The Bone Thief, page 6
“Grimsly. Grimsly Summerfield,” I say, starting to bolt from the couch, thinking I’ve had enough and am ready to cut my losses and brave the trip back, when the Seer lifts a cautionary hand.
“You really don’t want to do that,” he says, though it’s too late to heed the warning.
Merely by shifting my weight from the couch, I’ve set the whole house off balance to the point that the sofa is sent careering back along its track, taking me with it, as the Seer races past the opposite way. He waves to me as he rides his straight-backed chair to the side of the room where I sat just a moment before. When we both hit the end of our tracks, our seats spin around until we’re facing each other again.
“That never gets old!” The Seer throws his head back and laughs as though he’s actually enjoying himself. I struggle to catch my breath, not daring to so much as move, as I gaze longingly out the same window I came from. I wonder if I could possibly survive a jump from the fourth floor, because anything, anything is preferable to what might happen if I stay one more second in this house of crazy.
“It won’t end well.” The Seer frowns, presumably reading my thoughts. “I wouldn’t try it if I were you. Which I’m not, despite the startling resemblance.”
That’s it. I’ve had enough of his games. I’m either going to get what I came for or not (probably not), but the least I can do is put a stop to all this and stand up for myself. I’m tired of being the punch line to his cruel, twisted joke.
“Why do you look like me?” I ask. Actually, I don’t ask, I demand. The look I give him is meant to be withering. Though, from what I can tell, it wasn’t exactly received that way.
The Seer adopts a more serious expression and takes a moment to contemplate. Then, in a quiet voice, he says, “Who would you like me to look like, Grimsly?”
“Yourself. You. Whatever that may turn out to be.”
“Oh, I’m not sure you’re ready for that.” The look he gives me is challenging.
“Try me,” I say, attempting to appear confident, but mostly hoping I won’t live to regret it.
And even though I brace myself for whatever may come, nothing, and I mean nothing, could’ve prepared me for the sight before me.
“You’re a girl?”
For the record, I’m not proud of the question. And I’m especially not proud of the derisive tone I just took when I asked it. I have nothing against girls. Two of my best friends are girls. Still, not a single story I’ve heard so much as hinted that the Seer was a sweet-faced, golden-haired, green-eyed little girl wearing a blue sailor dress with a white pinafore, and a matching blue bow in her hair. I’m really not sure what to make of it.
“Not what you expected?” Her voice is sugary, syrupy, and it sets me on edge.
“What are you, eight—nine?” I ask. It’s like I’m determined to get on her bad side, but I can’t seem to stop myself.
“I’m ageless. Timeless. Lace and fineness.” She smiles at a joke I’m not sure I get. “I’ve lived a very long life. Longer than most. But nine was such a good year and such a good look for me, I decided to stick with it.”
“So, you haven’t grown since you were nine?” I run the idea around in my head, trying to make sense of it.
“On the contrary, I’ve grown plenty. Growing has nothing to do with aging. They’re two separate phenomena entirely.”
I’m really not sure how to reply to that. I have no idea what she means.
“Growth happens in here, and here”—she jabs a finger toward the side of her head and then in the general vicinity of her heart—“while aging happens on the outside. I decided on my ninth birthday that I liked what I saw and there was no reason to progress any further. But inside, I’m older than you would likely believe.”
“So does that mean you don’t celebrate your birthday anymore?” I know it’s a dumb thing to say, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around all this. It’s a lot to take in.
Also, I’m weirded out by how easily she switches from grumpy to animated. It’s like her moods shift as often as this strange house she lives in.
“No. I still have them. It’s just that every year I’m nine again.”
Outside, a breeze kicks up, a burst of mist blows through the open window, and my couch and her chair start gliding lazily toward each other, nearly meeting in the middle of the house. When the breeze dies down, we slope back to our separate sides.
“Why don’t you just put a lock on these things?” I ask, tired of all the back-and-forth, the complete unstableness of this place. “Or bolt the furniture down so everything stays put?”
She looks at me then. Even though she’s clear across the room, it feels like she’s sitting as close as my knees.
“Because nothing is meant to stay put. The universe is a vast and wondrous place of constant motion and change. And since I spend my whole life inside, stuck at age nine, this helps remind me of that. Also, it’s fun!” She grins brightly for a moment before her lips fall flat and her gaze turns serious. “So, Grimsly Summerfield, tell me—do you have any other deep observations, insights, or questions before we begin?” She assumes the appearance of a person who is waiting patiently, even though I’m sure that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I shake my head and try to quiet my body language, forcing my leg to keep from involuntarily kicking and my hands to stay folded sedately. Whatever it takes to keep her from getting annoyed and setting this house in motion again.
She nods briskly, sending her blond curls bouncing over her forehead. Then she rises from her chair and says, “You know the drill by now, so hang on tight.”
Before I realize it, I’m back on the other side of the room while she stands frowning before a very tall bookshelf built into the wall that just a moment ago was right beside me.
“Oh dear.” She shakes her head and taps her fingers against the skirt of her dress. “I’m afraid it’s on the uppermost shelf. So high up, even you can’t reach it. Even though you are rather tall for your age.”
“What is? What’s on the uppermost shelf?”
“Your prophecy!” she spits, rolling her eyes but stopping just short of saying duh! She acts as though she just said something glaringly obvious when that’s hardly the case. I have no idea what’s going on.
“Unfortunately, this means I’ll have to wake Sir Jinxly.” She bites her bottom lip and makes an exaggerated worried face. “Sir Jinxly does not like his sleep being disturbed, but then, who does, right?”
Without warning, she presses two fingers to her lips and lets out a very loud, very strange whistle. A few seconds later, an extremely fat cat with bright blue and green spotted fur emerges from a plush velvet cat condo I didn’t notice until now.
“He’s here!” The Seer claps excitedly as Jinxly the cat slowly approaches, dragging his considerable belly against the hardwood floor. “The one we’ve been waiting for has finally arrived!” she squeals. “So, up—up you go now! Up—just like I trained you!”
The cat blinks its sleepy long-lashed eyes at her but otherwise doesn’t so much as budge, leaving me to wonder just how long ago this training took place. Sir Jinxly looks like he’s spent the majority of his life doing little more than napping, eating, and riding his cat condo from one side of the house to the other.
“So that’s the way you’re playing it, huh?” The Seer plants a hand on each hip and whispers to me, “He always demands to get paid first, and I find it very vexing.” She heaves a loud, dramatic sigh and marches toward my side of the room, which sends the house teetering and creaking and leaving me queasy all over again.
She returns with a handful of fish- and bird-shaped cat treats. Jinxly devours them with the sort of delicate greed that would be fascinating to see if I weren’t so busy being nauseous and waiting for the seesawing to end. His snack finished, he licks his chops, his paws, and his fur and with a string of satisfied purrs settles onto a pile of confetti for a nice long nap.
“Hey—deal’s a deal.” The Seer towers over him, her voice so commanding the cat hisses in protest. Still, a moment later, I watch as the enormous feline crouches down low, tenses his body, and makes a glaringly reluctant yet amazingly agile leap toward the sky.
Instinctively, I cringe. I’m just not sure there’s enough magic left in this world to defy the laws of physics in the way this oversized cat is determined to do. Then, surprisingly, Jinxly soars gracefully through the air before landing with a pleasantly solid thump on the topmost shelf. He noses around for a bit, upending a few old hardcover and paperback books that spill to the floor, before locating a rolled-up piece of what looks to be parchment. Then he springs back to the ground with the prize clamped between his incisors.
“Well done!” The Seer grins proudly and reaches for the parchment, but Jinxly refuses to give it up. “Fine.” The Seer huffs, reaching into her pocket. “On the count of three. One…two…” Right on three, she drops a pile of treats to the floor and Jinxly surrenders the scroll.
“I love him, don’t get me wrong.” The Seer shakes her head. “But he can be really exhausting the way he insists on manipulating me.” She mumbles to herself and settles onto her chair as Jinxly disappears back into his cat condo. “Anyway, here.” She tips forward in her seat and rolls the parchment across the floor to where it lands at my feet. “Anything and everything you’ll ever want to know. It’s all in there. Maybe even a few things you didn’t want to know. But my job is to be thorough, not to be kind or to spare your feelings, so keep that in mind and don’t hate the messenger.”
I roll the scroll between my palms, surprised by how light and insubstantial it feels. With its curling corners and yellowing edges, it seems decades older than me.
“It is older than you,” she says. “Much, much older, in fact. You wouldn’t believe how old.”
I frown. I don’t really like that she can read my mind, though I guess it does offer a certain ease and efficiency.
Without another word, I remove the red ribbon, unroll the parchment across my lap, and stare in dismay.
“There’s nothing here!” I cry, hardly able to believe I’ve been duped. This whole outlandish show with the sliding furniture and Jinxly the improbable flying cat was just some sort of joke at my expense!
I glare at her, about to let forth a string of words I can never take back, when she beats me to the punch. “If the scroll is blank, it’s because you’re not yet ready to see what it contains. When you are ready, the words will appear.”
“How do I know that? How can I possibly know if that’s true?”
“Well, I suppose you won’t know until it happens. Once it happens, you’ll know, but certainly not before then. Either way, all you really need to know is that it’s enchanted.”
I drop my head in despair, taking in the state of my shredded suit, all the scratched and bloodied places where I was attacked by flesh-eating plants. I can’t help but wonder, what was the point of all this? Did I really come all this way just so I could hang out with some crazy old lady disguised as a nine-year-old girl who gets her jollies by being mean to desperate people like me? No wonder no one ever comes to see her. She’s pretty much the worst hostess ever.
She can hear me. She can hear everything I think, but I really don’t care. Fine, I made a mistake by deciding to trust her—wasn’t my first mistake and it won’t be the last—but that doesn’t mean I need to stick around so things can get even worse.
I shake my head, brush myself off, and am about to rise from my seat and take my chances going out the same window I climbed in, when she says, “If you truly did come to learn the future, then you might want to stick around just a little bit longer.”
“The future’s blank.” I wave the parchment furiously over my head.
“That’s not the future.” Her voice is quiet, authoritative, and it makes me fall silent.
“The scroll is important. Extremely important, so you might want to tuck it away in your bag to ensure you don’t lose it. Just because it’s no good to you now doesn’t mean you won’t need to rely on it later. But when you do read it, make sure you do so quickly and carefully. The information will only be revealed once, and when it disappears, it’s gone forever. Think of it as a living, breathing document—ever changing, always evolving.”
I take another look at the supposedly enchanted scroll. Despite what she says, it just looks like an old piece of paper. Still, I shove it into my messenger bag in the slim chance she’s telling the truth.
“So where do I learn about the future?” I ask.
She laughs as though I’ve said something funny. “Well, right here, of course. Why else did you endure such a journey? Certainly it wasn’t just so you could hang out with a crazy old lady disguised as a nine-year-old girl, now, was it?”
I shrink under her gaze. I’m about to apologize for thinking mean thoughts even though I knew she could hear them, when she steadies her focus on me. The next thing I know her eyes have rolled back in her head, and then her lids disappear, revealing two large, round screens in the place where eyeballs would normally be.
As I stare into them, the images I’m confronted with change everything I thought I knew about our world.
I wake up in a room so bright it feels like someone’s holding a flame to the backside of my eyelids.
I bolt upright, forgetting for a moment where I am, until the sofa reacts to the sudden movement by skating back and forth on its tracks.
Right. The Seer. But when did I fall asleep, and why did she let me when, from what we now know, I have other, more urgent places to be?
The last thing I remember seeing is an image of me standing at the very edge of the world. And yet strangely, the part that left me the most shaken were the images of Snelling.
In one, he was standing in Summerfield Lawn and his hands were dripping with blood.
In the other, he was also standing in Summerfield Lawn, but this time he was gazing in despair at the long rows of dug-up graves, the bones that were once buried inside them now gone.
As the Keeper, it was my duty to look after those bones, to maintain them, to make sure this sort of thing never happened.
Apparently, I’m the Keeper of the Bones.
Although Snelling never told me as much, he did hint at it the day he agreed to let me turn Summerfield Lawn into a graveyard for pets. His only condition being that I promise to protect the bones at any cost.
Clearly I failed at the task, seeing as how Chauncey the pony’s bones are gone.
But what Snelling failed to explain is why the bones needed to be kept.
I guess that’s the conversation he meant to have later. The one he started to have when that newspaper was delivered and I ran out the back door, denying him the chance.
So that’s why the town blames me, because I failed to keep the bones.
Though I’m still no closer to knowing what they meant when they claimed my family was cursed.
“Will Snelling be okay?” I catch sight of the Seer standing before the window, her young face creased with worry.
“I sure hope so,” she says, her voice grave in a way I couldn’t have imagined it sounding just yesterday. “But I’m afraid that’s just one of your problems.”
I rake a hand through my hair, swing my legs off the sofa, and wait for her to continue.
“The sun is shining, which means the protective dome is diminishing, which means the magic is lessening, which means the world you’ve grown to know and love will rapidly change in ways you won’t even recognize—unless you can stop it.”
I gulp. Oh yeah, I saw that part too. According to what the Seer revealed, Quiver Hollows is indeed in peril, and supposedly, as the Keeper, I’m the only one who can save it.
Seriously, of all the amazing people with all their amazing supernatural gifts, I’m the chosen one.
Me.
The only superpower I have is the power of supernormalcy.
“Oh, and to answer your question—I let you sleep because I figured you needed it. Also, I healed your nose while you were out. It took two cycles of nightfall, but you seem to be fine now.”
I stare at her blankly.
“You had a hairline fracture. I fixed it. You’re welcome.”
Tentatively, I run my fingers over the bridge. Sure enough, it feels normal again, less tender and no longer swollen. In addition, the cuts and scratches I received from the flesh-eating vines have disappeared as though they never existed. But what I say is, “Two days? You let me sleep for two whole days? Are you serious?”
“You have a long road ahead of you, Grimsly. But first—you need a few things.”
She pulls a stack of paper from her pocket and hands it to me. “It’s called money. It’s what people use in the outside world to get whatever they want or need.”
I stare at the flimsy rectangular pieces of paper. They’re similar in that each bears a number in every corner, and in the center there’s a picture of an old white man I don’t recognize.
“This is what they have in place of magic.” Reading the look on my face, the Seer says, “I don’t understand it any better than you do.” Her narrow shoulders rise and fall. “But believe me when I say that people have dedicated their lives to collecting large piles of it. Many have even died for it.”
“But…it’s just paper!” Everything she said seems so crazy.
“Power is rarely about the thing itself. It’s about the value you give to it. When there’s a perceived shortage of something, people tend to give it even more meaning than it deserves.”
“How’d you get this?” I ask.
“Like everyone else here, I have access to whatever I need. So this morning when this appeared, I knew it was so I could give it to you. But that’s not all—there’s a change of clothes too.”
She motions toward my bag, and I reach down to find a pair of blue jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a new pair of socks and sneakers, and a navy felt hat with the letters N and Y intersecting each other.
