Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 29

  I barely dared to breathe. I kept pressing down, feeling Jeff’s pulse strengthen under my fingers. This went against all medical logic and modern understanding of how blood and the body worked, but neither of those things mattered here or now, in the shadow of the hedge maze: what mattered was that in a fairy tale, this would have worked, and when you brought people like us together in a place like this, a fairy tale was essentially what you had.

  Demi pulled her mouth from her flute, catching a whooping breath before she said, “I’m going to pipe the bullet out and the blood in at the same time. Somebody be ready to catch it.”

  “On it,” said Andy, and stepped forward, kneeling on Jeff’s other side. He looked at me as he did, and when our eyes met, he nodded. Just once, but that was all I needed to know that he’d finally decided to believe me. We were teammates again.

  I looked to Demi. “Save him,” I said, half command, half plea.

  She nodded. “I will,” she said, and started playing again.

  This time the song danced, trilling and twisting around the high, jagged notes that called the blood back into Jeff’s body. There was almost none left on his skin or clothing, and my hands were clean. Demi blew a hard note, and a bullet shot up from his shoulder, gleaming in the shadows like a star. Andy’s hand lashed out, closing around the projectile. The song continued for a few beats more, calling the last of the blood home. Jeff’s pulse was strong, and so I moved my hands to cover the wound that was still there, ready to start bleeding again: Demi could pull the blood back into a body, but it seemed she couldn’t heal broken flesh and bone. We all have our limitations.

  Demi stopped playing and stood, panting, as I lowered my mouth to Jeff’s, and kissed him.

  His eyes fluttered open, and he blinked at me, nonplussed. Belatedly, I remembered that my face wasn’t my own, and that, from his perspective, he’d just been kissed by a stranger. That probably wasn’t the best way to begin something like this. I opened my mouth to explain, and stopped as he raised his hand and pressed it, trembling, against my cheek.

  “Henry,” he said. “I was starting to be afraid I was never going to see you again. What took you so long? Where did you go?” Then he stopped me from answering his questions by leaning up and kissing me again, more fervently this time. His chest moved under my hand as he breathed. He was alive. He was alive, and he was going to stay that way.

  When he pulled away, he grimaced and said, “I believe I’ve been shot.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. He sounded so offended, like this was the last thing he’d been expecting from his day. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that. It was my gun, and my finger on the trigger.”

  “But you’re not the one who pulled it,” he said. He looked toward Demi, who was still holding her flute just below her mouth. “I’m assuming you’re the one responsible for my miraculous survival? I was more than halfway dead, you know. There are goalposts between here and the afterlife, and I’d passed most of them.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That was me.”

  “Thank you,” said Jeff solemnly.

  Piotr and Agent Névé came jogging around the corner with two EMTs close behind. Demi hastily put her flute behind her back, as if she was afraid they would look at it and instantly intuit the entire purpose of the Bureau. Jeff looked at them and nodded cordially.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “I seem to have been shot. Would one of you care to assist?”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to add to that. I kept my hands where they were and held my silence, waiting for the EMTs to tell me what to do.

  # # #

  If the EMTs were surprised by how little blood there was at the scene, they were too professional to say anything. Jeff bled some when I was instructed to move my hands, but not much; Demi’s spell was holding. The EMTs got him bandaged up and loaded onto a stretcher, and he kissed me one last time before they carried him off to the ambulance and away from whatever might still be lurking in the maze.

  My unfamiliar heart was pounding against my ribs as the reality of what had almost happened began sinking in. He could have died. He almost had. Another few minutes of disbelief on the part of any of the people who’d tried to deny my identity and I would have lost a team member and a friend. The fact that I loved him was almost irrelevant. It was my team that I’d promised to protect. It was as my teammate that I’d failed him.

  A hand landed on my shoulder. I looked up to find Andy frowning down at me.

  “You’re short and you’re not pointy enough, and I don’t think I’ll ever get used to hearing you give orders in that voice, but I believe you are who you are,” he said.

  I managed to muster a smile. It wasn’t easy. “See, if you just believe me in all things, your life improves.”

  Andy snorted. “That’s the attitude that got me in trouble with the chick who swiped your body. How the hell did she do that, anyway? Do we need to set up secret passwords or something?”

  “That might not be a bad idea,” I said. “As for how Adrianna stole me, that’s a long story, and one I’d rather wait to go into until after we’ve managed to find Sloane. She’s all alone out there. She needs us.” It was odd to think about Sloane needing anyone, but if there was anything I’d learned from seeing the start of her story, it was that she wasn’t as invulnerable as she seemed. She could be hurt. She could bleed. Maybe, if someone knew where to push, and pushed hard enough, she could even die.

  “What do we do?” asked Demi. She was clutching her flute again, holding it like the security blanket it was. Without it, she could still do a lot of damage—a Piper can hum the rats back into Hamelin, if they really want to. But with it, she was unstoppable. There was a lot of comfort to be taken in that fact.

  I stood up straighter, trying to match the height I’d lost when Adrianna took my body. “We find her. We don’t split up—we never split up again, if we can help it—but we find her. Ciara, you’re our expert on secrets. You find things people don’t want you finding. Can you find us a door into the right part of this maze?”

  “Me and doors, that’s not always a safe combination,” she said nervously. “One day, that’s the thing that’s going to get my head chopped off.”

  “Could be today,” I said. “But if it’s not, then today could be the day when you find Sloane and bring her home. Can you do it or not?”

  Ciara looked at me for a long moment before she nodded. “I can,” she said. “Just give me a second.”

  “Take all the time you need, as long as you don’t need very much,” I said.

  “See, I knew Henry was weird after the coma,” said Andy. “She wasn’t nearly as bossy.”

  I glared at him. He grinned.

  “Welcome back, boss,” he said.

  Ciara walked toward the nearest hedge wall. It wasn’t purposeful; she swaggered, rather than striding, seeming to follow an irregular path that just happened to bring her up against the greenery. “Oh, hello,” she said, reaching out to caress a leaf. “Aren’t you beautiful? You know, I saw a hedge like you once. Green and fine and lovely. But that hedge had a secret door, so I suppose it was nicer than you are. Unless you have a secret door?”

  The hedge shook like it was fighting against a stiff wind. Ciara laughed.

  “You do, don’t you?” she said, sounding delighted.

  “Is she chatting up the hedge?” I asked, glancing to Andy. He didn’t look disturbed. I shifted my attention to Piotr, who did look disturbed. Good. I wasn’t the only one.

  Agent Névé, on the other hand, seemed perfectly sanguine about the whole situation. “She does this,” he said. “I watched her talk a manhole into opening once. It was amazing.”

  “If you didn’t know she could do this, why did you ask her to do it?” asked Piotr.

  “I thought she had some weird narrative connection to hidden doors, and could just wave her hand and have one open!” I said. “I’ve seen stranger things happen, especially since I fell into a magic
al, apple-induced coma and woke up a foot shorter and two cup sizes larger.”

  “Three, I’d say, but I take your point,” said Piotr.

  I folded my arms over my new breasts and glared at him before returning my attention to Ciara. She was still cooing sweet nothings at the hedge, which was enjoying the attention, if the rustling and slowly engulfing her hand was anything to go by. She smiled. The hedge pulled her a little closer—and then the hedge spread open like the mouth of some great beast, creating a tunnel where none had been before.

  “I knew you could do it!” said Ciara, and kissed the foliage before stepping into the opening, gesturing for the rest of us to go with her.

  “Your team is weirder than my team,” said Piotr.

  “We consider it a badge of honor,” I said, and followed Ciara through the hedge. Andy and Demi were close behind, with Piotr and Agent Névé bringing up the rear. Jeff was safe with the EMTs, I was almost sure; Adrianna, wherever she was, wasn’t the sort to come back and kill the wounded. Especially not when she thought she’d taken them out the first time.

  The door in the hedge closed behind us, weaving shut and leaving no sign it had ever been there before. That wasn’t the only change. The light seemed dimmer here, fragmented by unseen prisms, making the patterns of sun and shadow unpredictable. The walls were less well-trimmed, and twined and twisted around us in a mad array of looping branches and uncut thorns. Some of them were almost as long as my thumb, and looked wickedly sharp.

  I stopped, motioning for the others to do the same. “Did we ever find Birdie and Elise?”

  “No,” said Ciara. “We got the Rapunzel back. We still don’t know her name. But those two . . . we just don’t know.”

  “Adrianna said she knew where they were, back when we thought she was you, and damn near got us all killed,” said Andy. “In hindsight, that should have been a clue something was wrong.”

  “We’re so getting secret passwords,” I said, and pointed to the thorns. “Adrianna is a Snow White with access to both a Cinderella and a Storyteller archetype. Don’t touch the thorns. There’s no way of knowing whether she has access to a Sleeping Beauty, or worse, a Wicked Fairy, and I don’t have the time or the patience to wait for one of you to take a hundred year nap.”

  “You have the best assignments, Marchen,” said Piotr. “Remind me never to accompany you on another.”

  “I didn’t ask you to accompany me on this one,” I said, looking down the long green corridor of the maze. Moving as a group would mean we covered less ground. Splitting the party would make it easier for Adrianna and her allies to ambush us. Sloane was in danger, but we weren’t going to save her by acting like fools. “We stay together, we stay away from the walls, and if we see anything—anything—that doesn’t look like Sloane, we take it out. Understood?”

  “Understood,” said Andy. The others nodded, nervous levity fading as we locked in on our new mission. We were in the maze. We were past the first hidden door. What came next was what mattered.

  The smell of chlorophyll and wet grass accompanied us as we walked down the long corridor, watching for entries to the rest of the maze with every step we took. I was at the lead, my body tight and nervous as a cat about to bolt, my eyes scanning the shadows under the thorns for signs of ambush. Adrianna and I shared a story. If I could get close enough to her, I might be able to pick up on her presence before she had the chance to pick up on mine. After all, she didn’t know that I was coming.

  We moved through the shadows like ghosts, silent save for the faint crunch of Piotr’s footsteps. I glanced down. The grass around his feet was covered with a thin layer of frost, and he was casting looks at Demi that were half longing and half terrified. She had a flute. She could call out his wolf if she wanted to. That fact that she’d never do it didn’t matter.

  The corridor ended at a wall of solid green. We all stopped. It was Andy who spoke first, turning to Ciara as he asked, “So, uh, can you flirt with the hedge some more and get us through to the next pointless green hallway?”

  “No,” she said. She looked perplexed. “The hedge let us in because this was where we needed to be. It was the right door. We should be where we need to be.”

  “We are,” said Agent Névé, stepping forward. “Don’t you see it?”

  “See what, Carlos?” asked Ciara.

  He shook his head. “There’s a doorway right there. You can’t see it?”

  “No, this one’s all you,” said Andy.

  Agent Névé sighed. “I hate this fucking mirror,” he said, with surprising passion, before walking into the wall. Literally into the wall: as he stepped forward, he disappeared.

  “Uh,” said Demi. “Has anybody else here seen Labyrinth?”

  “Honey, if you’re telling me David Bowie is somewhere in this maze, I may forget that I’m a married man,” said Andy, and followed Carlos into the wall.

  That was the cue for the rest of us to begin going through, one at a time, until only I was left in the green corridor of thorns. I looked over my shoulder. There was no one there.

  Ciara stuck her head back through the green hedge wall. “You coming?” she asked.

  “I’m coming,” I said, and followed her.

  # # #

  The maze seemed to go on forever—far longer than it should have, given the limited space behind the house where it grew. Even if Adrianna wasn’t here, the narrative had clearly been hard at work, distorting distance and twisting causality until it created a virtual labyrinth in what should have been a rich man’s idle diversion. Demi’s earlier question might have been asked in nervous jest, but it was impossible not to look at the unending walls around us and wonder if we really were on a path to the castle beyond the Goblin City. If so, I hoped that they would be friendly hosts, and wouldn’t mind the fact that we hadn’t brought them any babies.

  Then we came around a corner in the maze, and suddenly we had much bigger things to worry about than David Bowie’s hypothetical trousers. Like the wall of thorns that had sprouted to block our path, ripping through grass and hedge wall alike. Even that wasn’t the biggest problem in front of us. No, that honor was reserved for Elise.

  She was sitting on a pumpkin shell throne, held aloft by three loops of thorns, and she was smiling, her pretty pink lips curled upward in a perfect Cupid’s-bow smirk. Her dress managed to look elegant and tattered at the same time, like the greatest fashion houses in the world had come together to make “shredded chic” the next big thing. She was even wearing glass slippers, clear enough to show the dirt on her heels and insteps. It was beautiful. It was terrible.

  “Hello, everyone,” she said, in a high, bright voice. “I was wondering when you’d come along.”

  Demi’s hands clenched on her flute. “Where’s Sloane?” she demanded.

  That was almost more of a surprise than Elise’s appearance. I wasn’t used to Demi showing that much spirit. I liked it. I didn’t say anything. If Adrianna didn’t know I was back, Elise might not know either. We could use that.

  “Do you mean my stepsister?” asked Elise, and smiled like a broken mirror, all jagged edges and distorted glee. She had shattered her own story and stitched it into a shape she liked better, and nothing would ever make it whole again. I felt bad for her, even as I feared what someone who’d broken so many of their own chains might be willing to do. “She’s gone to have a chat with our dear Mother Goose, who can show her the error of her ways. She’s played the lapdog for you people long enough. It’s time for her to learn what an unshackled story can do.”

  “Well, she’s telling the truth as she sees it,” said Agent Névé. He sounded slightly baffled. I suppose meeting someone else’s suite of enemies for the first time will do that. The Joker makes sense to Batman, but to anyone else, he’s just a shouting man whose coloration bears an unfortunate resemblance to my own. Elise made sense to us. To anyone else . . .

  “That’s delightful,” said Piotr. He raised his voice, calling, “Miss, if yo
u would please come down from your, ah, throne of thorns, I’d like to arrest you now.”

  Elise blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “The ATI Management Bureau gives me the authority to arrest anyone who knowingly and willfully uses narrative energy to distort reality,” said Piotr. “You’ve transformed a perfectly normal hedge maze into a terrifying tunnel of thorns and impossible doors. You’re thus clearly using narrative energy to distort reality, and are within my jurisdiction.”

  Elise blinked again, more slowly. She wasn’t the only one. We all looked confused, to one degree or another. All except Piotr, who was watching her with perfect calm, waiting for her response.

  “I’m not going to come down there and let you arrest me,” she said finally. “I knew that working for the government makes you arrogant, but I didn’t know it made you stupid.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Piotr. “But it does make us very, very good at obfuscation.”

  “Huh?” said Elise.

  “He was distracting you,” said Andy, as Piotr broke into a run, heading straight for the thorns.

  He was halfway there when his body turned inside-out, flesh becoming fur, hands becoming paws, until a great gray wolf was running in his stead. Demi raised her flute, starting to play the high, sweet solo from Peter and the Wolf. She’d been a music major before we activated her story and recruited her into the Bureau. She could probably have played that part in her sleep.

  Elise shrieked, surprised by the sudden appearance of an apex predator, and waved one hand in a throwing gesture. Shards of colorless glass flew from her fingertips, arcing toward Piotr, who was mid-leap and couldn’t dodge them. Agent Névé whistled. The shards changed direction, flying toward him instead.

  He grunted when they impacted with his chest. That was all: just grunted. I stared in horror as rivulets of glass began to spread out from the wound, turning glossy and bright. Elise was laughing in the background. Piotr was snarling, and Demi’s flute was playing louder and louder, chasing the narrative of the boy and his wolf ever closer to its conclusion.