The Art of Wishing

by Lindsay Ribar

  But before I could get close enough to find out, something slammed into me from behind, and I fell hard onto the pavement, my wrists and knees thrumming horribly at the impact. For a moment I couldn’t see anything, and all I could hear was the sound of my own breath, pounding like drums in my ears.

  When the world came into focus again, Not-Vicky was crouched in front of me, smiling like an evil Pollyanna. “Give me the ring,” she said again.

  “You’re crazy,” I wheezed. Mustering all my strength, I scrambled to my feet, put on my best action hero face, and ran again. But an action hero I was not. I only made it a few feet before Not-Vicky tackled me again, this time sending me tumbling onto the strip of grass between the curb and the sidewalk. I landed on my back. My head thudded against the cold dirt, and my vision went dim for a second. I could try again—

  Except Not-Vicky was sitting on my chest. I couldn’t move. I yelled and flailed my arms, trying to scratch at her face, but she pinned my wrists against the ground. All I had left were my legs. I kicked as hard as I could, but aside from brushing her back with my bleeding thigh, it didn’t do any good. Finally, in the face of her calm, cold determination, all I could do was let myself go still.

  “Give me the ring,” she said.

  “What do you want with it?” I asked, still out of breath.

  Her eyes narrowed in a mean, un-Vicky-ish expression. “The real question is, what do you want with it? Fame? Money, power, and a thousand beautiful men to worship the ground you walk on?” She paused, and her lip curled in distaste. “And, of course, your very own personal slave, until all your wishes are used up?”

  “Slave? I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  Not-Vicky squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head like she was a kindergarten teacher and I was the worst-behaved kid in her class. “No, you wouldn’t, would you. You have no real idea of what that ring holds. None of you do. You just take and take and take, and when it’s over, you long for what you still don’t have.” She opened her eyes again. “Give me the ring, Miss McKenna. I don’t want to hurt you again. Quite the opposite, in fact. But you’re making this very hard.”

  “How is slicing my leg open the opposite of hurting me?” I said. It was meant to come out louder than it did, but Not-Vicky’s weight was pressing down on my lungs.

  “For heaven’s sake, that was just a scratch. Honestly. Suburban kids. If you only knew . . .” She let out a short, bristly laugh, and squeezed her thighs together, making my ribs ache. “The ring,” she said again.

  I breathed out painfully, and closed my eyes against the sight of her. “Okay. Fine. You can have the damn ring. I just need to get to my pocket. The right one.”

  “Thank you,” she said, with what might have passed for sincerity had she not been sitting on top of me. Slowly, she let go of my right wrist. Slowly, I moved my hand down toward my waist.

  And as quickly as I could, I balled my hand into a fist and hit her in the face.

  It wasn’t a good punch. Not surprising, since I’d never hit anyone in my life. But my fist connected with her jaw, and it shocked her enough that she rocked back, giving me the opening I needed. I heaved myself upward, but found myself pinned again, with my right arm squished against my side, held in place by a leg that was far too strong to belong to little Vicky Willoughbee. My left wrist was clamped between her hands.

  “Help!” I called. It came out as a sad little wheeze, which I knew nobody would hear.

  “We’ll do this the hard way, then,” she said, ignoring my pathetic cry. I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to see what the hard way was going to be.

  She lifted my left wrist with both hands. Something made a horrible snap, and pain exploded like fireworks in my left hand, and I screamed. Well, tried to scream. And I opened my eyes. There, held up by Not-Vicky’s delicate fingers, was my left hand. More or less. All of my fingers were rigid with the same pain that was lancing like icicles through the rest of my body—except the middle one, which went up as far as the first knuckle, and then jutted awkwardly, unnaturally, out to the side.

  I lost track of the scared, pained, animal noises I was making. I know I kept saying “please” and “stop,” and at some point I’d started crying, but mostly I know that nothing I said or did had any effect on Not-Vicky.

  “The ring, Margo,” she said calmly.

  “Fine,” I said, gulping in as much air as I could between sobs. “You can have the goddamn ring. You can have it.”

  When she freed my right hand again, I reached into my pocket and grabbed the ring, making sure to hold it with my thumb and forefinger. If Oliver was going to find out that I’d given him up, at least he could see firsthand that I’d put up a fight for him.

  One Mississippi. I pulled the ring out of my pocket as slowly as I could. Two Mississippi . . .

  “You,” came a voice from somewhere above me. A voice so warmly familiar that I would have started crying if I weren’t already. “Oh god. Margo. What did you do to her?”

  Something shifted in the air; I could feel it. Not-Vicky’s iron grip on me loosened everywhere but my wrist, and she sat back like I was just a bench or something, not a person she’d just deliberately injured. “Hello, Oliver,” she said. All the sugary-sweetness and all the menace had drained from her voice, leaving a strangely mild tone in their wake. “It is Oliver, isn’t it? What was it last time—Daniel? Dmitri? Dylan? Something like that.”

  Oliver’s voice, closer now: “I said, what did you do?” I twisted my neck around, but I still couldn’t see him.

  She gripped my wrist tighter. I whimpered as a fresh bolt of pain lanced up my broken finger. “I was negotiating with your master”—she flooded the word with contempt—“for your release into my custody.”

  “You have no right to interfere with me and mine,” said Oliver, his voice harsher than I’d ever heard it before. “I want you to let her go.”

  There was a pause, and then Not-Vicky let out a breathy little laugh. “Ahh, I see, you like this one. That makes a change. All right, then.”

  She let my wrist go and gave my leg a little pat, right where the switchblade had cut me. I hissed in pain, but before I could do anything, she was already standing up and brushing the dirt off her jeans.

  Oliver knelt swiftly beside me, and sat me up. His face looked uneven, and his eyes seemed supernaturally bright as they searched mine. His whispering voice was as loud as a chain saw. “Margo, are you . . . Is it just your finger?”

  “My leg, too,” I said dizzily, clutching my finger. “A knife.”

  His face went hard, and he held me tighter as he looked up at Not-Vicky, who stood over us, arms folded. “So it’s time, is it?” said Oliver. “You want your third wish?”

  Something strangely distant flitted across Not-Vicky’s face, and she gave a curt nod. “It’s time. You and I, we’re the only ones left.”

  “I felt it,” he said shortly. “Ten days ago.”

  “It was a long time coming,” said Not-Vicky. “Come on, don’t give me that look. I just want to talk to you.”

  Oliver’s face twisted, and he laughed mirthlessly. “You really expect me to believe that, after last time? And after what you just did to Margo?” As if on cue, my finger throbbed, and a little moan of pain escaped me.

  “Your little slavemaster will be fine,” she said, annoyed. “And if you want me to leave her alone, then I will. You have my word. On everything that’s holy: I won’t touch her again.”

  “And me?” he asked skeptically.

  “Oh, Oliver . . .”

  “What. About. Me.”

  Oliver gave Not-Vicky the space of three seconds to answer, but she crossed her arms and remained silent. Letting out a breathy growl, he stood up and lunged toward her, hand raised in a fist. Not-Vicky sidestepped him easily, grabbed his wrist, and twisted—but only when she held the switchblade to his throat did he stop fighting her. He stood still as a statue but for his quick, shallow breaths. The sudden fear
in his eyes shook me to the core.

  Not-Vicky pressed the blade into the soft skin under Oliver’s jaw. “Did you just try to hit me?” she asked, her voice low and dangerous. “Answer me. Did you?”

  A small trickle of blood ran down Oliver’s neck. “Yes,” he said, through clenched teeth.

  The word curdled in the air between them, and she smiled mirthlessly. How had I ever mistaken this person for the real Vicky?

  “You should know better,” she hissed. In one fluid movement, like something out of a martial arts movie, she twisted Oliver’s arm around and knocked one of his legs out from under him. Oliver fell hard on his back.

  He tried to get up again, but Not-Vicky’s sneaker landed squarely on his chest, keeping him where he was. He bit his bottom lip, but didn’t cry out.

  I heaved myself to my feet, still clutching my injured hand. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I said. My voice rang woozily in my ears. I didn’t care. “You can’t just—”

  “I can’t just what, Margo?” Not-Vicky said evenly, her gaze cold and calculating as she looked at me with interest. She leaned forward, shifting even more of her weight onto Oliver. He still didn’t make a sound, but his face contorted in pain. Not-Vicky smiled. “Please, enlighten me.”

  I ran at her. My good hand firmly against the center of her chest, I shoved her with all the strength I could muster, and she stumbled backward, leaving Oliver gasping for breath on the ground. Her surprise gave me enough time to answer her question:

  “You can’t just show up out of nowhere, pull a knife on my boyfriend, and expect me not to kick your ass for it.”

  Not-Vicky’s eyebrows shot up, and for a second I was terrified she’d call my bluff. Even without the bleeding leg and the broken finger, I wasn’t exactly well-practiced in the art of ass-kicking.

  But she didn’t attack me again. She just smiled. “Interesting,” she said, and disappeared.

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  Oliver knelt beside me and reached for my damaged hand, but stopped himself before he actually touched it. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “Me? What about—” But when I managed to focus on him, the words died in my throat. The skin of his neck was as smooth and unmarked as ever, and there was no sign of blood. “What . . .”

  “I told you: Chop my arm off, I’ll grow a new one. Turns out, the same applies to necks and lungs. No problem.”

  “But she hurt you,” I insisted. Even with the blood gone, his face looked pinched and pale, probably from the effort of healing himself.

  He just shook his head. “She hurt you worse, and you can’t heal yourself like I do,” he said firmly. “Where’s your car?”

  “My car,” I said dizzily. Now that the threat of further injury was gone, and Oliver was more or less okay again, I felt my heartbeat slow to a normal pace. The chilly night air seeped in everywhere. My tailbone hurt where I’d landed when Not-Vicky had knocked me down. My head hurt, for so many reasons. My knees and my thigh hurt. And my hand . . .

  “I need to get this fixed.” Then a sob escaped me as I remembered: “The gig. I can’t play like this. I can’t—Oliver, my left hand, I can’t play my guitar—and I have to—”

  “Shhh,” he said, threading his warm fingers through my hair, holding my head steady. “Don’t worry about that. There’ll be other shows. Your finger will heal.”

  “But not right now,” I said frantically. “I need it to heal right now.”

  “Just show me where your car is, and I’ll drive you—”

  “No. No hospitals. Naomi’s house, then the South Star. I lied to my mom to get to this gig—I lied to her—and there is no way I’m just gonna go back home. No way. I have to—I have to—”

  But my breath was coming shorter now, and my jeans were soaked with blood, and the whole world felt so tilty that I knew I couldn’t stand up again, let alone stand on a stage in front of an audience and play music, because I’d just been attacked by a disappearing person who looked like Vicky but wasn’t, and nothing made any sense except that I had to play, it meant everything. . . .

  I held my injured hand out to Oliver. “You have to fix it,” I said through clenched teeth. “I need to play tonight.”

  “Margo, I can’t—”

  “You can if I make a wish. Right? Can’t you heal me if I wish for it?”

  He sat back on his heels and paused. And then flinched. “Yeah, I can,” he said quickly. “But I don’t think—”

  I held the ring up with two fingers, and he fell silent, setting his lips into a grim line. Remembering the last time I’d done this, I pressed the ring between my right hand and his. “Oliver,” I said, looking him in the eye, “I wish for you to heal all the injuries I have.”

  The sound of screeching tires reached my ears, and I looked frantically around, half expecting to see a manic Vicky clone, frothing behind the wheel of a monster truck, ready to run me over. But all I saw was an unfamiliar car, which sped past us without stopping.

  Panic jolted through me. “Wait,” I whispered to Oliver, shoving the ring back into my pocket. “We have to get farther away from the road first. Someone might see.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t put it off. You made the wish, so I have to grant it, or— Come on, I’ll do it fast. Just breathe.”

  Oliver seized my injured hand. I gasped at the pressure, but in less than a second, my finger was whole again. The pain was gone, leaving only Oliver’s warm touch behind.

  “Ohh,” I moaned, nearly crying again out of sheer relief as I curled my newly healed fingers around his.

  “What?” he asked, alarmed at my sudden grip. “You okay?”

  “Uh-huh. Very okay. You’re . . . you’re amazing, Oliver, and . . .” I trailed off, seeing him clearly for the first time since Not-Vicky had vanished. His whole body radiated tension, like he was trying to steel himself against the memory of Not-Vicky and the switchblade. I could still see fear lingering just behind his eyes.

  “She hurt you,” I whispered. He didn’t reply. “You have to go. Right now. Hide, or whatever you need to do. Should I make a third wish, or should I just give the ring back, or—?”

  I fumbled for my pocket, but Oliver put a hand on my arm, stilling me. “Don’t,” he said firmly. “It’s too late now. Just let me finish your second wish.”

  He let go of me, freeing his hands to work. He moved one hand to my thigh, and I fought the urge to squirm as he gently touched two fingers to the worst part of the slice in my skin. Soon, again, there was just pleasant warmth where the pain had been. Very pleasant warmth indeed.

  Eyes narrowed in intense concentration, he moved his hands over the rest of me, hovering an inch or two away from my clothing. Occasionally he stopped and let out a deep breath; every time he did, I felt another scratch disappear, another little bit of aching pain seep away.

  “You were pretty quick on your feet back there,” he said, running a hand over a scrape on my palm and making it disappear. “Were you really going to kick her ass?”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what you said.” He smiled up at me. “You also said I was your boyfriend.”

  I shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. “Sometimes I open my mouth and words come out. It’s a problem.”

  “Not a problem for me.” He sat back on his heels, giving me a once-over before he said, “There. Good as new.”

  I felt so light, so whole, that I wanted to cry. Or to pin Oliver to the ground and kiss that unreasonably attractive smile right off his face. Or to make him tell me why his mysterious knife-wielding nemesis looked like Vicky. But I heard the sound of another car approaching, and I remembered:

  “Oh no,” I said, heaving myself to my feet. “My car. I left it on the side of the road. What if it got stolen, or hit, or—”

  “I’m on it,” said Oliver, and promptly disappeared. Seconds later, my car rounded the corner toward me, shiny and undamaged, with Oliver at the wheel. He parked it, disappeared again, and immed
iately reappeared next to the passenger-side door, which he opened for me. “Your carriage, my lady.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’re a lifesaver. But I’m good to drive.”

  His smooth, gentlemanly demeanor faltered a little. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” I said, heading for the driver’s-side door. I reached for the handle, then hesitated. “You said it’s too late for you to run and hide.”

  He nodded, his face settling into a somber expression again. “I’ll explain everything later, Margo. I promise I will. But it’s a long story, and you’re running late.”

  “But—”

  “Later,” he said firmly. “You just made me grant you a second wish, for the sole purpose of playing this gig tonight. So let’s just get you to the South Star, okay?”

  Naomi’s house was the first stop, and she greeted us with blatant disapproval. “What took you so long?” she said, stepping aside so we could come in. “Does it really take that long to un-stall a car?”

  Oliver shot me a quick look: a silent hint that I should go along with the stalled-car thing, even though I could have figured that out on my own.

  “I’m just lucky it’s running at all,” I said, arranging my features into what I hoped looked like relief. “Thank goodness Oliver fixed it.”

  He gave Naomi a sunny grin. “What can I say? I’m good with my hands.”

  Naomi let out a loud bark of laughter, then gave me a quick nod of approval. Apparently Oliver had just proven that he wasn’t boring. Score.

  “Okay,” I said. “Naomi, you can do my makeup, right?”

  “Like I’d let you do it yourself,” she said with a smirk.

  “Awesome, thanks,” I said. “Then I just need to change, and—oh.”

  My throat closed up, and my hand pressed reflexively against my chest. There, half hidden in the shadow of Naomi’s epic staircase, stood Vicky. She watched us silently, like she was trying to blend into the background. But this is the real Vicky, I reminded myself. She is not going to cut me open or break my fingers or attack Oliver.