Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2)

by Seanan McGuire

  INDEXING: REFLECTIONS

  OTHER TITLES BY SEANAN MCGUIRE

  Indexing

  Sparrow Hill Road

  October Daye

  Rosemary and Rue

  A Local Habitation

  An Artificial Night

  Late Eclipses

  One Salt Sea

  Ashes of Honor

  Chimes at Midnight

  The Winter Long

  A Red-Rose Chain

  InCryptid

  Discount Armageddon

  Midnight Blue-Light Special

  Half-off Ragnarok

  Pocket Apocalypse

  Velveteen

  Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots

  Velveteen vs. The Multiverse

  AS MIRA GRANT

  Newsflesh

  Feed

  Deadline

  Blackout

  Parasitology

  Parasite

  Symbiont

  Chimera

  INDEXING: REFLECTIONS

  SEANAN MCGUIRE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Seanan McGuire

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503947740

  ISBN-10: 1503947742

  Cover design by Megan Haggerty

  This book is dedicated to everyone who asked me “What happens next?”

  I thought that you deserved an answer.

  CONTENTS

  FORBIDDEN DOORS

  BROKEN GLASS

  BROTHERLY LOVE

  SPLIT ENDS

  SLEEPING BEAUTY

  FROSTBITE

  FALSE LOVE’S KISS

  HOLLY TREE

  FELINE COBBLING

  UNTOLD TRUTHS

  MIRROR’S FACE

  NEVER AFTER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FORBIDDEN DOORS

  Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 312 (“Bluebeard”)

  Status: UNRESOLVED/IN ABEYANCE

  Ciara Bloomfield squinted at her reflection. She looked reasonably professional, especially by the standards of the organization she worked for: Sure, suit jackets over ruffled pirate shirts were unusual, but she had notes in her file that explained the choice. Her pencil skirt was long enough to be appropriate, and her sensible heels would make it possible for her to run for her life, should it become necessary. Which might well happen, given where she was going.

  “I think I need to make an appointment at the salon.” She bent forward enough to get a look at the crown of her head. “My roots are growing in.”

  “I love your roots,” said her husband automatically. He didn’t look up from his spreadsheet. She didn’t expect him to. Their relationship was a healthy one, built on mutual respect, shared interests, and her never unlocking the door to the garage.

  “Most people’s roots don’t grow in blue,” she reminded him, turning away from the mirror. “Will you be all right without me?”

  “I’ll finish this report, go down to the shipping yard to check on things, and order a pizza for dinner,” said Giles. He offered her a quick, toothy smile. “Don’t go into the garage while I’m away.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Ciara. She crossed the room to kiss his forehead before heading out. It was time to get to work, and it wouldn’t do for her to be late on her first day.

  # # #

  My day began—again—with half a dozen bluebirds beating themselves to death against my bedroom window. They were determined to wish me a good morning, and they’d been getting better and better at getting past the bird-safety nets I’d installed in an effort to save their featherbrained little lives. The sound of their bodies hitting the glass and rebounding into the bin Jeff had set up to catch them was almost soothing, at least until something larger hit the glass. It squawked on impact.

  I groaned, not opening my eyes. “Please tell me I didn’t just kill a falcon.”

  “Technically, you don’t kill any of them,” mumbled Jeff. He sounded like he was about half as awake as I was. He was not an early riser. His story tended to keep him up at all hours of the night, making him a champion of sleep deprivation and inappropriate napping. I hadn’t realized that before we’d become a couple; I’d always assumed his constant availability was the result of a strong work ethic. It wasn’t. It was insomnia, and a thousand midnights spent staring at the clock and fighting the urge to start making shoes.

  “I know, but they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.” I rolled over and squinted at the clock. 5:45 a.m.—at least this time they’d waited until it was almost time for my alarm before beginning the avian assault. “Once upon a fuck me running. I’m getting up. Do you want me to wake you in an hour?”

  “If I say yes, will you actually wake me?” Jeff sounded plaintive. He’d been sleeping more regularly since he’d moved in with me, largely because I wasn’t opposed to picking him up and carrying him to bed when I felt he’d been up too long. He’d given me permission to do exactly that. The upside of this arrangement was that he was better rested and hence better able to cope with a world that spent a lot of time trying to kill us. The downside was that he’d learned I would let him sleep through almost anything, just to be sure he was getting enough rest.

  It was all sickeningly domestic, and if there was any redeeming quality to our relationship, it was that Jeff was no Prince Charming and I was no dainty little maiden. He was one of the Shoemaker’s Elves, and I was a princess, and while there had been hundreds, if not thousands, of people like us through the years, I was pretty sure we were the first ones to fall into bed together. He couldn’t make me a Queen, and I couldn’t buy him socks without risking him breaking up with me, but we were making things work. Surprisingly well, in fact.

  There was probably a betting pool at the office on how long we’d last, and Sloane was probably organizing it, using her “Bed, Wed, Behead” chart. I wasn’t bothered. She’d earned the right to have a little fun.

  “I’ll wake you,” I promised. “But if you get up now, you can join me in the shower.”

  Jeff reached for the nightstand, recovering his glasses. “I’m up,” he said.

  I shook my head, smirking, and got out of bed.

  The hallway carpet was covered in wildflowers. Jeff stopped to squint at them, and then sighed. “Blue lupines,” he said. “Today’s the review, isn’t it? I wonder what the connection is going to be.”

  “Did you swallow a botany book while I wasn’t looking?” I opened the hall closet, taking out a pair of towels and passing one to Jeff. “Most men can’t identify the flowers growing out of the carpet without at least a little more effort.”

  “Most men don’t date women whose presence causes flowers to grow out of the carpet,” Jeff countered. “I like to know what to expect. You’re like a horoscope in horticulture.”

  “I’ll be sure to put that on my business cards,” I said.

  Jeff laughed.

  We met at work. We’re both agents for the ATI Management Bureau, an organization dedicated to keepin
g stories from eating the world. It’s in our motto, even: In aeternum felicitas vindactio. Defending happily ever after. For most people, fairy tales are beautiful things, meant to be encouraged and enjoyed, and I guess that’s an easy position to take when you’re the one wearing the glass slipper or kissing the princess. For the people in the way of the narrative, fairy tales are deadly, capable of rewriting reality in order to get what they want—and what they want is rarely good for anybody who’s not on the short list for a happy ending. Fairy tales are not for children, and they don’t care who dies. They never have.

  Jeff and I, along with the rest of our field team, worked hard every day to keep those memetic incursions from destroying reality as we knew it. Like most of the members of our team, we had a strong personal stake in the fight: we were both on the ATI spectrum, making us living fairy tales. Jeff was a type 503, a Shoemaker’s Elf. If the narrative had its way, he would have worked his fingers to the bone making shoes for strangers, all to teach some asshole the importance of respecting your hired help. It was a relatively rare tale type, and one that made him extremely well suited to working with our cleanup crews and in the Archives. I, on the other hand, was something more common and more dangerous. Aarne-Thompson tale type 709.

  Snow White.

  Until recently, I’d been holding my story at bay, living with the symptoms but not the fully fledged disease. Then our former dispatcher decided to play Storyteller and put me in a position where the only way to save myself and my team was to embrace my story. I’d been living with the dead-white skin, the blood-red lips, and the suicidal songbirds since I was a little girl. Now I had a solid connection to the fairy-tale forest where all the Snow Whites who’d ever lived existed, and I was spending half my dreaming hours trying to get a handle on what I was going to be for the rest of my life.

  At least I didn’t have to worry about princes. Jeff and I had started our relationship before I had fully manifested, and he understood the danger princes represented to me. Between the two of us, we were always on our guard. Nothing charming was going to get anywhere near me if we had any say in the matter.

  I’d always expected manifesting my story would mean that my life was over. Instead, it had coincided with a lot of things I’d never thought could happen. I had a boyfriend serious enough that he was living with me, not just visiting once a week until he ran in terror. I was talking to my brother again—really talking to him—more than once a month, and for more than five minutes at a time. I was even getting along with Sloane, which was a minor miracle if anything was.

  We were going to be okay. Or at least, we were going to be okay if we survived the review, which was by no means guaranteed.

  I stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around my head. “At least I don’t need to worry about fixing my makeup,” I said, keeping my voice forcedly light. “Nature has supplied me with sufficient lipstick and mascara to kill a legion of fashion models.”

  “Yes, and if you put on blush, you’ll look like you have a fever,” said Jeff as he turned off the water. “May I still suggest a little eye shadow? It’ll make you look less like a storybook character, and that could be important.”

  I sighed. “You’re right. I wish you weren’t.”

  “I know,” said Jeff, and left the bathroom.

  I sighed again and got to work. Jeff’s story had been active for years, and he understood how to work with the Bureau’s regulations better than I did. If I wanted to stay a field agent, I needed the people in charge to believe I was still on the side of the human race, rather than standing on the side of the story. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  Adding a few dabs of eye shadow made my reflection look perfectly made-up, if unnaturally pale. I looked at myself for a moment, trying to will color out of my lips and into my cheeks. It didn’t happen. It never happened.

  I turned out the light as I left.

  # # #

  We pulled up in front of the office ten minutes before we were due, a box of donuts riding on the seat between us. I slid our plain black SUV into the designated space, and watched, unsurprised, as the woman who’d been sitting on the curb rose and stomped over to meet us. Not walked: literally stomped. It was her primary means of locomotion, and had been for as long as I’d known her. She moved like she was mad at the world and wanted to make sure it knew.

  “Morning, Sloane,” I said, sliding out of the car and pushing the donut box toward her. “Cruller? It’s the only baked good that sounds like ‘cruelty.’ You know you want it.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously,” she snarled. “If you were, one of you would have taken a taxi. You want to give them an excuse to split us up? Huh? Because there are easier ways.” She glared at me.

  Sloane Winters had been with the Bureau longer than anyone else I knew—possibly for centuries, if her throwaway comments were meant to be taken seriously. She was five feet, eleven inches of rangy, easily angered Evil Stepsister, with the bad attitude and trust issues that came along with her story. Her hair was currently bleached ice white, and dyed with streaks of toxic green and bloody red, making her look like a walking poisoned apple. It went well with her outfit: red plaid skirt; black tank top with a bleeding-heart logo on the front; and, of course, big stompy boots. Always the big stompy boots.

  I continued to hold out the donut box until her expression softened.

  “You really got me a cruller?” she asked, opening the lid.

  “I really did,” I confirmed. “An apple cruller, even.” I couldn’t stop the shudder that moved through me on the word “apple,” half longing and half revulsion. Apples were my heroin. That didn’t stop my mouth from watering at the thought of biting through their crisp skins and feeling their flesh against my tongue.

  Every Snow White knows an apple will be her downfall, just like every Sleeping Beauty knows to be careful of spinning wheels, and every child of the Juniper Tree knows to watch out for oaken chests. And it never helps, because those are the things that draw us. They’re our magnetic norths, unique and terrible and inescapable.

  “Cool.” Sloane took the cruller. “You need to take this review seriously, both of you. I get that you feel like you’re invincible right now, but that’s the story talking. Bureaucracy trumps narrative any day, and bureaucracy can say that we can’t afford to have an active Snow White on a field team. You’re a security risk, Henry.”

  “Jeff’s been on the field team for years,” I said.

  Sloane took a bite of her apple cruller, eyes narrowing as I shivered. When she swallowed, she said, “Jeff’s never been allowed to lead a field team. He’s compromised. Now so are you. Not only that, but you have weaknesses he doesn’t. He isn’t vulnerable to princes the way you are.”

  “If it makes a difference, I did prove vulnerable to princesses,” said Jeff, adjusting his glasses with one hand. I wrinkled my nose at him.

  Sloane rolled her eyes. “You two are gross,” she announced. “Now come on. I need to make some popcorn to eat while I watch you getting fired.” She turned on her heel and yes, stomped away, putting so much force into each step that it was a wonder she hadn’t broken an ankle yet.

  “Do you think she has downstairs neighbors?” mused Jeff as we followed her. “I bet her landlord has to rent at a discount. She’s probably in someplace rent controlled. She’d be moving every six months otherwise.”

  “She’s been in town long enough,” I said. None of us had ever seen Sloane’s home. Apartment, house, or converted storage unit, I had no idea—although I suspected house, given how little she liked being around other people. Sometimes it was all she could do to keep herself from murdering us, and we were some of the few people she seemed to almost like. I couldn’t imagine her having close neighbors. Not without a basement and a body count.

  Jeff snorted, but didn’t say anything. We were too close to the doors. Casual conversation could be monitored and, given the day’s purpose, could be used against us in a court of human r
esources.

  The ATI Management Bureau was built in a repurposed biological-warfare research lab. It was fitting, in a sideways manner: fairy tales were memetic warfare, and we were constantly looking for ways to lessen or eliminate their influence on the human race. Our Archives contained copies of every known variant on every known story, and were being updated constantly to better prepare us for what we might wind up facing in the field. Our armories were packed with weapons both commonplace and cuckoo. Most princes could be stopped with a tranquilizer dart. For the ones who couldn’t, we had cloaks woven from lentils, bridles of gold, eggshell boxes, and more. So much more. For each common story like Snow White or Cinderella, there were a hundred less common ones, like the Juniper Tree, or the Three Princesses of Whiteland. Every story required a certain set of conditions to get started, and a certain sequence of events to end. Unless it was averted, of course. Aversion was our stock-in-trade.

  Jeff and I swiped our badges and made our way through the old air lock to the hall. The few people who were there looked at us sympathetically, and didn’t stop to talk. Everyone knew today was my team’s review, and the word on the street was that at least one of us—probably me—was going to get benched. It didn’t matter that I’d embraced my story for the sake of my team, or that we’d all have died if I hadn’t eaten that apple and manifested as a full Snow White. I was a story now, and as a story, I couldn’t be fully trusted. I might never be fully trusted again.

  Sloane was in the bullpen when we arrived, sitting squarely in the middle of her desk, which was used more as a chair than it ever was as a place for filling out paperwork. She had eaten half her cruller, and was waving the remainder tauntingly in the face of one of our other team members: Andy Robinson, a hulking mountain of a man who was looking more and more inclined to snatch the pastry out of her hand.