“How can I help?” Eleanor asked.
“Go upstairs and get Mom’s sewing kit,” Cordelia answered.
“Seriously?” said Brendan.
“And some Tylenol. Or ibuprofen. Any headache stuff you can find in the medicine cabinet. He’s going to need it.”
“I’m not allowed in the medicine cabinet.”
“You are now.”
“But I don’t want to miss what you’re doing!”
“Yeah, you do. Trust me.”
Eleanor went up the spiral stairs with her sister’s serious tone echoing in her head. Maybe it was better to be the youngest.
Cordelia inched the scissors, slightly open, toward Will’s wound, then hesitated.
“What are you waiting for?” Brendan asked.
“Shh! I’m trying to pretend Dad is here, guiding me!”
“That’s just gonna make you feel pressure—”
But Cordelia had already tuned him out, remembering what her father had told her: Hands were tools. The body was a machine. Sometimes you had to get in and fix it like you had to fix a dishwasher. Just dig in. One quick tug, like a Band-Aid, and it’ll be over.
On television Cordelia knew dramatic music would be playing while she did this. In real life the house stayed horribly quiet. She heard the crackle of the burning candlewick. She heard her breath. As the hot scissor blades approached Will’s skin, she heard the tiny hiss of hairs curling back on themselves . . . and smelled them. Truffle White Cocoa was no match for Eau du Singed Hair. Cordelia lost her nerve and pulled back.
“Maybe you should think of it like a video game,” Brendan suggested.
“Like a game where you operate on people?”
“Yeah, pretend they just came out with this high-tech version of Operation. Just imagine getting points if you pull the arrow out right.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Duh. Game over.”
Cordelia cleared her head and decided to try. Advancing on Will a second time, she pictured a counter above his shoulder starting at 0 points. With every inch she brought her hand closer, it ticked up: 10 points, 20, 30 . . . She pressed the tips of the scissors into Will’s flesh: 40, 50. . . . The singed hair didn’t bother her, nor did the sizzle of skin, because—60, 70—she was doing it. She dug in, gritting her teeth, going for the arrowhead. Will’s body twitched, but he stayed unconscious.
“Awesome, you’ve almost got it!”
Upstairs, Eleanor jumped off the bathroom sink with a bottle of Aleve and entered the master bedroom to grab her mother’s sewing kit. She wondered what color Cordelia would want to sew Will shut with. Black will make him look like a scarecrow. Maybe pink. She took the kit, which was in a wicker basket, and headed out, moving too quickly to notice the RW trunk in the middle of the room.
Downstairs, Cordelia felt the tips of the scissors hit the arrowhead: 80 points. . . . She pinched and pulled straight up: 90. . . . The blood-soaked shaft inched out of Will’s body. . . .
“Almost!” Brendan said, and then Eleanor shrieked upstairs. Cordelia flinched—“Nell?”—and jerked the arrow up too fast.
It came out, but so did blood, like a fountain.
Brendan bolted for the spiral staircase—he didn’t know what had happened to Eleanor, but Kristoff House had given them lots to fear. Cordelia dropped the scissors and scrambled for a dish towel. She figured she must have hit an artery, because blood was pulsing out of Will with the rhythm of a heartbeat. It slid into his armpits, down his sides . . . Cordelia was suddenly filled with guilt and regret. How could she have been so stupid? How could she possibly have thought she was smart enough to pull this off? Now she was going to have a dead guy on her hands, and a cute one at that. Maybe the first rule of being a doctor should be “don’t try.”
“Bren! Get back here!” Cordelia screamed. The blood spread beneath the excised arrow on the floor. She held the dish towel to Will’s shoulder. Brendan and Eleanor barreled in.
“Sorry, I bashed into that stupid trunk upstairs!” said Eleanor, before turning away in shock. “Oh no! What happened?”
“He’s dying!” Cordelia said, pressing on the reddening towel. Will twitched. “And waking up!”
“He can’t be doing both.” Brendan tossed the sewing kit on the table next to Will. He wiped the dish towel over the wound and threw it down. “We’ve just got to stop the blood.”
Will moaned as Brendan showed Cordelia the wound. “Look how small it really is.” With the blood wiped away, the tear was smaller than a quarter, but the problem was that the blood kept coming back.
“Tie it off!” Cordelia opened the sewing kit and began to thread a needle, but her hands were shaking too badly. All she had to do was get the tiny tip through the hole, but she couldn’t stop trembling. She made herself stop. She had done this before. She could do it now.
Brendan ransacked the sewing kit for something to tie off the wound. He found a spool of yarn and bit a length off with his teeth, then looped it around Will’s shoulder. As he did, he got a sudden flash of the veins and arteries in the Wind Witch’s face during the attack. She’s behind this, he thought, and we have no idea why. It was easier, in a twisted way, to focus on the looming evil that hung over them than on the situation at hand.
Brendan drew the yarn so tight—thwip!—that he thought it would break. Instantly the blood flow lessened.
Cordelia finally threaded the needle, knotted it, and moved toward Will’s shoulder.
“Here!” Eleanor yelled, pouring a tray of melted ice cubes over the wound to douse it clean.
Cordelia jabbed the needle in. No turning back now. She pulled Will’s skin together—one stitch, two, three, four—and then knotted the end of the thread (it was pink, the color Eleanor had hoped for) and stepped back.
It was done. The stitches held. The wound was closed. But Eleanor had an idea for one more thing that might be helpful.
She dumped candle wax all over it.
“Nell!” Cordelia exclaimed. The wax hit Will’s skin and quickly cooled into a hard white shell.
“Isn’t that good?” Eleanor rapped her knuckles against it. “Like a big scab.”
“I guess it can’t hurt,” said Brendan.
“And it smells nice,” Eleanor said. Will moaned beneath them.
“Is he dead?” Eleanor asked.
“Yeah, maybe the candle finished him off,” said Brendan.
“Shut up; he’s breathing,” said Cordelia.
“Well he should be dead.” Brendan grabbed a roll of paper towels. “I don’t even know how we did that. Good job, guys.” He started to wipe up the blood. It didn’t look red on the floor; it looked black. In all the excitement the sun had gone down, and the Walkers found themselves facing one another in a kitchen full of moonlight.
“Here’s medicine, Deal.” Eleanor handed her sister the Aleve.
“I hope that’s extra strength,” chuckled Brendan.
Cordelia put the bottle next to Will’s head. “We’ll give it to him when he wakes up. We have to keep an eye on him tonight. If we move him, we risk reopening the wound.”
“I’m not staying down here,” Brendan said. “If anyone or anything comes through the front door, I want to be upstairs.”
“Yeah, can’t we just go up and go to sleep? I’m so tired,” Eleanor declared, and it was like casting a spell; they all suddenly realized how tired they were. “Let’s wake him up and carry him. Then we can sleep in Mom and Dad’s big bed.”
“I’m not sleeping in the same bed as you two,” said Brendan, “but we should move him. Will! Wake up!”
“That’s not going to work! It’s too bad we don’t have smelling salts,” Cordelia said.
“Wait, doesn’t he have a gun?” asked Brendan.
“He keeps it on his left side,” Cordelia said. Brendan reached for the gun—
“Bren! Are you crazy? What are you doing?”
“I was going to fire some shots to wake him up.”
&nb
sp; “You can’t just use a gun!”
“Why not?”
“Listen.” Cordelia stared at her brother intensely. “Just because we’ve been magically sent inside a book doesn’t mean you can ignore common sense. You have no idea how to use a gun. If you tried, you’d probably get us all killed.”
“Hey, guess what? If I had a gun, maybe none of this would’ve happened in the first place! Maybe I could’ve shot the Wind Witch before she sent us here! Did that ever occur to you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m the oldest. I’m in charge. No gun.”
Brendan paused, letting his anger build. “Who needs you anyway? Any of you! I was doing just fine by myself! I could have been at my friend Drew’s house and missed the whole thing! It’s not like you’d miss me! You don’t ever care about me—and I don’t care about you!”
Before Cordelia and Eleanor could respond, Will moaned on the table and opened his eyes. “What’s going on? What is that woman screaming about?”
“That wasn’t a woman,” said Cordelia. “That was my brother. Having a tantrum.”
“He thought you were a girl!” said Eleanor, laughing hysterically. “At least you woke him up.”
“It wasn’t a tantrum,” an embarrassed Brendan argued, trying to lower his voice a few octaves. Will shook the cobwebs out of his head and stared at his shoulder.
“What have you done to me?”
Even in the dark blue light, Will could see that he hadn’t been the recipient of the most expert medical care. He sniffed his shoulder. “And what’s that smell?”
“Truffle,” said Eleanor. “You can pick that off.”
Will started to, but then held off. “It actually makes a nice bandage. But crikey, it hurts. Do you have anything for the pain?”
Cordelia handed him two Aleve.
“What is this, ingestible morphine?”
“Sure.”
Will took the pills dry and checked that he still had his gun on his hip. Brendan looked at it enviously.
“Can you walk upstairs?” Cordelia said. “We really need to get some sleep.”
“I suppose so, given a bit of help.”
Cordelia put The Fighting Ace under her arm so she would have something to read. Then she and Brendan got under Will’s shoulders (Cordelia took the injured one) and eased him off the kitchen table. Will groaned and complained, but he could walk. Eleanor ran ahead to make sure there was nothing on the floor that would trip him. As they all mounted the spiral stairs, Brendan’s sneakers stuck to each step, their bottoms soaked with blood from the kitchen floor.
“Thank you,” Will said quietly. It was all he said before he entered the master bedroom and declared, “Now that’s what I call a bed!”
The king-size mattress with plush sheets and extra pillows did look very inviting, even though it was on the floor and the bed frame was broken around it. “Since I’m injured, I’ll take it,” said Will.
“Hey, hold on, we can all fit in that bed,” said Cordelia.
“Out of the question. Unseemly.”
“Where do you expect us to sleep, on the floor?”
“I’ve got an idea!” Eleanor scampered away and returned with the mattress from her bedroom and a fluffy Hello Kitty sleeping bag. “Will can take the mattress and Brendan can have the sleeping bag.”
They were too tired to argue. Will lay on Eleanor’s mattress at the foot of the bed. Brendan climbed into the too-small sleeping bag. Cordelia and Eleanor used the last of their energy to go through the upstairs rooms and open all the shutters, just in case the house traveled somewhere else at night and they had to get their bearings again in the morning. Then they got the big mattress, but not before Eleanor aimed a kick at the RW trunk. “That’s for tripping me before.”
“Don’t do that . . . ,” managed Cordelia. “Not the trunk’s fault . . . We actually need to open that. Tomorrow . . . for sure . . . ” Her head sank into the pillow. She was asleep before the air seeped out of it.
It would be tempting to say that night passed quietly in the primeval forest of Denver Kristoff’s fiction. In truth it was only the extreme fatigue of the Walkers and Will that prevented them from being woken up every five minutes from the sound of a giant unknown beast howling or an oversize dragonfly buzzing by the window. They all had dreams, although only Cordelia remembered hers—tunneling nightmares where the Wind Witch blew her down a corridor as blood sprayed from the walls. When she awoke in terror, gray dawn light sifted through the windows.
Cordelia hated waking up too early. She could never go back to sleep. It had happened to her at a slumber party last year. She’d had a bad dream and woken up in a sleeping bag in a room full of five girls, not daring to go to the bathroom or get a book because the others would ask her why she was up so early. And then one of them would say, “Why are you so weird?”
Luckily Cordelia had The Fighting Ace. She opened it and started reading—fast. She could speed-read with the best, and she had the added motivation of really wanting to know what happened to Will Draper. She read about aerial dogfights and backroom army dealings, but most disturbingly, she read about a woman named Penelope Hope. A woman who was older, more beautiful, and more mysterious than she.
As Cordelia neared the end of the book, she heard, “You’ve been busy this morning.”
She turned. Will was smiling at her.
“How’d you know I was up?”
“I’ve been listening to you turn pages for an hour. Woke up early. Can’t get any kip in here. What are you reading?”
“Nothing.” Cordelia hid The Fighting Ace. She didn’t want Will to know she’d been reading about him. But thanks to the book she knew that kip meant “sleep.” “How’s your shoulder?”
“Feels like a tiny man built a campfire on me. But you did a wonderful job, Miss Walker.”
“Call me Cordelia.”
“From King Lear . . . ”
“Buffy, actually. My mother loves it.”
Will draped a hand off his mattress, inches from Cordelia’s. “Have you ever read King Lear?”
“No, actually. I’ve read most Shakespeare, but not that.”
“American education. Tragic.”
Cordelia was glad her siblings weren’t awake to see her turn beet red. Getting called out on a lack of literary knowledge was the worst—and besides, what was Will doing with his hand? Was he just going to leave it there as if she hadn’t noticed? She totally noticed.
“Cordelia,” Will declared, “was King Lear’s youngest daughter. At the start of the play, when the king asks his less-fit daughters what they think of him, they give flowery speeches. But Cordelia tells the truth and gets banished.”
“I actually think I remember that—”
“You’re a lot like her. I can see it in your eyes.”
He took Cordelia’s hand so smoothly that she found it hard to pinpoint when it happened.
“You’re controlled by your emotions. Ruled by your heart.”
“Actually, I like to think I’m ruled by logic,” Cordelia said, pulling her hand away.
“Then why is your heart beating so fast?”
Cordelia glanced at Will’s fingers. He’d been taking her pulse. She rolled over on her side, holding her hand close to her face, and felt the sharp shape of The Fighting Ace under her pillow. Will was brave in the book. And bold. And he had a lot of girlfriends.
“You know, all of a sudden, I am actually tired,” Cordelia said. “I’m going to try and get some sleep before everybody wakes up.”
“I understand. By the way, what’s a Buffy?”
They had Lunchables for breakfast. It wasn’t anyone’s first choice (except maybe Eleanor’s), but it was the last edible thing in the fridge; Slayne and his men had been alarmed by the bold packaging and had chosen to ignore it. Cordelia and Brendan pooled the snacks on a plate and arranged them into a passable spread of cold cuts and processed cheese. Will looked on with disdain. “What is this, wartime rations?”
<
br /> “Nope, they’re for school,” Eleanor said, expertly constructing a cracker sandwich.
Will pulled out an eight-inch knife and stuck it into a piece of baloney.
Eleanor gasped. “That’s huge!”
“Just ignore it,” Cordelia said, rolling her eyes. “It’s his Sheffield bowie knife. He takes it with him everywhere.”
“How do you know that?” Will asked.
“Can I see it?” said Brendan.
“No,” Will and Cordelia said together. Then Cordelia explained to Will, “I saw your knife before.” Of course that was a lie; she had read about it in The Fighting Ace.
“So, when will you be helping me get back home?” Will asked. “I have a war to return to.”
“As we explained yesterday,” Cordelia said, “you’re a character in a book. So the war you have to get back to isn’t real.”
“Not real? It’s just as real as I am! Just as real as these . . . Lunchables!” Will nibbled baloney off his knife.
“It’s only real to you because it was written by Denver Kristoff,” Brendan said. “I hate to say it, but Cordelia’s right.”
“Listen here!” Will said. “If I’m a poncey character in a book, I demand to see the book! Are you hiding it somewhere? I have a right to know what happens to me . . . what if I die at the end?!”
“I don’t know where it is,” Cordelia said, lying again; the book was upstairs under her pillow. She didn’t want to give it to Will until she herself read if he lived or died. Which she planned to do as soon as breakfast was over.
Will sheathed his knife and approached her. “You’re lying. Men of the Royal Flying Corps don’t like being lied to. Where is it?”
“Hey! Hold on!” Brendan got between Will and his sister. “Are you threatening a woman? I expected more of someone who fought in the Great War.”
Will looked for a moment like he might punch Brendan—but then he stepped back, impressed with the compliment. Brendan knew that people who fought in World War I never called it World War I.
“Anyway, Will, it doesn’t matter how the book ends,” Brendan continued, “because you came here and met us. So now you have a different destiny.”
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