The machete came down. Not-Henry rolled away once more. It was a narrower miss this time. She wasn’t going to be able to keep this up for much longer.
I wanted to feel bad. This was Henry’s body I was endangering. But either Henry didn’t live here anymore or the woman who had taken it over would leave the same way she had come. As soon as I had the slightest indication that Henry was back, I’d save her.
The gunshot was a surprise.
It echoed through the hedge maze. The Marquis staggered backward, blood spreading through the fabric of his shirt. The machete fell from his hands, and he shot me a pleading look before he fell, crumpling motionless to the grassy ground.
“See, they’ve broken you in ways that I’m just—well, I’m not entirely sure that we can fix.” The woman who wasn’t Henry picked herself up, holding the gun on me with one hand while she brushed herself off with the other. Some of the blood from our ill-fated Marquis had spattered on her front. She didn’t seem to care. It smeared when she touched it. She didn’t seem to care about that either. “You think like a hero. You think like the story will limit itself to the weapons it used traditionally. You think the good guys will always have the upper hand. I’m sorry, sweetie, but it doesn’t work like that in the real world—and if there’s one thing the narrative is good at, it’s adapting to the real world. Little girls don’t carry baskets into the deep, dark woods anymore. But there will always be alleys. There will always be places for the story to spread. And it learns. It revises.”
“You definitely think like a villain,” I said, putting my hands up. I didn’t have the power to ward off bullets, but I could stand still with the best of them. “Stop monologuing at me and make your pitch. I’m bored, and I don’t know how much more of this crap I can take.”
“You’ve already changed your story once, Sloane, when you shed your name and your narrative and became a hunting dog for the people who want to keep us down in the mud with the rest of them,” said the woman. “You know it can be done. If you’re not doing it, it’s only because you’re afraid of what the cost might be. I’m here to tell you that the cost is everything you are, but the profit, oh, the profit. The profit is the world.”
“You can’t be Birdie, because you don’t talk like her,” I said. “You’re not Elise, because there aren’t any mice, and she’s a little erratic sometimes. Pretty sure if you were Elise, you would have already gone for my eyes. So who the fuck are you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t make deals with people who steal the bodies of my friends and then don’t tell me their names. Call me old fashioned, but hey.” I shrugged. “You’ve read my file. You know how old I am. I’ve earned a little resistance to change. What’s your name?”
She rolled her eyes toward the sky, like it was going to explain my mulishness—although she didn’t lower her gun or shift her position enough to lose sight of me for even a moment. “You are genuinely insufferable, did you know that? How did Henry put up with you for so long? And don’t say ‘Prozac,’ we both know my niece was too straitlaced for that. No drugs or drinking for her. That would have seemed too much like actually having fun. You keep looking at me like I stole this body, but I assure you, the body sees it differently. I’m finally going to take the reins off and see what this baby can do.”
“Pretty sure that’s rape,” I said.
“Not when the body’s original owner isn’t coming back. Manifest destiny was the term they used when you were young, wasn’t it? God gave this country to you. Well, Grimm gave my niece to me. She left, and now everything I see belongs to me.” The woman’s lips tipped upward. “Stupid cow never should have eaten the apple.”
Some stories were more primed toward going wrong than others. A surprising number of Rapunzels ended with strangulations. A slightly less surprising number of Frog Princes ended with blunt force trauma. Snow Whites, however, rarely heard the siren song of the dark side. They were too busy freezing from the inside out to worry about burning things alive. A lot of modern reimaginings have cast them as vampires, creatures that don’t feel the cold, but suck the life out of everything around them. That’s truer than those authors probably realize. It still doesn’t make the Snow Whites evil.
When a Snow goes bad, it makes a mark. When a Snow goes bad, it draws attention. And when a Snow has gone bad within the last few hundred years, it’s usually been something I would notice.
“Adrianna,” I said. “Seriously? Why is it always you? I’d rather gargle glass than deal with you again.”
She blinked slowly, looking faintly unsettled for the first time. “You weren’t one of the ones who put me away.”
“I didn’t need to be. You keep talking about the power of stories. Well, you became one as soon as you started killing people who’d never even been story-struck.” It was such an old phrase, but it was so much more accurate than any of the thin, puerile ones we used today. There was no blood in them. When the narrative grabbed you, it was like an assault.
We should never have moved away from the words that actually meant what we were trying to say. I glanced toward the Marquis. He was gone now, but his story endured; the air still smelled of wet cat, and of the promises of power. I had been his Puss in Boots, when he died. He’d believed in me. Adrianna said I could change my story.
Maybe I could use that.
“That may be so, but you’re not in a position to criticize.” Adrianna adjusted her grip on the gun. She was standing less like Henry by the second. It must have been a relief for her, to finally let her real self out to play the way she’d always wanted to. “They’ve made a story out of you, you know. You’re whispered through the halls of Childe Prison. The villain who somehow got away and managed to become one of the good guys. You’re a legend and a traitor.”
“Sometimes those words mean the same thing.” Cats were quick, cats were clever, cats could disappear whenever they wanted to, sometimes while they were lounging in plain sight. I had been a Cheshire Cat for a while, when I needed to put on stripes in order to save my team. I knew how to be a cat, if I could find my way through the tangled strands of the story surrounding me to the place where the shit hit the scratching post.
“I’m offering you another way. Come on, Sloane. Join us. You know we’re your destiny. We always have been.”
“Elise is a Cinderella now, isn’t she?” Tooth and claw and stripy fur, that’s what little cats are made of. I reached for the smell of wet fur, trying to wrap it around myself without moving a muscle. It was harder than I expected it to be. It would be worth it if it worked. “You can’t recruit me. She’d be dead long before her body hit the ground, and you need her. I can’t control glass.”
“We could leave you with the Bureau as a sleeper agent. Blow my cover, chase me away before I can hurt anyone. Console that little puppy dog who keeps pawing at me about losing his one true love.” Adrianna grimaced. “I can’t believe my niece ever touched him. What did she see in him?”
“A man who loved her even though she looked like a creepy clown out of a children’s book? As a guess.” Henry and Jeff were good together. I might not care about their relationship that much, but even I could see that they bolstered each other instead of tearing each other down. More relationships should work that way.
Maybe if more of mine had, I wouldn’t have been rejoining the ranks of the single every time I turned around.
“He’s weak. She’s weak. Neither of them deserves their stories. So I took hers away from her. Really, she should be thanking me right now. She never wanted to be Snow White.”
“You stole her body. How—how did you even do that? There’s nothing about body snatching in the Snow White story.”
Adrianna smirked. The expression was entirely hers. Seeing it on Henry’s face made me want to mop the floor with her. Since that wasn’t an option right now, I just dug deeper into the story around me, looking for the seams.
He called me Puss before he died, I thought. He rec
ognized me as belonging to you. That means I am you, and you need to let me in. Give me what I’m asking for. Let me have this.
“Every story has its mysteries. You’ve never touched them, because you’ve never settled. Come with us. Let us show you how to settle.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” I said, and dove for the ground, praying as I fell that I had timed this right: that the story was welcoming me the way my heart and gut told me that it was.
There wasn’t enough narrative energy here for a physical transformation, and I didn’t want to be a cat anyway. I just wanted to be fleet and clever and hard to see; all the things the stories gave to felines when it wanted them to sneak around the edges, leaving claw marks in the margins and hair on all the tapestries. Adrianna jumped back, swinging her gun along to track me, and then stopped, a puzzled look flashing across her face. It was followed quickly by confusion, which faded even more quickly into fury.
“Where did you go?” she demanded. “Where did you go? You don’t get to run away from me! This isn’t how the story goes!” She shot the hedge at roughly head-height, face distorted into a rictus of fury.
I held perfectly still by the base of the hedge, barely daring even to breathe. There was a thin runnel of apple-scented air down there, warmer than the air that surrounded her. Sweeter too, like I was smelling a different version of the same story. Something I am doing is echoing Henry, I thought, almost dazedly, and the thought was so right that I didn’t try to argue with it. I just let it roll.
There had been a maze, then, and Adrianna and Henry had been inside it. Adrianna had threatened her, and Henry had . . . had what? Had tried to hide? I was effectively invisible because I had stolen part of someone else’s story. She was white in the truest sense of the word; she stood out against anything but a blizzard. So how the hell had she managed to disappear?
“I don’t believe this,” Adrianna snarled. “I will find you, Sloane, and you’ll be sorry you passed on this opportunity. You should have joined me when you had the chance.”
She turned and started walking deeper into the maze. I remained pressed against the ground, waiting. You don’t spend centuries stalking fairy-tale villains through their own stories without learning a thing or two about the way they tend to think—and sure enough, after she had gone about ten feet she whirled around, raking her eyes across the corridor behind her. I didn’t move. After a moment, she scowled and turned again.
This time, she didn’t double back. I picked myself carefully up, pausing only to retrieve the machete from the felled Marquis. An unexpected pang of sympathy for the man struck me as I was prying the hilt out of his hand. Maybe it was the fact that I’d willingly enrolled myself in his fading narrative, or maybe it was just that he hadn’t asked for any of this. He could have been anyone before the story grabbed him and turned him into a killer. He could have been me.
“Sorry, sire,” I murmured. The word choice was more Puss in Boots than my own, but I didn’t try to take it back. The Marquis, whatever his real name might have been, was dead. That couldn’t be changed. If he could take any peace in believing that his story endured after he was gone, then I was happy to give it to him. He deserved that much, even if he didn’t deserve anything more.
Holding the machete loosely against my hip, I turned and prowled, balanced on my tiptoes, deeper into the maze.
# # #
Adrianna moved surprisingly fast for someone who was wearing a body that didn’t belong to her. Had she ever suffered a period of disorientation? I thought she might have, but that could easily have been hindsight, which was always twenty-twenty, trying to make me second-guess myself. I had known from the beginning that something was wrong. I was just trying to make it bigger than it had really been.
Sometimes the subtle signs are the truest. The switch of a story from apples to snow, for example. Or the brush of a thorn against my skin as I pressed myself hard against the hedge wall, sticking to the shadows. Adrianna was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still out there, or make her any less dangerous.
Would she kill me? That was the real question. She had seemed determined to recruit me to her cause, but that could have been a matter of convenience. When you had access to a potential ally who had in some cases literally written the book on Bureau response, why wouldn’t you try to lure them over to your side? I had been an asset until I had shown her, conclusively, that I was no such thing. Now I was an enemy, and if she let me find my way out of this maze, I could blow her cover with everyone else.
Where was everyone else? A chill ran down my spine as I considered the all-too-plausible fact that she could have tried the same recruitment pitch with Jeffrey, only to be shot down even harder. I, at least, had been prepared to play along until I knew what I needed. Jeffrey loved Henry. Jeffrey had been by this woman’s side since she woke up in his lover’s stolen body—and if he had never realized that anything was wrong, he was going to hate himself. That was one more crime to lay at Adrianna’s feet. True love’s kiss hadn’t worked on Henry’s body because Henry hadn’t been there. Now it might not work because Adrianna had slipped in and slit love’s throat.
I’d just have to kill her extra slow.
Footsteps echoed softly through the maze. Adrianna was coming my way. I crouched further, tightening my grip on my borrowed machete. The smell of wet cat still clung to the air around me, although it was fading; the Marquis de Carabas was dead, poor story-struck soul that he had been, and while I was enough for the story to batten on to for a little while, I couldn’t sustain it. I wasn’t equipped to step into his role.
But what if I was? The thought was startling. Adrianna had been talking about changing my story, and I knew Elise had managed it—that was what had made her so damn dangerous. What if the answer was doing exactly what I was doing now, but forcing myself into the lead role, instead of taking up the sidekick’s part? Kill a princess to become a princess, in other words.
It was a terrible thing to contemplate. It might well be the only thing that would let me out of the maze of endless years in which I had been so long marooned.
Thorns prickled against my back as I plastered myself more firmly against the hedge wall, waiting for Adrianna to come around the corner. Maybe I couldn’t kill her while she was in Henry’s body, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hurt her a little. All I needed was to get the drop on her. She might be evil, while the jury was still out on me. She might be cunning.
I was a pissed-off wicked stepsister with a machete, and I would stack that up against anything else the story had to sling at me.
Adrianna stepped into view. I lunged for her, machete raised, moving with feline speed. She smirked and stepped to the side, as casual as anything. I tried to adjust and discovered that I couldn’t; my legs were slow and felt too thick, like they had been standing in cold water for hours. Momentum carried me right past her and sent me crashing to the ground.
“We have so many things to talk about, you and I,” she said, crouching to take the machete from my hands. I struggled to hold it, but she plucked it away from me as easily as pulling an apple from a tree. “That little stunt of yours—I don’t know how you did it, and I want to. If you can share stories, instead of changing them, that will change everything. Everything. I’m sorry, dear, but you don’t have a choice anymore about whether you come with me.”
I tried to speak. I couldn’t. I glared daggers at her instead, hoping that her ego would force her to keep talking. Her ego, and the story, which so often demanded that the villains explain their plans for the hidden heroes to hear.
But there were no heroes hiding here. Any member of my team would have stepped in to save me by now, even Ciara. We were alone, me and her, in the maze, and I couldn’t move.
“Don’t worry, Amity. The poison Elise put on those thorns will wear off soon, and you’ll be fine.” She tossed the machete aside and stooped, trying to scoop me off the ground. She stopped trying a moment later and straightened,
grimacing. “Did my niece never lift anything heavier than her badge? This weak, useless body is going to need some serious improvement. No matter. Wait here.”
She walked away. I struggled to move.
I was still struggling to move when she returned, pulling a wagon shaped from a giant pumpkin and accompanied by four of Elise’s mouse-men. Together, they loaded me into the wagon and pulled me away. I couldn’t fight them. I couldn’t even sit up by myself. All I could do was stare at the crows perching atop the hedge maze, and wonder what was going to happen when my team learned that I was gone.
Adrianna had changed my story after all. She had made me a prisoner.
It was up to me to find a way to escape.
UNTOLD TRUTHS
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 709 (“Snow White”)
Status: ACTIVE
No one had come rushing in to see what was going on: My new body must have been here for a while. Long enough for the nurses to stop watching for changes in her condition and resign her to long-term care. It was good care, at least. The body had sufficient muscle tone for me to move around on my own, even if my legs were weak and shaky, and when I pulled the hair back from my face and secured it with a twist tie I’d found on the floor, my fingers responded without complaint. I could function. I might not be happy about it, but I could do it. That was what mattered right now.
I finished peeling the sensors off my skin, probably triggering a bunch of alarms somewhere, and left the room with the quick, furtive steps of a fugitive. I didn’t want the hospital staff to find me, shove me back into the bed, and start contacting the family of the body I was wearing. This was a temporary stop on my way back to getting myself back. I would be as careful with her as I could. Even if the original owner didn’t want it back, this body wasn’t mine, and it deserved to be returned in mint condition, or as close to it as was possible.
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 25
