The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Series, Book 1)

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  Emery and his companions laughed as Prit quietly gathered his book and stood. He turned his back on Emery just as the bullied had always been taught to do. Just ignore them, Ceony’s mother had always advised, but Ceony knew from experience that ignoring didn’t make pigs go away. The image of Mickel Philsdon surfaced in her mind, a broad-shouldered and stout boy who had called Ceony a walrus in the seventh grade, before Ceony had grown into her teeth. She had ignored him for two years, but the relentless torture had only gotten worse. It wasn’t until the first day of secondary school when Ceony rounded on Mickel and cut him a steaming piece of her mind that he stopped his torment. As far as Ceony was concerned, the only thing bullies understood was bullying, plain and simple. Mickel had avoided her after that.

  “Stick up for yourself,” she found herself saying to Prit, who didn’t respond.

  Emery shoved Prit in the shoulder, making the boy stumble. “A little faster, paper boy?”

  Prit picked up his pace and disappeared into the crowded hallway.

  Frowning, Ceony turned to Emery and said, “You used to be a real jerk, you know that?”

  Emery reached down to where Prit had been sitting and snatched up a paper sack—Prit had left his lunch behind. He rifled through it, the friend on his right trying to peer around his arm to see what was inside.

  “Dibs on the cookie,” Emery’s flunky said.

  Emery grabbed a red apple and tossed the bag to his companion, then slid down to the floor, stretching his skinny legs in front of him. Rubbing the apple on his sleeve, Emery took a bite.

  Leaning to one side, Emery reached beneath him and pulled a folded frog out from under his backside—more of Prit’s handiwork. He chuckled around a mouthful of apple and crumpled the frog in his hand. “What a barmpot,” he said, throwing the paper wad at a dark-skinned girl passing by. The girl gave him a sour look, but continued on her way without retaliation.

  “Come on, Fennel,” Ceony commanded. As she lost sight of the paper magician, she took a deep breath. This was the past, after all. No use getting upset over it. “Still,” she said aloud, “I’ll have to ask you what changed your mind about Folding. And I hope you apologized to him.”

  Students filtered from the halls into their respective classrooms, thinning out the population enough for Ceony to find a set of double doors that appeared to lead outside. She assumed those doors would either reveal to her another shade of Emery Thane’s heart, or warp her back to the third chamber itself, which she had yet to physically see. She hoped for the latter—she needed to escape Lira’s trap quickly, and the only plausible way out seemed to be at the heart’s end—she had to reach it, just as she had to play out each of these stories, one by one, to get there.

  She opened the door and found herself in a familiar office—the first she had entered in this chamber, albeit lit with dim evening sunlight filtering through that square window and candles set on the desk and surrounding shelves. Ceony hesitated at the doorway to the office, the too-recent memory of it raking her brain with needles.

  Emery sat at his desk, poring over a thin stack of papers, though not the Folding kind. He held a pen in one hand and tangled the other in his hair, worn shorter than in present day.

  Fennel sniffed around the mauve rug strewn over floorboards stained with age. Ceony let the door shut behind her.

  Everything in the office—smaller than the study at the yellow-brick house on the outskirts of London—spoke of Emery. Shelves, trunks, and furniture pressed against all four walls of the room, each set in an almost symmetrical order without allowing the tiniest bit of space to go unused. A fine-looking shelf of cherrywood held stacks upon stacks of paper in eggshell, chartreuse, and rose, all cut into different-sized rectangles and squares. Another shelf held together with metal clamps bore endless volumes of very old books, some of which Ceony recognized from a different shelf in Emery’s present bedroom. Atop that shelf rested an assortment of glass bottles filled with bright colors of sand layered on top of each other, and beside those, an empty picture frame. Ceony wondered if it had ever held a photo. She didn’t recognize it from the yellow-brick house.

  A glass half-filled with some sort of tea sat at the end of Emery’s desk. Ceony touched it—cold. A sniff caught a hint of peppermint. Now that she thought of it, she hadn’t seen any coffee in Emery’s kitchen—perhaps he didn’t like the flavor. Or perhaps it made him jittery, and Ceony imagined “jittery” would not complement the list of Emery’s personality traits.

  Carefully placed clutter littered the desk everywhere except a perfect rectangle where Emery read those papers—a jar filled with writing utensils and a compass, a short calendar depicting a different species of tree for each day of the year, a bottle of blotting sand. More papers, folders, and small racks holding more papers and folders. Her inspection hesitated on a model of the Surrey Theatre entirely crafted from paper, from the columns standing guard at the front entrance to the English flag that flew from the spire protruding from the top of the theatre’s dome. Ceony marveled at it for a few long seconds, wondering how much time and precision must have gone into such a detailed piece. Phasing or no, she dared not touch it, though the front doors did look like they were meant to open via the mouselike hinges that held them to the building’s foremost wall.

  She glanced to Emery. He created such beautiful things.

  Emery flipped one of his pages over and began to write along the bottom of the next. Ceony finally settled her attention on the documents—thick legal jargon in small print crammed between one-inch margins on all sides. Each paragraph had its own number, and some sentences had been typed in all caps and separated with bold lines. Across the bottom Emery scrawled his signature—he had stunning handwriting, his lowercase letters all the same width and the capital E and T of his name drawn with minimal flourish. Part of Ceony wanted to trace those letters just so she could learn to scrawl half as well.

  He turned that page and began to scour the next, his lips in a frown, his eyes set in concentration and wrinkled at the outside corners. Ceony read the header at the top of the page: “BERKSHIRE COUNTY CLERK | DECLARATION OF DIVORCE.”

  The light in the office dimmed as the sun finally dropped behind the world. Ceony spied the date he penned alongside his second signature. Exactly two years and five months had passed since this memory. Had he been living alone all this time?

  Something clacked elsewhere in the house. Ceony stiffened and reached into her bag for her fan. But Emery had stiffened as well. He had heard it, too, which meant it couldn’t be Lira. The images of Emery’s heart reacted to Lira’s presence just as they reacted to Ceony’s—not at all. Whatever had made the noise had a place in this vision, though a prickling sensation still churned beneath Ceony’s skin.

  Emery stood from his chair, its legs scraping against the old wooden floorboards as it slid away from the desk. His jaw set above the high collar of his shirt. Stepping around the desk, he phased through Ceony as he approached the door.

  A moment passed before he folded his arms and said, “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  Silence answered him.

  A long sigh passed over Emery’s lips. Ceony reached for his hand, but stopped herself. He said, “I have wards set up.”

  Another moment passed before the door opened past its crack. Ceony squeezed her fan as Lira appeared, to remind herself this wasn’t the real Lira, the present Lira. Her hair was too short, and the malice in her face was less . . . prominent. In fact, she looked at Emery with the eyes of a lost hound dog and chewed on her lip like a scolded child. She wore a slim dress with a slimmer belt accenting her waist. The dress’s collar had been unlaced halfway down, revealing the soft curves of her breasts.

  Fennel barked and Ceony seethed inside, despite knowing all that she did. She forced her grip around the fan to relax, lest she wrinkle it and destroy its enchantment. Lira’s tormented disposition was a
n act—that much was plain. Ceony didn’t buy it for a second.

  And neither did Emery. His expression remained perfectly schooled, like that of a frustrated parent.

  “I need help,” Lira whispered.

  “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t march to the telegraph right now and report you,” he said, his voice stony. Ceony made a guess that Lira had been in more than one skirmish with the law since the last vision in this office. Ceony wondered if she’d bonded flesh yet, then cringed as the thought of how crossed her mind. She had no idea how one became an Excisioner, and she didn’t want anyone to enlighten her.

  Tears—real tears—brimmed on Lira’s dark eyelashes. The woman had some talent. “Just one night, please, Emery,” she pleaded. “I’ll be gone in the morning. I just need someplace to stay.”

  “I know a few good prison cells that might do the trick.”

  “I’m innocent!” she said, and Emery only responded with an incredulous raising of one eyebrow. Lira’s cheeks flushed and hard lines ridged her forehead. “Think of all I’ve given you, Emery! Don’t you know what they’ll do to me? I’m innocent!”

  Emery scoffed and threw his hands out to his sides. Ceony winced at how the gesture exposed his heart. She pushed down the vivid memories of Lira’s sharp fingernails digging into his chest as he hung against the dining room wall, Ceony helpless to stop it.

  “I know what you are, Lira!” he exclaimed. “Everyone does! You think you can play on your innocence now?”

  “You weren’t there,” she cried. Ceony stepped closer to her, studying her face, trying to find her secrets. Ceony wanted to push Lira away from Emery, but her hand passed through the woman’s torso as if she were an illusion read from a storybook. No, Ceony wouldn’t be allowed to interrupt this memory.

  “You don’t understand.” Lira wept.

  “I’ve tried to,” Emery countered, sitting against the edge of his desk and grabbing it with stiff fingers. “Heaven knows I’ve tried to, Lira. Just . . . just go.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “They’ve tracked me here.”

  “And the others?” Emery asked. “Grath? Menion? Saraj?”

  Lira shook her head, looking desperate. “I came alone. I want to get away from it all, Emery, you have to believe me! But how can I clear my name when Grath and his gofers have slandered it so? How can I start a new life when every cop in a blue hat is trying to fit a noose around my neck?”

  Emery shook his head and rubbed his temples. “Criminals have gotten worse for less, Lira. Or have you forgotten—”

  “I’m innocent!” she cried, stepping forward and grabbing Emery’s sleeve. “I’ve been nothing but a mascot for them, a scapegoat! I know I’m a fool, but everyone deserves a chance to recover from their mistakes! And oh . . . my mistakes . . .”

  Ceony frowned. “She’s toying with you,” she said. “Look at her eyes—it’s an act. I took theatre in secondary—I know.”

  But this was the past; Ceony couldn’t change it. Couldn’t prevent the heartache this woman piled on top of Emery. Couldn’t stop her from ripping his heart out.

  But she wanted to.

  She looked at Emery, whose eyes had begun to soften.

  “Don’t believe her!” Ceony shouted, and Fennel barked his agreement from behind her. A paper dog had more sense than this man! “You know what kind of person she is! What kind of person she’ll become!”

  “The worst of it is you,” Lira whispered, batting those thick eyelashes. She sunk against Emery like a half-filled sandbag. “You are my everything, Emery, and I’ve ruined all of it. I let them get into my head . . . I thought you . . .”

  She paused dramatically, pulled away from him. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. You don’t believe me.”

  “Lira—”

  “Can’t we go back to how it was?” she asked, eyes wide and wet. “Can’t we just run away and shed all of this skin?”

  A bad metaphor. Emery began to harden again.

  “You know I’m one of them,” he said. “I’ve helped them track you before.”

  “I know,” she said. Ceony stared hard at her face, but this time she couldn’t read Lira at all. Curse the woman and her perfect porcelain features. “I know, and I deserve your scorn. I know I’ve lost you . . .” Lira looked deep into Emery’s eyes, and Ceony could see that they had indeed softened, and she began to doubt her own assessment of the Excisioner. “Or have I?”

  I should leave. I have to leave, Ceony thought, the sourness still churning. She had a feeling she didn’t want to see where this vision led. She reached for the door behind Lira, but when it opened, she saw only the hallway outside, the hallway and the rest of the house. No new images, no fleshy chamber walls. The distant PUM-Pom-poom still echoed somewhere beyond her reach. She hoped its faintness was only a side effect of her being caught in a memory.

  She turned back to Lira and Emery. Something else clacked in the house. Moments later a solid knock came at a door—two slow beats, two quick. The furrow in Emery’s brow told Ceony he recognized the knocker.

  Emery’s lips pressed into a thin line. Lira clung to his shirt.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please believe me. You know me better than anyone, Emery. You must listen to me.”

  Emery hesitated for a moment before grasping Lira’s wrists and pulling her fingers from his clothes. He moved into the hallway—passing through Ceony—toward the front door. The house silently built itself around Emery as he walked, as though his presence allowed Ceony to see what lay in the dark beyond the vision.

  She followed him down the hallway. Though the front door had a narrow glass window in it, it was too dark to see anything but yellow light beyond it.

  Emery opened the door to two policemen, each holding a lantern.

  “What’s wrong?” Emery asked.

  “Sorry to bother you so late, Master Thane,” the taller policeman said, “but we believe Lira Hoppson to be in the city.”

  “Lira?”

  “No,” Ceony murmured behind him. “No, Emery, don’t lie to them. Don’t protect her.”

  The policeman nodded. “We thought she might try to contact you, or her mother. Have you . . . ?”

  Several stiff seconds passed. Ceony held her breath.

  “I’m sorry,” Emery said. “But thank you for the warning. I’ll ward the house.”

  “Perhaps you should stay elsewhere until we’ve tracked her,” the second policeman said. “If you hear anything . . .”

  “I’ll tell you,” Emery said with a nod. “Of course. Thank you.”

  The policemen bowed their heads and stepped off the porch. Ceony felt her own heart drip cold drops into her stomach, making her nauseated.

  She leaned against a wall for support, only to hear the creaking of hinges near her ear. The dark colors of the house swam around her, but she didn’t shift to another vision. Instead she appeared back in the office with Fennel and Lira as Emery closed the door behind him.

  “Thank you,” Lira whispered.

  “It is more than you deserve,” Emery replied, eyes cast to the floor.

  Lira stepped up to him, hesitant, and wrapped her arms around his waist. She buried her face into his collar and repeated, “Thank you.”

  Ceony bit her lips until she tasted blood. She felt immobile. How would the future be different had Mg. Thane turned Lira over when he had the chance? Ceony was trapped inside his heart trying to save his life, all because he couldn’t deny this horrible woman a prison cell!

  Her face grew hot and she felt tears sting the back of her eyes. She stepped toward the far wall. Let me go, she pleaded. Let me go somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  Emery said something quietly—Ceony didn’t catch it.

  Lira pressed herself against him in such a way Ceony flushed all the hotter. Lira murmured, “I love you, E
mery. You know I love you. Surely you know.”

  “Lira . . .”

  “You wouldn’t have sent them away if you didn’t know it,” she whispered. “If you didn’t still love me.”

  Her long fingers crept behind his neck like spider legs, each step sticking him with venom. Lira pulled his mouth to hers. He resisted at first, but like a bitten insect he stopped fighting and let Lira pull him into her web.

  A tear escaped Ceony’s eye. She had to get out, but they blocked the door—they—

  She backed into the wall and pounded the side of her fist on it. Nothing changed. Before a second tear could fall, she scooped Fennel off the floor and screamed “Let me out!” so loudly that her own eardrums rattled. “Emery Thane, let me go!”

  The office faded into shadow, then into nothingness. The sleepy thrum of PUM-Pom-poom beat against her at all sides, a pale imitation of her own heart’s frantic rhythm. One more chamber, she thought, grasping onto the shreds of calm that came with the words. One more chamber left.

  But the darkness of the third chamber hadn’t finished with Ceony yet. Instead of the red walls, the river of blood, and the tight valve that would take her to the fourth chamber, Ceony found herself in an unfamiliar city, the twilight sky overcast, and shrill police whistles sounding all around her.

  CHAPTER 12

  CEONY HAD NEVER SEEN this city before.

  A narrow street of wet cobblestone stretched before her, its gutters packed with hard snow several days old and mottled with mud. The overcast sky made everything blue and gray—it seemed to be evening, near twilight, but the cloud cover hid the sun so completely Ceony couldn’t be sure. A breath fogged before her mouth. Fennel backed up and sandwiched himself between Ceony’s legs as blood pulsed up and down her neck. Brick walls, dark brick walls, loomed two stories up on either side of her. One broke into an archway, unlike any architecture Ceony had even seen in London. The narrow road ended behind her in a set of cement stairs that led around some sort of office building. The other side ended in another brick wall where one building had backed too far into its neighbors.