Remo sighed. “Well he died the year I was born. And forty-four times five is . . .”
“Two-fifteen.”
“So, that would mean he was born in . . .”
“1803,” I said, almost without thinking.
Remo hiked up an eyebrow.
“What? I love math.”
“I see that.” He lifted his hand back to the keypad and punched in 1-8-0-3.
The light and sound went crazy again.
He tapped 1800 and all the other combinations until he got to 1810.
I clawed at my ears since clawing at the damn box was useless. I knew prison wasn’t supposed to be fun, but come on . . . this was taking torture to a whole new level.
Concentrating on my breathing, I tried thinking of what four digits Gregor and Linus could’ve come up with in those scheming brains of theirs. I tapped Iba’s year of birth—wrong—my paternal grandmother’s birthdate—wrong—then 0000—wrong. I growled.
I walked to the bar, grabbed the freaking piping hot pan and lobbed it at the shrilling box. All that did was a big fat nothing. No, that wasn’t true. It made a mess. Chunks of crust and gooey filling slithered down the bricks, darkening the mortar. When the pan hit the floor, its clang was barely audible over the pandemonium.
Heaving with fury, I molded my dust into a bat. Remo took a few steps back and crossed his arms. Apparently he wasn’t going to stop me. Good, because I might’ve whacked him if he’d tried. Ears ringing, elbow smarting, I swung it into the brain-shredding box. It didn’t break. Didn’t even chip. Unlike my eardrums. And my sanity. And my elbow.
Skies, my elbow . . .
Sweat trickled down the nape of my neck, bled into my still-damp suit. To think I’d been reveling in a bath an hour ago, wondering why my skin didn’t sparkle when wet. What petty, petty musings.
Snarling like a tigri, I took another swing. The bat flew out of my grip, hit the glass, and dropped before rolling toward Remo’s boots.
He stepped on it but didn’t bend over to pick it up. “Did you get it all out?”
I cradled my elbow. “No. Not even close. When I see Gregor—” I stopped talking. When . . . What a dangerous thing optimism was—it made you believe in miracles.
“Focus on that. On what you’ll do to him when you see him.”
The jarring ring turned into a staccato trill again, each beat like a nail scraping down a smooth piece of slate.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
“I swear, this is why we haven’t met any prisoners. They all went nuts and put an end to their miserable existences.”
“You forget that death doesn’t seem to be possible.”
“Maybe in this cell, it is.”
There was a bitter twist to his lips. “I say we don’t find out.”
I glared at the beeping box, then frowned when I noticed that over the dashes, letters had appeared. TRY. Then, LAST. Try last? Last what? Last day of the—
“You’ve got to be shitting me. Last try?” Remo’s voice seemed amplified by the glass façade.
What happened if we failed? I didn’t dare voice my concern. I didn’t even want to speculate what could happen because knowing Gregor, it would be worse than death.
The rushing in my ears intensified, crashing against my temples. “I don’t think it’s a date.”
Remo frowned.
“Your grandfather loves sick games. I think this is just another one of them. I think the four digits correspond to something in the inn.” I was already behind the bar, lifting alcohol bottles, checking labels. “Look over the tables and chairs. Maybe a number’s carved into one of them.”
I wasn’t sure if Remo would do it. He wasn’t the type to take orders. Especially from me. He stared around the room at the dozen or so tables, and then, as though deciding my idea wasn’t completely ridiculous, he walked toward the nearest one. After we’d scoured the entire restaurant, Remo announced he was heading to the second floor. Before leaving, I stared around the room one last time, noticing the pie had dematerialized. Although no greasy track mark remained on the bricks, its sweet, buttery scent clung to the air like smoke from a grease fire.
My stomach churned. When it didn’t balloon outward, I breathed a little easier. Well, as easily as possible when the words LAST TRY kept flashing, punctuated by incessant beeping.
I tried the sink behind the bar before leaving, but not even a droplet of water splashed out. My mouth felt dry as the road in Frontier Land. I made a beeline for the kitchen, drank a few deep gulps from the bowl, thankful I’d had the foresight to fill it, then set it down carefully.
I’d already searched drawers and cupboards—all empty—but an etching by the cubby hole caught my attention. I walked over to it. Someone had carved a heart and placed the names BLAKE + CAT inside of it. A chill swept through me. Was this the Blake Geemee Kaji had absorbed when he rose from his grave? Had my mother and Blake been lovers? Had she drawn the heart? Had he? Was it even real?
My name sounded somewhere outside the kitchen. I left the markings on the wall and went up to find Remo. By the time I reached the landing, I was again out of breath.
“Found something?” I asked hopefully.
He walked out of the largest room toting the framed picture of two kids, one with black pigtails and black eyes, the other with light blue eyes and hair shorn so close to his scalp it was impossible to tell the color. The girl sat on the landing of a treehouse, stick-thin legs caught midswing, and the boy was climbing the ladder, looking over his shoulder at the camera.
“Is that my mother?”
“Possibly, but that’s not why I unhooked it from the wall. Look.” He pointed to the bottom of the picture where the date 2008 was scribbled in pen. “It’s the only one with a date. I checked them all.”
“Did you check every bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“And you found nothing else?”
He shook his head, which made a piece of red hair fall into his eyes. “And you?”
I thought about the carving in the kitchen, but since it didn’t bear any numbers, I didn’t think I needed to share it with Remo.
“Should we try 2008?”
Goose bumps sprouted over my skin, awakening every little bruise and cut on my body. “What if we’re wrong?”
“What if we’re right?” He tucked the picture under his arm.
Gnawing the life out of my lip, I followed him back down the stairs. My gut churned and churned, as though trying to tell me something.
In six quick strides, he reached the alarm box whereas I froze on the threshold, gaze sticking to the table closest to me, or rather, to what lay on top. I clamped my hands around the back rungs of a chair and stared so hard at the damn pie its contours blurred. And then suddenly, they sharpened, and I whipped my gaze up. “Remo, wait!”
However much I wanted the beeping to stop, I sensed we needed to think this through a moment longer. I took a seat, and although it was icky, I raked my hand through the filling, looking for a clue.
On the anniversary of the Caligo Dias, it was Neverrian tradition that every ground-dwelling family be gifted a Caligo Crosta, a pie baked in the royal kitchens. Inside every pastry was a solid gold nugget. They all varied in size. For some families, the nugget could keep them afloat for an entire decade; for others, it would allow them to live like nobles for a month. It was Iba who’d established this tradition, inspiring himself from the Galette des Rois he’d sampled in France during one of his Earthly trips with Nima. Together, they’d come up with this compelling gift, a small token of appreciation for their less fortunate subjects.
I’d heard Gregor complain once that my parents were emptying the royal coffers faster than Linus had gone through women. I’d wrinkled my nose at the comparison, but Iba had smiled. For some reason, my father enjoyed riling up the wariff.
“What are you doing?” Remo asked, bringing me back to the inn with its shrilling box.
“Looking for a nugget.”
&n
bsp; “Not to burst your little bubble, prinsisa, but I don’t think we can buy our way out of here.”
I didn’t react to his taunt. Simply spread the filling over the table, fingers brushing through the sticky fruit and chunky crust. “I’m hoping there’s a number etched into the nugget.” If there even was a nugget.
My heart palpitated when my fingers knocked into something solid. I squeezed it between my thumb and index finger only to find it was a morsel of peach pit.
“So? Anything?” he asked.
My eyesight blurred, and then a tear rolled off my cheek and plopped inside the emptied pan. I scrubbed my disappointment away with my knuckles.
Remo must’ve deduced my hunt had been fruitless.
The irony of a fruit-filled hunt being fruitless made me snort out a laugh. Oh, Skies, the demise of my mind was upon me. I tunneled my hand through my hair, streaking it with globs of pie. Whatever. They would just magick themselves out of existence, I thought with another dark laugh.
I laughed a minute longer, and then I stopped. Just stopped. Because it was really not funny.
Nothing about this was funny.
My hair smelled like freaking charmed peaches.
My elbow felt like it had been evicted from its socket.
My face was crosshatched with stinging cuts.
My eardrums were bruised from the beeping.
Not to mention that if we didn’t figure out the correct four-digit code, we’d stay locked in this oversized tin box, drowning in warm pie.
Remo was watching me like I was one of those new animal specimens developed by human zoologists: a unicorn or a pompom. Probably more pompom than unicorn—horned horses made people gasp and coo, whereas poufy blue monkeys made people snicker and point.
“Why are you here?” I whispered to the pie. “Why? Why? Why?”
Great. Now I was talking to inanimate objects. Wait. Were objects that could materialize and dematerialize inanimate?
Grimly, I realized that in the end, inanimate or not, I was still chatting with a pie.
“Are you asking me?” Remo’s voice stole my attention off the wrecked pastry.
“No.”
He hefted a dark eyebrow, still clutching the framed picture. “You think the pie has something to do with it?”
“Don’t you? I mean, if it was just about freaking us out, why not make other stuff appear? Why peach pie?” Just as it had done too many times before, the spilled contents evaporated and reformed.
Pie. Pie. Pie. Pie. Pie. Pie.
The word shrilled in time with the blasted alarm.
I stood up so fast my chair skidded and toppled. “Pi! Remo, it’s pi!”
“We’ve established it’s pie. We’ve even established it’s magical and contains peaches.”
I rolled my eyes. “No. I mean it’s the number pi.”
“As in 3.14? That’s only three digits.”
My astonishment that he knew the basic number when everyone relied on technology for everything these days subsided at his ignorance that pi was an infinite number. “It’s actually 3.14159 . . .”
When his eyes grew as large as Gregor’s paranormal pies, my voice dragged off. Uttering the ensuing numerals served no purpose besides showing off my love for math, which Remo would probably see as showing off since he thought the very worst of me.
“So, you want to try 3-1-4-1?” he said between two beeps.
I swallowed, suddenly unsure. What if the resurfacing pastry had nothing to do with the alarm box? “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” I raked my hands through my hair again. My locks, although still a little damp, were pie-free. My fingers, too.
“I think it’s smart.” He put down the framed picture on a neighboring table. “I think we should try it.”
I gaped at Remo. He thought something I’d said was smart? Wow.
“What?”
Before he could fathom how much his compliment affected me, I blurted out, “I don’t want to get blown up, Remo.”
He sighed, rough and deep. “Maybe we’ll just get buried under peach pie.”
“I don’t want that either.”
“It would make for a sweet death.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Then let’s live.”
As I stared at the blinking red dot, he turned toward the keypad and raised his index finger. And then he tapped in the sequence.
19
The Tornado
Red turned to green, and the inn fell silent even though my skull still beeped. The word WELL flashed on the screen followed by the word DONE.
The grinding sound from earlier erupted around us as the metal sheets retracted into the ground, letting in veins of bright light. I never thought I’d be happy to see the cloud-filled sky, but Great Gejaiwe, I was on the brink of prostrating myself toward it.
Until I noticed the shutters on the house across the street flapping as wildly as a quila drunk on faerie wine.
“Um. Is it me, or is the wind—”
A mailbox banged into the window, and I jumped. When the glass webbed, my blood turned to ice. Now it breaks?
I retreated so fast I knocked into a table and then into a chair. Suddenly, a tree—a full-grown, huge-ass tree—skidded down the street, its roots twisting like a volitor’s. When the roots lifted, flipping it onto its leafy crown, Remo shot across the inn.
“We need to get to the basement!” His roar, combined with the impact of the trunk against the pavement outside, had my heart blasting against the zipper of my jumpsuit. “Amara!”
A segment of white-picket fence slammed into the window, crackling all the places the mailbox had spared.
I ripped around. “Shouldn’t we try to get to the train?”
Remo’s fiery red hair fluttered around as though the wind had somehow penetrated the cracks in the façade. Besides its deafening howl, the air was still quiet inside.
“Massive trees are flying around, and you want to go outside?”
“If we can’t die—”
“What if we can? What if the last world just created illusions, and my death was one of them? We need to get to the basement. Now, Amara!”
I whirled around and headed toward the staircase I’d noticed earlier, then tore down the cement steps, Remo on my heels. The explosion of glass somewhere in the inn startled me, and I stumbled down the last three steps, shooting my hands forward. I officially detested stairs. Cinching my lids shut, I fell. My palms smacked into the concrete first and then my knees. Although my face didn’t suffer from my clumsiness, my elbow shrieked in pain all over again.
I yanked back my injured arm but remained hunched even though all I wanted was to crawl into a ball and lick my wounds.
“Amara?”
Slowly, breathing through my pain, I opened my lids.
Remo was crouched in front of me. “Are you okay?”
No, I was not okay. We’d figured out the code just to get hit by a freaking tornado?
He lifted my face.
I twisted my head so that it slid off his roughened palm, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing me in pain. “I’m fine.” I rocked back onto my heels and glared at the shiny concrete under my bent legs.
Remo’s concern clung to the air between us, charging it. Unless it wasn’t concern. Unless it was smugness that I was so damn weak without my powers.
Wood splintered somewhere above us, and Remo jumped to his feet, then lunged toward the basement’s entrance. A glance over my shoulder revealed a table tumbling down the stairs. I needed to get out of the way, but somehow, I couldn’t locate the willpower or strength to get up and save myself. What was the point?
Remo groaned, and I thought he’d gotten hit but found him shouldering the door. The hinges groaned as he leaned all of his weight against it. Either it was the heaviest door, or it was stuck. The wood tabletop screeched as it got stuck between the walls of the staircase. Sweat glistened on Remo’s brow as he pushed and pushed. I should’ve go
tten up and helped him, but instead I sat there, my anger foaming like white caps. I wanted to scream like I’d done in the Cacti Desert, but all that had done was hurt my lungs.
A deafening crack sounded over the howling wind, and then the tabletop split in two like butterfly wings and flew straight at me. I squeezed my eyes shut, certain I was about to be struck, but the impact never came. And then the wind stopped blowing, and my hair stopped floating like Glade kelp around my face.
A latch clicked, followed by a booming thump.
I opened my eyes but could see nothing.
Either Remo had gotten the door shut, because there wasn’t the faintest trickle of light, or I was dead.
I heard heavy panting. Mine but also someone else’s.
I guessed I was still alive.
Something collided softly with my knee. I assumed it was Remo’s boot until he spoke, and I realized he wasn’t standing over me. “You think you can make a faelight out of wita?”
Swallowing, I pressed my palms together and extricated my dust. Its filaments glowed in the darkness as I stretched and weaved them into an orb which I tossed upward. It levitated toward the ceiling and spread light over the tight quarters, glinting against the shelves filled with stacked wine bottles and highlighting the edges of a countertop under which sat two large white boxes with portholes.
Remo was leaning against the door, breathing hard. His eyes ran over my still kneeling form. “Are you okay?”
No. I wasn’t okay. I was a mess. A broken, useless mess. I bit my lip and averted my watery gaze. When I caught sight of what had bumped into the side of my knee, my molars clicked together. It wasn’t pie, but it was almost as bad. I picked up the unblemished apple, and with my good arm, lobbed it against the wall of bottles. Its glossy red skin didn’t tear, its white flesh didn’t splatter. It simply bounced back down and rocked onto its side as though made of rubber.
I dragged my bad arm against my chest, trying to evaluate if the pain was the same as in Deception Central or if it felt different. Every inch of skin and bone hurt so damn badly that I imagined it was broken this time. How was I supposed to ascend a cliff with only one arm?
Reckless Cruel Heirs Page 17
