She turned her face toward him and smiled, and the moonlight found two sharp teeth.
"Nice place." She looked around the room, then back at him. "Shame it's mine."
Ray had rehearsed for this. He'd had three versions ready on his first night in that bed, and he had practiced them at a branch scraping the window. All three were gone.
"Hi."
"Hi." She rolled onto her stomach in the air and propped her chin on her fists. "You're in my house."
"I noticed. I mean, I noticed you. The house I knew about."
She came off the bed and drifted toward him, slow, with her boots a foot above the floorboards. She went around him once. Everybody in this world took a lap around him sooner or later. She was the first one who looked like she was deciding where to bite.
"You ate my garden. You slept in my bed." She stopped in front of him, close. "You used my mug. Do you know what I do to people who use my mug?"
"Charge a deposit?"
Her face came apart.
The jaw dropped to her chest and kept going. The eyes swelled up red, the hair stood out like the legs of a spider, and a tongue as long as his arm came out between teeth the size of kitchen knives. It hissed in his face.
"AAH!" His back hit the doorframe hard enough to shake the porch.
Then nothing else happened. The thing hung there, dripping, and Ray's heart pounded against his ribs for a while and ran out of whatever it was pounding with.
He had been measured, shot across a yard, frozen at, flown over a continent under an old man's arm and locked up with seven princesses since breakfast. He had about one good scream a day in him, and she had just gotten it.
"...Yeah. That's really good. The tongue is a nice touch." He slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the floor. "Sorry. I've had a long one. Can we do the rest of this sitting down?"
The face folded back into a girl's. She looked a little put out.
"You're supposed to run. They usually run."
"I got kidnapped this morning. My legs have done enough."
"You're not scared of vampires?"
"I'm scared of everything. There's a line." He counted it off on his fingers. "You're behind a wolf, a toad and a lady with a tape measure."
"I'm behind a toad."
"It was a big toad."
She hung in the air and looked at him with her head tipped to one side. Then she came down close, put her nose an inch from his neck, and breathed in. Ray held very still.
"Human." She sounded like somebody who had found a coin in an old coat. "I haven't smelled one of you in a long time."
"So I keep hearing."
Her eyes went down him and stopped at his feet. His high-tops were wet, and muddy, and dark red. She looked at them the way he had looked at the donut tower.
"Those are nice shoes."
"Don't eat my shoes. They're the only ones I've got."
"I wasn't going to." She didn't look up right away.
He looked back, since there was nothing else to do from down there. She had grey skin and pointed ears, and two small marks on the side of her neck. It was the face he had carried out of that show when he'd lost almost everything else. Nobody had told him it would be a real person one day, a foot away, in his living room.
It was also the other face. He had remembered it eight hours ago in a cell: a girl in somebody's house, crying in front of an old man with scraps of paper in his hands. One half of that scene was floating here asking about a mug. The other half was sitting in a wrecked castle with an egg.
'Don't. There's no way to start that sentence.' He kept his mouth shut.
"You got a name, mug thief?"
"Ray."
"Marceline. The Vampire Queen." She did a lazy little bow in midair. "That's the M on the door, in case you were wondering."
'Marceline. Marshall Lee.' The old man had kept the first three letters. Ray looked at the floor until his face was under control again.
"I was wondering, yeah. For about a week."
"A week in my bed."
"About that." He held up a finger. "Where I'm from, there's a thing called squatter's rights. If a place sits empty long enough, and somebody moves in and takes care of it..."
"You ate my garden."
"I shook out the blanket."
"So you're saying my house is yours."
"I'm saying there's a legal conversation to be had."
Something happened at the corner of her mouth, and she put it away before it got anywhere.
"I built that porch before your grandfather's grandfather was born, squatter."
"Okay. That hurts my case." He dropped the finger. "Plan B. Hi. I'm so sorry. I thought it was abandoned."
"That's one."
"You must be M. Love the place."
"Two."
"I'll do the dishes."
She looked over at the shelf, and then back at him. "There's one dish."
"I can commit to that."
She laughed. It was one short bark, and it seemed to surprise her more than it did him.
"No. Out."
She took him by the back of the shirt with one hand, the second person to do that today, and she was stronger than the first. She floated him through the door and over the missing step, and set him down in the grass.
"Go get your stuff."
Ray patted his pocket. It held a dead phone and a folded note. "I'm wearing it."
She looked at him a moment. Then the door shut, and he heard the bar drop on the inside.
He stood in the clearing and went through what he had. The Tree Fort was out. It was most of a day on foot, he had lost the route after the pond even in daylight, and the valley between here and there had something in it at night with too many legs. The flint was on the shelf next to the mug. His last food had gone to a wizard.
'I gave my egg to a wizard and got evicted by a vampire. Ten out of ten. No notes.'
He sat down against the apple tree, where he could see the window, and rolled his sleeves down. The window stayed dark. Whatever she was doing in there, she didn't need a light for it.
A week ago he had never seen that cabin. He had spent most of a week in it jumping at the roof and apologizing to a door, and he was sitting in the grass now missing it like a place he'd grown up in. He hadn't grown up in any one place long enough to check.
The woods started up around him the way they had on his first night. Something hooted in three voices. A bush near the stream giggled, and went quiet when he looked at it.
In the mall he'd had a door to shut. Out here he had a tree. His shoulders had come up around his ears, and he couldn't make them go back down.
So he made some noise of his own. He hummed, mostly to hear something that wasn't the bush, and the humming went looking for a tune and found an old one. It was "Stand by Me". It was older than anybody he had ever met, and he couldn't remember learning it. It had just always been playing somewhere, in a movie or a commercial or the back of a laundromat.
It was also about a night like this one, more or less word for word.
"When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the Moon is the only light we'll see
No, I won't be afraid
Oh, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me..."
He kept it low at first, under his breath. The bush didn't giggle. He sang a little louder.
...
Inside, Marceline was snooping.
It was her house, so it didn't really count. But she hadn't slept here in so long that it felt like going through somebody else's stuff. The apples in the bowl had been grey since before she stopped keeping track.
A few nights back she had flown over these woods and seen smoke coming out of her chimney. She had come by tonight to see what had moved in, and she'd been hoping for something she could chase.
'He washed the mug.' She turned it over in her hand. It had been rinsed and left upside down to dry. 'Who breaks into a house and washes the mug?'
The blanket was shaken out and pulled straight, too. Her old bass string was on the shelf right where she'd left it, and there was one handprint in the dust on the table, like he'd been scared to touch anything else. The garden was the only thing he had really gone after. He'd eaten that down to the dirt.
She let that one go. He was a human, a real one, with a pulse she could hear from across the room. She had figured those were all gone, and whatever was left of them was allowed to be hungry.
She'd kicked a lot of things out of her houses over the years. There had been goblins, and a bear, and a wizard who cried the whole way down the hill. Nobody had ever sat down on her floor and asked for a break.
"I'll do the dishes." She said it to the mug, in his voice, and snorted. 'Weirdo.'
She was going to crash here through the daylight and take off tomorrow night. The squatter could freeze his butt off till sunrise. After that, she'd see.
She had picked three apples off the tree before he showed up. She had the second one halfway to her mouth when something came in through the window.
She thought it was the wind in the chimney. Then the wind carried a tune.
It was a voice. It was a guy's voice, low and lazy, with nothing playing under it.
'What the hell is that?'
She waited for it to turn into something she knew. She knew every song in Ooo. She'd written half of them, and she had heard the other half so many times she could play them asleep.
It didn't turn into anything. It had a walk to it, slow, four to the bar, and there was a gap under the voice big enough to drive a cart through. Something was supposed to be playing down there.
Her left hand was already doing it. It was pressing strings that weren't there, two notes and two notes and a little climb, around and back again.
'That's a bass line. That's my part, and he doesn't even know it's missing.'
She tried to guess where the tune went next and blew it. She tried again on the next line and blew that one too.
'Okay. Rude.' She was at the window before she'd decided to go.
The squatter was sitting under her apple tree with his knees pulled up and his head back against the trunk. His eyes were shut. He was singing at the dark with those red shoes in the wet grass, like a kid whistling his way past a graveyard.
He had no idea she could hear him.
Then the words got to her.
"So, darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh, stand by me
Oh, stand, stand by me
Stand by me."
The apple was still in her hand, and it was still red. She put it down on the sill.
She went out through the window and crossed the grass a hand above it. She could be quiet when she felt like it. She stopped behind the tree and hung there upside down, with her hair pooling on the roots.
He went around the whole thing again. His voice cracked once where the tune climbed, and he laughed at himself under his breath and kept going. Her fingers went with him, and she let them.
Even the bush by the stream had shut up. He let the last note go and sat there with his eyes closed.
"Sing that again."