“I don’t think you want to hurt me,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and reasonable. It wasn’t easy, lying on the ground with my hands tied and my face full of snow. Still, I tried. I tried like I’d never tried before. “Adrianna, the mirrors are messing with your head. This isn’t you.”
She froze, eyes going wide. “Who told you about the mirrors? I never showed you the mirrors. How do you know about the mirrors?”
Well, crap. Score one for good guessing, immediately lose one for forgetting that sometimes it’s a bad idea to reveal information the bad guys don’t expect you to have. “Tanya. She’s my teacher. She told me about the mirrors.”
“She’s a good girl. The wood loves her. She knows nothing about the mirrors.” Adrianna stepped forward, grabbing my wrists and using them to haul me off the ground. I made a wordless sound of protest as she wrenched my shoulders. Adrianna ignored it. “She never had to learn about the mirrors, that spineless, gutless little princess. No one ever took anything away from her. How can she teach you about something that she doesn’t understand?”
The pain was intense enough that it took me most of her little speech to realize what she was doing. She was untying my hands.
“She understands them enough to know that the mirrors lie,” I said. “I don’t think you’re quite yourself. You keep changing your story. I think . . . I think the mirrors are bleeding over into you.”
“So what?” She pulled the cloth loose and dropped me back into the snow. This time, I was able to catch myself, and I didn’t hit the ground as hard. That was a relief. Adrianna paced away. “I know who I was when I was still in my own body. Who cares if I’ve picked up the shards of a few new narratives? I’m going to open you, little doorway, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. We’ve come too far for that.”
“You tried to open me once before, and that didn’t work out too well for you.” I strained toward the cloth that tied my feet. My shift was almost a foot shorter than it had originally been, and the smooth hem had become a ragged tear. “Maybe we should talk about this.”
“I stabbed you; you bled,” said Adrianna. “It seemed to work out just fine to me.”
I undid the knot and began unwinding Adrianna’s makeshift rope. “Yeah, thanks for that.”
“You can’t win, little doorway. You can’t run from me. You can’t escape from me. Your body isn’t waking up, because I’m not going to allow that to happen until I’m ready. You’ve lost. You’re still fighting me, because fighting is what you people do, but you’ve already lost.”
“I don’t even understand why we have to fight!” The last of the fabric binding my ankles came loose. I scrambled to my feet, swaying as my head tried to adjust to one change in altitude too many. The places where Adrianna had hit me ached and throbbed. The whiteout wood wasn’t real the way the waking world was, but it was real enough for me to suffer here. “You keep saying you’re my aunt. Fine. Tell me about my mother.”
Hearing the words said aloud—said in my own voice—woke a deep, almost submerged longing in my chest, like I’d just invoked the thing I wanted most in the entire world. Adrianna had known my mother. She had known her as a living, breathing human, not as a shell, scraped clean and used up by the story that had consumed her. She had known my mother before she became a Sleeping Beauty, before she found the spindle and dropped into the dark.
The questions were endless. Every time I tried to formulate one, two more appeared, shoving it aside and making themselves the center of my attention. I felt like a Little Mermaid, rendered voiceless by my own yearning.
“She was headstrong, arrogant, wild,” said Adrianna. Her voice was softer, like I’d distracted her into telling me the truth. “She never listened to anyone she hadn’t already decided to pay attention to. Sometimes that included me. I was older than her by five whole minutes, and she used to say that only mattered because it meant I got the snow-story, and left her with the roses.”
Rose Red was a much less common manifestation, because her story was harder to tell in isolation. Snow White got seven dwarves and a happy ending, regardless of whether she had a sister. Rose Red only ever had the bear, and the forest, and her sister’s hand, holding her close and terrified of ever letting go.
“She left me.” The softness was leaching out of Adrianna’s voice. “She saw the opportunity to do something different with her life, and she left me.”
“Wait!” I put my hands up. “What was her name?”
Adrianna blinked at me. “What?”
“What was my mother’s name?” I tried to look unobtrusively around myself as I spoke, searching for an exit. Adrianna was sounding more and more ragged. I didn’t know why. I didn’t want to stick around here long enough to find out.
We were at the center of the maze. We must have been: There was no other reason for such a large, empty circle of space to have been cut into a place that was, after all, supposed to keep people lost and wandering for as long as possible. There should have been openings every few feet along the walls, allowing weary maze-goers to seek another way out. Instead, there was only unbroken ice, extending in a gentle curve in all directions. There was no escape. Not unless I was able to get enough of a head start that I could boost myself over a wall.
“Angele,” said Adrianna. Her voice broke a little at the end of the word. “Her name was Angele, and she was my angel, and she left me. She left me for another story. She left me for you, little doorway. You, and your brother, and the chance you’d get out. She never wanted you to be story-touched like we were. All I’m doing here is what she would have wanted.”
“I don’t think my mother would have wanted you to do this.” I took a step back. My mother had never wanted anything for me that I’d been aware of. She’d been a Sleeping Beauty. She got pregnant while she was asleep; she gave birth the same way. Any plans she’d made for her future children had been made in the abstract, and I had to wonder if she would have kept us, my brother and me, when she realized we were echoing the story she’d already run from once.
Not that I’d ever know. My mother was dead and gone, and whatever wood or tower housed her monomyth was a place I had no interest in visiting.
“She would have wanted me to do anything that would spare you,” said Adrianna. She pulled her hand from behind her back, and there was a shard of ice the length of her forearm clutched in her fingers, gleaming bright and deadly. She lunged. I braced myself.
Adrianna was evil, or at least twisted, but she wasn’t the most skilled hand-to-hand fighter I’d ever encountered. I, on the other hand, had been dealing with Sloane on a daily basis for years. My elbow caught Adrianna in the solar plexus as she was pulling back her ice blade to strike. She staggered back, and I kicked her in the stomach, sending her sprawling into the snow.
That seemed like my opening. I went in for a stomp, and she stabbed me in the calf, sending freezing pain lashing through my leg. I jerked away, kicking her in the chin in the process, and she stabbed me again, this time in the belly. The cold that spread outward from the wound was intense, almost enough to make me black out again.
I jerked away, grabbing for her hair, intending to introduce her face to my fist. She responded by stabbing me in the stomach for a second time, twisting the ice blade inside my body. I felt something snap, and looked down to see blood pouring from the wound, turning the snow at my feet red, red, apple red, poisoned kisses red, wine red, death red. Blood on the snow: it always comes back to blood on the snow.
“I told you there was no point in fighting me,” hissed Adrianna. The vagueness was gone from her voice, replaced by nothing but cold. She pulled the blade out of my stomach.
I dropped to my knees.
“Ugh,” I said.
“But this was how it had to be. Don’t you see? You had to think you could win. It makes the opening easier. Now rest, little doorway. Your part in this story is done.”
She brought the glass blade down one last time, slashing it across
my throat in a hard, unforgiving arc. Blood poured down like a torrential rain, hot and thick and salty as my tears. I collapsed, eyes open, into the snow. I couldn’t move. I was bleeding out, and I couldn’t move.
Adrianna walked to the wall of the maze and dropped her blade before she ran her bloody hands along the ice, inscribing a rough archway. Then she stepped through it, through the solid wall, through the doorway she had crafted from my body, and she was gone.
The blood kept flowing, slower now, like I was running out. I closed my eyes, and all the world was black and white and red as blood, and I was gone too.
FALSE LOVE’S KISS
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 332 (“Godfather Death”)
Status: IN PROGRESS
Dr. Mortimer Pierson had been practicing medicine long enough that he’d heard all the jokes. “Ha-ha, here comes Doctor Death,” and “did your mother hope you were going to grow up to run a funeral home?” He tried not to tell patients his first name if he could help it. It wasn’t bad enough that it was old-fashioned; it had to be old-fashioned and carry connotations of the grave. It just wasn’t fair.
That feeling of unfairness had been haunting him all morning, making the world seem vaguely out of focus, like he was viewing it through a long, distorting lens. He’d managed to go through his morning rounds without betraying the fact that anything was wrong, but by the time he reached his last appointment before lunch, he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to keep it together. The world was just . . . it was just wrong.
“Physician, heal thyself,” he muttered, and opened the exam room door. The patient was an adult female, height and weight normal, who had checked herself in complaining of stomach pains, headache, and generalized flu-like symptoms. Perfectly normal, and a perfectly reasonable way to finish the first half of the day.
“Ms. Thomas, I’m Dr. Pierson,” he began, looking up from his clipboard. Then he froze, words dying in his mouth, and stared at the woman sitting on his examining table. She frowned, clearly unsure how to react to his expression.
She just as clearly couldn’t see the hooded, skeletal figure standing behind her, the oh so traditional scythe clutched tightly in its bony hands.
Dr. Pierson began screaming.
It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do, and once he’d started, it was surprisingly difficult to stop.
# # #
Some people shouldn’t be allowed to go into medicine. People with names that mean “death,” for example. Back in my day, anyone named “Mortimer” would have been discouraged from coming into contact with the ailing, since everybody would have recognized it for the ill omen it was. These days, it’s equal opportunity for everybody, even the people who don’t have the common sense to change their names when they decide to become doctors.
The doctor in question was currently holed up in a supply cupboard. He’d slashed two nurses and a patient with scalpels before security had gotten off their asses and gotten involved. Dispatch had sent us over right after, saying we had a three-three-two on our hands. Because it wasn’t bad enough that the poor guy’s parents had named him after his own mortality: they’d somehow managed to go and invite the Big D to become his godfather at the same time.
It was all symbolic, of course. His parents probably just made too many skeleton jokes when the guy was a baby. But the narrative thrives on symbolism, and now our healer was seeing Death everywhere he looked. Literal, bony, “I am going to cut your head off with my big farming implement” Death.
“You people have the worst relationship with your own mortality,” I muttered, before pressing my ear against the closet door. I could hear him shifting around in there. He didn’t put a scalpel through the wood. I decided that meant he liked me. Raising my voice, I called, “Hey, Doc, why don’t you open the door so we can talk about this like rational people?”
“You’re not a rational person! You’re a demon from Hell, sent to trick me into surrendering my immortal soul!”
“He’s got you there, Sloane,” said Andrew. He was staying well back, out of our violent physician’s potential strike zone. Of the two of us, he was definitely the more breakable.
I scowled at him anyway. “I’m not a demon, I’m just a bitch.” I turned back to the door. “Dr. Pierson, I’m with the government. I know what you’re seeing, and I need you to understand that it’s not real. There was a gas leak in the hospital. You’re under the influence of a highly potent mix of psychotropic drugs. Please come out of the closet and let us help you through this.”
“I killed people!” He sounded offended. I couldn’t tell whether it was because I wasn’t threatening to arrest him, or because I didn’t seem to be afraid of him. Quite honestly, I didn’t care either way. Offended was something I could work with.
“You sure did,” I said cheerfully. “You killed a coat rack, and a balloon bouquet, and an IV stand. Very good killing of things that the drugs made you see as people. A-plus murderousness. Now please come out of there, before we have to come in there.”
There was a pause. I was not following whatever script he’d written for his inevitable arrest. I wasn’t following the script, period. I was tired, I was cranky, and I didn’t appreciate the fact that my field team was operating at half strength, thanks to Henry being unconscious and Jeffrey having been ordered not to leave her bedside. Ciara was a decent enough team leader, but nothing I did seemed to get under her skin, and that was a big problem for me. I needed to piss her off. Until I did, I was just going to get more frustrated.
And now poor Dr. Pierson was getting it all dumped on his head. Poor, homicidal Dr. Pierson. I didn’t have much sympathy. He wasn’t the first Death’s Godson I’d met, but he was the first who’d reacted to the looming specter of his honorary godfather by starting to cut throats.
The door opened a crack. An eye appeared. I forced a tight smile. If he was going to come out on his own, I should be as encouraging as possible. The eye widened. Then the opening widened, and Dr. Pierson appeared.
“He’s . . . he’s not with you,” he said, sounding amazed. “How is he not with you?” His gaze flickered to where Andrew and Demi were waiting for me to deal with the dangerous, hallucinating target. “He’s with them. He hasn’t deserted this place. So how is it that he’s not with y—”
He stopped mid-word as my fist slammed into his nose, sending him toppling backward against the closet wall. He stayed there for a few seconds, looking profoundly confused. Then he sank down to the floor, eyes closing, and was still.
“Me and Death have an agreement, asshole,” I said. “He doesn’t mess with me, and I don’t tear his skeleton nuts off.”
I turned. Demi and Andrew were staring at me.
“Sloane, I know this is sort of what you do, but could you try, I don’t know, not punching doctors in front of security cameras?” Andrew gestured toward the camera in question as he spoke, in case I’d missed the urgency in his tone. “See that? That is a security camera! You just assaulted a doctor! On camera!”
“I protected myself from a man who’d already killed three people under orders from a hallucination, and who directly referenced seeing that same hallucination immediately before I struck him. He had a knife when he went into the closet. I had valid reason to believe he had a knife when he came out of it.” I produced my badge from my pocket and held it up for the camera to see. “Agent Sloane Winters, ATI Management Bureau. We’re with the United States Government; we’re allowed to punch people if we want to.”
“Please tell me that’s not going to be our new motto,” said Demi. “I think my grandmother will disown me if I come home with a T-shirt that has that written on the front. Even if it’s in Latin.”
“Does your grandmother read Latin?” asked Andrew.
“Doesn’t everyone’s grandmother read Latin?” I tucked my badge back into my pocket. “Go find some rope. We need to get this asshole restrained before he wakes up and starts trying to play guess-the-future with o
ur guts.”
“What about you?” asked Demi.
I flashed a toothy smile. “I’m going to stay here, and hope that he wakes up.”
The two of them exchanged a glance and fled.
# # #
It was reasonably easy to scavenge a chair for myself. That’s one thing I’ll say about modern hospitals: they always have plenty of seats. Seats for patients, seats for physicians, seats for the people who inevitably accompany patients out of the darkness of ignorance and into the darkness of knowledge. My first doctor hadn’t even kept a practice. He would come to your house if you had money, or you could come and see him in his parlor if you didn’t. Mama used to pay him with vegetables from the garden, or with whole chickens, plucked and ready for the fire. He hadn’t been married by the time I was near to coming of age, and I knew she’d been considering paying him with my hand.
It wouldn’t have been a bad match, all things considered. He’d been a kind man, and he’d always smiled for me. I could have made him happy. He could have made me happy. Too bad we’d never been given the chance to find out.
Dr. Pierson stirred, groaning. I kicked him in the head. He stopped stirring.
“You’re boring, and I don’t want to listen to you talk, so stay down,” I snapped. “Where the fuck are those guys with the rope? I’m getting old here, I’d like to leave.”
My phone rang.
I pulled it out of my pocket, warily eyeing the display screen—“unknown number”—before sliding my thumb along the screen to answer the call. I raised it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Sloane? What’s your status?” Ciara sounded slightly out of breath, like she hadn’t been expecting me to answer. She didn’t sound worried, though. If anything, she sounded relieved.
It was the relief that did it for me. “When did she wake up?” I asked.
There was a long pause before Ciara said, “About fifteen minutes ago. It’s taken this long for us to get her cleared by the doctors. They say she’s transitioned into normal sleep, and is breathing fine.”
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 17
