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  “Garter snakes?” he asked, sounding horrified.

  I nodded. “I had to call Jeff in the middle of the night to come and get them out. It was that or pee in the sink.”

  “Jeff, huh?” Gerry walked over and sat down on the couch next to me, his shoulder almost brushing mine. “Looks like you’re getting pretty cozy with that guy. How come I haven’t met him before?”

  “How about because we haven’t spoken for eight years as a starter?” I asked.

  Gerry grimaced and looked away. “I guess that would be part of it,” he admitted.

  I sighed and took mercy. “Jeff has been with the Bureau since about a year before I got assigned to my current field team,” I said. “He was on track to go into a permanent position in the Archives, but he managed to argue his way into something more active. His story doesn’t lend itself well to sitting still. I get the feeling that he was never much for idleness before he found out that he was part of the narrative.”

  “And is he your boyfriend?”

  Yes. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s … complicated.” I shook my head. “We’ve been having trouble with the narrative lately. It’s getting more aggressive, and it’s been changing the way that it attacks. He nearly got swallowed by his story. I kissed him to snap him out of it. I guess he’s had a crush on me for a while now.”

  “Uh-huh. What about you? Do you have a crush on him, or is this some sort of fairy tale compulsion?” Gerry’s lips twisted into a grimace. “I don’t like how much power this thing has over us. I really don’t want to think about it making you do things that you wouldn’t—”

  “It’s not like that,” I interrupted, before he could take himself any further along that unpleasant line of thought. “I’ve liked Jeff for a while too. He’s kind. He’s funny. He doesn’t look at me like I’m a freak. Those are pretty rare qualities to find in a man, and they’re rarer when you consider that I could never be involved with someone who doesn’t know my line of work. I don’t know what we are to each other yet—things have been hectic, what with my story going active and everything—but I’m happy to find out. Don’t go all protective brother on him. He doesn’t deserve that.”

  “As long as you’re happy.” Gerry leaned back into the couch, closing his eyes with a groan. “God, Henry. I thought I got clear of all this fairy tale crap, and then the damn deer show up at my school …”

  “Not just the deer,” I said.

  He opened one eye. “What?”

  “I said, ‘not just the deer.’” I shook my head. “I know you, remember? There’s no way you would have freaked out and run for the Bureau just because you saw some out-of-place deer. You might get spooked, but you hate the narrative too much to be that easy. There has to have been something else.”

  “Yeah.” He closed his eye again. “There was something else.”

  “So? What is it?”

  “I’ve been having these weird dreams lately. The kind that you remember the next day, and that seem so real …” Gerry frowned, eyes still closed. “I’m in this big field full of roses. Red roses, naturally. Anything else wouldn’t be symbolic enough, you know? And I can see another field nearby, full of white roses, and I know—in the dream—that if I can just get there, this can all be set right. Because that’s the other thing. In the dream, something is terribly wrong. I just don’t know what it is. So I wade through red roses, trying to get to the white ones, and I never quite make it, and eventually, I wake up.”

  “How long?”

  “How long does the dream last, or how long have I been having it?” Gerry didn’t wait for me to answer. “The dream seems to last for days, which is part of how I can remember that it’s a dream, even when it’s happening. I’d starve if I spent that much time alone in a field of roses. I’ve been having it for about a month. Only once a week at first, and then every other night. It’s been every night for a couple of weeks now.”

  That explained why he looked so tired. “You should have called me,” I said gently.

  “I was hoping I’d never have to. But you asked why the deer were enough to make me come here—why the deer meant my story was going live and not, I don’t know, that we needed to call Animal Control.” He finally opened his eyes, turning toward me as he held up his left wrist. I gasped before I could stop myself.

  There, on the inside of his wrist, was a row of livid red scratches. They had scabbed over, but were clearly still fresh.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Last night. I almost made it to the white roses. I thought, ‘this is great, I’m going to reach the finish line and then I won’t have this stupid dream anymore.’ I reached out too fast, and I cut my wrist on the thorns.” He wrapped his hand around his wrist, hiding the scratches from view. “I woke up with blood on my pillow. That’s when I knew that this was serious.”

  “I really wish you’d called me sooner.”

  Gerry grimaced. “So do I. But I’m here now. That has to count for something, right?”

  “I sure hope so.” I leaned over and hugged him before standing. “I’m going to get some sleep. You should do the same. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day of tests, questions, and research, and while that may sound boring, you’re going to want to be awake for it.”

  “I can do boring,” he said, with a small smile. “Boring has sort of been my life’s goal.”

  “Then let’s see if we can get your life back on track. Good night, Gerald.”

  “Good night, Henrietta.”

  He was still sitting up, holding his wrist, when I turned off the living room light and walked into my bedroom, leaving him alone in the dark.

  That night I dreamt of the wood, but all the whiteout women were missing, and the air carried the distant scent of roses.

  #

  As always, my alarm went off too early, yanking me back into a world I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with. I looked automatically toward the window as I sat up. Only three bloody crescents marked the spots where bluebirds had managed to slam themselves to death against the glass. My new bird netting was working. More cinquefoil had sprouted from the carpet near the bed, now joined by a riotous spray of snowdrops and crocuses. All of this was normal.

  The scent of coffee and bacon hanging in the early morning air … now that was a bit more unusual. I rolled out of bed, rubbing my eyes with the back of my hand as I shambled toward the bedroom door, pausing only long enough to snag my phone. I didn’t want to miss a summons by being too interested in what smelled very much like breakfast.

  The front room was empty. Gerry had even stripped the sheets off the couch, folding them in a neat pile on one cushion. His pillow rested on top. I touched it lightly as I passed. The fabric was cool. He’d been awake for a while.

  Then I stepped into the kitchen and stopped, blinking at the edifying sight of Sloane operating a waffle maker that I was more than reasonably certain I didn’t own. Jeff was sitting at my small dining table, sipping from a glass of orange juice, while Gerry flipped bacon at the stove. I gawked at them for a moment before asking the only question I could think of: “Where are Andy and Demi?”

  “Good morning to you, too, snow-shine,” said Sloane, almost kindly, as she looked over her shoulder at me. “I thought we should come over and make sure you two survived the night. Andy didn’t feel like getting up early, and no one wanted to prod Demi. She’s still too fragile to fuck with much.”

  “You have no idea how strange it is to hear you say that,” commented Gerry, leaning away from his bacon long enough to press a kiss to Sloane’s cheek. “Morning, sis. Jeff told me your alarm would be going off soon, so it seemed better to just let you sleep until then. You looked like you needed the rest.”

  “And you didn’t?” I folded my arms and leaned against the door frame, eyeing the bustling kitchen. My apartment hadn’t contained this many people since the movers dropped off the last of my things seven years ago. It was unnerving. “You’re the one who hasn’t been sleeping
.”

  “I know.” Gerry started sliding bacon onto a plate. “Unfortunately, my brain didn’t really care that I needed sleep. As soon as I appeared in that damn field, I was awake.”

  “Shared dreamscapes are a function of some stories,” Jeff said. I turned toward him, suddenly interested. “Sleeping Beauties tend to find themselves in endless castles, for example, and Cinderellas share a maze of kitchens and graveyards.”

  “Oh, that’s charming.” I unfolded my arms, starting toward the coffee maker. “What purpose do they serve?”

  “For the stories that are connected to them, they act as a unifying factor of sorts—a way for the narrative to track everyone who is currently living out that set of tales. We don’t know much about them. It’s hard to document something that requires an active connection to a very narrow slice of the narrative.” Jeff gave me a thoughtful look, and I tensed, waiting for the inevitable question. To my relief, he said only, “We have a few books on the phenomenon back at the Bureau. I was planning to start my research there, since Gerald has confessed to accessing one such dreamscape. It may come to nothing.”

  “Any port in a storm.” I sat down at the table next to him, watching Gerry and Sloane going through the surprisingly domestic motions of producing breakfast. “I really appreciate you helping out with this.”

  “Yes, well.” Jeff smiled, reaching up to adjust his glasses with one hand. “You can thank me after we’ve found an answer to your brother’s situation. Perhaps with dinner?”

  I blinked at him before slanting a glance back at my brother and Sloane. Both of them were steadfastly ignoring us. I looked back to Jeff and smiled, more shyly than I had intended. “Dinner would be lovely,” I said.

  “Breakfast is better,” pronounced Sloane, and dropped a platter of waffles on the table between us. “Eat up. I’m sure something’s going to fuck up the rest of the day to the point where we miss lunch.” She turned and walked back to the counter.

  The waffles were golden brown and perfect, filling the air with the scent of doughy sweetness. I blinked. “Wow. I didn’t know you cooked.”

  “I live alone. It’s cook or live on takeout Chinese, and I’m not that fond of dealing with delivery men.” Sloane returned with a stack of plates and forks in one hand and a large plate laden with butter, syrup, and sliced, sugared strawberries in the other. She set these down with more care than she’d shown the waffles, which I appreciated. Cleaning syrup off my kitchen floor wasn’t my idea of a good way to start the morning.

  “Eat,” commanded Gerry, joining us at the table with his own large plate, this one covered in bacon. “I hate wasting food.”

  “That’s not likely,” I said, and snagged a waffle.

  For a while, everything was quiet except for the sound of cutlery scraping against Ikea plates and the occasional smack of lips or crunch of bacon. It was surprisingly homey, and comfortable in a way that things all too rarely were. I found myself wishing that Demi and Andy had been able to join us, even though they wouldn’t have fit around my tiny table; we were squashed in as it was. Their absence was still the only flaw in what could otherwise have been a perfect morning.

  Gerry still looked tired, but he looked more relaxed than he had the night before: maybe sleeping on things had allowed him to come to terms with his current circumstances. Having Sloane around probably didn’t hurt. His brief flirtations with her before we’d gone off to college had been seen as a rebellion by our foster parents and a terrible idea by me—what potential Snow White wants to see her brother getting involved with a poison apple girl? Not this one, that was for sure. And yet …

  She was smiling as she ate her waffles, and Gerry was smiling back, stealing glances at her when he thought that no one else was looking. I wouldn’t say that they were in love, but they were definitely in like, and I cared enough about both of them to want them to be happy. Weird as that was, considering Sloane.

  “These waffles are amazing,” I said.

  “Old family recipe,” said Sloane. This time the smile was for me. I blinked, and smiled back at her.

  We were definitely going to have to make breakfast a regular team thing.

  Before we left for the office, Gerry wrapped up the last of the bacon in foil. “For later,” he explained.

  “Never leave me again,” I said, and kissed his cheek.

  He grinned. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and the four of us made our way out of my apartment. It was time to get to work.

  #

  Andy munched leftover bacon as he frowned at the piles of paper on his desk. “They’re definitely two different stories,” he said. “You can’t be both kinds of Snow White at the same time, and if you’re the kind who has apple issues, you’re not the kind who has a sister.”

  “We may be thinking about this all wrong,” said Jeff, wandering back into the bullpen with a large book open on his arms. He was frowning at the text, not looking at any of us directly.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “We’re all assuming Henry is Gerry’s Snow White,” said Jeff. “But what if she isn’t?”

  “She’s my sister,” said Gerry. Sloane didn’t say anything. She just sat up a little straighter and frowned, nostrils flaring.

  “Yes, but ‘sister’ can be interpreted a great many ways by the narrative. Close female friends can be sisters. Coworkers. Even other children who were in foster care at the same time that you were. If one of them is a four-two-six …”

  “Then we’re not looking for her, because we’re all too focused on me,” I said slowly, beginning to understand what Jeff was getting at. “Do we have a tracked list of potential four-two-sixes in this region? Or hell, in the region where Gerry’s been living? You may have run away from the other half of your story, Gerry, instead of running toward it.”

  “This is all very confusing,” said Demi. “I didn’t even know that there were two kinds of Snow White before I joined the Bureau.”

  “We have a problem,” said Sloane.

  “Most people don’t know, sadly,” said Jeff, looking at Demi. “It’s a translation error. Like having two men named ‘John,’ one with an ‘h’ and one without, and no one knowing who’s being talked about.”

  I yawned. “Can we stop the story if we don’t find the Snow White in question?”

  “It’ll be harder,” said Jeff, hiding a yawn behind his hand. “We can try, but we should really locate her and make sure we’re not just averting half of the story.”

  Someone was shouting in the hall. I turned toward it, frowning even as I yawned again. “What the hell’s going on over there?”

  “I said, we have a problem,” snarled Sloane, sliding out of her chair and running for the bullpen door. “There’s someone here that shouldn’t be.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I wanted to follow her—I should follow her, lead her even, as her superior—but I was so tired all of a sudden. I just couldn’t get my legs to obey me. “We’re all here.” Demi’s head was down on her desk, and she was snoring gently. Poor kid must have had a long night.

  Sloane didn’t slow down long enough to answer me. She just kept running, which meant that she was in the right spot to catch the woman who stumbled through the bullpen door.

  The stranger was tall and dark-skinned, with long black hair in a braid down her back. She was wearing a lab coat over jeans and a plain button-down shirt, and I had never seen her before. She collapsed into Sloane’s arms, reaching up with one hand like she was pleading. Then she went limp, all the tension going out of her body in an instant. Sloane staggered under her weight. I tried again to stand. My legs again refused to obey me.

  There was a thump. I turned to see Andy collapsed on his desk, already snoring. Jeff was wobbling, eyes gone wide and terrified behind the frames of his glasses. Then he fell.

  “Gerry …” I forced my eyes to stay open as I turned toward my brother, struggling for consciousness. He was slumped backward in his borrowed chair,
mouth hanging open. I could see him breathing. Thank Grimm for that.

  “Sleeping … she’s a Sleeping …” My eyelids were so heavy. They slid closed against my protests. Everything was slipping away.

  Sloane was shouting at me from somewhere far away, in the dark, but I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t do anything but fall, and fall further, and the world went away.

  #

  Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping Beauty”)

  Status: ACTIVE

  Priya Patel slept peacefully in the arms of the woman with the red- and green-streaked hair, and didn’t think about the future, or the past, or anything at all.

  Around the foundation of the building she’d been deposited in front of—the strange, unmarked building in the almost-deserted business park—the thorny vines began to worm their way up out of the earth.

  Everyone except for the woman with the red and green hair slept, and really, what did one woman matter?

  What did one woman matter at all?

  Episode 12

  Bad Apple

  Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping Beauty”)

  Status: ACTIVE

  “Oh, shit.”

  It wasn’t the most intelligent thing that Sloane had ever said, but considering the circumstances, she thought she was doing pretty well. The pretty Indian woman in the lab coat who had collapsed into her arms didn’t react to the profanity. Sloane gave her an experimental shake. She didn’t react to that either, and so Sloane shook her harder, hoping that maybe that would do something. All it did was cause the strange woman’s arms and head to flop around until Sloane started to worry about accidentally breaking her neck. The paperwork for that would be, well, murder. Not to be crass or anything.

  Lifting with her knees and not her back—since the last thing she needed to do was incapacitate herself at this point—Sloane hoisted the stranger up and moved her carefully to the nearest desk, sweeping its contents to the floor with one elbow. When the space was clear she stretched the stranger out, checking to be sure her limbs were straight and her breathing wasn’t obstructed. Once this was done, Sloane began the much more important process of patting the stranger down for ID. Luck was with her: the stranger—who she should probably start thinking of as “the Sleeping Beauty,” since that was obviously what was going on here—was carrying a plastic badge connecting her to a biotech firm downtown. Which meant she couldn’t have walked to the Bureau. Considering how quickly she’d passed out, she probably hadn’t been in any condition to drive for several hours.