Page 4

“Sonny. Most people call me Sonny.”

“That’s a very old name you have there, Sonny,” he said as his eyes took their time appraising me.

I wasn’t uncomfortable with being looked at. There wasn’t much to look at, really. I was no beauty by any means, and I was perfectly okay with that. My hair was thick and dark reddish- brown, my eyes a deep hazel with flecks of the forest. A spray of freckles adorned my nose and cheeks. But aside from those distinguishing features, I was just another waif who’d never grown into her womanly shape. I’d stayed thin from lack of nourishment, though, and not from a sense of fashion. I was too familiar with the song of longing my stomach sang to me most every night. I envied anyone who had the good luck to have a full table and a quiet belly all their lives, regardless of their size.

“Is it?”

He stared, as if cataloging me from head to toe.

“Mac Raith or Mac Craith. It means good fortune.” His words curled around my head and made me feel sleepy as he stepped around the desk and came closer. “Are you lucky, Sonny?”

I laughed, a full-belly, raucous laugh stained on the edges with years of bitterness. “Lucky? Sir, with all due respect, I’m the furthest thing from lucky as one living being could be.”

Mr. Ben’s face shivered like his skin was floating atop a liquid sea hit by a storm. It was only a few seconds, but that flash had every alarm bell ever minted in my mind ringing loud and clear.

It was time to get the fuck out. It was time to be anywhere but here.

“I can tell,” he hissed when my hand landed on the bar of the door handle.

Every cell in my body froze at the sound.

It was the same voice I had heard from The Woman Who Walked The Paths Between the lake and the house. It was the same sound of frozen lake water grinding against itself in the dead of winter. It was the same voice calling my name from under the windowsills all through the freeze.

The bar melted away from my grip like sugar left in the rain, my gaze dumbly following the brass droplets as they fell to the carpet.

“Anyone with even a drop of luck wouldn’t have answered that listing. But lucky for you, I peddle in the unlucky, the unfortunate, the unscrupulous,” he continued to my back.

I could tell he wasn’t moving, though.

“Is that so?”

Keep ’em talking. That was the best way to go about these things. Most people don’t like to punch on things that are sweet. Most people.

“Oh, yes. Very much so. So, imagine my amusement when a blessed one, a fortunate one, waltzes into my office and presents herself for my trade.” The sound of a match being struck and the fizzle of it against something decades-long too dry filled the empty spaces in my head. “Oh, do come away from the wall, dear. We both know you can’t use the door anymore.”

The painful sensation of someone watching me intently scratched at the space between my shoulder blades as I dumbly stared at the puddle of brass pooling on the dark-gray industrial carpet. Thoughts left my head on startled wings as I clawed to make sense of the door handle melting in my palm. Mental fingernails scratched at my Rolodex of rules, trying to find one that fit the situation, something to anchor myself to and keep me from drifting out into the sea of the unknown yawning before me.

Slowly, my gaze lifted from the carpet to the flat wall in front of me. The door had disappeared. No longer were the golden rays of an afternoon sun melting in through the sheer-curtain-covered French doors. What was left was a flat wall painted in a soft buttercream. Simple drywall and plaster stood as unassuming as it could be as if it had always been there.

Disorientation spun me, my eyes darting around the room, trying to figure out how I had moved from holding the drippy door handle to standing in front of an empty wall. My gaze stuttered over the unassuming man leaning against a cheap industrial desk, puffing on a cigar that stank of stale leaves and bad choices.

There was no door.

We were standing in an impossible room. A room that held me, Mr. Ben, a desk, and four enclosed walls. No windows, no doors, nothing. I felt myself short-circuiting. Felt the panic creeping up my throat and choking my voice as I locked eyes on the one thing that seemed to make sense in the newly minted madness surrounding me.

Mr. Ben leaned without a care, rolling a coin on his knuckles as he exhaled a black plume of smoke, something pink sparking in the cloud. “Take a moment, Sonny. You people aren’t exactly bright, so I will explain what’s going to happen from here. You’re dead. Well . . . not truly—not yet, at least. But you will never see life again, so might as well be dead. I tell you this mostly for my own amusement while your cage is being readied. Passes the time, you see.”

I began slamming my fists on the wall. Pummeling it and kicking it, trying to find a weakness in the drywall. Stubby nails dug into the thin plaster. It felt like I was punching and tearing at solid metal painted with a cheery little color.

Mr. Ben ignored my outburst and went on as I clawed and fought the wall. “This modern world, it has truly yielded some amazing things. It’s made my job ever so easy. There was a time when you people would be reluctant to venture out to a place you’ve never been, to meet a person you’ve never met. But you’ve become complacent little sheep. You no longer fear the voice in the woods, the shadow on the wall, the whisper in the night. You tell yourselves that magic was never real. You tell yourselves that monsters were never real. You lie yourselves to sleep, and what comes of it? You are so trusting of the things that walk between the worlds that you no longer even see us.”

“I’ve seen you,” I whispered to the small little chunk of dust I had managed to pry free.

“Do speak up, might as well. I doubt you’ll have much to say when we get to the Market.”

“I said I’ve seen you.”

I poured all the false concern and compassion I had ever seen performed by the line of convincing fosters into the simple words.