I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t what I found. Conn was sitting on the back porch without a coat on. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night, as if the moment he’d woken up and discovered I wasn’t there he had walked right out of the apartment to wait.
To wait for me.
Conn’s face looked fragile, like something that might break. And when I saw that, something broke inside of me, and I almost appeared, almost called to him.
I caught myself. His expression might have had nothing to do with me.
And if it did?
He wouldn’t look that way if he knew what my past really held.
I glided toward a tree, and as the sun slipped down the sky my shadow mingled with the ones thrown by a network of branches. I waited, and he waited, and I wondered if he somehow knew I was there, breaking my promise never to spy on him again.
At dusk, when all the shadows had blended into darkness, he burst from the porch in a furious movement. He leaped down the steps and stalked across the snow to the street. Then down the street and around a corner.
He was gone. He had given up.
I told myself that this was a good thing.
I slipped into his apartment, and the scent of it knocked me back into my body. Turpentine. Basil. And Conn.
I wobbled on my feet and caught my breath.
I didn’t want to stand on his wooden floor, to feel and hear the creaks echoing the ones we’d made last night as our feet found their way to his bed. I didn’t want to see the undone blankets. I didn’t want to climb inside them, touch his pillow, and press my face against it.
But the universe didn’t seem to really care about what I wanted.
I forced myself not to look at the painting in the center of the room—I’d never finish it now—and went into the kitchen for the pad of paper Conn had used last night to write down Kellford’s address. I tore off a sheet. Every word hurt to write, because they were the last words I would say to him, so I wrote as few as possible.
I think Meridian’s attack will take place near Cecil Deacon’s home. I’m not part of their plans anymore, so they’ll probably send Veldt and Loam to cause a panic that will herd humans into danger.
Convince Director Fitzgerald and the mayor to cancel any New Year’s Eve celebrations. Impose a curfew. It’s the only thing you can do, because Meridian’s counting on thousands of people being in the streets.
Please do it. They want to kill you, too.
Be careful.
Goodbye,
Darcy
I folded the sheet of paper and set it on the bar. Then I left.
* * *
FOR DAYS, I stayed a ghost. It was weird to think that every hour I remained like this was another hour padded onto my life, but that was definitely the lesser of two evils. The greater evil would have been to have a body that made me really feel, made my heart cramp in pain and my stomach clench with guilt.
You can’t cry if you don’t have any tears, or eyes, or lungs.
One downside of ghosthood, though, was that I never got tired, and every time night came I couldn’t help wondering if Conn was sleepless, too.
When Thursday dawned, I had had enough. Why was I lingering in this world, anyway? There was nothing for me here but bad memories, and I’d done what I could to help the IBI. As for Conn …
Conn would be all right. I couldn’t contemplate any other possibility.
I floated north over Lake Michigan, then picked up speed when I reached what in the Alter was Lincoln Park, and what in this world was another cemetery. I darted through the graves, looking for the mausoleum that had taken me to the Alter and would take me there again, to whatever kind of life I’d have there.
When I saw uniformed IBI agents standing in front of one of those small, stone mausoleums, I knew I had found the portal.
And I found something else there, too.
Someone else.
A girl, flirting with one of the guards.
A brown-haired girl, tall and radiating sexiness, even though her body was completely swaddled in a camel hair coat.
It was Taylor Allen.
I nearly went solid with shock. “Taylor? What are you doing here?”
42
Taylor screamed.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, remembering that it is a little scary to hear disembodied voices. I manifested.
The guards screamed.
“Argh!” I ghosted again.
The guards kept yelling and fumbled for their flamethrowers, one of them smacking into another, Three Stooges style. None of them looked older than me, and I felt a burst of thankfulness that this portal seemed to be a kind of training ground for rookie agents.
Then they switched on their flamethrowers, and I stopped feeling so grateful. I just had to hope that none of them was primed to see my shadow.
“Taylor,” I hissed in her ear. “It’s me, Darcy Jones.”
“I know,” she snapped.
“What?” One of the guards swiveled to look at her.
She gave a short, irritated sigh. In a quavering voice, she wailed, “I know the IBI will protect me!”
“Don’t worry,” said the guard. “You’re safe with us.”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the flames, and my shadow began to tremble. I had to get out of there or I would go solid. I whispered again in Taylor’s ear, “Cover for me, please. I’ll explain everything later. Tell them you see me somewhere else, okay? Then walk away—slowly, so they don’t think anything’s weird. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Oh, joy,” she muttered through gritted teeth. Then she surprised me by doing exactly what I’d said. “There!” she shouted to the guards, and pointed. “I saw her behind that tree!”
They took off running, and she sauntered in the other direction, toward the cemetery gate. I floated after her. “Thanks, Taylor.”
“Stop doing that! I will not have a conversation with someone I can’t even see.”
“It’s safer this way. Listen, I know this will be hard for you to understand, but I’m—”
“I know exactly what you are.”
“You … do? But how? And how did you get here? Why are you here?”
“If you want answers you’ll have to follow me home, and you will not—I repeat—will not talk to me until we get there, because I don’t relish the thought of everyone in public seeing me babble at myself like some straitjacket asylum psycho. Got it?”
I hovered and glanced back at the unguarded portal.
Taylor kept walking. “You’d better be behind me,” she called.
In a second, I was.
I followed her into the subway, where Taylor seemed to have no trouble finding her stop, if only because she laid a mittened hand on the arm of a college-age boy and purred, “Will you please tell me when we reach Old Town?”
Taylor’s trim, heeled boots rapped confidently down the streets of Old Town as if she owned all the luxury around her: the gorgeous Victorian brownstones, the intricate weavings of wrought-iron fences, the sidewalks meticulously swept clean of snow. My curiosity spiked when she took a key from her alligator skin clutch and walked up a stone front porch. She entered the mirrored vestibule, shaking snow from her coat.
“So, Taylor—”
“Later.” She opened her clutch, plucked out a lipstick, and began to apply, peering at one of the mirrors. Then she snapped her purse shut and walked up the gleaming wooden staircase, past numbered apartment doors. She flung open the door on the third floor and stepped into a living room with eleven-foot ceilings and elegant furniture, including deep armchairs and a high-backed sofa turned tastefully away from the entrance.
“Guess who I found,” Taylor sang.
A disheveled head popped up from behind the sofa’s back. “You didn’t!”
It was Jims.
I manifested. “Jims?” I breathed.
“Darcy!” He sprang up and over the sofa, and spread his arms wide. “You crazy Sha
de, you. Come over here and give ol’ Jims some sugar.”
43
I ran to him. I couldn’t believe I had ever forgotten, even for a few days, how good it is, how important it is, to have arms to hold someone tight.
“Um,” Jims wheezed. “I love you, too. I also love breathing.”
I felt something press against my cheek and pulled away. I reached into Jims’s suit jacket (Jims was wearing a suit?) and plucked a stick of beef jerky out of his inside pocket. I laughed. “Even in another dimension, you still managed to find this?”
“It’s not a Slim Jim,” he said, “but it is teriyaki flavored, with enough MSG to grow me a third arm.” He snatched it back and peeled open the plastic wrapper. “Delish.”
I heard doors slam and feet bounding down a hall. Raphael burst into the living room, with Lily right behind him. Raphael reached me first, swinging me into the air with his strong arms, murmuring something in Spanish that I hoped meant he’d never let me go.
“Hey, man.” Jims poked Raphael in the shoulder and nodded at Lily.
Raphael set me down.
Lily was standing there, stock-still, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Then her hands slowly unclenched and lifted to cover her face. Her shoulders shook.
She was crying.
“No.” I hugged her. “Lily, don’t.” I smoothed a hand over her hair—which, for once, wasn’t dyed. It was her natural black. It occurred to me that maybe I had seen her, that day I biked to the library. And that if I’d stopped and let myself believe the impossible, I would have found my friends so much earlier. Lily lifted her face, and I saw she hadn’t lost her love for blue mascara. I wiped away her blue tears.
“We were so worried,” she whispered.
“I wasn’t,” said Taylor.
There was a silence as we watched Taylor nonchalantly throw off her coat and settle into an armchair. Finally, she noticed our stares. “What?” Taylor said. “She’s a Shade. She can’t get hurt.”
Jims narrowed his eyes. “You seem to have forgotten some of the finer details of Shade biology.”
“You really know.” I looked around the room. “All of you.”
Raphael nodded.
“Have you always known? About me? About this world?” My thoughts got very jumbly. “Am I the last one to find out about what I am?”
“It’s not like that,” said Lily.
“We figured it out once we got here,” said Raphael.
“Which is when? And how? And…” I looked at Taylor. “Why is she here?”
“Thanks a whole bunch,” she said.
Lily glanced at her. “We needed the ride,” she told me with a shrug.
“Somebody please explain,” I begged.
Lily began. “When you called me after Conn attacked you, and we got cut off, I ran across the yard to Jims’s place and hauled him out of his cave.”
“Interrupting an intense online gaming session, I might add.” Jims glanced at me, then threw up his hands defensively. “Which I totally did not mind, under the circumstances.”
“Then we called Raphael and told him to meet us at Marsha’s.”
“Now that you’re safe,” Jims asked me, “can I say how impressed I was by the damage? It was a wreck.”
“Marsha was a wreck,” said Lily.
“I got there around the same time as the police,” said Raphael. “Who were oh-so-helpful.”
“Jerks,” said Lily.
“They made a call and discovered that Conn had no registered address, or record of birth, or social security number, or anything that would indicate he actually existed,” Raphael continued. “And even though you’d think they’d think this was worth investigating, they kept telling Marsha there was nothing they could do until you’d been missing for at least twenty-four hours. That’s when Lily began screaming at them.”
“And Raphael looked like he’d punch someone,” Lily added.
“And Jims told Mr. Officer of the Law where he could put his nightstick,” said Jims.
“That snapped Marsha out of it,” said Raphael. “She began soothing ruffled feathers. She buttered up the police officers until they cared at least ten percent more than the zero they started out at. They agreed to drive her to the station so she could file a report, and we said we’d stay at her place in case you came back. Since the cops couldn’t be bothered to do their job, once they’d left with Marsha we searched the house for clues.”
“Anything,” said Lily. “Anything that might tell us where Conn might have taken you, or at least where he’d come from.”
“In your bedroom, we found this.” Jims pulled a small, leather-covered rectangle out of his jacket pocket.
I took it. It was an ID card with a holographic image of Conn framed by a metallic raised crest. Interdimensional Bureau of Investigation, it read. Below Conn’s photograph were his name and the words Agent, First Class. “His badge,” I said. “I remember … when he first brought me into the IBI, they gave him a hard time for losing this.”
Raphael said, “When Jims saw the badge, he went wild. He kept claiming that it explained everything. He was like, ‘I knew it! I knew there were other dimensions!’”
“They thought I was completely crazy,” said Jims.
Taylor sniffed. “Like he’s not.”
“Then Lily found your sketchbook on the living room floor,” said Raphael.
Lily shifted uncomfortably. “I know that’s private,” she said to me, “and please believe that normally I’d never look in it without asking you, but I couldn’t help remembering how edgy you’d seemed when you talked about your latest sketches. How you kept drawing cityscapes that looked like Chicago but weren’t, and how it didn’t feel like you were inventing a new city, but that you were drawing from memory. As I looked through the sketchbook, I saw that you were right. The sketches did look like another version of Chicago.”
“And that made you believe Jims?” I asked.
“No,” said Lily. “I still thought he was crazy. But when I turned to the last sketch…”
“I recognized it,” said Raphael. He walked over to the fireplace, and I noticed my black sketchbook resting on the mantel. He returned with the book and flipped it open to the last sketch I’d drawn: the mausoleum. “After the Great Chicago Fire, the city began a wave of big civic projects, and focused on building Lincoln Park. There used to be a cemetery there … well, like the one here. In our world, Chicago officials convinced every family with someone buried in that cemetery to let the city move them somewhere else—every family, that is, except the Couches. This”—Raphael pointed at the sketch—“is the Couch Mausoleum. It’s famous.”
“So famous only Raphael had ever heard of it,” Jims drawled.
“It’s a piece of Chicago history,” Raphael shot back, then continued. “The Couch family got into a snit, said that no way would they ever move their dead. So the city built Lincoln Park anyway, around the mausoleum.”
“The Couches had to have known it was a portal,” said Jims. “I mean, some people back home must know about this world. It can’t be a secret from everyone.”
“Luckily,” said Lily, “Raphael knew what it was, even if he didn’t know what it could do. Thank God he recognized it.”
“It’s right by the Chicago History Museum,” he said. “I go there all the time.”
“You know,” said Taylor, “it’s really cliché for an immigrant to be obsessed with American history.”
“I am not an immigrant,” Raphael said. “My parents are immigrants.”
“Whatever.”
“Can we get to the part where somebody explains what Taylor’s doing here?” I said.
“Raphael”—Taylor glared at him—“called me to ask if I wanted to rehearse for Hamlet, and could I please pick him up at Darcy’s house?”
“If I’d told you what was really going on, you never would have come,” Raphael protested.
“I pulled up, and the three of them crammed into my ca
r, bullying me into driving around Lakebrook looking for you, as if I had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.”
I studied her with an unfamiliar curiosity. “But you did it.”
“Well…” Taylor looked down at her pink lacquered nails. “They were pretty upset.”
“We searched the neighborhood for hours,” Lily said, “but you were gone, and I could feel that you were gone. So we decided to drive to the Couch Mausoleum. I guess it was silly to think we’d find you there, but we couldn’t do nothing, and we didn’t know what you maybe hadn’t told us about the time you’d spent with Conn.”
“Remember when you ditched class?” said Jims.
“We thought it was possible that, at some point, you’d gone into the city with him, and had drawn the mausoleum from life. So maybe the place meant something to you, or to him, and maybe we’d at least find a clue about what had happened to you.”
“They were grasping at straws,” said Taylor.
“When we got downtown, everyone had gone silent. We parked at the Chicago History Museum and walked toward the mausoleum, and none of us could talk. Not even Jims.”
“That didn’t last long,” said Taylor. “As soon as we got to the mausoleum, Jims began babbling about its doorway, how it looked wavy around the edges. And then he said he could see through it, and that it looked like there was an entire cemetery inside the mausoleum.”
“Jims was primed,” I realized.
“Primed?” said Lily. “What do you mean? Like a canvas is primed?”
“Sort of. When we say a canvas is primed, we mean that it’s ready to be painted. Conn said—” I took a breath. It hurt to say his name out loud.
My friends had noticed how I’d paused over Conn’s name, and their faces hardened into cold masks.
Well, except Taylor. She still seemed mostly bored.
“Conn said that ‘primed’ is a psychology term,” I continued, “one that describes how the brain is able to accept information that on the surface seems insane, like the existence of an interdimensional portal, as long as it has been prepared—primed—for the possibility.”