A narrow column of swirling air formed over Eureka's head. It twisted faster, until a few raindrops faded and slowed ... and turned into snow. The column became thick with bright, feathery flakes that tumbled down and dusted Eureka's cheeks, her shoulders, her sneakers. Rain thundered against the rocks, splashing into the puddles all around them, but over her head the storm was an elegant blizzard. Eureka shivered, enthralled.
"Stay still," Ander whispered.
She felt goose bumps as hot tears cooled, then froze against her skin. She reached to touch one, but Ander's fingers covered hers. For a moment they held hands against her cheek.
He drew a spindle-shaped silver vial from his pocket. It looked like it had been crafted of the same orichalcum as the anchor. Carefully, he pulled the frozen tears from Eureka's face and dropped them into the vial, one by one.
"What is that?"
"A lachrymatory," he said. "Before the flood, when Atlantean soldiers went to war, their lovers made presents of their tears in vials like this." He placed the pointed silver lid atop the vial, slipped it into his pocket.
Eureka was jealous of anyone who could shed tears without deadly consequences. She would not cry again. She would make a lachrymatory in her mind where her frozen pain could live.
The snowflakes on her shoulders began to melt. Her wrist ached more deeply and miserably than before. The windy rain returned. Ander's hand brushed her cheek.
There now, she remembered him saying the first time they'd met, no more tears.
"How did you do that," she asked, "with the snow?"
"I borrowed a band of wind."
"Then why didn't you freeze my tears before I cried the first time? Why didn't someone stop me?"
Ander looked as haunted as Eureka had felt when she lost Diana. Outside of her own reflection, she had never seen anyone look so sad. It attracted her to him even more. She was desperate to touch him, to be touched--but Ander stiffened and turned away.
"I can move some things around to help, but I can't stop you. There is nothing in the universe half as strong as what you feel."
Eureka faced the girl in her half-dug grave. Her dead eyes were open, blue. Rain gave them vicarious tears.
"Why didn't you tell me how dangerous my feelings were?"
"There's a difference between power and danger. Your feelings are more powerful than anything in the world. But you shouldn't be afraid of them. Love is bigger than fear."
A high giggle made both of them jump.
Three women wearing amethyst-colored caftans stepped out from behind scrubby trees on the other side of the stream. Their garments were woven out of orchid petals. One was very old, one was middle-aged, and one looked young and crazy enough to have roamed the halls of Evangeline with Cat and Eureka. Their hair was long and lush, ranging from silver to black. Their eyes scoured Eureka and Ander. Swarms of buzzing bees made clouds in the air around their heads.
The youngest wore a silver necklace with a charm at the end that gleamed so brightly, Eureka couldn't make out what it was. The girl smiled and fingered the chain.
"Oh, Eureka," she said. "We've been waiting for you."
6
ENEMIES CLOSER
The women were so strange they were familiar, like dreaming of a future deja vu. But Eureka couldn't imagine where she would have seen anyone like them before. Then Madame Blavatsky's scratchy voice entered her mind, and she remembered sitting on the bayou behind her house at sunrise, listening to the sage old woman read from her translation of The Book of Love.
The muscles in Eureka's face tightened as she struggled to accept that she was experiencing something she had longed for as a child: characters from a book had come to life--and it was terrible. There was no way to flip ahead and reassure herself that this chapter would end happily. She knew no more than the hero of her story knew; she was the hero, and she was lost.
She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.
The women arched their black eyebrows.
"Go on," the middle-aged one goaded. "Say it." Her tongue was forked like a snake's.
"Gossipwitches," Eureka said in a tone more dramatic than she had intended.
In The Book of Love, the gossipwitches were ageless sorceresses who lived in the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. They were no one's confidants but knew everyone's secrets. They'd warned Selene that she and Leander might escape the island, but they would never escape Delphine's curse.
Doom decorates your hearts and will forevermore.
When Madame Blavatsky had translated that line, the word forevermore had clutched Eureka's heart. Selene was her ancestor; Leander was Ander's ancestor. Could the gossipwitches' ancient curse touch what Eureka and Ander felt for each other? Was there more to Eureka's ancestry than forbidden tears? Was love impossible, too?
"Gossipwitches!" the oldest woman hooted, and Eureka realized that all the witches' tongues were forked. The eldest one's black eyes were twinkly and enchanting, reminding Eureka of her grandmother Sugar's. It was easy to see how stunning the witch must have been in her youth. Eureka wondered how long ago that youth had been.
The old witch smacked her two companions' backs, sending raindrops flying from their orchid garments like fireworks. "The young are so attached to classifications!"
"I've heard stories about you," Ander said. "But I was taught that you belonged to the Sleeping World."
The young witch tilted her chin toward Ander, revealing the gleaming crystal charm in the perfect hollow of her neck. It was shaped like a teardrop. "And who are you, whose teachers are so boring?"
Ander cleared his throat. "I am a Seedbearer--"
"Are you?" She feigned intrigue, grabbing Ander's body with her greedy eyes and wrapping her gaze around him.
"Well, I was," Ander said.
"And what are you now?" The young witch narrowed her eyes.
He looked at Eureka. "I am a boy without a past."
"What's your name?" The mesmerizing murmur of the young witch's voice made Eureka dizzy.
"Ander. I was named after Leander."
"What are your names?" Eureka asked. If they were the aunts and cousins of Selene, as The Book of Love had said, then these women were Eureka's relatives and she shouldn't fear them.
The gossipwitches blinked as if they were queens and she had guessed their weight. Then they howled with exaggerated laughter. They bent over each other for support and stomped their pale feet in the mud.
The youngest one collected herself and dabbed the corners of her eyes with her petal sleeve. She leaned into Eureka's deaf ear:
"No one is ever what they seem. Especially you, Eureka."
Eureka pulled away and massaged her ear. She had heard the girl's voice with absolute clarity in the ear that heard so little else. She remembered hearing with her bad ear the lovely song of Madame Blavatsky's Abyssinian lovebird Polaris. That song had found her like a miracle. The gossipwitch's whisper landed like a telepathic punch, bruising something deep inside her.
"Your name means 'I have found it,' yet you've been lost your whole life." The eldest witch flicked her tongue into the cloud of bees, snatched one, twirled it on its stinger like a top, then released it back into the swarm.
"Never more than now." The middle witch's gaze circled their surroundings, then fell again on Eureka.
Slowly, they turned their heads to stare at the purple tote bag slung over Eureka's shoulder. Eureka palmed the damp canvas protectively. "We should get going."
The witches laughed.
"She thinks she's leaving!" the eldest witch cried.
"Reminds me of that song: 'She ain't goin' nowhere, she's just leavin',' " the middle witch sang.
"Come, Eureka," the young witch said. "You are lost, and we will lead you where you want to go."
"We're not lost," Ander said firmly.
"Of course you are." The eldest witch rolled her big dark eyes. "You think you can find the Bitter Cloud on your own?" She leaned in close and grasped Eureka
's broken wrist until Eureka yelped.
"Give her the salve," the old witch said impatiently.
From a deep pocket made of petals, the youngest witch withdrew a small glass bottle. A shimmery purple substance swirled inside. She tossed the bottle to Eureka, who scrambled to catch it.
"For your pain," she said. "Now come this way." She pointed across the muddy stream, toward a jagged mountain peak a hundred feet high.
Built into the cliff was a steep natural staircase leading up the mountain. Again, Eureka felt a puzzling impulse that this was the way to go. She glanced at Ander. He nodded subtly.
She unscrewed the cap from the bottle and gave the contents a sniff. The sweetly floral scent of jonquils entered her nose--followed by the throbbing sensation that her bone was shattering again.
"They'll want something in return," Ander whispered to Eureka.
"Let Solon worry about that." The witches laughed.
"Go ahead," the young witch said. "It will heal your bones. We'll wait."
Eureka splashed some of the purple liquid onto her palm. It was flecked with gold, like the nail polishes at her aunt Maureen's salon. She swirled a fingertip in the salve and rubbed it on a portion of her wrist.
Searing heat gripped her, and she felt immensely stupid for trusting the gossipwitches. But an instant later the heat subsided and a pleasant coolness washed over her, vanquishing the pain. The swelling shrank; the bruise faded where the salve had been, then disappeared. It was miraculous. Eureka spread more of the liquid over her wrist. She bore the heat, waiting for the cool relief and the pain it lifted like a layer of clothing. She closed her eyes and sighed. She tucked the bottle into her tote bag, eager to share the rest with Dad.
"Okay," she told the gossipwitches, "we'll follow you."
"No." The young witch shook her head and pointed to the staircase in the rock. "We'll follow you."
The path was steep and flooded. The clouds hung low, black as smoke from a house on fire. The witches guided Eureka and Ander through the lacework of delicate mountain peaks, always walking behind them, barking commands like "Left!" when the route forked unexpectedly, "Up!" when they were meant to scale a steep, slippery bluff, and "Duck!" when a half-dead snake slipped from a branch and cough-hissed at them as they passed. The middle witch yelled commands that Eureka didn't understand--"Ye!" and "Ha!" and "Roscoe Leroy!"
Every step took Eureka farther from her family and her friend. She imagined William and Claire peering at the mountain. She wondered how long before they gave up watching.
She entered a scattered forest of dying hazelnut trees. The leaves were turning brown and the shells of salt-crusted nuts crunched beneath Eureka's shoes. A spider's web dangled between two branches and swayed in the wind. Droplets clung to it like pearls a young nymph had abandoned in the woods.
"Eureka!"
She looked up and saw William and Claire cradled in the branches of a giant hazelnut tree. The twins hopped to the ground and splashed through the mud, running toward her. She didn't believe it was them, even when she had them in her arms. She closed her eyes and breathed in their scent, wanting to believe: it was ivory soap and starlight.
"How did you get here?"
The twins each took one of her hands. They wanted to show her something.
On the other side of the tree a long white object shimmered in the rain. Eureka approached it cautiously, but the twins laughed and pulled her harder. It was shaped like a hammock, but its fabric made it look more like a huge cocoon. Eureka studied it, amazed by what appeared to be a million iridescent moth wings woven together. The tiny, fragile pieces formed a massive bower that hovered in the air, floating on its own.
Inside the bower lay Eureka's father. A thin canopy of soft brown wings shielded his face from the rain. The sliced shoulder Eureka had bound in her shirt had been expertly redressed in a silky fuchsia gauze. A poultice of the same material was wrapped around the bruise on his forehead. He was awake. He reached for her hand and smiled.
"Good doctors on this side of town."
"How's the pain?" Eureka asked.
"A nice distraction." His eyes looked lucid but he spoke like he was dreaming.
She reached into her pocket, pressed the vial of salve into his hand. "This will help."
Beyond the moth-wing bower, three new gossipwitches huddled under another, sadder tree, murmuring to each other behind the backs of their hands. The witches who had led Ander and Eureka here flowed toward the others, kissing them on the cheeks and whispering as if they had years of news to catch up on.
"How many are there?" Eureka wondered.
Cat appeared at her side. "The freaky fairy godmothers showed up a few minutes after you left. I was like, 'Where are all my baby teeth you took?' Thanks for sending them down to help us."
"I didn't send them," Eureka said.
"One of them flicked her tongue in a hole in a tree," William said, "and a zillion bugs flew from it."
"The bugs made a big white diamond in the sky, then carried Dad up into the rain!" Claire added.
"These toddlers shit you not," Cat said.
"Dad can fly!" William said.
Cat reached for Eureka's thunderstone, studying its rain-reflective surface. "When they showed up on the beach, I knew they had something to do with you. It's like, somehow, you fit in more here than you ever did at Evangeline."
"And I thought I'd never find my clique," Eureka said dryly.
"I mean," Cat said, "you make sense where impossible things are possible. You're one of those impossible things." Cat held out an open hand to catch some rain. "Your powers are real."
Eureka looked back toward the gossipwitches, but they were gone. All that was left of them was a single orchid petal, glowing on the ground. "I wanted to thank them."
"Don't worry," a voice whispered in her deaf ear. It was the youngest gossipwitch, but she was nowhere Eureka could see. "Solon has a tab with us."
"Where do we go?" Ander shouted into the rain.
The witches' laughter shook the earth. Eureka felt something in her hand and looked down. A torch had appeared between her fingers. It had a long silver handle and widened into a broad fluted goblet near the top. A flame glowed from the goblet's center, unextinguished in the rain. Eureka gazed into the center of the torch, looking for the oil or coal that fueled its flame. Instead, she saw a little mound of glowing amethyst stones.
"You're welcome," the young witch's voice whispered in Eureka's deaf ear.
"Give Solon our worst!" the old one shouted.
There was more laughter, then silence, then rain.
Eureka paced the grove, looking for clues her new torch might illuminate. Just past the trunk of one of the trees she slammed into something hard. She rubbed her brow. Nothing unusual was visible before her--just more rotting, twisted trees. Yet she had walked into something as solid as a wall. She tried again, and slammed into it again, unable to take another step.
Ander traced the invisible force with his fingers. "It's wet. It feels like a cordon. It's real, I can feel it, but it isn't there."
"Guys." Claire waved from a few feet away. "Shouldn't we just use the door?"
Eureka squinted as something white blurred in the space in front of her sister. Claire rose on her toes to reach above her head, revisiting what seemed to be a tricky spot several times. At the edge of the grove, under the crooked elbow of a hazelnut branch, just past a flat stone bearing a patch of lichen shaped like Louisiana, a wall of porous white rock sharpened slowly, incredibly, before them.
Claire had finger-painted it into existence--or into visibility, for the rock had been there before its painter.
"Here it is." Claire's hands moved over a black portion of the rock like she was polishing a car. The rock looked more and more like a rounded doorway.
Eureka wished Rhoda were here to applaud. It made Eureka think about Heaven, which made her think about Diana, and she wondered if two souls interested in the same earthly subjects could
gather in the same celestial place to look down on them. Were Rhoda and Diana together, somewhere out there, on a cloud? Did Heaven still lie beyond the gray smear of sadness above?
She looked upward for a sign. Rain fell in the same lonesome rhythm it had been beating out all day.
Ander knelt next to Claire. "How did you do that?"
"Kids see more than adults," Claire said matter-of-factly, and slipped through the door like a ghost.
7
FOR A SONG
Eureka turned to Ander. "Do you think this is really--"
"The Bitter Cloud." Ander's smile was the opposite of William's open grin. It was a smile at the border of weeping, a passport flashed and pocketed. It fascinated Eureka, and it frightened her to consider what it would mean to be Ander's girlfriend, to combine her enormous pain with his, to become a power couple of loss. They would understand each other's sorrow naturally--but who would lighten the mood?
"You're as sad as I am," she whispered. "Why?"
"I'm happier than I've ever been."
It made Eureka wish she'd known Ander forever, that she had as many memories of him as he had gathered of her over the years.
She touched the bright white rock. The Bitter Cloud. If this was Solon's cave, Eureka could see why he compared the travertine stone to a cloud. Even after Claire had revealed how solid it was, there was a lightness to the stone, like you could almost pass your fingers through it.
Eureka held out her torch and entered the cave. Her bad ear listened to the soft vibration of moth wings carrying her father behind her.
William saw his shadow stretching on the cave walls and drew closer to Eureka. "I'm afraid."
Eureka had to set the example that love was bigger than fear. "I'm with you."
The cave walls had a strange, mottled texture. Eureka held the torch near one. Her fingers tightened around the torch's silver wand.
There must have been a thousand skulls arranged along the walls. Had they been former residents? Trespassers like her? An earlier Eureka might have shuddered at the sight. The girl she was now leaned closer to the wall, peered into a skinless, grinning face. She sensed that the skull had belonged to a woman. Its eye sockets were large and low and perfectly rounded. Its teeth were intact along its delicate jaw. It was beautiful. Eureka thought about how intensely she used to want to die, how she'd aspired to be like this woman. She wondered where this lovely skull's soul had gone, and what pain it had left on earth.