Double Eclipse

by Melissa de la Cruz

  “WHAT?” Molly yelled, and at the same time, I heard a tiny, sharp pop! followed by a little tinkle, and realized that she’d exploded all the lightbulbs in the room.

  “You heard me!” I yelled back as a whiff of smoke filled my nostrils. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see thin tendrils of smoke curling out of the electrical sockets in the wall. “I didn’t have to steal him because he liked me better!”

  “OH!” Molly screamed, and stamped her foot so hard that every single stuffed animal and book fell off the shelves in Jo’s room. “HOW! DARE! YOU!”

  “Girls, please,” a faint voice said somewhere below us. “It would be terribly rude to burn down Ingrid’s house after all she’s done for us.”

  “I’ll burn it down if I want to!” I yelled, and only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize who I was yelling at.

  “Dad!” Molly screamed. “Dad, you’re awake!”

  “Girls, what’s going on up here?” Ingrid’s voice came from the hall. “I was using my brand-new KitchenAid mixer, and the motor just—Thor!” she interrupted herself as her flour-covered form appeared in the door. “Oh, thank Odin!”

  She ran toward the bed, but there was no room for her to get in, because Molly and I had both thrown ourselves on Dad.

  “Girls, please,” Dad said, laughing weakly. “I just managed to get myself out of the astral plane. Please don’t smother me and send me back there.”

  “You’re okay!” I yelled. “Oh, Dad, you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” Dad said. “Or I will be, once I get one of Ingrid’s smoothies in me. That storm took a lot out of me.”

  “You’re going to get more than a smoothie,” Ingrid said, beaming. “I’ve got a wild boar in the freezer downstairs. We’re eating Valhalla style tonight! Assuming any of my appliances still work,” she added, casting a baleful look at me and Molly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I tried to catch Molly’s eye, but she refused to look at me. “I guess I was just overwrought and got carried away.”

  “It’s okay,” Dad said. “It was your voices that brought me back. The dulcet tones of home,” he added, laughing.

  “Overwrought?” Molly said, her eyes suddenly boring into me. “That sounds like a typical Mardi excuse.”

  “Molly,” Ingrid said in a warning voice. “This isn’t the time for fighting. Your father’s very weak.”

  “Her father will be fine,” Dad said. “But he wouldn’t mind a slight reduction in volume.”

  “Things’ll get a whole lot quieter when I go back to Fair Haven,” Molly said.

  “Molly, no!” Ingrid said. “You’ve only just gotten home. And I’m making a big dinner to celebrate your father’s recovery.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be delicious, Ingrid. Maybe I can have some leftovers tomorrow. But there’s no way I’m sitting down at the same table with this traitor who calls herself my sister.”

  “Are you serious?” I said. “Dad, tell her she can’t go!”

  But Dad just looked at Molly with sad but respectful eyes.

  “I’m afraid this is Molly’s call. If she feels like she needs to stand by your mother, I’m not going to stand in the way of that.”

  “But she tried to kill you!”

  “Maybe,” Dad said. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried to kill me. Hel, it’s not even the first time this summer. But she’s still your mother.”

  Molly looked as confused as I felt, as if she’d been expecting Dad to order her to stay.

  “You’re not mad at her?” she asked Dad.

  “Whatever beef your mom and I have, it’s between us, and you shouldn’t let it affect your relationship with her. I hid her from you for seventeen years. I’m not going to keep making the same mistake.”

  My eyes flashed back and forth between Dad and Molly.

  “Molly,” I said in an urgent whisper, “get over yourself.”

  Molly’s eyes jerked up to meet mine. I could see her brain searching for something to say.

  “You get over yourself,” she said finally, in a half-defeated voice, as if she knew how lame her comeback was.

  And then she ran from the room.

  27

  SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST

  From the Diary of Molly Overbrook

  By ten o’clock the next morning I was at the Cheesemonger. It had been a miserable night. In the first place, when I ran out of Ingrid’s house, I found myself standing in her front yard with no way to get anywhere. Ingrid lives a couple of miles outside of North Hampton, and a good ten miles from Gardiners Island, so I was not about to walk. I’m not Mardi. I could always call a cab, but I didn’t want to just stand around in Ingrid’s front yard for twenty minutes waiting for it to get there. So I ended up having to walk something like a half mile down the road to the next house, where I called a cab, and then I stood around like some crazy stalker until it arrived to pick me up.

  Then, when I got back to Fair Haven, I discovered that Mum wasn’t there. I went through the whole house looking for her. That probably doesn’t sound strange to you, but Fair Haven is a really big house, and I’d never actually gone through the whole thing before, even though I’d lived there for more than a month now. I discovered that Mum’s room was the only other furnished room in the house, although all the furniture was brand-new and looked like it had never been used. And who knew, maybe it hadn’t? Or, like, only one or two times—she’d been on the road almost every day since she’d bought the place. What surprised me was that her suitcases weren’t there. Ivan had left the Maybach at the East Hampton airport when we’d gone to the BH, and she drove me and Mardi to Ingrid’s and told us she was coming back here. But even if the car was in the garage and its trunk was empty, and my suitcases were in my bedroom, there was no sign of Mum or her luggage anywhere. I looked in all twenty-seven rooms of the mansion. I even poked my head into the east wing. The part of the house that had been featured in my dream, which held the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. I’d been in the kitchen, of course, many times, but I’d never ventured beyond it. Even though it was the servants’ wing, I expected something pretty grand because once upon a time, it had actually been the original house.

  But to my surprise, it was run-down and filthy. Not, like, dirty, but filled with dirt—and leaves and twigs and branches and a lot of little white things that looked like animal bones. And that was just the hallway. The rooms off it were even worse. The glass had been broken out of the windows and, judging by the piles of poop and fur and feathers, it looked like raccoons and crows and whatever else had been going in and out for who knew how long. But way before Mum had taken over the place. This surprised me, to say the least. It was hard to imagine Trent’s mother allowing this kind of squalor in her house, even if it was a part she wasn’t using. These were supposed to be servants’ quarters. The Gardiners had employed a dozen people, and Mum had said she’d kept a few of them. Yet clearly they weren’t living here, and after poking my nose in three or four rooms, I finally gave up and headed back to the normal part of the house.

  Somehow I got turned around, though, and instead of coming out into the kitchen where I went in, I ended up in the ballroom. I guess I knew that the ballroom abutted the east wing, but I’d never realized the servants’ wing actually “communicated” with it, as they used to say. But there I was, and as I stared at the doors on the opposite side of the room, the ones that opened onto the front hall, I realized that the last time I’d been in this room had been in my dream, and I had a sudden creepy chill that I’d somehow crossed into that other dimension, the one I’d felt in my dream. I made my way gingerly across the room, as if at any moment I might slip back into that strange place.

  I got there without incident, closed the doors behind me and made my way back toward the kitchen. It was dinnertime, and the only thing I’d had all day was a few berries for bre
akfast and the champagne on the plane, so I was pretty ravenous.

  When I walked into the kitchen, I got an answer to at least one of my questions. Because there, on the counter, was my favorite meal: a sushi platter with a small garden salad and a bowl of miso soup on the side. The food was laid out on the same china I’d been eating from since I’d moved into Fair Haven, and there were no take-out containers in the trash. The soup was piping hot, and the shrimp and unagi (that’s eel, if you’re not a big sushi eater) were fully cooked, but the stove and the oven were both ice cold. The food hadn’t been delivered, in other words, but it hadn’t been made here either. So Mum hadn’t employed a staff, after all. She’d used magic. That explained why the servants’ wing had been allowed to fall into disrepair, although I was curious why Mum had tried to cover up the fact that she was running the house with magic rather than with people. Maybe it contravened some Council ruling I didn’t know about? Yet another thing I wanted to talk to my mother about, but unfortunately, she was nowhere to be found.

  And, though I waited till two in the morning, she never showed up. Or at least I think she never showed up—Fair Haven is easily big enough that a whole crew of people could come and go without being heard. But I waited in Mum’s room, picking at my sushi off and on and going through a couple of bottles of sake, until I finally fell asleep in the middle of a Gilmore Girls marathon.

  Needless to say, I had the dream again. I mean, between the scare with Dad, the fight with Mardi, Mum’s disappearance, and actually going into the east wing, it was bound to happen. I made it across the puddle-filled yard and negotiated the ruined floorboards in the hallway as before, pulled off the door to the ballroom and found myself faced with the same strange dimensional shift as before. This time I forced myself to go all the way into the ballroom, where once again it morphed into that strange curving tunnel. The light was burning at the end of it. The woman’s shadow was visible, projected on the wall. Her voice echoed to me.

  “Mooi, is that you? Mooi? Are you there?”

  “Mum?” I called back. “Mum, is that you?”

  “Mooi,” the voice called to me. “Go back. It’s not safe here.”

  I still couldn’t tell if the voice was Mum’s, but something about the way it said go back had the opposite effect on me. Whoever was saying it was in distress, was in danger, and for some reason, I felt like I had to help her. I went barreling down the hallway.

  “I’m coming! Hold on, I’ll be right there!”

  “Mooi, no! Go back! You shouldn’t have to see this!”

  By then I was almost at the end of the hall, and I didn’t bother answering. Just charged forward around the last bit of curve. The light was stronger there, but I still couldn’t see the source. The shadow on the wall was at least twelve feet tall, but I couldn’t see what was casting it. As I ran the last couple of steps, I could see bits of doorframe poking through the mud and roots, I knew from my experience earlier in the evening that I was running out of the ballroom and into the oldest part of the house. This is it! I told myself. I’m finally going to figure out what this dream is trying to tell me.

  But instead of seeing the light source or whoever was casting that shadow and warning me away, all I saw was . . .

  Mum’s bedroom.

  I was wide awake, standing in the middle of the room as if I’d been sleepwalking. But then, when I looked down at my feet, I saw it was more than that.

  My feet were covered with mud and leaves, and when I scraped them off, I realized they were ice cold—my feet and ankles were so numb that I could barely even feel them.

  I was so freaked out that I ran into Mum’s bathroom and hopped in the shower and turned on the water even before I had my clothes off. I stripped and scrubbed myself with lavender-scented soap under the steaming water until even my Asgardian skin was tinted bright pink. Then I toweled myself off with one of Mum’s six-foot-long bath sheets until I was bone dry, wrapped the sheet around myself and skipped back through the eerily empty hallways to my room. It was almost nine, I saw when I checked my phone, and I decided to head into town for a cup of coffee and a croissant. I dressed and headed downstairs to the garage, but I had to go through the kitchen to get there, and there, on the counter, was the cup of coffee I’d been craving.

  “Uh-uh,” I said to the steaming cup. “No magical food today.”

  The key to the Maserati was hanging on a peg in the garage, and I grabbed it and hopped in, pressed the garage door opener, and backed out so fast I almost ripped the top of my head off on the bottom of the door, which had only raised itself halfway up. I spun out on the gravel parking lot and shot down the mile-long driveway at a hundred miles an hour—or, if not exactly a hundred miles an hour, then fast enough that Mardi would’ve been impressed—and didn’t slow down until I was back on the North Fork.

  And it’s not like I was heading to the Cheesemonger. The Cheesemonger just happened to be between me and the Last Cup Before Europe (which claimed to be the easternmost coffee shop on Long Island), the only place in North Hampton that can make a soy hazelnut latte that doesn’t taste like a cross between a McDonald’s milk shake and a Styrofoam peanut. But when I saw the Cheesemonger’s awning, something made me stop. I don’t know, maybe it was the empty angle-in parking spot right in front. In the past month, I’d gotten pretty good at driving forward and, you know, turning left and turning right, but reverse was like a whole other language. What I mean is, I can’t parallel-park worth a damn, and when I saw the spot, I grabbed it.

  As I marched up to the front door, I saw that it was still dark inside the shop. I glanced at my watch. It was a few minutes before ten. When I was running the shop with Marshall, we always got here a half hour early so that we’d be good to go at ten. But I guess Mardi and Rocky ran a looser shop.

  Well, screw that, I said to myself.

  I pushed on the door. The lock held for a moment, but a teenage goddess in need of her first cup of java of the day isn’t going to be put off for long. I felt a thump beneath my fingers as the dead bolt dropped out of its slot and the door fell open. The morning’s bread delivery—baguettes and bagels and croissants and, if they were still getting them, the best apricot-ricotta Danish you’ve ever tasted—sat in a bag beside the door, just waiting for someone to come along for it. I grabbed it and made my way inside, past the shadowed tables covered with pine-scented crackers and jars of kohlrabi pickled in ginger, caraway, and pomegranate brine, straight to the counter. Though I’d only been in the shop once in the past year—and that just to fight with Mardi—I still remembered where everything was. I measured the beans, ground them, fired up the La Marzocco espresso machine and, while my double shot was dripping, poured some soy milk into a pitcher and frothed it into a fluffy cloud. Five minutes after I’d entered the store, I had a steaming latte in my hand. The first coffee I’d brewed in a year.

  Nervously, I took a sip.

  “Girl, you still got it,” I said out loud. I took another sip. “Damn, that’s good.”

  And of course I could’ve just grabbed a Danish from the bag and taken off, let Mardi and Rocky try to figure out why the door was open and the espresso machine was warm. Instead, I walked over to the light switches and flipped them on, and then I unloaded the bag of bread into its various baskets and fluffed some gingham napkins over them to keep them fresh, and then I wandered back to the walk-in and grabbed the spreads—a dozen different kinds of butters and cream cheeses and honeys, a dozen more kinds of jams and jellies and preserves—and set them in their slots on the cooler table. Somewhere in there, I must’ve grabbed an apron out of habit, and by the time I’d done that, I knew I was there for the day. Coffee in hand, I made my way around the shop, refamiliarizing myself with the store’s exotic and esoteric comestibles and generally making things pretty.

  Thank the gods I wore flats today.

  My first customer came in at 10:05. I was halfway through h
is order—a toasted pumpernickel-raisin bagel with a cranberry cream cheese schmear—when the bell over the front door tinkled, followed a moment later by a hushed but still distinct gasp.

  “M-Molly?”

  I didn’t look up, but I knew it was Rocky. In fact, I think I’d known Rocky was coming when he was halfway down the block because the bagel in my hand was smoking, and I hadn’t yet run it through the toaster.

  “Miss,” my customer said, “that bagel seems to be burnt.”

  Just the way he said burnt annoyed me. Move to England if you want to say burnt. We’re American. We say burned.

  I looked up at the customer. He was a middle-aged man wearing a green pencil-striped button-down tucked over his huge belly into a pair of pleated khaki shorts. He only had about eight strands of hair, but he had at least as much product on them as I use, and his bronzer was sweating off his neck and staining his collar brown. In other words: a banker.

  I hate bankers.

  “Something tells me you like burned bagels,” I said to him in a flat voice.

  “I . . . like burned bagels?” he repeated in a confused voice.

  “In fact, you probably wish this bagel was more burned. You probably wish it was on fire.” I held up the bagel on its plate and it obligingly burst into flame.

  “I like my bagels burnt,” the man said.

  “Burned. You like them burned.”

  “I like them burned,” he repeated, nodding his jowly chin like a deflating air puppet.

  I clapped the two halves of the charred bagel closed. The flames went out in a puff of acrid smoke, and I handed it over to him like that. No bag, no schmear.

  “That’ll be twenty—no, fifty—bucks,” I said.

  The man pulled out his wallet and dropped three twenties on the counter.

  “I assume the ten is my tip,” I said in my sweetest, snidest voice.