The Marked Girl (8 page)

“You're hurt, too,” Liv said.

“I've had worse.”

“That's . . . not comforting.”

Cedric didn't respond, but continued to gently wipe bits of dried blood from the side of Liv's head. He moved closer to get a better angle, and Liv was hyperconscious of how his whole body was just a few inches away from hers. For a moment she felt lightheaded and short of breath. Weren't people supposed to sit down while bleeding from the head?

Cedric's fingers pressed gently against her temple, at the worst of the cut. He leaned in even closer, so close that his features blurred before Liv's eyes. Was it just her imagination, or was his breathing getting quicker, too?

Liv wanted to say something to break the thick silence that had fallen between them, but couldn't think of a single thing. Her gaze rested on a gold chain around Cedric's neck. It extended down beneath his shirt, and she could see the outline of what looked like a ring hanging from the edge of it.

“Nice necklace.”

The moment the words left her lips, Cedric stepped back from Liv sharply, taking his hands from her forehead. His left hand went immediately to where the outline of the ring pressed against his heart.

Liv knew she had said something wrong, but didn't get it.

“What is it . . . a ring?” she pressed on.

“Yes, it is.” Cedric averted his eyes and turned to throw the wadded-up paper towel away. “It is a betrothal ring.”

Liv laughed, sure he was being sarcastic. “You mean, like, an engagement ring?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, what? Aren't you a little young for that?”

“I am nearly at the proper age.”

“Yeah, in Kentucky, maybe. But that's not exactly a Southern accent you've got. So where are you from? Eastern Europe or something?”

“Or something. I think you can probably clean your hand yourself.”

“Oh. Right.”

Liv rolled up her sleeve and set to washing dirt and small pieces of gravel from the scrape on her hand. Under the fluorescent lights, it looked even nastier than before. She wrapped it in a paper towel, trying not to look at the blood flecks soaking through.

“Okay, I'm ready.”

Cedric peeled himself away from where he'd been resting against the tile wall, watching her.

“Good. The museum will be cleared out and mostly locked up now, so we will have to go out through a side door,” he said. “Quietly.”

Liv nodded. Cedric had almost reached the door of the men's room when a thought occurred to her. “I heard you talking to a girl in the tunnels. Is that the one you're . . . betrothed . . . to?”

“Yes, that was her. Katerina.”

Liv felt a small pang as she pictured the girl under the bridge. She'd been beautiful, all dark hair and fierceness. That girl seemed a perfect match for Cedric, with his rigid posture, untended wounds, and an actual betrothal ring. Liv imagined them in elaborate wedding gear, like two engravings from a fairy tale book sprung to life.

As the male half of the living fairy tale pushed open the scuffed door of the men's room, the image faded away.

“She said something about being killed?” Liv asked. “And now with the not-so-friendly alley attacker . . . what kind of trouble are you guys in?”

Cedric turned to her, his eyes concerned.

“You were eavesdropping.”

Liv shrugged.

“You should be careful when you do that, you know. You could overhear something you might not want to.” With that, he started walking quickly down the empty hallway, toward a door marked
EXIT.

“Okay, I can see you're really, seriously committed to this whole man-of-mystery bit.” Liv said, her voice low. “But the vagueness stopped being charming around the time my face hit pavement. Don't forget you owe me some answers.”

“I have not forgotten, and I will keep my end of the bargain. If you are absolutely sure you want to know everything, follow me.”

Liv hesitated, but only for a second.

T
he diner just down the road from the museum was mostly empty, so Liv and Cedric took one of the orange vinyl booths by the window. It was mostly dark now, and when Liv looked through the plate glass, all she could see was her own reflection.

Cold, recirculated air pumped down onto their booth from a grate in the ceiling, and Liv shivered. When the waitress came by to drop off some laminated menus, Liv ordered a coffee. She raised her eyebrows at Cedric. He just shook his head.

“Aren't you hungry at all?” Liv asked.

“I am fine.”

But she saw Cedric's expression as he glanced over the pictures of pancakes and French toast on the menu. Liv had seen that look before—hunger was hard to hide.

“Look, I can't decide between the Hash Brown Surprise and the Chocolate Waffles Supreme . . . split them with me? My treat.”

Cedric tore his eyes away from the menu, but said nothing.

“Come on, you'll really be helping me out,” Liv continued. “I don't feel like eating alone, and it's not like my foster mom is going to have a hot dinner waiting for me. Rita has many gifts, but cooking? Not among them.”

Cedric's eyes narrowed in confusion. “Foster mom?”

“You know, a foster parent. Legal guardian.”

“Guardian?” Cedric's voice was pitched unnaturally high. Liv wondered if he was messing with her. Had he really not heard of the foster system?

“Yeah, like, appointed by the state. She takes care of me because my parents can't.”

“Oh,” Cedric answered, his eyes clearing. “Why can't they?”

“They're dead.”

Liv kept her eyes on the table, feeling a little bad about her blunt reply. She knew just springing the dead-parent thing like that could freak people out, reduce them to stammering, pity-filled gazes, or worse—follow-up questions. Liv had become adept at steering entire conversations away from that inevitable next question—
what happened to them?

She finally lifted her eyes to Cedric's. He was looking directly at her, his mouth turned slightly down. He sat very still.

“I am sorry.”

Liv shrugged and pointed to the menu again. “So are you going to help me with my pile of carbs or what?”

“Maybe I will have a little,” he finally said.

When the waitress came back with coffee, Liv put in the order. She warmed up her hands on the side of the white ceramic mug for a moment before opening up a packet of creamer and
pouring it in. Cedric watched her with an intense concentration, as though he'd never seen anyone put cream in coffee before.

“Okay, so level with me. Were you, like, raised in one of those really strict religions that doesn't let you watch television or go outside on Sundays?”

Cedric shook his head, slowly.

“So what
are
you, aside from a museum employee? If you're even that? I mean, I saw how you moved in that alley . . . that must have taken some serious training.”

Cedric looked out the window. Liv didn't know what she expected him to say. Was he a martial arts expert? A speed freak? When he spoke, his voice sounded tired.

“I am a Guardian . . . and a prince.”

Liv tried not to react, but knew her eyebrows had shot up nearly into her forehead. She tried to hide it by taking a sip of coffee.

“Never seen a prince work for minimum wage before.”

Cedric shook his head. “I told you that you would not believe me. No one has, not since we arrived.”

“By ‘we,' you mean you and Katerina, right? And there was another boy under the bridge. Is it just the three of you?”

“Only us,” Cedric said, then looked abruptly away, toward the window.

“Cedric, are you . . . are you living down there? In the tunnels?”

Cedric's eyes flashed over to Liv. “You cannot tell anyone where we are. If they found out . . .”

“Who? The people at the museum?”

“Yes. And others.”

Liv's voice dropped low. “So what kind of trouble are you in?”

Cedric looked away, and Liv sighed. He wasn't going to make this easy on her.

“We only want to get home.”

“Okay. Where's home?”

Cedric knitted his eyebrows together, as if he was trying to solve a complex problem.

“Caelum.”

Liv brought the cup of coffee to her lips, running the name over in her mind. “Is that in Canada?”

Cedric shook his head. “It is difficult to explain. . . .”

“Well, the night is young, and Rita doesn't exactly give me a curfew, so . . . take your time.”

“Caelum is another place . . . that is not this place. Another world. I came to this world through a portal.”

“Oh, a
portal
. Well, that makes sense.”

Cedric's jaw tightened. “You are mocking me.”

Liv felt a tug of guilt. “No, sorry, it's just . . . a portal, you say?”

It didn't seem like Cedric was intentionally messing with her, and anyway, why would he do that? Why make up such an elaborate lie for a complete stranger?

Maybe he didn't think it was a lie at all. Liv had seen kids with mental illnesses before. Schizophrenia, delusions, even just drug-induced craziness. She remembered a boy named Ryan who'd lived with her in the same group home for a while. Ryan's story was tragic—his mother had died right after he was born,
and his father had been abusive—and Ryan had a tendency to retreat into a fantasy world in his mind to survive. The social worker who ran the home had explained to Liv that whenever Ryan talked about being afraid of “the dragon,” he was really referring to his father. Ryan had never frightened Liv, and he really was a generally sweet kid to be around, so long as you didn't touch his Fruit Roll-Ups.

Whatever his situation, Cedric, too, seemed more sad than dangerous to Liv as he stared down at a plastic carton of sugar packets. She definitely wasn't afraid of him.

“That thing that attacked you tonight . . . it is called a wrath,” Cedric continued. “And I was born to fight them.”

Cedric reached for Liv's torn-up packet of creamer across the table. He spoke quickly, and he kept his eyes focused on his hands, which ripped the creamer packet into tinier and tinier pieces.

“In my world, the wraths are more easily recognizable. Big, ugly things with horns and teeth and claws . . . they've plagued our lands for centuries, for as long as anyone can remember. We have never been able to defeat them completely, but we are—or were—able to keep them away from our cities and rule the realm in relative peace. I do not know if they followed us here or were in this world all along, but . . . they are different here. They walk around looking like men, and most people cannot even tell that they are different at all. . . .” Cedric looked up. “But you could. You saw its eyes? Its face?”

Liv recalled the all-black eyes of the man in the alley. Something had felt wrong about his face, deep-down, in-the-gut wrong.

“He looked . . . like there was something the matter with him,” she finally conceded. “But you're saying he was some sort of . . . monster? Like an actual monster, of the horror-movie variety?” It was hard to keep the skepticism from her voice.

“The wraths started hunting us shortly after we came through the portal. We did not know who they were at first, because they look so different here. But they are the same evil creatures from our realm. At least, they smell the same. What I do not understand is what they are doing here, or why they are tracking us.”

Cedric stopped talking when the waitress came back and set down two plates, each heaped with food. Liv pushed the waffles toward Cedric and pulled the plate of hash browns to herself. She moved the potatoes around on the plate with her fork, but she wasn't as hungry as she had been a few minutes ago. Cedric, on the other hand, had no such problem. He took one bite of the waffles and closed his eyes, as if savoring the taste. When he opened them again, he dove back into the food with a fury, cutting through it so hard that his knife made a screeching noise against the plate.

“Why do you think he attacked me?”

Cedric tilted his head, swallowing before speaking again. “It must have thought you were one of us. I do not know why, but I am sorry for it.”

“Yeah, me too,” Liv said, touching the strip of paper towel still wrapped around her hand. Whether or not Cedric truly believed in his weird delusion, the man in the alley had certainly meant business. He'd wanted to hurt Liv for real. She
remembered the gleaming blade that Cedric had wielded with such skill. She swallowed, trying to sound casual. “And your . . . knife thing?”

“I . . . acquired it,” Cedric said. “After losing the only sword we had. Getting it back will be helpful for fighting the wraths off, though it will not kill them. Only silver can do that. I used to have a whole arsenal of my own back in Caelum; you should see it, beautiful things—”

Cedric stopped when he saw Liv's expression. “But here, we could not find anything like that. We have only managed to find a few knives in the museum, and paltry ones at that, old and made of steel.” Cedric stuck a giant forkful of food in his mouth and chewed, then swallowed it down in a giant lump. “What did you say this was called again?”

“Waffles?”

“Waffles,” he repeated, savoring the word. “Amazing.”

“Yeah,” Liv responded, thrown. She felt a dizziness overtake her again, and realized she was having a hard time keeping track of Cedric's tale. She nodded to his plate.

“You should put syrup on them.”

Liv grabbed the syrup carafe and poured some onto his waffles in a long string. Cedric watched her carefully before shoving a syrupy forkful in his mouth. When his lips closed around the bite, he actually closed his eyes and let out a light
mmmm
noise.

When he opened his eyes, he looked directly at Liv and gave a small smile. “You do not believe me, do you?”

Liv averted her eyes. “Well . . .”

“I expected as much,” Cedric said, his voice kind of smug. “This is such a strange place, filled with so many things I can neither understand nor explain, and yet we learned very quickly that people here are unable to believe us. It is odd, though . . . they can speak to each other through devices smaller than this—” Cedric picked up the saltshaker on the table. “And yet the notion of a portal is unthinkable!”

“Well, cell phones are possible through science. Portals are . . . fantasy.”

“They both seem like magic to me. But I suppose I understand your reluctance. Sometimes I try to imagine going home and telling my sister, Emme, about some of the things I have seen here, and I know she would never believe me.”

Cedric shoveled the last bit of waffles into his mouth. Liv pushed the plate of hash browns over to him and smiled. He licked a bit of syrup off of his fork and dug into the new food.

“So why the museum? What would make you stay there, of all places?”

Cedric contemplated while chewing. Then he told Liv a story, about a man named Mal-something who had led a group of the creatures—wraths—into his home in the middle of the night. “A small group of us managed to escape our guards, but there was no way out of the castle. So we left through the only means we could think of—the portal.”

Now Cedric looked up, eyes blazing. But it wasn't Liv he was looking at. It seemed as though he was focused on something behind her, though there was nothing there but the vinyl booth. “We had to run in the moment, but I will not run forever. I will
find my way back home. Create a portal back to Caelum, and once there, I will raise my father's army. Malquin will not see us coming, and we will defeat him and the wraths.”

The silence that followed Cedric's tirade was heavy, and Liv felt that she should say something. “Well that sounds like . . . quite the challenge. So why haven't you gone back yet?”

Cedric looked away, the anger draining from his eyes. “We are looking for a set of scrolls, very old ones, that will open the way for us to get home.”

“You can't just go back the way you came?”

Cedric shook his head. “We tried. It does not work like that. The portal is closed from this side, and we need to reopen it. And the only way we can is with the scrolls.” He paused to swallow another bite of waffle.

“The scrolls. Right.” Liv once again put a hand up to her temple. One glance at Cedric's face revealed his complete earnestness. He truly believed all of the crazy things he was saying.

“So you thought these . . . scrolls . . . would be at the museum?”

Cedric sighed. “I do not know, truthfully. When we first arrived, our only goal was to stay alive. But the people we met were . . . not always helpful. None of them knew anything about the scrolls, or our world, or even wraths. I knew the scrolls were very old, and that I should look for them in a place where very old things might be stored. The museum is so large and has so many artifacts, I thought I would be bound to find them eventually. But I have so far only found
old parchment, rocks, and monster bones.”

Liv tried to stifle a smile.

“But how did you get a job there, at the museum?”

Cedric looked sheepish. “I did not, exactly. I took this uniform. So long as I keep my head down and move quickly, only coming up from the tunnels at night or when we really need to acquire food, no one has stopped me.”

“Acquire food? Is that, like, a fancy way to say stealing?”

Cedric leaned back against the booth with a heavy sigh. “We were so hungry . . . I have never known hunger like that, not in my life. But food was everywhere. Everywhere we looked—in stalls, in buildings, safe behind glass. We did not have the ability to pay for it, so . . . we took it.”

Cedric swallowed, looking down at the two now-empty plates before him.

“I get it,” Liv said. And she really did. Though secretly, she wondered whether Cedric's stealing habit had led him into more trouble than he was admitting. Was that why the black-eyed man was really after him and his friends? Had Cedric stolen from the wrong people?