“The history … be forbidden, yes?” Angorla says while holding the bakery door against the raging fey customers inside. She speaks with the exact white-noise-crackly voice I’ve always dreamed she had. By the shift of her gaze, I assume she’s referring to the picture book in my hand.
“History?” I ask, noting the illustration on display before slamming the pages closed.
“They isn’t look nothing like us, do they? There a reason for that. Writers. Words be the worst enemy of me and mine. But dreams, what a playground make. Aye? So we shut them silent. Take the tongue and swell it tight. Seal the lips and stitch ’em right. Once we own the parasite, then we sculpt their dreams at night.”
Clarey and I exchange uneasy frowns.
“I’m not following,” I say to the hobblegob.
“Oh, you followed just fine, you did. All Hallows and Eves we go, dancing and prancing, in leaves that blow. Now here you be, with he and me. But where the hairy one go?”
Hairy?
“You mean, my uncle? He’s not so hairy …”
She snickers. “I got the door, but they gots the dog. Poof and gone. Look-see, all around.”
I whirl to look behind me where Clarey’s already caught on and is desperately whistling and calling out, but no Flannie comes running.
My stomach plummets when he finds her collar lying empty on the sidewalk next to the glinting beads. “Oh, Clarey.”
He kneels to pick up the leather strand, cradling it tenderly. Then he kicks the silvery balls and shouts Jaspar’s name like a curse. “That’s why he dumped our stuff.” His molded lips warp into a furious snarl as he places her collar inside the duffel bag and zips it. “I had my back turned for one second … and he vanished with her.”
Thinking of how inconsolable I was when I first found Uncle’s busted glasses, I struggle not to reach for him, to calm him; he’s better off outraged than worried. He’ll keep his head this way. He’ll be sharper, well equipped for the fight.
“It’s the next leg of the game,” I conjecture aloud, suppressing my own anger so I can think clearly. “Jaspar had Filigree take Bonbon and the troll to the palace. I’m betting that’s where Perish is holding Uncle, and now Flannie. What did the idiot deliveryman leave for a clue?”
“Just these …” Clarey punts the tiny beads once more, sending them on another scattering tirade. “It’s those decoration dragées like your uncle uses. But we’re already at the bakery, so it’s a dead end.”
I steal a look at Angorla, who’s humming some nonsensical rhyme while barricading the bakery’s entrance. She doesn’t appear too willing to offer any other help. I hand off the book to Clarey, then scoop a bunch of silver dragées into my palm. With one coasting revolution around my skin, they become hard, grainy, and straw colored.
Angorla watches me with rapt attention then murmurs, “The true Architect.”
“Saint Shiznet. Are those … seeds?” Clarey asks, touching the grains in my hand.
I furrow my brow, distracted by Angorla’s “architect” outburst, but pressing on for the question we need answered most. “Well, are they seeds or not?”
Her electric eyes flash dim to bright. “Yay and nay; some good seeds, some bad,” she answers. “Dark hearts yield dark deeds … rusty fruits have metal seeds.”
“Fruits,” Clarey says. “Goblin fruits.”
I only partly hear; I’m wallowing in my own tortured thoughts … the memory of that Halloween Eve when Lark gave life to her robotic doll—her putting me on the spot about the bad heart I placed inside her Young Edison project, how it rotted all the mechanisms from within. It’s so strangely in tune with Angorla’s riddle now.
With anguished clarity, I finally understand why everything here contains pieces of my sister: this world was built entirely upon my guilt over living when she died, which means that its foundation, its very heart, is bad … wrong … ugly.
That ugliness is not only killing Mystiquiel but has leaked into my real life somehow; has lured in my uncle and trapped him here. And now Clarey and Flannie are in danger, too.
My gut clenches, because only I can stop this. And to do that, I have to move the final game piece, and land us where Perish waits.
“Is there an orchard around here?” I scoot the seeds around my palm, then start to dump them back on the ground.
“The seeds, they priceless be. Best to keep a few, in case you needs a plant or two.”
I shake my head at Angorla’s meaningless taunt, but tuck them away in my jeans pocket just in case.
Satisfied, the hobblegob leans her body away from the door, pulling opposite of the fey crowd locked inside. She bleats a goatish laugh, teasing them as though they were animals in a zoo.
“Well, where’s the orchard?” When Clarey reiterates my question, Angorla’s pointy, furred ears twist in our direction.
“Hills of cement, and walls of stone. Smoking clouds, and the eye that roam. No garden do these make.” She lifts her gaze toward the celestial orb, unspoken confirmation that it’s how the king is watching our progress. “Only one place seeds sprout, where the rot and rust won’t push ’em out. One place where things grow; a pottage of harvests, of sun and snow.” She nods her ram’s horns toward Wisteria Rising. “Being as your kind be magic-blind, you can’t find a way in, lest you eat from the vine.”
“What vine?” Clarey asks, looking toward the boutique around the corner.
“Guardian of the orchard. Hers not be a easy door to turn. She be fragile and vengeful. Wound her feelings—your skins itch, your eyes bleed, your ears catch flame, and your belly churn. Choose your bite wise so you don’t get burned.”
“How do we do that?” I ask.
“The guardian want what anyone want. Acceptance. Not for her charms; love her warts and leave her disarmed.”
Clarey passes me a dubious glance.
“O-kay?” I say. “But we’re not eating anything without that.” I point to the vial of goblin blood at her mismatched feet, skeptical she’ll let us have it.
“Want your cure, eh?” Angorla’s free hand morphs from its normal shape—if thin, metallic fingers curled like a tiller could be considered normal—into a shovel. She scoops up the vial. “It be yours for a wink and a favor.”
Warning bells go off inside my mind: Never make deals with faerie-kind. They’re cryptic, wily, and tricksters. It’s one of the rules not just of Mystiquiel lore … but of any fey mythos. Just like never eat their food. But we don’t have a choice on either front if we’re going to win this game and rescue our loved ones before the portal closes.
As though reading my thoughts, Clarey ogles the watch ticking away on the duffel.
“Well?” I ask him.
“Ten till nine.”
He holds my gaze. I know we’re sharing the same misgivings. What if the hobblegob is another distraction, put in our path to slow us down?
I set my jaw. “If we make this trade, will you stay out of our way?”
Angorla’s goat-bleating laugh erupts again, sounding a bit too much like Juniper’s giggles for comfort. Weird.
“Once trade made,” she answers, “I blend into the background, tall as a tree, quiet as a wall. Not stand between you and any door, evermore.”
“Except that one,” I say, motioning to the bakery’s entrance, the only barrier between me and the shouting fey. I’m not about to let her weasel her way into letting them out to attack us by agreeing to ambiguous terms. “You’ll hold them off until we’re gone.”
She smiles then, baring those rust-slicked teeth. “Ah, an earthen bird who knows the power of every word. Impressed I be. I’ll siege this door till you can flee.”
“It’s a deal,” I answer, despite Clarey’s garbled attempt to stop me. “What do you want in return?”
Angorla shifts her shovel-hand to a tin box that captures the vial inside. She straightens out her arm so the box is only inches from me. “All I ask is you lift the lid. The only favor I’ll ever bid.”
I start to stretch my fingers toward her.
“Nix, your gloves are gone,” Clarey reminds me, although I’ve already thought of that, and I’ve also reasoned out it’s the means to her end. She saw me change the seeds, saw the stained glass overtake the window. It’s possible she even watched me alter the troll. She said I’m an earthen bird, so she obviously knows I’m not from here. Even if she doesn’t realize I’m her creator, she’s aware of what my touch can do, and craves it.
Angorla wants to be real like me; like Clarey. Question is, would she be more or less dangerous to us as flesh and blood?
Hearing my dad’s watch click away each second, I go for broke and touch my fingers to the box’s edge. In a blink of metal, fur, and bone, Angorla changes. Her metallic horns and teeth become jagged, grayish white, and calcified, free of rust. A thumping heart replaces her internal mechanical whirring. From her head to her ankles, everything metal thins and vanishes—replaced by brown fur and pink skin like a baby mouse’s. Her eyes permutate from blinking lights to doe-eyed irises with slitted-white pupils like crescent moons. She’s no longer a cybernetic caricature, but a true organic being.
Throughout the unsettling conversion, she grunts and growls, never releasing the door’s latch. The claw that earlier formed the padlock shifts to a cloven hoof with a skeletal finger and thumb curving at the ends, holding tight to keep the faeries—who, upon seeing her transformation, snarl and howl even louder—at bay.
“Praises to you, and cures be yours.” Angorla opens the fist of her free hoof to toss the vial my way.
I catch it midair.
“Once you take a sip,” she says, “best to swallow no seeds. Lest you wish the moss to grow roundabout, marking you as one of ours, like the orchard’s finest trees.”
Her warning is reminiscent of Uncle’s insistence all this time, never to eat the fruit until he’d cleaned and prepared it. Is that why? Is she being literal? That a seed, when mixed with the squid ink … king’s blood … could somehow call the plants here, cause them to bind themselves to that human? I can’t afford to be distracted by his betrayal or the danger he seemingly put our customers in. I know him, and there has to be a reason for what he did. He’ll tell me once I find him.
“So we’re even?” I ask the hobblegob, overtly aware of the danger of loose ends in this place.
Her slobbery bearded mouth lifts to a smile of pure chicanery as she tightens the hoof holding the bakery door. “Aye, we be aligned in plot now, you and you.” She aims a wink at me, then one at Clarey. “And for my troth, I follow through.” The door has stopped rattling behind her. “Best to go then. Afore your face be breaked.”
Angorla gestures where my stained-glass likeness shines, glossy and prismatic, then camouflages herself once more with the storefront’s pattern, so I can see through her to the happenings within. Several of the trapped faeries take up flinging chairs at the window, causing the image of me to fissure and crack.
Clarey shoves Flannie’s collar and Mom’s book in the duffel, zips it, and nods at me, looking as wary as I feel.
“Hope that doesn’t come back to bite us,” he sputters on our sprint for the greenhouse boutique.
“Well, at least now she can’t give us tetanus.”
He frowns.
I chomp. “Metal teeth?”
We arrive at the boutique before he can unleash the annoyance narrowing his eyes. Thankfully, no reflections look back at us from the shop’s glass front; but it’s a catch-22, because, be it ice—Angorla mentioned something about snow—or an enchantment that coats the inside, it makes any preparation for what awaits us impossible.
I don’t see the vine guardian anywhere. Nothing but a metallic white handle shaped like an S. I start to grab it, but Clarey pulls me aside.
“That thing is breathing.” He gestures to the handle, then absently touches the place behind his covered left ear where his BAHA sits beneath latex conforming to flesh.
He waits a beat or two, then steps between me and the door. A soft glow seeps out through the glass’s frosty surface—a nod to Juniper’s calming lights in Astoria. He grips the handle but recoils when the metal shifts, forming a white, serpentine vine. Only now do I hear the intake and outpour of breath. I also see it in the plant’s stem, a rise and fall of what appear to be ribs beneath the thin fleshy coating.
Next, the plant unfurls wide, opaque leaves, and a fruit the size and shape of an egg droops at the end. It’s ugly: fuzzy and brown with protruding carbuncles that look like albino raisins. Were I sketching it as a character in a panel, I’d draw a kiwi with a severe case of acne.
“Blech,” I mutter.
“My sentiments exactly,” Clarey answers. “Also, how are we supposed to make a wise choice if there’s only one fruit?”
I press my lips together in thought. This is nothing I’ve ever drawn or imagined. “Tap it or something,” I offer. “Maybe it will multiply.”
Clarey does as I suggest, but there remains only one. However, two notable things do happen: first, the carbuncles burst with a nauseating, gurling hiss. A fog puffs out from the ruptured blisters, releasing a stench like skunkweed and stagnant bogs.
Gagging simultaneously, Clarey and I step back and shield our noses. Two moments later, the leaking, furry-brown husk sheds, revealing a shiny, smooth, and glowing rind underneath, shifting from red to purple to orange.
It dawns on me, the vividness of these colors, as opposed to the grayscale we’ve seen everywhere else. The vine and fruit are organic, no metal or rust in sight. I uncover my face to share the observation with Clarey, but I’m distracted by a new scent. With each color’s fluctuation, the aroma also changes: whereas the brown shade was pungent and off-putting, the red is refreshing, like a splash of sparkling wine; following that comes purple, triggering a waft of earthy sweetness that brings to mind baked plums sprinkled with brown sugar; and lastly, orange, carrying a delicious note of caramel and citrus.
After the cycle runs through the three bright colors, it starts over again with the brown. The fuzzy husk returns, bearing new blisters that pop and emit a worse vaporous stench than the prior time, before repeating the shedding process. The jewel-toned rinds and their appealing fragrances follow in pulsing sequence. Then back to the zit-faced kiwi. Over and over and over, with no apparent end.
“It’s a trick, made to play on our natural instincts,” Clarey says.
I pinch my nose tight in preparation for the oncoming brown cycle. “So if we use common sense and eat it in any of its ripe and delectable stages, we’re going to suffer the vine’s wrath.”
“Although bleeding eyes and itchy skin actually don’t sound so bad compared to putting that in our mouths.” Clarey flattens his entire hand across his lips and nose just as the newest furred and blemished rind releases putrid, wet streams.
When red overtakes, I bare my nose to the scent of sweet wine. “That’s the whole point, then. We have to eat when it’s at the right stage—or rather, the wrong stage. The blighted one; the unsightly one; the most repellent to all our senses.”
“Love the vine, warts and all. Does everything have to be literal here?” Clarey complains as he draws his hand away from his mask during our temporary reprieve. No doubt having to cover his face is a constant reminder of his own ever-changing features and flesh. Come to think of it, this whole process is an unusually cruel pantomime of what’s happening to him. Almost as if it was planned for that very purpose: to torment and annoy.
And I’m betting that’s exactly what Perish had in mind.
If only we had time, I’d convince Clarey he’s nowhere close to being abhorrent like this noxious fruit. He’s the same irresistible guy, even with a pumpkin for his face.
The brown cycle shoots vapors into the air again. I cringe; the idea of eating something that smells like marshlands and skunk glands makes my stomach flip. Not to mention the thought of the pustules bursting on our tongues. But when glass shatters around the corner at the bakery, indicating the fey have broken out, it prompts me to man up.
“Pluck it off,” I tell Clarey, afraid to chance touching it myself without gloves. “The second it goes brown and fuzzy.”
Clarey wrinkles his bulbous nose as the deep purple lightens around the stem to a pinkish hue; then an orange, warm as sunrise, spreads across the shiny rind. The moment it begins to grow fur and fades to brown, Clarey snaps it free and holds it by the stem. He glances over my shoulder where the sounds of snarls and growls grow louder and closer.
“Remember not to swallow any seeds, okay?” I clasp the vial of ink I’ve just uncorked. Clarey rolls his shoulder under the duffel straps—like a soldier preparing for his march to war—his fleshy mask almost gray with dreaded anticipation as carbuncles appear on the fruit.
Pinching my nose to suppress the surge of bile in my throat, I tap the vial, releasing a dot onto my tongue, then do the same for Clarey. I watch the black fade to white, then quickly put the stopper in to contain the rest. Clarey returns the favor with the fruit, holding it for me as I take a bite, avoiding the center where a fat seed appears. I chew while struggling not to notice the seeping bumps and spindly fibers gumming up my teeth. Not even waiting for my reaction, Clarey shoves the remainder—all but the seed—into his mouth.
The carbuncles dissolve on my tongue, but the horrible stench and flavor I assumed would slam into me never come. Instead, my palate lights up—though not in reaction to a flavor. It’s like bands of color smear across every sensory receptor. I’m overwhelmed by a variegation of emotions—free-falling in a thrilling rush: bouncing in a pink bubble of happiness that bursts to black rage then unrolls like a sponge to catch me in a yellow cushion of sorrow. The soft sadness swells to crimson excitement, then becomes a tidal wave, propelling me along blue currents of calm, ending in a silvery waterfall … a purge of loneliness.
It’s then I realize the king’s blood has spread over my tongue with perpetual warmth and raced along my taste buds and throat to form an oily, salty sleeve that repels any conventional flavors. Not only that, it binds all those emotions into one pristine color and feeling: the blank white of longing. Such a wide, yawning canvas, that if it weren’t for the dispelling qualities of the royal blood, I’d have to have the experience again—regardless of the gruesome conveyer: sizzling warts, wooly fuzz, and foul odors notwithstanding—just to glut the endless expanse, just to survive.
Now I get the allure of goblin fruits, and the danger they present: They magnify human emotions, to an intensity so powerful, it’s the closest thing to magic most people will ever know. The emotional overflow rises high enough to sweep one into the drowning depths of oneself, unless it’s forced to spill over by the king’s cure. The enchanted candles act as a funnel, collecting that overflow.
It makes sense, even in the context of Christina Rossetti’s fictional poem … Laura craved the goblin fruit to the point of dying because humans get addicted to that enhanced version of what makes them human. But the distillation of goblin blood in each of Uncle’s pastries protects our customers from the full potency. So they return to the bakery again and again because they’re drawn to that singular reminder of their humanness, instead of being driven to craven madness by an unrelenting hunger that only the rush of every emotion at once can satiate.
They return to feel alive, not to stay alive.
Coming back to my senses, I savor the smoky spiciness left on my tongue, something like cloves mixed with cinnamon and black cardamom—the residue of the king’s blood. I glance at Clarey, who’s already looking back at me.
“Trippy,” he says.
“Right?” I answer, breathless.
Before we can expand our one-syllable exchange to concern that the door still hasn’t opened, the vine grows to the size of an anaconda and wraps us in a swirl of stems and leaves, lifting us off the ground just as the faeries rush around the corner. The pressure around my chest and waist isn’t constrictive or threatening. It’s gentle and protective. And when Clarey’s eyes widen with awe instead of fear or pain, I know it’s the same for him.
The plant continues to grow and raises us so high our would-be attackers below begin to look like metal ants.
“If you’re planning to write a story about this, I’ve got a great title,” Clarey comments, his hands clasped around the white stem surrounding his torso.
“Yeah?”
“Jack-o’-lantern and the Beanstalk.” He waggles the ridges of his brow.
I snort. “That’s bad, Clarey. And I thought the fruit stank.”
I’d be questioning how calmly he’s dealing with this if I weren’t also adrift on the euphoric aftereffects of our sample. Seeing him start to joke about things gives me hope he might make it through this without any more attacks. He knows, once we get everyone home, all will be right again.
At least for us.
My mood plummets at that thought, on an opposing trajectory to the vine swooshing so high it could give the thirty-foot Grim Reaper’s Drop Tower a run for its money. I inhale deeply. Being here in the smoky clouds, I can’t escape the view below: the city so like the one we know, yet so different. Peering through hazy ribbons from this elevation, I find that the only splotches of color—red patches and dripping smears—look even more like seeping wounds than rust.
Mystiquiel is bleeding … dying.
With another breath, I draw in the burnt candle scent swishing around our heads, a reminder of Uncle and all he’s hiding. Does he know the root of this plague? Was he trying to help treat it somehow with the emotion-filled wax melts?
All conjecturing takes a back seat once the vine swings off to the right. My stomach bobs when we begin a sweeping descent toward the roof of the greenhouse boutique. I’m still too high up to know if the solid whitish surface is bricks or aluminum siding.
We pick up speed. My anxious screech joins Clarey’s and I struggle to keep my eyes open against the smoke and wind sucking them dry. If we don’t slow down, we’re going to splatter against that surface like bugs on a windshield. Clarey must have the same thought, because he’s wriggling against our binds as desperately as I am.
Almost as if offended by our efforts, the vine releases us and we free-fall—on a collision course for the roof.
Our eye strains—foiled, furious. Don’t let her out of our sight! But she will be, as will the boy, once the orchard swallows them whole. Only a temporary parting. For though we have no feet and hands to walk or grab, we have greedy minds that bend to our whims. They do our bidding, they worship our commands. It was too easy to lure them, to trick them. Soon, victory will be ours. We will infest all that stands, and bring Mystiquiel to its knees. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Let the clock tick its last … and the king fade to rust.