Disclaimer: Everything in the story belongs to Ms. Black and her wonderful world of Faey. sigh

A/N:
Whoot! Reviews!
Aimee: I know what you mean. We need more Holly Black stuff on this site!

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Condemned fey: I'm loving your user name. And if you've been looking as long as I have, then it's been way too long. Here's another chapter for ya.

Sorry I've taken so long to update! School started, and I'm going insane. Tis all good, however, 'cause I finally finished another chapter. Whoot.

Chapter 3: "Ah, Youth"

"Dead?" Natasha asked warily, stepping forward hesitantly to take the paper from Lisa's outstretched hand. "That's impossible."

Lisa just shook her head mutely, waiting as Natasha scanned the article. Most of it was useless, all about the rave and what the police had commented on, mostly how irresponsible teenagers in general were. There were hardly three sentences about the dead girl they'd found in the water. There was no name for her, but Natasha hadn't expected there to be. The family would have wanted to keep it quiet, most like.

As she gave the paper back to her friend, she could feel her hands shaking. Her eyes found Lisa's, and she knew the look in them was reflected in her own eyes.

"Should we… I don't know. Do something?" Lisa asked, a tremor in her voice. Guilt. It was the same feeling washing over Natasha. A flood that she knew could drown more surely than the heaviest wave of water.

"Like what?" Natasha asked her, sharper than she had intended. "Send flowers?"

Ignoring her friend's morbid sarcasm, Lisa replied. "Well, it is our…"

"No." Natasha told her, staring straight into Lisa's eyes, as if that would somehow get her point across more forcefully. "It is most definitely not our fault. You can't blame yourself that some girl got drunk and dove in." Lisa nodded, but Natasha could tell that the statement didn't change anything- for either of them. The unspoken words both girls wanted to say hung in the air between them, battling around inside them silently.

Natasha left Lisa's house quickly after that. She couldn't bear staying any longer.

No matter how hard she tried, Natasha couldn't get the fragile blonde girl out of her head. Was she the one who had died? Or had it been the other one? The flash of red Natasha had caught out of the corner of her eye, disappearing beneath the waves. She was sure there had been another girl. There must have been.

This is unbelievable. Just stop it already. The girl's dead. There's nothing you can do. Natasha scolded herself silently, driving past the familiar college campus she had learned to navigate like it was her home. Usually, Natasha and Lisa shared one of the dorm rooms on campus, but lately, Lisa had gotten into the habit of staying at the house she'd grown up in. It wasn't like her parents were ever there anyway. They traveled almost constantly, and had been since their only child had gone off to college. It was at this house that the girls had spent the night, and Natasha wondered vaguely if Lisa was still there, worrying about what they'd done.

Somehow, the air inside their room was colder than the air outside, and Natasha shivered involuntarily, running agitated fingers through newly-dyed black hair. She was still groggy from the severe lack of sleep she'd gotten, but at least her face was clean. She didn't want to imagine the kind of looks she would have gotten had she not showered at Lisa's parent's house. Liberal art-y people or no, if you looked like crap, then people would twitter. It was human nature, or something.

A month passed, and then two, and then two more. Slowly, Natasha forced herself to forget the girl. Girls, she amended. She had more important things to worry about than suicides on Halloween. It had all the ring of a fairytale. One of those dark, weird ones. Like something out of Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allen Poe. Insane people who shut themselves up, only to die by their own hand, letting every dark, grotesque creature of the holiday strip their flesh from their bones and their soul from their hearts.

It didn't matter. Natasha pushed the lingering guilt down inside herself, where she could pretend it didn't exist, and go about living her own life, instead of crying over a pair of people she'd never even met.

Natasha was falling asleep to the sound of Lisa's soft snoring above her on the bunk bed when the shrill sound of the telephone made her curse.

"What?" She answered the phone curtly, glancing up to where Lisa was still sound asleep.

" 'What?' Is that how you answer a phone, Kaylie?"

"It is when you call at two in the morning." Natasha answered her mother's query with a sigh, rising to the occasion as far as her sleep deprived mind would let her. Trust her mother to call the night she'd stayed up late studying for an exam. Natasha knew she would have no chance of passing if she kept her mother talking forever. More like a chance of passing out, during the test. Wonderful. Natasha reasoned that if she asked her mother what the hell she was doing up at this hour, the woman would leave her alone. "Mom, what's up?" She asked, trying and failing to put a note of concern in her voice. "Is something so important you had to call me now?"

This seemed to give Sara pause, because there was almost a full thirty seconds of dead air before she spoke again, Natasha waiting as patiently as she could for her mother to tell her whatever it was she had called about.

"It's Grandma."

"Which one?"

"Grandma Irene." Sara paused, but Natasha made no move as if to speak, and the dead air coming from her side of the phone spurred Sara to tell the rest of her story. "Kaylie, she isn't doing well. I was wondering if you could take a week or two and go see her?"

Was her mother trying to be so very clueless, or was it just Natasha hearing her wrong? "Mom, what are you talking about? What do I take a week off from?"

"College, of course." Natasha tried not to scream at her mother's reply. Of course Sara, who had never gone to college, or even finished highschool for all that, would think that leaving school for 'a week or two' would be as easy as getting a few PTO days from work.

"Mom, I can't just leave. It's college for Chris' sake." Natasha tried to hide the irritation in her voice behind another sigh. It wasn't that she hated spending time with her little-old-lady grandmother, it was the fact that Sara would rather inconvenience Natasha than go and visit her mother-in-law herself. "Why can't you drop by?"

"Because she doesn't like me. If you go and see her, it will do both of you so much good."

Natasha had every intention of refuting this when her mother, in a voice that sounded exactly like her own at her worst, pleaded softly. "Please, Kaylie. You're Father would have wanted you two to be close."

Damn. She'd used the F word. Natasha had been dreading it, but it seemed her mother had pulled out the big guns tonight. Both of them knew she could never turn something down when Sara told her 'Father would have wanted it'. Damn.

It took her all the next day after her exam to get all the assignments from her professors that she would miss in the next few days. Most of them gave her odd looks when she told them it was a family emergency, as if they could tell she was lying. These she chose to ignore, and the few teachers who wished her a good journey she left with a smile.

Grandma Irene lived quite close to both the college and the house Natasha had grown up in. Therefore, it was barely two hours later when Natasha found herself knocking on the old wooden door, painted a bright blue that had faded to a dingy gray over the years. Like the neighborhood and the woman who lived inside, the house had not stood up well to the challenge of time, although Natasha thought it must have been beautiful at the time it was built. For a moment, as she gazed up at the gables and shingles adorning the roof, she could almost see the outside walls as they must have been fifty years ago. Things like the bright white paint that had faded to a gray not unlike that of the door, and the edging on the roof, once a dark blue, was now black with age and mold.

"Kaylie? Is that you?" A spindly woman who still stood tall despite her age, leaned past the open door to grab Natasha in a hug that, ten years ago, would have swept the breath from the girl's lungs. Now however, Natasha was stronger, and Grandma Irene had not gotten any younger. There was less power in the hug, and Natasha was sick at the realization that she could no longer feel safe in her grandmother's arms. Anything could break through their frail hold. Anything at all.

Grandma Irene ushered her inside, and Natasha glanced around at the familiar objects scattered all across the room. To her surprise, most everything looked well kept-up and clean. She doubted her grandmother would have had the strength to clean, and she instantly felt guilty that the woman had exerted herself on her granddaughter's account. Natasha would hardly be staying a few days, and she tried telling her Grandmother this, but the woman shushed her.

"Oh, I still have some spark left in this old bag of bones I've become." Irene told her, chuckling in a creaky sort of way. "Besides, I've gotten me a helper."

"Oh?" Natasha asked her, for the first time realizing that Irene looked just as well as the last time she'd seen her. Her mother had lied, telling her that Grandma was in bad shape. What was the point of that? And if Irene had a helper around the house, what need did she have of her granddaughter?

"Yes. Aspen comes over every other day and helps me around, does errands. He's a wonderful help."

"Grandma, you have someone working for you named Aspen? Isn't that a… tree, or something?" Irene only smiled lightly, changing the subject, which annoyed Natasha immensely. She wanted to know more about who exactly was helping her Grandmother. She had never liked the idea of having to rely on others for help, and knowing that her Grandmother had to was almost unbearable.

"You've dyed your hair." Irene commented wryly, taking a whistling pot of hot water off the stove and making two cups of instant coffee.

"Yes. Do you hate it?" Natasha asked, amused despite herself. If there was one person who she could count on to support her whether she dyed her hair, moved halfway around the globe, or decided to join a nudist colony, it was Grandma.

"I don't hate it." Irene told her, setting a blue mug in front of Natasha. "You're so pale though. It looks unnatural." She paused, sipping at the steaming drink. "No. Not unnatural. Ethereal." She amended, smiling her half-smile at her granddaughter. "Reminds me a bit of Aspen, actually. Half the time he looks like he belongs in one of your books. I think you'll like him."

No. I won't. It didn't matter if he would turn out to be the most charming being on earth. She refused to like him until she'd spoken to him. "What books?"

"Oh, those fairy stories you liked so much when you were little. Sometimes, when I look out of the corner of my eye at him, it looks like he has wings." The wrinkled old woman finished with satisfaction, waiting for Natasha to remark on it. When the younger woman only raised an eyebrow, Irene amended: "But then, I blink, and he's back to his normal self." The old woman sighed, and for a moment, Natasha wondered at all those times she'd been read those fairy stories by the woman sitting across from her. Natasha used to believe so much in everything those books said, but years had gone by, and she'd grown out of it. For the first time, she began to realize that her grandmother, who lived in an old house next to a sprawling graveyard, with antique knickknacks piled up against every wall, had never really stopped believing in all those things. Boys with wings and haunted lamps all were a part of this woman's life.

Still smiling, Irene picked herself off her chair, moving to rinse out her cup at the sink. Natasha, over the rushing water, could hear the jangle of keys outside the front door, and had just enough time to stand and glance worriedly in that direction before her grandmother turned and spoke.

"Oh, and that'll be Aspen now." At the look Natasha was giving her, she frowned. "I know how you feel about these things, but I gave him keys to the front door. I hope you don't mind too badly."

Cliffhanger (kinda) dun dun dun.

Mmmkay. That's all for now folks. I'll try to update more often and more regularly, but no promises. Read and Review!