“This was a Puss in Boots scenario, correct?”
Piotr pulled to a stop, blocking the driveway and—not accidentally—cutting off all exits for my team. Even if they thought I was a liar or under an evil spell, they wouldn’t be able to leave. He killed the engine. “Correct. A young woman who’d been held for several days by a home invader managed to break loose, and a team—your team—was dispatched to investigate. The young man, who we believe to be a Marquis de Carabas at this point, fled into the hedge maze behind the house.”
I stared at him as I undid my belt. “There’s a hedge maze behind the house?”
“Yes.”
“Who the fuck has a hedge maze in a residential neighborhood?”
“This woman’s parents,” said Piotr. “Aside from that . . . serial killers, presumably. People who enjoy Stephen King novels a bit too much. And people who are hoping that one night, they’ll wake up to find David Bowie standing at their window.”
“Right,” I said, and opened the door, sliding out of the car. I didn’t wait to see whether Piotr or Carlos were following me, because waiting hadn’t ever been something I did. I walked straight into danger, no matter how likely it was to get me killed. Loitering around and waiting for backup now would just make me seem weak, and more, it would make me seem like someone else, someone I had never been before.
The part of me that was tethered most strongly to the Snow White story had always been there, lurking at the back of every decision I made, trying to pull me into passivity. I could feel it now, as much a part of this body as it was a part of my own. I shoved it aside, marching straight up to the little conversational huddle that Demi and Andy had created. They were positioned to discourage strangers from trying to interrupt. That was fine. I wasn’t a stranger.
“So we have a problem,” I said, skipping the preamble in favor of getting straight to the part I knew they weren’t going to like. They turned to look at me. Andy seemed amused; Demi looked disbelieving, like she couldn’t understand how I’d found the nerve to interrupt them.
“Really?” asked Andy. His eyes skimmed across me, taking note of my coloration and the cut of my suit and filing me—correctly, if incompletely—as a Snow White employed by the Bureau. “Is your team here to take custody of the scene? Who are you working for?”
“My team already has custody of the scene, and I answer directly to Deputy Director Brewer,” I said. I lowered my hands, letting him see that they were empty. “Andy, it’s me. Henry. We have a problem.”
Andy blinked. Demi looked confused. Then, to my surprise and annoyance, Andy broke out laughing.
“Oh, man, what field office did they dig you out of?” he asked. “I know we don’t have any other seven-oh-nines working in this time zone. Henry would have introduced us by now.”
“Your name is Andrew Robinson, you got married to Mike Dawson four years ago. I thought having your wedding at an amusement park was a little weird, but since it meant I got to give my best man speech while I was on an inverted roller coaster, I was cool with it in the end. Jeff threw up twice. Sloane laughed at him twice. The wedding cake was supposed to be the color of cotton candy, but it turns out that cotton candy doesn’t translate into frosting, so it was the color of Pepto Bismol instead. Am I getting through to you yet? Do I need to get embarrassing? Because I am too short and my tits are too big and I will get personal.”
Andy stared at me. Then his expression turned grim, and he took a step forward. It was all I could do not to take a step back. Was it just that I was smaller than I remembered being, or had he always been so damned big?
“I don’t know what you’re playing at, lady, but this isn’t funny. Henry was hurt recently. Hurt bad. Showing up here pretending—”
“I wasn’t hurt, I ate an apple, and I should have known better, but I was cutting corners because I was afraid, and I thought Jeff could wake me up. Only he couldn’t, because Adrianna was already in the way.” I glared at Andy, daring him to accept the truth in my words, to see the undeniable reality of my situation. Whether I was getting through, I didn’t know.
But I was getting through to Demi. She shifted positions, ever so slightly, before putting a hand on Andy’s arm. “When I was with Birdie, she talked about Adrianna,” she said, voice barely above a murmur. “She said Adrianna was her get out of jail free card. Maybe . . . ?”
“Lady, I don’t know what your problem is, but this isn’t funny,” said Andy.
“Henry’s been weird since she woke up. Sloane feels it most. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel it too,” said Demi. She turned to look at me. “Say something only Henry would know.”
I smiled a little. “You still watch Saturday morning cartoons. You got so mad when they stopped being on broadcast television that you asked me whether the Bureau had any pull with the FCC. I’m still sort of sorry that we don’t.”
“Anyone who has access to your Facebook would know you were angry about the cartoons,” said Andy.
“But would they know that she wanted me to call the FBI and claim that free cartoons for children of low-income households were a matter of national security?” I asked. Then I stopped, tensing. Someone was emerging from the maze. If it was Adrianna . . .
The figure was lithe, shorter than my body, with brown hair streaked in seemingly natural blue. Ciara Bloomfield. I relaxed a little; not completely. According to Deputy Director Brewer, Ciara had been assigned to my team as a temporary field leader while I was in my coma, and had remained as an observer after “I” woke up. She might believe me. She might put the nails into my coffin. There was no way for me to know, not here, not until she reached us.
Andy frowned when he realized I wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. He turned and snorted at the sight of Ciara walking across the grass toward us. “Good. Someone else to help me convince you to stop messing around when we’re on an active case. The last thing we need is for you to trigger some sort of body-swapping story.”
“I’m not messing around,” I said.
Ciara walked up to us, taking in me—and presumably, Piotr; I hadn’t turned, but I was reasonably sure he was standing behind me—with a quick glance before she said, “We have a problem. I lost track of Agent Winters, and I can’t raise Agent Marchen on the phone. Agent Remus, hello. Who’s your friend?”
So Piotr was behind me. Good. He took a step forward, putting us level with one another, and said, “Good afternoon, Agent Bloomfield. Agent Névé is in the car, in case we need to make a quick exit. As for my friend, this is Agent Marchen.”
Ciara looked at him like he’d just claimed that I was a swarm of wasps in a tailored suit. “Excuse me?”
“This,” he indicated me with a sweep of his hand, “is Agent Marchen.”
I gave him a sidelong look. “You could have stepped in a few minutes ago, you know.”
“I was waiting to see if you could talk your team into accepting your identity,” he said. “Since you clearly couldn’t, I thought it was time for me to get involved.”
“Thanks,” I said flatly. I turned back to Ciara. “As I was just explaining to Andy, hi. I’m Henry. A dead woman stole my body, and I want it back.”
A muscle at the corner of Ciara’s mouth twitched. “What?”
“Agent Marchen arrived at the Bureau a little while ago, telling this fascinating story,” said Piotr. “I’ll be honest, I thought she was making it up, but she somehow convinced Deputy Director Brewer, and Agent Névé believes her. At this point, I believe her too. Pretending to be Agent Marchen gets her nothing but a life no sensible person would want. Only the real thing would be this insistent.”
“What?” Ciara lifted her right hand as she moved toward me, wrapping her fingers around the key she wore at her throat. There was something almost predatory about the way she was focusing on my eyes, like she wanted to swing them open and pull out whatever was on the other side. I stood my ground. Backing down now would only cast everything I’d said into doubt, and I couldn’t
afford that. Not here, not now.
Ciara stopped with her nose barely an inch from mine. She narrowed her eyes, expression going blank for a count of five. Then, with no warning or shift in her stance, she smiled, wonder transforming her face into something beautiful.
“Henry!” she said. “I mean, Agent Marchen—we’re not well-acquainted enough for me to be that informal, my apologies. It is you!”
“Wait, what?” said Andy.
Ciara’s smile died as quickly as it had come. She turned to Andy and Demi. “This is the real Agent Marchen. The real Henry. She has the right eyes. They’re the mirrors of the soul, you know. She hasn’t been letting me get close enough to look since she woke up.”
“I thought it was ‘windows,’” said Demi. She had produced her flute from somewhere and was clutching it tight, elbows drawn in against her body like she was trying to make herself smaller and brace herself to start playing at the same time.
“Depends on who you’re talking to,” said Ciara. Her lips twisted downward, her mercurial mood shifting further into dismay. “Wait, if this is Henry, who have we been—?”
“Adrianna,” I said.
Ciara’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Finally, someone who reacts to that name like it’s a bad thing.” I threw my hands up. “She knocked me out and stole my body.” She’d done more than knock me out, but I didn’t feel like explaining the mechanics of the whiteout wood just now. That could come later, when the questions got harder and we were figuring out how to recover my original face. “She came here because she wanted access to the Bureau’s records. This was always her long game.”
“But why?” asked Andy. “The Archives are good. They’re not worth killing over.”
The Archives. I went still, feeling the cold wash over me like water, chilling and killing my sense of equilibrium. “Where’s Jeff?”
“What?”
“You said you lost Sloane and that Adrianna isn’t answering my phone,” I said. It was a struggle to keep my voice smooth and level. “Three of you are here. That leaves one member of the team unaccounted for. Where’s Jeff?”
Ciara’s horrified expression was all the answer I needed. I took off for the hedge maze at a run, and I didn’t look back.
# # #
It was too much to hope that Adrianna had simply taken my boyfriend with her, recognizing how useful he could be and carting him off to whatever Grimm-knows-where secret lair she was planning to hole up in. She’d been able to incapacitate Sloane somehow, and Sloane wasn’t small. I knew the limitations of my own body. There was no way she had carried them both out of the maze. That didn’t leave very many options for what she had done with Jeff.
Please don’t be dead, I thought inanely as I ran. I never got to say good bye. Shoemaker’s Elves had to have their equivalent of the whiteout wood, but I could sink back into dreaming and walk a thousand years before I’d find it. Our tales were too far apart for his story’s homeland to touch on mine. All I could do was run, spinning worst-case scenarios for the audience of my own heart and feeling each of them strike truer than I wanted it to.
It was still a shock when I came racing around a corner and found him crumpled on the ground, a bloodstain covering the left side of his jacket. I kept moving, more out of inertia than anything else, until my knees hit the grass and my ear hit his chest.
He had a heartbeat. He wasn’t gone yet.
“Medic!” I shouted, and the running footsteps closing from behind me told me the help he needed wasn’t far away: He’d have it soon. We’d have it soon. I stayed where I was, my ear pressed against his bloody jacket, and listened to the beating of his heart. I needed to know that he wasn’t leaving me. Not when I’d just gotten back from leaving him.
“She’s going to pay for this,” I whispered, and Jeff—whose breathing was shallow and whose eyes were closed—didn’t contradict me.
She was going to pay.
MIRROR’S FACE
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 503 (“The Shoemaker and the Elves”)
Status: ACTIVE
Dying, as it turned out, was quite a pleasant thing. The world went soft around the edges, taking all the pain and confusion and betrayal with it. They had seemed so important not long ago, when time had been measured in years, not in seconds. Now, it was finally clear that they’d never really mattered at all. This final descent into softness, into story, was what it was all about.
In the distance Jeff could hear the sound of tiny hammers tapping even tinier nails into hardened leather, driving them home. His hands were numb, but he felt sure that they’d be ready to hold the hammer when he opened his eyes again. Yes; it was time. He had frittered away his life on paperwork and pining after a princess who could never truly love him, and now he could let all that go. Now he could begin doing what he’d always been meant to do.
But she had loved him, hadn’t she? The question was hot and sharp against the warm softness dissolving the edges of his consciousness. Jeff had never been one to shy away from a question just because it wasn’t easy. He gripped it as tightly as his fading thoughts would allow, spinning it like a jewel as he studied every facet, every angle. Yes. Yes, she had loved him: he was sure of that. Her kiss had called him out of his story, once, when it had tried to take him before his time, and his kiss had pulled her out of the sleep that was supposed to last until the stars went cold. It wasn’t her fault that true love’s kiss hadn’t worked a second time. He must have done something to erode her love for him, damaged it in some way, because his love for her hadn’t changed in the slightest. He still loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone else. It was the kind of love that followed its owner to the grave.
Henry had loved him once. She had trusted him to wake her up when she ate the apple. She had believed in him. So why hadn’t it worked? It should have worked.
Unless the woman who’d shot him wasn’t Henry.
Everything began falling into place, suddenly making sense in the pause between darkness and death. She had been so different after waking up, and he’d been so consumed by guilt that he hadn’t seen it. He was the fairy-tale lover whose kiss had lost its potency, after all; how could he have been anything but distracted? And yet. Henry had sounded different, acted different, even stood differently after she woke up, which she had done entirely on her own—something Snow Whites weren’t supposed to be able to do. So what if the person moving Henry’s body wasn’t Henry? Things made so much more sense if that wasn’t Henry.
He could die without feeling like she’d blamed him for failing her if that wasn’t Henry. And maybe, just maybe, he would see her again, in the silence on the other side of the story.
Jeff’s eyes were already closed, but still, it felt as if he was closing them and letting go.
He had so far left to fall.
# # #
“Where the fuck is the medic?!” I screamed, my head still resting against Jeff’s chest, where the thready beat of his pulse told me he wasn’t gone yet, but he was going; he was going fast, and once he’d gone, he wasn’t coming back. His skin was starting to cool under mine. I didn’t know how much blood he’d lost. All I was sure of was that it had been too much, and that he couldn’t afford to lose any more.
Ciara, Andy, and Demi came pounding around the corner, scrambling to a stop when they saw me. Demi’s eyes widened, her hands tightening around her flute. She was staring more at me than at Jeff. I looked down at my hands. The blood stood out remarkably well against the bone-white of my skin. Everything always came back to those colors, to black feathers against the sky and red blood on the snow.
“He’s dying,” I said, lifting my head. “She shot him, and he’s dying and where is that medic?!” My last words came out in a piercing wail, higher and shriller than my own throat could ever have managed. For the first time, I was glad of my borrowed body. It seemed only right that I should be capable of keening.
“Piotr is getting the EMTs,” said Ci
ara. She took a half-step forward, her voice dropping, turning soothing. “Henry, what happened?”
I narrowed my eyes. I knew what she was thinking, and I needed to stop it here and now, before it could spread to the other members of my team. “Look at the blood. Feel how cold he is. He was shot before I got here—long before I got here. That bitch who stole my body did this to him, because . . . I don’t know. Maybe he figured out who she was. Maybe she got tired of him. He’s bleeding out. Do you understand what I’m saying? He’s dying. Where is that medic?”
“Blood is a liquid,” said Demi abruptly. We both turned to look at her. She didn’t shy back. If anything, she relaxed, her fingers beginning to sketch a phantom melody on the body of her flute. She was playing the song even before she had breath to put behind it. “Liquid moves. Do you trust me?”
“What?” I sat up straighter, trying to figure out what she was saying.
“Do you trust me?” she repeated.
The answer was easy. “Yes,” I said. “I always have.”
“Then don’t move.” Demi raised her flute to her lips and began to play.
There are no words to describe the tune that poured from her flute. It hung in the air for a moment, crystalline and demanding my full attention. Ciara and Andy were equally rapt, barely blinking as they listened. The music rose, peaking in a series of high, jagged points that seemed to climb to an impossible height, passing outside of the range of ordinary hearing. Something slithered over my hands. I looked down.
The blood on my hands was moving, turning liquid and rolling together to form larger and larger drops, until they pooled into a single ruby pool between my outspread fingers. It sat there for a moment, glistening and impossible, before rolling down Jeff’s neck and vanishing under the collar of his shirt, which was looking less bloodstained with every second that passed. The blood was pulling itself out of the fabric and rolling back toward his wound—and then inside, every drop of it returning to the veins from which it had fallen.
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 28
