The Golden Spiral (32 page)

The camera felt like a brick in my bag. I didn’t dare take it with me to see Valerie now. Not with Dr. Blair hovering over me. Even if I was able to get a picture of Valerie, Dr. Blair would want to confiscate the image for her “research,” and I couldn’t let that happen.

But I still needed to see her. I’d promised V.

I swallowed my outrage, my pride, and my fear, and said, “Okay. I’ll help you.”

Dr. Blair smiled, and I noticed her small white teeth were perfectly even. It didn’t do anything to reassure me.

***

Valerie was in the conservatory again. The omnipresent sound of water had been replaced by a choir of songbirds. I suspected it was meant to be soothing, but it sounded more like noise than a song to me.

I gestured for V to wait by the door, and I walked past the plastic leaves so I could approach Valerie alone.

“Hi, Valerie,” I said softly. “I came to visit.”

She turned her back to me, folding her arms across her chest and shaking her head. “I’m not talking to you.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t want to,” she muttered. “Don’t want to hear your lies.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Valerie. We’re friends, remember? And friends don’t lie to each other.”

“Friends don’t keep secrets either.” She lifted her hand and brushed tears away from her face.

“What secrets have I kept from you?” I asked, sitting down next to her on the edge of the fountain.

She twisted around and pointed a finger at the door hidden behind the grove of plastic plants. “Him! You didn’t tell me you were bringing
him.
” She jumped to her feet on the narrow ledge and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

“Valerie, get down!” I tugged at the hem of her bathrobe. “You’ll fall if you’re not careful.”

She reached down and swatted my hand away. “You should be the one afraid of falling, not me. I know where I stand.”

The plants rustled and parted as V stepped into view.

Valerie shrieked and covered her eyes with one hand. She flung out her other hand, fingers splayed. “Stop right there!”

V stopped midstep, his eyes locked on Valerie.

I could see the emotions warring on V’s face: confusion, shock, and sadness. In the end, despair won out, and I watched as he stepped back, seeming to shrink a little into himself. Clearly, he had imagined a different reaction.

The air around him shimmered. He was going to jump away from this time and place, but I couldn’t let him do that. How would I ever explain his disappearance to Dr. Blair? I could almost feel her leaning closer to whatever television monitor she had tuned into to watch this drama unfold. The fake birds continued tweeting their looping songs. It made me want to scream.

“V, wait!” I rushed to his side. “Just wait a minute, okay?”

“She doesn’t want me here,” he said, shaking his head. “I was a fool to think she would.”

“No, it’s fine. She just needs a minute.” I tugged on his sleeve. “Come on. Come sit down.”

He followed me with halting steps to the fountain. Valerie towered over us like a vengeful priestess calling down wrath from the heavens.

“Valerie,” I said in as calm and reasonable a tone as I could manage. “Please sit down. V has something he wants to say to you.”

“I don’t have anything I want to hear from him,” she said. But she did lower her hands, and her body lost some of her pent-up anger.

“He’s come a long way just to see you,” I continued, reaching up to take her hand in mine. “Come on. Be nice.”

She trembled, cutting a glance in V’s direction. “But he’s not a good person,” she whispered in a voice loud enough for both of us to hear.

“Yes, he is,” I said, gently drawing her down from the ledge. “He’s a very nice person.”

Valerie frowned. “Nice people can still be not good people. You’ve met the lady doctor. You know.”

I did know. I forced myself not to look up at the black dome eye watching our every move. “It’ll just take a minute. I promise.” I helped Valerie sit down next to V. “Trust me.”

V inched closer to Valerie, his eyes soft. He held out his hand and waited.

She looked from his face to his hand and bit her lip, worry lines rippling across her forehead. “That’s what the Pirate King wanted too. He just wanted his crew to trust him. He was going to take them to amazing places, show them amazing things.” She shook her head sadly. “But they didn’t trust him. They abandoned him when he needed them the most.”

V curled his hand into a fist. “He asked me to hurt you. I wasn’t going to do that. I couldn’t.” His voice dropped to a bare whisper. “I love you.”

She ignored him, and I saw the hurt move across V’s face.

“So he did what every good king and captain does when faced with betrayal, with
mutiny.
” Valerie narrowed her eyes at V as the word twisted from her lips. “He killed them all and left them for dead.”

“I’m not dead,” V said.

“That’s because he hasn’t killed you yet,” she said with a chilling calm.

He looked to me, but I shrugged helplessly. I didn’t know what to say. I had hoped this reunion would be a good thing, but the conversation was quickly unraveling into madness.

“And you think you’re so safe?” Valerie turned to me, her dark hair swishing around her ears as she tilted her head. “Tell me, Abby, do you miss Hannah?”

I felt dizzy. “You remember Hannah?” I asked.

“I remember everything,” she said, smiling like the sphinx. “That’s my job.”

V stood up, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “Do you remember this?” He pulled Valerie to her feet, wrapping his arms around her in one smooth, fast motion.

And then he kissed her.

Valerie tried to pull away, but he held her tight against him. Slowly, she relaxed into his embrace, her hands coming up to lock behind his neck.

I looked away, feeling a blush stain my face.

And that’s when I saw Dr. Blair standing nearby, her hands folded passively in front of her, her face strangely slack and void of expression. The birdsong overhead suddenly cut out with a strangled chirp.

In the silence that followed, V broke off the kiss, his head whipping around to follow my stunned gaze.

Even as my blood froze in my body, even as my mind shrieked in denial, some distant part of me was grateful for small favors, glad that Valerie’s eyes were still closed—her face upturned, her lips slightly parted—so that she couldn’t see what I was seeing.

Dr. Blair wasn’t alone.

This time she’d brought Zo.

Chapter

22

V disappeared in an instant, taking Valerie with him.
My mouth opened in surprise, my attention divided between the rippling air that still held the afterimage of two people embracing and Zo standing in front of me, his gold-banded hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. The
handle of his guitar rose above his shoulder like the hilt of a sword, and the black leather strap crossed his chest like a royal sash.

“Hello, Abby,” he said as though he had just noticed me standing there.

“What are you doing here?” I blurted. It wasn’t the question I really wanted to ask, but it was the first one that came out.

“The same thing you are. I came to visit an old friend.” He smiled and tossed his head so his hair flipped out of his eyes.

“You came to see Valerie?”

He laughed in honest surprise. “Not this time. I was supposed to meet V here. But he seems to have left rather unexpectedly.”

I sank back on the edge of the fountain, my knees refusing to cooperate. “But V said he . . . He said he wasn’t working for you anymore.”

“Of course he said that. I
told
him to say that.” Zo’s voice was gentle and made goose bumps lift on my arms.

“But he . . . he . . .” My thoughts spun out of my control. Had all my interactions with V been a lie, then? Every one orchestrated by Zo for his own purposes? “We had a deal.” I knew it was a silly thing to latch on to, but it was the only thing I kept coming back to.

“Oh, my sweet, trusting Abby.” Zo shook his head in mock remorse. He exhaled a deep sigh and turned to Dr. Blair, who was still standing motionless behind him. “Go back to your office. I’m done with you.”

She turned around and shuffled to the door like a rusty robot.

“What did you do to Dr. Blair?” I didn’t even try to keep the horror from my voice.

“Who?” Zo asked, looking over his shoulder. “Oh, her. I just made a few . . . modifications so she’d be more pliable to my needs.”

“You changed her? But I didn’t notice—” I bit off my words as Zo’s attention swung back to me, a suspicion lurking in their dark depths.

I wondered why I hadn’t felt that world-shifting pain warning me that Zo had changed something in the river. Was it because Dr. Blair had been his focus this time, and not me? Or were Dante’s fears that the barriers were weakening justified? Were the changes becoming more commonplace, and therefore less worthy of notice? Or had Zo figured out that I was noticing in the first place and learned to disguise his touch? None of the questions made me happy.

The longer I stayed quiet, the wider Zo’s smile grew, as though my silence merely confirmed something he thought he knew.

He strolled toward me. I wanted to get up and bolt for the door, but his eyes held me in place. I felt like a mouse trapped by a snake, and I didn’t much care for the comparison. I remembered Dante’s conviction that it would be my choices that would make the difference in stopping Zo. I had faced Zo before and survived. I could do it again. So I shoved aside the fear that threatened to well up inside me and made a choice. I would be the snake instead of the mouse. If Zo wanted to play this game, then fine, I could play it too.

Zo sat down next to me, exactly where Valerie had been a moment ago. I wondered where she’d gone. V said that he loved her. If he could still be trusted, then I hoped he had taken her someplace safe. And if he was still following Zo’s orders, then I hoped he had taken her someplace where I could still find her.

Zo slung his guitar from off his back, laying it across his lap like a bared sword. “It’s good to see you again, Abby. I’ve missed our little chats. But then, I suspect you’ve been busy.”

“What do you want, Zo?”

“So impatient,” Zo tsked. He reached out to stroke the neck of the guitar. The strings whined a little under his touch, a lost puppy begging for attention.

“Don’t,” I snapped. “Just . . . don’t play anything, okay?”

“Impatient
and
suspicious. A bad combination.” Zo tightened his hand around the instrument.

“It’s not a suspicion. I know what you do with your music.”

“Do you?” Zo arched an eyebrow at the same moment he strummed the guitar. “Are you sure?”

“I can guess.”

Zo raised his eyebrows and inclined his head, inviting me to speak.

“We both know your music can manipulate emotions. My guess is that you’ve been practicing.”

“Have you been spying on me?” Zo teased. “I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be.”

Zo laughed. “It was a good guess, Abby, but not quite right. Yes, I have been practicing, and yes, I can still manipulate emotions. But now I can manipulate memories as well. And my music can do more than simply make you recall a specific memory. It can also erase it.”

“So you didn’t change something in the river,” I said, swallowing hard, “you changed something in Dr. Blair? You erased her memory? Permanently?” If Zo was telling the truth, things were worse than I’d imagined.

He shrugged as though I’d pointed out he was wearing one black sock and one blue instead of suggesting he had tampered directly with a person’s mind. “She had outlived her usefulness, so I wiped her memory. When I leave, her mind will return, but she won’t remember me being here at all. She won’t remember you, either, for that matter. Or anything else that happened today. And any record of Valerie will be gone as well. I don’t like to leave a trail, you know. It’s too much work to clean up. It’s much easier to toss out the old and start fresh.”

Zo leaned forward, his mouth hovering close to my ear. “Tell me, sweet Abby. Is there a memory you wish to forget?”

“That’s not possible,” I said. I clutched at the edge of the fountain, feeling the rough skin of the stone, refusing to let myself contemplate an answer to Zo’s question.

Zo withdrew with a smile, settling back comfortably. He smoothed his palm over the curves of the guitar, a caress of possession. “That’s what I love about you, Abby. Your certainty. After everything that has happened, you can still say without hesitation what is and is not possible.”

I shook my head. “Dante knows what you can do. He would have told me—”

Zo opened his mouth, but I didn’t give him a chance to speak.

“Dante would have told me,” I repeated. “And I trust Dante.”

“Really? Are you sure?” Zo strummed a dark chord and something deep inside of me responded to the resonance. “Or do you just
remember
trusting him?”