they managed to break into the museum in New Delhi—the National Museum of India—to destroy the Kali Cup.”
“You’re talking a widespread network of very powerful people,” said Rhys. “Willing to go to great lengths to stop us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And on our side we’ve got…”
“You, me and a nursery rhyme that’s been in my family for generations.”
Rhys stared at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Uffach cols.”
Lex Stuart and I become friends just in time for me to watch him die. Even his willpower can’t hide it. His eyelids swell. His coordination fails him. He throws up in class.
Then he vanishes altogether.
I send get-well cards and hear nothing. The normalcy of volleyball and final exams surges back as if he’d never been there. Then, over summer break, his mother calls me.
She talks about BMTs and isolation periods and platelet production resuming—I’m thirteen now, but all I really grasp is how relieved she sounds. Then she asks me to visit him.
She’ll send a car. That’s my first clue that I’m about to enter a whole different world. Fairyland.
The Stuarts live outside of town, with tended woods and high-gated drives. Their lawn looks like a golf course. Their house looks like a palace. Lex’s mom looks like a movie star.
Only once she leads me to Lex’s room and I see him, do I truly believe that he’s alive.
He stands to say hello, despite his mother’s protests.
Once she leaves to “arrange a snack,” I fold my arms and say, “Way to keep in touch.”
“I’ve been preoccupied,” he says seriously. Not busy. Preoccupied. “Thank you for the cards.”
He looks weak, but good. He’s gone from wraithlike to skinny, from ashen to merely pale. His hair is growing in, a darker brown but still with ginger overtones.
“Are you back?” I ask.
He says, “I think so.”
So I take over the sofa beside his chair, so that he’ll sit, and demand that he tell me what it was like.
Even with his matter-of-fact presentation, without the uglier details, it sounds awful. His cousin was a match for a bone marrow transplant, which is why he got such serious chemotherapy. His mother cried. Some days he wanted to die.
“But now…” He searches for the right words.
“Now you don’t?” I prompt him.
He nods, with a ghost of a smile. But it’s a friendly ghost. My smile is more free; I feel that comfortable with him. I have the oddest sensation that our spirits are also conversing, and better, if only we could listen in.
The maid arrives with a huge platter full of crackers and cheese and fruits—and candy bars with the wrapper ends cut neatly off. Almost everything tastes as wonderful as it looks.
Lex tells me he’ll be coming back to class in the fall, at least until Christmas, maybe the full year. Recovery seems to be a slower process than I had imagined.
“There will be a dance, when school starts,” he says, still matter-of-fact…except for a certain intensity in his hazel gaze, a catch in his breath. Except for whatever our spirits are saying behind our backs. “I would very much like it if you would attend with me. If you don’t mind not dancing a lot.”
I’ve never been asked out before. “But that’s not for another month.”
“I wanted to beat anybody else asking,” he says.
I’m in braces, and I’m by no means slim. I’m not ugly; even I know that. But…he thinks there could be competition for me?
Lex Stuart, I decide, is wonderful.
“It will be years before we know how I’ll turn out,” he says, as if warning me. “Even if the cancer doesn’t reoccur, I could end up not growing or getting cataracts or getting really fat. Or…other stuff.”
If I think about it too hard, the warning won’t make sense. I deliberately don’t think about it, and it feels exactly right.
“I would love to go with you.” It is an understatement.
When I get home, I can’t stop talking about Lex and the Stuart mansion and the food and the fresh flowers.
“It’s like fairyland there!” I tell my parents.
They exchange worried glances.
Mom says, “Just remember your fairy tales, Maggi. Fairyland always has a catch.”
Chapter 6
I was expecting Lex to call—heck, I’d half expected it the day before. This was probably his version of giving me space.
I just hadn’t planned to be marinating in the destruction that powerful men so often wreak when he did.
After we checked out of the Holiday Inn, I rented a little silver Renault Clio. The train didn’t stop at the small town of Lusignan, where Rhys and I were now walking. What had once been a center of power was now a rural town. And the glorious castle—one of many—which the fairy Melusine had supposedly built for her bridegroom in one night…
Long gone. Nothing left but a sunny, public walking path where once the castle had stood, and trees, and an uninterrupted view down to the River Vonne. The castle had been razed for harboring Huguenots, adding to my frustration about finding anything. Whatever the goddess worshippers might have hidden at Château Lusignan was history, thanks to devastation and religious intolerance. Thanks to dark power.
My phone trilled out “Ride of the Valkyries” at the exact wrong time. When I glanced at the caller ID and saw it was Lex, I rolled the call over to voice mail.
Trust me, Lex. You do not want to talk to me right now.
Rhys glanced at me and my phone, then said, “Any goddess cult that worshipped Melusine would have gone underground by the thirteenth century—fourteenth, at the latest. Would they not?”
I fingered a little purple flower beside the path. “Mmmhmm.”
“And Lusignan was torn down, stone by stone, in 1574?”
Over religion. “A tower was torn down later.”
“So what did you expect to find?” asked Rhys.
“Not the chalice,” I admitted, though it would feel right to uncover it here at Melusine Central. “Just…a clue. Something. We have to start somewhere, don’t we?”
He looked around us and murmured, “Three fair figures…”
