“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
I couldn’t feel sad, or angry, because I couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t open her eyes. All I could think about was that I was sitting here in the middle of a field with a dying girl in my arms and my brain couldn’t process anything but the shape her hair made on her face and the colorless dawn grass and the little bit of unraveling brown thread on the arm of my sweatshirt.
Suddenly, I became aware that there was someone else crouching in front of me—and it scared the crap out of me, because I couldn’t think how they’d gotten there and I couldn’t think how long they’d been there.
“Sentimentality is such a dangerous thing,” said the other someone, and I realized, horribly, that I knew them.
“How do you figure?” I asked, pulling my arm out from under Nuala’s legs so that my iron bracelet was visible.
“Oh, don’t worry, piper,” said Eleanor. “I’m not here to kill you this time. I merely saw your distress and wished to see if I could be of service to one of my dying subjects.”
She was terribly beautiful, in a sort of sweet, savage way that made my throat hurt. Kneeling in front of me, she reached her long fingers toward Nuala’s forehead, but stopped short of touching her. “I really don’t see how she could tolerate that iron, poor dear. How ironic that in the end, it’ll be a human that kills her.”
“How do you figure that?”
Eleanor sat back, her pale green dress spreading out around her like flower petals on the grass. “Well, she’s a leanan sidhe, piper. Surely you know how it is she stays alive?”
She was right. I did. I just hadn’t let myself think about it. “Life, right? Human life.”
“Years, piper. She takes years off the life of those she graces with her inspiration. And she did not take any from you, did she?” Eleanor folded her hands gently in her lap and looked at them fondly, as if the arrangement of her fingers twined together pleased her greatly. “As I said, sentimentality is such a dangerous thing. So very human, too.”
I shook, both with the frigid air and the proximity to Eleanor. Everything in me screamed that she was an old, wild creature, and that I needed to get away. It took everything in me to not lift Nuala and get the hell out of there. “How much does she need?”
Eleanor lifted her face to me and smiled an awfully lovely row of pearly teeth, and I realized that she had been hoping I’d ask. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to know.
“I think two years would last her until Halloween,” Eleanor said, and now she smiled again at her hands, a small, secret smile that made the grass shiver around us. “She must burn, you know. Her body only lasts sixteen years, even if she doesn’t deprive herself of human life. That’s why she goes willingly to burn every sixteen years. Poor creature realizes that if she doesn’t toast herself”—Eleanor shrugged—“she’ll die for good. Of course, she’s probably going to die now anyway.”
I closed my eyes for just the briefest of moments. I wanted to close them for longer, to think, but the idea of not watching Eleanor every second she was close seemed like one of the more terrible concepts ever invented. “How do I do it?”
Eleanor regarded me with a gentle gaze. “Do what, piper?”
I bit back a snarl with great effort. “Give her two of my years.” Two years wasn’t long. When I became an old codger, I wouldn’t care if I died two years early. Anything to warm Nuala’s clammy skin and put color back into her lips.
“But you know she’ll only forget you after she burns.” Eleanor’s mouth was pursed now, like a lovely rose, but her eyes glimmered. She was like a little kid, bursting with a secret that she was begging to share.
“That’s what I thought, before,” I said. “But I’m guessing you can tell me a way that she won’t.”
In the rising dawn, her mouth spread into a wide line of pleasure that evoked memories of butterflies, flowers, sunshine, death, rot. “Truly,” she breathed, “Don’t let it be said that I am not a benevolent queen to my subjects. If she trusts you enough to give you her true name, piper, her true name that will grant you control over her, like the faerie that she is, you can save her memories. You must watch her burn from beginning to end, and while she does, you must say her true name seven times, uninterrupted, and when she rises from the ashes … she’ll remember everything.”
Suspicion prickled along my skin, but what Eleanor said had the ring of truth. Still, I had to ask. “Why do you want to help her?”
Eleanor spread out her hands, as if she were opening a book, and shrugged delicately. “Generosity of spirit. Now, you’d better hurry and kiss her, piper. Breathe two years into her, if you will.” She stood and brushed her knees off with pale, pale hands. “Ta, ta.”
And with a shuddering of the air around her and a tug through my limbs, she was gone. And the sun was rising and Nuala was setting.
I brushed her light hair away from her freckled face and lightly pressed my lips to her mouth. It didn’t feel like kissing Nuala. It felt like kissing a corpse. Nothing was happening. I was kissing a dying girl and nothing was happening.
Two years, Nuala. It’s not that long. I want to give it to you. Just take it. I kissed her again, and breathed into her mouth.
It didn’t feel like anything was happening. Hell. Shouldn’t she jump to life if it was working? I tried again—three times is the charm, right?—and tried to visualize my life flowing into her. I didn’t care if she took two years. I didn’t care if she took ten years. Her head rolled back and her skin covered with goose bumps. It looked dead and cold, like a frozen chicken.
“Damn it, Nuala!” My hands were shaking; every so often, my whole body shuddered. I shoved my fingers into my pocket and retrieved my cell phone. Flipping it open one-handed, I shut my eyes, trying to remember the shape of the numbers in my head. I imagined them drawn on my skin and then I had them. I hit send.
The phone rang twice, and Sullivan’s voice, thick with sleep, answered, “Hello?” He added, dutifully, “This is Patrick Sullivan of Thornking-Ash.”
“I need you,” I said. “I need your help.”
The thick voice was a lot more awake all of a sudden. “James? What’s going on?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. There’s a girl dying in my arms. Because of me. “I’m—is anyone else up? I need to bring someone in. I need your help.” I realized I was repeating myself and shut up.