Knitting needles flew at me, sharp and fast. Again before I could react, the Magician held up one hand, and the needles reversed—shooting back fast and straight. Two needles embedded themselves in the Storyteller’s heart.
She clutched at them, and then she toppled forward onto her knees, hard.
I heard screaming. My scream. It tore out of my throat and filled the air, and I couldn’t stop. Blood welled on her breast, staining her clothes.
The Magician fell to his knees in front of her. “No! No, no, what have I done?” He cradled her as she slumped to the ground. Quickly, he lifted her and carried her to me. Her breathing was ragged. A drop of blood dotted the corner of her mouth.
He slammed his lips onto mine and inhaled so deeply that it felt as if he were swallowing my scream. He broke away, my scream silenced, and he focused on her.
Her face shifted, smoothing. Her white hair darkened and softened. Her eyes cleared, ivory whites and brown irises. I’d seen her with this face in my visions, her younger self. The Magician yanked the needles from her chest, and he pressed his hands over the wounds. They didn’t heal. He didn’t—I didn’t—have the power to heal so grave a wound.
As he concentrated, her body shifted again: first, she became a dog; blood seeped into her short gray fur. Then she changed again, shrinking into a cat. Her wounds didn’t close. He changed her into a bird, a songbird that lay limp in his hands. Then an owl. Then a mouse. Pressing himself against me, he inhaled again. I saw tears bright in his eyes, unshed. Determined, he continued, trying to find some form that wouldn’t bear her wounds. He transformed her into a tree, rooted in the floor. Sap still leaked from gashes in her bark. “There, there, you’ll be all right, yes, yes.” He put his hand over the bark. “You won’t die. You can’t.” He changed her again, back to the woman with the silk black hair. She was paler now, her skin almost frostbitten. “No!” He changed her again—a stone. It was smooth and flawless. He transformed her back.
She was still dying.
No matter what form he chose, when he returned her to human, she was weaker than before. She put her hand, gnarled despite the youth of her face, on his wrist. “Enough,” she whispered. “We never … drained one … who could heal.”
His voice was broken. “I am sorry.”
“Do it. Don’t waste my strength.”
I watched the color drain from his face. But he said nothing.
The Magician found a stick of chalk. With shaking hands, he drew a circle on the floor of the wagon. He marked it with symbols—I’d seen the symbols before, both on his Tarot cards and on this same floor. I felt memories bubble inside of me. Those symbols … “You can’t!”
He didn’t respond.
“Please, not to her!” The Storyteller used to soothe me with stories as we traveled between worlds. Her stories had power of their own. They wrapped around you and forced you to listen. I remembered she used to do puppet shows for the children at the carnival, drawing her audience with her voice. Sometimes she’d use me in them. She’d tie strings around my wrists and ankles, and I’d dance on the stage. She’d praise me if I danced well, and I’d reveled in her praise.
Her breathing was loud, ragged enough to drown out the soft inhales and exhales of the dolls. She coughed, and blood speckled the floor. She opened and closed her mouth as if she wanted to talk but couldn’t. Her hands, around the wounds, were red, and a pool of red spread across the wood, seeping toward the chalk circle.
“She said she wasn’t my mother.” But she had to be. As mixed with nightmares as my memories of her were, she still felt like family. I couldn’t remember any other.
“She wasn’t, and she was.” The Magician didn’t look at me. I saw he had tears staining his cheeks. He plucked boxes from the ribbon, all except for one, which I knew must hold Zach. As the Magician plucked each box, the ribbon shook and Zach’s box swayed.
“Who are my parents?”
“You have none.” The Magician drew a knife from within the folds of his conjurer’s robe. It had a black bone handle, and the blade was covered in writing and runes.
“But where did I come from?”
“From her,” he said shortly. He crossed to me and picked me up as if I were a pile of cloth. He dropped me down beside her, in the blood. My face was inches from the Storyteller’s. Her young brown eyes stared into mine. I didn’t think she saw me. The blood smelled acrid, and I felt its warm wetness seep through my shirt.
I wanted to scream again.
“Breathe,” he told me.
And I remembered him saying that many, many times before. I remembered lying bound on the floor, facing eyes … green eyes, brown eyes, red eyes, cat eyes, black eyes, blue eyes.
“Breathe in her magic. Don’t let it be wasted.”
The Storyteller fixed her eyes on me. Milky eyes, old eyes again—her true eyes. I couldn’t look away. She was still alive, but only barely. Each breath was harder, slower. Her bloodstained hands lay limp across her chest.
Gently, the Magician lifted her face and placed her mouth close to my lips. I shrank back as far as I could, but the steel-like yarn held me tight. I felt the Storyteller’s breath, tasted it in my mouth.
And then I felt a rush of wind inside me.
It was magic, her magic, filling me.
She lay slack and still. Dead.
He began to cut her body. The knife slid through her flesh, her muscle, and her bone as if they were soft cheese. Blood didn’t drip where the knife cut. He severed each limb, and he placed each in its own box. He was methodical and silent, crying as he cut. Last, he lovingly carved out her eyes one by one and placed them in boxes.
He placed the rest of her in the final box and closed it. One by one, he strung the boxes on the colored string, and then he knelt next to me in the pool of blood. He leaned toward my lips. “Whisper sweet nothings to me,” he said.
He breathed in. Leaning back, he closed his eyes. He then picked up the needles, stained red with blood, and he chose a ball of yarn. Eyes still closed, he began to knit.
And I blacked out. But this time, it was the oblivion of darkness. There were no visions.
When I woke, the blood was gone, and the chalk had been erased. I again lay on the cot, bound in the Storyteller’s unbreakable yarn. I smelled of dried blood.
The Magician was seated across from me next to the unfinished doll. He was watching me.
“What … what am I?” I asked.
“You’re a doll,” the Magician said. “You were yarn and cloth and buttons and stitches. She made you to hold the magic we collected.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
“No person can hold another’s magic. Not for more than a few hours. It fades. But you can. You can hold it forever, or at least as long as you exist. You were to be our power source—our battery, so to speak—to draw on whenever we pleased. She made you that way. Creating you was her magic.”
It felt like truth, horrible and hideous.
“We filled you with transformation magic, plant magic, flight, weather … so many different kinds of magic.”
“Over the years, the magic changed you,” he said. “You absorbed more than merely power. You absorbed the essence, the life spirit, of those people, and you … woke. With the others, the new ones, we’ve been careful. Only a little power, only a few thoughts, only a few bits of soul. But with you … You were our first. We didn’t know.”
I remembered now. All of it. I was made from stolen bits of magic, comprised of bits of the thoughts and personalities of their victims. That’s what woke me up, made me alive—or at least lifelike.
I closed my eyes.
