“Whoa!” Izzy said, appearing like no more than a one-dimensional orange and red blob in front of me. Her voice wasn’t right either, less rich and simpler, but I knew it was her.
“The dragon realm. It overlays all the other worlds. Whatever you do, don’t take your hand off Luna,” I said, lifting Izzy’s blob up onto Luna’s back without removing my hip from touching my dragon. Ruby didn’t need help up, and soon, all three of us were squashed together on Luna’s back. I patted her shoulder blade. “Luna, make sure you duck way-far-down before heading through any doorways.”
Luna listened. At least, she remembered to listen for the first few doorways. We exited the family room and passed through the double doors to the sixth floor like nothing. Nobody moved at the nursing station as we rode our way down the corridor to the fourth door on the right.
But then Luna forgot to duck. I tried to pull Izzy and Ruby down, but didn’t have enough time. Instead, they jumped back, to protect their heads from the doorway, and toppled us backwards, sliding down Luna’s tail onto the hallway floor, breaking contact with our invisibility-producing dragon.
I scooped Izzy into my arm, cradling her body against mine, as I pushed Ruby into the room after Luna with my other hand.
My heart thudded.
Had anyone seen us reappear in the hallway out of nowhere? I had been in such a scramble to get us into the room that I hadn’t been able to watch.
“Luna, stand guard,” I whispered, sending my still-invisible dragon back out into the hallway, leaving Ruby, Izzy, and me with a wide-eyed middle-aged man who was scooting his sweat-soaked body up in his hospital bed. “Are you Frederick Barnes?” I asked.
He tilted his chin. “What did you say? You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Hear us out,” I said, taking a step closer. “My name is Greyson Warner, this is my sister, Ruby, and this is Izzy. She has the same sickness that you have.”
Now, I had his attention. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the edge of his sheet.
“Days ago, Izzy couldn’t walk, but I helped her. She’s still far from cured, but I think if we share some knowledge, we might be able to conquer whatever is making the two of you sick.”
His attention was unwavering. I had seen it on desperate illness-struck people before—the hope of salvation. I just hoped I wouldn’t let him down. “Could I place my hand on your forearm?” I asked.
He was hesitant, and perhaps I was too forward, but a sick man usually never argued. He pulled the sheet back, giving me a full view of the wolf tattoo on his arm. I covered the ink with my hand, searching through his body for a few things. First, I confirmed he was sick from magic. The same curse that afflicted Izzy. The second was that I sifted through the sand inside him, separating the magnetic particles to give him a little peace for a minute.
And finally, I searched for the stones that would be clouding his memories, but I found nothing there.
No signs of sickness.
And no signs of my father’s interventions either.
I narrowed my eyes at Frederick. “You have nothing wrong with your memories.”
He didn’t seem to hear me, as a big smile fell upon his lips. “I feel…better. What just happened?”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have helped him first. “Don’t get too used to it. It’s only temporary. First, I need to find out what you and Izzy…and the other victims have in common.”
“What we have in common?” Frederick asked, eyeing Ruby as she pulled the newspaper article from a hidden pocket of her queen’s gown she still wore. “I don’t know anyone else with this sickness. The doctors already quizzed me with everyone’s names.”
Ruby stepped in, still reading off names. The man shook his head at all of them.
“How about you, Izzy?” I asked. “Do you know where you could have run into Frederick or the others?”
Izzy and Frederick exchanged information on where they grew up, where they lived, and where they visited, which was a short conversation because the only places it seemed Izzy had ever been were the hospital and the mobile home she grew up in.
“It doesn’t seem like we have much in common,” Izzy said. “And our disease is quite different. I’ve been chronically sick nearly my entire life. It’s gotten much worse in the past year, but Frederick has only been sick for a month.”
“What about churches? Schools? Other places? People you know?”
Izzy and Frederick continued to list off other people and places. Where Frederick worked, who they all knew, hobbies, family members, but nothing was familiar to either of them. Eventually their long strings of conversations stopped.
“We’re getting nowhere,” I whispered to Ruby. Time for a change of tactics. I turned to Frederick. “Tell me why you faked memory loss.”
Once again, I had Frederick’s attention. “Faked memory loss?”
“You said you didn’t remember your childhood, but that’s not true.”
Frederick went to argue, but I stopped him. “I need to know the truth. Your life literally depends on it.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but when I waved my magic hands at him, reminding him how he went from uncomfortable to almost normal in a matter of seconds, the tenseness of his pinched expression disappeared. “No reason, really. I’ve always loved books,” he nodded to a book on the table beside his bed. “Although, I’ve been struggling to finish that one since I’ve gotten sick. I had been a heavy reader ever since I was a child.” He laughed. “I guess, when I was about twelve, I read a book and got carried away. The main character had amnesia and all things in his life started to go good from that point forward. I had thought—well, I guess, I thought that if I had amnesia, things would get better in my life, too.”
“And?” Ruby asked.
He shrugged. “It worked. Up until this point. Karma, huh? After a day…two…a week of playing the role in the book, it was impossible to go back. Now, thirty years have passed, and that’s who I’ve become. Please don’t tell anyone.” His dark eyes went from Ruby, to Izzy, and settled on me.
“We won’t say anything.” It was a secret he could take to his grave—which, at this rate, might not be too far from now.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be much more help,” Frederick said, sucking in his cheeks.
“You have helped,” Izzy said, picking up the book off his table and pointing to a price tag on the back that read, Lost in the Pages Bookstore. She looked up at me with her dark eyes and smiled. “I know exactly where we need to go next.”
Chapter 12
Ruby, Izzy, Luna, and I stood outside Lost in the Pages Bookstore with the Kingdom of Onieth’s familiar blue and yellow flag flying over its door. Izzy had recognized the name of the bookstore on a sticker on the back of the book Frederick was reading along with the memory of the flag over the front entrance of the building. She said it was a place her aunt used to take her as a child before she got sick. A place to go to escape her parents for a bit. Or, at least a place to go to get out of the house when her parents had a new drug to experiment with.
“Where’s your aunt, now?” I asked.
“Dead.” Was all she offered, and I didn’t pry. Her life was filled with so much sadness, there was no reason to force her to relive any of it.
“Why does it have the Kingdom of Onieth’s flag?” Ruby asked.
I took a deep breath, not liking, but still certain of the answer. “Because this bookstore is somehow connected to my mother.”
“Your mother?” Ruby exclaimed in a loud whisper. “I thought you didn’t know who your mother was.”
I rubbed my fingers against my temple. “I don’t. But this is where she is.” My stomach swirled and my palms sweated, but I didn’t want to explain all this to Ruby at the moment. I climbed up the three, worn concrete steps that led into the little bookstore.
When the little bell chimed above the entrance, the woman behind the counter looked up over her glasses. I tried to see some sign of familiarity beyon
d her brown eyes, but saw none. I reminded myself that this was the woman who left me with my father. Who abandoned me—if that woman behind the counter was even my mother?
She was short and round, very unlike me, and the amount of makeup on her face wasn’t a luxury I had ever predicted my mother to take. In fact, that’s one of the many reasons why I had a feeling deep in my bones that the evil queen wasn’t my mother with her manicured nails and red, herb-dyed hair.
I tilted my chin and squinted my eyes. Could I see any resemblance to me? To her sister Luciana?
The evil queen was my mother’s twin, and these two looked nothing alike.
Was I so excited to meet my mom that I was willing to accept anyone into that role? I returned to my witch’s roots. Grabbing the magic in the air, sacrificing a few pieces of wood from my woodpile, I waved my hand in a small revealing spell. A witch would give off a slight shimmer.
Which this woman didn’t.
She was as mortal as anyone else.
“Can I help you find something?” she asked.
Izzy held up the book she had borrowed from Frederick. “This book,” Izzy said. “Do you have more like this?”
Ignoring the uneasy sensation I got from Luna being stuck outside because of the narrow entrance door, I helped Izzy walk up to the counter to show the worn binding to the woman.
“Maybe a few,” the woman said, taking us to a row of used books near the back of the store and pointed to three copies, each with a varied amount of wear and tear. “Have you seen the new movie?”
“New movie?” I asked.
Izzy jumped in. “We haven’t yet.” She smiled.
“Well, you’re lucky. Ever since the movie was released, I can’t keep these things on the shelves. Nothing like a dose of media to revive an old title. I put out half-a-dozen of them yesterday and they’re half gone already.”
“Thank you,” Izzy said. “We’ll come find you when we’re done looking.”
The woman returned to her desk out of earshot of the three of us.
“So, what’s the story with the book?” Ruby asked.
Izzy pulled the other three copies off the shelf and flipped through them. “Before I got sick, my aunt bought me this book. We started reading it together, but I ended up finishing it myself in the hospital. I thought nothing of it back then, but knowing what I know now about witches, magic, and curses, what if this book made me sick? And isn’t it odd that Frederick got sick the exact same way?”
“Is it the same exact book?”
Izzy shook her head. “No.” She opened to the title page. “My aunt wrote me a dedication inside, like she did all my books. Frederick’s book has a blank title page.”
“What about the others?”
“They’re not mine either, but I don’t think it matters. If this story was recently made into a movie, everyone is out reading it.”
“And the story makes people sick?”
Izzy took a deep breath and gave me a playful slap on the cheek. “Greyson, you’re the witch. Not just the story, since the sickness doesn’t seem to be a national catastrophe, but a few particular books from this particular bookstore.”
I ran a hand along the books’ bindings, doing one more magic reveal spell to show that all three copies had a spell on them. I sacrificed more wood, running my hand along the rest of the books on the bookshelf, showing they were nothing more than normal books.
“Why this book?” I asked, turning a copy over in my hand and reading the title, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?”
“Because things are not what they seem,” Ruby said. When I stared at her, she dismissed my ignorance with a wave of her hand. “You’ll have to read the book—but just not these copies! They can’t get in anyone else’s hands.” Ruby took the books up to the counter. “We need to purchase all three of these,” she said, pulling money from her dress pocket, then she winked at me. “Always be prepared. Especially when going on an adventure with my bro.”
“Do you know where these copies came from?” I asked, leaning on the counter with one hand and supporting Izzy with the other, trying to appear at ease, despite the tornado of emotions swirling inside me.
“No. The owner does all our acquisitions.”
“The owner?” I asked. “Where can I find her…or him?”
The woman nodded up to a loft that hung over half the narrow store. “Up there.”
My eyes dashed through the piles of books and overflowing shelving, finally settling on a woman sitting at a desk, buried behind a few piles of books. I couldn’t see that much, but her long, jet-black, overly straight hair, was familiar.
But when the woman peered over a pile of books and looked at us with vibrant blue eyes that were clear even from the distance we were apart, I was certain where I had seen her before. Or at least had seen someone who looked nearly exactly like her.
That woman was Luciana’s sister.
My mother.
My mouth dried.
I needed to talk to her.
Gone were all thoughts of the curse upon Izzy, Frederick, and the others. All that filled my head was my own, deep need to know why my mother had left me when I was a baby. What would make her give her child up?
Why had she abandoned me?
Why was I unlovable?
My hands fisted and my jaw hurt from grinding my teeth.
What would I say? Hey, Mom. What’s up? Where have you been the past twenty-five years? What made you think Claude would make a good father for me? Do you have any idea what he did to me? Oh, yeah, and why’d you curse my girlfriend…um…friend, Izzy here?
“What’s wrong?” Izzy said.
“Excuse me, I need to talk to her.” I helped Izzy to a chair by the door, almost prying her hands off of me, but this was something I had to do alone. My muscles ached from tension as I took each step up to the loft. The woman’s eyes fixated on me, like she was shocked to see me. After all these years…here went nothing.
“Can I help you?” she asked all innocently.
Maybe she didn’t recognize me. “Claude Warner is my father.”
She tilted her chin. “Claude Warner? Do I know him?”
Like she needed a reminder. “I’m Greyson Warner. You’re my…mother.”
She laughed. “You must have me confused with someone else. I don’t have any children.”
How could she deny my existence? After all these years of being ignored by my father, I finally found the other half of me.
And she was as manipulative as I had hoped she wasn’t.
But that was just my luck, now wasn’t it?
Words spilled from my lips, not caring who heard my confessions. “You and my father are from the magical realm. You moved here twenty-five years ago right before I was born.”
She lifted her hands and shook her head. “I don’t know you.”
There were two potential reasons for her denial. One was she really didn’t know me and that could only be caused by my father wiping her memories, or two, she was pretending to not remember. My question came out through a clenched jaw. “Are you sure you don’t know who I am?”
She furrowed her perfectly arched eyebrows. “Seriously, you have me mixed up with someone else.” The tone of her voice was escalating, and I could hear it traveling to the bookstore below. She was backing up, moving herself into full view of her employee on the first floor.
Was I making her nervous?
I had been told I was intimidating.
“Hey, Grey?” Ruby called as she climbed the steps. “I think we should go. We can discuss this at home, okay?”
My hands fisted. I had finally found my mother, but I needed to know why she denied me. If I could just touch her, I’d be able to sense my father’s spell. I took a step closer to her. “You left my father. Left me…” I reached out, trying to grab her hand with mine. “How could you? I was just a baby!”
I lunged forward, my left hand grabbing her wrist with a bit more force than I wanted.
“Help!” she yelled.
But the second was all I needed. I sifted through her sand, finding nothing inside reminiscent of my father’s spells.
She was lying to me.
She knew damn well who I was.
The magic in the air hung on my skin like a layer of sweat, and I pulled it inside. Focusing it directly on my mother. If she wouldn’t tell me the truth, maybe a small dose of pain would be more convincing?
It had worked on my father when he had been trying to take over the kingdom of Mortia.
It had worked for my father when he was trying to gain more power. I was his little pain-bringer. What a motivation.
A bit of pain, and she’d admit the truth.
My mother would admit who I was.
She would admit she abandoned me.
And she’d tell me why.
I had to know.
The world around me dissolved and there was nothing that could deter me from my goals.
Except the little cough from downstairs.
A little cough that turned into more. Enough to make me turn my head to see Izzy doubled over, her head between her knees in a coughing fit.
I didn’t remember letting go of my mother and climbing down the steps, as I must have flown. I had my hands laid gently on Izzy’s cheeks, and before I closed my eyes to sift through her internal sand, Izzy stopped coughing long enough to say, “Take me home.”
To her home?
Was she abandoning me too?
But then, her little hands brushed the side of my cheeks, centering me. “Take me back to the castle. Anywhere but here.”
I nodded, reaching inside her for the magnetic sand, but found none that was clumped back together. Izzy wasn’t in trouble. She had pulled me away from my mother on purpose.
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