Alexander's Army

  She stood up slowly and held me by the shoulders. “Look up. Let me see your eyes.”

  They were filming with tears. And she knew, because of that, she didn’t need to quiz me anymore. “This is an outrage,” she whispered. “They can’t suspend you without proof of involvement. Besides, you love your books. You’re one of Mrs. Rowley’s favorites. Why would you ever do a thing like that? Right, I’m taking you to school a bit earlier tomorrow and we’ll have this out in Mr. Solomon’s office.”

  “No, Mom.”

  She flapped the letter. “We have to stand up for what’s right, Michael.”

  “I can’t … Please. I just … Please, Mom, I can’t.”

  “Shush,” she said soothingly, stroking my face. “All right, we’ll leave it be for now. But I shall write to Mr. Solomon. I’d only end up shoving him through a window if I lost my temper in his office. Then where would we be?”

  On the front page of the Holton Post. Pity. I’d have given my yearly allowance to see Mom lay a punch on Solomon’s chin. I picked up my schoolbag. “Gonna get changed.”

  “Just a minute. What’s this?” She pulled down my collar.

  Freya’s scratch. It was the first time Mom had seen it. I’d forgotten I was supposed to be hiding it. I felt for the bandage; it was still in place. “It’s nothing …”

  “Mich-ael?” She was on her guard again. “Have you been fighting?”

  “Only with … a tree.” I made a cutting movement with my finger. “Branch.”

  “At school?”

  Oops. There were trees at school, but climbing them was strictly forbidden. I could be digging myself into a hole, here. “Erm …”

  “Only … this bandage. It’s not the type I normally buy.”

  I shrugged. And, thankfully, she let it drop. Phew. She headed for the kitchen, saying, “You will work over these two days, won’t you?”

  “Course,” I said. I had plenty of “homework” in the envelope the Bulldog had given me.

  “By the way, what did Josie want, do you know?”

  On cue, Josie came into the living room. “Huh, you’re still here, then?”

  I flicked her arm.

  “Ow! Bully.”

  She came at me with punches I easily deflected. “Mom wants to know what you wanted her for.”

  “Oh, yeah.” End of fight. She turned on her heels and swept into the kitchen.

  I heard only parts of their conversation, which mostly consisted of Josie saying Pleeze and Mom replying Devon?

  When it was over, Josie skipped back into the living room, beating her fists and whooping, “Yes!”

  Well done, Agent Chantelle. One sister, perfectly glamoured.

  I read the pages on Devon Winters. Just three, laid out in detailed sections. Devon was my sister’s newest best friend. Not long in school. Clever. Musical. Everything Josie loved on TV or liked about bands or styles of clothing, Devon liked, too. Separated at birth, Chantelle had written, which was a good way to remember it. As far as Josie was concerned, Devon had no connection with me, and we were not to discuss the writing competition in front of her (or Mom). But for the purposes of our mission, Devon had seen me reading comics at school and asked what I was drawing. This had led to our collaboration on Crow Girl.

  I read the whole thing five times, memorized it, and shredded it.

  I was in my room when they came in from school. Keep a low profile was also in the notes. It wasn’t long before Josie came thumping up the stairs, saying, “I’ve got this really great top you can try. It’ll totally go with your eyes.”

  I took a breath and stepped out of my room, deliberately turning away from them, toward the bathroom.

  “Oh, that’s Michael,” Josie said. “He’s suspended for wrecking the school fountain.”

  “Really?” I heard Devon say. Her voice. Freya’s voice. It lanced my heart.

  I turned around and gave them the big-brother glare.

  “Don’t be fooled,” Josie said. “He’s a total wimp.” She took Devon’s hand and pulled her away.

  We managed one quick glance. Hi, I mouthed.

  Hi, she mouthed back.

  The change was uncanny. Makeover hardly began to describe it. Her face was still pale, but then so was Josie’s. There was only one thing Chantelle couldn’t hide and that was the power of Freya’s stare. It was there, just behind the pale blue lenses. The glower of the crow. The undead girl.

  For the first time in days, I felt an itch on one side of my neck.

  Freya played it to perfection. Slightly silly, slightly loud, and never pausing for more than ten seconds before saying something slightly inane. Josie was enraptured. It was a good thing I knew it was all an act or “Devon” would have been at the top of my list of irritating little girls to avoid.

  Mom, like me, was faintly overwhelmed. I carried some dishes into the kitchen after dinner and she whispered, “Goodness, that pair can yap. How do they keep it up? I’m sure I wasn’t like that at their age. Devon is a sweet girl, though. Older than her years. Quite savvy, really. In a funny way, she —”

  “She what?” I asked. It wasn’t like Mom to break off her sentences.

  “Oh, nothing. Here, dry for me, will you?” She offered me a dish towel.

  Which I gladly took. Any excuse to stay clear of the ten-best-boy-bands-ever discussion going on in the living room. I picked up a cup. “What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. Just a silly thought.” She looked out into the garden, lit gold by a low sun filtered through clouds. “How did you do today?”

  “Mo-om?” I gave her my best hard stare.

  She pulled on a pair of yellow gloves and paddled the dishwater into suds. “All right, but promise me you won’t be upset?”

  “I promise.”

  She held her breath for a second. “Devon reminds me a little bit of Freya.”

  My tongue could not have turned drier if I’d stuffed the whole dish towel into my mouth.

  Mom saw my shock and immediately went into flappy-hand mode, spraying the plants on the windowsill with suds. “Ohhh, I knew I shouldn’t have said that. Let’s change the subject to something more cheerful. Let’s talk about … soccer, eh?”

  “Mom, you hate soccer. Why do you think she’s like Freya?” Mom’s logic would never let her mind accept that it really was Freya beneath the disguise; all the same it was worrying that she’d made the connection. I glanced nervously into the living room. The girls had reached the top three of their boy band list.

  “I’m not sure,” Mom said. “Her voice, a little. But more her wit. I know they’re basically talking nonsense, but if you separate them out, Devon is a bit ahead of Josie — just like Freya was that time she came for tea. I liked that about her. She was a very smart girl.”

  Yes, she was. I put the cup down.

  “Oh, this is getting worse,” Mom tutted. For once, because her gloves were wet, she couldn’t hug me as she liked. But it didn’t stop her planting her wrists on my shoulders and unloading the big-eyed sympathy gaze. “Sorry, Michael.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Really.” I gently shrugged her off.

  At that moment, Josie popped her head around the door. “Me and Devon are going upstairs to make her bed.”

  “All right,” Mom said, quickly calling after her, “Josie, if Devon needs more pillows, there are some in the linen closet.”

  “Where?” came a distant voice from the stairs.

  “The LINEN closet! Do you know how to use the pump for the airbed?”

  “The what?”

  “The — Oh, never mind. I’ll come.” Mom peeled off her gloves. She was almost out of the kitchen when she checked back and took something off the fridge door, an envelope clamped by a magnetic penguin. “What’s the rule about pockets?”

  “Pockets?”

  “If you drop a jacket on your bedroom floor, you want it washed, right?”

  “Um … yeah.”

  “So what’s the rule about
pockets?”

  I rolled out the line. “Empty them first.”

  She pressed the envelope to my chest and put the magnet back. “In my experience, letters read better if they haven’t been through a spin cycle of twelve hundred revolutions a minute.”

  She hurried out.

  Tutting, I tore open the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper. On the paper was some printed text. All around the text were drawings of soldiers. Faceless soldiers, like on the Tommy cards. I fell back against the fridge when I saw the first line.

  Alexander liked to draw.

  So it was Alexander who’d put the envelope through my door. He had sent me a story. Or what looked like a story. I felt weak and sank down on a stool to read it.

  Alexander liked to draw. It was something he had always done from the moment he could remember picking up a pencil. He began with Mommy and Daddy, in a funny house with wobbly windows and a pigtail of smoke curling out of the chimney. There were flowers in the garden, and a spiky yellow sun in the sky. And there was Dexy, the big black Labrador, chasing a ball up the street. Sometimes, Alexander drew good things, like the time when Dexy delivered five puppies into a basket in the corner of the kitchen. And sometimes he drew bad things, like the time when Mommy and Daddy argued. Then his pictures were of dinner plates smashing against walls. Daddy with his mouth wide open, shouting. Dexy hiding underneath a chair. But then Daddy went away to join an army, to fight in a foreign war. There was quiet then. A fragile peace. Mother — she didn’t like to be “Mommy” — cooked for Alexander, tidied up for him, and talked to herself all day. Dexy regrew her missing fur, which was caused by stress, said Dr. Sammons, the vet. And Alexander continued to draw. He sketched and he sketched. On anything he could find. But now his pictures were not of funny houses. He drew what was not there. What lay behind his eyes. He drew what could not be seen. He drew his father.

  I shuddered and folded the story away. Then I leaned into the sink and heaved. I slid down onto the floor with the acid taste of vomit in my mouth. I couldn’t decide what had scared me most: the weirdness of the story or the fact that Alexander wanted me to read it or that he somehow knew my name. But I quickly realized it was none of these things. What really clawed at my nerves was that me and this madman had something in common.

  We had both gone through a family trauma.

  A trauma that had left us with an absent father.

  I didn’t have a chance to show the piece to Freya. I saw her only once more before she and Josie went to bed. She was wearing Josie’s spare bathrobe and had a hot water bottle under one arm, a teddy bear under the other. They’d braided each other’s hair. Weird. “Night,” I said. “Sleep well … Devon.”

  No discussion about what we would do if “the Boffin” turned up in the middle of the night. No mention of the comic she was supposed to have written. And despite the fact I’d checked my phone a dozen times, no instructions from Klimt, either. Too bad. I was tired. I let it go. Within an hour, I was in bed myself.

  But I couldn’t sleep.

  The night was still. No rain. A faint breeze.

  The usual shadows.

  I just couldn’t sleep.

  At 2:39 a.m., I threw back the sheets and sat for a minute on the side of my bed. The house was silent. All I could hear was the tick of my clock.

  I went to the window and peered out carefully. No crows. No one under the streetlamp. No flying pencils.

  No Alexander.

  But there was still Freya.

  I crept along the landing to Josie’s room, my heartbeats louder than my barefoot steps.

  The door was slightly open.

  Gently, I opened it a little wider.

  Josie was in bed, her cute little face to the wall, asleep. But the bed on the floor, Freya’s airbed, was empty.

  In the silence of the night, I heard my heart thump.

  I moved along the landing with a growing sense of urgency. The bathroom door was also ajar. I listened, but Freya wasn’t there.

  Maybe, I told myself, she’d gone downstairs for a glass of water.

  Maybe she sleepwalked.

  Or maybe she’d flown.

  I slipped by Mom’s room and took the stairs on tiptoe, checking the front door as I passed.

  Locked.

  She wasn’t in the living room. She wasn’t in the kitchen. The back door was chained and bolted. That left one more room to check.

  Dad’s old study.

  I turned the handle as if I were defusing a bomb, so silent a cat would not have stirred. Dad’s room, like mine, often filled with moonlight. His green leather chair was the first thing I saw, high-backed, turned toward the alcove desk. This, I was sure, would be where I’d find Freya, curled up in a ball or nesting like a crow.

  I put my hand on the chair and turned it.

  Empty.

  “Looking for me?”

  “Jeez!” I nearly broke the high-jump record.

  She was behind me in the shadows at ground level, a glint of silver along one shin. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing a simple nightgown.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “What are you?” she replied.

  “If Mom wakes up, she’ll —”

  “Your mom’s not gonna wake up,” she cut in.

  Another missed beat. “If you’ve done anything —”

  “Like what, Michael?”

  The lack of trust hovered like dust motes in the moonlight.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  “No. It’s too risky. Go back to bed.”

  “What for? I don’t sleep now. I never sleep. I have you to thank for that.”

  I slapped my hands to my head. This was so not a good idea. Why had Klimt ever sanctioned this?

  She took hold of her ankle and pulled one foot in tighter to her body. “Why don’t you stop being a drama queen and sit down and talk to me?”

  “This was my dad’s old room,” I snapped, making it sound like she’d broken a rule by even daring to ruffle the carpet.

  “I know,” she said plainly.

  “Josie told you?”

  “She didn’t need to. I can feel your dad’s auma.”

  “His what?”

  “Auma. It’s an Inuit word for fire, but in my world, we use it to describe someone’s life force. It’s all over the house, but it’s strongest in here.” Her gaze panned the ceiling.

  Okay. Now she had my attention. I dropped to her level and knelt on the floor. “Seriously? You think Dad haunts this place?”

  “No. That’s way too simple. It’s more like I hear his consciousness knocking, as if he’s tapping on the wrong side of frosted glass.” She swiveled her eyes to focus on a single point behind me.

  I looked over my shoulder. Her gaze had come to rest on the alcove wall. “The print? What about it?”

  “Something’s drawing me to it.”

  “Like what?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know. Go and look.”

  Sighing, I stood up and switched on the desk light. It burned with a smell of ancient dust. I looked over The Tree of Life, remembering how Klimt had been moved when he saw it. It was such a peculiar, dreamlike picture. So many whirling, twisting branches. That single black bird, so prominent among them.

  “Take it off the wall,” Freya said darkly.

  “What for?”

  “Just do it, Michael.”

  She sounded croaky. Crowlike. Scary. So much for Preeve and his wonder gas. Fearful of what might happen if I didn’t, I put my hands around the frame and lifted the picture clear of its hook. For one moment, I thought it might be hiding a safe. But all it revealed was a brighter rectangle of the wallpaper pattern.

  “Bring it closer,” said Freya.

  “Why? There’s nothing here. It’s just a stupid picture.”

  But I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. As I thrust it toward her, an envelope dropped off the back of the frame and lan
ded on the seat of the green leather chair.

  I stared at it for two or three seconds before resting the print against the alcove wall. I opened the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. Inside was a square of folded paper. On it was a handwritten message:

  In New Mexico: Dragons abound

  I almost gagged as I read it. And yet a more startling discovery awaited me. For the envelope, and therefore the message it contained, was not addressed to me or anyone in my family. Indented on the front, in fading pencil, were two letters, L and N. I knew only one person with those initials.

  Liam Nolan.

  Rafferty’s father.

  The man who helped UNICORNE with medical issues.

  Dad’s doctor.

  My knees gave way and I sank into the chair. In the space of just a few hours, I’d had a message from a lunatic and now one from Dad.

  I couldn’t stop shaking as I read it aloud.

  Freya didn’t respond.

  I gave it half a second and looked over my shoulder. She was no longer in the room. But on the floor where she’d been sitting was what looked like a comic.

  Our comic.

  I told myself I should probably go after her. But I couldn’t find the will to get out of the chair. I read the message three times over, just to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. Dragons. New Mexico. Liam Nolan. Then I picked up the comic and took it to the desk. And I sat in my father’s green office chair, trying to make sense of all that was happening, and read the story of the Amazing Crow Girl and the Unicorn Boy.

  It was short, just two pages long, mapped out in squares of varying sizes. Scratchy drawings. Tortured. Stark. In pencil, mostly, with the odd dash of color.

  It told the story of how Unicorn Boy, eager to possess the power of flight, had lured a hostile crow to his cave by crying in the voice of a dying dragon. Trapping the bird in a nest of promises, he cut off its wings with the horn he had stolen from an evil unicorn. Only then did he see that the crow, now slain, had changed into a beautiful dark-haired girl. She lay dead in his arms, her mauve heart glowing through the skin of her breast. What have I done? the boy asked himself. And laying the girl on a grave marked only by a wooden cross, he kissed her forehead and turned the wicked horn on himself, pressing the point against his own dark heart, unaware that the girl’s heart was beating again….