Conjured (18 page)

Eve sucked in air, and her eyes popped open. Harsh white light filled her vision and flooded her mind as if it wanted to sear away every thought. Her eyes watered as she tried to see shapes in the whiteness. She couldn’t move her arms or legs. She felt straps bite into her skin as she strained. She was lying flat on her back. She smelled antiseptic, and the smell triggered a memory—tubes in her veins, pain flowering over her skin, eyes burning. She heard a steady beep, shrill and insistent.

Hospital
, she thought.

She remembered in a rush: The tubes. The pain. The voices. The dreams. The way her muscles had seemed to
stretch until they snapped, the way her skin had felt peeled from her body like the skin of an apple, the way her blood had seemed to burn through her veins as if it were gasoline that had been lit on fire.

Last time, they had taken her old body and reshaped it into this new body, this stranger’s body. She had woken with only emptiness inside.

No!
Eve thought.

She couldn’t lose herself again.

She tried to flail, but the straps held her down. She arched her back, and alarms began to wail. She heard footsteps race toward the hospital room.

Out!
she thought. Out through the windows. Out into the world. Out. Away. Far away and never come back. Never be found. Never be unsafe. Never be lost. Never be broken again. She strained to the side and threw her magic at the hospital bed bars, the straps that held her, and at the windows with the drawn shades.

All the windows in the room shattered at once.

Darkness claimed her again.

I am sitting in the wagon, and the Storyteller’s arm is around me. “Shh, shh,” she tells me. “Hush.” She strokes my hair. “It won’t hurt. Not one bit.”

The Storyteller smells of Vaseline and greasepaint. Her cheeks have been painted with red circles, and a clown’s smile stretches over her real lips. The paint has cracked where her skin is wrinkled
.
I lean against her and let her comfort me, a child in a mother’s arms
.

I think perhaps I sleep
.

When I wake, she is gone
.

The Magician squats in front of me. He doesn’t wear his felt hat or his cape or stage makeup, and without them, he seems costumed—as if the ordinary pants and shirt of an ordinary man were a disguise
.

I shrink away, and feel the wood slats of the wagon at my back. Behind him, the scarves from his magic act are strung on a line of silk ribbon, as if they were laundry drying. Between each jewel-colored scarf is the wing of a dove, pinned to the ribbon. On the wagon wall, he has skulls as well, bird skulls and mice and snakes. He’s painted them in bright carnival colors. The boxes are stacked in a corner, all empty. I know I am looking everywhere but at him, and I know it will not matter in the end
.

He smiles at me
.

“
Come now,” he says. His voice is soft, soothing, even beautiful. “Whisper sweet nothings to me.”

I cannot run
.

He leans close. His lips are nearly touching mine
.

I scream, and he steals my breath
.

Eve placed a book on the shelf.

She stared at her hands, at the book, at the shelf.

She wasn’t in the hospital. She wasn’t strapped down. She wasn’t in a wagon or a box or a carnival tent. Eve pushed the book into its slot and looked down. She stood on a step stool. A book cart was next to her. It was half-full of books.

She didn’t want to turn around. She didn’t know what she’d see, what had changed, what she’d forgotten this time. Softly, she called, “Zach?”

He might not be here. She might have lost him; he might be only a memory. Or maybe he was never real at all. Maybe none of this was. Maybe she was still strapped to the hospital bed, and this library, this city, this world was only a vision. She’d never left the hospital, and Malcolm, Aunt Nicki, Aidan, and Zach were all a trick of her mind. Or she was trapped in a box on a string in a wagon, and even the hospital was false. Or she was Victoria’s sister—the antlered girl, as the mirror had shown—and she was dead.

Eve didn’t realize she’d crouched down, but she was hugging her knees and rocking back and forth on the library stool like a demented bird on a perch.

“Eve?” a voice asked.

Zach.

She heard his footsteps and then felt his hand on her arm. He knelt beside her. She leaned against him and breathed in the smell of him. He cradled her against his shoulder and stroked her hair with one hand. His fingers twisted in her hair, and she thought of the Storyteller. She shuddered. “Eve, are you okay?” he asked.

She turned and touched his face.
He’s real
, she thought. Or at least he was real enough that it didn’t matter. She let her fingers rove over his face and neck. She felt his breath rise and fall in his chest.

“Eve, you’re freaking me out. Talk to me.”

“I went to your house, and we made it rain.” Eve thought of rain pummeling the manicured lawn and patio stones, and then she thought of rain seeping through a carnival tent at night and of rain breaking through a canopy of leaves and making a campfire hiss and spit. “It rained on your lawn and on the street. I saw a black car through the rain, and a man went to your door. What happened next?”

She felt him tense through his shirt. “Eve … I told you everything. I swear. I didn’t keep anything from you. And you know I wouldn’t lie.”

“Please … Just humor me.” She looked at him and put every ounce of pleading in her eyes.
Don’t ask me why
, she thought.
Just tell me
.

Zach studied her for an instant and then adopted his usual light tone. “In retrospect, and only in retrospect, it was kind of cool. Stark interrogation room. One-way mirror. Hostile balding guy in suspenders, straight out of a cable-TV cop show …”

“Lou,” she whispered. Malcolm had lied. She felt herself start to tremble. Her insides were a jumbled knot. She’d let herself trust Malcolm. She wasn’t sure when she’d decided to trust him. It must have crept up gradually, but she’d believed him, and now … It was hard to breathe. Her mind kept repeating:
He lied to me
.

“Lou,” Zach echoed. Gently, as if he were talking to a feral cat, he said, “And then you know what happened. You were the cause.”

“I was?” She couldn’t seem to do more than whisper. Her throat felt locked.

“Your aunt called, said she’d talked to you, and boom, the interrogation ended. I was led to a room with a bed and a bathroom and left alone. Next morning, I was briefed on the fact that your safety depended on my secrecy, which was all very cryptically worded. I don’t know what they told my parents, but I was brought home, and everyone acted like nothing had ever happened.”

“And then?” Eve asked.

“And then …” Zach stroked her hair again. “You were missing for two days. The others said you fainted in Patti’s office during the earthquake.”

“Patti! Is she okay?”

“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t she be?”

Eve sagged against him. “What happened next?”

“You showed up at normal work time with more cryptic comments. Have you changed your mind about explaining? Because an explanation would be rather awesome.”

Lie
, Malcolm had told her before he’d lied to her. She opened her mouth to deflect Zach’s questions, but no words came out. She slumped on the stool, against Zach. She couldn’t keep doing this, lying to everyone, pretending she was okay when she was in fact splintering so badly that she was only shards of a person. “I don’t remember,” she said, barely a whisper.

“Hey, if you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay—”

She twisted to look him full in the face and enunciated clearly and loudly, “I don’t remember anything since that day.” At least she didn’t remember anything except for lying strapped to a hospital bed with tubes and machines and lights … or lying strapped to a bench in a wagon with wind chimes of magic boxes and old bones.

He tried to grin, as if wanting to believe she was joking. “Even the day in the basement stacks with the plants …” His smile faded. “You’re serious. Whoa. Really? Eve, that was two weeks ago.
Two weeks
.” His arms tightened around her. “You need a doctor. A hospital.”

Her fingers dug into his arm. “No!” She fought to control her breathing. “No hospital. No doctors. Doctors already know. I … I had surgery, and I woke with no memory of who I was or where I was from or why I was there.” She thought of the thick forest, of the wagon, of the meadow by a lake. “Since
then, I’ve had these memory losses. In the middle of shelving a book or drinking a glass of juice … I lose hours, sometimes days, even weeks. Maybe months. I don’t know.”

Zach’s eyes were wide. “Do the doctors have an explanation?”

“I think … I think maybe the doctors caused it. Something went wrong in the surgery. I came out … wrong. When other people use magic, they’re fine. When you use my magic, you’re fine. But when I use my magic, I black out and have these nightmares—visions, I call them—and sometimes I wake from them and I talk and walk and live, and then it’s suddenly all erased, everything I did or saw or thought since the vision.”

He continued to stare at her, blinked twice as if he were processing her words, and then said, “Like a computer crash?”

“I don’t—”

“Your brain resets to the last restore point.”

Eve didn’t know what that meant.

“You’re not saving properly.”

She shook her head. “What—?”

“Your magic is screwing up the way your brain transfers short-term memories to long-term memory.” He leaned toward her, his voice eager as he explained his theory. “They’re stored in different ways in different parts of the brain, and all this … stuff has to happen for a memory to move from the hippocampus to the temporal lobe. Or maybe it’s lobe to hippocampus. Anyway, your magic must be messing that up.”

He understood! Impossibly, amazingly, he believed her
and understood, even if she didn’t understand his explanation. “Malcolm said my magic makes my mind unstable.”

“So when your brain finally glitches, you lose everything back to before the memory transfer was messed up. Am I right?”

“I guess … Yes.”

He rocked back on his heels and stared at her again. “Shit. That sucks.”

Despite herself, despite it all, Eve laughed. It was a hysterical laugh that shook her so hard that she had to clutch Zach to keep from feeling that she was going to shake apart. Tears pricked her eyes. “Yes, exactly.”

He waited while she shook and laughed. Gulping in air, she settled again in his arms. He resumed stroking her hair. She lay against his shoulder. “You never talk about your past,” Zach said. “Ever. I thought … There are reasons not to talk about the past. I thought you had those kinds of reasons. How far back do you remember?”

“Living with my aunt. Starting work here. But then … it’s patches.”

“There has to be an explanation for what you’re experiencing. Long-term amnesia plus problems with short-term memory. Sounds like a side effect of a stroke. Or you could have been injured. You were hurt in a car accident or mountain climbing or skydiving or … Wow, Eve.” Releasing her, he rocked backward on his heels and ran his hands through his hair. “All this time … you’ve been hiding this from me, from everyone?”

She felt a lump in her throat, and she had to look away from him. Without his arms around her, her skin prickled, cold. She wrapped her own arms around herself.

“You’re really brave,” Zach said.

Another laugh burst out of her lips, still shrill.

“I’m serious. I can’t imagine …”

She heard footsteps. Both of them froze. A patron wandered into the aisle. He browsed through two shelves, selected a book, and then left. Eve listened to his footsteps recede, soft on the carpet.

Zach drew Eve close again and resumed stroking her hair, a little faster and harder than was soothing. “Listen, it will be okay.”

“You don’t know that.” Eve wanted to tell him what Malcolm had said—about how the unnamed “he” cut his victims into pieces. And how each piece was kept in a box. And how she saw those boxes in her visions. And how, in her visions, she’d been inside one, shrunken and trapped, in a box that stank of the old urine of other victims. And how she’d seen one of the boxes on Patti’s desk in this very library … How had it gotten here? Was the Magician here?
Am I safe?
She pushed down a burst of panic. The WitSec agents wouldn’t have brought her back to the library if it wasn’t safe, she told herself. She’d still be in the agency or the hospital.

“Well, no, I don’t know, but I think that’s what you’re supposed to say in situations like these. Not that I’ve ever been in a situation like this.” He was trying to sound light, Eve could tell, but his voice sounded strained instead.

Another patron poked his head into their aisle. He retreated with apologies when he saw Eve and Zach intertwined. Eve listened for more footsteps.

Zach stood up and pulled Eve to her feet. “It
will
be okay. Because I said so. And I don’t lie.” He placed his hands on her shoulders so she’d look directly into his eyes. “You know, the moment I saw you, I said to myself—because all the great people talk to themselves, of course—I said, ‘Zach, you have to meet that lovely lady, because she will make your life extraordinary.’ I was not wrong.” He took a deep breath and tried to smile. “I’m going to help you remember.”