Conjured

Chapter Seventeen

The Storyteller is combing my hair with her gnarled fingers. “She lives happily ever after, of course, though they don’t say how long ‘ever’ is. Perhaps it is only a day before her horse is startled by a snake and she falls from his back and breaks her neck.” The Storyteller strokes my neck lightly, softly. “Or perhaps it is only a week before a piece of meat lodges in her throat and no one is around to see that she cannot scream. Or breathe. Or she could have years with him in peace before she begins to doubt and to wonder and then despair that she will never be more than a story that ended—and so she ends herself with a rope from a strong tree branch.”

“I don’t like this story,” I say.

Her fingers are entwined in my hair, but they do not move, and so I move forward and feel her stiff fingers slip away from the strands.

“I don’t like it,” I repeat.

“It is the story I am telling,” the Storyteller says.

“Then I won’t listen,” I say. I know it’s a futile statement. When the Storyteller weaves her tales, you must listen. It is her magic, or at least a talent so powerful that it seems like magic.

She continues, and I listen as the princess in her story dies again and again and again.

I am outside under the trees by a campfire. The wagon is beside us. The bright colors are a glossy near-black in the darkness. Through the trees, I see the fires of other wagons. It’s cold by the campfire, even though the fire is red and yellow and pops and crackles. I feel cold inside. Wishing I could stop the Storyteller’s tale, I rise and step closer to the flames.

“Step away, or you will burn,” the Magician says. His voice comes out of the darkness, cutting through the Storyteller’s voice but not stopping it. Even he can’t do that. I don’t see him in the shadows by the wagon, though he must be there.

I take another step closer, and I can feel the fire’s warmth. “I am standing by the fire, and I do not burn.” But I feel the fire creep onto my skin. It seizes me, and I feel the fire spread through me, as if bypassing my skin and going straight into my bones. It shoots through me and then spreads outward.

At last, the story stops.

I have ended it, I think with triumph.

As the fire seizes me, the Magician wraps his arms around me. His cloak muffles me, but the fire is already inside, burning through my bones. I think I am screaming. I feel the Magician put his hands on my burning cheeks. His face is close to mine. He breathes in. And the fire ceases. Even the campfire dies. It is cold. I am cold inside.

“Next time, you will obey me,” the Magician says.

“Yes, Father,” I say.

He strokes my cheek. “Always remember: you are nothing without me.”

I’m not nothing, I think. I’m Eve.

And suddenly, it’s Malcolm with his arms around me, protecting me … or trapping me. I am in a meadow of delicate white wildflowers that bend and sway in the breeze. He holds me gently as he says, “Shh, shh; tell me who you are.”

I’m Eve, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t.

I was pinned to the wall like a butterfly in a display case. My beak was half-open, and I felt the shape of my paper wings splayed against the milk-blue fake sky. I saw the bedroom distorted through one flattened bird’s eye. The hat was all angles on a sea of quilt.

Beside the bed, Aunt Nicki bulged with her rounded limbs and torso, a three-dimensional person seen through my two-dimensional eyes. Malcolm was a vast bulk behind her. His eyes roved over the room.

I watched them test the window and check the closet. From the way Malcolm’s mouth moved and the way his chest pumped, I thought he must be shouting, but his voice was distant and muffled to my painted ears, as if he were underwater. The words slid into each other until they were indistinguishable. Only a few moments seemed to have passed since I fell into my vision.

Still shouting, he scooped the hat off the bed and hurled it across the room. It skittered over the wood floor and smacked lightly against the wall. I felt its impact a moment later, rippling through the wallpaper like a pebble tossed into a pond.

The hat was directly below me. It matched the description I’d given to the marshals—I’d told them about the black velvet—but I’d never described the wear that had eaten at the edges and roughened certain patches down to the threads. The more I studied it, the more certain I was that it was not the Magician’s hat. I remembered the true hat perfectly. It was as clear as my memory of the cards that the Magician used to lay on the red velvet table—ornate illustrations with medieval fairy-tale flourishes and, oddly, burn marks on the edges—and it was as clear as my memory of the Storyteller’s hands as she knit yarn with her hands and worlds with her mouth.

Stories used to fall from her plump, wrinkled lips, I remembered. She told beautiful stories about princes and princesses in magic castles or half-rat children scurrying through the alleys of a city on adventures. And then there were other tales, like from my visions, where the castles crumbled and the children didn’t leave the alleys alive. I hadn’t liked those tales.

I listened to the agents search the house. Their footsteps were sharp, heavy, and angry. They slammed doors, and I felt the reverberation of each slam. Through the walls, I could feel where each agent was—six of them, guns drawn and wearing bulletproof vests, in every room.

At last they left, and the house felt silent.

The silence sank around me. It permeated the walls. I felt as if the house were sighing, easing into the soil, relaxing. I breathed with it, slow and deep, if one could call it breathing. I sensed the other birds around me, a persistent tingling as if they were extensions of my paper skin. The light from the window moved across me, and I felt it only on one side. My other side was cradled against the wall, nestled tightly as if held by arms. I let the minutes slide away. Somehow, I slept.

Waking, I was certain I was alone, though I couldn’t explain how I knew. The house felt empty. Carefully, I peeled myself away from the wall. The glue hurt as it pulled, and I widened my beak in what would have been a scream if I’d had a voice. My fingers spread, and my wings expanded.

I poured myself into my memory of my body—smooth skin, golden hair, green eyes. I knew I had those correct. The rest … I wasn’t certain how tall I was or what exactly was the shape of my head or my chin. But it didn’t matter. I had my eyes, and that was enough.

I took a step toward the bed, intending to lie down before the vision overtook me.

I didn’t make it.

I am in the wagon.

Bottles clink together. Skulls rattle, their loose jaws opening and shutting as if they still have screams inside them. “Once upon a time,” the Storyteller says.

I clap my hands over my ears, though I know it’s a useless gesture.

She pulls my hands away. I am surprised at her strength. Her arms are so thin that she looks as though she could not bend a piece of straw, much less move my hands against my will, but she pushes them down as if I’d offered no resistance. She looks young today, a waiflike slip of a girl with cornflower-blue eyes and full lips.

“Once upon a time, a girl set out to find her fortune …”

“Where are we going?” I ask.

She grips my arms. “Once upon a time, a girl set out, and she was quick and she was silent and she was lucky and she was strong.”

Her eyes seem to blaze until the rest of the wagon dims. I feel the wagon slow as if it has reached its destination.

“I have done all I can for you and less than I should,” she says. “Someday you’ll forgive me, or you won’t.” I open my mouth to say I don’t understand, but she presses a red scarf over my mouth. Taking a needle, she sews it into my skin.

I cannot scream.

And then I am on the stage beside the Magician. He flips cards onto a table and hums to himself off-key. I cannot see the audience, but I hear them inhale and exhale, nearly as one. The lights above glare on the stage and prick my eyes. I look again at the cards. He has spread them on the velvet—the image of a blindfolded woman, a dead tree beside a tower, an owl with a snake in its talons. “Take one,” he says. I think he talks to me.

I try to reach for a card, but I am bound by ropes that crisscross my body in a pattern as intricate as a spiderweb. Only my fingers can twitch.

A girl walks out of the audience and onto the stage. She takes a card. It is an image of a blindfolded woman, but the eyes are the last thing that the girl loses. I close my eyes and wish I could close my ears too. There is screaming. And then suddenly, there isn’t.

I hear a soft snip. And then another. And another. I feel cool metal brush against my neck. Snip. Snip. The Storyteller is humming softly.

The ropes release and flutter to the ground. I look down. They lie around me in a circle, limp. I am standing before a silver mirror outside the wagon. The tent is behind me.

In the mirror, I look like the dead girl, but I know the mirror lies. My reflection does not have a red scarf sewn over her mouth; I still do. I feel the even stitches tear at my cheeks. In the polished silver, I also see the wagon and the Storyteller with her sewing shears in her hand. She’s middle-aged now, though her eyes are milky white and surrounded by wrinkles. She snips the scarf away from my mouth.

“Seek your fortune,” she says. “And don’t ever look back.”

She shoves me toward the mirror, and I melt into the silver.

Lying on the floor of the bedroom, I looked up at the cracks in the plaster ceiling. Every muscle shook, every nerve quivered, and my skin felt thick and bumpy. I lifted my hand in the air and studied it. It looked smooth and perfect.

I could feel a cramp in my left calf. Stretching my foot, I breathed in deeply. The air smelled like dried roses and lemon with a hint of mildew. I pushed myself up to a sitting position and listened.

Silence.

Even the air in the house was still.

The hat lay against the wall where Malcolm had thrown it—a vivid reminder that I couldn’t stay here. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the cell phone that Malcolm had used to track me to Zach’s and slid it under the bed. Feeling as wobbly as a just-hatched bird, I tottered to the bedroom door. I inched it open and heard nothing from the rest of the house. Moving as silently as I could, I crept through the hallway to the front door. Pressing my back against the wall, I peeked through the window next to the door.

A black car was parked beneath the tree across the street.

Quickly, I stepped back. Of course the house was being watched. I stared at the door for a long moment as if it could solve this for me. If I left through the front door or even any of the windows on the front or side of the house, whoever was in that car would see me.

My bedroom was the only room in the back of the house that had a window, but I knew that window was sealed shut. I retreated to my bedroom anyway and looked outside. The backyard was deliciously empty. It beckoned me. I ran my fingers around the edge of the caulk and thought about breaking the window … but my watcher might hear it.

I could use magic.

But then I’d lose consciousness and be helpless. An agent could find me. I don’t have a choice, I thought. Stay and be caught, or flee and maybe be caught.

I took a deep breath, and walked through the wall.

It slid through me as though I were walking through a dry waterfall. It felt as if dust were sprinkling over my skin and down my throat and into my lungs and into my blood, traveling to every inch of my body. I emerged on the other side of the wall, and the dust dissolved inside me until I felt human again. I sank into the bushes and waited for the vision to claim me.

I didn’t have to wait long.

I am strapped to the seat of a Ferris wheel. Ropes made of the Storyteller’s yarn are wound around my arms and legs and the metal bar in front of me. My hands are tied to the bar. I look out over the carnival. Below, I see floating wisps of light that drift between the tents, and the people milling between them. Their laughter and delighted shrieks rise up, up, up to reach me in the Ferris wheel seat high above.

I wonder if I should be afraid.

The moon is fat in the sky. I see the craters, as crisp as if they were drawn with a fine pencil. The wind is tinged with cold, and it carries the smell of popcorn and fries and, more faintly, the ocean.

Around me, the landscape looks like quiltwork with patches of pale and dark. Strings of light, like the wisps in the carnival, lace through the fields and over the hills like luminescent embroidery. As one strand floats closer, I see that the strings are composed of beads of light and that each bead is moving in a complex dance, always touching the other beads. I think that maybe the light on the fields and in the carnival is alive.

This high, I can only see the tops of the tents: the acrobats’ tent, the wild boys’, the fortune-teller’s, the headless woman’s, the cages of wonders, the dreamland, the contortionists’ … and the tattered red tent, the Magician’s. Our wagon is behind it.

The tents stretch on for up to a mile, and I realize I have never seen it all. This is the closest I have come, high above, and I don’t know why I have been allowed this sight. As the Ferris wheel turns, lowering, I see a crowd has gathered.

Twisting to see the wheel, I glimpse birds tied to each of the spokes. They spin as the wheel turns, their wings changing color as they frantically flap, until at last they burst into flame. The crowd below gasps, and I imagine they are seeing the wheel light up like a sparkler. A few children point. Others applaud. Others are transfixed. And some look frightened.

As more birds catch fire, they brighten the wheel, and I notice that I am not alone in the seat. Tied beside me is a silent shadow. It looks to be a girl, roughly the same height as me. Her face is shadowed, and she doesn’t move.

As the Ferris wheel lowers, lights from the tents spill into our chair.

My companion has a painted porcelain face with glass eyes. She’s dressed in a white pinafore, and has one hand tied to the metal bar. The other rests limply in her lap. She has a crack in her porcelain neck; smoke oozes from the crack. Her legs are unfinished, and cotton spills out of the seams.

I cringe, pulling away from her—from it—and wait for the ride to end.

But it doesn’t.

I sweep past the ground, past the crowd, past the man in a black-and-white harlequin suit who turns a crank at the base of the wheel—the Magician, I think, though it doesn’t look like him. The wheel rises into the air, and the birds continue to burn.

I woke in the bushes. Twigs poked into my flesh. My head lay against the house, and the coolness of the concrete foundation seeped through my hair to my scalp.

It was daytime, either again or still. The sky was gray, and the shadows were flat. It was impossible to tell if it was morning or afternoon.

I’d been lucky. So far, I hadn’t lost the memory of the false hat. Or of Aidan, Topher, and Victoria’s warning. I could have been trapped again and not even known it. I can’t use any more magic, I thought.

Slowly, I crept out of the bushes. Out of the shade, the sun pricked my skin. Humidity thickened the air. A few cicadas buzzed, and I heard a lawnmower in the distance. I need Zach, I thought. He could keep me free—at least until I figured out what to do. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I was sick of having things done to me.

With that thought, I sprinted across the yard. Reaching the fence, I threw myself at it and climbed over. I landed in the neighbor’s backyard, also empty.

No one shouted at me. No one chased me. So I kept running. I leaped over the fence into the next yard. And then the next yard, and the next. I ran through flower gardens and around sheds and play sets. I squeezed through bushes. I scrambled over wood piles. In one yard, I surprised an elderly woman who was kneeling in her garden—I landed in the soft earth of the flowerbed beside her. In another, kids played in a sandbox. But I didn’t slow. The body that the doctors had shaped for me was strong, and I didn’t need to slow. I felt my feet slap the ground and my muscles work and my heart pump and my lungs inflate and deflate, and it felt wonderful to run free after all the visions of ropes and bindings and boxes.

But it didn’t—it couldn’t—last forever.

The string of houses ended in a parking lot for a church. For an instant, I froze, staring at the church, as a memory poured into me. Elsewhere, another time, I’d seen a church beside a graveyard with silver pillars, marble statues, and a woman so still that she might as well have been one of the statues. She’d been wrapped in pale-gray scarves … Was it a real memory? I tried to picture the woman’s face, but she was shrouded in mist.

Shaking myself out of my reverie, I ducked behind a garage. Cars drove by. A sprinkler click-clicked as it rotated. On one of the driveways nearby, three boys played basketball. Everything seemed so peaceful and ordinary that it almost lulled me into feeling safe. But I couldn’t trust that feeling. I kept thinking of the woman in mist.

Across the street was the library surrounded by woods. Creeping around the garage, I hid behind a trimmed hedge. I waited until the road was clear, and then barreled across and plunged between the trees.

Green surrounded me, and I waded through the underbrush and climbed over fallen stone walls as I circled the library. The birds chirped louder, and the leaves rustled—squirrels, I hoped.

Listening to the noises, I thought about the woods in my memory, the one with ancient trees and the homes nestled high in the branches. I still couldn’t remember if I’d been chased through the woods or I’d been one of the ones doing the chasing. Oddly, it felt like both.

Ahead, I saw the rock that Zach had pointed out. Last time, I’d seen a snake on that rock: Victoria, watching me. Everyone always watches me, I thought. At home, Aunt Nicki watched over me. At the library, Patti kept her many eyes on me. Between those places, there was Malcolm. Or Lou. Or Victoria, Topher, and Aidan. Every moment of my life that I could remember, I’d been watched. Except right now, I thought—and it felt so glorious that I wished I could lose myself in the woods forever.

But the woods were finite, squeezed between streets and subdivisions. In only a few minutes, I spotted Zach’s street through the leaves. Keeping low, I climbed over another old stone wall and then peered out through the bushes at his house.

The lawn was pristine, even sterile. A silver car was in the driveway—Zach’s mother. A black car with tinted windows was parked down the street—a marshal. I felt my heart thump in my chest, harder than it had when I’d run through all the backyards. I crept backward, away from the road. At least one agent waited on the street. Others could be nearby.

Maybe this is a mistake, I thought. Maybe I should run. But where to? And then what? I didn’t know this world. I didn’t have money, a place to stay, a way to survive, or a way to stay hidden. Unless I used magic and risked losing myself … Zach will help me.

Half a block from Zach’s house, the street curved out of sight of the agents. Checking in both directions like Malcolm always did, I darted across and dove behind a white fence. I sprinted through the backyards, keeping as far from the street as possible. Lowering myself over yet another fence, I landed in the bushes behind Zach’s house.

For an instant, I didn’t move.

It wasn’t too late to change my mind. I could sneak back to the WitSec house, let myself back inside, and place myself back under the agency’s protection. Except then it would begin again … the visions and the memory loss and the lies and the fear and the hospital and the bulletin board and the hat and the box.

Gathering my courage, I ran toward the enclosed porch. I ducked my head and hunched my shoulders, as if that would keep me from view. Any second, I expected to hear a shout or a shot. I flung open the screen door and threw myself inside.

Inside, the porch had windows and skylights, far too many. I darted for the hallway. Inside at last, I leaned against the wall with the photos. My legs shook. My heart pounded.

There were voices in the kitchen.

I heard Zach’s mother, shrill and strained. “I can’t face it again! I can’t!” And I heard Zach reply, soothing and soft, with a lilt to his voice as if he were coaxing a bird to his hand. I couldn’t make out the words.

And then a man shouted, “Enough!”

Glass shattered.

Inching forward, I peeked into the kitchen.