Текст книги "Conjured"

Автор книги: Sarah Beth Durst

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter Twelve

Inside the lobby, Eve shook out the umbrella. Drops spattered on the carpet and the wall. Near her, a man seated on a bench lowered his book to frown at her umbrella and wet shoes. He wore a suit and had sunglasses tucked halfway into his coat pocket. She wondered if he was a marshal. As she wiped her feet on the mat, he raised his book, but she felt as if he were still watching her.

She expected to feel better once she was inside the library, but she didn’t. I’ll feel better once I find Zach, she thought. Talking to him, or listening to him talk, always made her feel better. She crossed to the circulation desk.

Two librarians were working the desk—an older woman with bobbed hair and a man with a tattoo on his neck. The woman clucked her tongue. “You’re late, Eve.”

The man was scanning returned books and adding them to a book cart. He didn’t look up. “Patti is pissed. Very, very pissed.”

Eve wished she knew their names. She was supposed to have known these people for weeks, but they seemed less real and less familiar than the antlered girl. “Have you seen Zach?”

“Not today,” the woman said. “But he’s probably in the stacks, where you should be.”

Eve eyed the door to Patti’s office. It was cracked open, and the light was on. She didn’t want to be delayed by a conversation with an irate librarian. With her umbrella dripping by her side, Eve hurried out of the lobby and into the main library.

The reference librarians scowled at her umbrella—or at her. She didn’t know their names either, though she thought they looked familiar.

Eve ducked into the stacks. She ignored the book carts full of books to be reshelved, and she steered around patrons. Systematically, she combed the aisles: reference, nonfiction, memoir, audiobooks, fiction, mystery, science fiction and fantasy … She checked the children’s room and the teen section. She looked in the presentation rooms, the reading room, the staff room, even the men’s room.

She didn’t find Zach.

He’s not here, she thought. Her heart thudded fast and hard in her chest. He should be here.

Maybe she’d missed his shift. Or maybe he’d stayed home sick. Or maybe that had been him in the interrogation room … Her hand reached for her phone and then stopped. If Zach had been there, then Malcolm had lied. And if he had lied … Standing in the middle of the stacks, Eve felt as if she were crumbling.

Stop, she told herself.

She didn’t know that Malcolm had lied to her. Zach could have left to run an errand or taken a break. Or she’d simply missed seeing him as she’d scurried through the library.

Patti would know, Eve thought. Patti Langley was obsessed with security. She’d know whether an employee was here or not. Clinging to that idea, Eve walked out of the stacks … and then jogged … and then ran.

Reaching the lobby, she stopped cold.

Aidan leaned against the circulation desk. He waved to Eve and aimed his dazzling smile at her, as if the sight of her filled his day with delight.

“You,” Eve said.

“Me,” Aidan said. “And you.”

She noticed that a line had formed behind a woman wrestling a toddler. If Zach were here, he would have been recruited to help at the desk. “I don’t have time to talk right now.” Eve started to march past Aidan. The man in the gray suit, she saw, was still there. He watched her from the bench.

“I know. And that’s why we need to talk.” The flirting lilt vanished from his voice. “We don’t have the luxury of time anymore.”

Halting, Eve stared at him. “Do you know where Zach is?”

“Zach? Ahh, Zach. So that’s his name.”

She felt her hands ball into fists. “Did you … take him anywhere?”

Aidan spread his hands to show his innocence. “I’ve never met him. I don’t even know what he looks like. Besides, why would you think that of me? I’m wounded, Evy. Truly.”

Eve couldn’t say why she didn’t trust him—and even if she could articulate it, she couldn’t say it out loud with the librarians listening. And they were listening. The closest librarian feigned interest in her computer screen, but her eyes kept darting to Eve and Aidan, especially Aidan. Another librarian stared openly, as if watching a TV show.

“I have to talk to Patti.” Eve brushed past Aidan. He caught her arm.

“You have to talk to me. And Victoria and Topher, of course. C’mon, we don’t bite. At least not often. And never in public. I swear we’ll be the model of decorum. We’ll only talk.” He tightened his grip.

“Let go of me,” she said quietly.

The other librarians ceased typing. She didn’t hear any pages rustle or books being stacked. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the patrons were watching also.

“I saw the photo on the bulletin board,” Aidan said, just as quietly. “That girl … She was Victoria’s sister. We need to talk to you.”

Eve felt as if her blood were freezing, crystallizing in her veins. She shook her head. “You’re lying,” Eve said loudly. The antlered girl belonged to her memories, deep in the past and in another world.

One of the librarians piped up. “Want me to fetch Patti?”

Aidan released her. He took a step backward and raised his hands as if in surrender. “You can trust me, Green Eyes, even if you don’t know it yet. I have your best interests at heart. We all do.”

Keeping an eye on him, Eve skirted around the circulation desk. The other librarians kept their eyes on Aidan as well. He didn’t vanish or even budge. She felt shivers on her skin. If he was telling the truth … She couldn’t think about that right now. She had to find Zach. Zach first, then she’d face Victoria.

She pushed open the door to Patti’s office and stepped inside. “Patti …”

Patti’s desk chair was swiveled to the side. A sweater was draped over the armrest. She’d just stepped out, Eve guessed. Her computer hummed softly, and her desk lamp was on.

On the desk under the lamplight, in the center of a semicircle of books, was a small box. It had gilded edges, jeweled faces, and an ornate clasp.

Eve took a step backward slowly, carefully, as if her knees weren’t fully functional. Her heart thudded so hard and fast that the sound of it filled her ears. She felt it beat through her chest and into her skull. Her lungs tightened, as if her rib cage were constricting. It was hard to breathe, and the air felt thick.

She’d seen this box.

In a vision.

It had a silver clasp in the shape of a tree. Rubies clustered like glittering apples in the silver leaves. It was the size of her palm and had slats on all sides. There was also a hook on the top so it could hang from a rope—or from a silk ribbon inside a wagon between feathers and painted skulls.

It couldn’t be real.

And it couldn’t be here.

She backed against the door.

As her back touched the door, she screamed, and she shoved her hands forward as if she could shove the box and all it meant away.

Books and papers blew off the table in a blast. The box flew against the wall and smashed into it. It crashed down, falling over stacks of books, end over end, and rolled onto the carpet. It lay on its side, and Eve kept screaming.

Behind her, voices were shouting. And then she heard shouts change to screams as magic poured out of her like water through a broken levee. Books flew from the shelves, and the computer monitor shattered into shards of plastic, glass, and metal.

Eve plunged into darkness.

* * *

Dangling from a silk ribbon, the boxes sway as the wagon bounces over the road. I am tossed against the painted wood walls, and I feel my skin bruise.

Eyes in the boxes watch me, and I watch them.

Bottles clink together on the shelves. Skulls snap their mouths open and shut. The skull of a mouse, of a bird, of a cat, of a man. Across the wagon, the Storyteller knits a ribbon of red and blue and gold. It coils around her feet already. Still, she knits it longer and longer.

“Once upon a time,” she says.

I want to speak, but my lips won’t move.

“A man and a woman wanted a child …”

I touch my face with my fingers. My skin feels soft and pliant, but my lips are sealed shut. I tug at them, and then I tear. My fingers gouge my cheeks and chin and lips. My mouth will not open.

Across the wagon, the Storyteller continues to knit. “So they made a child out of clockwork parts.”

I have blood on the tips of my fingers and under my fingernails.

“And when it was older, it killed them.”

The pain in my fingers feels exquisitely sharp, like tiny needles, and I see the droplets of blood form perfect spheres that plummet toward the wood floor of the wagon. But they do not hit. Instead, I hear rain on the top of a tent. I am no longer in the wagon. I am in the tattered red carnival tent. Rain seeps through the holes in the fabric so that it seems as if the tent itself is crying.

The rain slides down the paint on the face of the clown who contorts himself in the center of the tent. He is alone, and his dance is beautiful, a slow ballet that crosses over the floor of wood shavings. There is no music except the rain.

“Choose a card,” a voice says behind me. It is the Magician, and when I turn, I see he stands at a table of red velvet. Cards spin in the air around him as if they were birds. The cards float, twist, and then land in his open hand.

Four fall to the table, facedown.

One card flips over without the Magician touching it.

It’s the image of a sword in a disembodied hand. “The Ace of Swords,” the Magician says. Another card turns over on its own. “The Wheel of Fortune.” A third card flips, showing a man in a robe with a chalice, a sword, and flowers on a table before him. “The Magician.” And then the final card. It is blank.

I look up at the Magician for him to explain, but he is gone, and so is the tent around me.

I am outside, and the stars are spread close and thick in the sky, so many little pieces of brightness that I suddenly understand the word “stardust” because it looks like the blackness has been dusted with specks of light.

I smell burned caramel and popcorn, and I hear the ring and clatter of carnival games. The prizes hang above the booths—delicate clockwork birds in golden cages, masks made of curved horns, a flute that plays by itself. And I realize that I am perched like the prizes, high above the ground.

From here, I can see the carousel. Its horses are wooden mermaids and winged cats, and its riders are as strange and magical as the mounts—men, women, and children who have wings of their own or clawed hands or faces streaked with feathers. I watch the carousel for a long time, until the mounts detach from their golden poles and ride across the carnival grounds, rising and falling as if they were still connected to the mechanism. The riders are laughing with delight as they are carried into darkness. I stare after them into the darkness—and then realize I am looking into a darkened audience.

I am within the tent again, on the stage. Streaks of moonlight filter through slits and holes in the fabric. The stage is ringed with candles. They shed their light upward, twisting the Magician’s face into grotesque shadows, which he has highlighted with makeup.

“You are the blank card, of course,” he says.

Behind him is a silver mirror as tall as he is. It’s warped, and the curves elongate his reflection so that he stretches into a skeletal figure. His hat narrows into a slit.

I walk toward the mirror and stop in front of it. It is metal, not glass, and the candle flames flicker in it. I look into it, and a girl with brown hair and antlers looks back at me. I raise my hand toward the girl’s face. She raises her hand. I stop. She stops.

It’s me. She’s me.

But I have green eyes, I think.

And then I am pushed into the mirror.

I melt into the silver. It swirls around me, and coolness sweeps through me. In an instant, it’s over. I emerge from the mirror into a meadow. I am beside a lake that glitters in the sun. A wagon waits for me. On its steps is the Storyteller, knitting a red ribbon.

* * *

Eve sucked in air, and her eyes popped open. Harsh white light filled her vision and flooded her mind as if it wanted to sear away every thought. Her eyes watered as she tried to see shapes in the whiteness. She couldn’t move her arms or legs. She felt straps bite into her skin as she strained. She was lying flat on her back. She smelled antiseptic, and the smell triggered a memory—tubes in her veins, pain flowering over her skin, eyes burning. She heard a steady beep, shrill and insistent.

Hospital, she thought.

She remembered in a rush: The tubes. The pain. The voices. The dreams. The way her muscles had seemed to stretch until they snapped, the way her skin had felt peeled from her body like the skin of an apple, the way her blood had seemed to burn through her veins as if it were gasoline that had been lit on fire.

Last time, they had taken her old body and reshaped it into this new body, this stranger’s body. She had woken with only emptiness inside.

No! Eve thought.

She couldn’t lose herself again.

She tried to flail, but the straps held her down. She arched her back, and alarms began to wail. She heard footsteps race toward the hospital room.

Out! she thought. Out through the windows. Out into the world. Out. Away. Far away and never come back. Never be found. Never be unsafe. Never be lost. Never be broken again. She strained to the side and threw her magic at the hospital bed bars, the straps that held her, and at the windows with the drawn shades.

All the windows in the room shattered at once.

Darkness claimed her again.

* * *

I am sitting in the wagon, and the Storyteller’s arm is around me. “Shh, shh,” she tells me. “Hush.” She strokes my hair. “It won’t hurt. Not one bit.”

The Storyteller smells of Vaseline and greasepaint. Her cheeks have been painted with red circles, and a clown’s smile stretches over her real lips. The paint has cracked where her skin is wrinkled. I lean against her and let her comfort me, a child in a mother’s arms.

I think perhaps I sleep.

When I wake, she is gone.

The Magician squats in front of me. He doesn’t wear his felt hat or his cape or stage makeup, and without them, he seems costumed—as if the ordinary pants and shirt of an ordinary man were a disguise.

I shrink away, and feel the wood slats of the wagon at my back. Behind him, the scarves from his magic act are strung on a line of silk ribbon, as if they were laundry drying. Between each jewel-colored scarf is the wing of a dove, pinned to the ribbon. On the wagon wall, he has skulls as well, bird skulls and mice and snakes. He’s painted them in bright carnival colors. The boxes are stacked in a corner, all empty. I know I am looking everywhere but at him, and I know it will not matter in the end.

He smiles at me.

“Come now,” he says. His voice is soft, soothing, even beautiful. “Whisper sweet nothings to me.”

I cannot run.

He leans close. His lips are nearly touching mine.

I scream, and he steals my breath.

Chapter Thirteen

Eve placed a book on the shelf.

She stared at her hands, at the book, at the shelf.

She wasn’t in the hospital. She wasn’t strapped down. She wasn’t in a wagon or a box or a carnival tent. Eve pushed the book into its slot and looked down. She stood on a step stool. A book cart was next to her. It was half-full of books.

She didn’t want to turn around. She didn’t know what she’d see, what had changed, what she’d forgotten this time. Softly, she called, “Zach?”

He might not be here. She might have lost him; he might be only a memory. Or maybe he was never real at all. Maybe none of this was. Maybe she was still strapped to the hospital bed, and this library, this city, this world was only a vision. She’d never left the hospital, and Malcolm, Aunt Nicki, Aidan, and Zach were all a trick of her mind. Or she was trapped in a box on a string in a wagon, and even the hospital was false. Or she was Victoria’s sister—the antlered girl, as the mirror had shown—and she was dead.

Eve didn’t realize she’d crouched down, but she was hugging her knees and rocking back and forth on the library stool like a demented bird on a perch.

“Eve?” a voice asked.

Zach.

She heard his footsteps and then felt his hand on her arm. He knelt beside her. She leaned against him and breathed in the smell of him. He cradled her against his shoulder and stroked her hair with one hand. His fingers twisted in her hair, and she thought of the Storyteller. She shuddered. “Eve, are you okay?” he asked.

She turned and touched his face. He’s real, she thought. Or at least he was real enough that it didn’t matter. She let her fingers rove over his face and neck. She felt his breath rise and fall in his chest.

“Eve, you’re freaking me out. Talk to me.”

“I went to your house, and we made it rain.” Eve thought of rain pummeling the manicured lawn and patio stones, and then she thought of rain seeping through a carnival tent at night and of rain breaking through a canopy of leaves and making a campfire hiss and spit. “It rained on your lawn and on the street. I saw a black car through the rain, and a man went to your door. What happened next?”

She felt him tense through his shirt. “Eve … I told you everything. I swear. I didn’t keep anything from you. And you know I wouldn’t lie.”

“Please … Just humor me.” She looked at him and put every ounce of pleading in her eyes. Don’t ask me why, she thought. Just tell me.

Zach studied her for an instant and then adopted his usual light tone. “In retrospect, and only in retrospect, it was kind of cool. Stark interrogation room. One-way mirror. Hostile balding guy in suspenders, straight out of a cable-TV cop show …”

“Lou,” she whispered. Malcolm had lied. She felt herself start to tremble. Her insides were a jumbled knot. She’d let herself trust Malcolm. She wasn’t sure when she’d decided to trust him. It must have crept up gradually, but she’d believed him, and now … It was hard to breathe. Her mind kept repeating: He lied to me.

“Lou,” Zach echoed. Gently, as if he were talking to a feral cat, he said, “And then you know what happened. You were the cause.”

“I was?” She couldn’t seem to do more than whisper. Her throat felt locked.

“Your aunt called, said she’d talked to you, and boom, the interrogation ended. I was led to a room with a bed and a bathroom and left alone. Next morning, I was briefed on the fact that your safety depended on my secrecy, which was all very cryptically worded. I don’t know what they told my parents, but I was brought home, and everyone acted like nothing had ever happened.”

“And then?” Eve asked.

“And then …” Zach stroked her hair again. “You were missing for two days. The others said you fainted in Patti’s office during the earthquake.”

“Patti! Is she okay?”

“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t she be?”

Eve sagged against him. “What happened next?”

“You showed up at normal work time with more cryptic comments. Have you changed your mind about explaining? Because an explanation would be rather awesome.”

Lie, Malcolm had told her before he’d lied to her. She opened her mouth to deflect Zach’s questions, but no words came out. She slumped on the stool, against Zach. She couldn’t keep doing this, lying to everyone, pretending she was okay when she was in fact splintering so badly that she was only shards of a person. “I don’t remember,” she said, barely a whisper.

“Hey, if you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay—”

She twisted to look him full in the face and enunciated clearly and loudly, “I don’t remember anything since that day.” At least she didn’t remember anything except for lying strapped to a hospital bed with tubes and machines and lights … or lying strapped to a bench in a wagon with wind chimes of magic boxes and old bones.

He tried to grin, as if wanting to believe she was joking. “Even the day in the basement stacks with the plants …” His smile faded. “You’re serious. Whoa. Really? Eve, that was two weeks ago. Two weeks.” His arms tightened around her. “You need a doctor. A hospital.”

Her fingers dug into his arm. “No!” She fought to control her breathing. “No hospital. No doctors. Doctors already know. I … I had surgery, and I woke with no memory of who I was or where I was from or why I was there.” She thought of the thick forest, of the wagon, of the meadow by a lake. “Since then, I’ve had these memory losses. In the middle of shelving a book or drinking a glass of juice … I lose hours, sometimes days, even weeks. Maybe months. I don’t know.”

Zach’s eyes were wide. “Do the doctors have an explanation?”

“I think … I think maybe the doctors caused it. Something went wrong in the surgery. I came out … wrong. When other people use magic, they’re fine. When you use my magic, you’re fine. But when I use my magic, I black out and have these nightmares—visions, I call them—and sometimes I wake from them and I talk and walk and live, and then it’s suddenly all erased, everything I did or saw or thought since the vision.”

He continued to stare at her, blinked twice as if he were processing her words, and then said, “Like a computer crash?”

“I don’t—”

“Your brain resets to the last restore point.”

Eve didn’t know what that meant.

“You’re not saving properly.”

She shook her head. “What—?”

“Your magic is screwing up the way your brain transfers short-term memories to long-term memory.” He leaned toward her, his voice eager as he explained his theory. “They’re stored in different ways in different parts of the brain, and all this … stuff has to happen for a memory to move from the hippocampus to the temporal lobe. Or maybe it’s lobe to hippocampus. Anyway, your magic must be messing that up.”

He understood! Impossibly, amazingly, he believed her and understood, even if she didn’t understand his explanation. “Malcolm said my magic makes my mind unstable.”

“So when your brain finally glitches, you lose everything back to before the memory transfer was messed up. Am I right?”

“I guess … Yes.”

He rocked back on his heels and stared at her again. “Shit. That sucks.”

Despite herself, despite it all, Eve laughed. It was a hysterical laugh that shook her so hard that she had to clutch Zach to keep from feeling that she was going to shake apart. Tears pricked her eyes. “Yes, exactly.”

He waited while she shook and laughed. Gulping in air, she settled again in his arms. He resumed stroking her hair. She lay against his shoulder. “You never talk about your past,” Zach said. “Ever. I thought … There are reasons not to talk about the past. I thought you had those kinds of reasons. How far back do you remember?”

“Living with my aunt. Starting work here. But then … it’s patches.”

“There has to be an explanation for what you’re experiencing. Long-term amnesia plus problems with short-term memory. Sounds like a side effect of a stroke. Or you could have been injured. You were hurt in a car accident or mountain climbing or skydiving or … Wow, Eve.” Releasing her, he rocked backward on his heels and ran his hands through his hair. “All this time … you’ve been hiding this from me, from everyone?”

She felt a lump in her throat, and she had to look away from him. Without his arms around her, her skin prickled, cold. She wrapped her own arms around herself.

“You’re really brave,” Zach said.

Another laugh burst out of her lips, still shrill.

“I’m serious. I can’t imagine …”

She heard footsteps. Both of them froze. A patron wandered into the aisle. He browsed through two shelves, selected a book, and then left. Eve listened to his footsteps recede, soft on the carpet.

Zach drew Eve close again and resumed stroking her hair, a little faster and harder than was soothing. “Listen, it will be okay.”

“You don’t know that.” Eve wanted to tell him what Malcolm had said—about how the unnamed “he” cut his victims into pieces. And how each piece was kept in a box. And how she saw those boxes in her visions. And how, in her visions, she’d been inside one, shrunken and trapped, in a box that stank of the old urine of other victims. And how she’d seen one of the boxes on Patti’s desk in this very library … How had it gotten here? Was the Magician here? Am I safe? She pushed down a burst of panic. The WitSec agents wouldn’t have brought her back to the library if it wasn’t safe, she told herself. She’d still be in the agency or the hospital.

“Well, no, I don’t know, but I think that’s what you’re supposed to say in situations like these. Not that I’ve ever been in a situation like this.” He was trying to sound light, Eve could tell, but his voice sounded strained instead.

Another patron poked his head into their aisle. He retreated with apologies when he saw Eve and Zach intertwined. Eve listened for more footsteps.

Zach stood up and pulled Eve to her feet. “It will be okay. Because I said so. And I don’t lie.” He placed his hands on her shoulders so she’d look directly into his eyes. “You know, the moment I saw you, I said to myself—because all the great people talk to themselves, of course—I said, ‘Zach, you have to meet that lovely lady, because she will make your life extraordinary.’ I was not wrong.” He took a deep breath and tried to smile. “I’m going to help you remember.”

“You are?” Eve asked.

“You remember that you like to kiss me?” His eyes looked puppy-dog hopeful. “And what happened when you first kissed me?”

“We floated. And then the books in the reading room flew.” She could count the number of good memories that she had on one hand—those were two of them.

“And after that?”

She shook her head.

“We experimented. We learned. We … had our first real date.”

“I don’t remember.” Saying it out loud made her feel as if someone had reached inside and ripped away pieces of her. Those memories were supposed to be hers! She wanted them back.

“Then I will show you.”

He sounded so confident that she nearly smiled in spite of everything.

Taking her hand, he led her deeper into the stacks to a corner where the books were matching yellow and the fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed.

“Relax. All you have to do is give me the magic, and I’ll shape it.” He leaned toward her. “You don’t even have to kiss me. The magic is in your breath. I only have to breathe it in.”

She kissed him anyway, eyes open.

Behind him, she saw books sail off the shelves and then stack themselves around them, interlaced like stones in a wall, closing off their row from the rest of the library. He breathed in her magic again, and green tips of plants burst through the worn carpet. They grew, thickening and sprouting. Curling, they wrapped around the bookshelves and spread across the ceiling tile. Leaves unfurled, and soon the bookshelves and walls were draped in lush summer green. Red buds popped from the bends in the green. And then the buds opened all around them, a riot of burgundy roses.

He picked one and handed it to her. She took it. It still smelled like dusty paper, but when he touched the petals, they changed color, shifting from red to purple to blue to pale yellow. “Lovely,” she said.

“Not done yet,” Zach said. “I can use the magic in multiple ways. I can even hold the magic for a little while before it dissipates. Watch this.”

Again he kissed her, taking her magic through the kiss and then pouring it into the library shelves around them. She saw the painting at the end of the row shimmer. Ripples spread through the paint, and water spilled over the lip of the frame. It soaked into the carpet below, and water lilies sprouted in the dusty fibers. Painted geese swam in circles. “And now,” Zach said, “we dance.” He placed one hand on her back and held the other. She scooted her feet out of the way as he danced forward and backward, and then slowly she began to follow the rhythm. “You taught me this dance, and you described this bower. You said you’d seen it once and had wished you were the one dancing.”

She had? She didn’t remember that. She didn’t remember this!

Backward and forward. Their lips were almost touching, and she breathed with him as their feet danced. They rose into the air, spiraling up as they danced, and they swirled between the books and the roses and the pond on the wall.

She tried to remember … Maybe, yes, maybe I know this … The touch of his hand on her back. The feel of air beneath her shoes. This was familiar. Yes!

She could smell roses in her memory … But they were strewn on a stage. A woman in black and white scooped them into her arms and then waved to the audience. In Eve’s memory, the woman had no face. Eve’s feet faltered.

“What is it?” Zach asked. “What’s wrong? You liked this before. Said you never expected to have made a memory as nice as this. You said that. Remember?”

“I can’t.” She shook her head, as if she could shake the faceless woman out of her memory. “Stop. It’s not helping. Let’s just … stop.”

Gently, he kissed her again, and they drifted down. She felt the carpet under her feet. Around them, the roses began to close. The vines withered and crumbled into dust. The painting stilled, and the water evaporated.

“Oh, don’t stop,” a voice drawled. “He still needs to serenade you or produce a marching band from his pocket.”

Aidan.

Within the wall of books, Aidan lounged against a bookshelf as if he’d been there for hours. He hadn’t changed since her last memory of him. His hair still dusted over his eyebrows, his lips were still curved in a mocking smile, and he was still lovely.

Zach stepped in front of Eve, as if to protect her. “You must be Aidan.”

Aidan tipped an imaginary cap. “And you must be Zach. Kudos on your dedication to getting the girl. Seriously, animated painted swans?”

“You aren’t welcome here,” Zach said.

“It’s a public place. By definition, everyone is welcome.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you.” In front of Eve, Zach crossed his arms, as if attempting to channel Malcolm.

Aidan raised his eyebrows and then looked at Eve. “Eve, does your aunt know what kind of shenanigans you’ve been up to? I hope you’ve been sensible enough to hide it from her. For one thing, she’d be appalled that you fell for this sappy, maudlin mush. For another, if she knew you’ve been transferring your magic to a civilian … How much else have you told him?”

Eve opened her mouth and then shut it.

“Aww, you don’t remember, do you, Green Eyes?” Aidan said, ignoring Zach.