She couldn’t have given me a better opening for the conversation I’ve been hoping to have.
“Funny,” I say. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Delilah frowns. “You feel like a princess too?”
“No!” I shake my head. “I just… well, I think you’d make a wonderful one.” I force myself to meet her gaze. “I’ve never done this before. I mean, not for real, anyway.” Swallowing hard, I get down on one knee and take her hand in mine. “Delilah, will you marry me?”
“What? What! What are you doing?” She shoves me backward, so that I topple over. “Oliver, I’m fifteen! I’m not getting married before I even go to prom!”
“Maybe we could travel there on our honeymoon?” I suggest.
She stands up, frustrated. “You don’t understand.”
“I thought you wanted us to be together,” I say.
She moves to the open window, a flashback to the climax of this fairy tale. “In my world, you don’t get married when you’re fifteen,” she says. “Unless you’re pregnant and have been on an MTV show. I want a boyfriend. I want to go to movies and hold hands and have inside jokes. I want to take silly pictures with the camera on my phone. I want to get a Valentine’s Day card that’s not from my mother.” Delilah looks up at me. “I want a date with you.”
“A date. You mean like… the first Thursday in July?”
She smiles. “Not quite. It’s when you go somewhere and get to know the other person a little better.”
The picnic suddenly seems garish, over the top, a lousy idea. “We don’t have to get married,” I say. “All I really ever wanted was to be with you.”
“I thought that was all I wanted too—but it turns out, I was wrong,” Delilah admits. “I also want to wake up in my own bed. And wear pants. And—oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m saying this—go to school.” She puts her hands on either side of my face. “I want you in my life. But I want it to be my life.”
Guilty, I break away from her. “I know it’s all my fault. But when I realized that I was never going to be able to leave the book, I couldn’t stand the thought of—”
“Back up,” Delilah says. “What do you mean, you were never going to be able to leave the book?”
My face turns red. “I saw my future, when I was with Orville,” I whisper. “And you weren’t part of it.” I hesitate. “There was another girl in the vision he showed me.”
“What?” Delilah says. “Who? Seraphima?”
“Please. Ugh.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before.”
Delilah considers this. “The future’s always changing,” she points out. “A week ago, you wouldn’t have pictured me in this book, for example. For all we know, if Orville manages to cast a spell that sends me home, your future might be completely different.” She reaches for my hand and pulls me across the stone floor. “There’s only one way to find out.”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Orville was flirting.
I’ve never seen the old coot move so quickly before. He’s been blushing like a schoolgirl since I introduced him to Delilah, and he’s showered her with all sorts of magic tricks: the disappearing newt, the violin that plays itself in midair, and his latest project—a duck that speaks fluent Hungarian.
In return, Delilah is apparently telling him everything she ever learned in science class. “You mix the zinc into the sodium hydroxide, and then heat it till it’s practically boiling. Then you add the pennies, and they’ll turn silver. If you heat up those same pennies, they’ll turn to gold.”
“Alchemy!” Orville gasps.
“Well, not really. It’s the zinc and copper fusing together to make brass. But it looks like gold, anyway,” she says.
Scowling, I fold my arms. “If you two are finished exchanging notes, I’d very much like to see my future again… ?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Orville says. He leads Delilah into his workroom and lugs the stone birdbath onto the wooden table, along with several colored glass bottles. He begins to pour a mixture into the bowl, stirring rhythmically.
Delilah and I have come up with a plan, of sorts. We know from my experiment with Pyro that the small book I carry, which is a replica of the story I’m living, has the capacity to effect change in Delilah’s world. After all, somehow, it made the book in which we exist catch fire. Likewise, if we can find a way to explode the replica of Between the Lines, maybe the one we are living in will fall from Delilah’s bookshelf and land open. Presumably, at that moment, all of us characters will be pulled into our usual positions. When the book realizes Delilah doesn’t belong, she’ll be sent back home.
Or at least, that’s what I’m hoping.
Orville keeps his potions and ingredients under a spell unless he’s in his workroom using them. Which means that we can’t very well break into his cottage and find some concoction to cause an explosion. Instead, we have to distract him when he’s present, and when the spell has been dismantled by Orville himself. It was Delilah’s idea to ask him to replicate the magic that showed me my future. That way, we’d be killing two birds with one stone.
The liquid in the birdbath bubbles and evaporates almost immediately into a purple mist. “Let’s give it a test,” Orville says, and he looks around for something he can toss into the smoke. Delilah arches her brows at me and mouths a single word: Now?
I shake my head. “Not yet,” I whisper.
Orville scans the bottles and jars on the shelves behind him. Then he brightens, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small cloth bag. “Afternoon snack,” he explains, and he extracts a seed and drops it into the mist.
The purple smoke plumes and peaks, taking the shape of a sunflower.
“Now,” I tell Delilah. She falls back, ostensibly to let me get a better look at my own future, but in reality she starts grabbing every small bottle she can off the shelf behind Orville’s head. She tucks them into her pockets and up her sleeves.
“It’s all yours,” the wizard says. He plucks a hair from my head and lets it waft down into the haze. Just as it did last time, the mist forms a tall column that spreads wide as a movie screen, playing my future. I can see myself on a couch in a small room with bookshelves.
Delilah pauses, her fists still full of bottles and herbs, but she is drawn by the image too. “What’s the matter with this future?” she asks.
“Give it a second,” I say.
Sure enough, a girl walks in and embraces me. I can feel Delilah stiffen behind me.
“It gets worse,” I tell her.
The girl turns, so that we can see her face. Now, upon second sight, I realize this isn’t a girl as much as a woman. A woman I still have never seen before in my life.
Delilah gasps. “I know her!”
“You do?”
“Yes! That’s—”
Before she can finish her sentence, though, the door to Orville’s cottage slams open, smacking against the wall. Frump races inside, hurtling toward me with his teeth bared. I am so startled that I freeze. “Frump?” I cry. “What in the name of—”
He cuts me off, snarling, jumping at my throat. We fall to the ground in a blur of limbs and fur. I barely have time to notice Seraphima standing in the doorway too, her face ravaged by tears.
“You bloody liar,” Frump barks. “You broke her heart.”
“You don’t have a cousin,” Seraphima wails. “You don’t even have an aunt or an uncle.”
Before I can explain myself, I feel the weight of a vicious dog being lifted off me. I look up to find Delilah yanking Frump by the collar, pulling with all her might to get him to release his clenched teeth from the neckline of my tunic. Finally, the fabric tears, and Delilah and Frump roll backward in a somersault, crashing against Orville’s shelves so that a hail of bottles rains down over them.
“Delilah,” I cry, scrambling toward her. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she mutters, stand
ing up. There are wet splotches on her dress. “But I smell like feet.”
Orville peers down at the mess. “Looks like troll snot. Nasty stuff.”
“For God’s sake, Frump, have you contracted rabies? What’s gotten into you?” I yell.
Suddenly, Orville’s eyes dart upward. “Move!” he bellows. “Take cover!” He dives beneath his workbench, and I shield Delilah with my body as a box teeters on the uppermost shelf. It’s made of cast iron and is wrapped in chains and padlocked. “Don’t let it—”
The box shudders and tumbles to the floor, landing directly between Delilah and Frump and breaking open.
“—fall…” Orville finishes weakly.
Rays of light begin to squeeze through the cracks in the iron box. They form an iridescent hovering ball. Slowly, the sphere begins to shake, and then it violently vibrates, before shooting like a firecracker into the ceiling. Plaster falls on our heads, but the ball of light bounces, ricocheting off the walls and the floor. The more it moves, the more energy it seems to gain.
“What is that thing?” Delilah cries.
“Pandemonium,” Orville says. “You have to stop it before it destroys this place.”
The light whizzes past Seraphima’s cheek, and she shrieks, swatting at it. But she misses, hitting Orville across the face. He falls backward, knocking me to the ground as the light zooms in a spiral over the shelves, shattering every last standing bottle and slicing the hanging herbs off at their stems. It dips into the birdbath, sending up a spray of purple sparks before corkscrewing into the dirt floor, creating a deep black burrow.
For a moment, we all gather our senses, wondering if it’s finished. Orville and I creep closer to the tunnel, peering down.
It explodes like a volcano, zipping past Frump—
Frump?
My trusty, loyal hound is gone. Lying on the floor, quite naked, is a human.
“Frump?” I say, stunned. “Is that you?”
“I didn’t mean to go after you like that, Ollie,” he says, sheepish. “I just got so angry when Seraphima came to me all upset….”
Frump’s voice is the same. His mannerisms are even a bit hangdog. But he’s clearly not who he used to be. “Buddy,” I murmur. “Erm…” I point to his bare bottom.
He looks down, yelps, and grabs the nearest covering he can—a tablecloth sewn with silver stars—which he wraps around his midsection. He’s about my age, wiry and muscular, with shaggy hair the same color his fur had been. “What’s happened?” he whispers, grinning widely as he feels his arms, his hands, his nose.
“Frump?” Seraphima repeats. I see her eyes lock on his the way they’ve always locked on mine, like she cannot bear to turn away.
Behind me I am dimly aware of the Pandemonium still wreaking havoc everywhere it touches down—creating a giant fissure in the center of Orville’s work-table and singeing the tip of his hat.
The curse. The one that turned Frump into a dog must have been reversed, but how?
I turn to Delilah, but it’s too late to warn her as the Pandemonium skitters beneath her feet. As she falls to the ground, I notice the splotches on her dress.
Some combination of the potions and herbs Delilah had squirreled away must have seeped onto Frump when they went tumbling backward. I daresay she couldn’t replicate that accidental spell if she tried. But the end result is that Frump is once again the boy he used to be.
“Oliver!” I turn my attention away from my friend in time to see the Pandemonium rocketing directly toward Delilah.
“Shield yourself!” Orville cries.
It is moving too fast for her to roll out of the way. Delilah looks frantically around for something to block the impact. At the last moment, she grabs an object that is lying within arm’s reach away on the floor. It isn’t until she holds it splayed wide open in front of her face that I realize what it is.
The copy of Between the Lines that I stole from Rapscullio, which must have fallen from my tunic during the scuffle with Frump.
The Pandemonium drives itself full force into the pages of the book, with the spine absorbing its impact. Delilah slams the book shut, trapping the light inside. “Gotcha, sucker,” she says triumphantly, holding the tome against her chest.
The book begins to shudder so hard that Delilah is having trouble keeping it closed. I take a step toward her, hoping to wrest it from her grasp, but before I can, the fairy tale leaps out of her arms and bursts wide. The Pandemonium whooshes upward, rupturing a hole in the roof of Orville’s cottage, so that mud and branches and rock shower down. I shield my eyes and reach for Delilah, to pull her to safety. I can’t quite grasp her, though. Once the book leaves Delilah’s hands, they freeze in position as a thick crack runs the length of her arm. The crack spreads and branches at the shoulders, creeping up her neck, splintering her features—her wide eyes, her open mouth. I see it as if in slow motion—that book tumbling toward the ground until the moment it strikes, and Delilah shatters into a million pieces, vanishing into nothing but dust.
Delilah
THE FIRST THING I SEE WHEN I OPEN MY EYES is the book, peeking out from beneath my bed, wide open.
I roll from my stomach onto my back and blink at a purple ceiling, with little glow-in-the-dark stars. “My room,” I breathe.
It worked. Our plan worked.
“Well, of course it’s your room,” my mother’s voice floats to me.
I try to sit up, but a hand eases me down. “Take it slow, Delilah,” says a voice that I cannot quite place but that seems familiar.
I look to my left to find Dr. Ducharme standing beside my mother.
My mother sits down on the edge of the bed. “You’ve got a nasty bump on your head,” she says. “You must have fallen when you were trying to reach the box of videos in your closet.”
Wincing, I touch my forehead; it’s tender. “How long have I been gone?”
“Gone?” Dr. Ducharme grins. “Well, you’ve been asleep—but you haven’t gone anywhere. Your mom even got a doctor to make a house call last night to make sure you were all right. And she called me when you started talking in your sleep.”
I struggle to a sitting position. “What was I talking about?”
They exchange a look. “That’s not important,” my mother says. “You need to rest. And you’re going to have a nasty headache.”
I glance over her shoulder and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. On my forehead is a giant goose egg and an impressive bruise.
But I couldn’t have just hit my head. I was in that book with Oliver. I know I was.
I think back to what might have happened. The last I remember, we were at Orville’s cottage, and I’d managed to recapture the Pandemonium. Almost as quickly, my arms had begun to fracture, sprouting fine cracks, like a disintegrating marble statue. Gasping, I grab for my right arm with my left hand.
It’s perfectly intact.
What is going on?
“What day is it?” I ask.
“Tuesday,” my mother replies. “It’s nearly three o’clock.”
“I’m, um, starving….”
“Then we’ll get you something to eat.” She gives me a quick embrace first. “I was so worried you weren’t coming back,” she whispers.
My arms close around her. “Me too,” I murmur.
She stands up, and as she leaves the room, Dr. Ducharme puts his hand on her shoulder.
There’s something about that casual gesture that makes me relieved. While I was in the book, I worried about my mother being left alone. But maybe, one day, she won’t be.
As soon as I hear the door click shut, I scramble under the bed and grab the book. Sitting up, I see my reflection in the mirror. There is something sticking out of the collar of my T-shirt that looks remarkably—and terrifyingly—like a tattoo.
I pull down the collar, afraid to peek.
Strung around my neck is a line of backward cursive. I slip a fingernail under one edge and peel it off my skin like a Band-Aid. Then
I drape the letters over the edge of my bedsheet.
Just like the spider I pulled from the book days ago, the mermaid’s necklace—on the outside—has transformed into words. But I saw a vision of Oliver in Orville’s cottage—a vision where he was in the future, in this outside world, and he wasn’t just letters on a page.
Focus, Delilah, I tell myself. I grab the book and open it to page 43, where Oliver looks up at me with obvious relief.
“You’re alive!” he cries.
“What happened?” I say. “It was real, wasn’t it?”
Oliver’s face falls. “Don’t you remember?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “But I want to make sure I didn’t make it all up.”
“Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it’s any less true,” Oliver replies. He squints at me. “You’re hurt?”
“Just a bruise,” I tell him. But that reminds me of the Pandemonium, and the devastation it caused. “What about you? Are you all right? And Orville? His poor home!”
“It’s all intact again,” Oliver says. “The minute you opened the book, everything went back to the way it used to be.” He looks away from me.
“Frump?” I ask.
Oliver nods. “Just a dog.”
“But it worked, Oliver. Exploding your copy of the fairy tale set me free.”
“And I’m still here,” he says sadly. “So we’re back to square one.”
“No, we’re not. Remember the vision? Your future? I know who that woman is. It’s Jessamyn Jacobs.”
“Who?”
“She’s the author,” I tell him. “The woman who created you.”
Oliver’s eyes light up. “So that vision,” he says. “I’m in her house?”
I hear footsteps on the stairs. “Soup!” my mother sings out.
I slam the book hard, stuffing it under a pillow and yanking the covers over me. The door creaks open. “Thanks,” I say. I take a sip of the soup to satisfy my mom.
She sits down on the edge of the bed and watches me take one spoonful, then another. I blot my mouth with a paper napkin. “You’re not going to watch me eat the whole thing, are you?”