Echo City Read online

  Jill looked at me as if she meant to drill into my head with her gaze. "As you say," she said finally. "Will you contact me if anything changes? If you, perhaps, believe she is in danger. I may be able to help."

  "I guess so." It didn't seem like the sort of promise that could do any harm.

  Jill rummaged in her purse—a little clasp bag, spotless like the rest of her ensemble—and came up with a pink box of candy hearts like they sell for Valentine's Day. She shook them into her hand, sorted among them, and finally held out her palm to me with two hearts on it, one pink and one white. The white one said PROMISE. The pink one said BE MINE.

  She looked expectant. I gazed at the candy hearts, then at her.

  "I don't have a phone," Jill said. "This is how we stay in touch."

  "No. I'm not eating that."

  "I'm not asking you to eat it," she said with a trace of impatience. "I simply want you to take it. So that you can pass a message to me, should anything happen of concern with Muirin."

  "It won't poison me, or hurt me, or kill me."

  "No," she said.

  "Or do anything weird."

  "I don't know what 'weird' means to you."

  "Can I give it back if I change my mind?"

  "Of course."

  There was a catch. There always was. I could already see, in my mind's eye, the way Muirin would give a little huff of annoyance and then tell me everything I'd just agreed to that would make me wish I hadn't.

  I really wished she was here to ask about it.

  But sooner or later, if I kept dealing with Muirin's world, I would have to start making decisions like this on my own. I may as well start now.

  And ... I really was worried about her. There weren't exactly such a thing as therapists for depressed fae. It would be nice to have someone to call if she was really in trouble.

  Muirin wasn't a friend, exactly, and in some ways she'd lied to me as much as a person like her was capable of. I hadn't asked to be an exterminator of rogue magical creatures ... but she was also trapped as much as I was. It wasn't her fault that the sword had chosen me. She could have walked away—and she hadn't; she'd stayed, and trained me, and protected me.

  "So I'm supposed to choose?" I said.

  Jill nodded. "You take one, I keep the other."

  BE MINE was obviously a terrible idea. My hand hovered above the PROMISE one. And then I closed it into a fist, and drew it back.

  "No, thanks," I said. "We'll go it alone. I'll tell her you came by."

  Jill raised a perfect brow, but without complaint, she tucked the candy hearts back into her clutch. "As you wish."

  "I'll walk you out," I said.

  There was a silver convertible in our driveway, gleaming in the rain and looking entirely out of place beside my battered Subaru and the detached garage with its peeling paint. Jill lifted her hand in a small wave. I didn't wave back. Hands tucked into the pockets of the bathrobe, I watched her pull out of the driveway, and turned to go back into the house.

  Something gravel-hard popped under my heel.

  "Jesus!"

  I lifted my foot. There, underneath my foot, were the crushed remains of a candy heart. I could just read a fragment of the word PROMISE.

  "That's cheating!" I yelled after her, standing on one foot with my ankle gripped in the opposite hand. My heel felt bruised. "I didn't take it, jerk!"

  "Wow," Fresca said from the open kitchen door.

  "Why the hell did you invite her in?" I snapped. "Now she can get back in whenever she wants."

  "Don't blow up at me! What am I supposed to do, tell her to—oh." Her face shut down like a curtain closing. "She's one of them, isn't she."

  Beings like Muirin need an invitation to enter a house. And Fresca, not too long ago, had been treated to an up-close-and-personal look at what could happen when one of them came in.

  "I'm sorry, Fres," I said helplessly. "Could you, uh ... hand me a plastic bag?"

  She did, wordlessly. I swept the bits of shattered candy heart into it, and then stood holding it, unsure what to do. Keeping the bag obviously constituted accepting her bargain. If I threw it away, then what? Would that be even worse?

  Fucking fairies.

  "I'm sorry," I said again, limping into the house. Fresca was puttering with the coffee cups. "It really isn't your fault. It's just ... we've got to be careful."

  Fresca placed Jill's cup into the sink very carefully, looking like she wanted to throw it instead. "You mean you have to be careful. I didn't sign up to live in a—a state of siege all the time."

  It shouldn't feel like a knife in the heart. It really shouldn't. "Neither did I, Fres."

  "Are we in danger?" Fresca asked.

  "I ... don't think so. No," I said more firmly. "We're not."

  Muirin's kind were capricious and dangerous, but they kept their bargains; they really didn't have a choice. As long as I had a deal with Jill, I was pretty sure we had a sort of immunity from her, at least for the next week. On that thought, I reluctantly stuffed the bag into my bathrobe pocket.

  "Then I guess it doesn't matter." Fresca swished water around in the cup. Her eyes still held the dark weariness that she'd worn like a shroud for the last two months—ever since I went into a monster's lair and brought her back out with me.

  I guess it said a lot about my life these days that the most important thing about the whole experience wasn't that I thought I might be a little bit in love with my best friend and a lot more bisexual than I'd previously realized; college is all about those sorts of discoveries, I guess. No, the elephant in the room was that I'd been partly responsible for breaking her, and as desperately as I wanted to fix that brokenness, I didn't know how.

  Stories always end with the heroic rescue. The happily-ever-after is implied. But they don't talk about the nightmares, or the bitter knowledge that the safe, everyday world can be yanked away in a heartbeat.

  I wished I knew what to say, to lift that shadow from her eyes.

  "By the way," Fresca said, forcing a smile, "did your mother get hold of you?"

  Like the coward I was, I welcomed the safer conversational ground. "Sort of. I was distracted at the time. She called you too?"

  "Yeah, I guess she was having trouble getting through to you."

  "Yeah, I was out in the woods and reception was spotty. She got me eventually and I told her I'd call next weekend." I planned to enjoy the reprieve until then. If there was anything Mom just couldn't want to say, she would have no compunctions about calling me back—multiple times until she got hold of me, if past experience was anything to go by. I groped for something else to say to Fresca, finally settled on, "Thanks again for the coffee, Fres."

  Fresca nodded, and I poured myself a fresh cup and slunk up to the attic, which I had claimed as my bedroom and studio space back when first we rented the house. The Garret was my private domain, awash in cheap sci-fi paperbacks, art supplies, and half-finished canvases. Even Fresca didn't come up without an invitation.

  Today, the Garret's solitude wasn't the thing I needed most. With the desperation of an alcoholic grasping for a drink, I grabbed a pad of cheap paper and a box of charcoal. I began to sketch before I even sat down on my bed, quick sharp strokes describing the broad outlines of the nightmare creature I'd fought today. As I finished each sketch I ripped it off and dropped it on the floor. The drawings were rough and crude, the gorilla-creature more of a blob than a true likeness. But I wasn't drawing them for their aesthetics.

  This was my therapy. I'd found over the past couple of months that I had to get this stuff out of my head as fast as possible, in order to stop it festering and building into night terrors and phobias. If counselors existed for monster hunters, Muirin hadn't introduced me to any, so I did the best I could with what I had. To the percussion of rain pounding the roof of the Garret, I sketched and sketched: the dog and monster locked in scribbled combat; Muirin with her knives; Lily, rakish, hat tipped over her eyes; the white dog looking back at me
through dripping trees, with a quick slash of marker-red for a collar.

  I drew feverishly for perhaps forty-five minutes, going through half a pad of paper before the frantic urge to draw began to fade. I stretched my aching hand and looked at my last few sketches. There was one of Jill, though I couldn't see much resemblance, and a more detailed drawing of Fresca, looking off to the side, her eyes large and sad. I had often drawn Fresca—being pressed into impromptu model service is one of the hazards of rooming with an art major—and by now that I knew her face well enough to draw it without the model handy.

  This time, though, I'd changed her hair. Fresca normally wore it in a short bob, presently growing out from a blue dye job, but for some reason I'd felt compelled to draw it straight and black and long, cascading over her bare shoulders. It gave her the look of a mournful Filipina angel.

  I smoothed the drawing, gave it a quick spray of fixative, and laid it carefully to dry.

  None of my sketches showed Lily's face. It was as if my subconscious had shied away from focusing on her features too closely. She was represented in scribbly gestures, or the hat covered her eyes, or she was turned away and all that could be seen was her hair and shoulders.

  Taking more care this time, I began to draw her as I'd first seen her, sitting on a pile of foundation stones, the dog at her side, looking at me from under her hat brim. I rubbed out and redrew the lines of her face a dozen times, trying to recapture the likeness I remembered.

  And then, suddenly, I knew where I'd seen her before.

  The name should have given it away.

  Trembling a little, I began digging through my books. My room had books everywhere—stacked on the floor, stuffed into plank-and-concrete-block bookshelves, kicked under the bed and poking out of my backpack. Finally I found the specific books I wanted, buried under a heap of last semester's class notes.

  My grandmother Geraldine didn't own a lot of things—she'd moved around too much—but one keepsake she'd held onto through all her moves was a set of slim, cheaply published volumes of poetry, written by her mother, my great-grandmother. Grandma Geraldine had given them to me as a birthday present the year I left for college. The covers were primary colors, one red and one blue, so scuffed and worn they were soft to the touch. I held them carefully in my hands, as if I could reach through the years to the woman who had penned their contents. Grandma, I thought, had probably done the same.

  SELECTED POEMS, said the red cover. BY LILY-BELL TAYLOR. The blue volume was SELECTED POEMS II.

  It was a matter of family lore that Grandma's mother, Lily-Bell Reade, née Taylor, had been involved in the Harlem Renaissance literary scene. She wasn't famous; she only had a stub of an entry on Wikipedia. She'd died when Grandma was a young girl—at the time they'd been living somewhere in Ohio, as far as I knew—and this was all that was left.

  I tilted the red volume, and a photo slid out into my hand. I'd looked at it often as a child, fascinated by the great-grandmother no one in the family besides Grandma Geraldine had ever met. I could still remember exactly what my great-grandmother was wearing in it, and it was nothing like the canvas coat and ruins-explorer hat she'd been wearing in the rain. Dressed to the nines she was, in a white hat with lace, and a sheer close-fitting dress of the sort that had been popular in the 1920s.

  But her face was exactly the same, the high cheekbones and large eyes, the winsome charisma.

  Taking the photo with me, I made my way to the attic window across a floor awash in sketches and books. Outside, the summer night was a dark blur, the neighbors' lights smeared through the flyspecked window glass. My own reflection rippled in the wet glass like a ghost myself. I looked for Lily-Bell in my features and could not find her there.

  Looking out at the rain depressed me, so I turned my back on it and brushed aside enough art supplies and drawings to clear a space on my bed. I took slow breaths, the meditative deep breathing that Muirin had been teaching me to use to control my second sight. Rain drummed on the roof. Below me, music began playing softly in Leanne's room.

  It said a lot about my life lately that I didn't immediately dismiss the idea that I'd met my great-grandmother in the ruins of a house in upstate New York. Instead, I felt an odd, gentle wonder at the idea. I wanted to find her again: Lily-Bell Taylor, and her white wolfhound.

  I patted my pocket and took out the baggie with the fragments of candy heart. White powder stuck to the inside of the bag; it had been slightly damp from the rain-wet porch when I put it in there.

  I wondered what on Earth I'd agreed to.

  Muirin probably had the right idea, burning Lily's letter unread. Bargains always seemed to come with a terrible downside in Muirin's world.

  Eventually I fell asleep to the sound of Leanne's music and, more distantly, Drew the ghost, somewhere in the house, playing his guitar, strumming the same chord over and over.

  Chapter 3

  The morning dawned wet and gloomy. I was getting dressed in the chilly, dim Garret when tires crunched on the gravel outside. I looked out the window, sighed, and pulled on a hoodie to shuffle downstairs.

  I took my time in the kitchen, refilling the food bowl for Twinkie, Fresca's cat, and dumping the dregs of last night's coffee. Someone had drunk most of the rest of it, and I knew it wasn't Fresca, since she wasn't a coffee drinker. Had to be the mysterious Leanne. Someday I needed to corner her for an actual conversation. I saw more of my ghost roommate than the flesh-and-blood one.

  I made a fresh pot, poured two cups, and took both onto the porch. Here, as expected, I found Muirin slouched on a musty couch wedged among a welter of rusty bike parts, snow tires, broken chairs, and other junk, watching the rain make rings in the driveway puddles. Muirin technically had a standing invitation to the house, but rarely took us up on it.

  She was wearing her usual ensemble, a beat-up work jacket with what I hoped were oil stains across the front and a trucker cap pulled over her short hair. Work gloves covered her small square hands to protect her from the touch of iron. She definitely made a striking contrast with Jill Frost, with her impeccably tailored designer clothes and twee candy hearts.

  Ooh, I thought. Jill ought to have the same susceptibility to iron as Muirin. Even if an invitation, once given, couldn't be rescinded, I might be able to fairy-proof the house just by sprinkling iron filings across the doorstep.

  "Coffee," I said, holding out the cup. Muirin peeled off a glove with her teeth and took it, inclining her head in a small nod of thanks. "Hey, can I ask you a question?"

  She shrugged. I took that as assent.

  "Do you know if using the sword has any side effects for people who aren't O'Connors?"

  A sick chill crept over me. I had tried to say "Do you know anyone named Jill Frost?" but as my mouth shaped the first words of the sentence, my brain skidded sideways like a car on ice, and suddenly I found myself wondering about one of the other things that had been puzzling me lately. I had to wrench my brain forcibly back on topic, but not before the words were already out of my mouth.

  "I doubt it," Muirin said. "At least, I don't see why it would."

  I could think about Jill Frost just fine. I could wonder about her. I could recall every detail of our meeting in the kitchen. But as soon as I thought about trying to ask Muirin again, I found myself thinking about my fall class schedule.

  Well, apparently I'd found one of the hidden clauses in the bargain I'd stumbled into.

  "Why?" Muirin asked. "Do you feel unwell?"

  "Not really. Actually I feel pretty good, considering how sore I was last night." Unprepared to give up without repeating the experiment (for science!), I tried again. "Muirin, the thing is—you've got to admit it's unlikely anyone's done a study of magic sword handlers and their long-term health effects."

  No use. I couldn't keep thinking about Jill long enough to say her name, let alone ask a question about her.

  "I've spent two thousand years with Bill's family, Kay, give or take a few hundred years." Mui
rin's voice was dry as dust. "Their health was, if anything, better than typical." She got up off the couch. "Fetch the sword. We'll need it to match the weight and balance for your training sword."

  "This is a day trip, right? I have a shift at the bookstore tomorrow."

  "We won't be gone too long."

  What Muirin expected and what actually happened were often two different things, but I got the sword from its hiding place in my bedroom and left a note for Fresca.

  We drove south, out of Ithaca, through farms and fields and patches of forest gleaming jewel-green in the rain. People unfamiliar with New York are often surprised by how rural it is once you get out of the city. I grew up in a north suburb of Chicago, and I'd envisioned upstate New York as much the same: tract housing on little cul-de-sac streets, a short train ride from the big city.

  In reality Ithaca is a college town surrounded by mile upon mile of woods, barns, fields, and little farm towns. The big city is a four-hour drive away. After a certain amount of culture shock, I had come to like it here—or I had, anyway, back when I was still Kay Darrow, junior at a small liberal arts college in the greater Ithaca area, rather than Kay Darrow, monster slayer.

  I spent the hour-long drive to Binghamton attempting casually to pick Muirin's brain about supernatural lore and also testing the limits of the restriction Jill had put on me. I couldn't ask anything directly pertaining to Jill herself, but I was able to ask if an invitation across a threshold was permanent, and whether it could be taken back. The answer to most of my questions was, as usual, "sort of" and "it depends."

  "It's situational, Kay," Muirin said, starting to sound testy after my fourth or fifth attempt to get some clarification.

  "So let's say I wanted to take my invitation back and keep you out of the Nerdhäus. Could I?"