Dreams and Shadows

chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

THE YOUNG MAN EWAN BRADFORD

The years since he’d left the Limestone Kingdom had not been unusually kind to Ewan Thatcher. Never having known his given surname—as the fairies hadn’t used it—the kindly old shelter worker who’d taken him in off the street had named him Ewan Doe. And it wasn’t until he found his way to his first foster home that he’d taken the name Bradford.

The Bradfords were sweet enough, a pudgy pair of professional types who had tried for fifteen years to have a child of their own. Barren and cursed, they took in what they called strays, making the best of what the system could find them. Parenting, much like conceiving a child, wasn’t in their genes. It took less than a year for them to get fed up with Ewan’s screaming nightmares, strange behavior, and eccentricities before dumping him back into the system and trying their luck with another. From that point on, Ewan referred to the Bradford line—the point at which a family had kept him for as long as the Bradfords had. Three hundred and twelve days. Only two families since had ever gotten that far, neither getting much further. In the fourteen years since he’d entered the system, he’d been with twenty-two families.

Despite the foster care system having shipped him all over Texas, it was only natural that, when of age, he found his way to the only home he really knew. So on his eighteenth birthday, he packed his stuff, hugged his latest foster mother good-bye, and took the bus to Austin, Texas, where lived his closest friend in the world, the only person who remembered him from before: Colby Stevens.

While Colby had mysteriously turned up time and again throughout his life, consistently writing letters that always knew how to find him, he was still something of a mystery to Ewan. Always off on some adventure in a far-off part of the world, it struck Ewan as odd that he felt the need to keep in touch with someone he had known stateside when they were too young to remember even meeting. But Colby was a good friend, always there for him, providing the only real sense of stability in his erratic life.

At the age of twenty-one, Ewan was a mess. Tall, gaunt, and tattooed, he wore both his clothing and his dyed hair shaggy and black, concealing his innate good looks. While he never wore makeup, it was hard to tell without looking closely, his skin so pale and his eyelashes so thick that, coupled with the hair, he seemed to be aspiring to vampire chic. In truth, he embraced the look because with his hair its natural brown, he simply looked ill—like he was missing some essential component of his diet. The occasional crack about his style from a stranger was much easier to take than smothering concern. Are you eating right? You look sick. You need more iron in your diet. Or bananas. Potassium is good for that sort of thing. There was no need for the attention; it was humiliating. He was just naturally pale. So he dressed the part and people left him alone.

His apartment was a third-story, one-bedroom walk-up in a shadier part of town nestled between gas stations, a strip club, a liquor store, and a greasy-spoon diner where Janis Joplin had gotten her start as a singer—paid for by washing dishes and working as a bar back at a downtown club. While he could have made better money elsewhere, he kept the job because it meant occasionally talking the manager into substituting Ewan’s band as an opener when acts fell through, netting him almost weekly stage time. The manager—a seedy, overweight, and similarly overconfident hipster who looked surprisingly like a balding, overcooked potato in plaid—would let him play, but not for cash; that way they both got something out of the deal. He got a free act and Ewan got to experience firsthand how piss-poor his band really was.

He had no idea what his band’s name meant, but it had sounded cool when it came to him: Limestone Kingdom. They weren’t particularly good, but they weren’t dreadful either; they were just uninspired. Ewan played guitar, backed up by a pair of brothers he’d found through an ad on a telephone pole: LOOKING FOR LEAD SINGER/GUITARIST TO FRONT BASS AND DRUM DUO. MUST HAVE OWN EQUIPMENT AND SONGS. He wrote most of the music himself, but could never get it right. There was this music lingering just out of reach in the back of his head—something familiar but inaccessible—and that’s where he tried to write from. But it came out all wrong. So he assembled the chords the way he thought people would like them, layering them with lyrics about his life, short and poorly lived though it was. It never gelled, but he kept plugging away at it with the hope that one day they’d click and he’d never have to wash dishes again.

He was mediocre, unremarkable, and altogether ordinary, everything he strived every moment to break free of. So when his manager slapped his back with a meaty palm and asked, “Do you think you can get your band here by eight?” he was ready.

“Hell yeah,” said Ewan. “They’ll be here.”

The crowd was thin that night; the cancellation had been the headliner, bumping the opening act into the top spot, leaving Limestone Kingdom to open for the openers. Far from ideal. But it was still a gig and they played their hearts out—which is to say they played as well as they could. Few noticed and fewer cared. Thirty or so people milled around, mostly in groups, nursing beers or doing shots, often checking their watches and phones for the time, wondering how much longer before the next band took the stage.

Only one person in the audience was watching. She was hard to notice at first—sitting in a pool of shadow at the back corner of the club—but the moment Ewan caught a flash of her eyes, she was the only thing he could see. She was transfixed, sipping her drink, watching not the band, but Ewan himself—her eyes unwavering, as if he was the only thing onstage.

Thin and waifish, a stiff breeze could have knocked her over, dragging her several feet. Her eyes were large, brown, and dazzling, set below a high forehead framed with wisps of short brown hair. When she smiled, her delicate cheekbones dominated the landscape of her flawless, milky skin. She wore a gauzy top, a gossamer broom skirt, and a modest black beret, a handmade scarf hanging about her neck in a snarl of rainbow-colored wool. There was something entirely elegant about her every detail, a charm even to the simple way she sat.

The moment Ewan caught sight of her, his breath grew short. His throat swelled with dried cotton. His heart pounded. He was dizzy, mad with love; his eyes grew nervous and his knee twitched, as if his entire right leg might give out and cave in beneath him at any moment. Never once had he suffered stage fright, but here, for the first time in his life, he was terrified. Ewan knew, even at his age, that a girl who knocked the wind out of you came along rarely, if ever.

He couldn’t mess this up.

So he played, and he played, and he continued his awkward plunge into the depths of mediocrity. His voice cracked like a teenager bludgeoned into manhood by puberty. The music languished in the air, stillborn, tired, and repetitive. The crowd murmured, trying to ignore it, but the girl stayed tangled in the melodies. She got it; while there was not a lot there to get, she understood, felt its roots, connecting with whatever it was that it wanted to be—and never taking her eyes off him.

His set ended an unbearable twenty minutes later. He tried to keep his cool, but it was clear he was rushing through breaking down their equipment. The bassist looked down at him as Ewan unplugged from the onstage amp. “We saw her.”

“Yeah,” said his drummer.

Ewan looked at both of them, a bit confused. “Yeah?”

His bassist smiled. “Get down there, a*shole. We’ll finish up.”

Ewan hopped offstage almost a hair faster than his bassist could catch his guitar. He was off, speeding to the table before realizing he had nothing at all to say, his mind suddenly blank. He swerved instead to pass by, only to see that she was no longer there. Both flustered and disappointed, he stopped dead, staring thunderstruck at her empty seat.

“Looking for someone?”

He turned and found himself towering over her. Their eyes met. She smiled, slowly raising the straw of a soft drink to her lips before taking a single, dainty sip.

Ewan stammered. His chest seized up, choking his heart, his whole body shaking with the pound of each beat. Thumthum. Thumthum. Thumthum. Eight heartbeats into the conversation he came to life. “Hi,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m Ewan.”

“I know,” said the girl, rolling her words into a smile. “You’re the lead singer of Limestone Kingdom.”

“You’ve heard of us?” he asked, surprised.

She looked at the stage with a cool grin, amused by how rattled he was. “Um, yeah, I might have caught a show.”

He turned, looking at the stage, his face now a reddish purple. “Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah,” she nodded. Ewan floundered for a moment more before she dove in to save him. “I’m Nora.”

“Nora. Hey, I’m Ewan.”

She laughed, finding him adorable. “Yes. And before you run through it again, you’re in Limestone Kingdom, and yes, I’ve seen you perform.”

He blushed redder still. “I’m blowing this, aren’t I?”

“Oh no,” she said reassuringly. “I haven’t been insulted or called another girl’s name yet, so it could get much, much worse for you. Right now, you’re still in that charming, dorky, you-don’t-realize-I-find-you-as-attractive-as-you-find-me territory. You’re doing fine.”

Ewan scuffed the floor with his feet, his hands fiddling behind his back as if he were hiding a valentine.

“Look, you want to go somewhere or something?”

“Go somewhere?” he asked. “Like where?” Then a light went on. “Oh! Yeah! Yes I would.”

She flirted with a flutter of eyelashes and nodded toward the door. “Let’s go.”

It was cool and crisp outside, damp enough to leave dew, but not so much as to chill the bones. The club emptied right onto Sixth Street, only a light scatter of couples and cliques drunkenly wandering between each bar. Nora gracefully spun about, occasionally walking backward to maintain eye contact, quizzing Ewan on the details of his life story. She had a playful way about her, confident but effervescent, as if she was a woman already in love.

She giggled. She flirted. She shamelessly complimented him with her eyes. There was no mistaking that this girl was throwing herself at him—except, of course, for Ewan. Everything Ewan understood about girls was gleaned almost entirely from a lifetime of magazine articles and television—all of which was useless now. He was as clueless as ever.

They turned a corner and walked south, making their way across one of the wide bridges that crossed the lake, carrying them on toward south Austin.

“So, I’ve gotta ask,” said Ewan. “Who the hell are you?”

“Excuse me?” asked Nora, cocking her head, giving him a now you’re blowing it look.

“Who are you? How does an insanely good-looking girl end up alone at a bar, listening to a bunch of nobodies, before wandering off into the night with their lead nobody?”

Nora smiled, looking out over the water. “Maybe I like nobodies. Especially lead nobodies.”

“Oh, really?”

“Sure. Do you know how hard it is to land the lead singer of a band when they’re already famous? Impossible. You have to find them before they blow up, when they appreciate you as the girl who loved them when they were just a dishwasher.”

“Hey, how’d you know I was a dishwasher?”

“You’re a dishwasher? Oh, I can’t date one of those.” Nora turned back toward the bar.

“Hey!”

Nora spun back around, pointed a finger pistol at him, and fired it with a wink and a click of her tongue. “You really think tonight is my first night in that rat hole?”

“You’ve never been there before,” he argued.

“The hell I haven’t,” she said. “I’ve been in there a number of times. You’ve never noticed me, which explains why I was alone tonight.”

“How does that explain why you were alone tonight?”

“Because maybe if you’d noticed me earlier, we could have done this weeks ago.”

“I’m telling you, you’ve never been in my club.”

“Your club? Is that why you’re always helping the bartender?”

“You know what I mean. You’ve never been there.”

“Then how do I know you like blondes?” she asked, putting one hand squarely on her hip. Slowly she ran her lithe fingers through her short brown hair.

“I don’t . . . I don’t like blondes,” he said sheepishly.

“You do. You check out every blonde who walks in that place like you’re looking for someone.”

“I do not!”

“You totally do. And you’re totally busted.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe we’re on our first date and you’re already lying to me.”

“This isn’t a . . .” He trailed off. Nora waited patiently for what he had to say next. Her reaction hinged on the very . . . next . . . word. “Wait, is this a . . .”

Nora nodded.

“So, we’re . . .”

She nodded again. “You can say the word.”

“On a date?”

“There it is. Yes, Romeo, you’re on a date, though you’re not faring as well at this point as you were just a little while ago.”

“But I didn’t ask you out.”

“No, genius,” she said, shaking her head. “I asked you. Remember? When you ditched your buddies back in the bar to stroll off with some beautiful girl into the night? Alone?”

“Beautiful, huh?” he asked slyly, trying somehow to regain the upper hand.

She stepped toward him, bringing her face close to his, slowly running her fingers up and down his chest. Ewan’s eyes widened, his cotton mouth returning, his leg again twitching, tingling sensations rippling through every cell in his body. Nora leaned in close, standing on her tiptoes, whispering hot breath into his ear, almost knocking his knees out from under him. “Yes,” she said. “Don’t even try to pretend you’re not unbelievably turned on by all of this.”

Ewan swallowed hard. “Okay. Just don’t stop.”

Nora stopped. “Oh, too late.” She turned, continuing to walk across the bridge. Ewan shook off the daze and followed her, wearing the daffy grin of a lovesick schoolboy.

“So how many times have you been to the club?”

“Enough,” Nora said. She was seemingly aloof now, as if she’d lost interest in him—but only in jest. She wore a funny smile, clearly expecting him to follow, as if dangling from a string tied to her waist.

“I don’t know how I’ve never seen you.”

“Well, I might have looked different at the time.”

“Really?”

“You never know.”

“Well, why haven’t you ever spoken to me before?”

“Because, silly,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I was waiting for you to notice me. It’s no fun if it’s the other way around.”

“Fun?”

“Yeah. Fun.”

Ewan narrowed his eyes playfully. “You’re trouble.”

Nora smiled big and bright, then slid her arm around his waist, pulling herself close. “Yeah, but I’m your kind of trouble.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, but you’ll have to trust me on that one.”

They walked aglow, in silence for a moment, neither saying anything to spoil it.

Then, as if they’d never stopped talking, she looked at him. “Have you ever been in love?”

He shook his head. “No. Never.”

“Really?” She crinkled her nose a bit. “Never?”

“Nope. Never met the right girl.”

“The right girl?”

“All right, smartass. I’ve dated before.”

“But not successfully.”

He opened his mouth to speak, expecting something witty to fall out. Instead, his gaping maw sat mute, unable to form a single syllable. Then he shook it off, saying matter-of-factly, “No, I suppose not.”

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “You have that new car smell to you.”

“It’s my aftershave.”

“You don’t wear aftershave.”

“What don’t you know about me?”

She smiled shyly. “Less than you think.”

Ewan stopped at the end of the bridge. “Oh, really?”

“You’re not all that complicated, Ewan.”

“How do you know? I could be dark and mysterious. I could be a serial killer for all you know.” He pointed to the swelling green park just off to the side of the bridge, along the banks of the lake. “That’s why I brought you out here.”

“I brought you here, Ewan.”

“That’s only what I made you think. That’s how dark and mysterious I can be.”

Nora took a few steps toward Ewan, shaking her head. “You’re not dark, Ewan. You’re not mysterious. You’re cute. And you’re sweet. And you would protect me from the Devil himself if he showed up right now.” She tapped his breastbone with a single finger. “That’s what’s in that heart of yours. Inside you’re just a little boy who feels that somewhere out there is a place where he belongs, but he’s lost it and wants only to find it again.”

Ewan peered closely into Nora’s eyes. “How do you know that?”

“Because I know what that feels like. I want to find that place again too.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“Once,” she said.

“What happened?”

“He left.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t have a choice. But I screwed it up. I should have known he was going to leave, but I was young and stupid and we had no idea what we’d gotten ourselves into.”

“What happened to him?”

“He forgot me and went on with his life.”

“And you?”

“There came a time when I realized that the only way I’d be happy was if I went out looking for happiness. So I did. That’s how I found myself in Austin.”

“And me?”

She looked into his eyes, smiled, and, with alarming speed, swooped in, planting a sweet butterfly kiss on his lower lip and whispering into his ear. “You’re it,” she said. Then she sprang away into the bushes, running headlong into the park. Ewan remained, speechless, confused both by the tingling kiss and her sudden disappearance. Then it dawned on him what she was doing. Tag. And he took off into the darkness after her.

She was quick. Every time Ewan thought he had her, she would duck his tag or slip around a tree. Once she even managed to drop under a branch that Ewan failed to see, flooring him. When he rose to his feet, he caught sight of her standing a few paces away, smiling blithely, with a twinkle in her eye. “Come on,” she taunted. “I know you can do better than that.”

He bolted at her like a charging stallion.

She turned too late to get away, his arm wrapping around her waist as they tumbled together to the ground. They rolled around in the thick grass for a moment until he found himself on top of her, looking into her big brown eyes, his hand holding hers.

“Why do I feel like I already know you?” he asked.

“Do you believe in past lives?”

He shook his head and laughed. “No.”

“Neither do I,” she said. Then she kissed him deeply. Their lips met and fit together as if they had been molded as a set. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, one arm around her back and the other cradling her head. His body jolted to life, electric. This wasn’t his first kiss, but it sure felt like it. Everything in his body tingled, his mind drifting away, floating in felicity. Ewan could feel lips and the light brushing of tongues and a thousand tiny explosions swarming over every inch of his body—but there was nothing else in the universe. Nothing at all. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

And then gently, lovingly, she pulled away. Together they smiled like goofy children, lost in each other’s eyes. Then she whispered softly, “I have to go.”

“No you don’t,” said Ewan. “Stay here.”

“No, I really do need to go.”

Ewan sat up. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No!” she said. “No, you did everything just right.”

“Then why are you leaving?”

“Because I have to go.”

“Where?”

“Can I tell you next time?”

“I get a next time?”

“Yes,” she said with a nod. “You’ve earned yourself a couple of next times.”

“Can I call you?”

She shook her head. “I’ll find you.”

“What?”

She stroked his cheek delicately with the backs of her fingers. “Trust me,” she said. “I will find you.” Then she jumped to her feet, adjusted her clothing, and took a deep breath. “Good night, Ewan.” Before he could protest any further, she was gone, sprinting off into the dark. Ewan rolled onto his back and stared up at the stars.

“Nora,” he said quietly. And as he thought of her, he could hear music spring from his heart and poetry spill off his tongue. Words became phrases and notes became melodies. Ewan smiled. He had to get home and write this down.

NORA RAN FULL speed through the trees. She made little noise, her tiny feet barely kicking up any fuss. Then, when she felt she’d gone far enough, she darted around a tree, arched her back against it, and smiled dreamily. Her eyes twinkled, her skin shimmering in the blackness. For years, she’d dreamt of this evening, never imagining it would actually go so well. There was always the lingering fear that she couldn’t connect, that the spark that had existed before couldn’t reignite. But it had. And now it was ablaze.

Nora shook her head—curly, thick blond locks spilling out in the place of short brown wisps, a deep azure washing like a wave over the brown of her eyes; her skin stretched, filling out the contours of her face into a much slimmer, more elfin, shape; her lips puckered and swelled, becoming full and bee stung. In a few brisk shakes, Nora melted away and Mallaidh the Leanan Sidhe was all that remained. She was fully grown—a shapely, ethereal, demure woman standing naked in the shadows cast by branches in the moonlight.

Nora was an ephemeral dress she wore—woven of glamour, culled from hints of the mortals Ewan had admired at the bar. Mallaidh had probed his heart and seen what he desired most; Nora was her best approximation. After half a dozen trips, she had at long last built up the nerve to weave herself a cover. This dark, little, pixyish construct had done its job. Now it was entirely up to Mallaidh.

After fourteen years, she had finally found her hero. And she wasn’t going to lose him again. No matter what.