“You awake now?”
“What do you think?” I would have thrown my pillow at her, but I had none. I had nothing.
I turned over on the sweaty, twisted blankets, willing my heart to slow down and my hand to stop burning. Yellow light from the open doorway behind Rosalee spilled into the dark room. I looked at Swan up on the shelf in all her wooden majesty, her long neck ruler-straight, her wings folded close to her body, aglow in the half dark. “You didn’t have to bite so hard,” I muttered.
“What?” Rosalee watched me closely.
“Nothing.” I drew my knees to my chest; my dress was damp and sticky-feeling, giving me chills. “What time is it?”
“Almost six.”
“In the morning?”
“I figured you didn’t have an alarm clock, so I brought one up. I should’ve brought you a nightgown.” She pulled one of the blankets free, untwisted it, and draped it over me. Then she set the ticking wind-up clock on my shelf.
And then, instead of leaving, she knelt beside me again. The tarty black dress was gone, replaced with fuzzy red pj’s.
“I was gone sneak in and out with that clock,” she said, “but you were making that noise.”
“What noise?”
“That nightmare noise. What were you dreaming about?”
I hadn’t remembered my dream until she mentioned it. And then I relived it.
“I dreamed I was at Poppa’s grave,” I said. “And he asked if I would lie with him beneath the earth because he was lonely. He said … being dead was lonely.” I rolled onto my back, and tears pooled into my ears. “So I lay with him in his grave, and worms squiggled between my toes and bones poked the backs of my thighs. He missed me so much and was so happy to be with me, but all I wanted was to get away from him. The only person who ever cared about me.” I looked at Rosalee, a shadow-woman in the half-light. “How stupid is that?”
Rosalee listened to me cry for a while, staring out the open door as though wishing she’d fled when she had the chance. “You should do us both a favor,” she said, “and give me back the spare key you swiped. Because you won’t be happy here, either. Not with me.”
“But that’s just it,” I said, brushing my tear-wet hair from my face. “I’d rather be miserable and free than happy and caged.”
To my surprise, Rosalee nodded. “Love is a trap,” she said. “The ultimate cage.”
The trill of the alarm clock startled us both. Rosalee reached over and slapped at it—like it had cursed at her—until it shut off. We looked into each other’s wide, startled eyes. I laughed. I think Rosalee might have laughed too if she’d been capable of something so human. I wasn’t happy, but at least I wasn’t as unhappy as Rosalee. At least I was still able to laugh.
Maybe it was the laughter or the fact that Rosalee cared enough about me in her own weird way to drag herself out of bed at six in the morning just to bring me an alarm clock, but I didn’t feel hopeless anymore. What I felt was that I might be able to face another day.
This time when Rosalee insisted I take my pills, I took them.
The next two days were lonely, to say the least.
I’d meant to give Wyatt a piece of my mind for kicking me out of his lap, but I didn’t see him anywhere, not even at lunch. I saw his friends, Carmin and Lecy, and they saw me, but they ignored me, cold-shouldering me because Wyatt had.
Fucking herd mentality.
But before I could dissolve into a puddle of misery, Aunt Ulla made good on her threat to ship all my earthly possessions to Rosalee, who, screaming at my aunt over the phone, threatened to ship it all right back. I ignored them both and set to work building a nest for myself, glad to be able to make the empty attic my own.
That Thursday evening I opened the door to Rosalee’s room and found her sitting in the dark, her curly hair falling into the open red box in her lap. The hall light touched the box’s smooth, lacquered finish, imbuing it with a ghostly aura. Rosalee stared into the box, entranced, as if the box were whispering secrets only she could hear.
“Hey.”
Rosalee started and slammed the box shut, the look she gave me more outraged than entranced. “Knock next time!”
I backed up. “Sorry.”
She put the box in her nightstand drawer and locked it with the key dangling from her red bracelet.
“What was in the box?”
“None of your business.” Rosalee snapped on her bedside lamp so that I could clearly see how angry she was. “What do you want?”
“I made dinner. Are you hungry?”
She looked like she wanted to say no, but she didn’t. Instead she followed me to the dining table, her stomach rumbling, and sat in the red chair. I sat in the desk chair, which I’d pilfered from her office so we could finally sit at the table at the same time.
Rosalee stared warily at the bowl I set before her, prodding the contents with a spoon. “What is this?”
“Stew,” I said, in front of my own steaming bowl.
She swallowed a hesitant mouthful, then relaxed. “Your father fixed me a bear meat sandwich once. Been kinda leery of Finnish cuisine ever since.”
“What’s wrong with bear meat sandwiches?” I asked, curious.
She gave me a long look. “From now on, I do the cooking.”
If she wanted an argument, she wouldn’t get one from me. I couldn’t believe she’d volunteered to do something so domestic in the first place. After giving me milk and cookies that first day, she’d left me to fend for myself.
“What was all that racket you were making?” she asked.
“I just finished putting my room together,” I said, bouncing in the chair. “I had to borrow the armoire from your office since I don’t have a closet, but even still, all my furniture fits perfectly, even the sewing machine, like the room was made for me.”
“It wasn’t made for you. Don’t you dare get attached to that room.”
“You said I could stay.”
“For two weeks and that’s—” Her spoon clattered to the floor. “You took my armoire?”
“I needed a place to store my clothes.”
“I had all my books in that armoire!”
“I saw.” Hundreds of books, several in German and Dutch, and endless stacks of bound manuscripts had crammed the armoire; I’d sweated through my chemise removing them all.
“I stacked them neatly on the floor,” I said, so she wouldn’t think I was a slob.
Rosalee pushed away from the table, chair legs squealing angrily against the tile. I thought she was going to go into her office to see what I’d done with her books, but she went up to my room instead and did a slow 360-degree turn.
“Why is everything purple?”
“It was Poppa’s favorite color.”
“You painted my armoire purple!”
“It would have clashed otherwise.” She was making me feel like I’d murdered her best friend. “Why don’t we go finish that stew, hmm? Before it congeals?” Anything to get her out of my room before she decided to take back her armoire, and to hell with that. It had taken me forty minutes to wrestle it up the stairs—I’d earned that armoire.
Rosalee, looking like the only survivor of a train wreck, followed me downstairs. I tried to lead her by the hand, but she wouldn’t let me touch her. She was almost shy about it, the way she tucked her hands into her armpits, hiding them from sight. She was like the moon—part of her was always hidden away.
She sat at the table and stared at her spoonless stew.
“Take mine.” I handed her my spoon and stood to get another for myself. A thrill shivered up my spine as I watched her take my spoon into her mouth, watched her swallow my germs as though they were old friends.
“Did you like it, at least?” I asked when I took my seat.
“Like what?”
“My room. The layout. The design.”
“It’s fabulous!”
“Thanks,” I said, ignoring the sarcasm. I waved my hand at her kitch
en decor. “I noticed you like the Scandinavian style. So do I.”
“You are Scandinavian.”
“Then you must like me, too.”
I immediately regretted having set myself up so perfectly for what was sure to be a devastating put-down. But Rosalee didn’t say anything mean. She didn’t say anything. Just chewed and didn’t say no. She didn’t say yes … but she didn’t say no.
Chapter Nine
I met Petra on Friday. She cornered me at my locker before first bell. Petra van den Berg, dressed in all black, of course, with a silver key exactly like Rosalee’s dangling from a long, thin necklace. Blond, pretty, and bone thin. I wasn’t sure if her recent illness had wasted her flesh or if fashion had.
I figured she wanted to get into it with me, some he’s-my-man-so-step-off song and dance. If so, she would have to dance solo.
I don’t do drama.
“It’s not gone work with you and Wyatt,” she said, sounding congested.
“It isn’t?”
She cleared her throat and then leaned against me—like I was a wall!—resting her bent arm on my shoulder. “I get where you’re coming from, okay? You’re just a candy-ass transy; believe me, I’ve been there.”
Been there? She was still there. The slightest breeze would blow her down to Mexico.
“So you think, ‘Wow!’” she continued, her greenish waif’s eyes bright with sincerity. “‘Look at this strong, fearless, yummy-looking boy. He’s the answer to my prayers.’ Right? Well, wrong.” The sincerity darkened. “Wyatt’s Mortmaine duties always come first, so you’ll always come second. Or third. Or tenth.”
Petra took a break from her speech to cough into the back of her hand. She was very congested and still leaning against me, so I patted her on the back, wishing I had a jar of Vicks so I could offer it to her.
She needed a keeper.
“I don’t care about Wyatt’s priorities,” I told her. “I don’t care about Wyatt.”
Shock cleared away Petra’s congestion. “You don’t?”
“No.”
“So you’re not gone go for him? At all?”
“I wouldn’t cross the street with that boy.” I hadn’t forgotten or forgiven the lap incident.
“Well …” Petra seemed surprised I hadn’t put up more of a fight. Surprised and relieved. “Good. Great! You’re too strong for him anyway.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” As an experiment I sidled away from her oppressive leaning, just to see if she’d stand on her own. She didn’t. She backed up against the dark blue lockers and leaned against them.
“It’s not bad. Must be nice to be strong.” Petra ducked her head, examining the delicate framework of papery skin and spidery bones that was her body. She sighed. “But if I was, I wouldn’t need Wyatt. And he’s the kind of boy who needs to be needed.”
“You need air. You need food. You don’t need some beastly boy.”
A spark lit within her waif’s eyes, like the gleam of a razor blade in a bowl of pudding. “Wyatt’s not just some boy, and he’s not beastly. He’s Mortmaine. An initiate, but a survivor. A real badass.”
“Mortmaine?”
“They’re a family. Not a blood family, but they all take the name Mortmaine when they pass initiation. You have to be real special to join.” She took note of my blank face. “You must’ve seen ’em around. They dress all in green, drive green trucks, keep us all safe? Duh.”
I remembered the bossy woman all in green from the administration office my first day. “Safe from what?”
Petra’s eyes lost their spark. For the first time I understood what the dark peach girl had meant when she said you could always tell by the eyes who had seen something real and who hadn’t. Petra had seen something real—some thing that had burned itself into her retinas.
“I can’t even remember what it’s like to be that clueless,” she said, her voice low and awful. “I almost envy you.”
“Pet!”
Lecy stood near the stairwell, waving Petra over.
Petra grabbed my shoulders, leaning on me again, but this time so she could whisper in my ear. “Do yourself a favor and find someone tough, someone like Wyatt, who’ll look after you. You’ll thank me.” She let me go and rushed off to join Lecy.
Someone tough to look after me?
Petra seemed like a nice girl, not quite the bitch I’d been expecting, but even if I’d wanted to be her friend, her attitude would drive me insane. Did she think this was the fifties? I didn’t need some guy to look after me. I could look after myself.
I hurried to administration to give Cowboy my medical records before the bell rang, but the office was empty. Even the statue had gone. I’d turned to leave, assuming the staff were in a meeting or something, when the long stretch of window on the other side of the counter began to rattle.
My first thought was that the wind must be high and hard, but the scene outside the window was placid; the trees across the street could have been sculpted, their pale yellow leaves motionless. The perennial East Texas cloud cover eased momentarily and allowed a shaft of sunlight to blaze forth. The light struck the windows. …
It was as though I were standing before a row of stained glass.
Reds and blues and yellows pinwheeled across the window. Colored light lasered into the office, falling across my dress, my skin.
A lone swirl of green flowed down the glass in a long, snaky line, dragging one of the pinwheels in its wake. At the bottom of the window the line of green spilled out and thickened, hitting the tile floor with a sound like wet clay before it lengthened and darkened, stretching upward, shape-shifting into black boots. Blue jeans. Green shirt. Smooth brown neck. Dark, closely shaved hair.
It was Wyatt before me, his back to me. Wyatt had poured from the glass.
The clouds regrouped once more and swallowed the sun, and the pinwheels of color in the glass disappeared, except for the one Wyatt, arms straining, had pulled halfway from the window, forcing it to lose its flat, pinwheel shape and all its color so that he seemed to have hold of a trickling stream of water.
I must have made a noise, because Wyatt whipped his head around. Saw me. Gaped. “What’re you—?”
He lost his grip on the sparkling mass, which, like a rubber band, immediately snapped back to the window. Wyatt, catlike, grabbed it before it could be fully reabsorbed into the glass.
“Is that a lure?”
“Get outta here!” Wyatt yelled, pulling that long, sparkling strand—of light? of glass?—farther from the window.
I didn’t get out. My body didn’t seem inclined to take orders from either Wyatt or me. I was in the presence of the one person on Earth who was more of a freak than I was; I wouldn’t have left even if I’d been able to.
He tried to reach into his pocket, but the struggling lure—was it a lure?—whipped forward and pulled him off balance. Before Wyatt’s face could smack into the window, he got his booted foot up between him and the wall and used the leverage to push himself and the lure he’d captured away from the glass.
My head felt stuffed with cotton, not because of the earplugs I had taken to wearing in school like everyone else, but because I couldn’t take it all in, couldn’t focus on the existence of lure and a boy who could flow in and out of window glass at will. Not at the same time.
“Hanna!”
“I don’t have to go if I don’t want to.” Extremity had turned me into a five-year-old.
“I don’t want you to go,” said Wyatt, sweating and fighting to keep hold of the lure. “I want you to reach into my pocket and—Hanna! Are you listening?”
“Okay.”
“Get the red card from my right front pocket.”
I moved forward past the counter, super-slow, as though I were in a dream where the air was thick and spongy and hard to move through. Up close, a thin reflection of my face drifted across the glassine surface of the lure in Wyatt’s hands; I looked like a ghost.
“Hanna! The ca
rd!”
I stood within kissing distance of Wyatt, close enough to smell his sweat and the minty gum on his breath. Rummaging in the pants of a boy you intensely disliked had to be the most obnoxious chore in the world.
The pocket of Wyatt’s dark jeans was warm, but the cards I encountered were chill enough to numb the tips of my fingers. I pulled out the small deck, half the size of regular playing cards, and shuffled through them quickly, hating the feel of them, until I found a red card. It had a tissue-thin paper backing on one side; the other side was silky-slick and etched with curious black markings. I shoved the rest of the cards back into Wyatt’s pocket.
“Okay,” he said. “Pull the paper off the back of the card, and—Where’re you going?” He looked frantic, as though I were abandoning him.
I held up the tissue backing I’d removed. “I’m going to put this paper in the trash.”
“Never mind the goddamn trash! Put the sticky side of the card on the lure, but don’t touch the lure!”
I noticed then that Wyatt was wearing black rubber gloves, from which the color was fading even as I watched, fading only to reappear in thick black swirls within the struggling lure in his grip.
“Do it!”
I did it, and after I settled the card on the lure, Wyatt released it, and it immediately snapped back into the window, invisible except for the card stuck to it. But the lure didn’t remain invisible for long. The red rectangle quickly lost its shape, growing and altering, until it filled in the pinwheel shape of the lure, exposing it.
And the others.
The red color infesting Wyatt’s lure spread like licks of flame until the entire stretch of rattling glass was full of bloody-colored pinwheels throbbing like sick, misshapen hearts. The same inexplicable hallucination I’d seen before … but Wyatt could see it too.
He hustled me to the other side of the counter, and as soon as he pulled me to the floor, a loud, jangling explosion blitzed the office.
Red shards of glass fell all around us like hellish rain.
I ignored the glass and watched Wyatt instead, panting and warm beside me; a trickle of sweat rolled past his ear, such a fantastically normal sight after what I’d just seen.