The Art of Wishing (11 page)

Naomi hung up. I pulled my phone away from my ear and stared at it, not daring to meet the eyes of the person beside me. I wasn’t scared. No, scared didn’t even begin to describe this. I felt hollow, like nothing inside me mattered anymore, and I was just a thin layer of skin that could be punctured and sliced as easily as paper.

“Well?” came from the passenger seat. The voice was still Vicky’s—if Vicky were a little bolder and a lot meaner. The blade shone brightly between us.

I finally looked up. “Who are you?”

Chapter
TWELVE

H
er face turned sour for a split second, then settled into a contemptuous smirk. “I’m Vicky Willoughbee.”

The blade stayed steady against my leg, and I tried not to look at it. I couldn’t let her see how much it scared me. “Vicky’s at Naomi’s house,” I said. “You’re not Vicky.”

“Well, aren’t you Little Miss Smartypants.”

“Come on. If I’m about to die, at least tell me who to blame.”

The Person-Who-Was-Not-Vicky rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, you’re not about to die.”

I gestured with both hands at my thigh. “Then what’s with the freaking knife?”

She prodded my jeans with the tip of the blade, almost playfully. “Oh, this old thing. Don’t worry, I’ll only use it if I have to. But as they say, there’s a big difference between knife and death.” She giggled, but before I could even process how terrible a joke that was, her face was stone cold sober again. “Now, for the last time, give me the ring.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I swear, I really don’t. We’d have to go back to—”

“Stop lying,” she cut in, sounding almost bored. “You have it with you. I know you do.”

I curled my lip into a sneer. “If you’re so sure, then why don’t you just take it?”

Not-Vicky’s face clouded over. “I can’t take it until you’ve used all your wishes. Not unless you give
it to me.”

She couldn’t steal the ring. That was interesting. Maybe I could use that to my advantage somehow . . . while not getting stabbed, of course.

“What would I get in exchange?” I asked.

She bared her teeth at me, and pulled the switchblade away—only to bring it slashing down across my thigh. The pain hit me so fast and so hard that it knocked the wind out of me. I held my breath as my jeans split, and the skin beneath the fabric did the same, all in slow motion, and red began to spill out, and the
pain
—

My chest heaved with the urge to cry out, but I bit down on it, holding my bottom lip firmly between my teeth. A whimper escaped instead, and I realized I was breathing too fast. I wondered if I was hyperventilating. People did that when they were hurt, didn’t they? Would it help or make things worse? I pressed one hand against the wound, hoping that might stop the bleeding, or at least slow it. I looked up at Not-Vicky, who was eyeing the bloodied blade with distaste.

“In exchange,” she said, once she saw that she had my attention, “you get my promise that I won’t do that again.”

I had to admit, from where I was sitting, it sounded like a pretty good deal.

“The ring?” she said, holding her free hand out to me. I looked at her hand and thought how damn easy it would be to pull out the ring and give it up. But then I thought of Oliver. If she could hurt me without a second thought, what would she do to him? Especially if she got hold of his ring?

Suddenly, I knew. I didn’t know how it was possible, but I knew, deep in my gut, that this Not-Vicky person was the mysterious man that Oliver was trying to escape. The one he
would
have escaped, if I hadn’t kept him here so long and screwed up his getaway plan.

This was my fault.

Forgetting the distances and the odds and the blade, I flung open the door, jumped out of the car, and ran. I’d always been a decent runner, for someone who didn’t do it regularly, but my injured thigh wasn’t helping. I tried to ignore it, to concentrate on breathing evenly and moving faster, but it burned. I could feel the open wound rubbing against my jeans. I could feel blood running down my leg.

I rounded the corner onto Valley. Just up ahead was Hamilton Park, and that meant people. It wasn’t too cold or too late in the day, so there were bound to be some families hanging around, right?

But before I could get close enough to find out, something slammed into me from behind, and I fell hard onto the pavement, my wrists and knees thrumming horribly at the impact. For a moment I couldn’t see anything, and all I could hear was the sound of my own breath, pounding like drums in my ears.

When the world came into focus again, Not-Vicky was crouched in front of me, smiling like an evil Pollyanna. “Give me the ring,” she said again.

“You’re crazy,” I wheezed. Mustering all my strength, I scrambled to my feet, put on my best action hero face, and ran again. But an action hero I was not. I only made it a few feet before Not-Vicky tackled me again, this time sending me tumbling onto the strip of grass between the curb and the sidewalk. I landed on my back. My head thudded against the cold dirt, and my vision went dim for a second. I could try again—

Except Not-Vicky was sitting on my chest. I couldn’t move. I yelled and flailed my arms, trying to scratch at her face, but she pinned my wrists against the ground. All I had left were my legs. I kicked as hard as I could, but aside from brushing her back with my bleeding thigh, it didn’t do any good. Finally, in the face of her calm, cold determination, all I could do was let myself go still.

“Give me the ring,” she said.

“What do you want with it?” I asked, still out of breath.

Her eyes narrowed in a mean, un-Vicky-ish expression. “The real question is, what do
you
want with it? Fame? Money, power, and a thousand beautiful men to worship the ground you walk on?” She paused, and her lip curled in distaste. “And, of course, your very own personal slave, until all your wishes are used up?”

“Slave? I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Not-Vicky squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head like she was a kindergarten teacher and I was the worst-behaved kid in her class. “No, you wouldn’t, would you. You have no real idea of what that ring holds. None of you do. You just take and take and take, and when it’s over, you long for what you still don’t have.” She opened her eyes again. “Give me the ring, Miss McKenna. I don’t want to hurt you again. Quite the opposite, in fact. But you’re making this very hard.”

“How is slicing my leg open the opposite of hurting me?” I said. It was meant to come out louder than it did, but Not-Vicky’s weight was pressing down on my lungs.

“For heaven’s sake, that was just a scratch. Honestly. Suburban kids. If you only knew . . .” She let out a short, bristly laugh, and squeezed her thighs together, making my ribs ache. “The ring,” she said again.

I breathed out painfully, and closed my eyes against the sight of her. “Okay. Fine. You can have the damn ring. I just need to get to my pocket. The right one.”

“Thank you,” she said, with what might have passed for sincerity had she not been sitting on top of me. Slowly, she let go of my right wrist. Slowly, I moved my hand down toward my waist.

And as quickly as I could, I balled my hand into a fist and hit her in the face.

It wasn’t a good punch. Not surprising, since I’d never hit anyone in my life. But my fist connected with her jaw, and it shocked her enough that she rocked back, giving me the opening I needed. I heaved myself upward, but found myself pinned again, with my right arm squished against my side, held in place by a leg that was far too strong to belong to little Vicky Willoughbee. My left wrist was clamped between her hands.

“Help!” I called. It came out as a sad little wheeze, which I knew nobody would hear.

“We’ll do this the hard way, then,” she said, ignoring my pathetic cry. I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to see what the hard way was going to be.

She lifted my left wrist with both hands. Something made a horrible
snap,
and pain exploded like fireworks in my left hand, and I screamed. Well, tried to scream. And I opened my eyes. There, held up by Not-Vicky’s delicate fingers, was my left hand. More or less. All of my fingers were rigid with the same pain that was lancing like icicles through the rest of my body—except the middle one, which went up as far as the first knuckle, and then jutted awkwardly, unnaturally, out to the side.

I lost track of the scared, pained, animal noises I was making. I know I kept saying “please” and “stop,” and at some point I’d started crying, but mostly I know that nothing I said or did had any effect on Not-Vicky.

“The ring, Margo,” she said calmly.

“Fine,” I said, gulping in as much air as I could between sobs. “You can have the goddamn ring. You can have it.”

When she freed my right hand again, I reached into my pocket and grabbed the ring, making sure to hold it with my thumb and forefinger. If Oliver was going to find out that I’d given him up, at least he could see firsthand that I’d put up a fight for him.

One Mississippi. I pulled the ring out of my pocket as slowly as I could. Two Mississippi . . .

“You,” came a voice from somewhere above me. A voice so warmly familiar that I would have started crying if I weren’t already. “Oh god. Margo. What did you do to her?”

Something shifted in the air; I could feel it. Not-Vicky’s iron grip on me loosened everywhere but my wrist, and she sat back like I was just a bench or something, not a person she’d just deliberately injured. “Hello, Oliver,” she said. All the sugary-sweetness and all the menace had drained from her voice, leaving a strangely mild tone in their wake. “It is Oliver, isn’t it? What was it last time—Daniel? Dmitri? Dylan? Something like that.”

Oliver’s voice, closer now: “I said, what did you do?” I twisted my neck around, but I still couldn’t see him.

She gripped my wrist tighter. I whimpered as a fresh bolt of pain lanced up my broken finger. “I was negotiating with your
master
”—she flooded the word with contempt—“for your release into my custody.”

“You have no right to interfere with me and mine,” said Oliver, his voice harsher than I’d ever heard it before. “I want you to let her go.”

There was a pause, and then Not-Vicky let out a breathy little laugh. “Ahh, I see, you
like
this one. That makes a change. All right, then.”

She let my wrist go and gave my leg a little pat, right where the switchblade had cut me. I hissed in pain, but before I could do anything, she was already standing up and brushing the dirt off her jeans.

Oliver knelt swiftly beside me, and sat me up. His face looked uneven, and his eyes seemed supernaturally bright as they searched mine. His whispering voice was as loud as a chain saw. “Margo, are you . . . Is it just your finger?”

“My leg, too,” I said dizzily, clutching my finger. “A knife.”

His face went hard, and he held me tighter as he looked up at Not-Vicky, who stood over us, arms folded. “So it’s time, is it?” said Oliver. “You want your third wish?”

Something strangely distant flitted across Not-Vicky’s face, and she gave a curt nod. “It’s time. You and I, we’re the only ones left.”

“I felt it,” he said shortly. “Ten days ago.”

“It was a long time coming,” said Not-Vicky. “Come on, don’t give me that look. I just want to talk to you.”

Oliver’s face twisted, and he laughed mirthlessly. “You really expect me to believe that, after last time? And after what you just did to Margo?” As if on cue, my finger throbbed, and a little moan of pain escaped me.

“Your little slavemaster will be fine,” she said, annoyed. “And if you want me to leave her alone, then I will. You have my word. On everything that’s holy: I won’t touch her again.”

“And me?” he asked skeptically.

“Oh,
Oliver . . .
”

“What. About. Me.”

Oliver gave Not-Vicky the space of three seconds to answer, but she crossed her arms and remained silent. Letting out a breathy growl, he stood up and lunged toward her, hand raised in a fist. Not-Vicky sidestepped him easily, grabbed his wrist, and twisted—but only when she held the switchblade to his throat did he stop fighting her. He stood still as a statue but for his quick, shallow breaths. The sudden fear in his eyes shook me to the core.

Not-Vicky pressed the blade into the soft skin under Oliver’s jaw. “Did you just try to hit me?” she asked, her voice low and dangerous. “Answer me. Did you?”

A small trickle of blood ran down Oliver’s neck. “Yes,” he said, through clenched teeth.

The word curdled in the air between them, and she smiled mirthlessly. How had I ever mistaken this person for the real Vicky?

“You should know better,” she hissed. In one fluid movement, like something out of a martial arts movie, she twisted Oliver’s arm around and knocked one of his legs out from under him. Oliver fell hard on his back.

He tried to get up again, but Not-Vicky’s sneaker landed squarely on his chest, keeping him where he was. He bit his bottom lip, but didn’t cry out.

I heaved myself to my feet, still clutching my injured hand. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I said. My voice rang woozily in my ears. I didn’t care. “You can’t just—”

“I can’t just what, Margo?” Not-Vicky said evenly, her gaze cold and calculating as she looked at me with interest. She leaned forward, shifting even more of her weight onto Oliver. He still didn’t make a sound, but his face contorted in pain. Not-Vicky smiled. “Please, enlighten me.”

I ran at her. My good hand firmly against the center of her chest, I shoved her with all the strength I could muster, and she stumbled backward, leaving Oliver gasping for breath on the ground. Her surprise gave me enough time to answer her question:

“You can’t just show up out of nowhere, pull a knife on my boyfriend, and expect me not to kick your ass for it.”

Not-Vicky’s eyebrows shot up, and for a second I was terrified she’d call my bluff. Even without the bleeding leg and the broken finger, I wasn’t exactly well-practiced in the art of ass-kicking.

But she didn’t attack me again. She just smiled. “Interesting,” she said, and disappeared.