Lost (27 page)

I wanted out. I needed out. So much so that my throat closed and I couldn’t breathe. I brought my hand up to sooth it, and felt something odd there. Something silver. Where had I gotten this necklace? That didn’t matter now. It couldn’t matter.

The pendant on this unfamiliar piece of jewelry was shaped like something else I’d never seen in person. The sun. I remembered Dad’s songs about it. He always taught Science because it was too boring for Mom to do alone and she couldn’t sing about the planets and stars like he could.

I stuck one of the rays into the straight line cut into the screw. I almost screamed when it twisted. I removed them all and pulled the vent from the wall. The air gushed in, smelling of real life.
Sounding of it too.
I looked back to the long path I’d crawled through.

Something tugged on me to stop.
To remember what I was doing.
To remember that I needed to wait for the sun.

A branch scraped the side of the vent. A branch. Like from a tree. Leaves dangled from it. I touched one, shaking.

Dad had brought a bag of them in for me once. Just so I could see what outside life looked like. He’d said he had to travel far to get them. He’d lied. They were right outside.

My leaves all died in that bag; the green faded slowly to orange and then to a brittle brown. After, they let me grow my own plant because I’d taken it so hard. I’d named him Sprout. He didn’t last long.

I bet I’d see a whole lot of Sprouts out there.

I blew a kiss to my parents and Snowflake and extended my feet out of the vent. I didn’t find anything to land on. Holding on to the slick bottom of the vent, I dangled from my home. I’d seen houses on movies, and mine looked nothing like them. It was made of … rock, but it didn’t look like this from the inside.
A raw, untouched, massive rock.

Rain poured from the beautiful sky. I looked up, holding my eyes open against the natural urge to flinch, and smiled.

“Wow,” I said, admiring the water cascading from the air and through the trees. I wept over the sounds of things moving, things other than Snow and my parents. Things were alive here. I was alive here.

My fingers slipped from the vent, and I plummeted through the wet air, and the stack of stones that was my house flew past my eyes. I crashed to the ground. Every inch of me hurt until I numbed all over. I couldn’t move. I lay there for an eternity as I floated in and out of conscious thought.

I saw Snowflake running through the green. I saw my parents cooing over me. I saw an older woman pulling a necklace over my head.

Snowflake ran closer, her hooves splashing in puddles of water.

I’d always dreamed of riding her outside. My lips formed to cheer her on, but I couldn’t manage the sound. She flew through the rain, a beautiful dream, and I felt my sluggish body lift from the ground. Something yanked me and held me in the air.

“Look at this,” a voice said. The hands whirled me around. I was staring into the deepest brown eyes I’d ever seen. A man.
A dirty one.
“How much do you think we’d get for it?” he asked.

It? Get for it? Did he mean me?

“Leave it for him. We owe him, remember?” the woman said.

“This could mean dinner next week. We don’t owe him this much,” the man said.

He threw me over his shoulder. I tried to get down, but I wasn’t moving nearly as much as I thought. The man wasn’t bothered. He held me loosely, and my head scraped against the low-hanging branches.

“Snow!” I said, seeing a splash of white against the murky brown and green of the new outside world. I wondered how she’d managed to get out of the house. She wouldn’t fit through the vent. Did Mom and Dad let her out? Were they searching for me already? The world was going dark. I saw her again, closer this time. “Snowflake,” I said.

Her grunt sounded different. Through my squinted eyes, I could see that Snow looked smaller and not like a horse at all. She barked, and we came to a stop.

“We’re sorry. We found her first,” the woman said. Snow barked again and sniffed me. I forced my eyes open. If I were dying, she was the last thing I wanted to see.

Her huge brown eyes were replaced with green ones.
Beautiful and familiar.
They made me feel safe and happy and deeply in love.

“Nate,” I whispered, before my body gave in to sleep.

I was cold.
So cold.
And wet.

I opened my eyes. I saw a blurry toilet, a blurry sink, and a blurry me in a tub with no water.

A tiny finger reached to my cheek and poked me. The little boy giggled and poked me again. He flicked his tongue in his mouth through missing teeth. He didn’t seem to notice he was doing it. I remembered that undeniable urge to rub your tongue where teeth once were and would eventually be again. I remembered it well.
From two different lives – one with Mom and Dad watching.
In the other one, I was alone.

“Corey, stop,” the woman from the forest said. She was by far the largest woman I had ever seen in my life. She was well over seven feet tall and broad, but not overweight by any means. Her cheeks were sunken in like she needed to eat. Her hair was dark and horribly matted to her head, covered by a useless red bandana. She kneeled and scrubbed my face with a towel. I screamed and tried to scramble out of the tub. “Sit,” the woman ordered. Like I was an animal. Since she looked like a hungry giant, I obeyed her.

I patted under my shirt for my necklace. Still there, still invisible, I guessed.

“Where’s my bag?” I asked.

“Your things are mine because you are mine. Until I trade you in the morning.”

“Let me go!” She laughed and turned the water on in the tub.

“Dead bodies still sell for parts, little girl.”

The part of me that remembered fighting Kamon and the triplets pushed me to grab her neck. She snapped and my arms fell lifeless to my side.

A witch.

A bark shot through the silence.

I craned my neck to see the floor from the tub.

“Nate!” I screamed. He barked again and bumped his nose against the woman’s leg.

“She’s not yours, Nathan,” she said. She was wrong. I was completely his. “I can’t afford to trade you. It’s been a slow week.” Nathan jumped into the tub and stood on top of me. He growled at her, and she rolled her eyes. “Go get your father,” she said to the boy.

Corey returned with an equally as large man. He was wearing overalls with no shirt underneath it. “Oh, dear,” he said. “It looks like we have a situation in here.
Fine, Nathan.
What are you willing to trade?” He yanked a white robe from the back of the door. Nate jumped from the tub and trapped the ends of it in his mouth. He trotted out of the room with it and came back as the boy I was in love with.

Oh, God. It was really
him
. My love. My heart.
My everything
that I traded for nothing.

“I’ll watch Corey for a week free of charge,” Nate said. “You can take extra shifts.” The man smirked like that wasn’t a bad deal.

“Fine. And we’re square from you giving us clearance through the forest earlier?”

“Deal,” Nate said. He pulled me out of the tub and threw me over his shoulder. I wished he would’ve kissed me, but at least I was on my way out of here.

“Now, get out before I change my mind,” the man said. “Shannon’s right, you’re weird about that forest. It doesn’t belong to you and the things in it don’t either.”

Nate grunted and carried me to the door. Corey ran and hugged his legs. He gave him my bag and Nate ruffled his hair before we left.

“Nate,” I said, when the decrepit door closed behind us.

“My name is Nathan. Not Nate,” he said, lugging me down a dark street, only lit by torches in handles. Not streetlights. And he was in a thin bathrobe and didn’t seem to be freaked out by that.

Something with wings blew past us and circled around. It … she … maybe he … glittered and flew into my face. It flicked my nose with its tiny fingers, and I flinched.

“Nathan, what’s this?”

“My business, Olivia. Goodnight.”

She fluttered around to his face. I tried to lift myself up to see, but he pushed me back over his shoulder. “I hope you get something good for it. I heard you haven’t eaten. You know who was talking about it with
you know who
.”

“I’m not in the mood. Goodnight, Olivia,” he moaned.

He grumbled about Olivia and her gossiping as he hauled me down the street.
The magical street, apparently.
In this life, they weren’t in hiding. That made sense; there was no Lydia Shaw to make them follow a treaty.

He opened another rickety door to an apartment lit by candles with barely any furniture. He laid me on the floor and stepped over me.

“Nate.”

“Look, lady, don’t worry. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m not going to hurt you. I need to get a raincoat, and I’ll bring you home. What part of town do you stay in?”

“The forest, I guess.”

He laughed. “Come on, you don’t have to lie.
Kiya
would’ve traded you to anyone for food or gold. I won’t do that. I’m going to trade you to your parents. Do they live around here or on the upper side?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and stood from the dusty floor.

“Witch, right?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

“Human.” He stumbled over a rocking chair and ran over to me, raincoat in hand, still in the robe. Then he slung me over his shoulder again without saying another word.

The rain that had captivated me through the vents started up again, and he maneuvered me around while he slipped on his raincoat. “Nate, what’s going on?”

“It’s Nathan, and you’re on the wrong side. You’re probably worth a good bit. The decent thing to do would be to take you to your border and trade you there. Luckily, I’m a decent guy.”

Border? And what the hell was all of this trading? And why was he carrying me everywhere?

“Put me down, please,” I said.

“I can’t. I don’t trust you not to run away, and I’m not in the mood to chase you.” It seemed as though I’d traded one prison for another. A mansion for dirty streets on the way to whatever this border was. At least this sentence involved Nathan.

People in the strangest clothes, velvet jackets and dresses with ruffles and too many buttons, passed us on the street. They either spoke or waved to Nate on the way, not mentioning the girl on his shoulder or that he was in a white robe covered by a yellow raincoat.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“You’re out of it, aren’t you?”

“What?” He responded with a laugh. “Please tell me.”

I scraped my wet hair out of my face only to have it fall and stick to my skin again. I was close to fainting from the blood rushing to my head.

“On the lower side. Magical jurisdiction. West. Obviously,” he said.

“And … you’re taking me where exactly?”

“The pigeons I usually trade talk a lot less than you.”

A bundle of blankets in the middle of the sidewalk shifted as we passed it. It took me a moment to see the man huddled inside. “Are you … some sort of salesmen?”

“No.”

“Then why …”

He sniffed loudly and grunted, cutting me off. “You have got to be kidding me,” he said. He adjusted me on his shoulder and turned down a thin alley, walking towards music and laughter. It wasn’t radio music. It was live, mostly violins and drums. It sounded folky and medieval, like it should be danced to with bells dangling from your wrists, barefoot under the moon. Nate sniffed again and made a quick right, down an even thinner alley. “Let it go, Nathan,” he told himself. “No. I’m
not
letting it go. Not tonight.” He pushed the swinging door open and carried me into a smoky bar. The violins and drums shrieked in my ears.

He sat me on a stool, right across from the bartender – a dwarf with blue hair. I blinked hard several times to make sure he was really there. “Don’t move,” Nate said. “Hey, Vern.”

Vern eyed me like I was the weird one. “Hey, kid,”
Vern
said to Nate. “I like you, but no scenes tonight.”

“Not planning on it,” Nate said, pushing past a crowd of people dancing to folk music like it was hip-hop. Vern poured frothy beer into a mug. He climbed to my eye level and pushed it to me.

“No thanks.”

“Nothing to trade?” Vern asked.

I grunted. “What’s with the trading? Is that … like a magic thing?”

He laughed and drank the beer himself. “Oh … you’re
that
kind of girl. Look, we don’t sell that stuff here. You’ll have to go down the street a ways.”

“What?” He stared at me with eyes that matched his hair and grinned with his rotting smile.

“You look ridiculous,” a girl said, pushing Nate back to the front of the bar. She had on purple velvet pants and a black corset. Her red hair fell in waves on her bare shoulders. Compared to everyone else, she was stylish. At least she saw that Nate looked crazy in his robe and raincoat ensemble. “I’m not doing anything wrong. He’s here with his friends. It’s a total coincidence. You look jealous and nuts.”

Jealous? Of?

“Whatever, Shannon,” Nate said. “Tell him I said hello.” He turned away from her, and she caught his arm. She pulled him closer and pressed her disgusting red lips against his.

This was what it looked like for the world to end – Nate’s lips on another girl’s. It felt like buildings were crumbling and the whole sky was falling, pressing in on me, as I watched their lips part.

I wished the fall had taken me out. No, I wished I wouldn’t have climbed out of the vent. I’d rather die a slow death in the house with my parents than see my soul mate kissing someone else. There was nothing worse. Not even seeing my father
sedate
my mother.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was going out. Forgive me, baby?” she asked, lips still on his.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

I slid off the stool as they went at it again, heading for the door. I’d find a corner to hide in until the sun came up. Or I’d die any moment and it wouldn’t matter anyway. My parents were happy. Nate was happy.
All without me.
More evidence that I was a mistake my parents shouldn’t have let happen. They should’ve been more careful. I didn’t belong in this world or any.

“Hey, get back here,”
Nate
said.

He picked me up and threw me over his shoulder yet again.

“Who’s that?” Shannon asked.

“I’m about to trade her. She’s human.
On drugs.
I should be done in a few hours.”

She came around to his back and pinched my cheeks. It took everything I had not to spit in her man-stealing face. “Get something good for her.”

“Okay. See you later on?” he asked, turning me away from her. She took longer to answer than I thought it should have.

“Uh … maybe. I have plans,” she said.

He sighed. I smiled because it was his annoyed sigh, and I really wanted him to be annoyed with her. “Whatever, Shannon.”

“They’re just plans, Nathan. You wouldn’t know anything about that. It’s something fun people do. We don’t sit and twiddle our thumbs in the forest.”

He walked away and took a deep breath. He stopped suddenly and spun around.

“You know what, Shannon? Do what you want. Have fun with your plans, if that’s what you’re calling him now. Don’t come over. Maybe I have plans too.
And tomorrow either.
Don’t come over then. Don’t come over ever. I’m done.”

Done?
With her?
Perfect. If he weren’t about to trade me, I would say things were looking up.

“Did you just break up with me?” she asked. God, I hoped so. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you acting weird?”

“Maybe I’m just tired of finding you in bars with your ex. Have a nice life.”

Dangling over his shoulder, I watched the redhead as we stormed out of the bar. She rolled her eyes like she hadn’t taken him seriously. Maybe they broke up in bars often and she wasn’t worried. She snapped, and a drink appeared in her hand. Stupid witch.

“That was nuts,” he said to himself as the doors slammed behind us. “Just what everyone needs, another reason to think she’s turned me into a lunatic. Wonderful.”

“Nate…”

“
Shhh
. Don’t
talk
to me.” He paced in an alley, making me dizzy on his shoulder. “Today was not supposed to go like this. It was a normal day. Then I met a human and broke up with my girlfriend.”

“That’s good. I think I would’ve died if you kissed her again,” I said.

He grunted. “What? Never mind. Let me get you to your border so I can get to bed. I’m tired.
And cranky, obviously.
I can’t believe I just did that.”

He walked out of the alley and into a noisy market. He waved to a couple arguing over bread. They paused the quarrel for a moment to speak, then went back at it.

“Nathan, how much?” a man at the next booth asked.

“She’s not for sale, Jack. Sorry,” he said.

“You’re no fun,” Jack huffed. He winked at me and sped my heart. I couldn’t speak until we’d walked far away from him and the distance had turned him into a speck in my eye.

“How do you sale a person?” I asked.

“It’s simple, crazy lady who won’t stop talking. Let’s say I’m hungry. I have you. I give you to someone with food, and they, in turn, give me said food. Understand?”