And I’d had enough.
There was a buzzing noise, like a bug flying into a lamp, a quick but brilliant flicker of light, and Circe was gone. All that remained were words and letters, but even they were drifting apart, floating, languidly, out the tower window.
Wit ch m a magic i p o w er
Go dd ess a a g i c e v il
G o d d e s s s w t ch so rcer ess s s s s s
“So . . . there!” With that, I turned and ran down the spiral steps as quick as I could, all the while thinking of cooler things I should have said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Peter! Peter, wait up!” Only one voice could have stopped me so suddenly with a magic of its very own, as I dashed through the school’s courtyard. I turned around and saw Jenny; her brown hair had come untied and was flying behind her as she raced toward me, holding on to the straps of her backpack.
“Peter,” she breathed. “I . . . heard. Hold on.” She bent over, hands on her knees, and caught her breath. Finally she stood up straight. “I heard your internal monologue back there when we were outside of Mattie’s class, and . . . well, there was this voice in my head that went he only tells the truth in his internal monologue because he’s just really bad about controlling it, and then I realized, how could I possibly know that? I don’t know you at all—you’re just the guy whose books ruined my series all those years ago and now walks around campus with a stick up his—”
Bark!
“Dach-shund!” I shouted, more relieved than I ever would have believed. “How is Dach-shund here? I’ve been looking for her! Come here, girl!” I bent down to try and pick her up, but she backed away, looking at Jenny in confusion.
“How do you know Dach-shund? She’s only in the story because I’m in the story . . . Which I guess only confirms . . . We really did have a history.”
“A whole book,” I noted.
“It also means,” she went on, ignoring me, “you were telling the truth—you know how to get rid of??”
“You know about??!” I asked, giving up on befriending Dach-shund and standing up. “How could you possibly—Randy and I discovered that together; it’s top secret.” Then I realized, no, we hadn’t. Not in this version of things.
“Itdoesn’tmatterhowIknow!” she snapped, her face reddening. I gave her a Look.
“Okay, okay, because I worked the summer in the Black Market. We all knew about?—how the disappearances all began once he started coming around, then when he got too well-known, sending his little hobbit helpers. We just didn’t know how to stop him. And to try and to fail . . . hecouldhavemadeusalldissapear! L-l-like he did Joanne!” Jenny stammered, her eyes darting around nervously as though? could show up at any minute.
“It’s okay.” I stepped forward, my arms out, and she quickly backed away. “Right. Not there yet.” I swung my arms awkwardly by my sides. “Look, I don’t want him to make anyone else disappear either, Jenny. That’s why I’m on my way down to Detective now to blast my way into his office, get my backstory back, and put things right. I may not have been strong enough to get past his magical defenses before, but—I don’t know if you know this—in this version, I’m a pretty powerful wizard.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, you’re very powerful. We get it. But there’s no need for a big magical production here—I don’t know how it is in your version of things, but here, there’s no spell on Detective Potts’s door. You just have to know the security code to the building. Which I do.”
“But, how do you—”
The bell rang, and immediately, the rumble of students’ voices could be heard from within the buildings. Jenny looked around frantically, clearly terrified someone might see us together. “It doesn’t matter, Peter! Just meet me at the south entrance tonight at eleven o’clock. I’ll help you get inside to change your backstory—not because I care about a version of the story where you and I were together.” At this, she made an, admittedly, hurtful face of disgust. “But because that (bark!) made my best friend, Joanne, vanish. And I want her back.”
“Uh, okay, then,” I said, not really wanting to tell her that in the other version of things, she and Joanne weren’t all that close anyway. “Deal.” I stuck out my hand to shake on it; she looked down at it and walked away, Dach-shund trotting along behind her. I’d say this was going pretty well.
Several hours later, after trying but failing to connect in any way with my little sister (she seemed much more interested in listening to something she deemed “music” and painting the walls of her room—you guessed it—black), I found myself hanging around at a rarely mentioned café near the edge of Mystery and Sci Fi, with, of all people, Ed the YA vampire.
“She just doesn’t seem to care about me as a person,” he was saying, sipping his drink through a swirly straw, looking forlorn. We were outside on the patio; in front of us, the cobblestoned street of mystery was dotted with old, run-down shops with signs hanging, creaking in the breeze. One said “Candlesticks,” another simply said, “Who Knows What.” I didn’t say anything but sipped my own drink silently, a soda with an added pinch of Nonfiction extract. I watched as a tall, slender, and large-eyed alien meandered down the road from Sci Fi to our right. He nodded curtly as he passed and then slipped into the Candlesticks shop.
“I mean, you must know what I mean,” Ed went on, his words starting to get a bit more slurred. “She hates you—and why? Just because you saved her life? She whines, says you rub it in her face, make her feel guilty about it . . . But me?” He pointed to himself, sloshing some of his Bloody Mary onto the table. “I never did anything to her. She doesn’t even care that I can play the piano . . .”
I glanced down at my watch. Ten forty-five.
“Listen, Ed, I wouldn’t worry about it too much longer.” Just then a waitress from inside walked out to pick up some dishes from another table. I motioned for the bill, and she disappeared back into the building. When she came back, she placed the bill on the table, then vanished, mysteriously.
“Is this a six or an eight . . .?” I asked, looking down at the bill.
“It’s an eight,” she said, from under the table.
“Cafés in Mystery are weird,” Ed slurred, swinging his legs. “Oops, sorry.” She got up, dusted herself off, and collected my money (Ed had “mysterrrriouslyy forgotten [his] wallet”), and with that, Ed and I got up to leave—or rather, I got up, and he staggered into the table next to ours.
“Hey, Peter,” he said, throwing his arm around my shoulder once he’d regained his balance, nearly sending me flying backward. “Peter, I like you. You’re not aaaaasevil as everyone says youaare.”
I sat him back down, and before I could even make the universal “sorry, my friend is drunk and needs some coffee” gesture to one of the waitstaff, he’d keeled forward, head banging loudly on the table, fast asleep.
I left him at the café, head drooped on the table, feeling better than I had in weeks.
“Psst. Hey, Peter,” the purple hedge behind me whispered—which really isn’t all that weird in Fiction. What was weird, though, was that it wasn’t, in fact, the hedge, but Jenny, peering out from behind it. She looked around to make sure the coast was clear and stepped around the bush.
“Wow, you really don’t want anyone to see us together,” I remarked, noting the way she kept looking around, her head-to-toe black outfit, the full cloth mask she was wearing so only her eyes and lips were visible.
“It’s not just that I’m embarrassed of you. We’re about to do something seriously illegal. What are you wearing?!”
I looked down, not all that surprised to find I was wearing exactly what I had been earlier—a pair of jeans, some Converse, and one of my favorite T-shirts, an old, faded light blue one with a picture of Charles Merriam in the center.
“Here, at least put this on,” she said in exasperation. She tossed what at first looked like a black wool beanie over to me, but then I saw that holes had been cut out for the eyes and mouth. I slipped it on.
“Wow, Jenny, you really have a lot of, uh, illegal stuff,” I said, adjusting my face mask. She was pulling two pairs of night vision goggles out of her black backpack, then what looked like a sheet of fingerprint stickers, a crowbar, two small sticks of dynamite, a baseball bat, a large samurai sword, a pickax, a giant shovel, and finally, a can of spray cheese. She placed them all onto the ground one by one and then surveyed the pile.
“This, this . . . not this. Definitely these.” She was making another little pile of the things we’d need.
“That’s a pretty good extendable charm,” I remarked. She ignored me.
“Okay, then, take these”—she thrust the night vision goggles into my hand—“and I’ll hold on to these.” She put the dynamite, fingerprints, baseball bat, and spray cheese back into her bag, then carried the rest of the things back behind the hedge. Without another word, she set off toward the school, only pausing to make sure I was following her once she’d passed underneath the south entrance archway.
“Jenny, should I even bother asking how you—”
“No.”
So we walked the rest of the way to the Detective building in silence. Once we got there, I thought we’d probably pause to, you know, make a plan, check in, just see how we were both feeling, but without so much as breaking her stride, Jenny pulled both the can of spray cheese and her wand from the side pocket of her bag and marched right up to the building’s main entrance. She then uncapped the cheese bottle, tossed it up into the air, and aimed her wand at it, slowly gliding it toward what I only then saw was a tiny camera near the top left corner of the door. She covered the lens with spray cheese and then guided the bottle back into her bag.
“How do you—”
She turned around and held a finger to her lips as I continued to watch with my mouth hanging open. She unzipped her bag and took out the sheet of fingerprints, examined it for a minute, and then put one onto her pointer finger and tossed the sheet aside. Only then did I see that it was labeled with names.
“Hey, what’s my name doing on here?” I whispered as she tapped some numbers into the keypad next to the door. “How did you even get my fingerprint?”
“What?” She was distracted. She seemed to be having trouble with the code. “Oh, I just . . . you know, Black Market, we can get all kinds of things. It’s just in case I need to throw off the scent on a job sometime. I’ve never used yours.”
“Well, gee, thanks,” I muttered, wondering how many people’s she had used and wrongfully incriminated. Who was this person?
“Ah! There we go.” I heard something that sounded like an intercom buzz and the door opened.
“After you,” she gestured, stepping aside.
I stepped into the building, an intense feeling of wrongness creeping up on me for breaking into a place that I spent so much time in. I felt like I was violating the building itself somehow, so as we walked along the old, dingy hallway toward Randy’s office, I gave the brick wall a little pat as if to say, Hey, I’m sorry. I’m just here to set things right.
Only, I hadn’t expected the building to respond.
“Peter, what did you do?!” Jenny shouted. She had to shout, because all of the sudden, the hallway was rent with the screaming sound of a siren, alarm bells were ringing, white and red lights were flashing, strobing, making everything appear jagged and disorienting.
“Come on!” I screamed back. I knew we were almost there—and I also happened to know that Randy and his team would take at least five minutes to get to the office; Randy had told me.
So we ran full out until we reached his office door. I pulled out my wand—prepared to pour into the spell all of my terror, my disappointment, and my hope to all the gods of Fiction, Nonfiction, and somewhere in between this would work—when Jenny shot passed me and simply opened the door. She was right; apparently Randy didn’t usually lock his office in this world.
“Where are the backstories?” she screamed. The sirens were blaring through speakers throughout the building, including in the office. Through the flashing lights, I dashed over his large wooden desk and pointed my wand at the brick wall. I poured all of my emotion into the spell and—
Nothing happened.
I tried again and again, and then remembered how earlier, he’d simply waved his wand over the desk and—
It worked.
“Randy really needs to bump up his security in this version of things,” I murmured, rifling through the backstories in their enchanted encasings. Finally, I found my own and pulled it out as quickly as I could without tearing it.
“Oh, Peter, hurry . . .” Jenny was standing, back against the wall, next to the door with her wand held at the ready like a loaded gun.
I took a pencil from the top drawer on Randy’s desk and quick as I could, scrawled the words I knew were missing, hating myself as I did . . .
BETH—MURDERED?
But again, nothing happened. The lights continued to flash, making me dizzy and queasy; the sirens were blaring but not loud enough to mask the unmistakable sounds—a gunshot, shouts somewhere near the entrance of the building.
I tried again and still nothing happened.
“Peter, come ON!” Jenny yelled.
“Okay, okay . . . what am I doing wrong here . . .?” I closed my eyes and imagined the page as last I’d seen it. There it was—
Beth—murdered?
In my author’s handwriting. It was the handwriting! I’d been able to manage it before, merely re-creating the simple swirl of a question mark, but the letters . . .
“PETER!”
Footsteps were banging down the hallway, lots of them, close enough we could hear them over the sirens.
“This is the police! Put your hands—”
But at that moment, there was the loud unmistakable bang of a deflecting spell, and we didn’t ever find out what to do with our hands. I ducked underneath the desk, backstory and pencil in hand. I closed my eyes, imagining the exact curves of his letters, the way his hand must have moved—
Another blast—this time a gunshot. More screaming.
I moved the pencil over the paper, willing my handwriting to match his perfectly. I was just finishing up the question mark—
Someone grabbed my arm.
I jerked my head up, banging it on the desk above me with such force, for a moment, the world around me faded. The sirens still blared in my ears, but lower, deeper somehow, each one sending a throbbing pain through my head and down my back. Had I been shot? My head hurt so bad . . . I opened my eyes—the lights were no longer flashing, but everything seemed to be spinning. Maybe I was dying.
“Peter,” I knew someone was saying, but to me, it sounded like “P E E E E T E R R R R R” and was very far away.
Firm hands on my shoulders, pulling me out from underneath the desk. This was it; I was done for. I felt a pencil slip from my grip. But where were the flashing lights? And now that the ringing in my ears had subsided, where was the noise?
Finally, the room seemed to stop spinning, and though my head still hurt colossally, I could see that I’d managed to leave that horrible scene; I was sitting, slumped, in one of Randy’s armchairs. A slightly blurry Randy was standing behind his desk, facing a large medicine cabinet in the brick wall, pulling things out and placing them on the desk. He was saying something, something about “What the hell were you doing, Peter?” but I wasn’t paying much attention. It had worked. I may have given myself a concussion, but it had worked.
Randy walked briskly around the desk and pressed something warm onto the top of my head that smelled vaguely sweet like honey; immediately the pain began to subside and things became clearer.
“Are you okay?” Randy asked, stepping back to look me in the eye. He looked more worried than I’d have imagined. “You gave yourself quite a crack on the head, Peter. A pretty bad concussion by the looks of it. And you scared me nearly to death—turning up under my desk of all places! I’m just glad you’re okay . . .”
“Drink the whole thing,” he said, handing it over to me.
Though it was brown and smelled strongly of petrol, as soon as it hit my tongue, it was strawberries and cream.
“I meant, I was fixing something with my backstory,” I said, handing him the empty little bottle. “It’s a long story, but I think it all worked out . . .”
“Well, I should hope so, Peter. You’ve had us all worried to death, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
Randy shook his head in disbelief. “What do you mean, what do I mean? You’ve been missing for a week! I’ve had the whole force out looking for you—we combed all of Fiction, even some of Nonfiction, I sent Terrill and Ivor into Narnia looking for you . . . In the end, we thought somehow? had gotten ahold of your backstory. That you’d been . . . erased.”
“What?!” I jumped up from my seat, then my legs decided against it, and I crumpled back into the chair. “How could I have been gone a week—I haven’t even been gone, really; I didn’t go anywhere. And I was only . . . well, there, but not there, for like a day . . .” I tried to make sense of it all: moving into what was clearly another version of reality, without feeling like I’d actually gone anywhere, and a week passing, though time hadn’t felt any slower there—or here, or whatever that was . . .
“‘For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.’ Something I picked up in Eastern Philosophy. We looked for you there too,” Randy added at my questioning look.
The Timeless Tale of Peter Able Page 16