Conjured

Chapter Twenty-Four

The magician drew chalk circles on the floor of the wagon. He hummed to himself as he added symbols and runes. Dully, the doll watched.

He rocked back on his heels and studied his work.

The doll looked away. She counted the mirrors inlaid in the wall. Each button-size mirror reflected a part of a bird skull or a corner of a box, or a piece of the Magician himself—an elbow in one, a swirl of cloak in another, a bit of his beard in a third.

She heard the click of a clasp and looked back at the Magician. He held one box in his hand. The lid popped open, and the sides fell apart. Zach tumbled out onto the floor. He moaned as the Magician trussed him in bloodstained yarn.

“Eve, that was …” Zach stopped as he saw the chalk circle. His eyes widened, and he struggled against the yarn. “No! Are you going to kill me? Eve, is it me next?”

The Magician dragged him to his usual cot and tied him to it. Zach twisted and flopped. “Hush,” the Magician said. “I don’t harvest the powerless.”

Zach exhaled, and then his breath caught. “But it is someone. You’re going to kill someone. Here. Now. I can’t be here. I can’t watch this. Please, put me back in the box!” His voice rose higher, panic-infused. The Magician tightened the yarn. “Eve … you have to stop this!” Zach said. “Make him stop.”

The doll looked away. Strands of her yarn hair fell over her face, and she wished it could hide her, block her sight. She wished her eyes would close.

“She cannot,” the Magician said. “She must breathe in the last dying breath. There is no other way to harvest the power. If I do it, the magic will fade and be wasted. If she does it, the magic lasts. It’s simply a fact.” He placed another box in the center of the circle. He unhooked the clasp, and the sides fell open. Aidan huddled on the floor, curled into a ball, holding his knees to his chest.

“You!” Zach said.

Instantly, Aidan vanished.

The Magician laughed. “Splendid!”

Aidan reappeared by the door.

He vanished again and reappeared next to Zach. Aidan’s hand clapped on Zach’s arm. He disappeared with him, and then reappeared in the same spot. The doll heard the air pop and felt it whoosh through the wagon.

He tried again. And again.

The Magician’s eyes were alight. “We don’t have this in our repertoire. Such strength! Oh my dear …” His eyes dimmed as if he’d suddenly remembered that the Storyteller was gone. With a sigh, he leaned in toward the doll and sucked in a breath. When Aidan charged at him, he deflected him with a wave of his hand. The Storyteller’s leftover yarn then wrapped around Aidan’s body. “She would have found you to be an exquisite addition. In fact … you do look familiar. You aren’t from this world, are you, boy? We hunted you once before.”

“Talk to me, library boy,” Aidan said. “Why can’t I pop out of here?”

“I’m guessing the wagon functions like the boxes. Probably made of the same material. Magic can’t penetrate it—which means no teleporting out. Or blasting out. Or walking through walls. Please tell me you brought the cavalry.”

“Very observant,” the Magician said to Zach. To Aidan he said, “I’m sorry to tell you, but escape won’t be possible. Please know that your magic will be put to good use.”

“A fleet of marshals and law enforcement from multiple worlds is waiting to descend on this wagon,” Aidan said. “Surrender yourself, and it’s possible they’ll show you some leniency. If not … you’re surrounded. Escape won’t be possible for you either.”

“It will be, once I have your magic.” The Magician spoke gently, as if to a child.

“If I can’t teleport from within this box, then neither can you,” Aidan said. “You’ll be arrested as soon as you step outside. Do yourself a favor, and turn yourself in.”

The Magician sucked in another breath from the doll’s mouth, and then he transformed himself into an identical match to Aidan, right down to the cocky smile. “They won’t arrest you.” He then transformed himself back.

Aidan vanished and reappeared again, still bound in yarn. He struggled at the yarn, straining against it. But the threads did not even stretch. The doll leaned her head against the wall and wished she could change into stone and never feel again … but it wouldn’t work. She’d still feel. She didn’t think it would even help to die. The Magician could still use an inert doll, and besides, she wasn’t truly alive to begin with.

“Where’s Eve?” Aidan asked.

The Magician didn’t answer. He was absorbed in preparing the chalk symbols.

“Behind you,” Zach said.

“The freaky doll?” He twisted to look at the doll, and he struggled harder. “He changed her into that? Eve? Eve, is that you?”

“He changed me back to who … what … I am,” the doll said. “Eve doesn’t exist. She never existed. I’m not her. I’m not real.” Silently, she added, I don’t deserve to be real.

“You are Eve,” Zach said. “You may have started like this, but you became Eve!” The doll shook her head, lolling it on her limp neck. That had been a dream, a delusion. This was her reality. “Remember the day we first met? I made a bad apple joke. I told you I wanted to kiss you. You sat in the lobby and read books I picked out for you. Remember the everything bagel?”

The Magician flicked his hand, and Aidan was knocked off his feet. The yarn wrapped tighter, shackling him to the floor in the center of the chalk circle. He vanished and reappeared again.

“Tell her memories,” Zach told him. “Remind her that she’s real. First time you kissed. The moment when you knew she was perfect for you, when you knew you didn’t ever want to be anywhere else but with her, when you knew she was your escape and your salvation and your chance at something more.”

“I don’t …,” Aidan said. “I can’t …”

“She’s the one with the magic. Your life depends on her,” Zach said. “This is not the time to be squeamish about … what did you call it? Oh, yes … ‘sappy maudlin mush.’ Help her remember she matters!”

Aidan disappeared and reappeared behind the Magician. He tried to knock into him, but the Magician was prepared. Sidestepping Aidan, the Magician levitated the ritual knife to Aidan’s throat.

Aidan didn’t move. “I don’t have any memories because I lied. We were never together. I knew she’d lost her memories. I manufactured a relationship so she’d trust me.”

The doll swiveled her head to stare at him.

“Okay, that’s the opposite of helpful. Wait … really? It was only me?” Zach’s face lightened. “Eve, listen to me. What we had was real. You care about me. You know you do! I’d be a rotten hostage if you didn’t care. You have feelings. You are real!”

She now stared at Zach. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t help it.

“You’ve made yourself real! Maybe you didn’t start out that way. Maybe you weren’t born. Maybe your childhood was crap. Well, guess what? My childhood was crap too. After Sophie died … I was just someone else to blame, another person who wasn’t watching, who wasn’t careful enough, never mind that I was a kid too. My existence was only a reminder of her absence. But it doesn’t matter what happened in the past or what other people think of you in the present. What matters is who you are. And you … you’re amazing, Eve! You created yourself! He didn’t make you. You did it! You formed yourself! And that’s extraordinary.”

The doll couldn’t stop staring at Zach. He doesn’t lie, she thought.

“Enough,” the Magician said. He sucked in the doll’s breath, and the doll felt herself rise into the air. She floated to the circle and was lowered into the center. Knife still at Aidan’s throat, the Magician levitated him as well, laying him near the doll.

“Eve, listen to me,” Zach said. “The roses in the bookshelves, the painting with the real water, the books that flew around us, the way we flew … Remember how it felt.” She did remember. She’d loved the way it felt with their arms around each other, rising into the air. That had been real. What she’d felt … what I’d felt had been real.

“I said, enough.” The Magician flicked his hand toward Zach, and a scrap of cloth plastered itself over his mouth, silencing him. But it didn’t block Zach’s eyes. Zach was looking at me exactly the same way he had when I wore the body of a beautiful human girl, instead of a cloth face with green marble eyes. He was looking at me as if he saw me, all of me, as if I were real and whole and unbroken. I saw myself through his eyes.

I saw me.

As the Magician knelt beside Aidan, I said, “You must miss her. You must feel some sadness, some regret, some human emotion. I do. I miss her.”

He positioned Aidan’s body within the chalk circle.

I continued. “I miss the way she used to brush my hair, strand by strand, while she told me stories. I miss how she’d make the marionettes dance. Do you remember our life together? We lived in a forest for a time under the trees, and we watched the acrobats swing and twist in the air. And we lived on a pier in a harbor. You’d use the magic in me for beautiful things: to change both of you into seabirds and fly out over the waves, to make the rain dance as it fell, to grow hundreds of roses in an instant … Your shows were pure joy, and your audiences loved you, but your performances weren’t for them. Every one you did, every bit of stolen magic you used, was for her; everything was always for her—to make her happy and to keep her safe. Because of how she made you feel. Safe. Strong. Magical.”

He wasn’t listening.

He had to listen.

I thought of the Storyteller—how she could command the full attention of any audience with the tone of her voice. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who was afraid.” I said it in the way the Storyteller would say it, drawing on her memories of how to weave a tale. “He was afraid of dying, of hurting, of being weak, of being powerless, of being helpless, of failing, of humiliating himself, of being alone, of growing old, of never being safe … and the fear ate him inside.”

The Magician drew the knife, but he moved more slowly, as if the air had thickened.

“And once upon a time, this boy met a girl who knew how to steal strength from others as they died. But though the boy and girl stole the magic, the magic wouldn’t stay inside them. So the girl, who had become a woman, knitted a doll to hold the magic. This doll was made of cloth for skin, button eyes, thread for her mouth, and yarn for her hair. At first, the doll was like all other dolls, limp and lifeless. But as the magic poured into her, she began to wake up. She learned to breathe. She learned to see. She learned to hear. One day, she learned to move. Another, she learned to speak. And last, she learned to think and very, very slowly to feel. And while this happened, you were learning not to feel. With each death, you died a little inside, until you forgot why you were doing this—that it was for her, to be with her, to be alive with her, to be safe with her and special for her. And she was doing it for you, to be together without fear. She sent me away to protect you. She tried to kill me so you could be together …”

The Magician was crying.

“But you killed her instead.”

The knife slipped from his fingers and clattered on the floor of the wagon. The Magician dropped his face into his hands.

Seizing the moment, Aidan flailed his body. His forehead touched mine, and with a pop, we vanished. We reappeared beside Zach. Leaning forward, I pressed my embroidered lips against Zach’s and breathed all the magic I could into him.

The yarn that bound us dissolved into smoke that swirled through the wagon.

Free, I sprang to my shaky cloth feet and plucked an empty box off the string. I opened the lid. Using magic, Zach sent the box sailing toward the Magician.

As the Magician raised his tear-streaked face, the open box hit him in the chest.

He vanished inside it.