Conjured (2 page)

Lying on the bed, Eve sucked in air. Her hands flew to her neck. Smooth skin. She swallowed and felt her throat throb as if she had screamed it raw.

The birds were on the floor, lifeless as paper.

She heard a knock on the bedroom door. “Food’s ready, if you’re hungry.” It was Aunt Nicki. “Sandwiches. Microwave soup.”

Eve jumped up and scooped the paper birds off the floor. They lay limp in her hands with feathers spread and beaks open. She shoved them into a dresser drawer just as the doorknob turned.

Aunt Nicki stuck her head into the room. “You okay?”

Eve nodded. Leaning against the dresser, she wet her lips and wondered if she could speak.
Worst vision yet
, she thought.

The woman sighed. “This is the part where I say something all touchy-feely about how it’s all going to be okay and this will feel like home in no time and you have a wonderful opportunity to reinvent yourself and your life …”

“You can skip that speech if you want,” Eve said. Her throat felt rough, as if she’d swallowed sand. She licked her lips again.

“Awesome,” Aunt Nicki said. “Come out and eat so you don’t faint.”

Eve’s eyes slid to the bed. Anyone could see she’d been lying there. She didn’t know if Aunt Nicki noticed. “In a minute, okay?”

Aunt Nicki closed the door.

Eve sagged. After a moment, she recovered and peeked in the dresser drawer at the limp birds. The branches in the wallpaper were bare now, and the leaves fanned out against an empty blue sky. “Sorry,” she whispered to the birds. She wondered if they’d liked their taste of freedom or if they’d been scared. She shut the drawer again, gently this time.

Eve left the bedroom before Aunt Nicki could return to fetch her. She found the two agents in a tiny kitchen. They sat at a table squeezed between the refrigerator and a wall.

“Ham, chicken, or turkey?” Aunt Nicki asked without looking at Eve. She pointed to bags of cold cuts on the kitchen table. “Or do you want to be a vegetarian?”

Eve selected a roll and picked at the crust. She sat at the table, a little closer to both of them than she liked, but there wasn’t much choice.

“Vegetarians don’t eat meat,” Malcolm explained. “No hamburgers. No sausage. No steak. No bacon. No pepperoni.” He helped himself to a stack of ham slices and shoved them into a roll. “Instead, they eat a lot of beans. Also, fruit. This is a kiwi, by the way.” He speared a slice of green fruit with a fork and ate it.

He was being kind again, acting as if he could heal the holes inside her if only he were helpful enough, and Eve had to look away, studying the kitchen instead of him. The kitchen
was sparse but clean. The yellow walls were nice. The counter had been scoured bare in spots. Not all of the cabinets hung straight. The lace curtains drooped over closed shades. She interrupted a discussion of the pros and cons of vegetarianism to ask, “Can we open the shades?”

Malcolm and Aunt Nicki exchanged looks.

“We could,” Malcolm said slowly.

“You said I’d be safe here,” Eve said.

Both of them nodded. “So long as you follow the rules,” Aunt Nicki said. “No witness who followed the rules has ever been harmed in the history of the witness protection program.”

Malcolm studied her with narrowed eyes. “Repeat the rules.”

Eve put down her roll. The crumbs felt like dry dust in her mouth. “No contact with anyone I used to know. No phone calls. No letters. No smoke signals. And if telepathy miraculously becomes possible, no telepathy either.”

“And?” he prompted.

“Don’t tell anyone about my past,” Eve said.

“And?”

“Don’t discuss the case.”

Malcolm nodded. “Good.”

Eve crossed to the window and raised the shades. She looked outside at the brown lawn with the crooked tree, the black agency car with the tinted windows, and the dull gray sky.

“Feel better?” Aunt Nicki asked.

Eve didn’t answer.

445 … 446 … 447 …
Eve counted the cracks in the plaster ceiling as she lay in bed and waited for dawn.
451 … 452 …
Shadows clung to all the furniture. Occasionally, a car’s headlights swept across the room, erasing the shadows, but then they returned, smothering the room. She listened to the clang and snap of the pipes in the walls and thought of hands playing the pipes as if the heating system were a carnival organ, like the one that played in her visions.

492 … 493 …

Slowly, the shadows in the room faded from black to slate, then from slate to dove gray. The branches in the wallpaper still looked bare and bereft without their birds.

Eve heard a door open and close, and then footsteps. She counted them instead of the cracks … ten steps between Aunt Nicki’s room and the bathroom. Another door creaked open and shut, and then she heard the water
whoosh
on in the shower. This sent the pipes clanking and rattling in the walls
so loudly that Eve got out of bed and placed her hands flat on the walls to feel as well as hear the shaking. She felt like that inside—as if she were rattling, clanging and clanking and snapping like the pipes.

She waited until the sound of the shower ceased, and then she found a set of clothes in one of the dresser drawers. Malcolm had left them for her—socks, underwear, bra, jeans, and a T-shirt. She touched the cotton T-shirt to her cheek. He’d asked her in the agency, the day before they came here, what colors she liked. She’d picked a few at random. These shirts were those colors. Poking her head outside her room, she checked the hall. Aunt Nicki had already returned to her bedroom. The bathroom door was open. Eve darted inside and slid the lock.

Staring at the lock, she started to shake. She held her hands in front of her, and they trembled. Inside
and
out, she was like the water pipes.

She unlocked the door.

That was better.

Her ribs loosened, and she could breathe deeply again. She dumped the clothes in a corner, used the toilet, and brushed her teeth. She kept her eyes firmly on the sink and did not look up at the mirror until after she had spat. Then she steeled herself …
Black-brown eyes. Straw-yellow hair. Pink lips. Round face
. Fixing the image of herself firmly in her mind, she raised her eyes to see her reflection.

She almost looked familiar this time. She’d forgotten the shape of her chin and that her eyebrows were straw-yellow too. Also, the length of her eyelashes.

Eve showered and tried not to look at her body too much. It kept surprising her too. She couldn’t keep it all in her head: her toes with the freshly trimmed toenails, the goldenness of her skin, the shape of her knees, and the smoothness of her hands. She studied her hands in the shower. The flesh on her fingertips was puckering from the water, and her skin felt soft and squishy, waterlogged. She wondered if she’d ever be used to this flesh.

The doctors had said she would. They’d said the changes were all cosmetic, adjustments so she wouldn’t stand out, so she wouldn’t be noticed by those who shouldn’t notice. A necessary precaution, given that the suspect in her case had not yet been caught. Since she couldn’t remember what she looked like before, she couldn’t compare. It all felt new, and it all felt as changeable as clothes.

She dried herself and dressed. As the steam in the mirror faded, it tossed bits of her reflection back at her. Hair. Shoulder. Cheek. In a clear corner of the mirror, her eyes stared back at her, and she touched the image and then touched next to her eyes. “You should be green,” she said, suddenly certain. “Be green.”

She heard a rushing in her ears as black-brown drained out of the eyes in the mirror. Green infused the irises, spreading out from the pupils.

And then her legs folded underneath her.

I feel a brush in my hair
.

“It always begins with ‘once upon a time,’ my dear. That is how
it is, even if ‘once upon a time’ is now.” Gnarled hands separate the strands of my hair and wind them around knuckles. “A witch … for of course there was a witch. There always is, isn’t there? She had stars in her eyes and dust in her hair. She heard the sounds of the forest when she moved and the ocean when she spoke.” The Storyteller tilts my chin up. “Such pretty eyes. Such a pretty, pretty girl.”

The Storyteller is not pretty. Her face is shrunken in wrinkles, as if her skin were a squeezed dishrag. Her eyes are milky red, clouding out whatever their true color was. Her knuckles on the hand that holds my chin are knobs that curl her fingers. But she smiles at me, and it is like sunshine
.

“There’s a girl too,” she says, “in a tower, and it doesn’t matter whether she wakes or sleeps, for she’s locked inside with a world laid out before her that she cannot touch.”

She threads a piece of yarn through a needle. It’s straw-yellow yarn
.

“And so the girl sleeps and dreams wonderful dreams of horses in sea foam and birds that carry her to the tallest mountain. Lovely, lovely dreams of a pretty, pretty girl.”

Her fingers wrap around my wrist, and she smiles at me
.

Then she plunges the sewing needle into my arm
.

Footsteps echoed from outside in the hall. “Eve, is everything all right?” Aunt Nicki called through the door.

Splayed on the floor, Eve clutched the wet towel against her chest. She hugged it tight as she concentrated on breathing. In, out. In, out. In …

The doorknob twisted.

Eve tried to find her voice to answer. “F-fine.”

The doorknob stopped.

“Just … slipped. I slipped. I’m fine.” Eve rubbed her arms. Goose bumps prickled her skin. Everything ached. She winced as she touched her elbow. She must have hit it hard.

“Come to the kitchen when you’re done,” Aunt Nicki said. “We need to talk about what you’re going to do while you’re here.” Footsteps retreated from the door. Eve counted them—nine to the kitchen—and then pried herself off the floor. She used the sink to pull herself up and peered into the mirror.

Green eyes stared back at her.

“Such pretty eyes,” she whispered, touching her face. Shuddering, she backed away from the mirror. She staggered out of the bathroom. By the time she reached the kitchen (nine steps later), she felt steadier. Taking a deep breath, she entered.

Aunt Nicki stood in front of a toaster. She was dropping bread into the slots. “Orange juice is in the fridge,” she said without looking at Eve. “That’s a typical breakfast drink. You aren’t old enough for coffee.”

Eve nodded. She didn’t bother to question the statement, not without Malcolm here. She didn’t think Aunt Nicki would be so patient with explanations. Aunt Nicki hadn’t even turned around, not to greet her, not even to notice her eyes.
I should have changed them back
, she thought. But green … felt right.

The shade was up again, or still, in the kitchen, and she was drawn to the window. Outside was the same matte gray as yesterday. For an instant, she thought that maybe it was
still yesterday and she’d imagined the dark, silent night with the sounds of cars and the cold streetlight outside her window. But no, she could feel the damp hair on her neck from her shower, and her elbow ached from the fall.

“Malcolm isn’t here,” Eve said. She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that it was true. She didn’t hear any other sounds in the house. It was just the two of them, squeezed into the cramped kitchen. She’d thought she would like it with fewer agents around, but she didn’t. It made the house feel tight around her, as if it had shrunk in the night.

She shouldn’t miss him. Just because he’d chosen shirts in her favorite colors. Just because he explained seat belts and cameras and pizza and television. Just because she knew him better than anyone else she could remember …

“He’ll be here for you any minute,” Aunt Nicki said. With a butter knife, she gestured at a stack of papers on the table. “Read those. You need to choose one.”

Eve sat down in one of the chairs. It swayed under her, and she planted her feet on the ground, though she wasn’t sure how that would help her from falling if the chair decided to break. She picked up the papers and read “Job Description” at the top and “Duties and Requirements” underneath. Each sheet followed the same format. “A job?”