Everlast (The Chronicles of Nerissette) (Entangled Teen) Read online

  “Hurry up already, Allie,” Mercedes hissed as she elbowed me in the ribs.

  “I’m looking, but we’re running out of books.”

  “Well, hurry anyway. If we don’t go back to the table with something reasonable you know Jesse is going to try pitching his whole comic books are really just fairy tales that don’t suck idea again, and Winston will lose it.”

  I winced. “Oh, God. I can’t take another argument about the merits of comic books versus novels. I just can’t. My brain is already throbbing from trying to explain to him that just because The Avengers had a woman in it doesn’t make it a fairy tale.”

  “Mine, too. So, while I’d really love to watch Winston punch him and break into an old-fashioned throwdown, Mrs. Ath will bounce us out of here. Then we’ll never get this project done, and we’ll fail English, and then I will have to kill you.”

  “It’s not my fault that we can’t find a fairy tale that hasn’t been claimed by another group already or isn’t completely stupid—at least according to Her Majesty over there.” I ran my finger over the edges of the thick books on the shelf.

  Mythology. Cinderella. Scandinavian folk tales. None of them made it past Heidi’s eye-rolling dismissal before she sent me back to the shelves to find something else. Nothing I found was right. Everything was too much work, or too boring, or simply too uncool. But she couldn’t tell me what she wanted, so we were quickly running out of options. Unless we wanted to do a project on The Avengers or a critique on the fashion choices Disney had made when outfitting its princesses. The short version? Heidi thought they needed more couture and fewer ruffles.

  “What about this one on folk tales from Africa?” Mercedes pulled a red leather-bound book off the shelf.

  “She won’t go for it,” I said. “She’ll say that folk tales are cliché. Besides, it will get her into another rant on clothes with clashing patterns, and dear God that makes the whole Avengers thing seem like a debate we’d be having during an Honor Society meeting.”

  “This from the girl who claimed a TV show was a totally modern version of fairy tales for people who were too cool to bother with reading books? We couldn’t, I don’t know, pitch them as a sort of ironic indie fashion statement thing?”

  “Like I said, the folk tales won’t work. What about this?” I grabbed a thick, dusty book crammed into a small space toward the end of the shelf, lying horizontal instead of standing upright like the rest. I flipped the book over carefully and looked at the royal blue cover. The Chronicles of Nerissette.

  My jaw fell open. The book that inspired my dreams. Fate and her cloak of forgotten wishes. Kuolema and his brothers. My mother had read to me from this edition every night when I was a kid up until the accident, and when I’d gone back to our apartment to pack our things it had been gone.

  “We’ll use this.” I shoved the book into Mercedes’s hands and wiped my own sweaty palms on my jeans. I backed away from her, my eyes still on the book, and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in my stomach.

  “Allie?” She quirked an eyebrow at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. This is the book we’re using, and if Heidi doesn’t like it then she can do the project on her own, and then we’ll see what Mr. Brinnegar thinks of her fashion sense.”

  “Okay…” Mercedes followed me across the library cradling the book to her chest as the two boys in our group glared at each other. Heidi flipped through a cheerleading magazine, ignoring the rest of us as she had been for most of the meeting.

  “How can you not watch the Steelers on Monday Night Football?” Jesse asked Winston, his blue eyes wide as he shook his golden-blond surfer fringe so that it flopped forward to cover one eye.

  “I don’t watch football,” Winston answered. “It seems pretty logical to me.”

  “But it’s all that our country stands for. Not watching football is—I don’t know what it is. It’s un-American. That’s it. It’s, like, communist or something. The terrorists win if you don’t watch football.”

  “The communists aren’t technically terrorists,” Winston pointed out, crossing his arms over his chest. “Not that it matters because I still couldn’t watch football. We don’t have a TV in Casa Carruthers. The major says they rot your brain.”

  “You don’t have a television?” Heidi lowered her magazine to glower at Winston, her pouty, pink mouth curled up in a sneer. “Isn’t that like a crime or something? I’m pretty sure there’s a law about it.”

  “You would think so,” Winston said.

  Mercedes and I came up behind him and took our seats on either side, across the table from our less academically inclined partners. I gripped Winston’s clenched hand under the table. I knew the last thing he wanted to do was explain his father and the unconventional rules that he made them live by.

  “But…” Winston uncurled his fist and gave my hand a quick squeeze before pulling away. “Try as I might, I can’t persuade the Marine Corps to court-martial him over it.”

  “Oh, man.” Jesse ran his hand up through his hair, pushing it back off his face, his eyes wide. “That sucks.” He turned to me and smiled, a dimple flickering in his cheek. “Hey, Allie. Did you find something?”

  “Um.” I swallowed, and my heart started to pound again for no real reason. “Yeah. I found the book we’re going to use.”

  “After I approve it,” Heidi said.

  “I’m the group leader.” I turned to narrow my eyes at her and then reached out to get the book from Mercedes. “And I’m sick of you nixing all our choices. So this”—I dropped the book onto the table with a heavy thud—“is the book we are going to pick our fairy tale from.”

  Heidi sniffed. “Fine, but I get to choose what story we use.”

  “Whatever.” Mercedes flipped the front cover of the book open. “Let’s just choose something so that we can split the work up and get out of here.”

  “Fine.” Heidi glared first at Mercedes and then at me.

  “Fine.” I gritted my teeth.

  “I don’t see why you all are making such a big deal out of this anyway,” Heidi said. “Nobody else really cares about this stupid project. I don’t see why you’re making it such a thing.”

  “Because some of us need this grade,” I said.

  The snobby blonde rolled her eyes at me and twisted her lips into a sneer. Her normally hazel eyes looked gray and flat in the fluorescent lights, and I noticed she had a huge zit forming on her chin.

  “Like Jesse, if he wants to stay off academic probation and on the basketball team,” I said. “Or at least that’s what Mr. Brinnegar told me when he put you on our team.”

  “And some of us have actual lives and really couldn’t care less about anything as stupid as English class,” Heidi snapped. “Besides, Brinnegar isn’t actually going to kick Jesse off the team—they need him to win.”

  “What’s this?” Winston asked, ignoring our bickering. He and Mercedes were leaning across the library table, their heads almost touching.

  “What’s what?”

  “This.” He pointed to a sketch on the inside of the front cover.

  I leaned in for a closer look. The picture was of an old-fashioned room with a fireplace in the back and a table loaded with books. A small cauldron with tiny bottles and jars scattered around it was in the corner. In the very center of the table was a cat, peering intently into a crystal ball. A fancy ribbon was unfurled across the bottom of the picture with the words “The Fate Maker’s Lair” in thick calligraphy. Smoke curled around the bottom of the picture’s border.

  “Hey.” I goggled, bug-eyed, at the book and noticed that the picture seemed to have a lot more smoke than it had a second before, and, hold up—

  “Is that picture moving?” Mercedes pulled the book toward her.

  “What?” Winston yanked the book back, before glancing over at Mercedes like she’d lost her mind.

  “Just a minute ago the cat was gazing in the crystal ball,” Mercedes said. “I’m sure of it. The cat
was on the table, staring into the crystal ball, but look at it now.”

  The lights flickered and thunder rumbled in the distance even though the library was still flooded with bright sunlight. I turned my attention back to the book and stared at the cat in question.

  Mercedes was right. I’d seen that picture hundreds of times when I was younger. I knew that the cat was meant to be peering into the crystal ball, except that now it was sitting with its back straight, staring out of the picture at us with a wide, toothy grin.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Heidi slammed her magazine down on the table and grabbed the book out of Winston’s hands. “Pictures in books don’t move. It’s a picture.”

  Mercedes jabbed her finger at the cat on the page. “That picture moved.”

  “Pictures in books don’t move,” Heidi said, her voice crackling with irritation.

  The book flew out of her hands, sliding into the middle of the table, and began to spin, its pages fluttering. The lights above us exploded, the glass from the bulbs tinkling against the sconces like the patter of rain on a roof. A cold wind tore through the library, throwing open the doors on the far side.

  “Can’t move, can’t I?” a sharp, exotic-sounding female voice growled. I felt goose bumps prickle all over my body—I knew that voice. “Shows what you know.”

  Where the book sat open, no longer spinning, there was a black cat hovering in midair—glowering at us all. The same black cat that had been in my dream this morning. The one who’d said Fate was coming.

  She blinked once and let her mouth stretch into a wide smile, fangs glittering like they belonged in a toothpaste commercial.

  “You…you…you can talk,” I said. “You can actually talk. It’s not just a dream.”

  “Either that or you’ve gone around the bend completely,” the cat said.

  She gave me a wicked grin, and I tried to tuck myself behind Winston, totally not caring that I was acting like a wuss by hiding behind a guy. If the cat from my dreams was here, then the dragon Kuolema might not be far behind—and if any one of us stood a chance against Death himself, I was placing my bet on Win.

  “Either way, no time to waste.” The cat’s mouth stretched even wider into a maniacal grin. “You opened the book, and the die’s been cast. Time to meet the fate you each so richly deserve.”

  Before any of us could respond, the cat blinked and the world lurched, pitching us toward the table and into the swirling black mass where the book had once been.

  Chapter Three

  We plummeted headfirst as cold, gray smoke rushed past us, and I clung to Winston with my left hand and kept flinging my right out to find Mercedes. My fingers brushed against something warm and I felt a reassuring tug. I couldn’t see but I knew it was her.

  The wind turned icy and a loud rushing sound, like being trapped underneath a waterfall, filled my ears before I landed on something solid—and dirty. At least it wasn’t cold. Or alive. Mercedes landed a second after, halfway on top of me, and I coughed. Winston groaned at my other side, and I pulled away from him.

  “Both of you have got to lay off the candy bars,” he said.

  I rolled over onto my back and opened my eyes. There were dirty brown rafters above me, and a large, ugly bird’s nest in the corner. It looked like we’d landed in a room with stone walls, and I shifted—yep, I was going to be feeling that landing for a while.

  “Oh, for the love of the stars,” I whispered, my mother’s favorite saying slipping easily from my mouth.

  “Princess…”

  That same female voice was back again, and I turned my head and saw the cat from the library staring down at me—actually alive this time—her very real nose twitching. She twisted her lips into another grin, and the black patch of fur around her eyes crinkled. She sat back and lifted one white paw, licked along the length of it, then used it to wipe her face.

  I sat up and inched away from her on my butt, clinging to Mercedes and Winston again. “You get away from us. I don’t know who you are or what sort of freaky trick this is, but you stay away.”

  “My apologies for the landing. The Chronicles positioned you too far to the right. It truly is a wonderful instrument but, well, even in life the book was never known for her aim.”

  “Her what?” I whispered.

  “Just ask Tervalkien the One-Eyed Troll. Before their archery match he was just Tervalkien the Troll.”

  “Nope. No. No way.”

  “Yes, he was. And a rather handsome troll at that.”

  “No, this has got to be some sort of freaky prank. Like gas pumped through the vents at the library to make everyone hallucinate or drugs or—I don’t know—something that Heidi came up with so she could have a laugh probably. This isn’t real. You’re not real.”

  The cat swung her head around to stare pointedly at the huge pile of fluffy pillows about three feet from where Winston had landed. “Then why didn’t she arrange to land on the cushions instead?”

  “What?”

  “This,” Heidi started. I looked over to see her and Jesse cowering behind a table in the corner. “Whatever the heck this is—I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Yeah, right.” I glared at her.

  “If someone drugged us then it was one of you weird, fantasy-role-playing nerds. And it’s really not cool,” Heidi said. “You need to fix this.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it! How do you expect me to have pulled this off?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. You’re one of those boring smart people. I’m sure you have your ways.”

  “Unlike some people, I don’t live to torture others. If anyone is behind this it’s the cheerleading squad. This has you written all over it, Heidi Spencer. Nobody else would come up with a prank this over-the-top dramatic.”

  “We’d steal your clothes while you were in swim practice or fill your iPod with twenty hours of people yodeling, but causing explosions and kidnapping people? Not really our style.”

  “Allie.” Winston tugged on my hand and my gaze locked on his. A shiver ran up my spine. I shook it off.

  “Heidi and the rest of the cheerleaders aren’t smart enough to pull this off,” he continued. “I don’t even know what it is that happened, and if I can’t figure it out, you know Heidi couldn’t have done it.”

  “What?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you saying you’re smarter than me?”

  “Yes, and there is no way that you managed to pump the library full of hallucinogens, cause an explosion, and somehow manage to transport us to some weird prop room that’s been made to look like a castle dungeon.”

  “But how did it happen, then?” I asked.

  “He’s right,” Mercedes said, her voice trembling. “Heidi can’t spell explosion, much less make one. There’s no way she could have pulled this off. Whatever this actually is.”

  “Just because I have better things to do with my time than hang out in a chemistry lab doesn’t mean I’m an idiot,” Heidi snapped. “And for the record? I’m smart enough to not end up with mint-green highlights when I do my roots. So there.”

  “Heidi.” I turned to glare at her. “Did you do this somehow?”

  “No, duh, but that’s not the—”

  “Like I said”—the cat stepped closer so that she was standing next to my foot, her tail extended into the air like a flag—“I brought you here…with the help of the book, of course.”

  “The Chronicles of Nerissette? You’re saying that a book brought us here?” I asked.

  “Yes, the book. The one you picked up in the library. Remember that one? Blue cover? Slightly oversized and a bit pretentious in her bindings? More than a bit familiar to look at? Maybe it even reminds you of a book that once sat on your bedroom bookshelf?”

  I swallowed. “How did you know that?”

  “Miss I-Need-to-Be-in-Royal-Blue-Leather helped me bring you here, but she aimed too far to the right so you missed the rather soft pillows I had laid out for you,” the cat said
, ignoring my question. “Like I said, she always did have a lousy aim.”

  “Uh, well, thanks?” I shifted on the hard floor, trying to find a comfortable spot to sit. “I mean, for the pillows. It’s the thought and all when it comes to that sort of stuff. Or at least that’s what my mom always said…but we really shouldn’t be here.”

  “Yes, she did.” The cat looked at me shrewdly. “They do…mothers, that is. They always have those silly sayings like ‘it’s the thought that counts’ and ‘never count your mice before they’re digested.’ Things like that.”

  I bit my lip and stared at the cat. I was pretty sure my mother would have freaked out if I even considered eating a mouse, and she definitely wouldn’t have given me any tips on their digestion.

  “Look, as nice as it was for you to put out pillows for our landing, maybe you and the book could possibly come up with a way to—”

  “To?” The cat’s tail waved back and forth like a particularly curious S.

  “Take us home? Because whoever you think we are, we aren’t the people you want. None of us are rich or important or anything else. Kidnapping us won’t help you.”

  “Who said anything about kidnapping?” The cat tilted her head to the side, and I tried to control the tremor that was rushing through me as her lips curled upward into another smile. “Princess, I didn’t kidnap you. I brought you home.”

  “I’m…uh…” I scooted backward on my butt, trying to get away from her.

  “Hey, look, you.” Jesse stood up from behind the table and came around to stand in the middle of the floor, facing the cat. “I don’t know who you think you are but this is seriously not cool.”

  “I’m Esmeralda,” the cat said, “one of the creatures in this world who loves the princess the most. The one who would give up everything if it would keep her safe. The one who would bargain with Fate herself.”

  “Look, whatever sort of whacked-out hallucination this is”—Winston slipped in front of me—“it ends now.”

  “Hallucination?” the cat asked.

  “Whoever you are, whatever you think Allie knows or has or—I don’t know—you’re wrong,” Winston said. “You’ve got the wrong girl, and you need to take us home now before things get any worse.”