MORTAL COILS (70 page)

Eliot
remembered her on the floor of the bathroom, crying, so weak she could barely
lift her head to the toilet.

She
needed him.

But
didn’t Julie need him just as much?

He
was forgetting one thing, though. Running away wouldn’t get him off the hook
for the last trial. Uncle Henry and the others had found him once. How hard
would it be for someone with all that money and power to track him down again?

He
did, however, have a few tricks of his own. He touched the smooth body of Lady
Dawn, then carefully slid her back into the boot.

“If
only you were leaving a few days later,” he said. “So many complicated things
at home would get settled.”

“I
can’t wait a few days. I’m scared.” She squeezed his hand harder.

Eliot
wanted to go with her more than anything else in the world—and not just to run
away from his problems. He would be running to something as well: a new life.

But
there’s no way it would work. He had too many responsibilities.

And
how fair would it be to drag Julie into his family’s problems? If Uncle Aaron
and Aunt Lucia were prepared to kill him and Fiona . . . would they even blink
before hurting Julie if she got in their way?

Julie
reached up and stroked his cheek. “It’s okay. Don’t burn out all those brain
cells thinking about it.” She released his hand and poured more wine. “Just
spend the afternoon with me.”

She
offered him a full cup.

He
took it and sipped. The wine tasted better this time.

“Just
. . .” She hesitated.

“What?”

“Come
say good-bye to me. Tonight at the bus station. Five thirty.”

Eliot
mentally rearranged his chiseled-in-stone schedule. He’d call from Ringo’s
around four thirty and tell Cee he had to clean up the back room—that would let
him do whatever he wanted until at least six.

“No
problem. I can do that.”

He
slipped into daydream mode and imagined that he’d grab his extra set of clothes
from his locker at Ringo’s, meet Julie at the bus station, and leave everything
behind. In a few hours they’d be in Los Angeles, two people among millions.
Uncle Henry would never find them.

Julie
finished her wine and drew close. “Shhh. I told you,” she whispered. “Stop
thinking so much.”

She
brought her face close to his.

The
line separating reality and daydreams blurred, and Eliot found himself living
in his fantasy.

He
wasn’t sure what would happen tonight when he met Julie at the bus station . .
. but he was 100 percent sure what he was going to do right now.

He
kissed her.

54

WHAT
WAS CUT AWAY

Fiona
lay on the bathroom floor. Her stomach was hard and concave, as if her insides
had been scooped out. Maybe they had.

She
rolled over and opened her eyes. Blankets had been thrown over her and a pillow
had been pushed under her head.

Now
she remembered . . . Eliot had brought her these last night when she had
refused to move. She’d been too weak to get up and walk the six steps to her
bedroom.

Cee
had come by, too, and tried to get her to swallow some of her homemade
remedies—but all that had done was made her throw up more.

Grandmother
had not checked on her once.

For
the first time in her life Fiona wondered if Grandmother was really their
grandmother and not some caretaker appointed by her real mother before she
died. Sure, Grandmother looked like Fiona and the others in the family, but
even Uncle Henry had showed them more feeling—and he might end up killing them.

She
wanted someone to hold and comfort her. She wanted her real mother.

But
that wish was a distant candle flame in her mind, winking out, and buffeted by
the hurricane of recent events. No one was here to take care of her, and that
wasn’t going to change.

She
slowly got to her feet. Her body felt as if it weighed half as much as it did
yesterday.

Dreading
what she would see, she turned to the mirror.

A
gaunt slip of a girl stared back, eyes wild and bloodshot, hair a rat’s nest,
skin the color of chalk. What did she expect from someone who was supposed to
be dead soon?

She
ran the faucet and scooped a handful of water to her mouth. She managed to
swallow a tiny sip. The act was mechanical and didn’t quench her thirst. She
splashed her face, pulled her hair back and tied it in a knot—hideous, but it
kept it out of her face.

With
her hand flat on her stomach, she closed her eyes and tried to sense what was
going on inside her. It was still and quiet. The bout of gastric distress she’d
had last night was over. She wasn’t hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten any
real food for days. Breakfast was as abstract a concept as logarithms to her.

Last
night every chocolate she’d eaten from the heart-shaped box had been purged. It
seemed impossible now, but she had to have devoured ten or twelve layers of
truffles from the box. And yet remembering the sheer volume of the gunk she’d
upchucked—the rancid curdled-chocolate and syrupy taste—that was the only thing
that made sense.

She
licked her lips, tasted cocoa, and her gag reflex clenched.

No.
She’d be okay now. She was never going to eat another chocolate. Ever.

Fiona
knelt, picked up the blankets, and folded them. She’d had these wool blankets
for ten years, and they had been softened by a hundred hand washings. She
didn’t want to lose them, which is what would happen if she left them on the
floor. There was a rule.

   
RULE 16: No disorderly accumulation of personal property. Any pile or mishmash
of said property will, after twenty-four hours, and without prior notification,
be permanently removed from the premises.

Grandmother
had clarified that one when it had been added to the list. Fiona and Eliot were
only four years old. She called it the “clean up your mess or I will throw it
away” rule.

That
scared them, and they tried, but they were only four years old . . . so things
got messy again. That’s when Eliot’s collection of bottle caps and the
clothespins Fiona had been using to build castles had been scooped up by
Grandmother. She tossed them down the trash chute while they were forced to
watch.

They
had cried and pleaded and promised never to do it again, but they might as well
have tried to ask the sun not to set for all the good it did.

The
only indication that they had gotten through to Grandmother was her telling
them to “do better next time.”

The
only exception to RULE 16 was for books. Books were never thrown away, but if
found scattered or in disorderly piles, Grandmother would sequester them
indefinitely in her office. Somewhere in there were copies of Louisa May
Alcott’s Little Women and James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, taken
from Fiona and Eliot when they were seven.

Speaking
of missing things . . . where was Eliot? He had promised to stick around in
case she needed him.

And
right now Fiona could’ve used someone, even her brother, to talk to.

She
glanced down the hallway. The apartment looked empty. Burning odors wafted from
the kitchen, however. Fiona guessed that Cee was cooking up a batch of her
infamous chicken soup—charred poultry skin and all—just for her.

Eliot
probably got distracted with his violin or that book. So typical.

Her
annoyance evaporated, though, and she wondered if something else had happened.
Maybe the Council’s third trial had come and Eliot had foolishly tackled it
alone.

No,
even he wasn’t that stupid.

But
what if the Council hadn’t liked the job they had done on the second trial?
What if they wanted to question him and had taken him away?

Fiona
remembered with crystal clarity what they had done to pass the Council’s last
test. She relived the moment—pressing her stretched rubber band into
Millhouse’s coveralls . . . how the shimmering line cut through dirty blue
fabric and skin and meat and bone and snapped out the other side.

Fiona
felt nothing. She remembered crying last night over him, and over what the
Council had made her do, but this morning she felt no remorse.

She
inhaled and forced herself to focus on the here and now.

Eliot
was probably at work. She couldn’t imagine Grandmother would let him stay home
today. Her precious work ethic demanded that they go to Ringo’s with anything
less than a 102-degree fever (not that either she or Eliot had ever had such a
fever).

Fiona
paused, realizing something was indeed wrong.

Grandmother
hadn’t made her go to work. Did that mean she was really sick? Apart from the
hollow feeling inside her, though, she didn’t feel any different.

Fiona
went to Eliot’s bedroom door and knocked. There was no answer, so she entered.

Eliot
wasn’t here and his canvas pack was gone.

Fiona
immediately sensed something off with the place . . . like one of those
spot-the-difference pictures.

She
spotted it: a new book had been added to the shelves, a fat volume of gray
leather that couldn’t look more out of place than if it had flashing red
warning lights. It was that Mythica Improbiba thing he’d found in the basement.

She
told him to keep it downstairs. If Grandmother found it here . . . she’d what?
Take it away? Punish them? So what?

Maybe
Eliot was right to rebel and keep it near him, even right to keep it a secret
from her. Her little brother was sneakier than she had realized, and she kind
of admired that.

She
moved to the volume. It still gave her the creeps. She felt its pull, felt,
too, the waves of revulsion from it as if it were a magnet that couldn’t decide
what polarity it wanted to be.

She
closed his bedroom door and came back. She ran one finger down the book’s spine
and felt a tingle. It reminded her of the first time she’d touched her
heart-shaped box of chocolates.

What
if this book was a similar trap?

If
it was, she knew how to deal with it. A few cuts and it could be a pile of
confetti.

She
removed the book from the shelf and sat cross-legged with it on Eliot’s bed.
She opened it and flipped through perfectly preserved vellum sheets. It had to
be fifteenth century or earlier. Maybe much earlier. Books this old were
extremely rare, and despite her apprehension she handled it with reverence.

There
were pages with Greek writing, Latin, Arabic, and several with primitive
pictographs that she didn’t recognize. It was weird. More like a collection or
a journal than a single cohesive narrative.

Fiona
noticed a tiny slip of paper marking one page. She turned to it. There was a
woodcut of a monster poking terrified medieval peasants with a pitchfork. The
caption identified this creature as the devil.

Eliot
must’ve been doing a little research on their father’s side of the family. It
scared her, but she was glad he was learning about those relations in case they
showed up, too.

She
wrinkled her nose at the picture.