Out! she thought. Out through the windows. Out into the world. Out. Away. Far away and never come back. Never be found. Never be unsafe. Never be lost. Never be broken again. She strained to the side and threw her magic at the hospital bed bars, the straps that held her, and at the windows with the drawn shades.
All the windows in the room shattered at once.
Darkness claimed her again.
I am sitting in the wagon, and the Storyteller’s arm is around me. “Shh, shh,” she tells me. “Hush.” She strokes my hair. “It won’t hurt. Not one bit.”
The Storyteller smells of Vaseline and greasepaint. Her cheeks have been painted with red circles, and a clown’s smile stretches over her real lips. The paint has cracked where her skin is wrinkled. I lean against her and let her comfort me, a child in a mother’s arms.
I think perhaps I sleep.
When I wake, she is gone.
The Magician squats in front of me. He doesn’t wear his felt hat or his cape or stage makeup, and without them, he seems costumed—as if the ordinary pants and shirt of an ordinary man were a disguise.
I shrink away, and feel the wood slats of the wagon at my back. Behind him, the scarves from his magic act are strung on a line of silk ribbon, as if they were laundry drying. Between each jewel-colored scarf is the wing of a dove, pinned to the ribbon. On the wagon wall, he has skulls as well, bird skulls and mice and snakes. He’s painted them in bright carnival colors. The boxes are stacked in a corner, all empty. I know I am looking everywhere but at him, and I know it will not matter in the end.
He smiles at me.
“Come now,” he says. His voice is soft, soothing, even beautiful. “Whisper sweet nothings to me.”
I cannot run.
He leans close. His lips are nearly touching mine.
I scream, and he steals my breath.
Chapter Thirteen
Eve placed a book on the shelf.
She stared at her hands, at the book, at the shelf.
She wasn’t in the hospital. She wasn’t strapped down. She wasn’t in a wagon or a box or a carnival tent. Eve pushed the book into its slot and looked down. She stood on a step stool. A book cart was next to her. It was half-full of books.
She didn’t want to turn around. She didn’t know what she’d see, what had changed, what she’d forgotten this time. Softly, she called, “Zach?”
He might not be here. She might have lost him; he might be only a memory. Or maybe he was never real at all. Maybe none of this was. Maybe she was still strapped to the hospital bed, and this library, this city, this world was only a vision. She’d never left the hospital, and Malcolm, Aunt Nicki, Aidan, and Zach were all a trick of her mind. Or she was trapped in a box on a string in a wagon, and even the hospital was false. Or she was Victoria’s sister—the antlered girl, as the mirror had shown—and she was dead.
Eve didn’t realize she’d crouched down, but she was hugging her knees and rocking back and forth on the library stool like a demented bird on a perch.
“Eve?” a voice asked.
Zach.
She heard his footsteps and then felt his hand on her arm. He knelt beside her. She leaned against him and breathed in the smell of him. He cradled her against his shoulder and stroked her hair with one hand. His fingers twisted in her hair, and she thought of the Storyteller. She shuddered. “Eve, are you okay?” he asked.
She turned and touched his face. He’s real, she thought. Or at least he was real enough that it didn’t matter. She let her fingers rove over his face and neck. She felt his breath rise and fall in his chest.
“Eve, you’re freaking me out. Talk to me.”
“I went to your house, and we made it rain.” Eve thought of rain pummeling the manicured lawn and patio stones, and then she thought of rain seeping through a carnival tent at night and of rain breaking through a canopy of leaves and making a campfire hiss and spit. “It rained on your lawn and on the street. I saw a black car through the rain, and a man went to your door. What happened next?”
She felt him tense through his shirt. “Eve … I told you everything. I swear. I didn’t keep anything from you. And you know I wouldn’t lie.”
“Please … Just humor me.” She looked at him and put every ounce of pleading in her eyes. Don’t ask me why, she thought. Just tell me.
Zach studied her for an instant and then adopted his usual light tone. “In retrospect, and only in retrospect, it was kind of cool. Stark interrogation room. One-way mirror. Hostile balding guy in suspenders, straight out of a cable-TV cop show …”
“Lou,” she whispered. Malcolm had lied. She felt herself start to tremble. Her insides were a jumbled knot. She’d let herself trust Malcolm. She wasn’t sure when she’d decided to trust him. It must have crept up gradually, but she’d believed him, and now … It was hard to breathe. Her mind kept repeating: He lied to me.
“Lou,” Zach echoed. Gently, as if he were talking to a feral cat, he said, “And then you know what happened. You were the cause.”
“I was?” She couldn’t seem to do more than whisper. Her throat felt locked.
“Your aunt called, said she’d talked to you, and boom, the interrogation ended. I was led to a room with a bed and a bathroom and left alone. Next morning, I was briefed on the fact that your safety depended on my secrecy, which was all very cryptically worded. I don’t know what they told my parents, but I was brought home, and everyone acted like nothing had ever happened.”
“And then?” Eve asked.
“And then …” Zach stroked her hair again. “You were missing for two days. The others said you fainted in Patti’s office during the earthquake.”
“Patti! Is she okay?”
“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t she be?”
Eve sagged against him. “What happened next?”
“You showed up at normal work time with more cryptic comments. Have you changed your mind about explaining? Because an explanation would be rather awesome.”
Lie, Malcolm had told her before he’d lied to her. She opened her mouth to deflect Zach’s questions, but no words came out. She slumped on the stool, against Zach. She couldn’t keep doing this, lying to everyone, pretending she was okay when she was in fact splintering so badly that she was only shards of a person. “I don’t remember,” she said, barely a whisper.
“Hey, if you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay—”
She twisted to look him full in the face and enunciated clearly and loudly, “I don’t remember anything since that day.” At least she didn’t remember anything except for lying strapped to a hospital bed with tubes and machines and lights … or lying strapped to a bench in a wagon with wind chimes of magic boxes and old bones.
He tried to grin, as if wanting to believe she was joking. “Even the day in the basement stacks with the plants …” His smile faded. “You’re serious. Whoa. Really? Eve, that was two weeks ago. Two weeks.” His arms tightened around her. “You need a doctor. A hospital.”
Her fingers dug into his arm. “No!” She fought to control her breathing. “No hospital. No doctors. Doctors already know. I … I had surgery, and I woke with no memory of who I was or where I was from or why I was there.” She thought of the thick forest, of the wagon, of the meadow by a lake. “Since then, I’ve had these memory losses. In the middle of shelving a book or drinking a glass of juice … I lose hours, sometimes days, even weeks. Maybe months. I don’t know.”