Gwyn ap Nudd. Hades. Hermes. King of the dead."
The song was loud, now, wailing, keening, and I felt James fighting against the pull of it. He whispered to me, not even audible, maybe realizing finally that I read his thoughts as much as his words, "What is he singing?"
I translated--voice quiet, for his ears only:
I keep the dead and the dead keep me.
We are cold and dark, we are one and we are many, we wait and we wait, so sing the dead.
So sing I: grow, rise, follow.
So sing I: those not of heaven, those not of hell, grow, rise, follow.
Unbaptized and unblessed, come to me from where you flutter in the branches of the oaks.
Wretched half-demons who lay curled in the dirt, trapped by my power, rise up and follow.
Your day is coming.
Hear my voice. Prepare to feast.
James shivered, hard, drawing his head down, covering it with his hands. He stayed that way, knuckles white on the back of his head, until the thorn king's song had died and the sun had disappeared, leaving us in blackness. He slowly sat up, and the way he looked at me made me realize that something had changed between us, but for once, I didn't know what.
"Do you ever get the feeling something awful might happen?"
James asked me, but it wasn't really a question.
I sat up. "I'm the awful thing that happens."
James pulled up his hood and stood up. Then--small miracles-he held out his hand to help me up, as if I was a human. His voice was rough. "Like you said. Something worse than you."
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Theyr the daoine sidhe. The ones luke lives with. I know be i recognized 1, brendan. I dont know what he wants. They were waiting 4 me outside of class. He asked me do u want 2 c luke again?
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Washington, D.C. was one thousand miles away from
Thornking-Ash. Okay, not really. But it felt that way. It felt as if the bus that we'd rode in to get to the Marion Theater was a spaceship that had taken us from a remote planet covered in fall leaves to a concrete-covered moon punctuated by purposeful decorative trees and populated entirely by aliens in business suits.
Paul sat in the seat beside me, by the window so he wouldn't puke, while I took pens apart and balanced the pieces on a notebook on my lap. Somewhere, in the front of the bus, was
Deirdre. Most of my brain was up there with her.
Outside the window, afternoon light slanted between the tall buildings of D.C, snaking a stripe of sun in here and there where it could manage. Where it kissed the tops of the buildings, it glowed blood-red. There were hundreds of people on the sidewalk--tourists, businessmen, poor people whose eyes seemed to look into the bus with hunger or resentment or exhaustion. They all looked lonely to me. All alone in a sea of people.
Beside me, Paul said heavily, "I need to get drunk." He said lots of things in that ponderous, heavy way, but this was a change from his usual repertoire. Usually when you pulled the string on
Paul's back, he said something like, "I do not get what he's trying to say here," while staring at an open book or stack of notes. Or, "I'm tired of no one noticing the nuances of the oboe, man." Very few people notice the nuances of the bagpipes either, and I would've had a sympathetic conversation with him about it if the oboe didn't suck so bad as an instrument.
I looked away from the people outside to the pens on my notebook, parallel parked bits of pen. They jiggled a little when the bus pulled away from a light. "Drunk sounds so crass.
'Soused' or 'blitzed' is a bit more romantic."
"Man, if I don't get drunk soon, I might never get the chance."
Paul eyed my lap. He handed me his pen from his backpack and
I took it apart as well, adding its innards to the collection.
"When will I have this sort of opportunity again? No parents? A mostly unsupervised dorm?"
"Uhh, I don't know, maybe that little event they call college. I'm told it comes after high school for highly privileged white kids like ourselves." I began to screw the pens back together, mixing the pieces up to create three Franken-pens.
"I could die before then. Then what, I'm dead and I never got drunk? So, what, I'd arrive at the pearly gates a sober virgin?"
That struck a chord with me. I used one of the pens to write sainted on the back of my hand. "I think a lot of people would argue that's the only way to get to the pearly gates. Why the sudden push for getting sloshed?"
Paul shrugged and looked out the window. "I dunno."
I suppose if I'd been a responsible adult, I'd have told him that he didn't need to get drunk to be self-actualized or whatever.
But I was bored and generally irresponsible by nature or by choice, so I told him, "I'll get it for you."
"What?"
"Beer, Paul. Focus. That's what you want, right? Alcohol?"
Paul's eyes became even rounder behind his glasses. "Are you serious? How--"