Excerpt
Dark, bright. Dark, bright.
The lights flashed past the windows of the Metro train car as it rumbled through the tunnel. Marly looked at the phone in her hand; she was in the middle of a conversation. “I’m on the Metro.” Ruby! She was talking to Ruby. “I’ve just been riding around.”
No answer. She looked at her hand again—burns and blisters on her palm and fingers, but the phone wasn’t there. Ruby wasn’t there, either. And this train, wherever it was going, wasn’t the Metro.
She squinted at the station map above her head and tried to figure out where she was. She didn’t remember getting on the train, or what might have happened to her metro card, or where her purse was. The names of the stations were written in glittery gold and black ink, and the letters swam and danced, never quite coming into focus. This was a different trip, she realized, not the one she took to see Ruby and meet the king. And, of course, the kitsune.
The kitsune. The fox man. Her unwanted and uninvited roommate for the past few months.
Things had been bad before he showed up at her house,
but she’d been handling it. No, that was a lie. Quit lying. Things were bad and she was getting worse. It began with Ruby, of course. Ruby, who she was just trying to protect. Ruby who lied because an omission is just the same as a lie. It earned Marly a pair of fangs in her throat and a long weekend as one of those…things. Say it. Vampire.
At first, after the shock started to wear off, everything seemed to go back to normal. It was over, after all, and the best thing to do with things that were over was never, ever think about them again. Jokes, though. Jokes were okay. They proved it didn’t matter. My Vampire Weekend, ha-ha—see? She could even laugh about it. She felt okay, went back to her classroom, started up the unit on speculative fiction (Bradbury, There Will Come Soft Rains) …. then one morning she’d picked up a fork.
Breakfast, and she’d made eggs. Later, she figured out the pan was coated with Teflon or something, and the spatula was silicone, so they were okay. But she’d picked up a fork, and it burned her hand. I must have set it too close to the stove. But it never cooled off. And then the handle on the refrigerator, the rail on the metro escalator, the handrail outside the school, the doorknob on the schoolhouse door…she turned around and went home, her hands starting to blister, crying with shock and fear. She went to CVS that night for bandages and ran into Claudio, who peppered her with questions until she had to run away.
After that it was oven mitts and gloves and mittens and acres of gauze and gallons of Neosporin. At some point she’d gone to see Doctor Mike, but she couldn’t remember how she got his phone number, or how she got to and from his office. She knew what an ‘anomaly’ was but not why the word appeared over and over on her blood test.
The kitsune came to stay. Or maybe he’d been there all along? He’d vanished her doors and invaded her mind and told her she’d done terrible things. Even though she tried not to think about it, he kept asking, over and over: What did you do while you were dead? Did you like it, being a monster? She thought it was possible she had, because why else was she being punished?
Ruby talked to her on the phone the day she escaped from the fox man. Ruby told her where she needed to go. “All the people who love you will be there,” Ruby said, and she guessed that meant they weren’t fighting anymore. Ruby said the kitsune was gone, he wouldn’t hurt her anymore. But he doesn’t believe in doors, Marly thought. He can always just walk right back in. She didn’t say it, though, because she didn’t want to argue with Ruby.
And, of course, he had.
When she got off the metro that day and somehow made her way to Lauren’s house—the dead fae girl, the one it turned out she had not murdered—as soon as she walked in, she felt a deeply calming presence, like half a Xanax kicking in behind a glass of red wine. Or maybe it was the quiet, the absence of something, of the chaos the kitsune had scribbled all over her mind. She could feel it being washed clean.
She breathed it in, that calm feeling, and looked around. People were helping her; Dr. Bel was carefully washing her poor, abused hands, March—was he the source of the peaceful feeling? —and Ruby were fussing over her, and she let everyone buzz around her as her mind became more and more clear. Then he walked in—a tall and strange and handsome fae, wearing black armor and coming right to her. This is the king, she thought, this is the one from my dream even though in her dream, she hadn’t seen his face. She knew two things right away: he was the source of the feeling, and she had to be really careful. He looked at her, spoke to her, like he knew her. When the kitsune showed up—she knew he’d show up—the fae moved to stand in front of her, as if to protect her. The fox man told the real story; he’d been using her as bait to hurt Ruby and March, but that didn’t explain anything. It didn’t mean there wasn’t anything special about her. When the beautiful fae made his confession, she realized with growing amazement she’d been the center of the story all along. Sasha—the king, it appeared—had been searching for her. And the fox man had tricked him into thinking he would help the fae king find her. He explained how she wasn’t a murderer, or a vampire, or a broken mistake who should have been left among the dead, and she wanted it to be true more than anything. When he reached out and took off her sunglasses, when everyone saw her new entirely black eyes, she understood what anomaly meant. According to Sasha, it meant she was going to be a queen.
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