The Mirror Man, I wrote—
The world shook again, throwing me to my knees.
Gruffy lunged out of the black cloud. The octopus’s tentacles were tight around his neck, squeezing. Gruffy bit again and again, but the bites had no effect. The octopus was choking him! The creature created another cloud of ink and they disappeared into it.
“Gruffy!” I shouted.
“He’s dead,” Jimmy said from right behind me, appearing out of the billowing ink at the base of the throne’s pillar. “And so are you.”
I spun, and he leapt at me, a knife raised in one hand.
Flower! I scrawled on the air.
Jimmy hit me in the chest with a tulip. The dagger was gone.
He growled, but before he could lash out again, a gigantic crack ran up the side of the throne. Half of the coral pedestal sheared off and fell toward us. Jimmy shouted and jumped out of the way just in time, slamming up against the pillar as the coral crashed right between us.
Coral takes Ink King, I wrote, and the words burned on the air. The coral at Jimmy’s back leapt forward, enclosing his wrists and ankles in pink manacles.
Cracks raced in all directions away from me. The floor became a giant puzzle being pulled apart. The water in the shaped pools turned beet red. The ceiling sliced open and chunks fell. Red-tinted rain showered down all around us.
“The princess is here. The princess is here.” Pip appeared, flapping toward me.
I looked up to see Ripple emerge from the farthest pool. She was blue again, not the lavender-eyed, pale-skinned Vella Wren.
She looked at me, and I thought she would suck me away from Jimmy’s throne room, send me back to Earth or another part of Veloran.
Instead, she pointed at the octopus wrapped around Gruffy’s head and a plume of water shot from the closest pool like it was a fire hose. It nailed the octopus in the head, spinning it away from Gruffy. The octopus regained its balance, started back. Ripple hit it with another blast, smashing it into the wall. The octopus fled then, flying out of one of the tall windows.
Gruffy lay at the base of the back wall. Unsteadily, he rose to his feet. He looked battered and broken. I stood up and looked to Theron and my caged parents. I started toward them.
“Squeak!”
I looked back and saw Squeak by the edge of Sir Real’s cage.
“Squeak squeak!” he insisted.
Sir Real had awoken, and he was in his human form now. He held onto a shadow bar of his cage with one hand and gestured to me with the other. “Lorelei…” he murmured. “You must go…” His voice was so quiet I could barely hear him. “It is almost done. Veloran is almost gone.”
“I’m not leaving them,” I said. I took a step toward my parents’ cage, writing on the air.
Vanish.
The strength of my story rippled out, but when it hit the cage, it lashed back, blowing like a hurricane and knocking me to the ground. It drove me and Sir Real’s cage toward a crack where water sloshed up and almost took us over the edge. I fought the wave, grabbing at the uneven ground. I caught Squeak by the tail as he flowed past me. The water receded. I scrambled to my feet and put Squeak on safe ground.
Jimmy growled and thrashed against the coral shackles. “You’re not getting them. You’ll never get them!”
I clenched my fists, looked around helplessly. My gaze fell on Gruffy, lopsided, his wing hanging down.
“You will kill him,” Sir Real said. “You will kill all of them.”
“Gruffy wants me to stop Jimmy more than anyone!” I flung back at Sir Real.
“Because he was made for you. He was born to die for you,” Sir Real said. “What are you willing to do for him?”
“Shut up!” I said to Sir Real.
“Will you kill him to get what you want?”
“It’s not me! Jimmy is the…” I choked.
“Do not listen to the Flimflam, Doolivanti,” Gruffy said sternly. “If you leave, you let this villain win. That injustice cannot be borne.” He jumped over the chasm between us, landed badly, and his front leg buckled. He crashed to the cracked marble floor, then painstakingly stood up again. He shook his great eagle head. “Take your brother home. Regain your family and make things right.”
“Do not listen,” Sir Real said. “He is—”
“He’s what?!” I whirled on Sir Real.
“He is what you want him to be!” Sir Real shouted. “You made him to protect you. To serve you. To fight for you! That is what he is. He cannot make the right decision, but you can.” Sir Real looked at Squeak. “What about the mouse, chica? He is your wisdom. Remember? The little brilliant one. Are you listening to the mouse?”
“I can’t understand him! I never could!”
“Please, Lorelei,” Sir Real said.
I clenched my teeth and stared at my parents. Right there. Right in front of me. I could free them.
“You’ve created wonders while you have been here,” Sir Real pleaded. “Do not destroy them. Do not—”
“Wonders? I haven’t—”
“Sí! Wonders! I have marveled at you from the first moment. You did not let Veloran change you. You kept your own name. You did not use Veloran to escape. You used it to grow stronger. To grow up.”
“I didn’t—”
“All I ever did was hide,” Sir Real said, his dark eyes haunted. “This is the choice we are all given the first moment we come here. To get what we want. And now, you have it. Your family is here, and you wish to be the child again and not make the hard choice. But these decisions are why you are brilliant. It is why you kept your own name. It is why Jimmy cannot beat you.”
“You want me to let him beat me!”
“Do you not see how much larger you are? He is just a boy. And you…” He hesitated, bowed his head. “Do not make my mistake,” he murmured. “I ran away. I did not stand up for who I am. I did not tell my father I am a painter and face the consequences. I did not ever become the person I could have been. And I did not understand how wrong I was until I met you. You are yourself no matter who tells you to be another. Don’t you see? You are what Veloran can make all children.” He slumped against the bars, as though the speech had spent his strength. “Do not do it,” he whispered, so low it sounded like he was talking to himself. “Don’t destroy this place for every other child who needs it.”
I felt the strain pulling against me. Just standing here was hard now. The Wishing World was trying to push me out, and I was pitting my will against what Vella had called the “fabric of the painting.” I looked over at Ripple, but she only stood there, as though she had never been Vella Wren, as though she was only my faithful companion the sea princess.
The ground rumbled again. The sky was beet red.
I could defeat Jimmy. He was finished. His inky octopus had fled. The Ratsharks were gone. I could rip open his cage.
“Squeak,” Squeak said softly, and I looked down at the little mouse. His charcoal fur was wet, plastered against his tiny body. He looked scrawny, tiny next to Sir Real’s cage, but his eyes glimmered.
I can’t understand you, I thought. But I realized that was a lie. In this moment, I knew exactly what Squeak would say.
I looked at Gruffy. He was watching me, alert, ready to make the sacrifice. Pip hovered next to him and for once, the toucan had nothing to say.
The outer walls of the castle crumbled. Huge stones fell, cracking against the ground and splashing into the sea. The entire sky was the awful burning rip.
I screamed my frustration, turned to Jimmy, and grabbed his arm …
… and let go of the Wishing World.
CHAPTER 22
Veloran went flat. Gruffy, Pip, Squeak, Ripple, and Sir Real, bathed in red light, became characters in a painting moving away from us. Blackness flooded around Jimmy and me, washed us backward.
“No!” Jimmy shouted, his voice stretching long. “I’m the king of the Wishing World!” He reached for my neck. I fought him, gripping his wrists to
stop him from strangling me. His fingers groped desperately, hooking into my necklace. He twisted, and the necklace snapped. We tumbled separately through the dark.
Shapes flickered overhead. Water pipes, heating vents and electrical wires. Cluttered shelves slowly appeared to my left. The many-armed furnace appeared to my right. It was my basement, and I was alone.
That cold realization swept through me, and I spun, looking around desperately.
Jimmy wasn’t here.
I had grabbed him, pulled him with me. But he wasn’t here. I climbed up on the shelves and looked back into the crawl space, all the way to the front of the house. Nothing.
He had been with me.
I clapped a hand to my throat. The necklace was gone, too. The comet stone. My key to Veloran. Gruffy’s feather. All gone. Jimmy had yanked it off me.
“No!” My heart beat faster; I couldn’t get enough air. I had failed at every single thing. I’d never see Theron again, never see Mom and Dad. I’d given them up, and now I had nothing. I had even less than when I’d gone to the Wishing World. Now I didn’t even have hope.
I slumped against the crumbling brick wall, skidded to the ground, and hugged my knees. A sob shuddered through me. I was out of ideas. I was out of everything.
The door above opened and bright light spilled down the stairway. I squinted, trying to block the glare with my hand.
Mr. Schmindly’s praying mantis silhouette hunched at the top, his hands together in front of himself. The lenses of his glasses glinted.
“Well, you certainly look a little more compliant. Are you ready to tell the truth now?” he asked, as though he’d just put me down here, as though I hadn’t traveled the length of Veloran, found my family, and fought Jimmy in a crumbling palace beneath a red sky.
“Let me out,” I said weakly. It didn’t sound like I meant it, even to me. Did it matter if I stayed down here forever? Would any place in the world be any brighter?
Mr. Schmindly smiled thinly, leaned even farther down. “Let me in,” he whispered. “Show me the doorway, Lorelei, and you can go home.”
Home.
“You can’t give me my home,” I said. “And I’ll never let you into the Wishing World. Never.”
Mr. Schmindly’s mouth turned down in a frown. “You will,” he said menacingly. “Or you’ll live the rest of your life down here—”
There was a sound like running feet and something small slammed into Mr. Schmindly like a ram. He flew from view, crying out as he crashed into my bedroom to the right. Then there was another crashing noise, like a dresser had fallen on him.
I gasped and stood up.
Theron appeared in the doorway, fists clenched at his sides and his lips pressed together firmly. He glared in the direction he had bulldozed Mr. Schmindly.
“THERON!” I leapt to my feet and raced up the stairs. I threw my arms around him. “How…? How…?”
Distracted, he pushed me away, his fierce gaze still on Mr. Schmindly, who was sprawled on the floor, an old chair tangled in his legs. The glasses had fallen off his face, and he groped around for them. Theron pointed at him, his brows knitted together. “You get up and you’ll be sorry.”
“Theron! How?” I stammered.
He finally looked at me and grinned. “Hi, Lore.”
“How did you get back?”
“Oh. Him.” Theron stuck a thumb over his shoulder in the other direction. Inside our back door stood Sir Real in his human form, his wavy black hair tumbling down over his face. He was stooped and panting, as though he had run a marathon, and he leaned heavily on the door’s handle.
“Sir Real!”
He gave me a wan smile. “André,” he said softly. “My real name is André.”
I went to him in a daze. “But, you said if you told me your real name—”
“That I would have to come back to Earth. I know.” He laughed, his voice tired. “But you saved my Flimflams. You saved the Wishing World for all the other children. I could not stay. Not when I could give you what you most wanted.”
“What I most…” I spun around.
Standing by the sink in the kitchen, blinking and looking completely confused, were my parents.
“No way!” I launched myself toward them. Mom and Dad barely had time to look up before I slammed into them. I wrapped an arm around each of them and didn’t let go. I was never going to let them go again.
“Hey there, Lori-Bee,” Dad said.
“Jelly sandwich,” Mom said.
“And I’m the jelly,” I said, crying, burying my head in Mom’s shoulder. “I’m the jelly in the middle…”
CHAPTER 23
I sat in the basement of Auntie Carrie and Uncle Jone’s house with Theron. Their basement was a totally different kind than the one in our house. The walls were painted, for starters. And there were short, wide windows high up, next to the ceiling, which was white stucco with a fancy overhead light. And there was also carpet, cool and soft. Theron and I sat cross-legged, facing each other.
There had been a great deal of confusion about our return from Veloran. First thing I did after hugging my parents for an eternity was to ask Theron how he and André had gotten back.
“It’s actually been a while since you left, at least in the Wishing World,” Theron had said. “The cage around Mom and Dad sorta melted away. The storm blew itself out and all the Beetlins and Ratsharks took off once Jimmy was gone. Anyway, we spent some days helping Ripple put her palace back together while André’s Flimflams chased down the octopus Jimmy was using to go between worlds. Took them a while, but they painted a harness right on the thing. Made it take us back here.”
“Jimmy didn’t come back to Veloran?”
“I thought he was here,” Theron had said.
I told Theron of my disappointment in losing Jimmy. He could be anywhere, and that made me more than a little nervous.
But there were other concerns that caught up with us about then, and I didn’t get to chase the thought.
The police had showed up, responding to a phone call made by Auntie Carrie, who was looking for me and told them to check my house first. The police had a list of questions; they wanted explanations, and there were no answers that satisfied them. None that adults would believe, anyway. My parents had reappeared after a year. My brother had, too. And of course there was André, who lied and told the police he had no parents at all. That not only baffled the police, it baffled me until André told me the truth: he had been in the Wishing World for almost a century. His parents had died a long time ago. Theron and I begged Mom and Dad to let him stay with us and they said yes, and the police had allowed it.
But my parents didn’t remember anything about the Wishing World or the last year. The police questioned them for days, bringing in psychologists and other experts to try to get the truth. They also questioned Theron, who happily told them everything.
Except no one could hang onto the stories. Even right after Theron told them something, the police would get strange looks on their faces, then begin asking the same questions. Theron finally yelled at them to stop talking.
I didn’t say much about Veloran, but I gave them everything about Mr. Schmindly. From him tripping me in the dining room to throwing me down the basement stairs to locking me in. I showed them the finger marks on my arms, the scrapes on my elbows and chin.
The police’s attention had turned to Mr. Schmindly then. Had he locked us all down there? A psychiatrist could prescribe drugs. Had he given the whole group of us drugs that fogged our memories? And why did his daughter, Tabitha, have a split lip and a black eye? Apparently, when we came back from Veloran, she was up the street at Walgreens getting a cold pack for her face. She had returned to flashing police lights and had tried to run. They caught her.
Also, apparently, Jimmy had been missing for a year. All the proper missing child reports had been filed, but now there was a heap-load of doubt on Mr. Schmindly. What had he done with his son?
In a flash
, it was Mr. Schmindly’s turn to answer a lot of questions. And the answers he stammered out kinda sucked. The police seemed to feel the same way, and they took him to jail.
The police let Mom and Dad join Theron, André, and me at Auntie Carrie and Uncle Jone’s house when they realized that they honestly had no recollection, and we had all stayed here for the last day and a half, trying to sort through the last year. My family was together again. That was what mattered, and I was never letting them out of my sight again.
Of course, I told Mom and Dad the whole truth, but it didn’t work with them any more than it had with the police. There was something about the Wishing World that wouldn’t stick in the minds of adults. I thought at least Dad would believe. With his excitement about Narolev’s Comet, the camping trip, and making the comet stone charms for us, I thought maybe he already knew about Veloran somehow. But a few minutes after Theron and I would tell him the story, he’d ask again what happened. It made me wonder how Mr. Schmindly knew that there was a Wishing World at all. Had he gone there as a child and returned, like all of us? Was that what let him remember? Were there other adults who knew about the Wishing World?
“They’re not going to believe,” Theron had finally said to me. “They’re grown-ups.”
I wondered if, when I got older, I wouldn’t be able to remember Veloran anymore. André said I had grown up in the Wishing World. Did that mean I would forget? Narolev’s Comet had finally left the night sky, and the Wishing World seemed so far away, a bright and magical place. Details about Gruffy, Pip, Squeak, and Ripple faded a little more every day.
It hurt my heart to think that they might vanish altogether. What if soon I couldn’t recall Pip’s blue plumage? Or Gruffy’s fierce and lovable face? I thought about writing myself into the Wishing World again, trying to go back, but I didn’t dare. I had done so much damage. And I didn’t even know if it was possible, now that I had no comet stone.
“It might happen to us, too, you know,” I said to Theron, and I sighed. “The more time that goes by, the less I believe it. Even André is starting to seem like a boy we already knew.”
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