Conjured (24 page)

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.