Conjured

by Sarah Beth Durst

  Eve heard the door to the house open and shut. She listened to heavy footsteps in the hall. Outside her door, Aunt Nicki greeted Malcolm. Eve knew she should stand, but she felt as if the weight of the lost days held her to the floor. How many days? Or was it weeks? Months? Weeks, she guessed. Judging by the clothes and the trees outside, it was still summer. She could stand, open the door, and ask Malcolm … but she couldn’t face the sight of his eyes, of the disappointment she’d see there.

  A knock on the door. “Ready, Eve?” Malcolm called.

  No, she wanted to say. But then she remembered the door had no lock. He could open it. She peeled herself off the floor and called, “Coming!” She laid the monkey on the pillow and crossed its arms so it looked as if it were defying the world, and then left the room.

  Malcolm waited for her in the hall. Eve pasted a smile on her face, but he only glanced at her and then headed out the door. She followed him out of the house.

  Outside, it was humid. The sticky air prickled on her skin. Eve sucked in a breath and smelled overripe trash. She heard a dog bark once, but didn’t see anything move in either direction. Even the leaves were motionless on the trees.

  The car was red with a gash on the back door. She’d never seen Malcolm in anything but a black car. She thought about teasing him, saying the car was blushing in embarrassment at the gouge in its paint—that seemed like something he’d like her to say. But maybe she’d already made that joke. It wasn’t a very good joke anyway. She climbed into the passenger seat without saying anything.

  Malcolm got into the driver’s seat and locked the doors. His muscles were tense. He hadn’t been this tense before. She wondered what had changed in the missing weeks.

  Anything could have happened. Or nothing. She didn’t know which would be worse.

  Eve tried to think of what she could ask that would give her clues but wouldn’t reveal her memory loss. She rejected every question she thought of. In silence, she watched him as he leaned forward, hands tight on the wheel.

  He drove into the library parking lot. She suddenly wanted to be inside, surrounded by objects whose memories were permanent and unchanging, right there in black and white. Better, they wouldn’t care how much of her own story she knew or didn’t know.

  But there would also be people inside. She wondered what she’d said to them, what they’d said to her, what she’d done. She thought of the boy Zach and wondered if he’d be there.

  Malcolm parked near the entrance. He rubbed his hand over his eyes. He looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept well in days. She wondered where he did sleep. She didn’t know where he lived, if he had a family, what his life was like outside WitSec. He must do more than shepherd her from home to work to the agency and back—if that was indeed what he’d been doing during the missing weeks.

  “He won’t stop,” Malcolm said. “He’ll find another way. I know the type. He believes he is justified or invincible, or he simply wants. If we don’t catch him, it will begin again.”

  “I …” She searched for words. He must have meant the suspect in her case. Eve hadn’t known the suspect was a he. And what would begin again?

  “We can protect those who match the profile, but it’s all guesswork. And he could simply change whom he targets.” Heaving a sigh, he looked at her for the first time today. She saw thin red veins in the whites of his eyes, and the circles underneath were dark, almost bruises. “You are the key, Eve,” he said. “I know it.”

  She swallowed hard and knew she couldn’t tell him about her memory loss. Her eyes shifted away from his, and she focused on the clock. Seven thirty. She remembered the librarian, Patti Langley, saying her shift would start at nine o’clock. She must have been switched to an earlier shift. So much could have changed.

  She felt Malcolm’s hand on her shoulder. “I don’t mean to pressure you, Eve. Lou’s methods, though … I don’t think either of us wants a repeat of that. We have to make forward progress.”

  She nodded. She couldn’t think of any other response. She thought of the hospital—the drip of the IV, the beep of the monitors, the pain that gouged like a fork in her veins, and his orders for more, more, more. “I’d better … I have work.” She put her hand on the door handle.

  He squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t let anyone know that you’ve forgotten again.”

  She froze. Her heart fluttered in her chest. Air roared in her ears. She hadn’t … He couldn’t … “How did you know?” Her voice sounded thin.

  “I know you,” he said simply.

  “How often …?” She licked her lips. She knew this had happened before, in the agency, in the hospital, but she didn’t think it had happened here before. Maybe it had.

  “Often enough.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated, as if considering many answers. “Your magic makes your mind unstable,” he said at last.

  “Can you fix me?”

  The pity in his eyes made her throat feel tight. She blinked fast, her vision suddenly blurry, watery. “We’re trying,” he said. “All of this … Believe me, we’re trying.”

  “Will my memories come back?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “What do I do?” She meant about her memory, herself, the case, the lost weeks, all of it.

  “Lie,” he said. “Lie to everyone until you know the truth.”

  Chapter Six

  Eve stood in front of the sliding glass door. Inside, the library lobby was dark and empty. Weakened by clouds, sunlight seeped through the windows in a pale haze. It wasn’t enough to alleviate the shadows that lay in thick gray blankets over the circulation desk, the bookshelves, and the benches.

  A sign on the door read LIBRARY OPENS 8:00 A.M. CLOSES 9:00 P.M.

  Malcolm must have made a mistake. He’d left her outside a deserted library.

  She checked the parking lot. He was gone. The lot was empty except for one black SUV parked at the back of the lot, far enough away that she couldn’t see inside it. It could be a WitSec car. Or it could belong to anyone, watching her.

  Don’t, she told herself. She couldn’t freak herself out continuously. She had to trust that Malcolm wouldn’t make a mistake with her safety. He and Aunt Nicki had deemed this place safe. She had to trust that and trust them.

  Deliberately, Eve turned back to the library door—and saw a face, ghostly, in the glass. Every muscle in her body froze.

  “You know, on average, we can remember seven items in short-term memory for thirty seconds,” a voice said behind her. Zach. It was his voice, and it was his reflection in the glass door. He was holding a paper bag, and he was smiling cheerfully at her reflection. Her body slowly unfroze.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Of course, that doesn’t make sense,” Zach said. “If I had eight friends in a room, I wouldn’t automatically forget the eighth one. So I’m thinking that it must only be true in an experiment; like, show a guy twenty objects for one second and he’ll remember seven of them thirty seconds later. Anyway, point is that this is always your eighth item.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a snarl of keys. He jingled it. “You forgot your key again, didn’t you?”

  She forced her lips to smile. “Guess I did.”

  “Mmm,” he said, as if he understood. She wondered if he could understand. She must have seen him every day since her last clear memory. They must have talked. But about what?

  “Shall we go in?” he asked.

  “Oh. All right.” She continued to stare at him, as if by committing his face to memory she could elicit other memories. He shifted uncomfortably under her stare.

  “Okay. Um, excuse me.” He reached around her and stuck his key in the lock. Close, she felt his breath on her cheek. He blushed, and the red spread across his cheeks to his ears. She wondered if she’d ever kissed him. Why did I think that? she wondered. She felt her face heat up, as if she were blushing too, and she stepped quickly out of his way.

  The door slid open.

&n
bsp; She followed him inside, and the door slid shut behind them, erasing the sounds of outside that she hadn’t even noticed: cars on the road, wind in the trees, a lawnmower hum in the distance. In the lobby, the clock ticked extra loud in the silence.

  The lobby was coated in shadows. Bookshelves blocked the thin light from the windows, and the circulation desk created its own pool of darkness. Eve wondered why it was okay with Malcolm for her to enter an empty building with a boy she barely knew (or thought she barely knew)—especially a public building with shadows that could hide anyone. Before she’d entered the house on Hall Avenue, Malcolm had checked every room. He always watched the street as she got into his car. Yet he had simply dropped her off here.

  She tried to tell herself that meant this place was safe.

  She still didn’t like the shadows or the silence.

  “You get the lights, and I’ll switch on the computers, okay?” Zach didn’t wait for her to respond. Instead, he headed for a bin beside the door. It was positioned beneath a slot in the wall, and it overflowed with books.

  She didn’t know where the light switches were. She couldn’t ask. Instead, she chose a direction and walked toward that wall, hoping she’d see the switches before Zach noticed that she was aimless. At least she could remember what a light switch was. Zach rolled the book bin toward the circulation desk. A few books toppled off the top, and he bent to pick them up—buying her time to spot a bank of light switches by the corner. She lunged for them and flicked them on. Yellowish light spread across the lobby. The shadows faded somewhat, washed away, and she exhaled in relief.

  With the lights on, Zach ducked behind the desk and turned on the computers. One after another, they hummed to life. She watched him, glad he hadn’t asked her to do that, trying to memorize which buttons he pushed in case she had to do it later. As if he’d felt her watching him, Zach raised his head. “You okay? You seem … quiet today. Not that you aren’t usually the antigarrulous type. And that was an impressively convoluted sentence, if I do say so myself.”

  “Very impressive,” she agreed.

  “Like the New York pretzel of sentences. Or croissant. And now I’m hungry.” Finished with the computers, he set the paper bag that she’d seen him carrying on the desk, and he pulled out a bagel with flecks of pepper, onion, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds. “Your bagel, my lady.” It rained seeds on the desk. His was plain.

  She picked up the bread—“bagel,” he’d called it. With all the seeds, it looked like a feast for a bird. But she must have eaten one before. He was acting as if this was their routine. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him split his bagel in half, spread cream cheese on both halves, and then close them back together like a sandwich. She mimicked him and then took a bite. The seeds stuck to her teeth.

  “Despite legends to the contrary,” Zach said, “bagels have nothing to do with the shape of the King of Poland’s stirrups.”

  Eve heard a soft thump. “Did you hear that?” she asked. The bagel suddenly tasted like cardboard in her mouth. She quit chewing and listened. She’d thought the sound had come from Patti Langley’s office. But her door was shut, the light was off, and the sound didn’t repeat.

  “Hear what?” Zach asked. “The agony of a dozen legends, condemned to history’s ‘false’ list, crying out at once? Also false: Twinkies having an infinite shelf life, and Caesar salad having anything to do with Julius Caesar.”

  She stared at the office door until she’d convinced herself she’d imagined the noise.

  Finishing his bagel, Zach swept the crumbs into the bag. She handed him her partially eaten bagel. “I’d say you eat like a bird, but birds eat half their weight in food every day,” he said.

  “Just not hungry today.”

  “Too many factoids sour your appetite? Sorry. It’s just that you …” He trailed off. “Right. Okay. We should process the returns.”

  After disposing of the bag, Zach set himself up at one of the computers. He typed a few keystrokes and then began to scan the items from the bin. Mimicking him, Eve stationed herself at a nearby computer, and her fingers froze over the keyboard. She didn’t know what to type. In fact, she had no memory of ever having used a computer, though she knew she had spent many hours watching Malcolm and Aunt Nicki use theirs. A screen blinked, demanding a user name and password.

  She glanced at Zach. He continued to pluck books out of the bin and scan them with a handheld scanner. Every few books, he’d type numbers into the computer. Lie, Malcolm had said. She’d have to lie with actions as well as words, she realized. “I’ll pass you the books,” Eve offered. “It’ll go faster that way.” She scooted around him and picked books out of the bin.

  “Uh, okay. Good idea.”

  They worked side by side as the clock ticked closer to 8:00 a.m.

  At a few minutes to eight, the library door slid open, and Eve jumped. Waving at them, a man strode into the lobby. “Good morning, Zach. Eve.” He headed for the Children’s Room without slowing. A librarian. She forced herself to breathe normally.

  “Eve, you sure you’re okay?” Zach asked. “You seem jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof, which I have never personally witnessed but must be spectacular, at least for the observer if not for the cat.”

  “Fine.” She plastered a smile on her face and did her best to keep it there as other librarians drifted in. All of them greeted Zach and Eve by name. Eve knew none of them. After each hello, she pretended to be absorbed in her task and hoped no one would try to talk to her. Soon patrons began to arrive. Eve dug through the books in the bin until it was empty and all the books were sorted onto carts. At last, she looked up.

  Patti Langley was watching her.

  Eve bit back a yelp. She hadn’t heard her arrive. She glanced over her shoulder at Patti’s office—the door was open. How had she slipped by? Never mind, Eve told herself. Patti was here now. Eve forced herself to breathe evenly, and she summoned up a smile for the library director. At least hers was a face that Eve knew.

  Patti did not smile back. “I told you I want you in the stacks. No interaction with patrons.”

  “Oh. I …” Eve couldn’t think of an excuse. A hush had fallen over the lobby, as if everyone had slowed to look at her. She shot a glance at the other librarians and the patrons. None of them were paying any attention to her. Still, she felt eyes on her. Shivers crept over her skin.

  “Done!” Zach announced as he added the final book to a cart. “Don’t worry, Ms. Langley. We’re going.” He snagged Eve’s hand and pulled her out from behind the circulation desk. She continued to feel watched as he led her through the lobby and into the main library, hurrying past the reference librarians, a man in a gray suit with a newspaper, and a woman with a toddler.

  Soon they were within the stacks. She felt as if the shelves were folding around her protectively. At last, the feeling of being watched began to fade.

  “Safe now,” he said. She noticed he still held her hand. He seemed to realize it at the same moment. He dropped her hand and then cleared his throat. “Someday you’ll have to tell me what you did to get under Peppermint Patti’s skin.”

  Eve shrugged and looked at the bookshelves. It was hard to look at him while she lied. “She didn’t like me from the beginning.” She supposed she could be telling the truth, for all she knew. I don’t know enough, she thought. I’m going to make a mistake. Or more mistakes. She’d reach a critical mass of mistakes, and then … She didn’t know. She wished she could claw at the empty places inside her until she ripped through to expose what she did know.

  “Well, I liked you from the beginning.” He grinned at her. Startled, she stared at him. “Hey, you usually laugh when I flirt like that. You sure you’re all right?”

  She clung to that clue of what she’d forgotten: he’d flirted, and she’d laughed, even if she couldn’t remember it. “Tell me why you like me.”

  His grin vanished. He had a crease in his forehead between his eyebrows, and his lips were pursed
as if he were worried. “You’re fascinating. You’re … like a closed-up flower. You’re a shell with mother-of-pearl inside. You’re a cloud that hasn’t formed into a shape yet, but could. You’re shadows layered over shadows.”

  “You mean that.”

  “Every word.” Zach didn’t break eye contact. His eyes were brown, as warm as Malcolm’s. “Even the stupid poetry clichés, which, let’s face it, were pretty much all of them. You are the mystery and excitement that I have been craving my entire life.”

  “I’m not an unformed cloud. I’m a cloud that’s broken open, and my insides are pouring out like rain.” As she spoke, the feeling of safety dissipated. The stacks weren’t hiding her; they were hiding others. She imagined eyes between the books, peering out at her. The shelves could hide a dozen listeners.

  “Okay, that’s way more poetic than mine.” Zach caught her hand. “Hey, I’m not mocking! Okay, I am mocking a little. You are obviously having a bad day. And that is obviously an understatement. If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand. But if you do … I’m your guy. Always.”

  She stared at her hand in his. His fingers twisted around hers, locking their palms together as if they were two halves of a broken whole. She wanted to believe him. “What do you want from me?”

  “Undying affection?” Zach suggested. “Passionate love? But I’ll settle for a little trust. You never talk about yourself or your life. I want to know you, Eve. Is that too pushy? I don’t want to be too pushy. But you did ask.”

  “And you don’t lie.” Eve felt a smile creep onto her face, but it vanished in an instant as she heard voices near their shelves: a librarian guiding someone to a nearby section.