Betwixt (25 page)

Ondine said nothing. She could feel herself being studied. She thought of the mice in her father’s lab, wondering if it would
be more food today, or the needle that administers the killing serum. The woman’s choice of words:
Pet. Human home.
Heat rose to her face and she nearly covered her cheeks with her hands, then stopped herself.

“Moth is your guide, Ondine,” Viv continued. “His task is to help you. He has passed through the stage you are experiencing
now and has acknowledged the truth about himself. Let him lead you to the light.”

It was the way she held her lips. The violet-gray pool of eyes. Ondine shook her head, signaling no, but she could not speak.

Her vision narrowed to a pinprick, at the end of which was Moth’s face, leering in false compassion. She felt the undulation
of what had been solid ground beneath her —
Oh my God, I am actually going to fall down again
— when a nervous, bony arm encircled her shoulders.

“Nix!”

The word erupted from Ondine’s mouth, and as she whirled to embrace him, she registered her relief at his return. But instead
of Nix’s narrow face and nervous eyes, she saw a mane of lustrous black hair that seemed to have a life of its own, apart
from the pale, eerily calm face it wreathed.

“Morgan.” Her mouth opened and closed. “What are you doing here?”

The girl looked into her old friend’s eyes, ignoring the two people behind her. “I’ll take you home.”

“But — why are you here? How did you get here?”

“Later.”
Morgan whispered.

“I —”

Why was she hesitating? A moment ago, all she had wanted
was to leave. But Morgan: she was the last person Ondine expected to see.

“I saw Nix leave,” Morgan said smoothly over her silence, then looked over her shoulder, coldly, at Moth. “He left with Neve.”

“That’s what —” Ondine broke off.
That’s what Viv said,
she thought, but didn’t say it aloud.

Morgan’s eyes returned. “Ondine? Honey? Let’s just go, okay?”

She wanted to say yes. But more than that, she wanted Morgan to tell her why she was here at the gathering. Who had told her,
though she already knew. All Morgan said was, “Neve looked pretty trashed, and Nix, well, he seemed to really want to get
her into his car.”

“My car,” Ondine whispered.

“What, sweetie?”

“Let’s just go.” She started walking in the direction of the forest she and Nix had come through earlier, stopping to tie
a shoelace that had come undone in the chaos. She heard Morgan tell Moth and Viv that she expected a complete reckoning when
they got back to Portland.

“What’s your last name?” Ondine heard Morgan say, presumably to Viv. The woman laughed. “I think you know you won’t find me
in the phone book.”

Then she felt Morgan’s tense little arm guiding her back up
the hill, through the forest. Ondine let herself be led. It had gotten dark; the only light came from the moon.

“Waxing crescent,” she heard herself say.

“What?” They had passed out of the clearing where she and Nix had first settled when they arrived. The tent was gone. Nix
must have packed it up.
How thoughtful.

“Waxing crescent,” Ondine repeated. She made a vague motion toward the sky. “The moon.”

“Oh,” Morgan replied. “Right.” Then she did something strange. Something Ondine had never seen Morgan do in the half year
she’d known her. She stopped and turned toward Ondine and took her hands in her cold smaller ones, squeezing, and said, “I
think we shouldn’t talk about this for a while. I think we should wait till we get home to do anything.”

Ondine swallowed. She waited for an explanation but none came. Given a choice, she would’ve preferred that this night had
never happened. But laws were laws and someone had died. She had been a witness. To have Morgan request a silence — Ondine
didn’t want to use the word “suspicious,” but Morgan’s hands were squeezing hers harder now, and she felt that if she didn’t
agree, the girl whose hair was so dark it seemed to grow out of the sky would squeeze her hands until the bones crumbled.

“Okay,” Ondine whispered, forcing herself not to yank her hands from the girl’s grip.

“Okay!” Morgan repeated brightly, squeezing one more time.

With that the two girls exited the first line of trees and headed toward Morgan’s black Lexus, which beeped comfortingly when
she clicked her key ring, as if the car had been waiting for them. Otherwise the lot was empty. The headlights cut a narrow
swath through the darkness, and Ondine kept her eyes focused on the bright part and ignored the blackness that pressed in
all around. When Morgan said, “You wanna listen to the radio?” Ondine jumped a little in her seat and bit back a scream.

“Okay,” she said, and kept her eyes on the hard light in front of her.

C
HANGELINGS

N
EVE
C
LOWES SLEPT THE WHOLE WAY
back to Portland, her forehead forming a filmy spot of warmth and grease against the Masons’ Jetta window. Nix zipped up
the jacket — Dr. Mason’s — he’d given her and covered her cold hands with socks, making sure her boots were laced and her
cuffs were rolled down. His gestures were tender, and with each he thought of Ondine, whom he knew he had abandoned. She’d
have to understand. He’d explain everything later. Now he needed to help Neve — and Jacob.

Nix didn’t actually think the words “He needed to help the humans,” but they were there anyway.

He tried to give Neve water, but it just dribbled out of the side of her mouth, coiling around her bare neck like a translucent
snake, and she coughed and sputtered, not really waking up. Nix wiped the water from her mouth, making sure her nose and her
throat were clear. He’d learned to do these things from Finn at the squat. It was how people choked, Finn told him. How
they most often died when they were OD’ing. Doing these things felt good, or at least real.

The moon at the lip of the window, the low music he was playing (a Bill Evans CD was still in the car, from Mrs. Mason): these
things made him feel grounded, actual, intact. Nix even found himself tapping one of Evans’s silky melodies on the steering
wheel, keeping time with the clicking orange road markers and an occasional pine outlined against the black-blue sky.

It was a familiar feeling, this getting used to things. He had done it many times before. Even as a child, when he first started
having his visions. It was the perpetual truth of his existence, the one thing he could count on. Eventually he would take
in stride whatever strangeness the world threw his way.

The Evans CD came to an end. Nix was still tapping. He thought about Ondine. She knew him. At least one person understood
a little of what he had experienced. Ondine, he trusted. Now to find himself locked in this situation with her, and — he almost
tripped on her name — Morgan D’Amici of all people. The girl’s intensity threw him. How unlikely that the three of them would
be bound together here, in Portland, in this place, next to these hills.

The mountains. What is in them?
He recalled again what his grandfather had communicated silently to him those days on the water. They rose up black and still
in the moonlight, massive and ancient, surrounding Portland. He thought back to something
he remembered the woman in the black coat saying:
We inhabit the Ring of Fire,
and Nix knew instinctively that she meant these mountains. But who was “we”? And what, exactly, did “inhabit” mean? He shouldn’t
have left so early, but he had to, for Neve’s sake.

He had heard one name just as he left,
Novala.
Was it a place? An actual place, with a geography, yet unmapped? Or was it a place like in that children’s book about the
lion and the closet, where only the border was important? At the gathering, the trees at the edge of the parking lot had marked
a line. Once he’d stepped past it, everything had felt more solid; sounds had rung clearer; Neve’s body had been heavier.
Was that Novala, too?

Even if it were a hallucination, Nix felt the loosening of all of this thinking work its calming effects on his brain, and
for a while he was happy to just sit there, music-less, Neve’s head bobbing to the beat of the ruts in the road. He started
to replay the little he’d seen. There was the girl on the stage … then the lightning struck … the boy … then the woman in
the black coat … and Bleek … and the bird.

He felt gravel and rocks under the Jetta just prior to hearing them. Neve moaned, and his hands responded to the wheel even
before his mind did. Nix braked, hard. He must have fallen asleep. They were on the shoulder, a few feet from the trunk of
an oak. He glanced at Neve. She was drooling, the seat belt
across her chest splitting one small, perfect breast from the other. She was safe.

His hands trembled on the wheel, and his second thought, after Neve, was,
So we can feel fear. If not for ourselves, then at least for humans.
He took a breath. They hadn’t run into anything. The relief made him drowsy and he realized how long he’d been on the road
that day, then out in the rain. Weeks of staying up with Ondine had caught up with him. He was tired and confused. It was
late. Neve was still sleeping, her breathing more regular now. He needed to get her home, but a quick check of the dashboard
clock told him that there were another two hours to drive, and as the moon was just setting, it would only get darker.

He’d deal with Jacob in the morning. Now he needed sleep. Nix looked behind him on the road. No cars approached and he was
off the shoulder enough to be safe. He’d just rest till dawn, then get back to Portland, where for once, everything might
turn out fine.

M
ORGAN AND
O
NDINE WERE QUIET MOST OF THE WAY HOME
. Ondine stared out the window; Morgan played the radio: an oldies station, something Ralph Mason would have chosen. Almost
as if she knew it would relax the girl beside her. In fact, Ondine realized, as she ran through the little things that Morgan
did
during the drive, they all seemed chosen, calculated, to please her: the relaxing oldies station with its repetitive commercials
for weight-loss supplements; Morgan asking her more than once if the temperature was all right, even turning on the seat warmers.
Ondine fell asleep, and when she awoke they were in the parking lot of a gas station. Morgan had left the car — gone to the
bathroom, probably — and sitting in the holder was a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate. Ondine drank it, realizing the last thing
she had eaten was Nix’s PB&J in the tent the previous morning. That is, if you didn’t count the dust she’d licked off a stranger’s
palm. The memory of her eagerness, her idiotic abandon, shamed her.

Morgan came back a few moments later, coffee in hand, the car beeping softly. She had locked Ondine in. “How are you?” she
asked, devoid of her normal irony. “You fell asleep for a while. That’s good.”

Ondine nodded into her hot chocolate. She couldn’t look the girl in the eyes. She felt embarrassed even sitting there with
her.

“All right. Just tired. I want to get home.”

Morgan hadn’t said anything. She regarded Ondine in the semidark and smiled. Then she rested her hand on Ondine’s knee, a
startling gesture coming from a girl who rarely touched anyone. They started off and, despite herself, the gentle rocking
of the car and the familiar crackling of the AM oldies station lulled Ondine back to sleep. She awoke in her driveway on N.E.
Schuyler. Morgan was already out of the car, stretching. The sun was rising and everything was a little pink.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at dawn, sailors be warned.

It had come to Ondine unconsciously, the aphorism. She didn’t even know where she had picked it up. She shook it out of her
head and watched Morgan stretching, lifting her bony arms into the air. Skin showed where the girl’s shirt separated from
her jeans and Ondine had shivered, as if she, too, were standing in the cold morning air.

“You’re up.” Morgan smiled, opened the door, and ducked her head in to look at Ondine, who felt embarrassed to have been watching
her. She fumbled for her bag in the backseat and stood up too quickly, hitting her head on the roof of the car as she emerged.

“Ow.”
She touched her crown and laughed nervously. Morgan, draping her forearms across the top of the Lexus, rested her chin in
her hands.

“Long night.” She squinted and cocked her head. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ondine rejiggered the knapsack on her shoulder. “Just … out of it.”

Morgan nodded, her eyes serious. “Me, too.”

Ondine had not known what to say then. Everything felt reorganized; the slight edge she had always had with the other
girl, she realized, was gone. Even the way Morgan was shrugging now, rubbing her shoulders to warm herself — a familiar gesture
from afternoons spent walking around the track at school, talking — had taken on a new confidence. She felt silly and small.
She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she tucked them into her still-damp jeans and looked at the ground.