“If we’re given full cooperation with the rest of our investigation, I believe we can be lenient in this instance,” I said blandly. “Please understand, however, that this is for your safety, and for the safety of your students. It’s important we not encounter any further complications.” The threat didn’t need to be spoken to be heard. That’s the nice thing about threats. Sometimes they can make themselves clear without any outside help.
“Of course,” said Principal Hanson. “How can we help?”
“You called it in, right?” asked Sloane, turning on Gerry. “I remember your name from the report.”
“Yes,” he said, glancing toward Principal Hanson. She would probably interpret his discomfort as related to our jobs, since no one likes to be singled out by a government agency. That was fine. I knew that he was actually uncomfortable about the idea of being identified as my brother. The more wrong everyone’s assumptions were, the better off we’d be.
“Good,” I said. “We’ll need you to show us the source of the smell. We have an extra face mask you can wear, in case we determine it to be dangerous. Principal Hanson, if you’d remain here in case the press causes any additional trouble, we’d be very appreciative. One of our agents, Andy Robinson, is outside speaking to them now. When he makes it in, please let him know we’ve gone on ahead. He’ll determine for himself what the best course of action is.”
“Certainly,” said Principal Hanson. She didn’t look thrilled about the fact that we were walking off with one of her people, but she didn’t raise a fuss either. After her secretary calling down the local news on our heads, she didn’t have a leg to stand on.
“Follow me,” said Gerry, and started for the office door. We fell into step behind him.
The last thing I saw before the door closed was Principal Hanson staring after us, a disturbed look on her face. Her world was changing, and she didn’t like it one bit. I understood the feeling, but I couldn’t stick around to commiserate with her. I had work to do.
# # #
Gerry stayed quiet until we emerged at the rear of the school, and the rest of us followed his lead. He’d been working here long enough to know where the cameras and poorly designed vents were located, and the last thing any of us wanted was to be overheard while we were trying to get to the incursion.
The smell of freshly cut grass assaulted us as soon as we stepped out of the hallway and onto the blacktop behind the school. The smell of gingerbread followed, worming its way under the grass, seeming almost to whisper promises in my ears.
“Does anyone else hear that?” I asked.
“Mild synesthesia has been associated with the smell of gingerbread houses in the past,” said Jeff. He didn’t sound any happier about it than I felt. “It’s a way to lure even those who are not necessarily vulnerable to the promise of sweets. Suddenly there’s a whole second layer to the temptation, one that the conscious mind may or may not be able to process.”
“You can make anything sound boring, did you know that?” asked Sloane. She seemed genuinely curious, at least until she punctuated her question by turning and punching Gerry in the arm.
He yelped. “What did you do that for?”
“You could have called and warned us that we were coming into a press situation,” snapped Sloane. “We might have been able to park down the street, and keep Andy with the rest of the team.”
“Look on the bright side: no one had a chance to notice how young Demi is,” said Gerry. Then he stepped around Sloane, leaned over, and hugged me. “It’s good to see you, Henry.”
“Good to see you too,” I said, returning the hug as quickly as I could before letting him go. The smell of gingerbread was starting to put my back up. “Are you sure no students have wandered into the woods?”
“No,” said Gerry grimly.
We all turned to stare at him. He shook his head.
“The wood appeared before the smell, and they’re teenagers. All the curiosity, none of the ‘oh hey wait, I could die’ self-awareness. Younger kids are pretty good about avoiding this sort of thing, because they’ve been so schooled on not trusting strangers that they know there’s something about it that isn’t right, but teenagers? We’ll be lucky if there aren’t already a dozen of them in there, being digested by the house.”
“I love my job,” said Sloane, and started stalking across the blacktop toward the distant, looming wood.
The rest of us followed. Demi had her flute out and was clutching it tightly, eyes darting here and there as she watched for attack. I didn’t say anything, not even to reassure her. She needed to do this. This was the story that had been used to take her away from us once before. If she was ever going to feel like she could trust herself again, she needed to face it without someone holding her hand.
That wasn’t going to stop me from ordering Sloane to smack her over the head and carry her back to the van if it proved necessary. I was all for my team experiencing personal growth and learning to deal with their demons, but my tolerance ended as soon as their lives were in danger. We had come here as a team. We were going to go home as a team, if I had to kill people to make it happen.
“The forest appeared sometime between the end of classes yesterday and second period this morning,” said Gerry, falling into the easy, almost lecturing tone that had always come so naturally to him. It used to make me want to punch him in the stomach when we were kids and I thought he was talking down to me. Distance and adulthood had made it clear that this was his way of distancing himself from the situation and coping with his fear. “Normally, you can see straight through into the neighboring housing developments. They keep the underbrush trimmed back to cut down on truancy and lunchtime drinking.”
“Do high school students sneak out during lunch to drink?” asked Jeff, sounding appalled.
Sloane gave him an amused, not unkind look. “Nerd,” she said.
“Proud of it,” Jeff countered.
“I noticed the forest midway through second period,” said Gerry, ignoring them. “I confirmed that my students could see it too, which is when I noticed the scent of gingerbread and contacted you.”
“You did the right thing,” I said.
His smile was thin and bitter. “Why did I have to? Have I been exposed to so much fairy-tale crazy that it’s going to start following me around now? Because that was never what I wanted, and you know it.”
“I know,” I said. What I didn’t say was that when he had run from the “fairy-tale crazy,” he’d done it by leaving me behind: he’d broken free of his half of our shared story and condemned me to princesshood, whether I wanted it or not. Nothing was ever going to put color in my cheeks or keep the apple from my hand, and as soon as he’d realized that, my brother—the one person I’d always counted on, my twin, the other half of my soul, if not my story—had walked away from me.
I could understand why he’d done it. I could even forgive him. I might have done the same, if our positions had been reversed and I’d had the option. But that didn’t mean I was ever going to forget the history behind the words “fairy-tale crazy,” and that didn’t mean they were ever going to stop hurting me, deep down, in the place where I wasn’t an agent or a princess, but just a frazzled, frightened little girl.
Gerry sighed, looking at my suddenly tight jaw and the lines that had appeared below my eyes. “Sorry, Henry. You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You never do, Gerry,” I said, and kept walking.
Sloane was ranging about six feet ahead of the group—far enough that if anything decided to attack us, it would go for her first, and close enough that we’d be able to step in and help whoever was attacking her before she ripped their heads from their bodies. Traveling with Sloane sometimes meant adjusting our idea of whose side we were supposed to be on. Yes, we’d come to her aid before we helped anyone who had happened to trigger her ire, but for the most part, we wanted to keep her from killing anyone. The paperwork when she did was a nightmare.
&n
bsp; The smell of gingerbread grew stronger the closer we got to the trees. Sloane reached the tree line and stopped there, rigid, her hands balled into fists by her sides. I exchanged a glance with Jeff and sped up, leaving Demi and Gerry to trail behind us. Demi wasn’t a physical combatant. Gerry was thin, but he was out of shape; he’d never needed to learn how to outrun an onrushing story. That was something I had that he didn’t.
I wasn’t sure it was a good thing.
When we reached Sloane, we both stopped, Jeff so fast that he nearly overbalanced and crossed into the wood. I grabbed his arm before he could fall, pulling him to a halt sharp enough that it was probably going to leave bruises. He cast me a thankful glance all the same. The consequences of falling would have been far worse than a few bruises.
The sound of children laughing drifted out of the trees, distant, ghostly, and thin. It was impossible to tell whether the gingerbread house had managed to attract supplicants already, or whether the laughter was a special effect generated by the story to lend veracity to its claims of joy and peace within the dark, dark woods. It didn’t matter. The laughter, whatever its source might have been, was less important than the glimmering barrier that kept us from pursuing it. Had the sun been a little lower in the sky, or had Sloane not been so attuned to the presence of stories in the process of unfolding, we might have missed it. It was a subtle thing, after all, and we’d all been so busy moving toward the sound of laughter that we hadn’t been looking down.
Glass shards glittered amongst the grass, rammed into the ground to form an unbroken line. I glanced to Sloane for confirmation. She nodded, her jaw set in a hard line. I could almost hear her teeth grinding.
“Elise was here,” she said.
“Who’s Elise?” asked Gerry, panting a little as he stopped. He squinted at the ground. “Is that broken glass? God, have those kids already started drinking out here? I swear, they think everything is an excuse to throw a kegger.”
“So did we, when we were their age,” I said. “Jeff?”
“On it,” he said, and crouched, careful not to get any closer to the shards. After a moment of study, he said, “They’re not actually touching anything but the grass.”
“Grass has its own narrative weight,” I said. “Demi, can you do that trick you pulled back at Childe? Pipe the glass out of here?”
“Step back,” she said, trying to sound confident. I did as I was told. So did Jeff and Sloane, who grabbed Gerry’s sleeve and dragged him with her as she moved.
Demi waited long enough for all four of us to be out of her potential line of fire before she lifted her flute and began to play. It was the song she’d used before, but sweeter somehow, like all the rough edges had been sanded off while the music was bouncing around inside her brain. The glass began to move almost immediately, flowing like water into a single solid sphere that then proceeded to roll to rest against one of the trees. I held my breath, waiting to see if the tree would turn to glass. Nothing happened.
Demi lowered her flute.
“There wasn’t any other glass near here,” she said. “Not even Jeff’s glasses.”
“Nope, they’re more ‘plastics,’” he said, tapping one lens while he chuckled unsteadily at his own joke. “We’re going to have to come back for that. Even if it’s inert right now, there’s no guarantee that it won’t wake up again later.”
“This is why I became a high school teacher,” said Gerry. “Nothing inanimate ever ‘wakes up’ around here.”
“Yeah, well, lucky for you,” I said. “Sloane, we good?”
“Nothing else seems out of the ordinary for a horrible haunted forest being inhabited by a child-eating witch,” said Sloane, grabbing Gerry’s arm again. He gave her a startled look. She smiled thinly. “You’re with me now, handsome. I’m going to explain why your sister’s going to murder you soon, and you’re going to listen.” She dragged him into the woods.
Demi looked alarmed. “Are you really going to murder your brother?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m going to yell at him a lot if he doesn’t cut this ‘my life is so much better than yours because it’s not under constant attack by stories’ bullshit. Come on. We don’t want to let them get too far ahead of us. I’m willing to bet that people get lost in this forest.” I started walking.
As expected, Jeff paced me, glancing nervously in my direction several times before he said, “You know it can’t be a coincidence that Elise is involved with this story, and that it’s happening this close to your brother’s school.”
“I know,” I said. “I think Gerry knows the story didn’t land here by accident. It would explain why he keeps rubbing it in my face that he got out and I didn’t.”
“Henry . . .”
“We were doing so well for a while there, you know? I was almost starting to feel like my brother and I could have a relationship that wasn’t about fighting with each other all the time.” The sound of giggles drifted through the trees. I scowled. “And maybe this is not the right time to get upset because my brother got the good end of the stick.”
“Did he really?” Jeff’s voice was soft. “He didn’t get caught in a story, because he was born part of a story that could never have been his. Maybe if he’d been given a Jack’s role, or a second son’s, or even a stableboy . . . but no, the narrative wanted him to be a princess, and the only way to get away from it was to leave everything behind. Was to leave you behind. I know he loves you. You’re the most important person in his world, you’re his twin, and the only way he’s been able to wrest even the thinnest sliver of peace from the universe has been by cutting you out. At least you had the option of accepting yourself for what you were. At least you knew it wouldn’t destroy you.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “I don’t want to forgive him for leaving me the way that he did. And I don’t want to just shrug and let him insult my life’s work because it makes him feel better. But I don’t know how else to deal with this.”
Jeff smiled, the expression barely visible through the gloom of the wood. “Ah, but you see, you’ve already made some great strides. A year ago, you would have suffered in silence, rather than saying anything to anyone. Now you’re opening up to me. That means you’re feeling much more confident in your place.”
“A year ago we weren’t dating and we didn’t have Demi to help balance out the power levels on this team.” A year ago, I hadn’t been a Snow White: I’d been holding myself in permanent abeyance, praying I could get through the rest of my life without slipping up and letting my story take me over. A lot of things had changed in a year. My relationship with my brother wasn’t even the biggest of them.
My relationship with . . . oh, shit. I stopped dead, my eyes going wide as I searched the trees ahead of us for any sign of Gerry or Sloane. Had I seen them since we stepped into the woods? It seemed like I must have, and yet I couldn’t remember even catching a glimpse of Sloane’s ice-white hair, which should have been standing out like a searchlight in the gloom.
“I just stepped into the dark woods where a gingerbread witch lives, in the company of my brother,” I said, voice gone tight. “My twin brother, who broke his story and is at the center of an unassigned narrative. Where’s Demi?”
“Right here,” said a small voice. I turned. Demi was close behind me, clutching her flute to her chest. She forced a wan smile. “I wasn’t letting you out of my sight. I’m not feeling like getting baked into gingerbread today.”
“Good,” I said. “Stay close.” I looked down. There, as I had more than half expected, was a small white stone tangled in the grass. It was visible, despite the darkness and our shadows falling across it. Of course it was. Without it, how would we have known which way to go?
“This is a trap,” I said, as quietly as I could. “The story isn’t after you, Demi: it’s after Gerry.”
“The story is after Gerry and his sister,” corrected Jeff. He sounded worried. “Elise proves stories can be changed. Recast you from Snow White to Gretel,
and whatever threat you pose is reduced, or even nullified.”
“I’m not a threat,” I said.
“Someone thinks you are,” said Jeff.
I hesitated before nodding. “All right then: We move. We go fast, and we go quiet, and we get our people back. Understand?”
“Yes,” said Demi.
“Wish I didn’t,” said Jeff.
“Let’s go,” I said, and resumed walking.
Following the trail of little white stones through the trees was easier than it should have been. Every time I thought we’d missed one, another would appear, visible enough that there was no mistaking it for anything else. My fingers itched with the compulsion to start collecting them. I balled my hands into fists and kept walking. Touching them would mean accepting this story more than I already had.
“If the story wants you to be Gretel, and Gerry to be Hansel, what does it want with Sloane?” asked Demi.
I glanced at her. “What do you mean?”
“It took her too. Gerry didn’t just vanish into the trees: they both did.”
I froze. It all made perfect sense now. Perfect, terrible sense. “Jeff, do you have cell service in here?”
“What?” Jeff pulled out his phone. “Yes, four bars. Why?”
“I need you to call Andy. I need you to tell him to get down here. And I need you to tell him to swing through the cafeteria first.”
Jeff blinked. “What for?”
I told him.
I just hoped it would be enough.
# # #
Standing still in the dark, creepy forest full of distant giggles and the smell of gingerbread was even harder than walking through it. At least when we’d been moving, we’d been doing something. Part of me hoped Gerry and Sloane would come walking back through the trees, pissed off because we’d fallen so far behind. The rest of me—the sensible part of me—knew that wasn’t going to happen. They’d passed out of sight because the story had taken them, and it wasn’t going to give them back without a fight.
The sound of branches breaking alerted us to the approach of someone, or something. I leaned up onto my toes as I tried to see. Demi clutched her flute a little tighter, ready to start calling ants out of their nests to attack whoever was coming.
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 8