Handmade Loafers was as motionless as the fountain. His lips were parted slightly. Avalon suspected he was struggling for breath.
“Going...”
Avalon’s own breath shuddered in and out, in and out. The blood rang in her ears.
“Going...”
She knotted her sweat-slick hands and pressed her lips together to prevent her silent, desperate prayers from escaping. She struggled not to close her eyes.
“SOLD! The House at Devil’s Leap sold to the Lady in the Shades!”
A great collective whoop went up.
Avalon had fainted once before in her life, and the moment preceding it had felt alotlike this one: the light-headedness, the black spots dancing before her eyes. So she didn’t trust herself to move just yet.
She did close her eyes briefly and indulged in an exhale so lengthy it ought to have deflated her two sizes.
“Congratulations on your exquisite taste and your triumph, my lady, and thank all of you for coming today. Why don’t we give her a hand? Come have a chat with me, if you would.” Chuck Beasley beckoned her forward.
She took a long, low, slow bow to acknowledge the applause. Her head swam on her way back up, another reminder that she’d slept maybe two hours last night. When she was upright she glanced around her as if she was seeing the world for the first time. Once again, everything had changed, and she’d done it. The sky seemed to have acquired a sort of rippling haze. She distantly knew this was because she was drunk on euphoria and bravado and fury and fatigue.
She moved, as though borne on a magic carpet, toward the beaming, beckoning auctioneer. She couldn’t feel her feet.
Handmade Loafers rotated slowly to watch. She was distantly aware that his expression suggested she might be a creature he’d never before seen, something cute but perhaps rabid. He was holding his cell phone a few inches from his ear, as if it was perhaps too hot to hold it closer. A peculiar high-pitched whine seemed to be emanating from it, as though it was picking up outer space signals, or an incoming fax, or perhaps preparing to explode.
And as she drew nearer to him, she nodded gently, and became aware that the whining sound was, in fact, a word:“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo...”
