“Willard, please! Help me!”
“Wait!” Kane held her hand as she drifted up. “What are you doing to her?”
Helena’s hand went cold. Seismic dread rumbled under her skin. Something horrible was happening and Kane, still attuned to Helena’s mind, felt her understand she would not survive whatever came next.
“Forgive me,” Helena sobbed. “Please, forgive me!”
Poesy reached into her coat and, to Kane’s deepening dread, produced a teacup. Unlike the ones from the library, this one was pale pink with scalloped edges brushed in gold. She flicked the porcelain with one manicured nail and, like a boat running suddenly aground, the reverie jolted.
A ringing spun outward from the porcelain like one hundred pealing church bells, flooding the reverie with a sparkling cacophony that terrified Kane. It reverberated within him as much as he heard it around him, and he knew what happened next. The gardens began to shiver apart, their colors dripping into the chiming air. Everything began to break, to spin, to unravel.
It was just like last time, except Kane was not the center. Poesy was. The whirlpool plucked at him as though sampling his taste. His feet lifted off the ground, but before he was sucked in someone wrenched him from the phantasmagoric vortex. Elliot. They huddled together, helplessly watching as Helena squirmed in whatever psychic grip Poesy exerted. Scream after scream tore from her throat as her reverie ripped itself to shreds, as her dreamt youth ripped apart, too, revealing the crumpled form of an old lady in a little yellow sweater and elastic-waist jeans. She kicked at the air with her orthopedic sneakers, the laces neatly tied. And then, as though her world wasn’t enough, Helena collapsed into the teacup, too.
And it was over.
The small backyard refocused. The Tudor house watched them, stoic. They were back in Reality Proper, where the night pulsed with a blustery chill. The gazebo, the château, the beasts—they were gone. Taken.
There was the sound of crushing, and then Poesy plucked something small and glittering from the teacup’s belly. She hooked it onto her bracelet with the rest of her charms, then swiped the bottom of the teacup with a finger to sample the residue.
“Sweet. Grasping. A floral whimsicality and a full-bodied escapism. Hmm. Notes of nostalgia for times she never lived, homesickness for places she’d never been. Oh! And what an aftertaste. Undertones of envy and desperation, accented by several harsh desertions. Hints of obsession and—oh, gross—such saccharine self-pity! Smacks of mania.”
It was Adeline who finally protested. “You can’t do this! You can’t just steal her away!”
Poesy’s smile was wide and self-assured.
“Finders keepers,” she said, her nails clicking against the Dreadmare’s beak as it bowed to be pet.
And they flickered out of sight.
• Twenty-Two •
STILL
There would be no going to the diner tonight. No one even seemed comfortable looking away from where Helena had been. It was like standing over a grave, watching the dirt settle atop the space where someone had been swallowed up by the earth. Leaving felt like losing them for good.
Then, one by one, the Others looked to Kane. Where there had once been annoyance and pity, a new expression tinted their eyes. Fear. Adeline spoke in a soft, slow voice, as though to a rabid animal.
“What did you do?”
Kane moved to his sister, who sat shaking on the ground.
Adeline tried again. “Kane, leave her, I can help her. First just tell us what that was?”
“She doesn’t need your help,” he said.
“Just let me soften the memory a little. It’ll ease the shock. We need to talk about this.”
Kane couldn’t face what had just happened, and he wasn’t going to let them hurt Sophia. He hugged her to him as he guided her from the garden. They left the Others staring after, putting the small house squarely between them, as though its new emptiness was vast enough to swallow any bridge the Others might devise.
But as they reached Sophia’s car and Kane took the keys from her stiff hands, he had to wonder: Was she better off with him? Was anyone?
He buckled Sophia into the back seat and drove them home, turning to check on her every couple of minutes. Her eyes were fixed on the distance as though she could see right through this world and into the next. When Kane got her in the house, she waved off the hello from their parents in the living room and climbed the stairs, stepping as light as smoke from a snuffed candle. Her door shut softly.
“Are you two fighting again?” Kane’s dad asked. He wasn’t mad. In fact, he sounded relieved that Kane and Sophia were talking at all.
“We’ll figure it out,” Kane promised.
His parents exchanged a look, then went back to their reading, though Kane knew they were waiting for him to leave so they could talk. He gave them both quick hugs, which he was sure alarmed them, and then went to his own room. But he didn’t close the door. He kept it ajar, so that he could hear if Sophia needed help, so that he’d know if anyone tried to enter their home and erase her memories. Focusing on Sophia meant he didn’t have to think about Helena.
Kane listened all night, until he didn’t even know he was falling asleep, and in his dreams the burning form of Maxine waited. Only this time, Maxine didn’t wait alone.
Helena burned, too.
It was two days later. More than that, actually. It was sixty hours later. It was twenty-three cold glances from Adeline later. It was six missed calls and five voicemails from Elliot later. It was nine notes from Ursula later, each stuffed into his locker and each left folded. Kane couldn’t respond to any of it. He could only count, and keep counting, wondering how much longer it would take the world to forget about him.
And then Elliot kidnapped him.
“I’m sorry for the trap,” Elliot said as he drove them toward an unspecified location. A moment ago, Kane had gotten into his mom’s car, with his actual mother, to head home from Roost. And then, suddenly, his mom was gone, replaced by a teenage boy. Elliot. Kane’s mom’s Subaru was gone, revealing Elliot’s car. It had been an illusion. “A necessary illusion,” Elliot said. “We really, really need to talk to you.”
Kane texted his mom. Grabbing food here. I’ll call when I’m ready to go.
They pulled up to an unfamiliar house.
“Urs’s place,” Elliot said, leading them up the driveway. “And, just a quick warning before we go in, don’t say anything about the mess. Urs goes on baking rampages when she’s stressed.”
They entered through the kitchen door.
“I got him!” Elliot called, his footsteps crunching. The floor was covered in grains of sugar. And then Kane saw what Elliot meant. By the looks of it, Ursula was very stressed. Baked goods covered the entire kitchen. Cupcakes, cakes, pastries, cookies; they littered every surface of her kitchen in a sugary clutter, as though they’d washed up in the low tide of some mania.