Unhinged: 2 (8 page)

I squeeze his hand, partly out of frustration and partly out of relief. “That’s not why she’s mad.”

“Why, then?”

I glance at the stuffed animals on my window ledge: a bear, a rather large clown with a boxy-checked hat that covers the top of his head, and a goat eating a tin can with
Get Well
on the label. The clown looks familiar in a sinister sort of way, but I decide it must be the lighting. Shadows drape across all the toys, making them appear to have missing eyes or limbs. It reminds me so much of Wonderland’s cemetery that my stomach flips.

“Al.” Jeb nudges me. “Are you going to tell me why you guys were yelling when I came in?”

“She just wants me to concentrate on my career, to not get sidetracked. She feels like she lost her shot at being a photographer after being committed. It’s not you specifically. It’s about anything she perceives as a distraction.” I fidget under my covers. A lie shouldn’t be so easy to spin.

Jeb nods. “I’m not a distraction. I’m helping. I want you to succeed just as much as she does.”

“I know. She just doesn’t see it that way.”

“After my meeting with Ivy Raven tonight, I should have all the money we’ll need to get started in London. That will prove how much I want to help.”

My fingers jerk in his. So that’s why he shaved and dressed up. To make a good impression on his new heiress client. My mom’s warning of betrayal surfaces in my mind, but I push it down. I know I can trust Jeb. Still, I can’t seem to control what comes out of my mouth next.

“You’re going to leave me for work on the first night I’m awake?” I cringe at the neediness in my voice.

Jeb wraps my hair around his fingers. “Your mom made it clear I should be gone before she gets back. Ivy’s in town, so I’m going to
meet her and let her choose a painting. She’s not in the country very often. We have to take advantage while she’s here.”

“But it’s a holiday. Isn’t the gallery closed? Is Mr. Piero meeting you there?”

“He’s home with his family. He’s letting me use the showroom as a favor.”

My lips tighten. I don’t like him going alone, though I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s my netherling side, because the emotion feels animalistic … feral. A dark and disorienting instinct that’s pecking away all of the trust we’ve forged over the past year.

Jeb’s mine.
Mine mine mine
.

A snarl tugs at my lips, but I suppress it. What’s wrong with me?

The stuffed clown flops to the floor with a metallic twang, and Jeb and I both jump.

“Huh,” Jeb says as he picks the toy up and rearranges it on the windowsill. He tugs at the oddly shaped hat. “There’s something metal under there. Must be top-heavy.”

“Who’s that from?” I ask.

“The guy who helped on Friday after I pulled you out. I was trying to get you to breathe, and he appeared out of nowhere … said he saw an ambulance going down the street and waved it down for us. My cell phone was lost in the flood. He got the help I couldn’t give you.”

There’s something about the clown. Apart from it looking distantly familiar … apart from it being bigger than the other toys. It almost appears alive. I keep waiting for it to move.

As it stares back at me, the shadows seem to change its expression—from a smile to an evil sneer. Even the cello in its hand can’t soften the image.

A cello.

My wariness kicks up another notch. That’s the one instrument that I know how to play. The one instrument I haven’t touched since last summer. How would a stranger know that about me?

Jeb said the guy appeared out of nowhere …

Trepidation knots in my throat. “What’s this person’s name?” I ask.

“I didn’t get it,” Jeb answers. “The card on the clown said, ‘Hope you’re feeling up to your old self soon.’ No signature. But we checked with everyone else and no one we know sent it. So it must’ve been him.”

The toy’s beady black eyes zero in on me like eager cockroaches.

“Up to my
old
self,” I mumble. “That’s a weird thing for a stranger to say, don’t you think?”

Jeb shrugs. “Well, maybe that’s how they talk in England.”

My pulse jumps. “England?”

“Yeah. After the ambulance left, the guy helped me drag my bike from the water. He’s a foreign exchange student, enrolling at Pleasance High. Seems pointless to enroll during the last week of school. But his parents insisted.”

My arms feel limp. “He told you he was from England?”

“He didn’t have to. He has the accent.”

Morpheus’s threat rings loud in my memory:
By the time they find your body, I’ll already be there.

Heart pounding, I kick off my blankets. “We have to get out of here!”

“Al!” Jeb tries to keep me from sitting up.

Instead, I use his arms for leverage to stand. “Please, Jeb, take me home!”

“What? No, c’mon, you’re going to hurt yourself. Just lie down.”

When he attempts to guide me back into bed, my pleas escalate to shouts. I rip the IV from my skin before he can stop me. Blood drizzles out the back of my hand, getting on the blankets and sheets, slicking up Jeb’s fingers as he tries to stop the flow while pushing the nurse’s call button.

Mom and Dad return. Mom’s face pales to the color of my sheets as she takes over for Jeb.

“I think you need to leave,” she tells him.

I cry out, “No!”

What I really want to say is that my panic has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the netherling guy who played a pivotal role in her commitment to the asylum twelve years ago.

“Nobody needs to leave,” Dad interjects, the voice of reason amid the chaos.

Nurse Terri comes in, and her sad gray eyes coax me to behave.

She and Dad ease me back into bed. She mentions something about a delayed reaction from being in shock and comatose for three days. Then she reinserts the IV and sticks a sedative-filled syringe into it.

As I watch the needle appear on the other side of the clear tubing, I move my lips to ask her not to do that. Not to leave me vulnerable to my dreams. To please at least take the sinister clown away. But my tongue is frozen and my mind is racing.

I’m groggy within five minutes. Jeb kisses my hand, says he loves me and to get some sleep. Dad hugs me good night, and they both walk out together. Mom strokes my hair, folds down her cot, and goes into the bathroom. Then, despite all my efforts to hold them open, my eyelids droop shut.

I’m not sure what time it is when I wake up. I’m just glad to be awake at all.

The scent of disinfectant reminds me where I am. It’s dark. There’s no light coming through the blinds or seeping under my door from the hallway. I assume Mom shoved some rolled-up towels there. Sometimes she sleeps better if she seals herself in, a habit she formed while living at the asylum. Each night she’d check every crevice of her room—from the walls to the floors—for insects. Once convinced that none were there, she’d stuff the bottom of the door with her pillowcase.

It’s hot, like I’m being smothered by heavy air. I should move the towel away from the door for better ventilation. I kick off my blankets and inch my ankles toward the edge of the bed but freeze in place before sitting up.

The wind shakes the panes … louder than earlier. An eerie, vibrating hum that almost sounds like a song. Even the plants and flowers on the windowsill stay silent, as if listening to it. A sudden flash of light blinks across me. It takes a few moments for me to realize that it’s lightning. I don’t hear any rain. It must be an electrical storm.

The next flash illuminates my surroundings. Thick cobwebs stretch from my bed frame to the windowsill to the ceiling—a morbid canopy, as if a giant spider has laid a trap.

I sit up, and a sticky film suctions to my mouth. Next blink of light and it’s even thicker, suffocating me. I scrape webs from my face and scream for my mom, but I can’t see her; there are too many strands between us. I yank out my IV and leap off the bed.

Blood flows from my hand, different somehow. It floats upward,
a solid strip, forming a glowing red sword. I take it instinctively, slashing at the filaments, cutting my way through the sticky fibers to reach Mom’s cot. A thick sheet of spider silk has engulfed her body.

The red glow from my sword reveals stuffed animals and dolls hanging in effigy on the glistening radials all around me, more toys than I remember seeing on my windowsill. They grab my hair and bite my skin as I hack my way and weave toward Mom’s cocooned form. An instant before I’m there, the clown drops down from a swinging thread. It plays the cello and laughs, taunting me. What I heard earlier wasn’t the wind at all … it was the instrument.

I lash out with my dagger of blood, and the toy drops to my feet, its song silenced, though its arm continues to move the bow across the muted cello strings.

Finally, I reach the cocoon. I slice open the white shell, afraid to look. As the sides fold back, it’s not Mom’s corpse staring dead-eyed at me.

It’s Jeb’s.

Jeb’s face, gray and lacerated. Jeb’s mouth that opens and screams. I scream in unison, our combined wails so shrill I have to cover my ears.

In the resulting silence, a voiceless whisper slides into my mind.

“It will end like this, unless you fight back. Rise to your place. Wake up and fight.
Fight!”

I wake up, gasping for air. Hair tangles around my face. I comb back the strands so I can see. Moonlight filters through the blinds. There’s not a web in sight.

My heartbeat settles as I see Mom sleeping peacefully in her cot. The stuffed animals sit in their places on the windowsill, all but one. The clown hunkers on my nightstand, staring up at me, its hand
slowly moving the bow along the cello strings in time with the wind howling outside.

I stifle a horrified moan and shove the heavy toy to the floor. It lands with a strange jangling noise and slumps there, unmoving, yet the message of its muted song still resonates: Morpheus is here in the human realm, and everyone I love is in danger unless I find him, reclaim my throne, and stand up for Wonderland against Queen Red’s wrath.

The clown didn’t haunt me again after the nightmare. I stuffed it in the trash under some paper towels and magazines while Mom slept. The toy was more solid than I thought it would be—almost like a toddler—and seemed to wriggle in my arms. It was even more unsettling because, although I can’t place where, I’ve seen that clown before. I told Mom I gave the toy to a nurse for the children’s ward, since it was from a complete stranger.

Stranger
. The perfect descriptor for Morpheus. He’s stranger than any person or creature I’ve ever met. And, boy, do I have a long line of comparison subjects.

On Wednesday morning Dad drops me at school twenty minutes early.

I’m exhausted. After being discharged from the hospital on Tuesday, I refused to take any of the sedatives prescribed by the hospital’s attending physician. Between the pain of my injuries and thinking about Jeb’s heiress client and Morpheus’s crash-landing into my everyday life, I didn’t get much sleep.

“You look pale, even with the makeup.” Dad hands me my backpack across the seat as I slide out of the truck onto the asphalt parking lot. “I hope you’re not overdoing it.”

There’s no way to tell him the real reason for my blood-drained face. And his concern is nothing compared to what Mom’s been feeling since I’ve been home from the hospital. She wouldn’t let me have any visitors, insisting I needed to rest, so I didn’t get to see Jeb or Jenara. Since my new cell phone wasn’t charged and programmed, I settled for a short and unsatisfying landline call divided between both of them. Jeb was evasive about his visit with the heiress, insisting we talk about it in person. That did nothing to calm my nerves.

Mom’s final words as I left this morning were, “I’m not sure school’s a good idea so soon. Maybe take a day off from classes while your car is getting its tire fixed.”

Somehow I managed to talk Dad into driving me anyway, and I’m not leaving now. “Dad, please stop enabling Mom’s paranoia. Persephone’s given me the entire week off from work. I’ll get bored sitting at home. I have exams to make up, and there’s no way I’m going to summer school. I want to graduate with my class.”