Conjured (29 page)

“Yes,” I said.

Again, we walked through the silver—and we walked out
into a city plaza made of gray paving stones. Skyscrapers towered around us. Again, I knew this place. I had been carried through here at night. That time, we had been the ones being chased. “We can’t stay here either,” I said.

A trio of people strode toward us. They wore matching blue uniforms. Their faces were streaked with fur and scales, and they had batons at their hips.

“But the carnival could be …” His voice died as he saw a woman with wings on her back. Another had antlers on his head. And still others … each a medley of human and animal. At last I saw him notice the trio of officials closing in on us. “Guess it’s moved on.”

Zach and I scrambled back into the silver. I grasped for another memory—and I thought of a pier, the Ferris wheel rising high above the water, kids laughing as loud as gulls.

The mirror melted around us, and we emerged beside an ocean. Or not an ocean. A harbor. Sailboats were parked in their slips, their white hulls gleaming. Fishing boats with crates and ropes and cranes with nets were tied to a dock. Between them, a woman with green skin hauled herself out of the water to bask on a buoy.

“This looks nicer,” Zach observed.

Several brick buildings jutted out onto piers. The wood pillars supporting them were coated in green threads and roughened with barnacles. A glass sculpture reflected the harbor on its surface. Above, the sky was brilliant blue.

“Eve, look.” Zach pointed behind me.

I turned and saw another dock. On it, tent posts without tents rose into the air, like skeletons without flesh. At its tip, a
Ferris wheel was empty and motionless. A fence cut across the entrance to the dock. The fence was covered in photos and little pieces of paper, stuck into the links. Below the photos was a pile of wilted flowers, melted candles, and stacks of seashells.

I was walking toward the dock before I even decided to move, and then I was running. Skirting the fence, I entered the abandoned carnival. Gulls circled overhead, and water lapped at the pillars of the dock, but other than that, it was silent. I remembered this place flooded with people—cries of laughter, the call of the barkers, the music of the carousel.

A few of the rides remained, only the shell of a balloon ride that had lifted people to a floating roller coaster made out of clouds. The coaster was gone, swept away by the wind, but the balloon baskets and the ropes remained. The baskets were covered in graffiti.

I walked to an empty booth. There had been a pyramid of brightly colored balls at this booth that sang as they flew through the air. I remembered the face of the man who had run this game. He’d had a beard and sunken eyes. I didn’t remember his name. I didn’t know if I’d ever known it.

Zach stood behind me. “What happened? The other sites were empty. Why did they leave all this behind here?”

I didn’t know. For the first time, I was worried about the Storyteller and the Magician, which was crazy—they were at the heart of my nightmares. “I need to find them.”

“We,” Zach corrected. “There’s a term for the first person plural. Not for the second person plural, unfortunately. Closest
we have for that is ‘you guys,’ which sounds like 1980s New Jersey, or ‘y’all,’ which sounds too affected southern for anyone who isn’t really southern.”

Gulls cawed at one another. One dove sharply down, snatched a piece of paper from the chain-link fence, and rose back up to the sky. I continued through the abandoned carnival until I found a darkened patch on the wood dock that matched the size of the wagon.

“I think we came here often.” I looked out over the water and saw peaks—they weren’t buoys or islands. They were the tips of underwater buildings. The city extended out under the harbor. I used to watch the selkies swim. “It was part of our regular circuit. But sometimes we’d do extra performances.”

It shouldn’t have been abandoned like this. It should have been dismantled and packed in wagons. No one should have defaced our site. And I started moving, fast, toward the fence and the papers that the gull had been pecking, certain that it would hold a clue. Zach jogged after me. I tugged one of the photos through the link and stared at it. A teenage girl with light-green skin and brilliant-blue hair pinned by shells …

“Who died?” Zach asked.

I looked at him.

“It’s a memorial. At least, it looks like one.”

I dropped the photo as if it had burned me. I didn’t know that girl. She wasn’t in my memories, and her photo wasn’t on Malcolm’s tablet.

“He’s killing again,” I said.

I knelt behind the memorial on the carnival side of the fence.

“He must have been careless,” I said. “Her death must have been traced to the carnival. They must have all fled.” The flowers were half wilted, their blossoms closed or drooped. Leaves hung limp on the stems. A few were roses, their petals wide open. Others were flowers that I didn’t recognize, tight clumps of purple petals with spikes of white in their hearts and teacup-like delicate blooms of pale yellow.

“You don’t know any of that for certain,” Zach said. “She could have fallen from the Ferris wheel or choked to death on popcorn or—”

“Aunt Nicki and Malcolm said that he’d started again. If it’s true, then we’re walking straight into the danger that they tried so hard to protect me from.”

I felt his hand on my shoulder, a comforting weight. “If it’s true, then he doesn’t stand a chance against you,” Zach
said. “Together, we wield more power than a dozen superheroes.”

I faced the memorial again, all the notes and the photos. One wreath of flowers had the word “sister” pinned to it. Another said “beloved daughter.” I thought of the antlered girl, Victoria’s sister, and all the other faces on the bulletin board. “Do you really think I can stop him?”

“Yes. And I think Lou wants you to.”

“
I
want to.” As I said it, it felt right.

“I know.” He squeezed my hand, and I looked at him. He didn’t look resigned or afraid or angry. He looked … proud and pleased. I wondered if he’d had this in mind all along … if he’d come for that reason … if the agency had encouraged him to come or even forced him. I wondered if he was manipulating me too, and then I pushed that thought down as hard as I could. It was
my
idea. If I discovered that my past held horrors, then I’d try to end them.

A voice came from the other side of the dock. “Hey, what are you kids doing?”

I spun, looking for the speaker.

“Just paying our respects!” Zach called.

Softly I said, “I don’t see …”

Zach pointed to a man off the side of the pier, half in and half out of the water, bobbing with the waves. Shortly, several more mermen drifted to join the first man.

I stood up and dusted my knees. “Let’s go.”

The first merman hoisted himself out of the water. Seaweed dripped from his arms, and his tail split into two legs.
On scaly feet, he jogged toward us. Behind him, others pulled themselves out of the water.

Hand in hand, we ran around the fence and back to the silver mirror. They ran after us. We heard their footsteps sloshing on the sidewalk. But we were faster. We plunged into the silver … and found the carnival.

Banners and flags were strung between brightly painted poles. An elaborate archway marked the entrance. It was carved to look like clowns dancing, but the paint was chipped and peeling, so only the clowns’ eyes were left in bright blue and green.

On the archway, a sign proclaimed, BE AMAZED AND ASTOUNDED BY THE FINEST FEATS OF MAGIC, STRENGTH, AND WONDERMENT FROM SEVENTY-SEVEN WORLDS! The banner fluttered in the wind and then hung limp and twisted.

“I think I’m home.” The words tasted like cardboard in my mouth, and I had the nearly overwhelming urge to dive back into the mirror.

Beside me, Zach squeezed my hand. “Remember the plan? Kiss me?”

Wrapping my arms around his neck, I kissed him as if I were drinking him in. I tasted his breath in mine, and I gave him my magic in return.

Stepping away, I took a deep, shaky breath of air that tasted like stale cotton candy, and we walked up the hill toward the entrance. I’d been on this hill before. The antlered girl had run over it to visit the carnival.

Beyond the banner, the carousel turned slowly, the hundred bits of mirror in its top flashing in the sun. Music drifted down the hill, a complex melody of flute and fiddle that twisted and wove in on itself.

A woman was perched on top of the closest tent. She wore a billowing red dress and a hat with multiple feathers. She blew into a silent brass horn, and clouds shaped like horses, dragons, and rabbits ran, flew, and crawled from the mouth of the instrument. The clouds drifted across a bleached-blue sky and then dissipated. On the ground, a few kids ate cotton candy and watched. I remembered watching those clouds.

“Should we disguise ourselves?” Zach asked.

“I am disguised. That’s what the surgery was for.”

He stared at me. “What did you look like before?”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh.”

“Do you mind? Not knowing?”

He considered the question for a moment, and I waited. “No. But then, I liked you as a dragonfly too.”

Despite where we were and what we were about to do, I smiled.

We passed through the archway and entered the carnival. There were seven tents with a ring of wagons beyond them. Game booths were to our left. An outdoor stage was to our right. On the stage, the contortionists were performing.

One of the female contortionists bent backward and placed both hands on her ankles. Another stepped onto the first woman’s raised stomach and lifted her own leg over her head and wrapped it around her neck. One of the men then
stood on his hands in front of them and wrapped his feet around the second woman’s neck.

Her head snapped off from her neck. She caught it in one hand and rolled it up her arm and then down her other arm. She then continued to stretch her leg around her body until it popped out of its socket and detached.

The other performers then silently removed their heads and rolled them up and down their arms. They traded heads once, twice, three times, and then they rolled the heads back to the necks of their original owners. The heads fused seamlessly back onto their necks.

Behind me, I heard Zach make a retching noise, and I turned to see him bent over a trash can. He raised his head and wiped his mouth. “Sorry,” he said. The crowd applauded as the contortionists bowed, and I led Zach away from the stage.

We stopped at a water fountain, and Zach rinsed his mouth and splashed water on his face and neck. The water sparkled as if flecks of jewels had been mixed in it. When he finished, the fountain rose up on four legs and scuttled away.

“Now what?” Zach asked.

“Our wagon should be in the back corner.” I pointed in a direction blocked by a tent … a tent of tattered red. I slowly lowered my arm.

That was it, the tent.

I took a step backward.

“You can do this,” Zach said. “That is, if you want to do this. If you don’t want to, I’m with you too.” His eyes widened, bug-like. “Is that a mermaid?”

In a rusty tank, a mermaid swam in lackluster circles. Her pale-orange tail flopped against the glass walls. Algae had grown on the glass, and the water was so murky that when she swam away, she vanished into mist. Circling, she suddenly appeared again, distorted and blurry, against the front glass. She was an older mermaid with thin seaweed-green hair, wrinkled skin, and sagging breasts. Her eyes were bloodshot red. As she circled through her tank, her eyes fixed on me. My skin prickled as she vanished and reappeared, each time looking directly at me. I looked away, wondering if the mermaid would remember that the girl from the Magician’s wagon had green eyes.

A line of boys and girls waited at the game booth to chuck balls at the algae-coated plastic treasure chest at the bottom of her tank. She caught the balls without altering her lazy circles and without looking at anyone but me.

I didn’t know her name. Maybe I never knew it. I remembered she’d tried to leave the carnival once. She’d returned when she’d learned her family had died.

Tugging on Zach’s sleeve, I led him away. His neck swiveled as he tried to look everywhere at once. In one tent, the wild boys were conducting their show. Riderless motorcycles shook the canvas walls as they roared past, racing upside down onto the ceiling. Six boys in loincloths and war paint chased after them with whips and nets, herding the cycles into more and more elaborate tricks. In another tent, an eyeless woman guided her audience into a dreamstate. She’d let them talk to their lost loved ones while she emptied their
wallets. I’d never seen her perform, but I’d heard the Magician and the Storyteller say once that no one ever objected. As we passed by, I saw that her patrons were all levitating prone in the air. She walked beneath them in a tattered shawl and a dozen crystal necklaces.

Soon, the Magician’s tent was directly in front of us. A gold sash tied the curtain doorway open, but it only revealed dark shadows. I knew candles lit the foot of the stage, but from here, I only saw the silhouette of the back of the audience—the backs of heads and the curve of empty chairs. I half wanted to step inside, to see how closely it matched my visions, and I half wanted to run as fast and far away as I could.