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

  “Wait—I thought she was awake.”

  “She’s not in a coma anymore. That’s basically the same thing.”

  But it wasn’t, not for a Snow White. Henry should have gone from deepest coma to perfect wakefulness in an instant, with no pause for recovery in between. Hell, the shock of waking up sometimes caused the sleeping princess archetypes to get the narrative equivalent of the bends, becoming disoriented and time-displaced while they readjusted to having a body.

  I didn’t say any of that. Something was wrong, and until I knew what it was, I was going to take things slow and careful. Instead, I said, “Our man’s down. Andrew and Demi are fetching rope, and we should be ready to leave here in less than twenty.”

  “That’s a negative, Agent Winters. I want you to remain where you are until the cleanup crew arrives to take Dr. Pierson to Childe. He’s already displayed violent tendencies, and if this is going to get out of control again, it’s not going to happen on my watch.”

  I opened my mouth to reply. Then I stopped and counted backward from ten, in Greek, before saying, “Excuse me, ma’am, but if I’m not allowed to see my teammate as soon as possible, Dr. Pierson’s violent tendencies are going to be the least of your concerns.”

  “Are you threatening me, Agent Winters?”

  “No, ma’am.” Dr. Pierson groaned again. I kicked him again. He was probably going to need some dental work when he got to Childe. “I’m simply stating a fact. My story doesn’t give me a lot of cause for patience.”

  Ciara sighed. “I’ll see what I can do to speed up the cleanup crew, all right? Please don’t murder anyone. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on this assignment, and I’d rather not be called up before a review board before I can head out with my husband.”

  “I’ll do what I can to keep my temper under control, but if you want to see the Caribbean this year, you should hurry it up.” I disconnected the call before she could say anything else. Something was wrong. I knew it, and if she talked to me long enough, she would know it too: She wouldn’t be able to help herself. She’d hear it in my voice. So I needed to be quiet, and think, and keep an eye on our prisoner.

  He stirred again. I kicked him in the head again. It took the edge off of my nerves.

  “You’re going to give him a concussion,” said Demi. I turned to see her walking down the hall toward me. She wasn’t holding her flute for once, but her right hand was sketching out pantomime chords in the air. I narrowed my eyes, studying her face. She didn’t even seem to realize she was doing it.

  Our little Piper might become a danger again, sooner than anyone thought. “Why should I care if I give him a concussion?” I asked. “People are dead. Innocent people, who never expected to find an active narrative incursion at the hospital.”

  “People die every time a fairy tale goes live, don’t they? I thought the people who got touched by the stories were victims too.” Demi’s phantom chording became more aggressive. She was probably trying to pipe me away from her.

  She could have done it too, if she’d been holding an instrument. “This guy’s caught in a three-thirty-two, a Godfather Death. The kid in that story isn’t usually a villain, and he doesn’t kill people, he just stops saving them when he sees the reaper’s shadow. It makes him an incredibly famous and wealthy doctor. We don’t catch most three-thirty-twos, because they follow that pattern. When they start seeing Death appear next to their patients, they stop taking the ones who come with their spectral godparent, and their survival rates spike. Dr. Pierson didn’t have to be a villain. He could have been the hero. Once he chose the darker path, he signed himself up for a few concussions.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?” Demi looked at Dr. Pierson, her fingers stilling.

  “Ciara just called. We’re waiting for the cleanup crew, and he’ll be transferred to Childe, where he’ll probably wind up assigned to the medical staff. Not the happiest ending, but he’ll have some freedom of movement and protection from the compulsion charms. Which is more than he deserves, seeing as how he killed people.” I kicked him in the head again. Childish? Maybe, but it made me feel better. I like things that make me feel better. They can be so rare in this world.

  Demi frowned. “Doesn’t him seeing Death mean those people were going to die anyway?”

  “Not before he’d made up his mind to kill them. None of the stories are as precise as we want them to be. If they were, you’d still be in musical school, and I’d be dust on the wind.” Footsteps echoed down the hall. I turned to see Andrew come around the corner. “There you are. Is the cleanup crew here yet?”

  “No,” he said. He looked exhausted. His tie was loose, and the top button of his shirt was undone: sure signs that whatever battle he’d been fighting, it had taken more out of him than usual. “I’ve pacified the media and calmed hospital security. Official story is that Dr. Pierson was mugged by some kids who dosed him with a synthetic hallucinogen that has a long lead time. I’ve probably just triggered half a dozen panicky ‘do you know what your kids are doing?’ news reports and a bunch of inappropriate budget upgrades to the local police, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not thrilled about it, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. I looked from him to Demi, and sighed internally. Neither of them was in a good place to hear my suspicions: they were tense and unhappy and dismayed by the day’s events, and I couldn’t blame them.

  Ah, well. Either I was borrowing trouble and everything was going to be fine, or I was right, and they’d figure out that something was wrong when we got to the hospital and Henry was still asleep.

  “Ciara called; Henry’s awake,” I said. “We’re supposed to stay here until the cleanup crew arrives, but she’s going to hurry them along as much as she can.”

  Demi’s eyes were so wide and round that they looked like they were about to fall out of her head and roll away across the floor. Andrew’s reaction was more subdued. He blinked once, slowly, before he nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “It’ll be a relief to get back to normal.” And to find out what Henry had learned during her time in the whiteout wood—what had kept her away from us for so long. Whatever it was, it had to be important. There was no other way she would have borne it.

  “Yes,” I said. “It will.”

  # # #

  The cleanup crew arrived forty-five minutes later and took control of the scene. They barely had time to claim their paperwork before we were heading for the door. Andrew had parked the car in one of the spaces supposedly reserved for doctors. A parking ticket jutted from under the windshield wiper, fluttering in the breeze. Andrew yanked it off, wadded it up, and threw it to the pavement.

  “People need to learn to read the damn permits on this thing,” he muttered, and dropped himself into the driver’s seat.

  “We’ll be back in the SUV in no time,” said Demi, climbing into the back. “We just didn’t need such a big car when we weren’t at full staff, that’s all.”

  “See? A few more of us drop into unbreakable enchanted slumbers and you’ll be able to get that motorcycle you’ve always wanted.” I slammed the door as I got into the front-passenger seat. “Now drive like Henry’s grading you.”

  He drove.

  On his best day, he didn’t drive with Henry’s lawless mania or Ciara’s easy grace, but he knew how to operate a motor vehicle, which was more than could be said for me. He was eager enough to see Henry that he violated a few traffic laws, coasting through stop signs and roaring through intersections as the light turned yellow. Every so often, he would flash the lights, signaling any nearby police that we were government officials on business, and didn’t have time to deal with being pulled over and ticketed.

  I maintained my usual position in the passenger seat for the entire drive, languid and boneless and flicking through the radio like I believed it was some sort of oracular power that would direct our coming actions. Andrew kept his hands tight on the wheel, and Demi hummed along with every song. It all seemed s
o normal, like we’d never been touched by tragedy, like we weren’t racing even now toward an uncertain future.

  My relationship with my own story has made me more attuned than most to the narrative at work. It wants me badly, has wanted me for centuries; it murmurs to me in the night, sometimes in my mother’s voice, and oh, I love it because it sounds like my memory of her, who is so long in the ground and would otherwise be a hundred years forgotten. But I hate it for taking me from her, and from the doctor who might have been my husband, and from all the others I once loved. So I’ve learnt to watch for it, when it opens its eyes upon the world.

  Henry had always seemed to me to walk in a perpetual winter. Flowers grew in the carpet of her apartment, but they should never have been able to blossom in the cold. Everything about her would have screamed “Snow White” to me, even if she had dyed her hair and buried her complexion under a showgirl’s share of pancake makeup. That was just the way she was, and she had no more choice in being it than I had in seeing it writ across the world.

  Compared to what radiated from the hospital as we pulled up in front of it, she might as well have been narratively dead. I shivered as the wave of cold washed over me, suddenly wishing I had a coat of some sort. The air tasted like apples, fresh-cut, so sharp they burnt the back of my tongue. I glanced toward Andrew, who was parking the car, expression grim but not disturbed. He didn’t feel anything. Demi’s reflection in the rearview mirror revealed the same sort of casual concern. They were worried about Henry, but they didn’t know how worried they were meant to be.

  Something was very wrong.

  The hospital door opened and Ciara came striding out, incongruous as ever in her mix of piratical blouse and businesslike black suit. The blue streaks in her hair had spread since I had seen her last, and that had been less than half a day before. She didn’t appear to have noticed, and I wondered how surprised she’d be when she next glimpsed herself in the mirror. The narrative swirled around her, smelling of saltwater and the sea. Her own story might not be up in arms, but it was active, and it was hungry. We all needed to tread carefully for the next little while—and I had no idea how to warn them.

  “Sorry it took so long for us to get the cleanup crew to you,” she said, once we were out of the car and she was close enough to talk without shouting. “We had a Girl Who Couldn’t Smile and a Clever Jack manifest on opposite sides of the city. The support teams have been running themselves ragged all day.”

  “That’s an awful lot of narrative activity,” said Andrew.

  “Given the reports of what happened the last time former Agent Hubbard was loose, this is no more than we expected, and frankly less than we’ve been braced for,” said Ciara. “I’m concerned that it’s only the beginning. That’s why it’s a good thing you’re here. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Is Henry actually awake?” I asked, earning myself startled looks from Andrew and Demi. I hadn’t bothered telling them about her transition from coma to seemingly ordinary sleep. Without more information, it would have done no good, and would have moved me into the position of needing to explain things I couldn’t yet put into words.

  Ciara nodded. “She woke completely about fifteen minutes ago. She was disoriented at first, but she recovered quickly, and she’s been asking for you. She said she wanted her entire team here when she explained what she had been able to learn.”

  “Then why are we standing around here?” demanded Demi. “Let’s go!” She hurried forward, and Ciara turned to lead her inside. Andrew followed them, leaving me to bring up the rear.

  The air was cold, and the wind tasted of apples, and something was very, very wrong.

  # # #

  Henry was sitting up in her bed when we entered the room. Jeffrey had moved his chair away from her bedside, and was sitting about four feet away, nervously cleaning his glasses on the tail of his shirt. He didn’t look as happy as I would have expected for a man whose lover had just awakened from an enchanted sleep. Maybe it was the fact that his kiss hadn’t been able to call her back to us this time. That’s the trouble with “true love’s kiss” as a concept: when it doesn’t work, you know there’s a problem.

  Or maybe it was the fact that he also knew that something was wrong. He just didn’t want to admit it.

  Henry’s eyes found the four of us as we appeared in the doorway. She looked from one face to another, measuring, assessing. She didn’t pause when she got to Ciara; she didn’t show any sign she thought our temporary leader didn’t belong. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Ciara had been at the hospital this whole time. She could have filled Henry in on the changes that had occurred in her absence. But still, that failure to hesitate made me even more uneasy.

  The taste of apples was heavy in the quiet air of the hospital room. It was underscored by a faint, floral smell I didn’t recognize, sweet and cloying at the back of my throat. I tried to take shallow breaths.

  “I wondered when you were going to get here,” said Henry. “What, a lady takes a nap, and you all decide to get on with your lives? I’m sure there’s something in the employee handbook that says that’s not cool.”

  “Henry!” Demi’s delighted cry twisted itself into a wail as she ran across the room and flung herself into our erstwhile leader’s arms. Henry hugged her back with barely a pause.

  Andrew stepped forward, leaving me to stand alone with Ciara in the doorway. “We were worried sick about you. What the hell kind of stunt was that? If the whiteout wood is that dangerous, I don’t think you should be going there anymore.”

  “I can’t help it, Andy. The wood is connected to my story, and it pulls me in whether I want to go or not.” Henry grimaced at him around the slope of Demi’s shoulder. “On the plus side, I got what I was looking for. I know where Birdie and Elise are hiding.”

  “What?” Ciara stepped forward. I didn’t make any motion to enter the room. I was still trying to sort through the conflicting fairy-tale signals I was getting from the air around Henry, and until I knew what I was walking into, the safest thing seemed to be holding as still as I possibly could. “Agent Marchen, I know you were hoping to have your whole team present before your debriefing, but if you had information of this much tactical significance, you should have shared it as soon as you awoke.”

  “Why, so you could have seized control of the situation and rushed off to guarantee you got the credit for solving the problem? My team paid for this knowledge.” Henry grimaced, her permanently bloody lips making the expression seem exaggerated. “They paid more than you could ever know. They deserve to be the ones who see this through.”

  Ciara frowned slowly. “I’m sorry. I never thought of it that way. I was just concerned about putting an end to a clear and present danger.” Her words were light, chosen with obvious care. At the end, she glanced back at me, and I knew that she shared at least a part of my concern. Something was wrong with Henry. Whatever had happened to her in the wood . . .

  “I’m just glad you’re feeling as well as you are,” said Jeffrey, replacing his glasses on his nose and shooting Henry a look that was equal parts confusion and longing. “Disorientation and mood swings are common side effects of magical coma. I wasn’t sure you’d be able to explain what you’d found for at least an hour.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have been sure, would you?” The look Henry shot at Jeffrey was pure malice. “You were supposed to wake me up.”

  Jeffrey flinched. “I tried,” he said.

  “You failed.” Henry turned back to the rest of us. “I know where they are. I know what they’re planning. We need to get moving, and we need to get moving fast.”

  “Why?” asked Demi. “You need to get better.”

  “Not as much as I need to stop Elise,” said Henry. “They have a Dorothy. They’re going to use her to summon a poppy field, and then they’re going to use the pollen to spread the glass through the city. Thousands—maybe millions—of people will die. Sorry, but my recovery doesn’t matter nearly as
much as preventing that. Now get off me. I need to get out of bed.”

  Demi let her go. Henry promptly cast her blankets aside, pausing to blink at the nightgown and socks she was wearing.

  “Huh,” she said finally. “All right: somebody get me some clothes, and then we’ll go save the world.”

  # # #

  Having Henry back meant we were once more traveling in the SUV: big, black, and built like a tank. Jeffrey was in the front seat. Andrew and Demi were seated in the middle, while Ciara and I sat in the far back, away from the tension that radiated from the front like some terrible cold. The winter had followed Henry into the vehicle; it seemed to radiate from her skin now, like she was a woman in the process of freezing from the inside out.

  “I guess you can go on that cruise now,” I said, slanting a glance at Ciara as I tried to read her expression.

  “I suppose that’s so,” she said. Her fingers were folded over the key she wore around her neck, stroking the metal in quick, anxious gestures. She looked unhappy and confused, like there was something about the situation that didn’t make sense. “That’s . . . that’s a good thing.”

  “Is the Bureau going to let you? Last I checked, all vacation had been canceled. Pretty sure they’re even pulling people off of sick leave.”

  “My story is so unstable that they approve any requests for leisure time involving the ocean,” said Ciara. “Being on the water stabilizes my husband, which in turn stabilizes me. It works out.” She was still frowning, her fingers moving constantly. Uncomfortable as it no doubt was for her, it was hard to read that as anything but positive. I needed someone on my side.

  Jeffrey looked miserable with this newly awakened Henry; he kept stealing glances at her, cringing like he was afraid he’d done something wrong. He’d been in love with her for ages before she’d shown signs of reciprocating. There’d been a time when I’d believed he’d carry that torch all the way to his grave, and never the chance to set it to a forest fire. But for one brief and shining moment, he had been in possession of everything he’d ever wanted, and now—because of one kiss that had somehow been judged not quite true enough—he could see it slipping through his fingers.