Waterfall (7 page)

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.”

T
he women were so strange they were familiar, like dreaming of a future déjà 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.