Holly and Her Naughty eReader (18 page)

And then he turned into a wolf
and imprinted on my baby. Just kidding. He actually stood right in front of me
and said, “Yes, your story needs a Jacob, and it needs him right now.”

Don’t tell, but Taylor Lautner’s
breath smells a little bit like dogfood.

“Fine then,” I said. “What does
my Jacob character do?”

“Let’s ask them,” Taylor said,
turning to the class. “What does Jacob do?”

“He loves the girl even though
he can’t have her,” said Sam Romero.

“It’s more than love,” Penny
Lawson interjected. “Jacob protects the girl. He looks out for her. He fights
for her. He even protects her from herself.”

“He tells her what she needs to
hear,” said Tom Baker.

Taylor brought his hands
together, signifying that he’d heard enough and was now going to tell us the
answer.

“He tells the Bella character
the truth,” Taylor said, his voice carrying a weight and finality to it. “That
is the central facet of the Jacob archetype. Bella is so confused in her new
world that she requires a truth-teller to help her sort it out. That
truth-teller is Jacob.”

He turned and looked at me. “Holly,”
he said, “I’m here to tell you the truth.”

Taylor snapped his fingers and
the classroom disappeared. Now we were standing in the luxury suite in the
Marriott of downtown Denver. Max and I were asleep in the bed. No…wait. Max was
waking up. He was getting out of bed.

“Where’s he going?” I said.

“Let’s wait here and see what
happens,” Taylor said.

We watched as Max gingerly
stepped out of bed, careful not to wake me. Ever so quietly, he went to the
front door and walked out.

“Well this stinks, is he walking
out on me?” I said.

“You don’t know what he’s doing,
so neither do I, but you can hear him even as you sleep,” said Taylor.

“Oh, I get it. This is really
happening out there and I can hear it, so it’s entering my dream,” I said,
remembering many a dream on a Monday morning about a giant alarm clock that
wouldn’t shut up.

“Shhh….here he comes,” Taylor
said.

The door opened and Max
returned.

“Open your eyes, Holly. Have a
look at what he’s brought back inside.”

And then I was back in the bed,
my right eye cracking open as I lay there. For just the briefest of instants, I
got a view of Max sneaking through the room. He had something in his right
hand. Something small and rectangular.

Something small, flat, and
rectangular with a sticker of a blue holly flower on the back.

I closed my eyes and was back in
the dream, standing over the bed with Taylor Lautner.

“That’s my Kindle!” I said. “He
has my Kindle!”

“So much truth you needed to
know,” Taylor said. “Now you know that your Kindle is fine, that Vivian didn’t
destroy it after all, and that Max has been lying to you.”

“But what’s he doing with it?” I
said.

“Looks like he’s carrying it
into the office,” said Taylor.

We watched as Max walked past
the bed and went into the office of the hotel suite. He opened the cabinet and
pressed four buttons on the hotel safe. It popped open and he put the Kindle
inside.

I followed him into the office
and tried to get a better look. I watched as he closed the safe. I tried to get
a view of the numbers he was typing in to lock the door, but Max’s body was in
the way.

A mirror hung on the wall behind
the safe. I had been so intent on watching Max I hadn’t noticed my reflection
in the mirror, but as he stood up, I caught a glimpse of it.

It wasn’t me. I was looking at a
woman who looked an awful lot like Kristen Stewart.

I was Annabelle Stone.

Then Max stepped into view, and
in the mirror he wasn’t Max at all. He was Christoph.

“Taylor, what’s happening?” I
said.

But Taylor was gone. And even
though he’d been oblivious to my presence until now, this time Max seemed to
hear me. He turned to look at me, and in Christoph’s voice he said, “Annabelle,
it’s me.”

That’s when I woke up. I was in
the bed. Max was next to me. He was fast asleep.

“Just a dream,” I whispered. “Just
a dream.”

This is reality
, I thought.
Come
back to the real world, Holly.

The real world had a hard time
coming. Where did it begin? Where did the fantasy world end? Forty-eight hours
ago I was in Albuquerque, itching to go see Vivian and take my Kindle back. Now
I was in bed with Max Brody? How had this happened?

Durango. We went to Durango and
Vivian was nowhere to be found and we were hitting it off and he was so, so
different than I remembered from high school. He was confident to the point of
arrogance. He was forceful. He had lots of money to spend.

That last part was the hardest
to wrap my head around in the middle of the night. Whitewater rafting, the NBA
Finals, a suite at the Marriott—how had Max done all of this? Why had he done
this? What just happened, and how had I allowed it all to go down so quickly?
The more my mind cleared of sleep, the more absurd this all seemed, so much so
that I wondered if I hadn’t returned to reality at all.

Moving slowly, I crawled out of
bed. Max stirred but he didn’t wake. I went to the office and slid open the
cabinet. A small metal breadbox with a numeric keypad on the front—the safe was
exactly as it appeared in my dream. How could that be? I had never seen this
safe before. Was it possible I had been sleepwalking? Surely the vision in my
dream…

Brushing the thought aside, I
squatted down in front of the safe. It was locked shut. A sticker on the door
explained how it worked. The safe should have been open. The only time it was
closed was when a hotel guest programmed in a new 4-digit code and locked it.

I stood up and looked around. The
office was exactly the same as it appeared in my dream, right down to the
mirror hanging on the cabinet door. The memory of what I had seen in that
mirror was so vivid as to give me a shiver, and I turned around, half-expecting
to see Christoph Green in the room with me.

Christoph Green. The name was
charged with so much memory and emotion I could hardly handle it. There were
the memories of being with Christoph, of the magic he worked on me in his Den
of Decadence, and there were the memories of being Christoph. I spent only
moments inside his character, but that was all I needed to get a complete
download of his horrible, tragic life.

If Christoph were here, if
Christoph had programmed that safe, there was only one four-digit code he would
have used. It was the code on his ATM card, and his garage.

It was a date of supreme
significance to Christoph. November 20, the day he emancipated himself from
slavery. The day he killed Helga and declared his own independence.

Squatting down in front of the
safe, I punched in the numbers. Star, 11, 20, pound.

Nothing happened.

It was both a disappointment and
a relief. All this nonsense about Max being Christoph was in my mind. I was
just confused. Who wouldn’t be? The Kindle had messed me up. I was mixing up
story with reality. Yeah, that was it. A few more days out here in the real
world and I’d get things straight. I needed to forget about Christoph. I needed
to forget what I had seen, what we had done, and who he…

“Who he was,” I said, a wave of
panic coming over me.

I had the date right, but the
format wrong. Max was in Hungary when he killed Helga. In Hungary they kept
track of the dates in a different format. Day first; month second.

I reached back for the safe.
Taking a deep breath, I punched in Star, 20, 11, pound.

Gears whirred, a lock
disengaged, and the safe popped open.

My Kindle was inside.

Chapter 20

I set my Kindle on the desk and
looked at it for a long time before I did anything. I left it there while I
went to the bathroom, half expecting it to disappear while I was gone. It
didn’t go anywhere.

I inspected it from all angles.
The nick on the lower left of the screen, a scar from when I dropped it at the
airport. The smoothness of the plastic backing where my fingertips had spent
many hundreds of hours holding on. The blue holly sticker on the back.

Why was it here? Why had Vivian
sent me a message that she’d destroyed it when clearly it was fine?

Why was Max keeping it a secret
from me?

I went out to the bedroom to
check on Max. He was on his back. His breathing was deep and regular. He wasn’t
waking up anytime soon.

I went back into the office and
closed the door. I sat at the desk and looked at the Kindle.

I swear it was looking back.

Telling myself it was the only
way, that somehow I would find the answers in there, I pressed the button on
the bottom of the Kindle. My heart leapt in my chest when I hit the switch. I
looked around, making sure that neither Max nor Christoph nor Taylor Lautner
was in the room with me. Satisfied that I was alone, I swiped the yellow bar
across the screen.

It went straight to
His Golden Shackles
. I didn’t allow
myself to read a single word of text, and instead focused my eyes on the
progress bar at the bottom of the screen. I pressed my finger to it and dragged
the story back to its beginning.

I took a deep breath and read
the first line of the story.

Still unhappy with my bangs, I gaze at my reflection in the window, and
furrow my brow in frustration…

That’s all it took. I was back
in the familiar world of
His Golden
Shackles
. I was Annabelle Stone.

The face looking back at me was
beautiful. It’s one I loved to be. I identified so completely with it before.
What a joy it was to look at my reflection and see the most beautiful young
twenty-something you could imagine looking back. Innocent, lost, naïve…

“Vivian?” I whispered. “Are you
in there?”

I was in uncharted territory. If
Vivian had been in this character, and I came in on top of her, would we both
be in there at once? Would we be sharing a body like Steve Martin and Lilly
Tomlin in
All of Me
?

“Vivian,” I whispered again,
looking right into the eyes of my own reflection. “It’s me, Holly.”

I sensed people nearby looking
at me, but only vaguely. Without doubt, they’d all seen their share of strange
folks on the subway.

Come to think of it, there were
an awful lot of strange folks on the subway this morning. There was a man
wearing a suit straight from the 1920s, complete with a black derby on his
head. There was a woman with bright pink hair dressed in a blue rubber suit.
Further down, in the next car, there was a man dressed up like a knight of the
round table. And next to him was a midget dressed up just like a hobbit.

Dismissing all of this as New
York City, or better, New York City as it existed in the imagination of LA
Jones, I turned back to my own reflection, and looked again to see if it was
just Annabelle in there, or someone else.

No signs of Vivian in here. No
voices speaking to my mind, fighting for control of my body. Just the familiar
pull of Annabelle’s character on me. It would have been so easy, so fun, to
become her one more time, to turn my back on all the chaos of the real world and
live in here again. Maybe for just a minute. Could I do it for—

No. I am not Annabelle Stone. This isn’t real. None of this is real.

Breaking character, I looked
away from my reflection in the window and stepped to the back of the subway car.
According to the story, I was supposed to slide out of a shoe getting off the
crowded subway, wait for a bus that never arrives, and run through the heart of
Manhattan to arrive at work a few minutes late.

The subway rolled to a halt at
my stop. It was time to change this story. It was time to take charge of this
character. I was Holly Pritchett, not Annabelle Stone.

Rather than pushing for the door
like a hundred other people, I held back. There was a twinge of guilt and
confusion in my mind—it was Annabelle, wondering what the hell I was doing. I
pushed those thoughts away and stood in place. Everyone got out, my shoe stayed
on, the doors closed, and I rode the subway to the next stop, where I was able
to exit without any drama in the slightest. The subway, the bus, the crowds—I
skipped them all, and caught a cab outside the train station.

I may or may not have seen Aslan
the lion in the rearview mirror of the cab when we turned on 6
^th
Street.

I arrived at Greenworld
Enterprises five minutes early.

“Hello. My name is Annabelle
Pritchett,” I said to the receptionist.

“Good morning,” she said, a
completely different person than the bitch I was meant to meet twenty minutes
later. “May I ask you to take a seat for a moment? Things are a little bit--”

“Crazy, I know,” I said. “You’re
short-handed, I bet, what with it being flu season. A lot of people out today,
huh?”

She smiled at me. “Yes, that’s
exactly what’s happening.”

“I can pitch in wherever you
need me,” I said. “I’m particularly good at minute taking, say, if somebody
needed to take notes for one of your executives.”

A minute later, Carol, the
friendly receptionist, was leading me down the hall to Christoph’s office. I
was going to be the minute taker for Christoph’s conference call, just as is
written in the book. But I was not going to play by the rules. I was going to
tell Christoph who I was and why I was here. I was going to ask him straight up
if he knew about Vivian.

The receptionist opened the door
and led me inside.

“Mr. Green,” she said. “This is
Annabelle Stone from the temp agency.”

Christoph looked at me, and
right away I knew something was off. The sexual energy that Annabelle was
supposed to feel, the sense that they were making a magical connection with
their eyes, was absent.