“Aren’t you hungry, Mr. Baker?” Talia asked. “You’re not eating.”
Linus choked on his tongue.
Everyone stared at him.
He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I seem to be quite full from the ice cream.”
Lucy frowned. “Really? But you have so much room. I ate all my ice cream, and I’m still hungry.” As if to prove a point, Lucy attempted to stick an entire pork chop in his mouth. He wasn’t very successful.
Linus smiled tightly. “It is as it is. I may have … so much room, as you say, but that doesn’t mean I need to fill it.”
Theodore peered over at him, a bit of fat hanging from his mouth.
“You’re being awfully quiet too,” Phee said, chasing a small tomato with her fork. “Is it because Lucy almost killed a man today?”
“I didn’t almost kill him! I wasn’t even trying very hard. If I wanted to, I could have exploded him with the power of my mind.”
That certainly didn’t make Linus feel any better, though it didn’t frighten him as much as it would have a couple of weeks ago. He wondered if this was what Extremely Upper Management meant in their letter. Against his better judgment, he was almost charmed. That wasn’t a good sign.
“You shouldn’t kill people,” Chauncey said. He had yet to remove his bellhop cap. Arthur had told him he could wear it to dinner just this once. “Killing people is bad. You could go to jail.”
Lucy attacked his pork chop viciously. “No jail could hold me. I would escape and come back here. No one would dare come after me because I could make their organs melt.”
“We don’t melt people’s organs,” Zoe reminded him patiently. “It’s not polite.”
Lucy sighed through a mouthful of meat, cheeks bulging.
“You should eat,” Sal told Linus quietly. “Everyone needs to eat.”
And how could he refute that coming from Sal? Linus made a show of taking a big bite of the salad on his plate.
That seemed to appease everyone. Almost everyone. Arthur was watching him from across the table. Linus was doing his best not to meet his gaze. It seemed safer that way.
He didn’t know what Arthur was capable of.
* * *
Linus begged off after dinner, saying he was more exhausted than he expected. Lucy looked a little disappointed that Linus wouldn’t be listening to the new records he’d purchased, but Linus promised him that tomorrow was a new day.
“You do look a little flushed,” Zoe said. “I hope you’re not coming down with something.” She had a strange glint in her eyes. “Especially seeing as how it’s your last week here and all.”
Linus nodded. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
She took his plate from him, still nearly full. “Well, get some rest, Linus. We’d hate to see you sick. We need you, you know.”
Ah. Did they? Did they really?
Linus was almost to the door when Arthur said his name.
He closed his eyes, hand on the doorknob. “Yes? What is it?”
“If you need anything, all you have to do is ask.”
He thought the knob would crack under his fingers. “That’s very kind of you, but there’s nothing I need.”
Arthur placed a hand on his shoulder. “Are you sure?”
Oh, how easy would it be to turn around? To look upon the man who had twisted his heart so? The man who, in not so many words, had kept so much from him?
“I’m sure,” Linus whispered.
The hand fell away. “Be well, Linus.”
He was out the door and into the night as quick as he coul d go.
* * *
He stared at the ceiling in the dark, the comforter pulled up to his chin. Sleep was impossible. That blasted file had made sure of that. Even now, he could feel its presence underneath the mattress where he’d shoved it earlier. He didn’t want Chauncey finding it if he came in to take Linus’s laundry.
Which brought another wave crashing over him.
Did they know? Did the children know about who Arthur was? About what he was?
He could see it clearly in his mind, though he didn’t want to. Arthur in the classroom, telling the children that a man was coming from the mainland. A man who would be there to evaluate them, to investigate them. A man from the Department in Charge of Magical Youth who had the power to take this all away from them. Lucy, of course, would offer to make the intruder’s skin crack from his bones. Theodore could eat what remained and then regurgitate it into a hole Talia had dug. The hole would be filled in, and Phee would grow a tree on top of it. When someone came to ask after this interloper, Chauncey would offer to take their luggage, and Sal would say earnestly that they had no idea who Linus Baker was.
Arthur, of course, would tell them in no uncertain terms that murder wasn’t the answer. Instead, he whispered in Linus’s head, you must make him care about you. You must make him think for perhaps the first time in his life that he has found a place to belong.
It was ridiculous, these thoughts. All of them. But thoughts late at night when sleep is nothing but a fleeting notion usually were. In the dark, all of it seemed as if it could be real.
It was after midnight when he sat up in the bed. Calliope yawned from her spot near his feet.
“What if it’s all a lie?” he asked her in the dark. “How did I get to the place where I wouldn’t be able to stand that?”
She didn’t answer.
Life before had been mundane and ordinary. He had known his place in the world, though every now and then, the dark clouds parted with a ray of sunshine in the form of a question he barely allowed himself to ponder.
Don’t you wish you were here?
More than anything.
And then another thought struck him, one so foreign that he was barely able to grasp onto it. It was so outside the realm of what he thought possible that it boggled the mind.
What if, he thought, it’s not Arthur who is lying? What if it’s not the children?
What if it’s DICOMY?
There would be a way to prove that.
One way.
“No,” he said, lying back down on the bed. “Absolutely not.”
Calliope purred.
“I’ll just go to sleep, and in six days, we’ll go home, and all of this won’t matter. What did the letter call me? Susceptible? Bah. Why, the very idea is ridiculous.”
He felt better.
He closed his eyes.
And saw how Chauncey had hid under his bed the first morning, how Talia had looked sitting on the floor of a record shop with her tools, how Theodore took the buttons as if they were the greatest gift, how Phee had lifted a trembling Sal from a pile of clothes, how Lucy had cried after breaking his music, how Zoe had welcomed him into her home.
And, of course, Arthur’s smile. That quiet, beautiful smile that felt like seeing the ocean for the first time.
Linus Baker opened his eyes.
“Oh dear,” he whispered.
* * *
The night air was cold, much colder than it’d been since he arrived. The stars were like ice in the black sky above. The moon was barely a sliver. He shivered as he pulled his coat tighter over his pajamas. He reached down to his pocket, making sure the key was still there.