I loved that Dancer saw so much beauty in the world. We needed more people like him. Could I heal his heart? Did I have such power? Should I try to find the legendary elixir and give it to him? Would he want it? I wasn’t sure I would.
“Here’s my version of pi,” he told me. “I took it more classic rock.” He opened an MP3 and hit PLAY.
It was different, but equally uplifting.
He said, “You can do all kinds of interpretations of pi but it’s just one of many mathematical equations that convert brilliantly to song. I want to break down the music in the box and study it. It makes sense to me that since sound is vibration is frequency, and the Hoar Frost King was devouring frequency from the fabric of our world, it would be another sound/vibration/frequency that would repair it. We just have to isolate it. I can’t compute it with the information we currently have because the Hoar Frost King removed those chunks of complex frequency. While I was able to determine that it was drawn to the flatted-fifth, there were multiple frequencies occurring at each scene that got iced. The Devil’s tritone may have been only one of many frequencies he stripped from those locations. I’ve tried playing all kinds of music to the black holes repeatedly, but nothing I’ve played has had any effect.”
I smiled faintly, envisioning him sitting near a black hole with a boom box. None of what he’d said explained why I heard the symphony of my dreams coming from the box while he heard a nightmarish melody. “Any idea why you and I hear it so differently?”
He shook his head. “But let me play with it and I’ll text you when I’ve got something.”
“You’ll text me?”
He grinned. “Barrons gave me a phone loaded with numbers and said he programmed my number into yours.”
Figured. After showing him how to open the music box, I said goodbye and headed for the door. I had a lengthy list of goals to accomplish today.
But first I wanted to cross a personal one off my list.
Cellphones didn’t get reception in the Silvers. Well, with the exception of IYD, which magically bypassed natural laws. As I moved toward the door I pulled mine out to call Mom and gasped. I’d been so busy I hadn’t looked at it since returning from the Silvers.
I had fifty-two voicemail messages and over a hundred new texts. My cellphone was on mute. I turned the volume back on and glanced at my texts first. Mom, Dad, Ryodan, Alina.
Alina? I thumbed them up and a long line of them whizzed by, leaving the last one on the screen:
Sept 11, 10:43 P.M.
Oh, for crying out loud, Mac, where ARE you? Mom and Dad are LOSING it! How did you handle them when I died? They totally melt down! Okay, so maybe I’m melting down, too. WHERE ARE YOU??????
I stared blankly. It was dated yesterday. I scrolled back. There were pages and pages of texts. I finally got to the first one:
August 8, 7:30 A.M.
Hey, little Mac—breakfast is ready!
August 8, 8:00 A.M.
Sissy, where are you?????
August 8, 9:02 A.M.
Seriously, Jr., what the fuck?
August 8, 11:21 A.M.
Mac, coffee’s getting bitter and so am I. Get your freaking petunia over here. I will NOT be stood up by my baby sis. You’re pissing me off.
Tears filled my eyes. How was she still here? Even though I’d put her on my list of personal goals, I’d been going through the motions, nothing more. I’d accepted that she’d been an illusion with substance, created by the Sinsar Dubh. I’d also accepted that since it had been rendered inert, she would no longer be here.
Was it possible the Book had genuinely brought her back from the dead? And whether it was contained or not, here Alina would remain?
I shivered. On some level, I found the thought unsettling, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. It was possible I’d just seen too many monkey’s paw type movies where you had to be really careful what you wished for because there was always some terrible karmic price for interfering with Fate. And although I’d once said I didn’t believe in the bitch, I’d decided that either I did or it didn’t matter because Fate believed in me.
I scrolled through Alina’s messages again. She was living with Mom and Dad in a townhouse on the north side of the River Liffey.
After memorizing the address, I hurried out into the storm.
LANDSLIDE
* * *
I learned, much later, after I’d hunted down the man named Seamus O’Leary, that I was the reason he’d broken my mother’s heart.
From my cage, I’d watched a good mom turn into a terrible mom and, finally, a mortal danger to me.
I needed to know why.
I was ten when I realized you couldn’t yield even an ounce of your essential self for any reason. Good people didn’t turn bad overnight. It happened from the accumulation of many small compromises, sacrifices, and losses.
Small, consistent erosions turn into landslides in time.
A widower with three sons, Seamus hadn’t been averse to marrying a woman with a child of her own and blending their families.
He’d found her funny and clever, pretty and kind. A junior partner at a law firm, he’d fallen in love with the gentle, downtrodden after-hours cleaning woman.
But she was cursed by the O’Malley bloodline, and while some men learned to live with the ancient heritage of the six sidhe-seer houses, to respect and love their wife and daughter’s gifts, not all men were so inclined.
And some were simply unwilling to believe at all.
Secure in his love, certain of his intentions, my mother told Seamus about herself, her heritage, and me.
His shock took a darker turn to concern for her mental health, this woman he’d nearly entrusted with his young sons.
This woman who actually believed she had a child that could move so fast no one could see her.
She’d presented him with an insane and vividly detailed delusion about fairies and women who’d been selectively bred to protect the world against them.
She’d affixed her delusional paranoia to real world people and businesses, insisting a local, highly respected abbey was really a secret society of women that guarded the world from these ancient, immortal monsters and, in Dublin, they posed as a bike courier company called PHI (that his office frequently used to dispatch files about town) so this special cult of gifted “fairy-killers” could keep tabs on their city, ever alert for threats to humankind.
She’d contended that her daughter had been so strong by the age of three that she’d shattered the toilet merely by crashing into it too fast in something she’d called “freeze-frame.”
(I remembered that day. I’d struck the commode with my little kid belly so hard it’d been black and blue for days. We hadn’t been able to afford another toilet for months. When she’d finally brought one home, it was cracked and discolored and she had to repair it. I have no idea where she found it. Probably in someone’s trash.)
Then, the coup de grâce—my mother told Seamus that she’d been forced to handle her very special daughter by keeping her locked up in a cage.
For years.
This woman he’d nearly taken home to his precious young sons.
I remember the look on his face when I freeze-framed into his office late one night, after everyone else had gone home for the day, leaving him alone. I’d been trailing him for weeks and had finally realized I would never get the answers I wanted without forcing them from him.
I’d blasted in, moving so fast I was undetectable, and whirled around and around the chair he was sitting in, unfurling thick, heavy rope behind me, tying him securely to it.
I remember his expression when I finally slowed down enough for him to see me—curly hair wild, eyes wilder. My strength so enormous by then that I’d been able to simply toss his heavy ornate desk out of my way without the slightest strain.
When I was done with Seamus that night, he believed.
Accepted that every word my mother had told him was true, even wept at the end.
>
If only he’d believed her sooner, if only he’d been willing to learn and accept, I might have gotten a father to help raise me. If only he’d come to the house, met me, kept an open mind, my mom could have proved the truth to him and he’d have gotten a wonderful mother for his sons. The erosion would have stopped. Erosions need new, solid soil to be brought in every now and then.
She’d never wanted to keep me in a cage. A woman without family, alone, without education, didn’t have many choices.
She’d just needed a little help. She’d never gotten it from anyone.
And Rowena, that stone-cold bitch, never once offered aid. I’d known that night I would one day kill the powerful headmistress at the abbey. But I still had questions, big ones, and I’d begun to suspect Rowena was the only one with those answers.
I knew what had broken my mother’s heart but I still didn’t know how we ended up where we ended up that fateful night I gained my freedom.
Outraged, horrified, Seamus had thrown my mom out of his car in the dark, twenty-two miles from home. She’d walked through the pouring rain, crying the entire way. He knew that because he’d followed her, arguing with himself, debating whether he should pick her back up and take her straight to the nearest psychiatric facility.
The irony: if he had, I’d have been found in my cage by social workers and freed from it. Placed in a center, or foster care, I would have vanished in no time, grown up, and gotten her out. Taken her home and taken care of her. She wouldn’t have died.
Seamus had driven away.
Then he’d gone one step further the next day and had her fired from her cleaning job, lodging a formal complaint of theft against her with his firm.
He’d said he wouldn’t press charges if she went quietly.
She had.
My mother always went quietly. She didn’t know any other way.
Word got around, after she’d been fired, that she wasn’t to be trusted, and others refused her employment.
We’d needed that job. And the many others she was never able to get again.
I didn’t kill him.
But I wanted to.
I didn’t because, like my mom, he wasn’t a bad person.
He was just the final erosion that started the landslide.
When I was thirteen I made a plaque for my mother’s grave that said:
Emma Danielle O’Malley
Weep not for the life she lost,
But the life she never got to live.
JADA
I’d once taken a vacation Silverside, about three years in.
The planet I’d christened Dada—because it wasn’t full-blown surrealism and Shazam’s nihilism had been getting to me—was a crazy, rainbow-colored world that made me feel as if I were living in the game Candyland.
Nothing on that planet was the right color, assuming you used Earth for a gauge, but after a few months on Dada, I decided Earth’s gauge was boring and wrong.
It was a small, lushly overgrown world with humid rain forests and pink oceans, dunes and beaches of powdery cerulean sand, and craggy burnt orange mountains. I’d explored that world from end to end, finding neither civilization nor ruins to suggest any had ever existed. It was paradise for me and Shazam.
Everything was edible.
The flowers had tasted like sweet and sour Gummy Bears and were massively high energy. The tree bark was varying flavors of chocolate. (I only peeled it away from fallen trees.) The water was pink lemonade and the plants tasted like fruit, even the leaves. The mushrooms—though they were the color and consistency of Hershey kisses—I hadn’t cared for. They’d been pretty much like those on Earth. Sautéed, breaded, or plain, mushrooms always tasted like dirt to me.
“I like mushrooms,” Dancer protested. “Have you ever tried a stuffed Portobello?”
Lying on my back next to him, I turned my head and narrowed my eyes. “I now find you completely suspicious and don’t think we can be friends anymore, Brain.”
He grinned. “Continue, Pinky. Tell me more about Dada.”
The plants were so large, with such mammoth, sturdy, coated leaves that Shazam and I had been able to pluck them from segmented stems and sail down pink rivers together, racing kaleidoscopic, flying fish. The sky was light lavender and, at dusk, it turned violet before settling into a deep purple twilight. True night never fell on Dada, beneath seven brilliant purple moons that peaked at intervals.
I had no idea how long I’d stayed on that planet. I’d counted it as four months. Four blissful, peaceful months that had undone a lot of the damage from the past three years. I’d arrived on Dada badly injured. I’d left ready to tackle anything, and a damn good thing, too, because the next world had been hostile and harsh.
“How did you keep track of time?” Dancer said.
“Sloppily,” I told him.
I’d had no watch and days Silverside unfolded in an unquantifiable blur, although I’d done my best to track it. Some planets had short nights, others felt like they lasted days, and on a few no sun ever rose. Those were the really bad ones.
Although I’d told people I’d been gone five and a half years, it was only a rough estimate. Still, I was pretty sure I was somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one.
“So, I might be a seriously younger man,” Dancer said, smirking. “You cougar, you.”
I snickered. Me, a cougar. Right. “Not in any way that matters,” I told him. Age didn’t exist when I was with him. He was just Dancer and I was just me. We were sprawled out on our backs on one of the counters in the physics lab, holding hands. I’d dropped by to stock up on food but had taken one look at the exhaustion in his face and ended up staying, searching for something to say that would make him light up, recharge.
He propped himself up on an elbow. “Tell me more about Shazam.”
I stared into those long-lashed, brilliant aqua eyes that I adored seeing light up with laughter and fascination, especially when they were turned my way. What deranged God would give him a damaged heart? I’d already told him how we’d met. So I told him why we had to leave Dada. “He ate all the fish. I think to extinction. The other animals found out and stampeded, chased us all the way to the exit portal I located shortly after we arrived. He was only gone an hour when he did it.” I frowned. “I’m not sure how he ate them all so fast. I think he has another form he never lets me see. Maybe more than one. There’s a lot about Shazam I don’t know. The whole hiding up in the air gig, he never taught me how to do it, though I pestered him relentlessly.”
And it would have proved invaluable if he had. Some worlds had shorted out my sidhe-seer gifts. Shaz had a theory those planets were heavily laced with some mineral my blood reacted to badly. I’d always felt sick on those worlds and been unable to freeze-frame. Those had been tough worlds to survive. I had no clue how ordinary folks got through the days.
“Shaz says there are things limited life-forms like me aren’t supposed to know until they reach that phase of evolution. You know, he’d been really good with his diet up until then, too. I’d had him restricted to plant life. I didn’t think it was fair for him to eat another living being on Dada. They were so funny and playful and curious. They had complex societies and strong familial bonds. I asked him how he would like it if something ate him. He sank into an enormous depression for days, weeping uncontrollably, then told me with regal ire that ‘For my Yi-yi, alone, I will starve if she so demands it.’ ” I added dryly, “She so demanded it. He wasn’t starving. Shazam has enough belly fat to live off for months. But I’d never tell him that,” I added hastily. “He’s super sensitive about his appearance.”
Dancer rolled over onto his stomach, head propped on fists, eyes dancing with excitement. I was relieved to see he looked far less tired than when I’d first arrived. “Mega, I’ve got to meet him! Why didn’t you bring him back with you?”
Just like that, the shining bubble of happiness I’d blown for us popped. I closed my eyes and focused on my breath. After a l
ong moment I said, “I’m starving. Mind if I hit up your supplies?”
When I opened my eyes, he was still in the same position, watching me with that steady, brilliant gaze. “Why did he call you Yi-yi?”
I had no intention of answering him but this was the most freely I’d spoken to anyone about my time Silverside. I was finding it increasingly difficult to say no to Dancer about anything, and my mouth said, “It was his way of saying he loved me. He used to say, ‘I see you, Yi-yi.’ ”
Dancer smiled and pushed to his feet. “What are you hungry for? I’ll nuke us some lunch.”
“I need to head out to the abbey. I’ve wasted too much time already.”
“It’s good to take a break every now and then, Mega. Just like your vacation on Dada. Thanks for telling me about it. I want to hear about other worlds, too, like where you went from there. I want to hear about all of them.” He shook his head with a look that was equal parts admiration and unabashed envy. “Christ, I’ve only ever seen one bloody world. You’ve seen what, hundreds? Thousands? Mega, when this is over, let’s go off world. Let’s go adventuring! We can do anything, go anywhere!”
I raided his little pantry in back, grabbed a few dozen protein bars, crammed all but one in my backpack, ripped it open, and headed for the door.
“Sure,” I forced out through a tight throat.
“See you tonight, Pinky?” he called after me.
We used to crack ourselves up calling each other Pinky and the Brain in a much simpler time, hatching our schemes to take over the world.
He’d kissed me last night. I’d slept over. The abbey was a ruin and none of my old hidey-holes had appealed. I’d been someone else when I stayed in those places, someone I’d never be again.
I’d slept on the couch despite his insistence I take the bed and he’d take the couch.
I shaped a No, I’m busy, with my lips, prepared to toss it over my shoulder. Instantly, a vision exploded in my head: dropping by tomorrow to find him dead. Last word he’d ever heard from me a “No.”