Protagonist Bound (36 page)

I know, I know, these are my best friends I’m talking about. They
would try and understand, they would try to listen, and they would try to
. . .
try very hard to help me.

But I had already been pushing the crazy card lately with the perilous activities I’d dragged them into (past, present, and future included). So I didn’t want to lay an extra, unnecessary dosage of nutso onto our team’s already full load.

And besides that. . . Well, I just couldn’t tell them. Not just for my own good, but for theirs too.

The information thoroughly freaked me out, so I figured I was doing them a favor by protecting them from assuming its burden. I owed it to them to at least extend that courtesy, especially since a part of me sort of wished that there had been someone to protect me from finding out about all of this.

Sadly, there hadn’t been. I now had the truth and along with that came the understanding that a lot of things were about to get weirder and way more complicated. Knowing that, if by keeping my mouth shut I could somehow corral these consequences—only allow them to affect me, and not my friends—then that’s just what I was going to do.

To sum up, for the time being there were clearly way more reasons not to tell the others about Natalie than there were to share the revelation. So I kept her folder hidden, kept my internal freak outs to myself, and when my friends asked me about what I’d gone back for during our visit to the Fairy Godmother Grand File Room, I lied and said it was nothing important.

Pearl of Wisdom

n Saturday morning I was awakened by the sound of SJ’s screams.

“What’s wrong?!” I asked as I bolted upright in bed.

Blue had already jumped to the floor and had her knife in hand—ready for action. “SJ, what’s the matter?!”

Our friend was running about the room emptying drawers and throwing things left and right. “The book, I have lost it!” she kept repeating.” I have lost the book!”

“The potions book?” I clarified.

Hey, when you live in a world actually called
Book
, sometimes a girl’s gotta ask.

“Yes!” SJ confirmed. “I left it in my nightstand drawer before we went to sleep like I always do and now it is just gone!” She moved across our suite like a tornado—clearly not noticing the irritation in Blue’s crinkled forehead.

“Really, a book? That’s why you woke me up with a heart attack?” she scowled.

SJ ignored Blue and zoomed back and forth in front of us. She was dashing around at such a speed it was almost enough to give you whiplash. I’d never seen her so freaked out. And rightly so, given how important that book was to her,
and
to our plans. Consequently, Blue put away both her anger and her knife, and the two of us didn’t waste another second before aiding our friend with the hunt.

“Calm down. It has to be here somewhere,” Blue told SJ as we began helping our frazzled friend search the room.

The statement was reassuring in the moment but, unfortunately, proved to be false in the end. After the three of us combed through the entire suite—turning it inside out in the process—we realized that the potions book was not, in fact, here.

I was also stricken with concern when I discovered that something else of value was missing from our room. Something of mine. But I decided not mention this just yet as it would only make SJ even more worried.

SJ sat on the edge of her bed and started to hyperventilate. “What . . . am I going . . . to do?”

“I don’t know, but there go our plans,” Blue replied.

SJ took a few deep breaths and swallowed hard before continuing. “Well, actually the potions I was making are almost complete and I sort of memorized the instructions a long time ago anyways.”

“That’s great!”

“But Madame Alexanders is going to expel me when she finds out I lost the book!”

“Maybe not,” I thought aloud. “SJ, just how many of the potions in that book have you memorized in the last month?”

“Um . . . all of them, I believe,” she said, confirming my suspicion.

Blue rolled her eyes. “Ugh, you really need to broaden the scope of how you spend your free time.”

“Hush, Blue, I’m going somewhere with this,” I interceded. “SJ, if we can’t find your book then we’ll copy all of the potions down in a new book from your memory.”

“But Madame Alexanders will know it is not the same one,” she objected.

“I doubt it; books around here all look the same. Fancy, leather-bound, tinted parchment paper—trust me, it won’t be that hard to get the right replacement. Heck, we’ll probably find a suitable one in the Lady Agnue’s student store.”

“But the potions book was really old and worn,” SJ objected again.

“Then we’ll beat the crud out of the new one until it looks that way,” Blue piped in. “Don’t worry, girl. It’ll be okay. For real.”

After some more comforting that she was not doomed, SJ eventually calmed down. And with the help of some of her animal friends outside we were able to put the room back in order within the hour.

Still a little shaken from the trauma, SJ decided to go down to the potions lab when we were done, to finish her work and get her mind off the situation. Blue and I offered to go with her, but she said she’d rather be alone. We didn’t object and she departed without us just as the last of the squirrels was dusting off her desk.

The moment she’d gone, as luck would have it, the squirrel in question brushed his tail against one of her glass figurines (the Pegasus one). It fell off the desk and would’ve plummeted to its destruction had I not been standing there. I was thankfully able to catch the thing in mid air before it hit the floor and broke into a million pieces.

After such a rough morning the last thing SJ needed was to come home and discover one of her beloved collectibles smashed to bits.

It wasn’t the squirrel’s fault really; SJ shouldn’t have kept the shiny knickknack in a place where it could fall so easily. Nevertheless, Blue chased the fluffy woodland creature out of the room as if he were fully to blame. She slammed the balcony doors shut behind him—letting out an aggravated grunt as she did so and ignoring the creature’s angry squeaks.

Meanwhile, I drifted back to my own desk and mourned the other object I hadn’t been able to locate during our search of the room. Noticing my melancholy, Blue asked me what was wrong and, reluctantly, I told her. One of my pumpkin earrings was missing.

It was the strangest thing. I left the pair on my nightstand every night before going to sleep and one had simply vanished without a trace.

Blue reasoned that maybe it had fallen behind my bed, or was stuck in my clothes from the previous day, or (more likely) one of SJ’s dang birds had eaten it. But she reassured me above all else that we would find it. I sighed and tried to believe her as she punched me in the arm affectionately and then marched back toward her bed.

“After all that, you’re still going back to sleep?” I asked.

“It’s Saturday,” she huffed as she buried herself beneath the covers. “And it’s before noon.”

“Fair enough.” I shrugged.

With that, I suppressed the strange unease this morning’s disappearances were causing me, cuddled up back in my own bed, and fell asleep to the sounds of the embittered squirrel raging at us from outside.

By seven o’clock the following night, SJ had finally finished preparations for the potions, and for our break-in.

Earlier that day the three of us had also successfully recreated Madame Alexanders’s potions book, so our friend was no longer in panic mode and instead was now delighted to be showing off her newest innovation. At first glance it appeared to be a normal glass marble. However, upon further—extremely close—examination, you could see a kind of colorful gas swirling around inside its translucent shell.

“What is it?” I asked, handing the delicate object back to SJ.

“It is my own creation,” she responded. “I call it the Portable Potion.”

Blue scratched her head. “Yeah, I’m gonna need a little more than that.”

“I have had the idea for some time,” SJ explained. “And I started fiddling around with base formulas for it over the summer, which I have now perfected.”

SJ held the glass sphere up to the light as she continued. “You see, I brew a normal potion and then make a separate potion that crystallizes it into this form. The original potion is thereby concealed inside of this miniature, easy-to-transport package that will only release its contents upon impact.”

“Dang,” Blue said as she looked over the tiny orb. “That’s brilliant.”

I nodded in agreement. “Completely brilliant. So what potion is in this one?”

“Phase two of our plan for this evening,” SJ answered. “Now, as per your instructions, Crisa, I have requested that a few finches outside wake us up at two o’clock in the morning. And since we are all ready for tonight, I suggest that we try and get at least a couple good hours of sleep until then.”

Yeah, like that’s gonna happen,
I thought to myself as I rolled my eyes.

Have you ever been in a room that just made you feel uneasy and on your guard?

Maybe it was a dark hallway, a musty basement, an abandoned shed, or an unintentionally creepy puppet store?

That’s how I felt when I was in that room.

Well, I should clarify that I was not technically in the ominous room I was referring to; I was asleep and my nightmares had transported my subconscious there.

But I assure you, even in all its blurry dreaminess, this unknown part of Book my spirit presently found itself in felt very, very real.

My dream self was currently following a girl in a richly colored purple cloak. Her entire form and face were hidden beneath it, so the only other thing about her I was able to make out was the fact that she was wearing glittering, black pumps with four-inch, silver-sequined heels.

Hmm, not the footwear I would’ve chosen for a midnight adventure. But that’s just me.

The unidentifiable girl and I were in a grand place with marble floors as black as tar that matched the seemingly infinite number of shelves coiling around the room. These shelves stretched up to the high ceiling, which was being propped up by regal white columns every two-dozen feet.