Conjured

Aunt Nicki tried to cover. “The hat was a mistake. But let’s not overreact. Obviously you’re distraught, but take a deep breath and think for a minute. People are dying out there! He’s started to kill again, and you have information in that dense head of yours that we need to find him and stop him. Don’t you want us to get that information out? Don’t you want to save people? I know you do! You want what we want, for this all to be over. Think about it, Eve. This helps you as much as it helps us!”

Eve felt along the wallpaper, inching away from her. “How do I know that anything any of you say is true? How do I even know there is a killer? Or if there is, how do I know you’re not on his side?” They’d manipulated her at least twice that she knew of. They’d confessed to the surgeries that changed her body and maybe affected her memory. How did she know where the truth ended and the lies began? It could all be lies. Everything she knew could be a lie.

She heard the front door slam open. Footsteps in the hall.

I can’t trust anyone, Eve thought.

Aunt Nicki turned her head toward the door, and Eve pressed backward into the wall. She imagined she were melting into the wallpaper. She felt the air rush out of her and felt herself shrink, spread, and flatten. She shaped herself into a bird on the wallpaper, perched on a branch, identical to the hundred other birds on the wall.

Malcolm burst into the room. “Where is she?”

Aunt Nicki pivoted to point … and then she faltered. “She was right here!”

On the wall, a bird in the wallpaper, Eve lost consciousness again.

Chapter Seventeen

The Storyteller is combing my hair with her gnarled fingers. “She lives happily ever after, of course, though they don’t say how long ‘ever’ is. Perhaps it is only a day before her horse is startled by a snake and she falls from his back and breaks her neck.” The Storyteller strokes my neck lightly, softly. “Or perhaps it is only a week before a piece of meat lodges in her throat and no one is around to see that she cannot scream. Or breathe. Or she could have years with him in peace before she begins to doubt and to wonder and then despair that she will never be more than a story that ended—and so she ends herself with a rope from a strong tree branch.”

“I don’t like this story,” I say.

Her fingers are entwined in my hair, but they do not move, and so I move forward and feel her stiff fingers slip away from the strands.

“I don’t like it,” I repeat.

“It is the story I am telling,” the Storyteller says.

“Then I won’t listen,” I say. I know it’s a futile statement. When the Storyteller weaves her tales, you must listen. It is her magic, or at least a talent so powerful that it seems like magic.

She continues, and I listen as the princess in her story dies again and again and again.

I am outside under the trees by a campfire. The wagon is beside us. The bright colors are a glossy near-black in the darkness. Through the trees, I see the fires of other wagons. It’s cold by the campfire, even though the fire is red and yellow and pops and crackles. I feel cold inside. Wishing I could stop the Storyteller’s tale, I rise and step closer to the flames.