Waterfall (22 page)

“Solon, no—” Eureka said. The robot was neutral now, but she knew how quickly he could morph into the ghosts he
carried. Hadn’t the twins been through enough without having to see Dad’s dead face in the machine?

She wondered whether the Poet’s ghost inhabited the robot, whether the acquiring radius Solon had mentioned now reached the Glimmering.

“Don’t worry, he’s asleep.” Solon stood behind Eureka, placed his index and middle fingers along the right corner of her jaw, like he was checking her pulse. Then he twisted his fingers clockwise and whispered: “For when you need to know.”

He was showing her how to power down the robot. She noticed the subtle infinity-shaped indentation on the inside of Ovid’s jaw.

“We need to talk to you,” she said. “We just came from the Glimmering.”

Solon’s eyebrows shot up. “Did your vanity survive?”

“What’s the Glimmering?” Claire asked as she climbed on Ovid’s shoulders the way she used to climb on Dad’s.

“I saw something in there,” Eureka said to Solon.

“Her hissstory,” a soft, feminine voice sang.

Eureka turned and saw no one. Then bees appeared, a few at a time, until they were swarming the eye sockets of the skulls on Solon’s walls.

The gossipwitches entered the salon in swaying caftans. They arranged themselves in the shape of a triangle, with Esme at the point closest to Eureka.

“Well, good morning, Ovid,” Esme said. “I see your crapshoot tinkering finally paid off, Solon. Tell me, how did you bypass the valve filled with vermilion sands? Or didn’t you? Oh—did someone die?”

“It was the children’s father, since you’re sending condolences,” Solon said.

“All witches are orphans,” Esme said to Claire. Eureka wondered if it was possible that the witch was being kind. She turned to Eureka. “Did you enjoy the Glimmering?”

“Do not lie,” the old witch snorted. “We have underwater eyes. We saw everything you saw.” She looked at Ander. “And did
not
see.”

“What did she say?” Solon pointed at the old witch. He spun toward Ander and let out a noise somewhere between guffaw and cough. “Exactly what didn’t you see?”

“I—I don’t know,” Ander stammered. “We need to talk.”

“You do not belong,” the old witch said. “Get it? You’re
nothing
!”

The middle witch said something behind her hand to the old witch. They looked at Eureka and laughed.

“You know what my reflection means,” Eureka said to Esme.

The witch smiled and tilted her head, considering her reply as she looked at the twins, at Ander. “Some truths are best kept secret from loved ones.”

Then Esme shrugged and laughed, and Solon laughed and
lit another cigarette, and Eureka saw everything clearly and completely: no one had any idea what was going on. If there was a system or a meaning to the magic around them, no one knew what it was. Eureka would have to take matters into her own hands.

A shadow shifted in the back of the cave and Eureka heard a sniff. Cat poked her head out from behind the tapestry separating the guest room. Eureka knew they were still in a fight, that things between them would never be the same, but her body moved to be with Cat before her mind could stop her.

“What are they doing here?” Cat asked.

The witches flicked their tongues and turned to Solon. “We did not receive our payment yesterday,” Esme said. “We require triple wings today.”

“Triple wings.” Solon laughed. “It can’t be done. The bugs have bugged out.”

“What did you say?” Esme’s forked tongue hissed. Her bees paused in their busy circles to tremble in the air.

“I was raided yesterday,” Solon said. “I lost nearly everything. The butterfly room, the hatchery—gone.” He pulled a small velvet pouch from his robe pocket. “I can offer you this. Two grams of orchid petals in your favorite color.”

“This trifle does not aid us in our mission,” the middle witch said.

The old witch glared at Solon through a monocle, her
amber eye huge and distorted behind the glass. “We cannot go home without more wings!”

Esme raised her hand to quiet the others. “We will take the robot.”

Solon let out a sudden laugh that became a ragged smoker’s cough. “Ovid is not collateral.”

“Everything is collateral,” the old witch said. “Innocence, afterlives, even nightmares.”

“Tell it to the judge.” Cat had slipped away from Eureka to stand in front of Esme. “ ’Cause the robot stays with us.”

The girl-witch raised an eyebrow. She seemed to be preparing to do something terrifying. But Eureka had driven Cat to karate lessons. She’d watched Cat’s fists make both of mean Carrie Marchaux’s eyes black. She recognized Cat’s expression when she was about to whale on someone.

Cat’s left leg snapped up. Her bare foot connected with the witch’s jaw. Esme’s neck twisted to the side and four shiny white teeth shot from her mouth. They clattered across the floor like loose mosaic tiles. The blood that dribbled from the witch’s lips matched her amethyst gown. She wiped the corner of her mouth.

“That was for the Poet,” Cat said.

Esme smiled a wicked, toothless smile. She flicked her forked tongue, and every bee in the cave swarmed around her head. She flicked her tongue again. The bees dispersed, flowing as a team over the cave floor, retrieving each of her
teeth. She threw her head back and opened her mouth wide. The bees entered her mouth and placed the teeth back in the blood-wet grooves in her gums. She turned to her companions and giggled.

“If the girl gets this incensed over a silly boy, imagine when she finds out that her whole family”—Esme turned to Cat, spitting purple blood as she hissed the words—“is rotting on the putrid New Shores of Arkansas.”

Cat tackled Esme. Bees stung her arms and face, but she didn’t seem to notice. She had the witch in a choke hold, until Esme snapped her neck free. Cat tore at the gossipwitch’s hair as bees crawled up her hands, her fingers trolling the back of Esme’s head. Then she paused as disgust filled her face. “What the—”

“Control your impudent friend, Eureka!” Esme shouted, and struggled to untangle herself from Cat. “Or you will all regret it.”

Cat thrust the witch’s head down toward her chest.

Where the back of Esme’s skull should have been was an amethyst-colored void, at the center of which a single monarch butterfly flew furiously in place.

This explained the gossipwitches’ endless appetite for winged creatures. This was how they flew.

Cat plucked the butterfly from the void in Esme’s head. Its wings beat just once more between her fingers; then the insect curled up and died.

Esme roared and flung Cat off her. The other gossipwitches gaped in horror at the back of her empty head. They touched the backs of their own heads, checking to make sure everything was still intact.

Bees flocked to Esme’s fist, coating it like a glove. She towered over Cat, grabbed the back of her head, and punched the base of Cat’s skull with her bee-bound fist.

Pain exploded in Cat’s eyes. She screamed a brutal scream.

Eureka shoved Esme aside and swatted at the bees on Cat’s scalp, but they wouldn’t fly away. She tried to pick them out of Cat’s hair. They stung her hands and would not budge. They were a part of the base of Cat’s skull now, swarming the back of her head, stinging and re-stinging endlessly.

Esme staggered backward to rejoin the other witches. She was out of breath. “If you will carry Ovid as far as the threshold, we will take him from there.”

“The only thing you’re getting is out of here,” Eureka said.

“Be gone!” Solon said, taking courage from Eureka’s stand. “I’ve wanted to say that to you bitches for so long.”

“You’re not thinking, Solon,” the middle witch said. She and the old witch were supporting Esme, who looked faint. “Remember what happens when you can’t afford our glaze.…”

“Nothing lasts forever,” Solon said, and winked at Eureka.

“All your little enemies will find you,” the old witch said. “The big one will find you, too.”

“Solon,” Ander said, “if you let them drop the glaze—”

“Are the bad people coming back?” William leaned on Eureka. She hated that she could feel his rib cage through his shirt.

“Don’t cry,” she whispered automatically as she tended to Cat’s scalp. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

It was too late. William’s tears fell on her shoulders, on her cheeks. Their innocence was startling, a sparkling jewel in the black rift. She changed her mind.

“Cry,” she said. “Cry it all out on me.”

William did.

“We will give you until midnight to change your mind,” the old witch said. “Then the glaze is gone.”

Solon stamped out his cigarette. He walked to where Cat whimpered woozily in Eureka’s arms. He kissed Cat’s cheek.

“As you wish.” Rage surged beneath the surface of Esme’s weakened voice. The other two witches flicked their tongues and four bees slowly returned to orbit their heads. The rest remained with Cat.

Carrying their crippled companion, the old and older gossipwitches lumbered back through the long, dark hall of skulls.

A
round dusk, Eureka and Ander stood at the edge of the veranda and looked down at the Tearline pond. Solon had retreated to his workshop with Ovid, and the twins and Cat were resting in the guest room. Cat said the throb in her skull had dwindled to the level of a migraine. She barely felt the constant stings anymore; that pain was easier to bear than knowing what had happened to her family.

“Maybe it was just gossip,” Ander had said, but they all sensed that the witches spoke the truth.

They had divvied up the last of the food—two small apples, a few gulps of water, the dregs of a box of muesli. After Eureka ate, hunger churned in her more fiercely than before. Her body was weak, her mind cloudy. She had not slept since waking
from her nightmare of drowning in the wasted dead. Six nights remained until the full moon—if they even survived that long.

The rain had fallen for so long she didn’t feel it anymore. It had become as regular as air. She leaned over the veranda’s railing, touched Ander’s back so that he leaned over, too. Two blurry shapes looked up from the surface of the pond.

“You didn’t disappear just because you weren’t there in the Glimmering,” she said. “And I …”

“You’re not the face you saw, either?” Ander asked.

“I went to high school with that girl,” Eureka said. “Maya Cayce. We hated each other. We competed over everything. When we were young we used to be friends. Why would I see her in my reflection?”

“Somewhere all of this makes sense.” Ander’s fingers lightly traced her neck. “The question is: do we survive the journey there?”

Eureka turned from the reflection to the real. Her hands slid up Ander’s chest, her fingers twined around his neck—and she knew she shouldn’t. Her hands had murdered yesterday. They were out of food. The glaze would be gone by midnight.

“I wish we could stop everything and stand here forever.”

“Love can’t be stopped, any more than time,” Ander said softly.

“You’re talking like love and time aren’t connected,” Eureka said. “For you, they’re the same thing.”

“Some people measure time by how they fill it. Childhood is time, high school is time.” He touched her lips with a fingertip. “You have always been my time.”

“I would puke,” a voice said behind Ander, “but it might attract starving locals.”

Someone stepped from the shadows of the cherry tree. The witches must have dropped their glaze early. He had found them.

“Brooks,” Eureka said.

“Atlas.” Ander lurched forward. So did Brooks. Eureka was caught in the middle, both of their bodies against hers.

They would fight now. They would try to kill each other.

“Get out of here,” Eureka said quickly to Brooks.

“I think he’s the one who should get out,” Brooks said to Ander.

Ander’s lip curled in disgust. “You’re going to lose.”

Brooks’s face became a gruesome flash of rage. “I’ve already won.”

Ander drew the long orichalcum spear from its sheath at his hip. “Not if I slaughter that body before your world can rise.”

“Ander, no!” Eureka spun so that her body shielded Brooks. For a moment she felt the familiar heat of his chest. “I won’t let you.”

“Yes, please, Eureka, save me,” Brooks said. Then he lunged forward with all his might and sent Eureka tumbling. When Ander bent to check on her, Brooks rammed him hard. He grappled for the spear.

Ander’s back arched over the veranda’s rail. He couldn’t right himself. He grabbed hold of Brooks’s forearm and took him down with him. Eureka tried to stop them, but they were already gone.

She ran to the edge of the veranda. The spear had slipped from Ander’s hands and out of Brooks’s reach, too. The boys clutched each other and swung desperate fists as they tumbled through the air, each blow missing its mark, forced into truce by chaos and gravity. Then they splashed through the surface of the Tearline pond.

During the stillness that followed, Eureka couldn’t help imagining that both boys had disappeared from her life forever, that love was gone, that it was easier that way.