He suddenly felt his fragile mortality so much more. There was a reason his mother didn’t want him running around at night, and it was more than the usual human worries. It was more than getting mugged on the 6-train platform. It was getting mugged by a werewolf breaking the peace treaty because he hadn’t eaten in days. Or a renegade cult using his bones to summon an interdimensional demon. It was an old worry, in their time of supposed peace, but it was New York City. Anything could happen. Why was he expected to live afraid all the time? Why was he expected to be the scared one, unlike the great, terrifying, fearless brujos he’d heard of in the past?
Then he saw the rope. It cascaded down in front of him. His heart stuttered, thinking it was a snake or some sort of octopus thing. He needed to stop watching scary movies was the real truth of it.
It was just hair.
He smiled at himself. He grabbed the rope braid and wound it around his hand.
Then he climbed.
* * *
Danaë gasped softly. “He’s really coming up.”
She felt the tug at the roots of her hair, and she yelped like a cat that had been stepped on. She held on to an arm-length chunk of braid and propped a foot against the windowsill. She pulled to help him up, her heart like the tap of tambores in her eardrums. A strangling sensation wrapped around her throat, like the times she’d fallen asleep tangled in her own braid. She’d imagined this moment for years, decades. For so long that it was only ever a fantasy. She had only ever hoped to be like the girl in the stories, but stories never ended happily for girls like her.
Then she could hear him. Did all boys grunt so loudly?
She saw the moment when he looked down and the fear of falling overtook him. His eyes went wide, and then she was reaching for him. He grabbed her hand and tumbled inside. She staggered back, pressing her palms on her thighs, watching him.
He stood to full height. He looked about the age she’d been when she’d been frozen forever—sixteen or seventeen. His dark curls were smooshed at the top, probably from the hat shoved in his back pocket. His nose reminded her of a bird’s beak, but it was lovely on him. High cheekbones and lashes so black she took a step closer to see if he was wearing makeup. It wasn’t something men did in her time, but times changed always. When he smiled, the flutter of wings took off in her belly. Her mother had once said something about beautiful boys with crooked smiles. But her mother wasn’t here. Her mother had left her behind.
This boy was here now.
“Hey,” he said, brushing the front of his leather jacket. It looked soft to the touch, but she kept her hands around her torso.
“Hello,” she said.
He looked out the window and grinned. “You know, I’m glad my friends dragged me to that rock-climbing wall in Brooklyn. It came in handy for this.”
“Rock-climbing?” She searched her memory for something like that from her time before the tower. But the closest she came was from her time in the Dominican Republic. There had been this sea-facing cliff the local kids would leap off on sweltering days. “Is it dangerous?”
He laughed, and his laugh was so sweet and musical. “No. Well, sometimes. My cousins have been trying to get me to conquer my fear of heights.”
The tension of strangers dissipated with every direct eye contact, every moment he fidgeted and his full mouth tugged in a playful way. She found that her whole face ached. Muscles that hadn’t moved were stretching, and it was painful.
“Yet here you are scaling the side of a building a thousand feet in the air,” she said.
“I’m going to be real with you right now,” he told her. “This is scarier. I’ve thought about you for so long and now here you are.”
She walked to the window, around him, and stared at the city night, lit up with a million lights. She reeled her braid back. “Are you disappointed?”
“No!” he said, reaching for her quickly. His fist closed around air, like he was afraid to touch her. “I guess I never got to the part where I actually met you. How long have you been here?”
When she got the last of her hair up into the tower, she sat on the neat pile of it, a throne made of her own locks. She gestured to the pillows on the floor. He kicked off his sneakers, and though there was no door anywhere, he left them neatly pressed against the wall under the north-facing window.
He sat cross-legged across from her and waited.
“I used to count.” She twisted the end of her braid around her finger like a garden snake. Her brown eyes darted to the wall beside him.
He pushed the curtain aside and noticed long scratches in the smooth gray stone. There were dark spots, and it took him a moment to realize they were blood. She’d clawed those tallies, or used something so sharp she drew blood.
“And then I stopped counting,” she said. “I tried to train pigeons to fetch me things, but they’re incredibly flaky. I was brought here in 1947, a year after my—my mother and I moved to Spanish Harlem from a little town outside La Romana.”
“Is that in the DR?”
“Where?”
“The Dominican Republic,” he clarified. “The kids from the floor downstairs call it that.”
“It’s strange having once been from a place and not knowing what to call it anymore. It hasn’t been home for a long time. But then, this tower is not my home either.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
At that she felt her blood run cold, and her words sharpen. “What makes you think I did anything?”
“I—I’m sorry. It’s just. Well. Everyone knows the hunters built this tower as a prison. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone hates them and they hate us.”
“I was put here by a sorcerer.”
“Well, they do employ magical beings when it’s convenient for them. No one is supposed to come near here. That’s what my moms says, though. I don’t think anyone knows the real truth.”
Danaë breathed fast and short. Was that why no one had bothered with her? What did she know about the man who brought her here? “I can’t always remember the day it happened. I just know I saw him twice more. He’d checked up on me once after locking me up…and then he never came back.”
“And you’ve been here all this time.” He shook his head. It was like his world was inverting.
“What did you expect? A dragon? A witch?”
“I’m a brujo,” he told her. “So that wouldn’t be very shocking.”
She perked up. “You are? That’s why you can see the tower.”