Storykiller (10 page)

“Hey!” one of the guys shouted, leaning over to examine his friend and looking accusingly at Tessa. A teacher’s head popped out of a classroom.

“What’s going on here?”

Tessa shrugged, “He must have tripped on something?”

The teacher looked at the group and pointed to one. “Go get the nurse. The rest of you, to your classes, now.” Tessa turned and walked past Micah, trying her best not to catch her eyes. She was supposed to be ignoring her. It wasn’t going so well.

She got better at avoiding Micah and Brand, but it wasn’t easy. Lunch had been the trickiest, but she managed to escape them by leaving campus, which was against the rules for juniors it seemed, and returning late, after the final bell for fourth period had already rung. She also saw Nash twice more though she didn’t think he saw her, or possibly she’d overestimated her appeal and he’d forgotten all about her already. Tessa barely noticed a thing through her last class, her thoughts darting around her brain like stray bullets. It was American History (she was almost sure) and Nash was there, sitting across the room from her—a painful but lucky distance—she probably didn’t need even more drama than she already had on her plate. When the final bell rang, Tessa made a mad dash for the exit, hoping she could avoid everyone and get home without any more confrontations with Micah and Brand. She’d have to walk home (a long damn walk) to avoid them on the bus again.

But just when she thought she was clear of everyone, Brand stepped out from behind a tree and stood in her path, clearly not willing to leave until he’d been heard. He started before she could even protest.

“Listen. You need to make up your mind. You tell us off. You avoid us. Then you stand up for Mike—which is it?” he said more than asked, still more hurt than anything, though he was clearly aiming for angry. Micah was to their left, leaning against a tree, looking like someone had kicked her in the gut, and Tessa felt like she had.

“Brand—” Tessa began, looking around, worried about what new hell might be lurking and ready to tear everyone to shreds. Brand held up a hand signaling that he wasn’t finished.

“I’m not done—” he said, taking in breath to continue. Tessa stopped him short anyway. She hated to do this to him, she already had an unheard of affection for both of them, whether it was because they were amazing, or because she’d never had friends before, or just because of the bizarre thing they’d been through together, but the only way to be sure to keep them alive was to keep them out of this nonsense she was caught up in, and the only way to do that was to break their damn hearts. Hard and fast.

“Yes,” she said coldly. “You
are
done. You’re done, and I don’t want to hear from you again. Either of you,” she said, cutting a mean look at Micah. “You’re out of it, and I don’t want to have this conversation again. Got it?” Tessa raised her eyebrows and stared Brand down. He crumpled
into himself like a busted piñata.

“Tessa—” his voice came out soft and plaintive, and Tessa thought the sound of it would break her. Just when she almost caved on all of it, a horn honked and Tessa turned to see The Snow Queen standing next to her car in a bright white, backless mini-dress that was drawing stares from all the students still on campus.

Tessa couldn’t believe she was relieved to see Snow. She must be even more desperate than she realized.

Tessa sat in the car with Snow in silence. She was grateful for her unexpected arrival as an excuse to escape Brand and Micah but that didn’t mean she wanted to talk to her.

Also, sitting in a shiny convertible next to the damn Snow Queen made it pretty hard to pretend the woman didn’t exist and that had been part of the pretending plan.

When they arrived at her house, Tessa put her hand on the door handle but stopped short of getting out.

“Why did you pick me up?” Tessa asked.

“I need a favor.”

Of course she did.

“Alright, I suppose I do owe you from the other day. What do you want?”

“Send me back to Story.”

Tessa couldn’t help but laugh. “What?”

“Open the doorway, you did it before, do it again.”

“Can’t,” Tessa said, shaking her head. “I tried to open it again, just to see if I could. It didn’t work.”

“Tova,” Snow said quietly.

“Are you cussing?”

“Yes.”

“In what freaking language?”

“We just call it Story. Since our original Fictions are all different origin languages we all learn Story so we can easily communicate,” Snow said absently. “It’s also all magical and crap and thus nearly impossible for Mortals to learn. An added perk.”

“Kinda like the opposite of Esperanto, real inclusive of you guys,” Tessa said meanly, but she didn’t really care. “So, what happened to Bluebeard, like…his body?”

“Nothing. It is as you left it.”

Tessa’s shook her head a bit, surprised. “Won’t that bring up questions? ”

“When your minions look at him, they see a man named Rene Severin. It’s the same for any Mortal. That is who he is now, just a dead body named Rene Severin.”

Tessa felt tired.

The man Bluebeard was pretending to be in Lore still very much existed, although only as a body, and it was just Bluebeard and everything Fictional and related to him that had ceased to exist. Tessa put her head in her hands, “But how is that possible? I mean, the ripples it must cause to eliminate that Story. I’m no genius and even I can imagine that the ripples must be massive.”

Snow shrugged. “It’s magic.”

Tessa glared at her and mimicked her shrug. “How can you just wave it away? I’ve changed the world in ways I can’t even begin to understand, and you’re just saying it’s okay?”

“I didn’t say it was okay, I said it was magic. It’s hard to understand, it can be infuriating, but it is what it is,” Snow said.

“That can’t be all there is to it. What about somewhere, someone, who has, for whatever stupid reason, built their life around this Story—what happens to them now?”

“Their lives will change. They won’t know any better, but things will shift until it all works again. Most of it will be subtle, like you said—ripples. It’s instantaneous.”

Tessa shook her head again. “It doesn’t make sense!”

Snow nodded wearily. “Again, I didn’t say it makes sense, I said it was magic.”

Tessa pounded her hand on the dashboard too hard. “Argh! I don’t want to believe that’s possible—that everything can be so easily undone.”

“Well then, how do you explain any of this, Scion? Somewhere someone puts pen to paper and whole worlds are born. Worlds that change lives—both Mortal
and
Story—what can describe that
except
magic. Our whole lives are magic.”

The words were poetic and even beautiful, but they felt to Tessa like a slap across the face. Until now, Tessa had been just rolling with the insane punches. How could she not? Evidence supporting all the weirdness had been massive. But now as Tessa really thought about it, she felt like her brain would explode. Every Story she’d ever read and the millions she hadn’t, millions she would never even get to, were all real. Unless she destroyed them first, of course.

Tessa sat silently for a moment. “I gotta go. Where can I find you, if I have to?” She paused while opening the car door.

Snow screwed up her mouth as if she didn’t want to say but then relaxed. “I’m in a penthouse downtown.”

“Can you be a bit more specific?”

Snow cast a skeptical glance at Tessa. “It should be obvious when you look.”

Tessa sighed, some kind of test or something. She was all ready to be annoyed but then gave up, She didn’t want to have to call on her anyway. She got out of the car but just stared at her house blankly. “I’ve got to get them away from me, don’t I?”

“Who?”

“Micah and Brand. They’ll die just like Bishop, won’t they?”

“Who can know? It’s definitely not the safest life for them.”

Her sentence sounded unfinished. Tessa prodded her, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That doesn’t sound like nothing. Spit it out, Snow.”

“They’re going to change,” Snow said simply.

“Change?”

“They’ve been to Story. Mortals are not supposed to go to Story. It will infect them. Change them. Nobody can know what they will get, or when, but it will happen, that much is certain.”

If Snow was hoping to drop the hammer that would break Tessa, that had done it. Tessa’s vision swam with tears. What had she done?

“Your minions acted loyally, as minions should. They were noble, even, to follow you into the unknown. And this is what nobility gets you, Scion. You should remember it.”

Tessa closed the car door without saying goodbye.

Tessa tossed for hours worrying about Micah and Brand, how she was going to tell them, what was going to happen to them, how it was almost entirely her fault. Around three a.m., with sleep still eluding her, she heard something in the house, again. Her first thought was naturally
‘Troll!’
but this sound was too quiet for the Troll. This was a sound she could not have heard without superpowers.

This was something different.

Something scarier.

Tessa’s heart fluttered in her chest as she reached for the bat by her bedside. Her hand shook, and she clenched it to stop the tremor. Was her life always going to be scary now? She worried it would. Would she actually become brave at some point? It seemed like that should have been part of the “standard superhero package.” It was kind of a glaring oversight that it had been left out. Tessa looked doubtfully at the bat. It seemed she really was going to have to invest in a weapons cache of some kind. She took a deep breath. ‘
Show no fear’
she said resolutely inside her head while squeezing the bat in her hands. Tessa inched into the hallway and then down the stairs, avoiding the always-creaky eighth and third
steps.

From the foyer she could see a tall man standing in the shadows of her living room. He seemed to be examining the pictures that sat on the mantle above the fireplace. He was wearing dark jeans and a black t-shirt that strained against broad well-muscled shoulders. As he moved into some moonlight drifting through the window, Tessa could see that he was, in fact, gorgeous, with dark hair that had recently been shaved very close. He had the strong jaw line of superheroes and the general bone structure of supermodels. Tessa had to remind herself that this superhero/model person had broken into her house. She cleared her throat loudly, hoping to startle him, but he just turned his head slightly, acknowledging her presence but otherwise not moving. There was no surprise in him, as if he’d known she was there all along. This unnerved her further, but she was determined not to let him know that.

“Hello, Scion,” he said, his voice rough and dark.

Tessa sighed deeply. “I guess I should be pissed, but since you’re the more attractive thing to break into my house in the last 24 hours, and you’re not running around breaking shit, I’ll just thank you for apparently not coming through one of my windows and ask you to get the hell out.” Tessa raised the bat and rested it on her shoulder, one hip cocked to the side. The stranger chuckled.

“I’d heard you were funny,” he said, still not facing her.

“Yeah, there are a lot of rumors going around about me, it seems. I have to say, I like that one better,” Tessa said. The stranger turned around, one of the pictures still in his hand. It was a picture of Tessa and her mother, taken not long before she’d left, when Tessa was eight. “Your hair is different,” the stranger said without looking up at her, his eyes fixed on the picture alone. Tessa blinked. She wasn’t sure what to make of this guy.

“I was eight. A lot is different,” she said, trying to be bored, trying to be calm, trying very much to
not
notice how well-shaped he was. Dude was clearly Fiction, only the imagination could make someone this brutally hot.

“True. We don’t have that you know. I mean, I was never eight. I was always
this
, or some form of this. Children are a funny thing to me—how they turn into something else—it’s like magic.” His voice was hypnotic. He spoke with a strange, almost poetic cadence and an accent that Tessa thought was vaguely British, but British by way of something she couldn’t quite place.

She felt oddly drowsy.

“Get out,” she said again, trying to get her bearings, trying to shake off the rhythm of his voice. He took a step closer to her, and Tessa raised the bat off her shoulder and pointed it at him. “Yo,” she said, as if that one word alone was a whole sentence full of warning. He put up his hands in protest, one still holding the picture frame, and a wide, gleaming white smile broke out across his face.

“No need for that, Hardcore. I’m not here to harm you.”

“Oh, yeah. I totally believe that. You broke into my house in the middle of the night so we could, what? Have tea?” Tessa said, the bat still raised
. He ticked his head to the side like he was thinking about it.

“Sort of, yes,” he said.

Tessa blinked at him confused. “Huh?”

“Well, I am here to tell you a tale of sorts, and no, I certainly wouldn’t turn down tea,” he said, his grin becoming a gentle tease. Tessa shook her head but kept the bat leveled at him. Nothing about this was going the way she expected.