehow it was weird hearing her voice without seeing her in person--I felt kind of lost, without the image of her busting out of her shirt to anchor her personality. I held the phone an inch from my ear. "Yeah, this is Dee."

"This is Sara." Without waiting for me to say anything else, she said, "Okay. You gotta tell it to me straight. Like, seriously, were you two playing a prank on me at Dave's? You have to tell me, because I've just been--like--spazzing over it since I got home and I have to know."

I wasn't going to lie to her. Not when Freckle Freak might just try to pull something on her if he couldn't get to me. "No prank, Sara. I wouldn't do that. You know I wouldn't."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I didn't think of that. Duh, right? It's just so hard to, like, wrap my head around it. I mean, he turned into a--God! I'm never going to look at rabbits the same ever again!"

Luke didn't exactly smile, but the side of his mouth tugged up and I laughed in spite of myself.

"Look, Sara, you've got to be careful around Them. I don't know what They want. Maybe you won't see any of Them again, but maybe you will. I'd keep something iron around just in case. It keeps Them away."

"Yeah. I got that, with the whole shovel thing. That was, like, seven different kinds of awesome.

So what, are They all sketchy-looking guys?"

My stomach growled, and I coughed to cover it up. "Um, no, not all of Them. Some of Them are drop-dead-gorgeous-looking girls."

"Right--they look like me," Sara said.

There was too long of a pause before I realized, she made a funny. I laughed, finally, and Sara said, "Okay, I was totally joking. But--They're real. I don't need to check myself into the crazy hospital and start taking Prozac and crap, right?"

"Right," I said, shocking myself a bit with my own certainty. "They are real... the rest is up to you."

There was another pause, and then Sara laughed. Was it a sign we were on different planets that it took light years for either of us to get the other's jokes? "Okay. Right. Thanks. I feel better now."

I glanced at Luke. "Um, call me if you see another one, will you?"

"Yeah. Totally." We hung up and I looked down at the phone for a long moment. Had the world gone mad? Sara Madison calling me and asking about faeries like it was school gossip. I think the Sara callingme-on-the-phone bit was even more shocking than the faerie bit. I felt like my high school invisibility was wearing off, just as I'd started to find it convenient.

The car slowed and bumped into a parking lot. I looked up and blinked at the sign, which bore a glowing neon pig with a glowing neon smile. The Sticky Pig.

"This is where you always go, right?"

I looked from the sign to Luke's face, which was pensive. "Uh. Yeah."

He made a face. "I saw it in your memories. I recognized the sign. Are you hungry?"

I nodded and made the understatement of the year. "I could eat."

He looked relieved. "Thank God. I'm starving. C'mon, I'll buy you dinner."

Guilt nagged at me: me eating out, Mom sitting at home getting dates wrong. "Maybe I should call Mom."

Luke paused, his hand on the door. "Why? She thinks you're at the gig still, and if you call her, you'll have to tell her why you're not. Do you want to have that conversation right now?"

"That," I said, climbing out of the car, "is a very good point."

He came around the front of the car, his face lit red by the smiling-pig sign, and held out his hand. I took it, wondering if I'd ever get tired of the sensation of his fingers holding mine. We crossed the empty parking lot and walked into the freezing air-conditioning of the restaurant; the hostess (not the James-bedazzled one) led us to a booth.

Luke slid into one side and I stood at the head of the table for a long moment, tapping my fingers against my legs, torn between bold Deirdre and normal Deirdre.