The Book of Lies

by Melissa McShane

  The Kevin-thing shoved me away and began to rise. “Help!” I screamed, tackling it again.

  I was suddenly surrounded by the members of the Board of Neutralities. Hands dragged me away from the thing. “A robber?” Stirlaugson said. “That seems oddly—”

  The Kevin-thing’s mouth opened widely, and black tendrils emerged from it. “Get it outside!” I shrieked. “Don’t ask questions, just do it!”

  Four of the Board members grabbed the thing and hustled it through the door, throwing it to the pavement. “Inside, inside,” I gasped, and shut the door and threw home the dead bolt. I leaned against the door, too spent to worry about whether the Kevin-thing had the means to break through it.

  I heard gasps, and swearing, and looked up in time to see something black and angular emerge from the Kevin-thing’s mouth. It had waving tentacles where its mouth should be, and the back of its head came to a wicked point. Eight multi-jointed legs that ended in spikes pulled free of what was left of Kevin’s head. Black vapor pooled beneath it, rising up from its chitinous skin and melting the snowflakes that touched it. It had a dozen eyes like beads of blood, lidless and filled with a terrible intelligent menace, that it turned on me. It couldn’t have smiled, not with that mouth, but I could swear it was laughing as it looked at me. “You’ll have one more chance, custodian,” it said in a voice that hit every one of my primal panic buttons. “One more, when all hope is lost. Remember.”

  It turned and took a few steps toward the market, but before it could go farther, it shimmered like it was passing through an oil slick. It hurt to look at it, but I squinted and saw it flatten out into a two-dimensional caricature of itself, then fold like the most complicated origami I could imagine. Then it was gone, and snowflakes began to drift into the space where it had been. Kevin’s body, which looked like an empty, distorted suit now, lay on the pavement in front of my door.

  “Thanks,” I said to the air, not sure how I was going to explain this to the Board.

  There was silence. I turned around to find them all looking at me with…was it pity, or shame? Either way, it made no sense. “We should probably get Kevin’s body before someone notices it,” I said.

  “Tim, Erich, see to it,” Stirlaugson said, and Ragsdale and Harrison opened the door and hoisted Kevin’s body back inside. I hovered nearby, just in case the invader was still there and hiding well, but nothing happened. Ragsdale turned the dead bolt again and, as an afterthought, turned the sign to say CLOSED.

  We all stood there in silence, me feeling exhausted and terrified and confused. Why weren’t they asking questions? I’d ask questions if I were them.

  Finally, Stirlaugson said, “The Board wishes to apologize to you, Ms. Davies. We had no idea they would act so quickly or decisively.”

  That confused me more. “What are you talking about? Are you saying you expected this?”

  Stirlaugson sighed and sat on the metal chair just inside the door, wobbling a bit. “We didn’t intend to tell you anything,” she said. “The point of this visit was to determine if you’d already been corrupted. If not, you need never know the danger; if so, we were prepared to…deal with you.”

  “I don’t understand. Corrupted how? You mean, how that thing wanted me to work for it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you knew it would try something like that. You know about the Wardens who work with the invaders. Why haven’t you told anyone?”

  Stirlaugson looked at Ragsdale, who was wiping his hands on a handkerchief that looked just like the ones Malcolm carried. “The night the familiars attacked the hotel,” he said, “the Board was…visited…by an invader who wore human form. It told us of the invaders’ alliance with a handful—maybe more than a handful—of Wardens, how they’d been working with them for centuries. It laid out their plan for conquering the world and invited us to join them. I apologize for how distant I sounded when we spoke, but it threatened to…discorporate…as that one would have, destroying the hotel and killing everyone in it, if I gave its presence away.”

  “That’s why you couldn’t come down. Not the familiars, but one of them. How did you escape it?”

  Ragsdale smiled. “We’re more physically competent than we appear. We subdued it long enough to get it out of the hotel before it could injure anyone. Then we set about doing damage control.”

  “They let the familiars into the hotel! No—were they behind the bindings failing in the first place?”

  “They were not. That was a simple flaw in the Nicollien binding. They just took advantage of it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘damage control’?”

  “We have no way of knowing which Wardens are in league with the invaders,” Stirlaugson said. “We began by interrogating the magi who created the flawed wards, to see if they had done it on purpose. During the interrogation, we rendered them unconscious and conducted a thorough physical. We hoped to find some alteration in their bodies that would indicate they had accepted the invaders’ promises. It was something our visitor had implied might exist.”

  “You didn’t find anything.”

  “We found something,” said the red-headed Board member, “but it occurs naturally in perhaps one out of three humans. Hardly conclusive.”

  “But something to go on,” said Harrison. He seemed not at all antagonistic toward me now.

  “Wait,” I said, “you’re not magi. How could you conduct that kind of physical? Because I’m sure it was more complicated than checking their pupil dilation.”

  “We enlisted Lucia Pontarelli’s aid. She’s loyal to us, and has proved that loyalty time and again.” Harrison wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “But—I have faith in Lucia, but how could you be sure she wasn’t a traitor? You can’t trust anyone!”

  “At some point we simply have to act on faith,” Stirlaugson said. “We are cleaning house, Ms. Davies, beginning with the Neutralities, and we hope to do so quickly, before knowledge of this…this shadow cabal spreads.”

  “You have to tell people.”

  “And do what? Incite riots as Nicollien and Ambrosite go to war, this time over a real threat? If you have a better solution, we’re listening.”

  I shook my head. “I understand. Nobody will be able to trust anybody else. The factions will be even more divided than they already are. You want to figure out who’s really on our side and get as many allies as you can before the war begins, so you’ll have people you can trust.”

  “Which is why we’re going to ask you not to tell anyone about this,” Stirlaugson said.

  “What…no one? You can’t expect me to keep this a secret from Judy!”

  “Judy Rasmussen’s loyalties are already strained. She might be innocent, but she might also feel obligated to tell her father. And we are by no means sure that William Rasmussen is not a member of the shadow cabal.”

  “I trust Judy with my life.”

  “We appreciate that. Nevertheless, you will not tell her. We will let you know when you’re allowed to speak.”

  “But—”

  “Consider yourself bound by the Accords, Ms. Davies.” Stirlaugson stood and brushed off her skirt. “We intend to find a way to identify traitors, and when that happens, secrecy will no longer matter. Until then, hold your tongue.”

  I nodded, feeling mulish. I couldn’t tell Judy. I couldn’t warn Malcolm that his allies might be traitors…oh, no, Malcolm couldn’t be one of them, could he? I thought of how he’d looked every time I’d seen him fighting invaders. No. It was impossible. But I’d promised not to tell, and I had to stay quiet. This really was a violation of the Accords that would see me executed.

  The nine members of the Board closed in around me. It felt menacing, and I readied myself to fight free of them. But they just offered their hands for me to shake, one at a time. Ragsdale looked at me with compassion, when it was his turn, and Chukwu nodded to me as to an equal. Stirlaugson was last, and she held onto my hand when I would have let go and said, “We kno
w what we’re asking of you. We honor you for keeping the secret.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’ll leave by the back way.” Stirlaugson pulled out her phone and turned away to hold a short conversation with whoever was on the other end. “Some of you, bring the body. We’ll dispose of it. He can’t ever be found, not looking like that.”

  Kevin did look like an empty skin, deflated and torn, and I swallowed around another lump in my throat, remembering the cheerful, flirtatious guy I’d met that first night. I didn’t want to know if he’d died in pain.

  I showed them the back way out, then locked the door behind them and trod slowly upstairs to my apartment. I kicked off my shoes and sat on my couch with the lights turned off. It was still afternoon, but the heavy snowfall turned the light gray and made everything look dismal and dull. I curled into a ball and shook uncontrollably. This was too great a disaster for tears. I’d come face to face with death, but that wasn’t what terrified me. It was the knowledge that likely somebody I knew was a traitor to the Wardens’ cause. Someone I knew thought that invader, with its smooth speech and gentle logic, was right, and a few humans could and should be sacrificed for the sake of the rest of humanity.

  I shook, tearless, until my body calmed enough that I could stand and walk to the window. I looked down at the spot where Kevin’s body had lain, where the invader had disappeared like folded paper, and tried to breathe normally. The Board would figure something out. They were ruthless and committed to the truth.

  Unless one of them is a traitor, too.

  Why would the invaders make a move now, if they’d had centuries to infiltrate magery? The Kevin-thing had implied it had something to do with me—that they’d wanted to test me, see if I could hold strong and keep the oracle alive. That didn’t make it my fault, but it made me utterly determined to fight them. “I won’t let you win,” I whispered, and my words echoed in the stillness of my apartment. “I won’t let you win.”

  19

  When I was younger, our family living room had always looked like a disaster area at ten o’clock Christmas morning—wrapping strewn everywhere, toys stacked up in our separate corners like a three-way game of Jenga. Now it looked more sedate, though the piles were still there, smaller piles now that Tickle Me Elmo wasn’t a likely gift. “Maybe we can get Cynthia and Ethan out here next year,” I said, dangling my new watch by its strap and watching the Christmas lights on the tree reflect in its face. “It would be fun to have a baby around.”

  “She won’t be even a year old yet,” Mom said. “Not old enough to really have fun with Christmas. Give it a year or so.”

  “I can’t believe I’m going to be a grandpa this time next year,” Dad groaned. He was lying on the couch with his eyes closed and the Sunday newspaper tented over his chest. “I’m too young for this.”

  “Cynthia’s twenty-six. That’s not too young.”

  “I didn’t say she was too young, I said I was too young. I’m barely thirty.”

  “Mentally, you’re six,” Jake said. Dad threw a ball of crumpled wrapping paper at him, but it fell short by a foot.

  “I have to check the turkey,” Mom said. “And the potatoes.”

  “She’s barbecuing it,” Jake whispered when she’d left. “Barbecuing Christmas turkey. That’s got to be a crime.”

  “Come on. If Mom’s doing it, it will be great,” I said, though secretly I had reservations. I’d never gotten the deep-frying craze, and barbecuing seemed like just one more wacky experiment that had huge potential for disaster.

  Jake shrugged and pushed himself upright. “I’m going to put my loot away and sleep until dinner. Lunch. Whatever it is when you have Christmas dinner at noon.”

  I strapped the watch to my wrist. No more fumbling for my phone to check the time. It was a vintage piece my parents had found for me, and I loved it. “Dad, don’t sleep on the couch. You know Mom hates it when you do that.”

  “If I sleep, she can’t find things for me to do,” Dad said, but he sat up and folded the paper. “You still liking that job of yours?”

  “I love it. I’m so glad you still read the actual newspaper, or I never would have found it.”

  “I just can’t believe it put you in danger. When we learned you’d been in that hotel where the wild dogs attacked…that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  “It was scary. I’m just glad so few people were hurt.” The lie hurt, like denying my colleagues’ suffering, but what else could I say?

  “You must have been terrified. You’ve always been afraid of big dogs,” Mom said, coming into the room with an apron in her hand. “Ever since you were three and that dog came after you.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “We were having a picnic in the park. Some woman was walking her dog—I can’t remember what kind it was, but it was easily as tall as you were and probably outweighed you—and it got loose. Came running right up to us, snarling and barking.”

  “I don’t think it came after you specifically, but you probably didn’t care about the distinction. You shrieked like it was going to kill you,” Dad said. “The woman got hold of it, very apologetic, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so we just let it go. But for weeks afterward, you had to sleep with the light on. Kept screaming about monsters coming after you.”

  I sat with my hand on my watch band. “Monsters?”

  “Yes, and you drew the most awful pictures and kept asking when they were coming back.” Mom laughed. “It’s funny now, but at the time we came close to taking you to a specialist.”

  “I don’t remember,” I repeated.

  “Well, you were only three. I don’t know how many memories any of us have from that age,” Dad said. “And it passed. We were worried you’d develop a fear of dogs, but mostly you were just wary of the big ones, like any small child might be.”

  “Yeah, dogs don’t frighten me.” Monsters? That was far, far too long ago to be explained by my being Abernathy’s custodian. But if Mr. Briggs hadn’t seen through illusions…. “I must’ve just had an overactive imagination.”

  “Probably. Though you’ve always been our level-headed child.” Mom patted my level head and smiled. “Why don’t you come set the table?”

  “Why do I always have to set the table? Jake should learn how so he can impress his girlfriends.”

  “Because it gives me a chance to talk to you.” She put on the apron and made a little “come here” gesture with her right hand.

  I grumbled, but got out the silver and china and laid places around the table. “Speaking of girlfriends,” Mom said, “are you seeing anyone?”

  “Not a girlfriend, Mom.”

  “It was by way of being a segue, smart girl. Well?”

  “I…” My parents had no contact with the magical world and were unlikely to tell anyone who mattered about my relationship. “Actually…yeah, I am.”

  “Really?” Mom’s voice ratcheted up into Maternal Busybody mode. “Who is he? Why haven’t we met him? How long?”

  “Mom, calm down. We’ve been dating for a few months, but he travels a lot, so we haven’t seen much of each other. And I was going to bring him over when I felt it was serious.” Two-thirds of that was a lie, and I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t tell my parents the truth about Malcolm. As for not bringing him over…I never felt awkward about how much older Malcolm was than me, except when I thought about my parents meeting him. It wasn’t as if I were dating someone their age, which would be truly awkward, but…it was irrational, and I should get over myself. “Maybe we could come for dinner some night?”

  “Of course. I’m glad you’re dating. You’re too young not to be having fun.”

  Oh, we have lots more than fun, Mom. Another thing you didn’t talk to your mother about, even if a healthy sex life was a good thing. “I think you’ll like him. His name is Malcolm and he loves old movies. It’s sort of how we got together.”

  “So, dinner and movie night. Just let me know
when you want to come over, and I’ll make something special.”

  I set out the final napkin, folded the way I’d learned in home ec, and said, “I’m going to get my things packed up. I should probably leave after dinner.”

  “I’m glad you came.” Mom slipped out to check the turkey again, and I gathered my little pile of gifts and trotted downstairs to my old room. The purple carpet, as ugly as it was, filled me with nostalgia, and I sat on my old bed and breathed in the lavender smell of the potpourri my mom scented the sheets with. Coming home, even if only for a visit, always left me with the strangest mix of feelings: irrational regret, quiet happiness, and an urge to leave and return to my actual home as quickly as possible.

  I packed my suitcase—I was starting to get sick of the sight of it, after five days—and made the bed, something I normally would not have done. I saw no point in making a bed you were just going to mess up again. But I was a guest now, not a resident, and I wanted to leave this room, now a guest room, as nice as possible. Even if Mom would probably change the sheets after I left.

  My eye fell on one of my old stuffed animals wedged into the upper shelves of the ceiling-high bookcase. Snoopy wasn’t as white as he’d once been, thanks to age, and his bright black eyes regarded me with indifference. I remembered the Kevin-thing’s eyes, not the blood-red ones of its actual body, but the black, malicious beads that had stared out at me from Kevin’s body, and turned Snoopy to face the other wall.

  So. I’d had nightmares about monsters. I really didn’t remember that at all. Could there be something magical about me that didn’t have anything to do with Abernathy’s? It wasn’t being attractive to invaders, or I’d have seen a lot more attacks growing up. Or been killed by one. No, in that respect I was a typical custodian. But if Diane was right, being Abernathy’s custodian didn’t have anything to do with my ability to see through illusions.