“What?” Delilah says. “Who? Seraphima?”
“Please. Ugh.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before.”
Delilah considers this. “The future’s always changing,” she points out. “A week ago, you wouldn’t have pictured me in this book, for example. For all we know, if Orville manages to cast a spell that sends me home, your future might be completely different.” She reaches for my hand and pulls me across the stone floor. “There’s only one way to find out.”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Orville was flirting.
I’ve never seen the old coot move so quickly before. He’s been blushing like a schoolgirl since I introduced him to Delilah, and he’s showered her with all sorts of magic tricks: the disappearing newt, the violin that plays itself in midair, and his latest project—a duck that speaks fluent Hungarian.
In return, Delilah is apparently telling him everything she ever learned in science class. “You mix the zinc into the sodium hydroxide, and then heat it till it’s practically boiling. Then you add the pennies, and they’ll turn silver. If you heat up those same pennies, they’ll turn to gold.”
“Alchemy!” Orville gasps.
“Well, not really. It’s the zinc and copper fusing together to make brass. But it looks like gold, anyway,” she says.
Scowling, I fold my arms. “If you two are finished exchanging notes, I’d very much like to see my future again… ?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Orville says. He leads Delilah into his workroom and lugs the stone birdbath onto the wooden table, along with several colored glass bottles. He begins to pour a mixture into the bowl, stirring rhythmically.
Delilah and I have come up with a plan, of sorts. We know from my experiment with Pyro that the small book I carry, which is a replica of the story I’m living, has the capacity to effect change in Delilah’s world. After all, somehow, it made the book in which we exist catch fire. Likewise, if we can find a way to explode the replica ofBetween the Lines,maybe the one we are living in will fall from Delilah’s bookshelf and land open. Presumably, at that moment, all of us characters will be pulled into our usual positions. When the book realizes Delilah doesn’t belong, she’ll be sent back home.
Or at least, that’s what I’m hoping.
Orville keeps his potions and ingredients under a spell unless he’s in his workroom using them. Whichmeans that we can’t very well break into his cottage and find some concoction to cause an explosion. Instead, we have to distract him when he’s present, and when the spell has been dismantled by Orville himself. It was Delilah’s idea to ask him to replicate the magic that showed me my future. That way, we’d be killing two birds with one stone.
The liquid in the birdbath bubbles and evaporates almost immediately into a purple mist. “Let’s give it a test,” Orville says, and he looks around for something he can toss into the smoke. Delilah arches her brows at me and mouths a single word:Now?
I shake my head. “Not yet,” I whisper.
Orville scans the bottles and jars on the shelves behind him. Then he brightens, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small cloth bag. “Afternoon snack,” he explains, and he extracts a seed and drops it into the mist.
The purple smoke plumes and peaks, taking the shape of a sunflower.
“Now,” I tell Delilah. She falls back, ostensibly to let me get a better look at my own future, but in reality she starts grabbing every small bottle she can off the shelf behind Orville’s head. She tucks them into her pockets and up her sleeves.
“It’s all yours,” the wizard says. He plucks a hair frommy head and lets it waft down into the haze. Just as it did last time, the mist forms a tall column that spreads wide as a movie screen, playing my future. I can see myself on a couch in a small room with bookshelves.
Delilah pauses, her fists still full of bottles and herbs, but she is drawn by the image too. “What’s the matter with this future?” she asks.
“Give it a second,” I say.
Sure enough, a girl walks in and embraces me. I can feel Delilah stiffen behind me.
“It gets worse,” I tell her.
The girl turns, so that we can see her face. Now, upon second sight, I realize this isn’t a girl as much as a woman. A woman I still have never seen before in my life.
Delilah gasps. “I know her!”
“Youdo?”
“Yes! That’s—”
Before she can finish her sentence, though, the door to Orville’s cottage slams open, smacking against the wall. Frump races inside, hurtling toward me with his teeth bared. I am so startled that I freeze. “Frump?” I cry. “What in the name of—”
