“Will you tell me your memories instead?”
Aunt Nicki slowed. She stared at her, blinked once. “Excuse me?”
“I want … to hear your memories. I’m hungry for memories.” It was the best way she could think of to put it. It felt like hunger, vast empty spaces yawning inside her that wanted to be filled.
“You are the weirdest kid that I have ever met.” Aunt Nicki sped up again, making a cheese sandwich and plopping it into a pan. It sat there, sad and unsizzling. She selected a cup of soup and put it in the microwave.
Eve sank into one of the kitchen chairs. Not looking at Aunt Nicki, she fiddled with the edge of a placemat. It curled as she kneaded it. She only had a few memories of her own, rattling in the emptiness inside her, and so few of them made sense. “Why do I have memories of them, the people on the bulletin board? And why do I know they died? Was I … was I there when they died?”
Aunt Nicki didn’t turn. Looking up at her, Eve saw that the muscles in her neck and shoulders were tense. “It’s what you choose going forward that defines who you are,” Aunt Nicki said. “Not what you chose in the past.”
“What did I choose?” Eve asked. “Why didn’t I stop their deaths? Could I have …” Her voice failed her, and she sat in silence. She clenched her hands in front of her on the placement.
Aunt Nicki flipped the sandwich. It was still pale yellow with unmelted chunks of butter on the other side. “Ah, yes, heat will help,” she said, falsely merry. She turned on the stove. “There we go.” She fetched a plate and a bowl and a spoon. Folding a napkin, she adjusted it so that it tucked neatly under the side of the plate.
“I need to know,” Eve said softly.
“You asked about my memories.” Aunt Nicki sat opposite Eve and uncurled Eve’s fingers. Eve had bunched up the corner of the placemat. Aunt Nicki smoothed it flat. “I spent a lot of time trying to forget my past. My childhood … Let’s say I did not have a perfect one. Spent a lot of time … Well, when I hit eighteen, that was it. I left it all behind.”
“I didn’t choose to leave my past behind,” Eve said. “It was taken from me.”
“Are you sure about that?” Aunt Nicki asked gently. The microwave dinged. She popped out of her chair, retrieved the soup, and flipped the sandwich. At the stove, her back to Eve, she said, “My father drank. My mother drank. My older brother … dead in prison by eighteen. Hanged himself. Or had someone help him. No one was ever sure. Can’t say I was sorry. He used to put out his cigarettes on my arm, at least until Dad stopped him with a baseball bat. After that, he left home, and Dad left soon after. Now, it’s just Mom and my baby brother. He’s in California, as far away as he could get. She’s in a nursing home and needs twenty-four-seven care, which I can barely afford. Alcohol ate her brain cells. She’s fifty-eight and barely knows her own name … She reminds me of you, actually, but you drool less. And so I chase down petty fugitives to pay her bills, when I’m not babysitting for someone who doesn’t know me and barely knows herself. But it’s my choice, to be the responsible one, to be the caretaker, to be the person who …” Aunt Nicki took a deep breath and turned around. “Point is, I invented me … maybe as a reaction to them … definitely as a reaction to them. I am myself in spite of my memories.”
“So are you saying I shouldn’t remember?” Eve asked.
“God, no,” Aunt Nicki said. “Lou would have my head. Especially now, with the latest developments. You need to remember faster.” She pushed away from the table and returned to the stove. A minute later, she flopped the grilled cheese sandwich onto a plate and slid it next to the soup in front of Eve. “Eat.”
Eve sipped her soup. It slid warmly down her throat. She bit into the sandwich, and the cheese singed the roof of her mouth. She puffed air to cool her mouth.
“Dip it,” Aunt Nicki suggested. She mimed dipping the sandwich into the soup.
Eve tried it. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s comfort food.” Eating it made the agency and the hospital and the visions feel far away. She couldn’t bring herself to ask about the “latest developments.” Most likely Aunt Nicki wouldn’t explain anyway.
She ate in silence and didn’t try to remember anything. If she couldn’t remember everything, she wondered if it would be easier if she remembered nothing. Aunt Nicki busied herself cleaning the kitchen. At last Eve asked, “Do you think I could do that? I mean, invent myself like you did.”
Aunt Nicki stopped. “I have absolutely no idea.”
As she turned that thought over and over in her mind, Eve finished the soup, running the last of the sandwich crust around the bowl.
Aunt Nicki cleared her dishes. “Get some sleep. That boy from the library is anxious to see you at work tomorrow. He’s been calling nonstop for the past week.”
Zach! Eve stood up. “I can call him back—”
Aunt Nicki shook her head. “Sleep. One more night won’t kill him.”
“Can you promise me that?”
“He’s not the primary target,” Aunt Nicki said. “I can promise you that.”
Eve thought of the who’s-next game from the cafeteria, and she wondered how many people—aside from Aidan, Topher, and Victoria—the marshals were protecting. For all she knew, there were hundreds hidden around the city or spread throughout this world. “Who’s the primary target?”
Aunt Nicki looked at her. “You,” she said. “It’s always been you.”
Eve nodded. Of course. She knew that. She’d always known that. She was the key, whatever that meant. “Thank you for the food.”
“Go.” Aunt Nicki waved toward the bedroom. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite, and all that.”
Eve tried to smile, failed, and gave up. She nodded to Aunt Nicki, then headed down the hall. She trailed her fingers over the faded hall wallpaper and thought of Zach. His hall had been filled with family memories.
She wondered if, someday, she could piece together bits of memories like that wall. Maybe if she accumulated enough little memories, she too could have a history. Thinking of that possibility, Eve opened the door to her bedroom.
Lying in the center of the quilt was the Magician’s hat.
Chapter Sixteen
The black velvet hat was incongruous on the cotton quilt. It lay like a cat, asleep or dead, in the center of the bed. Dust particles drifted around it, catching the light from the window.
Eve screamed.
The air shoved out of her throat so hard and fast that she felt as if it would never reverse and she would never breathe again. She would simply scream and scream until every bit of oxygen was forced from her lungs, her blood, her body, her mind, and she turned inside out into the air itself and dissolved into her scream.
And then Aunt Nicki was there.
Out of the corner of her eye, Eve saw the marshal burst into the room with her gun drawn. Kneeling, she swept the gun in a circle, aiming it at all corners of the room. She stalked to the closet, kicked it open, aimed the gun inside. Empty. She dropped to the floor, looked under the bed. She checked behind the door. At last, she leaned against the wall beside the window. Gun up, Aunt Nicki peeked out the window. The backyard was empty.
Eve’s scream slowly died.
Aunt Nicki pulled out her phone. “Code 34. Malcolm, respond now.” To Eve, she said, “Keep clear of the window, stay away from the door. Center of the room is safest.”
“Don’t leave me alone with it.” Eve couldn’t tear her eyes away from the hat. It permeated her vision, as if it were growing and spreading through her mind’s eye.
“I’m not leaving you,” Aunt Nicki said. “And reinforcements are on the way. I need you to stay calm. Breathe. Atta girl. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s only a hat. See?” Aunt Nicki tipped the hat with the butt of her gun, and it fell to the side.
Eve sprang back.
But the hat was empty and motionless. No horrors crawled from it. Inside was red velvet trim … She’d expected black. The Magician’s hat was black inside.
Eve took a step
toward the bed, toward the hat. It had a silk ribbon around its base. His hat didn’t. This hat’s brim curved slightly like his, but it wasn’t battered. His had a dent in the brim halfway around and a rip in the velvet …
“It’s not his hat.” Eve felt oxygen rush into her lungs. She could breathe again. “It’s not. It’s … Whose is it? Why is it here? Who put it here?”
Again, Aunt Nicki glanced at the door, but this time it seemed to be the glance of someone who was looking away, not looking toward something.
“You?”
“No!” Aunt Nicki said.
“Not Malcolm. Lou?”
Aunt Nicki wouldn’t meet her eyes. “It’s an extreme technique to jog your memory. And it did work. You remembered the original enough to spot this as a fake, right? That kind of precision is exactly what we need on the witness stand.”
“And the box in the library?” Eve thought her voice sounded calm. Distant but calm.
Aunt Nicki didn’t answer.
Eve backed away from Aunt Nicki until she felt the wall at her back. She spread her hands against the images of branches and birds as if they could somehow comfort her or protect her against this woman who was supposed to be her protector, her guard, even her family.
Aidan, Topher, and Victoria had been right. She couldn’t trust them.
“This was for your own good,” Aunt Nicki said. “Lou thought—”
“You let him come in here and place this thing on my bed, where I’m supposed to be safe, where I’m supposed to feel safe.” Eve wanted to knock the hat off her bed. She couldn’t bring herself to approach it. “I wanted so badly to trust you.”
“Of course you can trust us!”
“How can I?” Eve noticed that Aunt Nicki still held her gun. It was pointed down, held loosely in her right hand. She didn’t think Aunt Nicki would aim it at her. Oh no. Not while she was still useful. Not while there were memories to pry from her. “All you care about is accessing my memories. Once you have them all, then what? You kill me?”
Aunt Nicki blanched.
It’s true, Eve thought. Without a shadow of a doubt, she was certain. She could see it in Aunt Nicki’s eyes. They’d use her, and they’d dispose of her.
Aunt Nicki tried to cover. “The hat was a mistake. But let’s not overreact. Obviously you’re distraught, but take a deep breath and think for a minute. People are dying out there! He’s started to kill again, and you have information in that dense head of yours that we need to find him and stop him. Don’t you want us to get that information out? Don’t you want to save people? I know you do! You want what we want, for this all to be over. Think about it, Eve. This helps you as much as it helps us!”
Eve felt along the wallpaper, inching away from her. “How do I know that anything any of you say is true? How do I even know there is a killer? Or if there is, how do I know you’re not on his side?” They’d manipulated her at least twice that she knew of. They’d confessed to the surgeries that changed her body and maybe affected her memory. How did she know where the truth ended and the lies began? It could all be lies. Everything she knew could be a lie.
She heard the front door slam open. Footsteps in the hall.
I can’t trust anyone, Eve thought.
Aunt Nicki turned her head toward the door, and Eve pressed backward into the wall. She imagined she were melting into the wallpaper. She felt the air rush out of her and felt herself shrink, spread, and flatten. She shaped herself into a bird on the wallpaper, perched on a branch, identical to the hundred other birds on the wall.
Malcolm burst into the room. “Where is she?”
Aunt Nicki pivoted to point … and then she faltered. “She was right here!”
On the wall, a bird in the wallpaper, Eve lost consciousness again.
Chapter Seventeen
The Storyteller is combing my hair with her gnarled fingers. “She lives happily ever after, of course, though they don’t say how long ‘ever’ is. Perhaps it is only a day before her horse is startled by a snake and she falls from his back and breaks her neck.” The Storyteller strokes my neck lightly, softly. “Or perhaps it is only a week before a piece of meat lodges in her throat and no one is around to see that she cannot scream. Or breathe. Or she could have years with him in peace before she begins to doubt and to wonder and then despair that she will never be more than a story that ended—and so she ends herself with a rope from a strong tree branch.”
“I don’t like this story,” I say.
Her fingers are entwined in my hair, but they do not move, and so I move forward and feel her stiff fingers slip away from the strands.
“I don’t like it,” I repeat.
“It is the story I am telling,” the Storyteller says.
“Then I won’t listen,” I say. I know it’s a futile statement. When the Storyteller weaves her tales, you must listen. It is her magic, or at least a talent so powerful that it seems like magic.
She continues, and I listen as the princess in her story dies again and again and again.
I am outside under the trees by a campfire. The wagon is beside us. The bright colors are a glossy near-black in the darkness. Through the trees, I see the fires of other wagons. It’s cold by the campfire, even though the fire is red and yellow and pops and crackles. I feel cold inside. Wishing I could stop the Storyteller’s tale, I rise and step closer to the flames.
“Step away, or you will burn,” the Magician says. His voice comes out of the darkness, cutting through the Storyteller’s voice but not stopping it. Even he can’t do that. I don’t see him in the shadows by the wagon, though he must be there.
I take another step closer, and I can feel the fire’s warmth. “I am standing by the fire, and I do not burn.” But I feel the fire creep onto my skin. It seizes me, and I feel the fire spread through me, as if bypassing my skin and going straight into my bones. It shoots through me and then spreads outward.
At last, the story stops.
I have ended it, I think with triumph.
As the fire seizes me, the Magician wraps his arms around me. His cloak muffles me, but the fire is already inside, burning through my bones. I think I am screaming. I feel the Magician put his hands on my burning cheeks. His face is close to mine. He breathes in. And the fire ceases. Even the campfire dies. It is cold. I am cold inside.
“Next time, you will obey me,” the Magician says.
“Yes, Father,” I say.
He strokes my cheek. “Always remember: you are nothing without me.”
I’m not nothing, I think. I’m Eve.
And suddenly, it’s Malcolm with his arms around me, protecting me … or trapping me. I am in a meadow of delicate white wildflowers that bend and sway in the breeze. He holds me gently as he says, “Shh, shh; tell me who you are.”
I’m Eve, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t.
I was pinned to the wall like a butterfly in a display case. My beak was half-open, and I felt the shape of my paper wings splayed against the milk-blue fake sky. I saw the bedroom distorted through one flattened bird’s eye. The hat was all angles on a sea of quilt.
Beside the bed, Aunt Nicki bulged with her rounded limbs and torso, a three-dimensional person seen through my two-dimensional eyes. Malcolm was a vast bulk behind her. His eyes roved over the room.
I watched them test the window and check the closet. From the way Malcolm’s mouth moved and the way his chest pumped, I thought he must be shouting, but his voice was distant and muffled to my painted ears, as if he were underwater. The words slid into each other until they were indistinguishable. Only a few moments seemed to have passed since I fell into my vision.
Still shouting, he scooped the hat off the bed and hurled it across the room. It skittered over the wood floor and smacked lightly against the wall. I felt its impact a moment later, rippling through the wallpaper like a pebble tossed into a pond.
The hat was directly below me. It matched the description I’d given to the marshals—I’d told them
about the black velvet—but I’d never described the wear that had eaten at the edges and roughened certain patches down to the threads. The more I studied it, the more certain I was that it was not the Magician’s hat. I remembered the true hat perfectly. It was as clear as my memory of the cards that the Magician used to lay on the red velvet table—ornate illustrations with medieval fairy-tale flourishes and, oddly, burn marks on the edges—and it was as clear as my memory of the Storyteller’s hands as she knit yarn with her hands and worlds with her mouth.
Stories used to fall from her plump, wrinkled lips, I remembered. She told beautiful stories about princes and princesses in magic castles or half-rat children scurrying through the alleys of a city on adventures. And then there were other tales, like from my visions, where the castles crumbled and the children didn’t leave the alleys alive. I hadn’t liked those tales.
I listened to the agents search the house. Their footsteps were sharp, heavy, and angry. They slammed doors, and I felt the reverberation of each slam. Through the walls, I could feel where each agent was—six of them, guns drawn and wearing bulletproof vests, in every room.
At last they left, and the house felt silent.
The silence sank around me. It permeated the walls. I felt as if the house were sighing, easing into the soil, relaxing. I breathed with it, slow and deep, if one could call it breathing. I sensed the other birds around me, a persistent tingling as if they were extensions of my paper skin. The light from the window moved across me, and I felt it only on one side. My other side was cradled against the wall, nestled tightly as if held by arms. I let the minutes slide away. Somehow, I slept.
Waking, I was certain I was alone, though I couldn’t explain how I knew. The house felt empty. Carefully, I peeled myself away from the wall. The glue hurt as it pulled, and I widened my beak in what would have been a scream if I’d had a voice. My fingers spread, and my wings expanded.
I poured myself into my memory of my body—smooth skin, golden hair, green eyes. I knew I had those correct. The rest … I wasn’t certain how tall I was or what exactly was the shape of my head or my chin. But it didn’t matter. I had my eyes, and that was enough.
Conjured Page 17
