by Trisha Telep
I remembered reaching for the bowl of fruit on the table, and the way Haiden had snapped, “Don’t!”
I remembered the softness of his voice and the sadness in his eyes when he said, “I’ve made mistakes in the past. If you come with me, it will be of your own free will.”
12
My friend Ashley and I went up to Malibu that weekend after I visited Josh. Ashley’s father had a house on the beach, and Ashley thought I needed some time in the sun. “You’re starting to look really pale,” she complained.
At dinner Ashley’s father talked about the movie he was making and bickered with Ashley’s mother about computer games. Afterward Ashley and I watched a couple of DVDs and drank wine and talked late into the night. When I made my way up the stairs and down the hall to one of the guest bedrooms, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. There was a piercing ache in my chest, as if someone had run a blade through it.
The only person who could make that ache go away was Haiden, and yet I had been avoiding the abandoned white house on Bel Air Road and trying not to think of him at all.
God of the Underworld. For crying out loud.
Why couldn’t I have fallen for some nice normal boy at my school? Every so often I’d catch myself touching my lips, tracing their outline, remembering Haiden’s kiss. But I didn’t want to deal with lost people, dead people. I didn’t want to sit at some guy’s side in the Underworld. I wanted what other people had, or what I believed other people had, even if I didn’t know any of them. I wanted happy and normal.
I didn’t want to be Persephone. What had happened to her, anyway, that Haiden had to come looking for me? Maybe she had moved on. Maybe the myth wasn’t accurate—it was a myth, after all. Or maybe she was a kind of metaphor for other girls—girls like me—who maybe had some Persephone in them. “Life after life after life,” Haiden had said. Maybe there were a bunch of us Persephones, trailing down through the ages, and every so often Haiden had to come find us.
I changed into my pajamas and threw open the French doors so I could listen to the ocean while I slept. I went out on the balcony. The water glimmered a midnight blue, waves spilling along the private beach.
Someone was walking through the sand.
At first I thought it was Ashley’s father, but the figure was too tall and slender. Then my heart kicked and I thought— Haiden. But it wasn’t him either.
The figure moved into the glow of the security lights. I saw the longish, tousled brown hair, and the shimmer of his body, the way the light seemed to sift right through him.
“Josh!” I yelled. “Josh!”
He paused, and for a moment I thought he heard me and was going to look in my direction. But no. He was simply standing there, the light falling over him, the half-moon high overhead, the waves sliding to his feet and sliding away again.
He wasn’t leaving any footprints in the sand.
I ran out of the guest room. I clambered down the stairs. I spent a few moments trying to find the door that opened onto the beach. And then I was outside, the salt spray in my face, screaming, “Josh!”
He turned to look at me.
“Don’t be dead.” I was half sobbing. “Please don’t be dead.”
He smiled.
And I felt it, that deep sense of knowing that came from inside me but also somewhere beyond me. It felt as cold and ancient as the stars. It moved through my body and I felt my arm lift. I was pointing out into the water. “That way,” I said. I tasted salt on my lips, from the ocean but also my own tears. “That way.” Josh smiled again. His lips moved—I think he said thank you —and he turned away from me and started gliding into the water. His form dissolved into the waves and he was gone.
I fell to my knees in the sand.
I don’t remember returning to the guest room, but at some point I must have. I must have crawled into bed and fallen asleep. Because bright light streamed into my room and Ashley’s voice was in my ear: “Sasha, Sasha, wake up! You have to wake up!”
“Go away,” I muttered. I didn’t want the day to start, because I knew what it would bring me: the news that Josh was dead.
“Josh is awake,” Ashley said. “He’s out of his coma and asking for you!”
13
Three days later I went back to the little white house. I left Paloma at home.
I called out Haiden’s name. No answer.
But the door was unlocked and opened easily.
I walked down the hall to the sunken living room where my lessons had taken place. I listened to the sound of my breath and the rap of my footsteps and the faint strains of birdsong filtering in from outside.
The table was still in the middle of the room.
The bowl of fruit was still on it.
I knew I was alone ... and yet I could feel Haiden’s presence. He was somewhere close. He was waiting to see what I would do, why I had come here.
I wanted to tell him about Josh. I wanted to describe the warm glow of love in my chest when I saw him, awake and alive, sitting up in the hospital bed and poking at the remains of his lunch.
“Sasha,” he said when he saw me. “I’m back!”
“You’re back.” I was laughing.
And I wanted to tell Haiden what Josh had said to me, after we’d cycled through our first rounds of conversation, talking about everything and nothing. Then a pause settled over us, and Josh looked at me with his calm, level gaze that was familiar and strange at the same time.
“Do you know what it’s like to be lost?” he said to me.
“Everybody gets lost.”
“I mean ... really lost.” His eyes searched my face. “So lost you don’t know if you’ll ever find your way back ... or forward. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know where you’re supposed to be. It’s like the universe misplaced you and then forgot you ever existed.”
“It sounds terrible,” I said, “and lonely.”
Josh touched my wrist. “But you were there.” His voice was a rasp. “You were there,” he said again, a touch of awe in his voice, “and you found me.”
I’ve always been good at finding lost things.
Now, in the abandoned white house that no longer felt so ... abandoned, I sifted through the mess of apples until I found the one pomegranate, hiding at the bottom of the bowl. I’d brought a knife for this purpose. I sliced the fruit open and picked out six seeds.
I would live in my world and be a writer, and I would also live in Haiden’s world and be Persephone. I swallowed the seeds one after the other.
“Haiden,” I said, “Haiden.”
I could feel him somewhere close, and drawing closer. I was ready. I stood there and waited.
The Spy Who Never Grew Up
BY SARAH REES BRENNAN
There is a magic shore where children used to beach their coracles every night.
The children have stopped coming now, and their little boats are tipped over on their sides, like the abandoned shells of nuts eaten long ago. The dark sea rushes up to the pale beach and just touches the crafts, making them rattle together with a sound like bones.
You and I cannot reach that shore again. We’ve forgotten everything. Even the sound of the waves and the mermaids singing.
But the men in Her Majesty’s Secret Service can go anywhere.
***
The submarine drifted to a stop not far from the island, its periscope breaking the surface of the water like the lifted nose of an inquisitive pointer dog. After a few minutes, a man emerged from the submarine and got into a boat, one not at all like the children’s boats arrayed on the shore.
When the boat sliced through water to white sand, the man stepped out of it.
They had given him a number and taken away his name. Unfortunately for him, his number was 69.
This was a subject of many tasteless jokes in the Service, but nobody would have known that from 69’s serious face and his extremely dapper black suit.
He took a few purposeful steps along the
shore to the forest, then looked down. Under his feet, and under a layer of the black grease of age and filth, were pebbles like jewels and children’s toys and human bones.
There was a barely perceptible shift in the air before his face, but the men and women in Her Majesty’s Secret Service are extremely highly trained. 69 looked up.
The boy before him was beautiful in a slightly terrible way, like a kiss with no innocence in it.
More to the point, he was holding a sword as if he knew how to use it, and floating about a yard above the ground.
“Dark and sinister suit,” said the boy. “Have at thee.”
“I am afraid I do not have time to indulge you,” 69 said. “I am here on a mission from her Majesty.”
“Ah,” said the boy, tilting his chin. “I know it well.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Majesty,” the boy said, waving his sword vaguely. “Belonging to ... Her. I know all about it.”
“Her Majesty the Queen,” 69 said, with a trifle more emphasis than was necessary.
“I knew that,” the boy informed him.
“She feels that the Service has a need for a man—”
The boy hissed like a vampire exposed to sunlight, lifting his free arm as if to protect himself from the word. Man.
“Excuse me. A boy of your special talents,” 69 said smoothly. He had been raised in diplomatic circles.
The boy spun around in a circle, like a ballerina with a sword in zero gravity.
“My talents are special! So awfully special!”
“Indeed,” said 69. His countenance remained unchanged. 69 was very highly trained, and also a gifted amateur poker player. “And the Queen needs—someone of such talents for a job.”
The boy started to laugh, a high lovely laugh that wavered between a baby’s gurgle and the peal of bells. It did not sound quite sane.
“A job?” he asked. “Make a man of me, will you? Oh no, oh no. You sailed your boat to the wrong shore.” He made a quick, deadly gesture with his small sword to the island around them, the dark stones and trees with branches like bared claws. “This is no place for men.”
“So I see,” said 69. “And I see there is nobody here who would be brave enough to risk all for her Her Majesty’s sake: nobody who is enough of a patriot to die for their country.”
Peter was not entirely sure what a “patriot” was, but he would have scorned to betray this fact. He did not even acknowledge it to himself, really: Peter’s thoughts always move like a stone on water, skipping and skimming along the surface until they hit a certain spot.
69 had turned toward the sea, but he was not entirely surprised when a sword landed, light as a very sharp butterfly’s wing, on his shoulder.
He turned back to meet the sight of the lovely, terrible smile.
“To die for your country,” said Peter. “Would that be an awfully big adventure?”
***
The party was a very glamorous affair, with chandeliers like elaborate ice sculptures and ice sculptures like elaborate chandeliers. This created an effect of very tasteful strobe lights playing on the discreet black clothing of the guests.
A suspiciously nondescript man paused on his voyage over the glowing floor to speak to a lady. She was wearing a dress more daring than any of the party dresses around her, and very striking lipstick.
They were, of course, both spies.
“Who are you hunting today?”
“Oh, the English, of course,” said the lady. She did not turn her T s into Z s except when playing certain roles, but her faint accent was nevertheless very Russian. “Look at their latest golden boy.”
She laid a certain emphasis on the word boy.
Let us play I Spy, and follow the spies’ line of vision to the bar where a boy was leaning. He wore a black suit like every other suit in the room, tailored to discreet perfection.
The look was rather spoiled by the knotted dead leaf he was wearing as a bowtie.
The Russian spy detached from her companion and came over to the bar, slinking like a panther in an evening gown. Which is to say, with some suggestion that the evening gown might be torn off at any moment.
She offered the boy her hand. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
The lady noted his wary look, and told herself that no matter how young he seemed, he was obviously a true professional. She was not to know this was how Peter regarded all grown-ups.
“Ivana,” she murmured, which I must tell you was a fib.
“The name’s Pan,” said Peter, who I must admit was showing off. “Peter Pan.”
Neither of them was really on their best behavior. Spies rarely are.
“What will you have?” asked the bartender.
“Martini,” said Ivana. “Shaken, not stirred.”
“Milk,” said Peter. “Warm, not hot.”
The bartender and Ivana both gave Peter rather doubtful looks. Peter has been receiving such looks for more years than he could ever count, and he looked disdainfully back.
“Come now,” Ivana said, and reached for Peter’s arm. “I think we can do better than that. After all, you’re almost a man.”
Peter’s eyes narrowed. “ No. I am not. ”
She was very clever, that Russian spy who was not really called Ivana. She instantly saw she had made a mistake.
“I meant to suggest that this affair must be boring you. After all, it really isn’t up to the excitement that a boy of your ... many talents must be used to.”
Peter looked more favorably upon her. “I do have many talents. Thousands, really. Millions of talents. Nobody has ever had as many talents as I!”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I keep them in a box,” said Peter, and looked briefly puzzled when Ivana laughed and then triumphant as he decided he had meant all the time to make a splendid joke.
He beamed at her, and Ivana reared back.
She quickly collected herself, however. Remember, she was very well-trained.
“I imagine you have done many things,” Ivana murmured. “Such as the affair of Lady Carlisle’s necklace in the embassy?”
“Oh that! Yes, I took it! I flew in under cover of darkness and stole it.”
Ivana blinked. “You did?”
“I am a master thief,” Peter said with some satisfaction.
“It was my understanding that the English were the ones who got the necklace back,” Ivana said slowly.
“Oh yes,” Peter told her. “I fought the dastardly thieves single-handed and restored the jewels to their rightful owner! I remember now.”
“I see,” said Ivana.
***
