by Kit Alloway
“Isn’t this beautiful?” she asked Haley as he ducked under the shelter of the branches. “I love nature. I love being outside. And … I’ll do what they ask, because it’s my duty. But I don’t know how long I have—to live, or maybe just to do things like this and not have any consequences. And there are so many things I want to do.…”
He smiled like he knew. He was shivering, too, arms wrapped around himself, even in today’s pink-and-brown cardigan, so she felt justified in inserting herself between the sweater and his chest. To her relief, he wrapped his arms and the wet fabric around her.
“I want to help you,” he told her. “Tell me how to help.”
She hugged him tight. He felt steady, almost as steady as the tree trunk had. “Don’t let me lose myself.”
Somehow, she knew he smiled. “I can do that,” he said.
She looked up at him. He trembled harder against her, but his fingers moved in small circles against her back, so timid and yet so bold.
This is a perfect moment for a first kiss, she thought, but instead of kissing Haley, she said, “Are you still in love with Winsor?”
He tilted his head. “No.”
“If we put her soul back in her body, is she going to wake up and feel like I stole her boyfriend while she was in a coma?”
“No,” he said. “We broke up almost a year ago.”
“You broke up with her?”
He swallowed. “She slept with my twin brother.”
“Oh,” Mirren said. “Is that why he doesn’t live with you?”
“He’s dead.”
“I should stop asking questions.” She felt like she had tried to kill one hornet and instead woken an entire nest. “I think I should have just kissed you when the moment presented itself.”
Haley actually laughed aloud. “We can wait until it comes around again.”
“Thanks.”
So they stood there, nestled in Haley’s cardigan, his face turned so that he could rest his cheek on the top of her head, and slowly, they both stopped shivering. Mirren didn’t know how long they stood that way or how long they might have gone on, but eventually the rain stopped and the sun reemerged, turning the dampness around them to glowing orange mist.
* * *
The next day, Mirren announced that Davita had given her the go-ahead to admit her real identity to the household. She asked Josh to break the news because she felt that Josh had the highest status of the three people who knew her secret, but almost as soon as she began speaking, Mirren realized she should have asked Will instead.
“So,” Josh said without preamble, “Nan’s really the lost dream-walker princess. Her name’s Mirren Rousellario, and she’s going to try to beat the Lodestones at the Accordance Conclave.” Josh stopped to think before adding, “Deal with it.”
Laurentius and Kerstel exchanged glances. Deloise’s jaw dropped, then her mouth slowly formed an O. Whim gave Mirren a skeptical look and squinted, as if trying to recognize her. His father, Alex, slid off the couch so he could fall to his knees.
“No, no, please,” Mirren said. “Not this again.”
“The Avisharas have always been loyal to the monarchy,” Alex proclaimed. “The safety and protection of our home is yours, my queen.”
“Thank you,” Mirren said, because she honestly didn’t know what else to say.
“Get off the floor,” Alex’s wife told him. “You look like an idiot.”
“I should have figured it out,” Deloise said. “You look so much like your parents! I have all these books about them, I used to read them all the time.”
“Wait, we’re taking her word on this?” Whim asked. “Remember that chick who spent her whole life claiming she was a Russian grand duchess, and after she died it turned out the real grand duchess was rotting in a mine shaft?”
“No, no.” Josh waved at the words in the air. “Davita’s doing a DNA test, but we’ve already pretty much confirmed it.”
“Wasn’t she convicted of treason?” asked Saidy, Whim’s mother.
“Um,” Josh said.
“Yes,” Mirren admitted. “And even though the conviction was largely symbolic, helping me could be considered treason. I don’t want to mislead you on that point.”
“Oh my,” Kerstel said.
Whim reached for the phone with exaggerated slowness, and Deloise shoved him.
“You’re not calling anyone,” Deloise said. “She was a baby!”
“So? It sounds like she’s going to try to bring your grandfather down.”
“Do you want to see him stay in power?” Deloise demanded. “Because if you’re rooting for the guy who tried to kill my sister to lead our government, I need to seriously rethink this relationship.”
Whim released an aggravated “Aarrggg. You know I don’t like your grandfather. You know I don’t want anybody snuffing Josh out. But he’s not the only person in the Lodestone Party, and I do support staging.”
“So go vote for him,” Will told him irritably. “Mirren running isn’t going to change the fact that you’ll still have a ballot. Just remember not to check her name.”
“How about a deal?” Deloise suggested. “You keep Mirren’s secret, and in return, she gives you a scoop here and there for your website?”
“Website?” Mirren asked. She hadn’t had a chance yet to explore the Internet, but it was near the top of her list of things to experience in the World.
“Hell, yes!” Whim exclaimed, and then he explained about his blog, Through a Veil Darkly. “If I break the story that the lost dream-walker princess is alive, I’ll be a legend in the underground blog movement.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Saidy said.
“So you want me to…” Mirren said.
“Just give me a call before you go public. Give me a good twelve hours’ notice so I can post an announcement. I’ll run it all past you before it goes live.”
Mirren shrugged, but she’d have to check with Davita. “All right.”
And that was the end of Whim’s issues with Mirren.
Whim’s mother was less interested in the political implications of Mirren’s joining the race than she was concerned about bringing Peregrine’s wrath down upon them, which was Lauren and Kerstel’s major fear as well.
“Personally,” Lauren said, holding his pregnant wife’s shaky right hand, “my only concern is for the safety of my family. You’re welcome to stay here, Mirren, until such time as your presence endangers my family, and at that time I’ll have to ask you to leave. And, as long as I’m making speeches, I might as well add that I’m sorry for what happened to your family and for my former father-in-law’s part in it.”
“The same goes for me,” Kerstel added.
“Thank you,” Mirren said. “I would never want to endanger your family, and I’ll do everything in my power to avoid doing so.”
The household agreed on a code of silence regarding Mirren’s presence there, but Mirren didn’t know how long it would last. Davita was anticipating bringing her before the junta in just a day or two. With the Accordance Conclave so soon, they didn’t have any time to lose.
Somehow they still made it to Young Ben’s barbecue that evening, though.
Eleven
Young Ben lived in a crazy cabin on stilts at the edge of a swamp. He’d built onto the cabin several times, with the result that each addition had made the building more ramshackle and sprawling, like an aboveground bunker.
When the Weaver-Avish caravan pulled up the mud-and-gravel drive, Young Ben was standing on the porch beneath the light of orange bulbs—the better to keep the West Nile mosquitoes away. “Welcome, friends!” he called.
Everyone tumbled out of the car, grabbing packs of soda and sacks of groceries. Will took a bag of buns away from Kerstel, who protested that they weighed less than her purse, and told her to be careful on the steps. Josh hiked a microwave-sized watermelon up on her shoulder, and they followed everyone else up the rickety staircase to the porch.
“Will, good to see you,” Young Ben said as Will passed him, and clapped him on the back.
Young Ben, who was somewhere between ninety and a hundred years old, had only recently begun to stoop. Always plump, he’d put on a significant amount of weight in the past few months, and now a line of hairy, pale stomach protruded from what Will was pretty sure was an original Ghostbusters T-shirt.
“Get the groceries into the kitchen,” Saidy called. “You can say hello afterward.”
Everyone ignored her and clustered on the porch.
“Abendirk Sounclouse,” Deloise said, her voice excited and a little formal, “allow me to present Mirren Rousellario.”
Mirren held out her hand. “How do you do?”
Ben clasped her hand between his instead of shaking. “Ah, Princess Mirren. What a genuine joy it is to meet you.”
Mirren smiled, but stiffly. Will knew she was about to tell Ben not to call her princess when he went on.
“I had the honor of knowing both your parents and your grandparents. In fact, when I was born, your great-grandparents were on the throne.”
Ben kept hold of Mirren’s hand and beamed reverently at her. Will felt an unexpected pang of jealousy; over the last week he’d realized that, in many ways, Mirren was as much an outsider as he was. But here Ben was fawning over her, having only met her two minutes before, when after six months he still told people that it was “Josh’s paper” up for the Nicastro Prize.
Will slipped past Deloise and into the house.
They ate an hour later, sitting around a grill built into the back deck so that it doubled as a fire pit. The food was abundant: hamburgers and hot dogs, potato and pasta salads, BBQ beans, ambrosia, chess pie, and Kerstel’s own carrot soufflé, which Will thought he could probably live off of for six months or more.
“You can count on my vote,” Young Ben promised Mirren. “Staging is an amoral plague upon the earth.”
“What? That’s a wild exaggeration,” Whim told him, “and I say that as someone who’s accused of wild exaggeration on a near daily basis. Ninety-nine percent of people who are in favor of staging want it because it could do a lot of good for a lot of people.”
“And the one percent who don’t?” Ben asked. “What about that fellow in France last year, the one who staged nightmares for his wife until she killed herself so he could collect the insurance money?”
“Obviously, that guy was just an asshole,” Whim said.
“How did he find his wife in the Dream?” Will asked, curious in spite of himself.
“He built an archway in their bedroom closet,” Josh explained. “After his wife went to bed, he’d sit there with the looking stone and wait until one of her nightmares came up. Then he’d jump in, dressed up like Death with the cloak and a sickle, and tell her she was getting sick, that she was going to die soon. Her doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her, but eventually the nightmares wore her down until she killed herself.”
“That’s awful,” Deloise said. “How could he do that to his own wife?”
People are capable of terrible things, Will thought, thinking of Feodor, and suddenly he wanted to be away from this conversation. Ben’s right—staging is a plague upon the earth.
Will went for a second serving of the soufflé and came back from the kitchen with that and a glass of punch. He didn’t usually drink punch, but the liquid smelled unusually appealing tonight. As he sat down beside Josh on the cooler they were sharing, Kerstel said with surprising urgency, “Will. Which pitcher did that come out of?”
Will realized she was asking about his drink. “Ah, the pink plastic one. The glass one was empty.”
“The plastic one has sangria in it,” Kerstel told him.
“Oh,” Will said. Sangria—fruit punch and wine. His brain flatlined; he didn’t know what to do, so he just held the glass away from him as if it were an angry cat trying to scratch him. “Ah…”
The conversations around the fire died down for a moment.
“I’ve got it,” Josh said, and took the glass from Will’s hand. She jumped up and headed inside, and everyone started talking again.
Will didn’t embarrass too easily, but he was glad his face was hard to see in the firelight. “I’m sorry,” he said to Kerstel.
She reached out from her chair and touched his shoulder. “I wasn’t criticizing. I just wanted to make sure you knew what you were drinking.”
“I didn’t,” he said firmly.
But of course he had, hadn’t he? He’d smelled the contents of the pitcher, but instead of telling him, Booze, his brain had just said, Good. Drink that.
He didn’t doubt for a second that, subconsciously, he’d known what he was doing. And that scared the hell out of him.
His first instinct was to pretend nothing had happened, to go off by himself and find a distraction, to go home and work on his stalker wall. Yes, that’s exactly what he wanted: to open his files and dig through the articles Feodor had written until he understood what the madman had been doing, how he could be outwitted, outsmarted, outfoxed.
Instead, he left his plate of soufflé on the cooler and went into the house to find Josh.
This is what girlfriends are for, he reminded himself. Isolating myself right now is the worst thing I can do.
In the kitchen, Josh was pouring the sugar water from a bottle of maraschino cherries into a glass of soda. “Hey,” she said. “I’m making you a special drink.”
“That’s okay,” Will told her.
“It’ll be like sangria without the wine,” she insisted, and he watched her mix cream of coconut into the glass. He was pretty sure she didn’t know what was in sangria.
“It’s fine. I’m not even thirsty. I … I’m kind of freaking out.”
“It’s no big deal. You just mixed up the pitchers.”
“No, Josh, Saidy made sure to tell me which one had the sangria in it. I think I … I didn’t realize it, but I poured the sangria on purpose.”
Josh opened the refrigerator and hunted around, finally surfacing with a plastic lime full of juice. “You wouldn’t do that. Besides, so what if you did drink it? You can have a sip of sangria. You aren’t an alcoholic.”
The room began to tilt, and Will grabbed on to the countertop. No, technically he wasn’t an alcoholic. Yet. But hearing Josh brush off his fears frightened him more than pouring the sangria had. She didn’t understand—he had to stay ahead of himself. One wrong step—one wrong sip—and it could all fall apart. He could fall apart.
Josh finished peeling a banana and stuck it in the glass. “Here. Drink this.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “It’s all good,” she said. “Come on, let’s go make s’mores.”
She didn’t notice when Will failed to follow her back outside. In the glass she’d shoved into his hand, one end of the banana rested surrounded by clots of unmixed coconut. Feeling at once panicked and numb, he carried the drink to the sink and poured it down the drain.
Josh had left the glass of sangria sitting on the counter.
Will poured that out, too.
He didn’t want to go back outside afterward. He’d reached out for support and hadn’t found it; now he wanted to be alone.
One reason Young Ben kept building onto the house, Will reflected as he wandered into the living room, might have had to do with his tendency toward hoarding. He had two complete sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica, a laundry basket full of wire hangers, a book called Social Media for Grandparents—although he had no computer—a cardboard box labeled “Blankets,” and a display stand for pipes with only one pipe in it.
Will sat down on the couch. The clutter itself was sort of comforting, in a weird way, and he browsed through the mess on the coffee table. Beneath several stained pairs of pants, he found a photo album that must have been fifty years old. The black-and-white photos were glued to black pages, each picture smaller than Will’s palm. The book was open to a photo of a beautiful young woman with a man who was a few years older
than her, posed together on the porch of a house. She wore a plaid shirt and close-cut shorts, and the man wore high-waisted pants that showed off an infant beer belly. They were both grinning, and the woman had her face turned toward her lifted shoulder.
The pose struck Will. It seemed familiar, as did the woman’s figure—
“Oh, my God!” he said aloud. “It’s Dustine!”
The woman reminded him of Deloise because she was Deloise’s grandmother. Will had known her for only a few months before her death, but now that he had identified her, he couldn’t see anyone else. She even had Josh’s chin.
If the woman was Dustine, that meant the man with her was probably Young Ben. This was, after all, his photo album. Will recognized him now, too—the height, the square face, the emerging gut.
I didn’t realize they had known each other for so long, Will thought.
He peered more closely at the photo. Behind Ben and Dustine, a blurred figure moved inside the house, crossing the doorway at the moment the photo was snapped. The blurring was bad and the figure’s face was turned away so that only part of his profile appeared, but if Will hadn’t known better, he would have sworn the man was Feodor.
Ridiculous, of course. But he felt as if Feodor had somehow inserted himself in the photo just for Will’s benefit, as though his ghost were infiltrating the edges of everything.
Will shivered, then chastened himself. As he forced his hand to turn the page, Whim, cell phone pressed to his ear, walked hurriedly from the kitchen to the hallway, cutting through one corner of the living room without noticing Will.
Whim loved that phone. He used it so much, he had to charge it twice a day. But something about the speed in his step aroused Will’s suspicion that this was not a normal call from one of Whim’s legion of friends.
