Conjured

“Thanks.” Releasing me, Zach clasped the man on the shoulder. I hurried inside. The staff room all seemed normal: piles of books on all surfaces, labeling equipment on the floor, a half-eaten lunch on the table. The odor of tuna salad wafted across the room, overriding the smell of dust and printer toner. But my skin itched as if someone were watching me.

The librarian plopped down at the table and shoved the uneaten half of the tuna fish sandwich in his mouth. Zach lingered as if he wanted to talk to him, but before Zach could speak, I yanked him out of the staff room and into the main library.

“You don’t think he—” Zach began.

Covering his mouth with my hand, I shuttled him into one of the rows. His breath felt soft, tickling my palm. “I don’t know who to trust, and marshals could be anywhere.” I lowered my hand. “We need to reach Patti’s office without being seen. Any ideas?”

“Oh yes, I have ideas.” Zach’s eyes were alight, and he was grinning broadly. “Kiss me.” He hooked his arm around my waist and drew me closer. I breathed magic into him through the kiss. He released me. “It might not —”

Suddenly, I felt as if fists were pummeling me from the inside out. I fell to the floor. Zach lay writhing beside me. In a few seconds, it was over.

The library looked gray, blue, and black. The shadows between books were crisp and layered, and the fibers in the carpet next to my cheek were in stark relief. I lifted my head. Beside me, a gray cat flicked his tail. He regarded me with narrow black pupils, and then he stood shakily. His front paws wobbled, and his tail swished behind him. Looking down at my own front paws, I placed them carefully on the rug and pushed up with all four legs. My center of gravity felt off, and the tail was an unfamiliar weight behind me. This won’t work, I thought. We’ll be seen. Hoping he’d understand, I shook my head slowly and emphatically and hissed.

He nudged his cat nose against mine and inhaled.

I felt my back itch.

Falconlike wings unfolded between his shoulder blades. They stretched out on either side of his cat body. Twisting my cat head, I saw black-and-white feathers behind me. A winged cat. Stretching my wings, I glared at Zach. His cat eyes were bright, as if he were laughing. Absolutely not, I thought.

I thumped my nose against his, exhaling into him. In less than a second, I felt myself shrink. I collapsed toward the ground. My bones squeezed, and my skin tightened as if it wanted to strangle me. As I gasped for air, the world fractured around me. It was as if I saw the library in a broken mirror, reflected over and over in a thousand shards. I could see in nearly every direction—the fibers of the carpet in front of me as thick and deep as my chest, the bookcases rising up like steel mountains beside me, the books like skyscrapers … I looked at Zach, focusing my fractured vision.

Two teal orblike eyes dominated his tiny face. His body shimmered with metallic green, and his thin blue tail looked like a chain of precious metal. He also had four ethereal wings that stretched as wide as his body was long. Dragonfly, I thought. I’d seen dragonflies speed across a meadow of wildflowers, their wings beating so fast that they blurred. Yes, this will work.

I flexed my back, and air swirled around me as my wings rose up and down. I felt my thin, sticklike feet lift off the carpet as I pumped faster, and then I shot upward into the air.

My four wings swiveled in figure eights, stirring up tiny whirlwinds on either side of me. Midway up the shelves, I steadied myself. Zach rose after me, wobbling and shaking in the air, and then he shot ahead of me. Straightening my tail like an arrow, I flew after him.

Side by side, we banked hard and careened into the center aisle. We shot through the stacks. Emerging into the reference area, we flew toward the ceiling. The glare from the lights bleached the world. It felt as if we were flying through the sun.

Below us, I saw the brightened heads of the librarians and patrons, including the same man in a suit that I’d seen before. With my sharp dragonfly eyes, I could see the bulge of a gun under his suit coat—he was a marshal. But it didn’t matter. In an instant, we were past him.

First Zach led, and then I led. We spiraled around each other, our wings nearly touching. If I could have laughed out loud, I would have. We swooped through the archway into the library lobby. Patti’s door was only open a crack. We aimed for it.

As we dove into her office, the carpet rose up toward us. It was a forest, and we were airplanes. The fibers were the treetops, and we were going to hit. I tried to slow, stilling my four wings. My thin feet skimmed the floor, and then I toppled over my wings and crashed against the bookcase. Zach landed on top of me, one wing folded over my torso.

I twisted my head and pressed my smooth dragonfly face with globelike eyes against his and breathed. Ripples spread across my torso. I felt as if I were cracking. In an instant, Zach and I were human again, splayed on the floor of Patti’s office. “Please don’t,” I gasped out as Patti opened her mouth to scream. I untangled myself from Zach. “They’re after me.”

Patti shut her mouth so fast that I heard the snap of her teeth hitting together. She strode to her door, closed it, and then slid the lock. Her high heels clicked as she walked back to her window and pulled the shade shut. “You shouldn’t have come here. I work hard to keep this place safe.”

I opened my mouth to reply and breathed in the wood smell of the bookshelf. Suddenly I pictured the forest; I saw a caravan of wagons disappearing into a silver wall, moving because people were coming … I shook away the memory and forced myself to focus on the present.

“She needs help,” Zach said. “We need help.”

“I can’t help you,” Patti said. “You need to leave. Before whoever is chasing you finds you here. I’ll call Mal —”

“No, please!” Quickly, I explained—the memory losses, the visions, the hat, the box. “Those boxes … that’s how he held his victims, if my visions are true. They’re magician’s boxes—they shrink whatever you want to put inside. Created for magic tricks, little parlor tricks. And then … adapted. The agency left one on your desk for me to find, to jog my memory, to frighten and manipulate me …” I described how I’d woken in the hospital and how they’d manipulated me to induce other visions.

Patti’s face paled. She lowered herself into her desk chair. “They used my office, my library …” She ran her hands over her desktop as if reassuring herself that the box was gone.

“You hide yourself. You keep yourself safe,” I said. “Please, tell us how to do it!”

Patti shook her head slowly, as if to deny my words or my request or me in general. “WitSec hid me. My family … I’m safe because of the marshals. I don’t know how to be safe from them.”

Zach watched the door. “Does she need to be scared, or are we being paranoid?”

I watched Patti’s face, trying to read her expression. Patti’s eyes flickered toward the door. Uncertain, I guessed. She doesn’t know. Or doesn’t want to tell me. Patti rose and crossed to her bookshelf. She lifted two books and pressed a button on the shelf behind them.

The shelf slid to the side to reveal a windowless room.

“Whoa,” Zach said.

Crowding into the doorway, we peered in. The hidden room had a bed on one side and a bank of monitors on the other. Each monitor showed a different view of the library—the lobby, the reference area, the parking lot.

“About an hour ago, the marshals infiltrated the library.” Patti pointed to people in several monitors—a woman in the reading room, a man in the lobby, another man in the nonfiction section. She also pointed to the black SUV under the tree in the parking lot. “As to whether they’re here to help or harm you … you have to trust yourself. In the end, that’s all you have. You.” She’d said that before, when I’d asked for her help with Aidan.

“I don’t know who I am,” I said.

“Then find out,” Patti said.

She said it so matter-of-factly, as if that wouldn’t mean walking into the heart of my nightmares and confronting the very people from whom WitSec was purportedly hiding me. “But I’m the target,” I said.