"Waiting for your bus?"
I didn't recognize the smooth, moss-green shoes that stood in front of me, but I recognized Eleanor's voice. I looked up from where I sat and saw Eleanor's nameless human consort at her side. He inclined slightly at the waist and held out his hand as if to help me up, but Eleanor slapped his fingers lightly and he withdrew them.
"Tsk. That's not a good idea, love. She's hungry and you, as you know, are delicious." Eleanor looked down at me and held out her hand instead. Each of her fingers had a ring on it, and some of them were linked together by long gold chains that hung in loops beneath her palm. I stayed sitting. Eleanor frowned at me, an expression of delicate and excruciating pity. "Do you not stand for your queen, dear? Or are you too faint?"
I looked up at her, and I knew my voice was petulant but I didn't try to hide it. "Why? Will you have me killed if I don't?"
Eleanor pursed her pale lips. "Oh, so you're the one who refused to help the other night. I told you before there were things we were doing here that we didn't need meddled with."
Her consort looked at me. His face said stand up in a very blank sort of way. His thoughts were still very hard for me to read, but I could see that he'd seen death recently and he didn't want to see it again.
I stood. "I'm not meddling with anything of yours." I didn't think
I was. I guess I didn't really know. I looked at James, and
Eleanor looked at him too. By the bus station, a woman was approaching him, arms already outstretched for a hug from several feet away. James' face was lit with genuine happiness. I didn't think I'd ever seen him happy before.
Eleanor started to laugh, and she laughed so hard that even the humans, yards away, shivered and glanced around and remarked on the storm that was supposed to arrive later.
Eleanor dabbed at her eyes--as if she could cry--and shook her head at me, smiling disbelievingly. "Oh, little leanan sidhe, is that your chosen, there?"
I didn't like her laugh, and I didn't like her looking at him.
"What an odd and appropriate choice you've made. I nearly killed him a few months ago, and the daoine sidhe brought him back to life for the cloverhand. And now you will finish him off.
It's got a lovely circular feel to it, doesn't it?"
I didn't say anything. I just crossed my arms and stood there watching James smile proudly at his mom hugging Roundhead, like he had invented both hugs and his mother.
"Oh." Eleanor's hand flew up to her mouth. She leaned toward her human and her delight was hard to bear. "Oh. Do you see that, lovely?" Her consort made a noise of consent. Eleanor said to me, "So that is why you tremble with desire, little whore?
Because you have been going without?"
Bullshit I was trembling. I was fine. It hadn't been that long since Steven. "It's none of your business."
"Everything is my business. I care deeply for all my subjects and
I hate to think of you wanting for anything."
"Is that so?" I sneered.
"You need only ask," Eleanor said. She turned toward James, smiling distantly, like she was remembering. "What's wrong?
He won't make a bargain with you? I can make him more pliable for you. He was very easy to break, the first time."
In her head I saw the memory of him, broken and gasping, so clearly that I knew she'd meant for me to. My voice was fierce.
"I don't want to make a bargain with him. My bargains are my own business. You have your business and I have mine. I don't meddle in yours and you don't meddle in mine."
I'd gone way too far, but that image of him had ripped something open inside me. I turned my head, waiting for her wrath.
But she just placed a hand on my shoulder and shook her head, clucking her tongue. "Save your strength. If you mean to last until the day of the dead without making a bargain, you'll need every bit of it."
I looked up into her face, and I saw that she was smiling. She was smiling in an awful way that told me she knew exactly how
I felt about James and she thought it was interesting. Eleanor, like all the court fey, liked to break interesting things, especially things she'd broken before.
I pushed her fingers off my shoulders, and when I turned to face her, she was gone.
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U were right ok? Evrything isnt ok & i shouldv told u evrything. But i cant now. What if u told me 2 stop? What if u askd me if i really hadnt gotn ur txt? What if u askd me if i really knew what i wantd? I hate lying.
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Dee
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In most of my classes at good old TK-A, there were about eighteen students. With the teacher presiding at the front of the classroom, the rest of us had, over the weeks of class time, conveniently arranged ourselves by personality types. Front row: suck-ups and over-achievers like myself. Second row:
Friends of suck-ups and over-achievers. And wanna-be friends.
And wanna-be suck-ups who were too slow to grab a seat in the front row. Third row: People who were neither suck-ups nor screw-ups (latter parties belonged in the back row). Third row people didn't interest me. Or anyone else, I think. Too good to be bad and too bad to be good. Back row: as mentioned before, screw-ups, trouble-makers, and those who just didn't give a damn.
Funny how I really belonged in both the front and the back rows. Didn't seem like it ought to be possible.
Anyway, our normally cozy class structure was all shot to hell this morning, as Sullivan's class had been thrown together with
Linnet's dramatic literature section for some nefarious purpose undoubtedly to be revealed later on in the period.
So we'd taken over a larger, brilliantly sunny classroom down the hall that could accommodate the lot of us and suddenly we had to fight for our previous seat/personality assignments.
Which is how Paul and I found ourselves in the back row, a place I probably belonged and a place Paul could probably make himself belong by sheer virtue of hanging out with me.