Eleven
That night I met the outlaw prince again.
On purpose.
Or by accident.
I still wasn’t sure.
I was playing The Settlers of Catan with Karl in the rec room like a good little lackey when my iPhone started playing “Every Breath You Take.”
It was 10:59, one minute earlier than I’d expected. I pumped my fist. “Called it!”
Karl, who’d bet on midnight, fished out five bucks from his pocket. “No fair. You work for her.” He slammed the fiver on the table.
I took it off his hands. “There’s gotta be some perks,” I said, secreting my win into the front of my bra. “Excuse me, will you?” And I took the phone out to the hall.
Thanks to the miracle of FaceTime, the Queen’s pale visage filled all four-by-two inches of the screen. Her makeup had been removed, exposing her true features, which were extraordinarily corpselike, and her hair was gone, tucked into what appeared to be a white turban.
But that wasn’t what I found shocking. It was her eyeballs.
They were rolling wildly in their sockets.
“Ma’am. Are you okay?”
“I most certainly am not! There is a mote in my eye, Zoe, and I need you here posthaste to remove it.”
“Just blink,” I said.
“What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve been blinking so much, my eyelids have biceps. Now stop with the dillydallying and hurry. I can’t sleep until this cursed offender has been extricated from my ocular perimeter!”
The Queen’s verbiage was the perfect example of what my English teacher called using fifty words when one will do.
With apologies to Karl, I went upstairs to the Queen’s office, where a door led to her private quarters in a separate turret. Using my master key, I opened the gold lock and stepped into a marble hallway lined with exquisite, thick Persian carpets and beige walls covered in framed photo after framed photo of . . . her.
“Hurry, Zoe!” she beckoned from a far room. “I’m in agony!”
“Yes, ma’am.” I would have liked to have lingered over what might possibly have been a shot of her with Justin Bieber, but clearly time was of the essence as I scurried past a pair of ornate French doors to her chilly air-conditioned bedroom.
Against one wall was a humongous four-poster bed, and in the center of that, lost among piles of white bedding and white pillows, was a rail-thin figure tossing and turning as if she were on fire.
“Help! I am blinded!”
I rushed to her side and adjusted her bedside lamp but found nothing except for one seriously bloodshot eye. Still, figuring she’d never be satisfied until I removed something, I ran a finger over her lower lashes and faked success.
“All done. See?” I held up my bare finger.
She squinted. “No, I don’t. And it still hurts.”
“Because you’ve irritated it. Now lie back and close your eyes,” I said, fluffing up a pillow. “And let your natural tears do their job. That’s what my mother used to say.”
The Queen lay back as I tucked her in. “What else did your mother used to say?”
“That if you can’t sleep, try to see how many words you can make from a bigger word.”
“Like incarceration?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of petunia or lavender. You know, something pleasant.”
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed with the floral options but gamely rattled off pet, pen, pie, pit, tip, tan, tap, nit, nip. “It’s no use. I can’t sleep. It’s the stress, what with the traitor and those dwarfs giving me such trouble.”
Earlier today it had been discovered that Grumpy had fallen in love with Bo Peep and was now as cheerful as one of her lambs while Sleepy had become mildly addicted to energy drinks and seemed bent on singing “Hi, ho!” at warp-speed.
Seriously, everything down at Snow’s was all wrong.
“I need my sleeping potion,” the Queen declared. “Call Chef and have him concoct a batch. Tell him it’s an emergency.”
It was almost midnight. I wasn’t sure if that was fair to Chef, who was usually in the kitchen by 4:00 a.m.
“Do it!” she croaked.
Chef was on her phone’s speed dial, and our conversation took all of a minute, concluding with several choice swears on Chef’s part plus, “I’ll leave it on my doorstep. Don’t wake me again.” Click.
I hated doing that. “I’ll be right back. I just have to go over to his house and get the stuff.”
“He lives far in the Haunted Forest, way behind Hansel and Gretel’s Candy Cottage.”
There were several employee cottages there that weren’t attractions. “No problem. Back in a jiffy,” I said, tiptoeing out.
“You can’t miss it,” she called. “It’s the one closest to the Forbidden Zone.”
I stopped and smiled to myself, deciding the Queen must have passed me off for an idiot. This emergency was indeed a test, though not to see whether I’d gone to the party.
It was a test to see if I could catch a spy.
Ian was on his way to the party when I ran into him on the fairy path. “Hey, I’ll go with you,” he said, adding, “unless, um, you’re going to meet someone.”
I laughed at his lame attempt at subtlety. “Like Dash?”
He shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and kept a brisk pace. “You like him, don’t you?”
“He’s nice enough. I don’t really even know him.”
“To know him is to love him. That’s the princesses’ take, anyway.” Ian kicked a stray stone off the path that, due to the old-fashioned gas lamps, glittered even in the dark.
“Well, obviously he’s kind to animals, even cannibalistic chickens, so that raises his hotness right there,” I teased.
Ian groaned. “No, you’re not going to get me to go that far.”
“As if you would.”
“Really? You wouldn’t believe the lengths I’ve gone to . . .” He quickly changed the subject. “So you must have the scoop. What’s up with that whacked memo the Queen sent out the other day? A traitor? She has to be kidding.”
“Or nuts.”
“Or nuts,” he agreed.
We headed side by side into the Haunted Forest. It was darker there, even with the gas lamps, and more private, for which I was thankful, seeing as how I had to bring up a subject that was probably going to ruin his night. “Look, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” I took a breath. “Oddly enough, you’re her prime suspect.”
He stopped and turned to me, stunned. “Get out.”
“To make a long story short, she had a camera set up by the hole in the fence to the Forbidden Zone. The images she got back were blurry because of a glitch, but they managed to capture a guy who was slim and dark—”
“And tall and sexy?” He kept his expression dead straight. “Because if he’s so hot he broke the camera, then I was definitely the dude.” He held up his hands. “Guilty as charged.”
Gullible me, I actually wondered if he was serious until his whole face broke into one big grin. “Yeah, I have no idea what she’s talking about. I didn’t even know there was a hole in the fence. Or that there was a fence. And where’s this so-called camera?”
“Wherever it is, you shouldn’t go near it, because she got it repaired and now it’s working.”
“All the more reason, don’t you think? That way she can compare and see for herself that it wasn’t me.” He started heading even deeper into the Haunted Forest, and when we passed Hansel and Gretel’s Candy Cottage, its white picket fence glowing strangely, I grew nervous that he just might try something foolish.
“You don’t know her, Ian. It’ll only confirm her suspicions if you show up on one of those shots.”
He let out another laugh like I was overreacting. “Chillax, Zoe. She might be kind of crazy, but she does manage a huge theme park and has for years. There’s gotta be some grounding to her.”
If only he’d been in her apartment a half hour ago. Help! I am blinded!
“The party is that way,” I said, when we got to the Witches’ Crossing intersection. We could make out the green glow of the Frog Prince’s Castle in the distance and even this far away hear the faint boom, boom, boom of a pounding bass beat.
“You wanna take a shortcut?” He reached out for my hand as easily as if we’d been friends forever. “We can get there without having to do that unnecessary half-mile loop.”
He led me off the sparkling fairy path and through the forest in violation of several rules. My heart fluttered slightly as often happens whenever I’m on the verge of doing something I shouldn’t, especially since I knew the Queen was desperately waiting for her potion.
“Um, I really should be heading the other way,” I said.
“Worried that the trolls will catch you stepping off the path? Don’t be. They’re in bed getting their beauty sleep.”
“No, it’s not that, it . . .”
“Low branch!” He pushed aside a tree limb, and we emerged from the forest into the castle’s backyard. Princes and princesses and furries in civilian clothes were dancing in the warm night under the light of tiki torches. Some people were sitting on the fake lily pads dangling their legs in the green-lit water and tossing around a Frisbee. Over in the corner on an oversize red toadstool were Jess and Marcus—making out!
I hoped RJ wasn’t there to see this. Or maybe that was the whole idea.
“Looks pretty decent.” Ian was still holding my hand. “Wanna go in?”
I wiggled my hand free. “I can’t. I have to do an errand for the Queen.”
“Now? It’s gotta be close to midnight.”
“A little after, to be exact.”
He cocked his head. “It won’t be any fun without you there. Who will I tease?”
I was about to shoot back something about the princesses when I lifted my chin and realized he was looking at me in a funny way, more than just his usual joshing self.
Suddenly my senses sizzled, as if a switch had been flicked and everything was in high-def. For the first time this summer, I detected the faintest whiff of briny air from the sea miles away and became aware of how my arms were damp from the falling dew. The fireflies seemed brighter, and Ian’s breathing sounded heavier. I hadn’t realized before how tall he was or that I desperately wanted to touch his hair to feel if it was as soft as it looked or that his brow, so determined, shadowed dark, twinkling eyes.
Please tell me I’m not blushing and, if I am, please tell me he can’t see that in the dark, I thought as heat shot up the back of my neck. The only way to maintain equilibrium was by concentrating on my bare toes.
Ian gave me a gentle nudge. “Don’t be that girl, Zoe. You’re allowed to have a life, too, you know. Nothing the Queen wants at midnight can’t wait until morning.”
Normally I would have agreed. But this was a sleeping potion, and she needed it an hour ago. “I really want to go, Ian. You don’t know how much. But . . .”
He put both his hands on my shoulders and bent his head close to mine, nose to nose. It was the closest we’d ever been.
“Okay, I can see you mean it, so I won’t be offended that you’re blowing me off.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key chain, taking off a small flashlight. “You should have this for the way back. It doesn’t put out a ton of light, but it gets you there.”
I curled my fingers around his gift, grateful. “Thanks.”
“It’s the least I could do. Sure you don’t want me to go with you wherever it is you’re going?”
“To be honest, she’d kill me if she found out I told anyone else.”
“Thought as much.” He hesitated, like he wanted to say something else, but then he backed up toward the castle. “Thanks for the walk. And stay away from the Queen’s trap, Zoe. I’d hate to see you be sent upriver.”
“Would you?”
“You bet.”
Too casual to be meaningful and, yet, the way he lingered suggested that maybe Ian Davidson was beginning to think of me as more than a chicken-loving vegan fool.
I turned and, smiling to myself, ran to find Chef’s house while Ian went to the party. The last thing I heard as I ducked into the woods were the princesses screaming his name.