Conjured

And then they fell.

Their feet hit hard on the carpeted floor. Zach staggered backward, catching himself on the shelves. Eve reached forward, steadying herself on him. He gripped her elbows. “What was—” he began. His eyes widened as he looked beyond Eve’s shoulder, and he released Eve. “Ms. Langley!”

Catching her balance, Eve pivoted to face Patti Langley. The librarian looked pale, and Eve thought she saw a hint of fear. But it vanished fast, hidden beneath a scowl.

“Did you see that?” Zach asked her.

“Unfortunately, yes.” Patti placed her hands on her hips. “This is not appropriate behavior for a library. I’d expected better of both of you.”

Zach waved his hand at the ceiling. “No, no, I mean—we were flying! Seriously, feet off the ground! You must have seen it.”

Eve opened her mouth and then shut it. She’d felt it too. But it wasn’t possible. If she’d used magic, she would have fallen into a vision, not straight down onto the carpet, awake and alert. “We couldn’t have been.”

He looked at her. “You do sweep me off my feet in a cliched, metaphoric way. But this was literal! You must have felt it. We crashed down!”

Eve shook her head. She knew how it worked—if she used magic, she collapsed. It was the one constant. “It must have been your imagination.”

“There was no flying,” Patti said. “Or floating. Or even hopping enthusiastically. There were only two library pages who weren’t shelving.” She waved at the shelves and the half-full book cart nearby.

“But—” Zach began.

Patti held up her hand. “Zachary, I’m going to have to ask you to work the front desk for the rest of the day.”

He turned to Eve. “Eve—”

“It was a nice kiss. So nice it made me dizzy.” Eve withdrew from him. “But my feet didn’t leave the floor, and neither did yours.”

“I was sure—”

“Zachary,” Patti said. “Now.”

Eve forced herself to smile at him. “You should do what she says.” Shooting glances over his shoulder, Zach retreated through the shelves.

Both Patti and Eve were silent until Zach was gone.

Patti leveled a finger at Eve. “I can see the wrongness gathering around you like a storm.” She tapped her sternum above her extra eyes as she said “see.” “When your storm breaks … don’t catch that boy in it. And don’t use magic in my library ever again.”

She left before Eve could think of a reply.

Chapter Seven

Fluorescent lights bathed the library shelves in a sickly yellow. In several rows, the lights flickered or had already died. Eve avoided those. Aimless, she drifted deeper into the stacks.

Any time she heard footsteps, Eve veered into a different row. It wasn’t difficult. The library patrons strode through the bookshelves with purpose, often lugging already-full book bags, and they zeroed in on one section of shelves. Sometimes they’d linger there, opening and shutting books, murmuring to themselves, and sometimes they’d strike, selecting a single volume and taking off with it. She watched them through the gaps in the books several rows away, and then she’d continue on, alone again.

As she passed by books, she ran her fingers over the spines. Bits of dust clung to her fingertips, and she wiped them on her jeans. She didn’t open any of the books. It was enough to know that the words were there— that at least someone had remembered enough moments and facts to fill a book. Occasionally she noticed a book that had been misshelved and moved it. Oddly, that act made her feel better, calmer.

If my insides were a bookshelf, she thought, I’d be a jumble of volumes, stacked in random order and filled with blank pages.

She wandered deep into the library, going to the end of every row. Each row ended in a brick wall with a faded print of a cracked oil painting: a garden or a pond or a fruit bowl. Studying one, she decided that it was hideous and that she liked it. The scene was so motionless that it felt as though it were outside of time; there was no past or future to it, just a garden with blurred purple flowers and a too-blue sky.

“Eve?” A woman’s voice.

Eve jumped and then pivoted to face a woman she didn’t know. The woman was dressed in a mud-brown blouse, her gray hair held in a twist on her head. She wore slipper-like shoes that were soundless on the carpeted floor. She didn’t hold a gun or look threatening in any way, but still Eve’s heart pounded wildly.

“Your shift ended fifteen minutes ago,” the woman said.

“Oh,” Eve said.

“Your ride’s outside, and he’s impatient.” She gestured toward the front of the library.

“I must have lost track of time.” Eve winced at her own wording. In truth, she had no idea when her shift was supposed to end. Malcolm must be worried. He was always worrying—it was part of his job description. She was surprised he’d waited fifteen minutes instead of marching in to find her.

“Overachiever. You make the rest of us look bad.” The woman smiled as she said it to soften the words, and Eve attempted a smile back.

She headed through the stacks, past the reference desk, and into the lobby. Eve didn’t see Zach. At the circulation desk, Patti watched Eve with her two visible eyes. Feeling Patti’s eyes on her, Eve walked quickly out the sliding glass door.

She halted on the welcome mat.

A boy with tousled hair leaned against a fiery-red sports car. He raised his hand in a wave when he saw her. She scanned the parking lot, looking for Malcolm’s car or even the SUV that had been parked there earlier. She didn’t see anything that looked like an agency car.

Aidan could not be her ride.

“You coming, Green Eyes?” he called to her.

“With you?” Eve asked.

For an instant, he tensed—and Eve suddenly pictured a different boy, tensed like that, alert and listening, in the darkness. He’d worn an embroidered gold shirt. The image was so vivid that Eve was certain it was a memory, but she didn’t know from when or where. And then Aidan relaxed and smiled lazily at Eve, destroying any similarity to her memory. “Yeah, with me. Unless you want to walk, which I wouldn’t recommend since it looks like rain. You don’t have the right complexion for ‘drowned rat.’”

The memory didn’t sharpen. She could picture the set of the boy’s shoulders, the tension in his legs—as if he were caught between fight or flight—but she couldn’t see his face. He was a shadow, and the world around him was a blur.

“There’s nothing wrong with my complexion,” Eve said. Fact, not arrogance. The surgeries had left her with perfect skin.

“Of course not,” he said smoothly.

She looked at the parking lot again. Still no Malcolm or Aunt Nicki. This could be the routine, she thought. The woman in the brown blouse had said “her ride” as if this were normal.

She continued to hesitate, glancing over her shoulder at the library lobby. From the circulation desk, Patti Langley watched her. Her hands were on the books, scanning them and handing them to patrons, but her eyes were unblinkingly fixed on Eve.

If this was the routine, she couldn’t let Aidan guess she’d forgotten. And she couldn’t let Patti think anything was wrong.

Malcolm’s voice whispered in her memory. Lie to everyone.

Eve walked down the stairs.