Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (31 page)

Andy frowned when he realized I wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. He turned and snorted at the sight of Ciara walking across the grass toward us. “Good. Someone else to help me convince you to stop messing around when we’re on an active case. The last thing we need is for you to trigger some sort of body-swapping story.”

“I’m not messing around,” I said.

Ciara walked up to us, taking in me—and presumably, Piotr; I hadn’t turned, but I was reasonably sure he was standing behind me—with a quick glance before she said, “We have a problem. I lost track of Agent Winters, and I can’t raise Agent Marchen on the phone. Agent Remus, hello. Who’s your friend?”

So Piotr
was
behind me. Good. He took a step forward, putting us level with one another, and said, “Good afternoon, Agent Bloomfield. Agent Névé is in the car, in case we need to make a quick exit. As for my friend, this is Agent Marchen.”

Ciara looked at him like he’d just claimed that I was a swarm of wasps in a tailored suit. “Excuse me?”

“This,” he indicated me with a sweep of his hand, “is Agent Marchen.”

I gave him a sidelong look. “You could have stepped in a few minutes ago, you know.”

“I was waiting to see if you could talk your team into accepting your identity,” he said. “Since you clearly couldn’t, I thought it was time for me to get involved.”

“Thanks,” I said flatly. I turned back to Ciara. “As I was just explaining to Andy, hi. I’m Henry. A dead woman stole my body, and I want it back.”

A muscle at the corner of Ciara’s mouth twitched. “What?”

“Agent Marchen arrived at the Bureau a little while ago, telling this fascinating story,” said Piotr. “I’ll be honest, I thought she was making it up, but she somehow convinced Deputy Director Brewer, and Agent Névé believes her. At this point, I believe her too. Pretending to be Agent Marchen gets her nothing but a life no sensible person would want. Only the real thing would be this insistent.”

“What?” Ciara lifted her right hand as she moved toward me, wrapping her fingers around the key she wore at her throat. There was something almost predatory about the way she was focusing on my eyes, like she wanted to swing them open and pull out whatever was on the other side. I stood my ground. Backing down now would only cast everything I’d said into doubt, and I couldn’t afford that. Not here, not now.

Ciara stopped with her nose barely an inch from mine. She narrowed her eyes, expression going blank for a count of five. Then, with no warning or shift in her stance, she smiled, wonder transforming her face into something beautiful.

“Henry!” she said. “I mean, Agent Marchen—we’re not well-acquainted enough for me to be that informal, my apologies. It
is
you!”

“Wait, what?” said Andy.

Ciara’s smile died as quickly as it had come. She turned to Andy and Demi. “This is the real Agent Marchen. The real Henry. She has the right eyes. They’re the mirrors of the soul, you know. She hasn’t been letting me get close enough to look since she woke up.”

“I thought it was ‘windows,’” said Demi. She had produced her flute from somewhere and was clutching it tight, elbows drawn in against her body like she was trying to make herself smaller and brace herself to start playing at the same time.

“Depends on who you’re talking to,” said Ciara. Her lips twisted downward, her mercurial mood shifting further into dismay. “Wait, if this is Henry, who have we been—?”

“Adrianna,” I said.

Ciara’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Finally, someone who reacts to that name like it’s a
bad
thing.” I threw my hands up. “She knocked me out and stole my body.” She’d done more than knock me out, but I didn’t feel like explaining the mechanics of the whiteout wood just now. That could come later, when the questions got harder and we were figuring out how to recover my original face. “She came here because she wanted access to the Bureau’s records. This was always her long game.”

“But why?” asked Andy. “The Archives are good. They’re not worth killing over.”

The Archives. I went still, feeling the cold wash over me like water, chilling and killing my sense of equilibrium. “Where’s Jeff?”

“What?”

“You said you lost Sloane and that Adrianna isn’t answering my phone,” I said. It was a struggle to keep my voice smooth and level. “Three of you are here. That leaves one member of the team unaccounted for. Where’s Jeff?”

Ciara’s horrified expression was all the answer I needed. I took off for the hedge maze at a run, and I didn’t look back.

# # #

It was too much to hope that Adrianna had simply taken my boyfriend with her, recognizing how useful he could be and carting him off to whatever Grimm-knows-where secret lair she was planning to hole up in. She’d been able to incapacitate Sloane somehow, and Sloane wasn’t
small
. I knew the limitations of my own body. There was no way she had carried them both out of the maze. That didn’t leave very many options for what she had done with Jeff.

Please don’t be dead,
I thought inanely as I ran.
I never got to say good bye.
Shoemaker’s Elves had to have their equivalent of the whiteout wood, but I could sink back into dreaming and walk a thousand years before I’d find it. Our tales were too far apart for his story’s homeland to touch on mine. All I could do was run, spinning worst-case scenarios for the audience of my own heart and feeling each of them strike truer than I wanted it to.

It was still a shock when I came racing around a corner and found him crumpled on the ground, a bloodstain covering the left side of his jacket. I kept moving, more out of inertia than anything else, until my knees hit the grass and my ear hit his chest.

He had a heartbeat. He wasn’t gone yet.

“Medic!” I shouted, and the running footsteps closing from behind me told me the help he needed wasn’t far away: He’d have it soon. We’d have it soon. I stayed where I was, my ear pressed against his bloody jacket, and listened to the beating of his heart. I needed to know that he wasn’t leaving me. Not when I’d just gotten back from leaving him.

“She’s going to pay for this,” I whispered, and Jeff—whose breathing was shallow and whose eyes were closed—didn’t contradict me.

She was going to pay.

Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 503 (“The Shoemaker and the Elves”)

Status: ACTIVE

Dying, as it turned out, was quite a pleasant thing. The world went soft around the edges, taking all the pain and confusion and betrayal with it. They had seemed so important not long ago, when time had been measured in years, not in seconds. Now, it was finally clear that they’d never really mattered at all. This final descent into softness, into story, was what it was all about.

In the distance Jeff could hear the sound of tiny hammers tapping even tinier nails into hardened leather, driving them home. His hands were numb, but he felt sure that they’d be ready to hold the hammer when he opened his eyes again. Yes; it was time. He had frittered away his life on paperwork and pining after a princess who could never truly love him, and now he could let all that go. Now he could begin doing what he’d always been meant to do.

But she
had
loved him, hadn’t she? The question was hot and sharp against the warm softness dissolving the edges of his consciousness. Jeff had never been one to shy away from a question just because it wasn’t easy. He gripped it as tightly as his fading thoughts would allow, spinning it like a jewel as he studied every facet, every angle. Yes. Yes, she had loved him: he was sure of that. Her kiss had called him out of his story, once, when it had tried to take him before his time, and his kiss had pulled her out of the sleep that was supposed to last until the stars went cold. It wasn’t her fault that true love’s kiss hadn’t worked a second time. He must have
done
something to erode her love for him, damaged it in some way, because his love for her hadn’t changed in the slightest. He still loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone else. It was the kind of love that followed its owner to the grave.

Henry had loved him once. She had trusted him to wake her up when she ate the apple. She had
believed
in him. So why hadn’t it worked? It should have worked.

Unless the woman who’d shot him wasn’t Henry.

Everything began falling into place, suddenly making sense in the pause between darkness and death. She had been so
different
after waking up, and he’d been so consumed by guilt that he hadn’t seen it. He was the fairy-tale lover whose kiss had lost its potency, after all; how could he have been anything but distracted? And yet. Henry had sounded different, acted different, even stood differently after she woke up, which she had done entirely on her own—something Snow Whites weren’t supposed to be able to do. So what if the person moving Henry’s body wasn’t Henry? Things made so much more sense if that wasn’t Henry.

He could die without feeling like she’d blamed him for failing her if that wasn’t Henry. And maybe, just maybe, he would see her again, in the silence on the other side of the story.

Jeff’s eyes were already closed, but still, it felt as if he was closing them and letting go.

He had so far left to fall.

# # #

“Where the fuck is the medic?!” I screamed, my head still resting against Jeff’s chest, where the thready beat of his pulse told me he wasn’t gone yet, but he was going; he was going fast, and once he’d gone, he wasn’t coming back. His skin was starting to cool under mine. I didn’t know how much blood he’d lost. All I was sure of was that it had been too much, and that he couldn’t afford to lose any more.

Ciara, Andy, and Demi came pounding around the corner, scrambling to a stop when they saw me. Demi’s eyes widened, her hands tightening around her flute. She was staring more at me than at Jeff. I looked down at my hands. The blood stood out remarkably well against the bone-white of my skin. Everything always came back to those colors, to black feathers against the sky and red blood on the snow.

“He’s dying,” I said, lifting my head. “She shot him, and he’s dying and
where is that medic?!
” My last words came out in a piercing wail, higher and shriller than my own throat could ever have managed. For the first time, I was glad of my borrowed body. It seemed only right that I should be capable of keening.

“Piotr is getting the EMTs,” said Ciara. She took a half-step forward, her voice dropping, turning soothing. “Henry, what happened?”

I narrowed my eyes. I knew what she was thinking, and I needed to stop it here and now, before it could spread to the other members of my team. “Look at the blood. Feel how cold he is. He was shot before I got here—long before I got here. That
bitch
who stole my body did this to him, because . . . I don’t know. Maybe he figured out who she was. Maybe she got tired of him. He’s bleeding out. Do you understand what I’m saying? He’s
dying
. Where is that medic?”

“Blood is a liquid,” said Demi abruptly. We both turned to look at her. She didn’t shy back. If anything, she relaxed, her fingers beginning to sketch a phantom melody on the body of her flute. She was playing the song even before she had breath to put behind it. “Liquid moves. Do you trust me?”

“What?” I sat up straighter, trying to figure out what she was saying.

“Do you trust me?” she repeated.

The answer was easy. “Yes,” I said. “I always have.”

“Then don’t move.” Demi raised her flute to her lips and began to play.

There are no words to describe the tune that poured from her flute. It hung in the air for a moment, crystalline and demanding my full attention. Ciara and Andy were equally rapt, barely blinking as they listened. The music rose, peaking in a series of high, jagged points that seemed to climb to an impossible height, passing outside of the range of ordinary hearing. Something slithered over my hands. I looked down.

The blood on my hands was moving, turning liquid and rolling together to form larger and larger drops, until they pooled into a single ruby pool between my outspread fingers. It sat there for a moment, glistening and impossible, before rolling down Jeff’s neck and vanishing under the collar of his shirt, which was looking less bloodstained with every second that passed. The blood was pulling itself out of the fabric and rolling back toward his wound—and then inside, every drop of it returning to the veins from which it had fallen.

I barely dared to breathe. I kept pressing down, feeling Jeff’s pulse strengthen under my fingers. This went against all medical logic and modern understanding of how blood and the body worked, but neither of those things mattered here or now, in the shadow of the hedge maze: what mattered was that in a fairy tale, this would have worked, and when you brought people like us together in a place like this, a fairy tale was essentially what you had.

Demi pulled her mouth from her flute, catching a whooping breath before she said, “I’m going to pipe the bullet out and the blood in at the same time. Somebody be ready to catch it.”

“On it,” said Andy, and stepped forward, kneeling on Jeff’s other side. He looked at me as he did, and when our eyes met, he nodded. Just once, but that was all I needed to know that he’d finally decided to believe me. We were teammates again.

I looked to Demi. “Save him,” I said, half command, half plea.

She nodded. “I will,” she said, and started playing again.

This time the song danced, trilling and twisting around the high, jagged notes that called the blood back into Jeff’s body. There was almost none left on his skin or clothing, and my hands were clean. Demi blew a hard note, and a bullet shot up from his shoulder, gleaming in the shadows like a star. Andy’s hand lashed out, closing around the projectile. The song continued for a few beats more, calling the last of the blood home. Jeff’s pulse was strong, and so I moved my hands to cover the wound that was still there, ready to start bleeding again: Demi could pull the blood back into a body, but it seemed she couldn’t heal broken flesh and bone. We all have our limitations.

Demi stopped playing and stood, panting, as I lowered my mouth to Jeff’s, and kissed him.

His eyes fluttered open, and he blinked at me, nonplussed. Belatedly, I remembered that my face wasn’t my own, and that, from his perspective, he’d just been kissed by a stranger. That probably wasn’t the best way to begin something like this. I opened my mouth to explain, and stopped as he raised his hand and pressed it, trembling, against my cheek.

“Henry,” he said. “I was starting to be afraid I was never going to see you again. What took you so long? Where did you go?” Then he stopped me from answering his questions by leaning up and kissing me again, more fervently this time. His chest moved under my hand as he breathed. He was alive. He was
alive
, and he was going to
stay
that way.

When he pulled away, he grimaced and said, “I believe I’ve been shot.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. He sounded so offended, like this was the last thing he’d been expecting from his day. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that. It was my gun, and my finger on the trigger.”

“But you’re not the one who pulled it,” he said. He looked toward Demi, who was still holding her flute just below her mouth. “I’m assuming you’re the one responsible for my miraculous survival? I was more than halfway dead, you know. There are goalposts between here and the afterlife, and I’d passed most of them.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That was me.”

“Thank you,” said Jeff solemnly.

Piotr and Agent Névé came jogging around the corner with two EMTs close behind. Demi hastily put her flute behind her back, as if she was afraid they would look at it and instantly intuit the entire purpose of the Bureau. Jeff looked at them and nodded cordially.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I seem to have been shot. Would one of you care to assist?”

There didn’t seem to be anything to add to that. I kept my hands where they were and held my silence, waiting for the EMTs to tell me what to do.

# # #

If the EMTs were surprised by how little blood there was at the scene, they were too professional to say anything. Jeff bled some when I was instructed to move my hands, but not much; Demi’s spell was holding. The EMTs got him bandaged up and loaded onto a stretcher, and he kissed me one last time before they carried him off to the ambulance and away from whatever might still be lurking in the maze.

My unfamiliar heart was pounding against my ribs as the reality of what had almost happened began sinking in. He could have
died
. He almost had. Another few minutes of disbelief on the part of any of the people who’d tried to deny my identity and I would have lost a team member and a friend. The fact that I loved him was almost irrelevant. It was my team that I’d promised to protect. It was as my teammate that I’d failed him.

A hand landed on my shoulder. I looked up to find Andy frowning down at me.

“You’re short and you’re not pointy enough, and I don’t think I’ll ever get used to hearing you give orders in that voice, but I believe you are who you are,” he said.

I managed to muster a smile. It wasn’t easy. “See, if you just believe me in all things, your life improves.”

Andy snorted. “That’s the attitude that got me in trouble with the chick who swiped your body. How the hell did she do that, anyway? Do we need to set up secret passwords or something?”

“That might not be a bad idea,” I said. “As for how Adrianna stole me, that’s a long story, and one I’d rather wait to go into until after we’ve managed to find Sloane. She’s all alone out there. She needs us.” It was odd to think about Sloane
needing
anyone, but if there was anything I’d learned from seeing the start of her story, it was that she wasn’t as invulnerable as she seemed. She could be hurt. She could bleed. Maybe, if someone knew where to push, and pushed hard enough, she could even die.

“What do we do?” asked Demi. She was clutching her flute again, holding it like the security blanket it was. Without it, she could still do a lot of damage—a Piper can hum the rats back into Hamelin, if they really want to. But with it, she was unstoppable. There was a lot of comfort to be taken in that fact.

I stood up straighter, trying to match the height I’d lost when Adrianna took my body. “We find her. We don’t split up—we never split up again, if we can help it—but we find her. Ciara, you’re our expert on secrets. You find things people don’t want you finding. Can you find us a door into the right part of this maze?”

“Me and doors, that’s not always a safe combination,” she said nervously. “One day, that’s the thing that’s going to get my head chopped off.”

“Could be today,” I said. “But if it’s not, then today could be the day when you find Sloane and bring her home. Can you do it or not?”

Ciara looked at me for a long moment before she nodded. “I can,” she said. “Just give me a second.”

“Take all the time you need, as long as you don’t need very much,” I said.

“See, I knew Henry was weird after the coma,” said Andy. “She wasn’t nearly as bossy.”

I glared at him. He grinned.

“Welcome back, boss,” he said.

Ciara walked toward the nearest hedge wall. It wasn’t purposeful; she swaggered, rather than striding, seeming to follow an irregular path that just happened to bring her up against the greenery. “Oh, hello,” she said, reaching out to caress a leaf. “Aren’t you beautiful? You know, I saw a hedge like you once. Green and fine and lovely. But that hedge had a secret door, so I suppose it was nicer than you are. Unless
you
have a secret door?”

The hedge shook like it was fighting against a stiff wind. Ciara laughed.

“You
do
, don’t you?” she said, sounding delighted.

“Is she chatting up the hedge?” I asked, glancing to Andy. He didn’t look disturbed. I shifted my attention to Piotr, who
did
look disturbed. Good. I wasn’t the only one.

Agent Névé, on the other hand, seemed perfectly sanguine about the whole situation. “She does this,” he said. “I watched her talk a manhole into opening once. It was amazing.”

“If you didn’t know she could do this, why did you
ask
her to do it?” asked Piotr.