The Art of Wishing (21 page)

Chapter
TWENTY
-
TWO

A
bout twenty minutes later, we were sitting in my room. As my computer booted up, Oliver rooted through a box I’d labeled “Random Wires and Stuff,” which usually lived out of sight under my bed. Both his hoodie and his boots had mysteriously vanished now that we were inside, leaving him in a blue T-shirt and socks with little palm trees on them. Ziggy Stardust had visited us for about ten seconds, before deciding we weren’t worth her time. I, however, remained firmly planted on the bed, watching Oliver with fascination.

“Cell phone charger,” he muttered. “External mic. Extension cord. Bottle of purple nail polish. Margo, I find it comforting to know there’s a part of your life that isn’t organized. Even if it’s just this one box.”

“Shut up,” I said, stifling a smile.

“Bottle of
green
nail polish. Phone charger. Bike lock. Ah, USB cord.” He pulled out a wire that looked pretty much like all the other wires, then hoisted himself into my swivelly desk chair. Once my computer stopped humming, he clicked the browser icon and navigated to a photo hosting website, where he logged in. Then he plugged the camera into the computer, clicked a few more buttons like it was an old routine, and turned and smiled at me. “This’ll take a while. I’ve taken a lot of pictures since I came here.”

“Of the play?”

“Some,” he said. “But I already stuck those on a flash drive so I could give them to your director.” After a moment, he added, “Mostly they’re of people I like.”

I smiled at the sly little compliment. “So does that mean you have pictures of all your masters, stashed away somewhere?” I asked, thinking of the closed doors in his empty apartment.

“Yeah, most of them. And no, I’m not telling you where they are.”

“What if I ask?” I teased. “Wouldn’t you have to tell me?”

He side-eyed me. “I would. But I’m sure you’d never do such a thing.”

“Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes dramatically. “Can I at least see these, then?”

“Once they download from my camera, they’re at your service.”

There was a little bar across the screen, slowly measuring the progress of the download in question. I found myself wondering how many pictures he had stored on that site. How many different lives had he captured on film? How much effort did it take to remember them all? Were there any masters he hadn’t taken pictures of?

Did he have pictures of Xavier somewhere?

Oliver must have seen the direction of my thoughts, because when he moved from the chair to the bed, he wore a somber expression. “Now will you tell me what happened today?”

Almost immediately, my eyes dropped to the bedspread. As much as I didn’t want to tell him, I couldn’t rightfully keep this from him any longer. “It was, um,” I faltered. I tucked one knee carefully underneath myself, buying a moment to assemble the right words in my head. “He gave me one day.”

“What?” said Oliver, his voice dangerously low.

I looked up at him. “One day. If I don’t make my wish by sun-set tomorrow, or if I go after him again, he’ll . . . It won’t be good.”

“Sunset tomorrow,” he repeated to himself, nodding slowly. Then something seemed to click, and he narrowed his eyes at me. “Wait. What do you mean, ‘go after him again’?”

I shifted uncomfortably, looking down at the small stretch of bedspread between us. “That’s sort of why he found me in the first place. I wanted to find his coin, and he sort of . . . he heard me.”

“He
what
?” Oliver jumped to his feet, both hands in his hair like he was about to pull it out.

“Calm down, okay?” I whispered. “My parents are right downstairs.”

He stilled, eyes darting to the door. After a few hushed moments of nothing happening, he looked back at me, taking care to lower his voice. “Seriously, he heard you? What do you mean? How?”

So I told him what Xavier had said, about the blood exchange. Oliver’s face went white as he listened. “I didn’t know you could do that,” he murmured. “But I should have. God, I’m sorry. I should have known.”

“How could you?” I said. “I didn’t.”

He shook his head. “But you don’t know him. I do. And he may be a little . . . well, unhinged . . . but he’s never been one for hands-on violence. Magic, yes. Knives, no. I should have known he was up to something.”

“Something other than trying to kill you,” I added icily.

His eyes were dark as they met mine again. “I asked you to stay away from him. I meant it, Margo, and this just proves it. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

“Yeah, Xavier made it very clear that I am young and stupid and mortal and all this stuff is way beyond me. Thanks for the reminder.”

“Margo, I didn’t mean . . . Look, I already said I don’t want you killing him for my sake. Using his vessel as the weapon instead of mine doesn’t make it any better.”

“I wasn’t going to kill him,” I said hotly. “Honestly, why is that all you people think about? If you must know, I was going to wish for him to change his mind about killing
you
. You said you didn’t have enough power to do that yourself.”

“Oh,” breathed Oliver, his eyes going wide. “That’s actually kind of brilliant.”

Sighing, I leaned back on my hands. “Not brilliant enough. He must have heard me wanting to do all that stuff, and that’s why he confronted me. Lots of threats, lots of ‘Look how powerful I am.’ Some illusions.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Also, he told me about the djinn.”

His eyebrows shot up, and his mouth twisted. “The djinn?”

“Yeah. You never told me, Oliver.”

“Told you what?” He sat carefully back on the bed, watching me closely.

“Everything.” I swept one arm around in an expansive gesture. “True magic, and how you . . . you know. Lost it.” It didn’t sound as impressive when I said it. Apparently Oliver thought so, too, because he just looked at me with the same bemused expression.

Then he burst out laughing.

“Are you serious?” he said, voice suddenly light with mirth. “He’s still using that old line? ‘Poor us, we used to have all this magic and we don’t know where it went, so now I have to kill everyone’? For heaven’s sake.”

“What?” I said, annoyed. “What’s so funny?”

“The djinn!” he said again. I raised an expectant eyebrow, and he rolled his eyes. “I never lost any magic. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I made my fourth wish. The djinn are . . . I don’t know. A legend. A fairy tale. Something you can talk yourself into believing, if you want to feel like you came from something bigger than what you are. But they’re just the same word in different languages.”

“That’s what I said,” I murmured. “But he told me all that stuff like it happened to him personally.”

Oliver smiled. “Here is something you may have noticed about Xavier. He is very, very dramatic.” As if to illustrate his point, he stretched his arms out and flopped backward onto my bed. Even with his legs hanging over the end and his feet touching the floor, he could almost reach my headboard with his fingers.

I waited for him to say something else, but it seemed like that was it. I scooted back so I could lean over him, and he grinned up at me. With his arms reaching like that, his shirt had ridden up, leaving a thin stretch of bare stomach between his shirt and his belted jeans. I tried very hard not to stare at it.

“So none of that stuff really happened?” I said.

“Xavier believes it did,” said Oliver placidly. “But no, I don’t think so.”

“Hmm.”

He reached over to touch my knee. “You seem disappointed.”

“I’m not,” I said, distracted by his hand. It wasn’t doing anything untoward, just resting on the fabric of my jeans, but between that and the little stretch of bare skin above his belt, I felt my cheeks start to heat up. “I mean, maybe a little? I don’t know, it’s just the thought of infinite magic. It’s so huge. Romantic, almost.”

“You think so?” he said, with genuine curiosity. “Seems overwhelming to me. I don’t know what I’d do with that much magic.”

I smiled down at him. “If I were a genie, I think I’d want infinite magic.”

“Yeah, I bet you would,” he said with a laugh.

I stretched myself out languidly beside him, looking up at the ceiling fan. “And a house furnished entirely with pillows and candles and drapey things.”

“Drapey things,” he echoed thoughtfully, his hand rubbing small circles on my leg. “Indeed.”

“And a magic carpet.”

“Obviously.”

“And a handsome young man whose only job is to fan me and feed me grapes.”

“A perfectly reasonable request. In fact . . . hmm.”

He sat up and pushed himself to his feet. I propped myself up on one elbow, watching curiously as he looked around. It was only a moment before he spied what he was looking for, sitting on my dresser.

When Oliver sat beside me again, he held my fern, now slightly more brittle than when he’d first given it to me. And he started to fan me with it. I laughed and buried my face in a pillow—and when I chanced a peek at him again, he was still waving the fern up and down, looking absolutely solemn.

“Does this please my lady?” he asked, in a fake accent that was probably supposed to be British. He looked at me expectantly, like he was awaiting further orders.

I cleared my throat, schooling my face into an expression as serious as his. “It pleases me greatly, handsome young man. But where are my grapes? I demand grapes.”

He tilted his head to the side, considering. “If thou desirest, lady, I could raid thy refrigerator and find grapes for thee.”

I grimaced as I pushed myself back up to a sitting position. “Bad idea. Parents. Downstairs.”

“Curses! Foiled again.”

“How about a kiss instead?”

“Oh?”

“Come now, handsome young man. I command it.”

A grin tugged as his lips, but he bowed his head to try and hide it. “As my master commands,” he said, “so shall it be.”

Setting the fern gently aside, he bent over and kissed me. One hand cradled my neck, fingers burying themselves in my hair and sending tingly prickles of magic shooting down my spine. I stretched into the sensation, leaning closer to him.

But after a short moment, Oliver broke the kiss, pulling away just far enough to give a little flick of his fingers. In an instant, my ordinary bed was gone, leaf-patterned bedspread and all. Instead, Oliver and I were surrounded on every side by silken drapes, all red and purple and gold, hanging languorously down from the framework of a four-poster bed. Soft, richly colored pillows cocooned us. I started at the sight of it.

“Too much?” asked Oliver. “I know you don’t like surprises, but you said you wanted drapey things. . . .”

“I did, yeah.” Even the sound of my own voice was more intimate, with all this fabric closing us in. “No, not too much. This is a good surprise.”

He lifted one of my hands and pressed it to the center of his chest. “And what else does my master command?” he asked. The phrase rolled comfortably from his lips. Too comfortably. I drew in a sharp breath, remembering.

He tilted his head to the side. “Margo? What is it?”

What does my master command?
The Oliver illusion had said the same thing, in the same tone, with practically the same inflections, back in the parking lot. Right before he let Xavier kill him.

I grabbed his shirt in my hands and pulled him down toward me. “Kiss me,” I whispered. “Hard.”

Something flickered in his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. He pressed his mouth against mine, so hard it almost hurt, hard enough that it felt real, so real, and then I was pushing myself up against him, threading my fingers through his hair and holding tight and
pulling
and kissing him as hard as I could while his fingers sought out the small of my back, touching the skin just under my shirt, trailing magic everywhere, and before I knew it he was tumbling over onto the pillows and I was pinning him down with the weight of my body, feeling his breath moving his chest up and down beneath me, and my hands were holding his wrists firmly against the bedspread, just inches above his head.

We breathed together, silent. I looked at Oliver. Really looked at him: willingly trapped beneath me, watching me closely. He leaned up a little, as if to try kissing me again, but I pressed his wrists hard against the sheets. “Don’t,” I said.

He instantly went still. I could barely even feel him breathing. He was tense and coiled beneath me, waiting for my cue.

Want to play?
echoed Xavier’s voice in my head.

“He said I want you gone,” I whispered. “Xavier. He said he saw that in my head—that I want you out of my life.”

His features went rigid. He pressed his lips together, and didn’t reply.

“Can you see that, too?” I asked.

Eyes still locked on mine, he nodded, very slowly.

My throat went tight. I forced myself to speak anyway. “That was Saturday night, though. I was angry, and I’m sorry. But I swear, I don’t want to lose you.”

“Sometimes you do, though,” he said, still making no move to escape my hold on him. “Sometimes you wish you’d never met me.”

I didn’t know if it was the words themselves, or the matter-of-fact way he said them, but suddenly I felt on the verge of tears. “Sometimes? As in more than once? How long have you been seeing that in my head?”

He smiled, sort of sadly. “Since the day you found my vessel.”

I drew in a sharp breath. “All that time?”

“Yes.”

“And you still . . . ?”

“Yes,” he said again. “I still let myself fall for you. No matter what you think about me when you’re sad or angry, there’s another part of you that’s very happy I’m in your life. And that’s the part you’ve acted on, the entire time I’ve known you.”

“I guess so, but—”

“Listen,” he interrupted. “Nobody ever feels just one way about another person, Margo. We’re so much more complicated than that. I can see a million things you want from me, just like the million things I want from you. Some of them are wonderful. Some are awful. Some contradict each other, and some don’t make any sense at all. But none of those things matter, not really. What matters is what you do about them.”