Fever (13 page)

“Fruit, in this weather?” Annabelle says. She rubs some grime from her glasses with both fists, revealing murky green eyes. She’s a first generation, but her voice is light and young. Her house smells charred and sweet. It takes a second for me to recognize the smell. Incense, not overbearing like the kind at Madame’s carnival, but sweet, similar to what burned in the hallways on the wives’ floor.

For some indiscernible reason it’s making me homesick.

Gabriel says, “They aren’t very good.”

“Actually, they’re about rotten,” I say. It doesn’t stop Maddie from eating the next one I feed her.

Annabelle kneels beside Maddie’s cushion, her frizzed white hair full of firelight. Maddie snarls at her, teeth stained pink with juice.

“I don’t have anything for a broken arm,” Annabelle says. “But I have something for fevers, if you wouldn’t mind my taking those strawberries off your hands. You said yourself they were rotten.”

“Take them,” Gabriel says before I can interject. I shoot him an indignant look, but his eyes are on Maddie, whose cheeks are flushed.

I hand over the strawberries, careful to keep the stale bread hidden. Who knows when we’ll be able to find food again.

We watch Annabelle eat every mushy strawberry, several at a time, then suck the juice from the cloth, and finally suck each of her fingertips. The entire process seems to go on for a very long time.

“Ah,” she groans, sitting back on her heels. “That hit the spot. Hardly anything but dehydrated food in the winter.” She doesn’t ask where the strawberries came from, though, which I take as an act of consideration on her part.

She crawls to the dresser and rummages through one of its drawers, finally extracting a mason jar of white pills. Normally I would be wary of accepting pills from a total stranger, especially after Madame, but as she brings the jar closer, I recognize their oval shapes, the
A
stamped onto each individual pill. Aspirin. The same stuff my brother and I kept in the house. It’s not hard to come by—if you can afford it.

Annabelle is so grateful for the semi-fresh fruit that, in addition to giving Maddie a dose of aspirin, she even offers us a spot on her floor to sleep. “Only until noon,” she says. “That’s when I start getting customers.” She adds, “That sure is pretty, dear.”

She’s eyeing one of my necklaces, which bears yellow beads shaped like stars and moons. I pull it over my head and hand it to her without a word. And then I settle on the blanket, my back to Gabriel’s chest. Maddie is already asleep on the cushion, which is why it’s so easy for me to drape my arm over her. I’m a light sleeper. I’ll know if she or Gabriel moves away from me.

Annabelle ignores us, humming as she pokes the fire and arranges the tarot cards on her coffee table. A few minutes later she leaves, I think to use the outhouse that stands a distance from her house.

“We shouldn’t both sleep,” Gabriel says the moment she’s gone. “You go ahead. I’m wide awake anyway.”

My cheek rests on his arm. In the abyss of my eyelids, I can see both of his arms wrapping around me, coiling and coiling, covering me head to toe. It’s as creepy as it is comforting. I feel myself fading. How can he stay awake?

“Shifts,” I agree. My voice sounds a million miles away. I’m not even sure if I’m speaking, or dreaming of speaking. “When you get too tired, move away from me and I’ll wake up and take over.”

He peels some hair from my face, and I can feel his eyes studying me. “Okay,” he murmurs. It’s not even a word. It’s a white throb in my eyelids.

Living with my brother after our parents died, I trained my body to sleep deeply for an hour at a time, and to be alert for the hour after that so I could keep watch. But it’s been so many months of crisp linens and down pillows, and the cadenced breathing of my sister wives across the hall, the
click-click-click
of my gold-rimmed bedside clock, the subtle shifts of the mattress when husband or sister wife crept in to sleep beside me. And though I try to maintain the urgency of this situation, sleep is pulling me back to that warm dark place.

“Good night,” a voice says.

“Good night, Linden,” I murmur as everything fades away.

T
HERE ARE NO WINDOWS,
and when Gabriel wakes me, I have no way of knowing how long I was out. “I just need a few minutes, okay?” he whispers. “Wake me if you get tired.”

But I’m feeling more rested than I have since I left the mansion. My dreamless sleeps are always the deepest, and the easiest to slip out of.

Maddie is awake, lying on her side so that she faces me, her broken arm resting on her hip. The sheen of sweat on her face tells me the fever is breaking. In the firelight her too-light eyes are exhausted and serene. She stares at me, and I stare back, both of us searching out each other’s faces as though there will be answers.

It occurs to me that I’ve just inherited this child, that Lilac lost her daughter and her chance of freedom in one fell swoop, and gave both of those precious things to two strangers. I don’t know why. I can only guess that if Maddie were discovered by Madame, she’d be murdered, and Lilac thought watching her daughter disappear was better than watching her die.

“I lost my mother too,” I say. It’s the only thing I can think to say.

Maddie blinks at me—slowly, wearily. Then she sighs, her chest puffing out like that of a tiny bird defending its territory before she deflates. She reaches with her good arm to stroke my necklaces.

“Where’s Annabelle?” I ask her. “Still outside?” I don’t really expect an answer, but Maddie’s eyes dart to the door and then back to my necklace.

“She went outside?” I say.

I think she nods, but she might have been shaking the hair out of her eyes.

Annabelle returns a few minutes later with arms full of splintered boards that I guess she has foraged from nearby buildings. I didn’t get a good look at the area, but I think most of it’s abandoned.

“Your face is much nicer after you’ve had a little sleep,” Annabelle says. She kneels by the fireplace and begins piling the boards into a triangle.

I sit up, necklaces swishing out of Maddie’s uncurled fist. I can hear something ticking, and I have to scan the cluttered room twice before I finally spot the metal clock dangling from a nail on the wall. Ten o’clock.

“Thank you for letting us stay,” I say. “We’ll be out of here soon.”

Annabelle, half-facing me as she works, smiles. “Off to your broken castle, Empress?”

“I thought empresses lived in palaces,” I say.

She laughs, and the sound catches in the glass wind chimes outside her door.

“You were something great in a past life,” she says. “A siren, maybe, or a mermaid.”

I sit up fully, stretch my legs before me, and then cross them, lean back on my hands. I don’t believe in past lives, or mythical creatures, but I indulge her anyway. At least it fills the silence. “I’ve always loved the water. In this life, anyway.”

“There’s a man who would drown for you, I bet,” Annabelle says. Then, imitating my tone, she adds, “In this life, anyway.” She smiles ruefully at Gabriel, and I can tell she isn’t talking about him.

I don’t respond. Part of being a good liar is never letting an apt guesser know when she’s happened upon a truth. So I watch her hands moving, putting scrawnier boards into the fire. Her fingers are fascinating, freckled and shock white, covered in silver and brass and copper rings at every knuckle. The necklace I’ve given her blends perfectly with her mismatched motif. First generations are very sentimental about things, I’ve noticed. My parents were that way too. They had books and jewelry, and memories to breathe life into them.

A pang of jealousy flits through me. I’ll never live long enough to feel that way about anything.

Annabelle stands, dusts off her hands, and moves to sit on a cushion across the table from me.

“Tell me, Empress.” She folds her hands, leans forward. “Is there anything you’d like to know?”

“About my past lives?” I say.

“That is my specialty,” she says, and her hands break apart and flutter like a riot of birds. The shadows make them multiply. “But you, I suspect, have more pressing things in
this
life.”

Maddie is sitting beside me now, coiling her finger around one of my necklaces. The plastic makes a dull grinding, like her thoughts turning. I hesitate; then I shrug the necklace over my head, and Maddie lets go.

I place it on the table as payment.

Annabelle makes a gesture for me to give her my hands. I do. Her thumbs prod my palms. Her rings are cold. She closes her eyes, settles more comfortably on the cushion.

I can see her eyeballs roving around behind her eyelids. Part of the show. My brother says fortune-telling is a form of psychology, and I know he’s right. But a very small part of me—the part that is homesick, and tired, and afraid to die—wants to believe that I could have been an empress or a siren, that I was once destined for greatness. And that desire is why Annabelle has so many trinkets.

But she says nothing. She opens her eyes, narrowing them at me as though I’ve deliberately eluded her. “What is your sign?” she asks me.

“My sign?” I say.

“Sign, sign.” Her fingers flutter as though the answer should be obvious. “Your astrological sign.”

“How should I know?” I say.

“What is your birthday, child?” she says.

It hits me all at once.

Time stood still for me in the mansion. Looking back, those months now feel as small as minutes. But as I frittered away in Linden’s dreamland, the world was going on nonetheless. Time was passing. My life span lessening. I’ve always known that, in some way-back part of my brain. As the Gatherers’ doors slammed shut; as Linden pressed his face into my neck and breathed me in; as Cecily pounded out the notes on the piano; as Jenna let loose her final breath. And since my escape, as the date drew nearer and I remained no closer to my twin brother or my home, I have been dodging the reality of it. I spent an indeterminate period of time in a haze brought on by Madame’s opiates, even opening myself up to terror and nightmares. Anything to escape the truth, which is that one side of the hourglass is much emptier than the other.

“January thirtieth,” I say. “It’s just passed.” How long ago? Days? Certainly not more than a week. But I am sure we’re into February now.

“Aquarius,” Annabelle says, and smiles. “Ever the unpredictable one.”

So I’m unpredictable. I decide to take it as a compliment. It’s hard to capture the unpredictable, to keep it restrained.

“Ask me a question,” she says.

Her voice is not theatrical. She has no crystal ball. (I’ve seen plenty of those with roadside clairvoyants.) Everything about the statement is ordinary.

I try to think of a way to ask my question without also giving away the answer. That’s another bit of psychology right there.

“I’m trying to find someone,” I say.

“That isn’t a question.”

“Where is the person I’m trying to find? then.”

She smiles wryly at me, shuffles the deck of tarot cards. Maddie watches with interest, sitting up, the fingers on her good arm making swirls over her knee. Her hair is dank and wilted with sweat.

“Where is that person? Where is that person?” Annabelle murmurs as she spreads the cards facedown, sweeps them together, spreads them apart. When she has lumped the cards into three piles, she says, “Which pile?”

I randomly point to the one on my left. She pushes it toward me. “And another,” she says.

I point to the one in the middle. She pushes it toward me. “Take the top cards from each pile,” she says. I do. “Turn them over,” she says. I do.

They land on the table before I’ve really looked at them. One, then the other.

There’s a picture of a man on one card, a woman on the other. Both of them are dressed royally with red robes and crowns. I read their respective captions:

The Empress.

The Emperor.

Despite myself, I get goose bumps. Annabelle looks at me, eyebrow raised smugly. “Now I see why you’ve been eluding me,” she says. “It’s not just your unpredictable nature. You’re missing your other half. Your Emperor.”

I lean back on my hands, maintaining my neutral gaze. “I didn’t know the cards were gender specific,” I say. “What makes you sure I’m not the Emperor rather than the Empress?”

“Gender has nothing to do with it,” Annabelle says, sliding the two cards toward me. “This is the card you chose first.”

“Randomly,” I interject, my voice cool to hide this new sense of intrigue.

“Would you like to know what the Empress is telling me?” Annabelle asks. She’s grinning, showing a mouthful of yellowed teeth. Clearly she’s enjoying her little accuracy.

I’m replaying the way she shuffled the cards, trying to remember if anything was strange about it, if she glanced at them, if she manipulated them so that they would read what she wanted them to read. But I can think of nothing, and even if this is all a scam, at least it’s entertaining and all it cost was a necklace I didn’t care about. I only say, “What?”

“The Empress is a good card. The Empress is nurturing and loyal. Though”—she frowns at the Emperor card—“perhaps to a fault.”