The stage was set.
‘It opened its bare-bone jaws,’ I said, mustering my full theatricality, ‘and in a voice like dead leaves blowing down an empty street, it told him, though it had no way of knowing his name, You will die, Karel Novak…WHEN I KILL YOU!’
At that moment, Tomas bumped the glass case so that the puppet seemed to jump, and Karou gasped, and then laughed and punched him in the arm.
‘You two are terrible,’ she said, and that should have been the end of it. That was the extent of our prank – amateur hour, I see that now – but…Karou gasped again. She grabbed my arm. ‘Did you see that?’
‘See what?’
‘I swear it just moved.’
And she looked scared. Her breathing went shallow, and she was holding my arm really tight, just staring at the puppet. Tomas and I shared an amused look. ‘Karou,’ I said, ‘it didn’t move—’
‘It did. I saw it. Maybe it’s trying to tell us something. Jesus, it’s probably starving. How long has it been in there, anyway? Don’t you guys ever feed it?’
And the look Tomas and I shared then was more of the um, what? variety, because until that moment, Karou had seemed normal enough. Okay, fine. Karou never seemed normal, with her blue hair and tattoos and drawing monsters all the time, but she did seem mentally sound. But when she started worrying about the skull puppet being hungry, you had to wonder.
‘Karou—’ I started to say.
She cut me off. ‘Wait. It wants to tell us something. I can feel it.’ She was staring at it, and she hesitantly leaned toward it so her face was a foot or so from the glass, and then asked it, in this tentative, gentle voice – like you would a body you found lying in the street and didn’t know if it was drunk or dead – ‘Are you…okay?’
For a second, nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. It was a puppet in a glass case. No one was touching it. Without a doubt, no one was touching it. Karou was clinging to me, Tomas had stepped back from the cabinet, and I know I didn’t do it.
So when all of a sudden it turned its head and snapped its jaws at us, I screamed.
Tomas did, too, and so did Karou. Knowing what I know now, I laud her evil chops for that scream. Not for a second did it occur to me that she might be responsible. I mean, why would it? She clearly hadn’t touched it. All my childhood terror over the Puppet That Bites came flooding instantly back. It was true, it was all freaking true, and if that story was true, maybe all of Deda’s stories were, and oh my god, how many times had I considered breaking the glass, and if I had, would we all be dead?
I don’t even remember running. Just, the next thing I knew, the three of us had crossed the courtyard from the workshop and were slamming through the back door into the kitchen, shrieking. The house was full of a Christmas crowd of aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors, all well-acquainted with Deda’s stories, and there were gales of laughter to see us – teenagers! – beside ourselves with terror, babbling that the puppet was alive. ‘No, really, it turned its head. It snapped its jaws!’
No one believed us, and Tomas sealed our fate when, within minutes, he backpedaled and claimed credit for the whole thing. ‘You should have seen your faces,’ he said to Karou and me, as if he could erase his own high, thin shriek from our minds. He put on that smug oh you kids face that is so deeply infuriating in older siblings, made all the worse because he was so absolutely lying.
For this treachery he would pay dearly a couple of days later, but that’s another story.
The point of this story is that I will never forget the sound of those sharpened fox teeth snapping together, three times in rapid succession, and I will never forget the perfect clarity of terror that thrilled through me as, in an instant, my long-dead belief in magic flared back to life.
It wouldn’t last. It would die back down again to a low flicker of uncertainty, but it turns out I was right to believe. It was magic. Just not the kind I thought.
The Puppet That Bites is just a puppet, but…Karou is not just a girl.
That Christmas Eve was my first exposure to scuppies, though I wouldn’t know it for more than two years – two years she let me believe the puppet was hungry, that minx – until a couple of weeks ago, when Kishmish flew on fire into her window and died in her hands.
That was…a shock. Seeing Kishmish die was a shock. Seeing him at all was a shock, and finding out that he’s real – or he was real – and not just some flight of fancy from Karou’s imagination. At a glance he just looked like a crow, but once you focused on him, your brain started to issue error messages: Something wasn’t right, wasn’t normal. And then: Oh, it was his wings. They were bat wings. And his tongue. It was a serpent’s tongue. Interesting, that, and it was just the point of entry.
It wasn’t only Kishmish. Everything in Karou’s sketchbooks was real, and the African trade beads she always wears are actually wishes. ‘Nearly useless wishes,’ that is, since scuppies are the weakest kind. She’s traveling right now, trying to get her hands on more powerful ones, but before she left Prague she gave me a present. I’m looking at them right now.
In the palm of my hand, the size of pearls, no two alike in color or pattern and indistinguishable from African trade beads, are five scuppies. Nearly useless they may be, but even one scuppy would be more magic than I’ve ever held in my hand before, and I have five.
Five tiny secret weapons to add a spice of magic to a certain plan I’m cooking up.
What plan, you ask?
The plan to finally – finally, finally – meet violin boy, and sweep him off his feet.
Me, sweep him off his feet? I know. The laws of the jungle and romance novels would have it the other way around, but I’m not going to wait one more second for that. Milquetoast girls raised on princess stories might sit tight and bat their eyelashes in desperate Morse code – notice me, like me, please – but I am not that girl. Well, to be honest, I’ve been that girl for three months now, and I’ve had enough. What’s happened to me? When Karou talks about butterflies in the belly and invisible lines of energy and all that, I make fun of her for being a hopeless romantic, but DEAR GOD. Butterflies! Invisible lines of energy!
I get it.
I feel liquefied, like a cucumber forgotten in the crisper drawer, and I want to hold myself at arm’s length and carry me to the trash. Who is this sack of slush masquerading as me? It’s intolerable. If Karou can sally forth to track down the most awful people in the world and steal wishes from them, then I can meet a damned boy.
I am a rabid fairy. I am a carnivorous plant. I am Zuzana.
And violin boy’s not going to know what hit him.
2
That Kind of Alien
Here’s what I know:
His name is Mik.
He plays violin in the orchestra of the Marionette Theater of Prague.
If we’re talking facts, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. But we’re not talking facts. We’re talking whatever I feel like talking, so I will tell you that Mik is one of those people you can look at and totally imagine as a kid. You know how some people were absolutely never children, but just came from a catalog fully grown, while other people you don’t even have to squint to imagine them charging down the stairs on Christmas morning in superhero pajamas? Mik’s the latter. It’s not that he’s ‘boyish,’ though I guess he is a little – but only a little – it’s just that there’s something direct and real and electric and pure that hasn’t been lost, the intense, undiluted emotion of childhood. Most people lose it. They get all tame and cool. You know how some people think cool equals bored, and they act like they’re alien scientists who drew the short straw and ended up assigned to observe this lowly species, humans, and they just lean against walls all the time, sighing and waiting to be called home to Zigborp-12, where all the fascinating geniuses are?