I blinked at her.
She seemed oblivious to my horror, and instead said kindly, with obvious effort, "Would you like your tear back? You'll need it."
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"No thanks. I think it looks better on you." Una grinned at me.
***
Sara was so clueless trying to get us home that she finally pulled over and let me drive instead.
Even though I rarely get to practice driving, I was much better at finding our way back down the back roads. I was almost giddy. Being stolen away by the Faerie Queen and tortured was bad, but it was so much better than being dead. Dead was irreversible. Suddenly I was noticing details that I had missed before: just how gorgeous the day was, how loud the cicadas were, how the leaves of the trees were flipping up to reveal their pale undersides, promising a storm later on despite the brilliant blue sky. With my change of mood, I saw something on the way back that I hadn't noticed before: Luke's car. I slammed on the brakes.
Sara screamed. "Holy crap! What are you doing?" I backed her car up to the little dirt road where I'd seen Luke's car.
"Sorry. I saw something. I'm just going to check it out, okay? Just--two seconds."
She squinted out the windows and then reached into the back seat for a magazine. Apparently, she thought that my "two seconds" meant the same as hers. I left her reading and made my way over to where Luke's car sat, pulled back into the mouth of an overgrown dirt road that was used to access the cornfield behind it. The angle of the car implied 253
a certain haste, and in my head I imagined that Luke had somehow come riding to James' rescue, pulling him from the car where James was pinned. It was a much better image than a bloodied James dragging himself out of his Pontiac onto the asphalt.
The Audi was unlocked, and though I felt a little foolish, I climbed into the driver's seat and shut the door behind me. Leaning back in Luke's seat, I closed my eyes and let his smell trick me into thinking he was there in the car with me. Even though I'd only seen him the night before, I missed him unimaginably; the part of me that was in him felt as if it were a million miles away, in a place too distant to ever visit. When I was with him I felt loved, wanted, protected; now I felt like a little boat adrift in a strange dark sea.
I opened my eyes and it was dark; night surrounded the car like a close blanket. It took me a moment to realize that I was in a memory. I was Luke, sitting in the driver's seat, my heart pounding with adrenaline. Urgency pumped through me--I had to get to the scene of the crash before They did. I swiveled in the seat, looking at a mason jar full of yellow-green paste lying on the passenger-side floor, and thinking I ought to put some of it on my shoes as protection. But no, there had to be enough for Dee and her parents, and I didn't want to risk wasting it. Anyway, it wasn't me They wanted; not until Dee was dead, anyway. Crap. I left it lying on the floor and jumped out of the car, hoping the kid was still alive.
The memory snapped to an end with the sound of the door opening. In real life, my life, the door was still closed,
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and I was still sitting firmly in the driver's seat. I looked over to the passenger-side floor, and sure enough--sitting in the stark shadows cast by the noon sun shining through the windshield--a mason jar full of Granna's concoction lay on its side. It looked like cat vomit.
So he had found it. I sighed, picked the jar up--oh nasty, it was a little warm, like it was living--and got out of the car. I wished I could think of an excuse, something to tell Sara so that I could take Bucephalus back home. Selfishly, I wanted the reminder of Luke close to me.
Movement caught my eye, something blocking the light in the sparse trees that bordered the cornfield. Before me, ten or fifteen feet in front of the car, walked a tall man with skin as brown as the dust of the road. Due to his height, he had to move slowly through the tree branches. He was absolutely naked, his muscles long and sinewy like a deer or a racehorse, and though my attention should have been drawn to his indecent exposure, all I could focus on was his tail. Long and whip-like, it ended in a tuft of hair like a goat's. The faerie--because that's what he had to be--paused, and turned his head slowly to look at me. His eyes were too close together, and his nose was too long and thin over his wide mouth to be human. It was the gaze of a feral thing, a creature that knew what I was and was both unafraid and disinterested. I waited long moments until he was out of sight, and then I bolted to Sara's car and got in, cradling the jar carefully.
"What's that?" Sara put her magazine down.
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"It's some sort of anti-faerie juice that my Granna made."
"Whoa. Oh. Where'd you get it?" I pointed. "Luke's car." "Luke is that cute guy? Where is he?"
"I don't know."
Sara frowned. "I'm getting creeped out. This is totally starting to sound like a horror flick, and everybody knows the hot chick dies first. Let's get out of here."
We did, leaving the only evidence of Luke's existence on the dusty road behind us.
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seventeen
Why are you looking up
