Six.
Stina
We ended up at the entrance to a rickety amusement park I’d never heard of, and were greeted by a clown trashcan that had been tipped over onto its side, cigarette butts spilling out of its painted smile. The faded and splintered arch over the gate was missing all the vowels in the word “carnival”, making the sign kinda pointless. When I glanced beyond the gate to the tall rides, I noticed none of them were moving, and several were missing cars or whole bits of track.
I had no idea which state we were in. Details mattered, but so little of everything Jens had done made any sense to me, I guessed that even if I knew every detail, I’d still be in the dark.
He parked the car and got out, stretching from head to toe and then shaking like a dog kept in a cage too long. I made no effort to join him, though I was terribly stiff. Jens opened my door and popped the trunk, taking out a red backpack. He jerked his head toward the lackluster park. “Out you go. You’ll be safe with my people while we figure things out.”
I obeyed, but only because I didn’t want him to carry me again. I’m sure Tonya would’ve been thrilled to be tossed around by the older, rugged-looking man. I frowned, my melancholy stamping itself on my shoulders and weighting them. Memories like those would have to do, being that I would never see her again. Only solid girlfriend I’d ever had, and just like that she was gone from my life. I tucked that despair away and kept my expression neutral as I followed Jens to the entrance.
I heard organ music piped in from the center of the park, but it had that terrifying serial killer clown feel to it – too slow and clunky to be classified as cheery. Despite my dislike of Jens, I didn’t stray too far from him. I’d never been terribly fond of clowns ever since Linus downloaded every clown slasher movie in existence and made me watch them all in a single weekend. That was his retaliation for me making him watch all the seasons of my favorite girly show, which he declared was far more scarring than his horror movies.
We didn’t go to the open ticket booth, but to a closed one. He banged on the plexiglass, waving a gold badge from his pocket. An elderly lady looked up from her knitting and greeted him. She wore an orange cardigan and had thick creamsicle bifocal frames to match. Her sweater reminded me of the one my Uncle Rick wore like a uniform with his Dockers. If you’ve never seen a tall black man in an orange cardigan, you’re missing out. Somehow he rocked it. “Good to see you, Jens. It’s been positively boring without you around to entertain me.”
“Now, now. You can’t have me all to yourself, Mattie. But I came back for you, so the world’s right again.”
“So it is.” She uploaded his badge information with a digital scanner and read the pertinent information to him through her thick lenses. Her eyes and lips were framed in accordion wrinkles as she read aloud. “The Kincaid girl’s place was terminated. No casualties. An imprint of her dental work was left where the authorities could find them in the rubble. She’s been identified and declared dead. Well done, peach pie, as usual.”
Jens nodded, ignoring the fact that my heart plummeted in my chest and my nerves were showing themselves in the form of cold sweat beading on my forehead. It was hot out, but I was chilled through to the bone. I would never see Tonya again. My life had been yanked out from under me.
“Peach pie. Are you flirting with me, Mattie?” Jens pocketed his badge and leaned on the sill.
“Oh, I’m always flirting with you, and you love it.” The woman whose blue faded nametag read “Matilda” slid open the window and reached forward at the same time he leaned in. She pinched his dimpled cheek, and then slapped it lightly.
“Is Alrik still here? I couldn’t find him.”
“Alrik came back early. Said he ran into some trouble with Weres entering civilization too close to humans, not that anyone except for you and me would believe him. Three of them were tracking him, so he had to get Tucker to burn his favorite place down. Then he came back to Undra just to throw off the scent.” She shook her head. “Such a shame. He loved stocking the shoes at that bowling alley. Alrik crossed over earlier this morning.”
Jens rolled his eyes. “Must be nice to port places. Just pop from state to state whenever you like. Elves are such cheaters.” He jerked his thumb in my direction. “I’m taking my charge to see him.”
Matilda handed him a clipboard with her thick, wrinkled fingers. “Sign her in, dear.” She looked me up and down appreciatively. “Thanks for bringing this one in without making a scene. Did you get a Huldra to spell her to make her so calm?” She gave a visible shiver to indicate she did not care for Huldras.
Something in the recesses of my brain pinged when I heard the term, but I couldn’t place why it sounded familiar.
Jens glanced back at me and frowned. “Nah. Just used my awesome people skills.”
Matilda made a huff of disbelief and took back the clipboard, her chubby fingers winding the pen’s chain back around the clip. “Boy, you’re lucky you’ve got the face of every mother’s nightmare.”
He grinned in a churlish way that made me want to puke on his black boots just to take him down a notch. I pretended to accidentally brush against him as I reached past to check he spelled my name right. I smiled through my irritation, loving how easy he was to pickpocket. I’d picked many a pocket in my day – not to steal cash, but usually as part of one of Linus’s harebrained schemes that never (always) got us into trouble.
“Go ahead on in, kids. Give Alrik a hug from me and remind him he owes me $3.25 from our bridge game last week.”
“I can pay off his high-stakes gambling debts.” Jens’s thumb touched the edge of his empty pocket. My victory was ill timed and therefore, short-lived.
Matilda smiled, her cherubic cheeks moving her glasses up on her face. “Oh, you’re a sweet boy, Jens. I don’t care what King Johannes says about you.”
His thick eyebrows pushed together as he patted both his back pockets. “Left my wallet in the car. I’ll be…”
He stopped talking when a red sports car pulled in at a speed not considerate of pedestrians. It parked at the entrance, which was not actually a parking spot. A black-haired beauty in her thirties stepped out, revealing…well, just revealing. She wore a purple dress that was kind of a dress and kind of a butt-length form-fitting shirt. Her black heeled boots up to her knees and red lips to match her car made me feel like a kid still in pigtails.
My toes clung to my mismatched sky blue and black Chucks as I leaned against the ticket booth, waiting for Jens to put his tongue back in his head.
“Jens!” Matilda’s voice turned sharp in that way elderly women have of shaming you by simply saying your name. “Everything on this side of the gate is property of Undraland. Huldras aren’t allowed past it. Not a toe. I don’t care how short her skirt is.”
“I know the rules, and so does she,” Jens assured her. “We’re not together, Mattie. She just helps me out on jobs sometimes.” He pointed an adult finger in my face, and I despised him for it. “Don’t move from this spot. I’ll be right back.” He called to the woman, “Stina, what do you want?”
Short Skirt Stina’s eyes glossed over me like I was a sea urchin, or you know, something that doesn’t belong in a picture with Jens.
Matilda slammed the sliding window shut, a clear look of fear on her face. “Huldra,” she mouthed, shuddering, staring with dread at Stina.
Then I remembered. When Mom and Dad went out on their rare date nights, Uncle Rick would stay with Linus and me. We straight up begged like gypsies when it came to avoiding bedtime. We put on puppet shows with our socks for Uncle Rick, sang songs, and pled for story after story.
Uncle Rick was a great storyteller. He made up all sorts of goofy tales, one of which was about a people called the Huldras.
I studied Stina, suspending my disbelief for the moment that the world was in fact, a more bizarre place than I realized, and that Huldras were real.
Huldras were women who had magic in their whistle that could be used to contro
l people. They could enchant people to do their bidding for hours, which would explain Matilda’s self-inflicted booth isolation. I began to feel very exposed.
Jens needed no mind-controlling whistle to scamper toward Stina. Their conversation was too far off to eavesdrop on. I turned and leafed through his wallet, bummed at the lack of useful information he’d stashed inside. I expected some top-secret intel or direct orders or something.
Instead I found a few receipts for nothing damning, a black card I tried not to be impressed by, and a few pieces of paper I began thumbing through to gain more information on Jens to be used for nefarious purposes later.
One folded piece of paper had a list of cities, all with a line drawn through them except for my latest address. My intake of breath was not noticeable, but my upset probably was. There, in perfect geographic order were the past five years of my life. It was the list of cities my family had moved to on our run from Weres or whatever it was my parents were always hiding us from.
The next piece of paper was a note to someone from Linus. My heart banged in my chest like an alarm as I read it.
You ate the last bagel, you jag. The ransom’s set at 2 dozen donuts if you ever want to see your precious knife again. You have until I get home from school.
I couldn’t stop asking the note over and over and over whom it had been written to. Linus didn’t know about Jens and Weres and all that. He’s my twin brother. I would’ve felt it if he had. Maybe someone from his soccer team? “Jag” didn’t exactly narrow anything down. Which of his jock friends carried around a knife? And why did Jens have a piece of my brother in his wallet?
I tugged at the thin braided rope around my neck, twisting through the material the heart-shaped vial that hid under my shirt. It was Linus, literally. He’d been cremated, and I got a vial of his ashes. The cop who’d found my parents in the car wreck gave me some crap reason why I couldn’t see or have my parents’ bodies, so I didn’t have a piece of them to take with me.
It was just Linus and me.
I kifed the note from Jens’s wallet and shoved it in my back pocket. My brother. My note.
I was too upset to go through the rest of the wallet’s contents. I dropped it next to me for Jens to find when Stina was done flirting with him, if a timeframe existed for that. She was trilling her red fingernail down his arm. She was over six feet tall, which was a nice match for him, height-wise.
Jens shook off her advance, but she paid his subtle signals no mind. She reached out for his hand, tracing a design into his palm as she spoke.
Boys are so dense.
She followed him to his car while he fished around for the wallet he would never find, chatting all the while as she checked out his butt none too subtly. That, I couldn’t blame the girl for.
When he went to search the trunk, I took pity on him. “Jens, your wallet,” I called, making a show of picking it up so he could see how clumsy he was in dropping it in the dust.
He rolled his eyes at himself and trotted toward me, ignoring Short Skirt Stina as she prattled on about something very important to her that Jens couldn’t have cared less about.
“I’m talking to you, Jens!” she shouted.
Jens stopped and turned, an eyebrow raised almost comically. “I’m working, Stina. Why don’t you just keep dialing up the crazy? Nothing sexier than that.”
“A blonde? Really?” she directed toward me. “You’re such a cliché! I can’t believe you’d take her to your house when we were together not a month ago!” She said it to me like she was announcing some scandal, as if he’d been cheating on me with her last month. I didn’t really have a convincing gasp in me, so I leaned against the ticket booth while I waited for their very mature fight to finish up.
“Ignore her,” he called to me.
She shouted to me in a high-pitched screech of desperation, finger jabbing like a threat. “If you think he’s only sleeping with you, you’re dead wrong, honey!”
Jens met my wary gaze with one that was mildly embarrassed, then he turned to bark at the long legged beauty. “Leave her alone, Stina.”
I thought Stina would give him a verbal jab to parry, but instead she pursed her lips and sucked in a lungful of air.
Jens gasped in surprise and lunged at her, his fist cocked. So quick, I barely saw all of it, Jens socked Stina in the nose with force meant to combat a large man. Her head snapped back, and she stumbled. Jens caught her, anticipating she would fall backward, and lowered her to the ground gently, as if he’d not been the one who’d just leveled her with a single blow.
I screamed with my hands over my mouth, shocked that the puppy prone to misbehaving was capable of biting. The gravity of the situation hit me afresh; I knew nothing about Jens.
Jens glanced over at me, chagrinned that he’d been a horrible person in my presence. He shrugged as if to say, “What else was I supposed to do?”
I ran to the woman, shocked and appalled that I’d let a smidgen of my guard down around him. I passed through the gate and helped her up. “Are you okay? Jens!” I thrust open the car door and fished around for some napkins, pressing them to her nose and pinching the bridge so the red globules would clot.
Stina spat blood onto the ground and sneered up at him, delivering a swift shove to my chest to scold me for helping her. I caught myself before I could fall backward on my rear, surprised that she lashed out at me when I’d had nothing to do with her bloody nose. When she spoke, everything was gulpy and nasal. “I can do whatever I want out here. You forget we have free reign of the Other Side. When you need to get out of a tough spot, I’m the one you want, but now you’re all high and mighty when I try to use my whistle just to calm you down?” She spat more blood on his black boots, but Jens didn’t even flinch.
Instead, he stared down at her imperiously. “Don’t you ever try anything like that on me again.” He yanked on my arm, and I had no choice but to bob along behind him like a rag doll.
Finally I regained my footing and jerked myself out of his grip. “Get your hands off me!” I shouted, stomping in the opposite direction.
“Lucy, we have to go! You have no idea how dangerous Stina is.”
“Stina hasn’t punched anyone in the face!” I countered, stomping past the woman who still had blood trickling out of her nose. Her lips pursed together again, and I could tell she was trying to whistle, but couldn’t manage it with her face in such disarray.
In only a few steps, Jens cleared the distance between us. His hand banded around my waist, but he surprised me by jerking my head to the side. His lips suctioned to the space between my shoulder and my neck, confusing me more than anything. I felt a slight pinch when he bit me, and felt my chest constrict after I choked out a scream. Jens was talking to me in that irritated tone he gets when I piss him off, but I couldn’t make sense of the words that tumbled out of him too fast.
He steered me back toward Matilda, and I walked with leaden feet as I tried fruitlessly to protest.
“Jens! She’s positively white as a sheet. Be careful!” Matilda called, pushing a button to let us through the turnstile.
“It’s only a half dose,” he said, as if whatever he’d done to me had a good excuse. I tried to dig my heels in, but I only managed to trip myself and ram my hip into the metal bar.
This was it. Somehow I’d just been roofied by a vampire who thought he was a garden gnome. It was the only explanation.
Jens righted me, but my knees were shaking. I could smell hot dogs and a stomach-churning mix of amusement park foods. The hot dog made me think of Tonya and her creative, yet appalling hot dog casserole. I wondered if she made it with cabbage, like she did last time she concocted the creation. It smelled the same going down as it had coming back up. What I wouldn’t give for her casserole now. I’d muscle my way through the whole thing if it meant I got to see her again.
Apparently, I’m dead now, since Jens had my apartment burned down and me declared deceased. My last meal had been that tast
eless granola bar I’d stolen from Danny. He was probably just getting home now to find his belongings burned. Tonya would cry on his shoulder. They’d get closer. He’d probably count it as a gain when it was all said and done. He’d do the obligatory “feeling sad” dance concerning my death for Tonya’s sake, but there would be no funeral. Who would come? Everywhere I went I was erased shortly thereafter.
Jens was yammering at me, but I didn’t hear anything. He wanted me to walk faster.
I clutched at my chest in what felt like slow motion. My limbs were stalled as if moving through Jell-O, each gesture an effort.
Then I couldn’t move at all.
The air was too thick to breathe. I looked around for anyone who could help me, but Jens was the only face I could focus on. Then I lost even that. My anxiety peaked when I realized we were the only people in the entire park. Even if I could scream, no one would hear it.
My vision blurred as I tried to resist his iron grip. “Lucy, it’s okay. I’ve got you,” he insisted, as if that was supposed to be a comfort. I whimpered in his arms, and then, just like the Gravitron carnival ride we were standing next to, the bottom dropped out from under me.