The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen - Delia Sherman [67]
Airboy shrugged. “So you’ll have small scars instead of big ones.”
Tiffany reached for the jar.
“Hold on,” I said. “What’s to keep you from taking the cream and then refusing to talk, or even just making up some lie?”
“Same thing that’s keeping you from sticking me with a jar of Harbor mud.” She hesitated. “You’re not, are you?”
“No,” said Airboy. He put the jar in her hand, and she stashed it in the pocket of her coat.
“The mirror,” I said.
She hesitated, then went through her pockets. She seemed to have an awful lot of them—in the jacket she wore under the coat, in her shirt, even in the legs of her baggy pants. She didn’t look in her sleek leather Designer Bag, though. She didn’t have one.
“What happened to your magic bag?” I asked.
“My ex-fairy godmother took it away,” she said, still patting and groping. “Changelings without a Neighborhood don’t have them.”
“Then how do you—?”
Tiffany fixed me with her one blue eye, wild and angry as a were-cat’s. “You want the Mermaid’s mirror, Wild Child, or the story of my life?”
She had the mirror. She actually had the mirror. I couldn’t believe it. And she was going to give it to me, just like that.
There had to be a catch.
“Ta-da!” She produced a thick wad of cloth and laid it on the desk. “Check it out.”
Gingerly, I picked it up and unwrapped about a million layers of grimy cloth. At the final layer, I hesitated.
“Scared, Wild Child?” Tiffany grinned. “Old Scratchy’s in there, all right, but she can’t get out unless you call her.”
“I’m not scared.”
The mirror I uncovered was the same size as the Mermaid’s mirror I remembered, and had the same plain silver rim. The mirror itself was cloudy and dark, with a storm of red and black lurking in its depths. I held it in the special way Changeling had taught me and felt for the special grooves.
Tiffany snatched at the mirror. “Stop, you moron! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Checking it out.”
“I meant look at it, not turn it on.” She said some words I’d never heard before. “You don’t want Old Scratchy loose in the Bowery, do you?”
“Is that what would happen?”
“Do you really want to find out?”
I rewrapped the mirror and laid it on the desk.
“So,” said Tiffany, all casual. “You still want it?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m going to give it back to the Mermaid Queen.”
“No!” Airboy burst out, horrified. “We can’t. It’s . . . infested.”
“So what? She’s the Genius of New York Harbor. She can un-infest it.”
He shook his head. “Bad things would happen. Worse than salt water in the Park. You have to believe me.”
I did. Airboy wasn’t a liar. “Well, we’ll just have to exorcise it ourselves.”
“She’ll eat you alive,” Tiffany said.
“I didn’t say me. I said us.”
Tiffany laughed. “Us? A fish boy and a country girl who hasn’t been in school for two minutes, and a Neighborhoodless monster? What do you think this is, a fairy tale? You’re out of your freaking mind.”
Airboy nodded. “What she said.”
“No, not just us.” I had no idea what I was about to say, but I suspected it was going to be brilliant. “All of us: Fortran and Espresso and Stonewall and Mukuti and Danskin. And Bergdorf, because she was the one who did the binding in the first place.”
Tiffany snorted. “That collection of goody two-shoes would fall over dead if you even suggested they come to the Bowery.”
“Not the Bowery,” I said. “Miss Van Loon’s, tomorrow night.”
There was a long silence, and then Tiffany burst out laughing. “You’re even crazier than I am. All right. I’ll be there.” She stuffed the mirror back in her pocket. “Looks like we’ll have our little Hallowe’en challenge, after all.”
Chapter 19
RULE 46: STUDENTS MUST ATTEND ALL SCHOOL RITUALS.
Miss Van Loon’s Big Book of Rules
It was Hallowe’en night at Miss Van Loon’s. The stairwell was dark as we groped up the steps. Stonewall went first, with Danskin. Fortran was next, followed by Bergdorf, Espresso, Mukuti, Airboy, and Tiffany. I brought up the rear.
The sounds of the Hallowe’en Revels filtered up from below, shrieks