At first I stiffened, and then I moved. All I knew was that my skin rejected Prince’s touch, spewed it back. Without even understanding what I was doing, I lunged at him. I registered the blazing chair behind him, but a plan to shove him into it—I don’t think I had one. Instead I had his kiss still coiled and flexing in my cheek, and I had Owen’s seventeen-year-old bulk pinning me down. Owen’s voice whispering that, if his parents knew, they’d send me away again. He’d been right, it turned out; he was their bio child, after all, and I was just a stray dog. And I had what I couldn’t name, whatever was happening to Josh. Some kind of unbalancing in who he was, like the rage in him was getting the best of his gentleness. All the times I’d been too shocked, too scared to react at all—it turned out now that those moments were still with me, and they were tensile, and ready for violence.
My hands shot up and forward, catching him at the base of his throat, and my legs sprang. I was screaming again, yowling, like I had when I’d smashed those flowers, but more loudly. And Prince gave way. Even if he was nearly seven feet tall, tonight, he was light, airy. Decayed inside. One naked, skinny banshee of a girl was enough to send him flying.
Into Emma’s fiery chair. And I was airborne too, winging after him. I’d shot myself into nothingness, that was how it seemed, until I landed on my knees on the asphalt. My head, horribly, fell on Prince’s thigh. I reared back and saw him, in his shiny leather tights and white bubble of a jacket, sitting enthroned in flames. His stance was lazy, comfortable, both arms spread on the armrests.
His followers stood silent, but Josh didn’t. He cried out and came after me, wrapping me in a soft embrace. Pulling me back and away, and the whole time the terrible thing was that Prince didn’t scream, although he must have been burning. He’d seemed as dry as tinder. He didn’t respond at all, just lounged in the blazing recliner, his head tipped slightly to one side. The brilliance around him singed my vision, and it was hard to make out the look on his face—but at a guess I would have said he was bemused. Toxic whorls of smoke caught in my throat and sent me stumbling back, still tangled in Josh’s arms. Prince didn’t seem to care.
If anything, the black scarves of smoke wrapped him lovingly. He stood up, in no hurry at all, a few small patches of blaze still clinging to his hair and clothes. A girl I’d seen that first night, with a dress of silver snails, jumped forward to pat the flames out. Was that all there was to it? I’d committed the most violent act of my life, tried to burn a man alive, and he barely deigned to notice? He advanced on me and Josh, head still tilted, smile at a slant. Josh was opening his mouth, ready to babble who-knows-what in my defense; maybe that I hadn’t known what I was doing. Maybe that I was too traumatized to be touched.
“Your sister is such an enlivening presence, isn’t she, Joshua? I suspect the tedium of court life exhausts a man more than hard labor ever could. Ksenia flings herself at me, strives to do me bodily harm, and I find myself wonderfully refreshed.”
He reached out and patted me on the cheek, and again I was openmouthed but helpless, my throat thick with a wobbling mass of what felt like heat and pus and tears all at once. Because the violence in me had finally broken free.
And it had been useless.
Josh relaxed, though. He didn’t care that I’d failed, only that Prince didn’t seem to be angry with me. “I like her too.” At least there was an edge in his voice. “Oh, Kezz, you’re bleeding? Why don’t you go inside and get cleaned up? I … this might take a while.”
Crimson was running down my shins. I’d hurt myself, not Prince. That made it even more shameful, somehow: that no matter what I did, the wounds would rebound into me, or straight through me and into whoever I loved. I couldn’t cry, not in front of these people, but the tears I was holding back turned the stars into dandelion bursts of light. I would have given anything to run into the house and escape.
But I’d already let them steal him from me once. “I’m staying with you, baby. Whatever they want from you, they’re going to have to take it from me too.”
Prince grinned at that, and beckoned the mink-head girl closer. “Of course. You needn’t worry about your sister, Joshua. We can attend to her scratches for her here. No trouble at all. Unselle, dearest?”
“Kezzer!” Josh said—and it was in the new, weirdly authoritative voice I’d noticed earlier. “Please go in. Let me deal with this.”
Prince stepped aside and the mink-head girl—Unselle, he’d called her?—rustled closer in her frothing dress. All at once I got the sense that she was a big deal in this place, maybe Prince’s second-in-command. She knelt at my feet in a pool of pale lace and arched her chest toward me. Her ruffles engulfed my calves. I had no idea what was happening.
“No,” I said. I understood one thing now: there was a price to be paid for being here, for the house and the champagne and our freedom from a world determined to tear the two of us apart. Even if none of this was my choice, I wouldn’t let Josh pay for both of us. “I won’t lose you. Not any more than I have already.”
“You surely can’t expect to hide Ksenia away from society indefinitely, can you, Joshua? Not when she brings such grace wherever she goes,” Prince said. And now the girl’s head was flung back, her eyes closed and her ice-pale curls tumbling backward. Blood dripped from my knees onto her lace-veiled breasts and she shuddered. It would have been such a perfect face, if there wasn’t something sharp and terrible about it. She seemed to have three pairs of cheekbones, raising thin, knobby ridges to each side of her nose.
The stuffed mink head sewn over her heart gave a sleepy little growl, yawned, and swirled a long pink tongue over its jaws. I saw a drop of my blood splat on its jutting lip. Heard it purr.
I almost jumped back, but Josh was still pressed against me and Prince was watching with his acrid green eyes. He’d enjoy it if I panicked. Instead I stood perfectly still while the girl wriggled closer, rubbing me with her chest, and her lifeless mink began to lap the weeping blood from my skinned knees. Its rough tongue dug into my peeled flesh, pausing once to suck out a curl of bright-blue glass from one of those broken flowers. I hissed against the pain, but I held steady. Kept my expression blank and disdainful, as well as I could, though I felt queasy.
The problem was, Prince obviously enjoyed this too. Watching a taxidermy mink slurp down my blood was as good as a porn film; that was what the look on his face told me.
“Kezzer isn’t really part of this,” Josh insisted. Though there was something hungry in his expression too, watching that dead thing feeding on me. I could feel its whiskers trembling on my skin, feel its freakish hot-cold breath. “She’s living here with me, but only because I brought her along. She didn’t come for you.”
“And does it matter why she’s here, Joshua? She’s in my realm and she belongs to us, along with the pleasure of her company.”
I was starting to feel weak. How much of my blood was that mink sucking down? I raised my foot and knocked Unselle back, and she flopped over in a frilly heap. Eyes still closed, ecstatic smile. Emma’s chair now misshapen behind her, a charred hulk drooling stray flames.
“That’s not how it works. People only belong to whoever they love,” Josh said. I was relieved to find that he was still capable of talking back to these people, and dismayed to realize that I hadn’t been sure if he could.
“Is that so? And why don’t we enquire what Ksenia herself has to say on the subject?”
It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about, because I wasn’t sure if I belonged to anyone, not even to myself. I loved Josh, but was that enough to make him own me? Maybe I did belong to a part of Joshua, though: the part that Mitch and Emma didn’t want to think about or even believe existed. To the rage and desperation that could make him much more dangerous than he seemed to be. To everything in him that had brought us here.
And I was afraid that those were thoughts that might prove Prince was right, in a way.
I opened my mouth to say something, though I still hadn’t decided what. But then I saw that Prince wasn’t looking to me for the answer.
He was gazing at my bowler hat, with an air of waiting politely for it to speak.
His arm snaked out, longer than I would have thought possible, and lifted the hat off my head. Held it in front of his face, and gazed into the hollow where my scalp had been, and where the oversized eye had welled up earlier. Of course: that eye had been his. Exactly the same bright bile green. And now he spoke into the hat, like someone calling into the depths of a cave.
“Ksenia, my beauty? What do you think of all this? It seems to me that Joshua is presuming overmuch on your affection. So: where do you belong, and by what are you possessed? Do tell.”
Then he threw my hat on the ground. Hollow facing up, just the way that Josh had said I should never let it fall. In case there was something in there, something that might try to escape.
There was. They burst out now. There were so many that at first I couldn’t make them out; all I took in was a blur of jointed petals, multiplying mothlike wings.
But no: they were all me. Jagged and fragmentary, stunted and squeaking. A legion of broken-mirror Ksenia-imps, no taller than the middle of my thigh. They swung and shook like ringing bells, each one unfolding into more and more leering duplicates. Thousands of them, all as naked as I was. Blond hair like poisonous spines, tiny pointed breasts. They swarmed and bubbled over the lawn, sometimes flat and sometimes bristling with dimensions, their limbs clacking like cicadas’ wings. All of them wore black penny loafers, all of them had bleeding knees.
And maybe I’d been in denial about the Josh-imp. I’d managed to believe that it was distinct from Joshua himself, that it was an alien entity. But seeing my own broken, dwindled selves was different. I recognized them, I knew they were more genuinely and completely me than I had ever been myself, in all my life. My true image, my sick and garbled being.
No wonder Prince spoke to them and not to me. They were my reality, and they would never lie, to him or to anyone.
But they didn’t answer him now. Instead they rolled up the lawn in a rattling, faceted melee, leapfrogging one another, clapping together and then splitting into multiples again. Sometimes they shrieked, and I recognized the high, pitiful voice that had clamored out of my phone right before I threw it down. They piled onto one another and flocked straight up the butter-yellow siding, plastered the roof of the house’s low main section.
There was more clattering, more seething. And then Mitch and Emma’s bland suburban house had an entire second story, where there’d been nothing but sky five minutes before.
That was it. The night was silent and starry, with only a few stray mousey peeps emitted by the new upper level of our house. All the Ksenia-imps were gone from the lawn and the street. I knew that the second story was made out of little Ksenias, that it was a living colony of my fractured selves, but they were doing a brilliant job of making the addition appear as if it had been there all along. There was the same yellow vinyl, or what looked just like it. The same shingle roof, just one floor higher up. Two windows gawking darkly at the night, both open. The only innovation was the curtains blowing in our new upstairs rooms. There was enough light from the streetlamps that I could see they had red and white checks, brighter than anything Emma would have chosen.
Not what I would have chosen either. Except that maybe I had.
Everyone had fallen silent while all of this was happening. Understandably. Now Prince bent down, scooped up my hat, and handed it back to me with a flourish. It was no lighter than it had been, but somehow I could feel that it was empty in a way it had never been before.
“And there we have it, Joshua. Whatever questions you might have, pertaining to Ksenia’s belonging—I believe she, and you, can locate an answer somewhere up there. Assuming she’ll let you in, of course. And now I think we’ll wish you both a good night.”
“Kezzer won’t go up there!” Josh said. His voice sounded frantic, percussive; was this the first time since I’d found him out in the woods that he’d been truly afraid? “You can’t make her. We’ll both pretend—that whole floor—we’ll just ignore it. I’ll board up the stairs!”
We hadn’t been here for very long, but I already knew that boarding up a stairway was no kind of solution. Josh should have known that too, especially since he was the one who’d dragged us into this. Those imp things could warp the house to suit their own purposes, open as many ways through as they wanted. I’d seen what the Josh-imps had done with the stairs down to our lower half-story, dilating space and collapsing it again, and why would the Ksenia-imps be any less capable? It wasn’t like Josh to be willfully stupid.
“Oh, but I don’t suppose Ksenia would have gone to the trouble of building so much new space onto your house,” Prince observed. “Not unless it had something to offer her.”
That was how it happened. As honestly as I can remember it, anyway. But I can’t tell how long we’ve been here. Every passing second has a trickery about it, and when I try to pin anything down—any word, any hour, any slippage of the sunlight down the walls—I find that I can’t. All I can say for sure is that here isn’t going anywhere.