Eyes of the Forest Page 11

  Even though Rowan staggered, he remained on his feet, blood trickling from his ear.

  “Kneel before me and tremble, you piteous wretch, or I—”

  A newly bejeweled hand reached past Bob to hit the red button on the treadmill’s control panel. “Okay, it’s time to stop. It’s well past time.”

  The treadmill coasted to a halt as he turned to face Joanne, tugging up his too-loose pants over what used to be his belly. She was holding a JCPenney bag as well as the stun gun.

  “I brought you some new sweats.” Her nose wrinkled. “Size L. I guess I’ll sell the ones you’re wearing now. Your last set went for $376.11.”

  The new sweats were a hideous orange-yellow, the color of an egg yolk, a color he could not imagine looking good on anyone. Which was probably why Joanne had chosen it.

  It was clear that she herself wasn’t shopping at JCPenney, at least not any longer. Diamonds the size of dimes tugged at her earlobes. Bob was no connoisseur of fashion, but even he could tell that her high-collared black jacket, matching slacks, and pointy high heels with red soles must be expensive.

  “Thank you.” He reached for the clothes.

  She held the bag out of reach. “First, I have some viewer requests.”

  Bob let out a heavy sigh. He’d gotten used to everything—the healthy food, the treadmill, the hours of writing—except the tricks.

  “Can’t we just skip this part, Joanne? Derrick told me the chapters are selling well.” Based on the hints the boy had dropped, Bob had done the math in his head. He’d already made them well over a hundred thousand dollars. “Don’t you want me to write?”

  She cocked her head. “Don’t you mean that’s what you want, Bob?”

  He hesitated, sensing a trap.

  “Let’s just say I’m not that interested in what you want. My ex fell in love with your books to the point that he didn’t care about real life. Didn’t care about me. And now Derrick is following the same path. So if I can make some extra money humiliating you? It seems like I deserve that, at least.”

  For the next hour, Bob twerked, did Tai Chi, and pretended to play table tennis while Joanne watched from the doorway. The whole time, she regarded him like something she’d discovered on the bottom of one of her new shoes and was now desperate to scrape off.

  That look made Bob face reality. Once he finished the book, he would lose all value to her. Even Derrick would no longer care about the person who had written all those words. Bob would be nothing but a liability. What incentive would they have to let him go?

  So what if they had a video of him agreeing to their plans? It wasn’t like the three of them had signed a legally binding contract. It had been a drunken conversation on his part, nothing more. What were the chances the video would hold up in court, especially once he testified that he’d begged to be released?

  Finishing the book might just get him killed.

  So obviously Bob couldn’t finish. Instead, he might need to be like Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. In that ancient tale, when an Arabian king found out his first wife had been unfaithful to him, he put her to death. He decided that he would start each day by beheading the previous day’s wife and then marrying a new young woman. That way, she wouldn’t have the opportunity to cheat.

  But when Scheherazade became the new wife, she spent the night telling an exciting tale. As dawn broke, she stopped in the middle. The king spared her life for another day. The following night, Scheherazade finished the story and then began a second, even more thrilling story. At dawn, she again stopped halfway through. Again, the king spared her life for one more day so she could finish.

  And so the king kept Scheherazade alive day by day.

  In the fable, at the end of a thousand and one nights and a thousand stories, Scheherazade told the king that she had no more tales. But during those nights, the king had fallen in love with her. He spared her life and made her his queen.

  Bob had always found the ending a touch questionable. Who would want to marry a man who had killed dozens of other women before you?

  But maybe Scheherazade had just been making the best of a bad situation, the way Bob was going to have to.

  BOB

  Time to Call a Halt

  Since realizing his life depended on never finishing Eyes of the Forest, Bob had added two fresh characters and a whole new subplot to Derrick’s version of the book. But the more he thought about it, the more he knew that he was only stalling the inevitable. Eventually, somebody was going to tire of things. Readers. Derrick. Joanne. Or maybe all three.

  When Derrick carried in his Lean Cuisine dinner, steaming in the chilly room, Bob set into motion the new, desperate plan he had come up with.

  “Look, Derrick, the closer I get to the end of the book, the more I realize I need my researcher. Bridget keeps track of all the details.” His rueful smile wasn’t entirely fake. “Over the years, I’ve just created too much. Too many creatures, too many cultures, too many backstories, too many relationships, too much history. I can’t keep everything straight anymore. To finish the series, I really need Bridget’s help.”

  “No,” Derrick said flatly as he set the plate down on the nightstand. Bob actually ate fruit now, so it was mostly empty. “I’ll just bring you all the previous books in the series. If you need to know something, try asking me. And if I don’t remember, then you can look it up.”

  Bob sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the plate. He’d learned not to butt heads with Derrick. It just made the boy stubborn. “But a lot of times I’m not exactly sure where or when I’ve said things. That will take hours. Instead of writing, I’ll be sitting here skimming thousands of pages. Bridget has this huge cross-referenced database. Without it, I’m going to make mistakes.” He tried for a connection. “You know how fans are. Change a character’s eye color, and they start obsessing it’s a hint it’s not the same character at all.”

  “Like the were-fox,” Derrick said.

  “Right. The fans will never forgive me for that one.” In King of Swords, Bob had said a character named Sonder Cozen was a were-fox. By the time Sonder popped up again in Mountains of the Moon, Bob’s faulty memory had decided he was a were-lynx, a mistake neither the editor nor the copyeditor caught. After Mountains of the Moon came out, complaints and speculation had dominated the Swords and Shadows Reddit for weeks. “So if you could let me borrow your phone, I can email Bridget some questions.” He peeled back the lid of the entree. Today it was two tiny pieces of chicken covered with a yellow sauce and flecked with a few bits of red pepper. Next to them was approximately a quarter-cup of white rice. He picked up his plastic fork and dug in. After weeks of limited food and limitless treadmill, he was now about the size he’d been in college.

  The boy made a scoffing noise. “Right. In two seconds, you’d be dialing 911.”

  “I promise I won’t. Come on, Derrick, I need Bridget’s help.” It wasn’t even a lie. Bob did need Bridget. To save him. “I can’t finish without her.” He spoke around a mouthful of food. “There’s no way I can write thousands of words tying up all the loose ends from the six previous books without having access to her. Plus she’s got all these reference works about medieval royalty and feasting and child-rearing practices. Do you want a book larded with mistakes? I need her.”

  “Is that why those chapters you showed me yesterday didn’t seem as good as some of the other books?”

  Feeling a twist of offense, Bob made himself nod. “Right. Because I could only rely on my memory.”

  “All right.” Derrick sighed. “Type up the questions you want me to send her.”

  “Thank you,” Bob said as he scraped up the last of the gummy food from the plastic box. “I’ll get my thoughts organized.”

  Lying in bed that night, Bob tried to figure out how to alert Bridget.

  His first idea was to refer to Princess Elspeth, King Tristan’s daughter. In Darkest Heart she’d been kidnapped by Maulty Minglehouse, forced to marr
y him in front of a drunken, bribed priest. A nobleman fallen on hard times, Maulty had erroneously thought that the marriage might make King Tristan elevate him to a higher position. Instead, the king, believing his own daughter had defied him, and fearing that marked her as the murderer foretold by the blind seer, had sent assassins after them.

  But invoking Elspeth seemed too big a clue. While Bridget knew the books better than anyone, Derrick was nearly as familiar. Any mention of Elspeth, and Bob’s email wouldn’t get sent. Any mention of Elspeth, and Derrick might tell his mother, at which point Joanne might decide it was time to make Bob disappear.

  He had to choose his words carefully, the exact opposite of the technique that had allowed him to write two books and nearly finish one.

  Whatever he wrote would be turned into ones and zeros on a computer. That meant he couldn’t write in lemon juice (which he didn’t have) or urine (which he did, unfortunately, thanks to the chamber pot) in the hopes Bridget would hold the paper over a candle flame to reveal its secrets.

  And of course Derrick wouldn’t transmit anything that was clearly a code, such as a nonsense string of numbers, letters, or words.

  Bridget was Bob’s only hope, but getting her to understand he was in trouble seemed nearly impossible. The only thing in Bob’s favor was that she was so smart. So watchful. And so surprisingly brave. He would never forget her facing down the crowd at Powell’s.

  Finally, Bob realized how he could get her to look underneath the surface of his note. In the middle of the night, he got up, snugged the quilt against the door, switched on the lamp and rolled a piece of paper into the typewriter. It took several tries to get it right. He kept blinking and yawning. But finally he had a message that might pass muster with Derrick while still alerting Bridget.

  Looking at the finished product, he sighed. Because he also knew that it might hurt her.

  BRIDGET

  A Rabble Approaching

  “I won’t let anyone hurt you again.” King Orwen gathered Jancy into his arms.

  With a gasp, she went rigid. But when he did nothing more, her shoulders slowly relaxed. She tilted her head back to return his gaze.

  His focus narrowed until there was only her. Did Jancy have any idea how beautiful she was, with her black curls tumbling past her shoulders? Her generous mouth, ripe for kissing?

  His gaze went from her full lips to her sky-blue eyes and back again. And she was doing the same to him, looking from eyes to lips to eyes to—

  “Sire!” A page burst into the room. “Sire!”

  Releasing Jancy, King Orwen turned, warmth replaced by cold fury. “Did I not make it clear I was not to be disturbed?” His hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. He was torn between taking the flat to the boy’s backside or simply running him through.

  The page’s face paled until the only color was the spots on his forehead and cheeks. “Begging your pardon, Sire, but there is a rabble approaching.” He drew a shaky breath. “And they are demanding your head.”

  With a sigh, Bridget closed Mountains of the Moon. She gave the book a pat to thank it. She’d read it a dozen times, but that ending never failed to thrill her.

  For a long moment, Ajay didn’t move. Didn’t even seem to breathe. Then he shook his head as if waking from a dream. “Wait. What?”

  “That’s the end of the last book.” Reading aloud the scene between Jancy and King Orwen, Bridget had imagined herself and Ajay. What would it be like to have his arms around her? To feel him press his lips against her throat? Every day he sat right next to her, close enough that she could feel his warmth. He seemed like a miniature furnace, while she was always bouncing her knees, snugging her coat tighter, and occasionally blowing on her fingers. And every day he did not move a millimeter closer.

  “You’ve been saying all week that this would be the last day, but that can’t be the end,” Ajay protested. “He can’t just leave us hanging there. That’s got to be the peasant army coming for King Orwen, right? What’s going to happen when Jancy learns that Rowan’s leading it? Plus, don’t the humans realize they have to stop fighting each other and start fighting the undead? It’s almost too late! And the unicorns still haven’t said if they’ll help.”

  “Welcome to how everyone else has felt for the last three-plus years.” Bridget popped the last spoonful of her mulligatawny soup into her mouth. She was trying to hide it, but she felt equally bereft, for different reasons. Tomorrow was the last day before winter break. When school started up again in January, would Ajay still want to eat with her, now that their reason for being together was finished?

  She had been counting on their trade lasting well into the new year, but then Ajay had come back from Thanksgiving break and admitted he’d just listened to the audiobook of Court of Sorrows. He had been so apologetic, but then again, he was always so polite. Had it just been a way of shortening their time together without coming right out and saying it? Even now, she was still unsure how much his presence next to her was due to her and how much was due to the books. Maybe she could start reading him another series. Although nothing was as good as Swords and Shadows.

  Ajay persisted. “But you’re not everyone else, are you? I know Bob sometimes asks you about what’s he’s already written. That must give you some pretty good clues about the next book.”

  Bob had asked her not to disclose his writer’s block. Bridget settled for something true that wasn’t the truth. “I haven’t heard from him in a few weeks.” Saying it aloud made her realize just how long it had been. What was supposed to be a distraction for Ajay became a concern for her. “Actually, that’s the longest he’s ever gone without asking about anything. That’s not like him.”

  “Maybe he’s found his groove, then.”

  “Maybe,” she echoed, still feeling uneasy.

  Ajay reached into his backpack. “Before the bell rings, I wanted to give you this.” He pulled out a small flat package wrapped in blue paper printed with white snowflakes. The wrapping paper was a little crooked, like he’d done it himself.

  “Oh,” Bridget stammered, her mouth suddenly dry. “I didn’t get you anything.”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything. I just wanted to show my appreciation for you introducing me to some amazing people—even if they’re fictional.”

  The package was too small for a book. Was that good or bad? A book could be a sign Ajay wanted to continue their reading ritual. But Bridget also wanted something that made it clear how he felt about her. That would make it obvious he liked her as much as she liked him.

  What could be inside? Bold earrings that would brush her shoulders? Two tickets to an upcoming concert or play? A charm on a delicate silver chain?

  Inside Bridget’s chest, her heart started to gallop. Warmth suffused her whole body. For once, she didn’t even feel the cold. She tried to slide her finger underneath the tape, but the paper tore.

  She lifted the lid of the box to reveal something nestled in white tissue paper.

  A pair of socks. Thick, plain, black wool socks.

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly feeling like an idiot. “Thank you.”

  Mercifully, the bell rang, signaling the end of lunch and giving her the out she so desperately needed. Tears stung her eyes as she realized just how stupid she’d been, making up a romantic story about what was clearly their practical, transactional relationship. Grabbing up the socks, the book, and her pack, she made toward the doors into the cafeteria as fast as she could.

  “Bridget—wait!”

  “Sorry!” she called without turning around. “I’m late for a test.”

  BOB

  False Words

  Hello Bridget—

  You’ll be glad to know I’ve turned my attention back to the manuscript and am making good progress. Have you had a chance to ask your parents about working for me full-time over the summer? Please tell Anna and Graham how much I’ll need your help if I’m to finish.

  As we discussed earlier, I’m adding a new chara
cter. So please look for all instances of:

  “Jade Tarnno.”

  And then flag each spot with:

  “Add Ken Pipem.”

  The rest of this letter details what I’m trying to get right on my third attempt, at least initially.

  Can you help with researching endowments? Can you look up whether daughters can be inheritors of the nation? Consider the monarchy—what if Tristan learned that he and Princess Ofelia were not only father and daughter but also cousins because of a secret wedding? Bridget, that means I will probably need some more help with adding extra characters too, like jongleur Ken Pipem.

  Best,

  Bob

  Derrick looked up from the note Bob had typed up last night. “Who’s this Jade Tarnno person? And Ken Pipem?”

  “Jade Tarnno is a female minstrel I’ll be adding to the book,” Bob said, improvising madly. “She has green eyes and black hair as straight as a waterfall. Her lover is a jongleur named Ken Pipem. Ken is always masked because he’s hiding his leprosy.” Behind his hand, he stifled a burp. “Ken wears a mask to hide his deformed nose, and the fingers of his left glove are stuffed with horsehair to hide the fact that two are missing.”

  As Bob frantically lied to save himself, Jade Tarnno and Ken Pipem took shape in his imagination. Took shape and then broke out of the mold. They were no longer flat characters he’d just made up.

  Instead, it felt like he was describing people who already existed. Like he was watching a movie and simply describing what he saw.

  This vision was also informed by his years of research. In medieval times there had been more than two thousand leper colonies in France alone. The Sunday after the leper was diagnosed, he was dressed in a shroud and brought to church on a litter carried by four priests singing psalms. Once inside, he was set down a safe distance from the congregation. After the service for the dead was read, the priests carried him out of town to the leper colony. He was given a bell or a pair of castanets to warn others of his presence. And he could never again enter a church, a mill, a market, or any place where others gathered. He could not bathe himself nor wash his clothes in stream nor spring. If anyone spoke to him on the road, he could not answer until he was downwind.