A Tangle of Knots (15 page)

43

Mrs. Asher

W
HAT DOLORES HAD BEEN HOPING FOR WHEN SHE ROLLED
down the window was a breath of fresh air. A bit of a country breeze to help clear her head as she continued down the highway.

What she got was a faceful of ferret.

“Aaaaaaggggggghhhhhh!”
Dolores screeched, swerving as she struggled with the furry blob that had attached itself to her nose. She finally managed to pull to the side of the road and wrestle the critter to her lap. “Sally!” she cried, willing her heart to slow to only three hundred beats per second. “Where on earth did you—You scared me half to—Oh, Sally.” Dolores’s voice softened as the ferret curled into a frightened, hairy ball and sniffled a sad sort of sniffle. “You miss him, too, don’t you?”

Click-click-clack,
Sally replied.

Dolores scratched at the scruff of Sally’s neck. “Where in the world could that boy be? I bet
you’d
know”—
scratch, scratch, scratch
—“since you and Will are always going on all those adven—”

Dolores stopped talking. Slowly, with one hand still around the ferret in her lap, she returned her foot to the gas pedal and eased back onto the highway.

44

Zane

I
T WAS A CURIOUS SENSATION, BEING HIT BY AN ONCOMING CAR
while flying backward on a bicycle. Somehow thrilling and terrifying both at once. Like a roller coaster, but without a safety bar.

The part after the collision, where Zane flew feet-over-face past his handlebars and thwacked headfirst into the dirt, that wasn’t thrilling at all.

There was a screech of tires and the slam of a car door.

“You damn kids!” came a voice behind him.

Marigold rushed to Zane, picking his head out of the dirt. “Oh, Zane, I’m so sorry, are you okay?” Zane was not okay. His whole head throbbed, his palms were burning. He wondered if he might have broken an ankle.

“You
damn kids
!” came the voice again. The Owner. “Move this mess,
now
!”

As Zane did his best to rub the sting out of the back of his neck, Marigold stood to her full height, hands on her hips. “You
hit
my
brother
!” she screeched. Dozens of squirrels, Zane noticed as his vision began to clear, had leapt out from the trees, and they were swarming into the road in order to . . .

Actually, what
were
they doing? Zane craned his neck ever so slightly, pins and needles soaring up his spine as he did so, to take in the scene.

A mangled bicycle. Four suitcases burst open in the dirt. Cameras, wallets, belt buckles. And jars. There were jars everywhere, scattered across the road. Broken and cracked and slivered, every last one. And rising up from the shards of each broken jar—Zane blinked when he saw it—was a fine sort of mist. A gray haze that swirled up into the sky, slowly at first, then swaying slightly with the breeze until it funneled up, up, up into the clouds.

Yut!

Yut!

The squirrels seemed fascinated, digging their curious faces right down into the broken glass to sniff.

Yut yut! Yutyutyutyutyut!

The Owner had noticed the mess, too. And he wasn’t as happy about it as the squirrels.

“You
damn kids
!” he screamed again. His face was purple, veins bulging in his forehead. With two burly hands, he lifted the twisted heap of a bicycle off the ground and threw it into the bushes. A pedal caught Marigold in the cheek, and she squawked in surprise, slapping her hand to cover it.

But Zane had already seen the blood forming.

“You leave my sister alone!” he howled, rising, teetering to his feet. Zane’s ankle wailed at him to stay still, his hands hollered, his knees shrieked, but Zane didn’t listen. He lunged at the Owner, sending the squirrels chittering in all directions.

Things became a bit of a blur after that. Maybe it was because Zane was in so much pain that he found it hard to follow the events that unfolded right in front of him. But what
seemed
to happen (although it couldn’t be what
really
happened, because it was all too peculiar to be true) was that something in the Owner’s pocket let out a soft
plunk!
, like a pebble being tossed to the floor, and the Owner suddenly shrunk two inches. And then, without warning, there was a sharp chill in Zane’s forehead. He couldn’t tell if it lasted a moment or a lifetime, but it was . . .
cold.

And then, all at once, the Owner shoved Zane back into the dirt.

In the Owner’s hand was a small rock of ice.

45

Cady

“A
ND WHAT CAKE WILL YOU BE BAKING TODAY?” THE LARGE
woman with the chef’s hat asked Cady.

“Hmm?” Cady looked up from her baking station, just as the man with the greasy black hair wheeled by with his flour barrel. Nose still in his book, he scooped a mound of flour from the barrel into Cady’s container. She coughed out a bit of flour dust.

“Your cake,” the woman said again. She tapped the clipboard in her hand. “I have to write it down, what you’ll be baking.”

“Oh, I . . .” Cady looked up into the bleachers, where the rows and rows of guests were sitting. She couldn’t spot Toby, but she knew he was there somewhere. Miss Mallory would be, too, soon.
Probably the last time I’ll ever see her,
Cady thought.

She turned back to the woman with the clipboard. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I usually wait until I meet the judge.” How could Cady bake the perfect cake for the judge until she knew who that judge was?

The woman frowned. “Well, the judges will be coming out to greet the contestants in a moment, but I really do need to note down—”

“Judges?” Cady asked.

“Yes.” Cady could tell by the woman’s voice that she was growing more and more impatient. “They’ve changed the rules around a little bit since last time. There are five judges this year.”

Cady’s eyes went wide. “
Five?
But how am I supposed to . . . ?”

The woman’s face softened just the slightest. “You’re never going to be able to please every person every time,” she told Cady.

Cady squinted her eyes shut for a short second, searching her brain. The large woman standing before her was, surprisingly, not a cake at all, but rather a blackberry pie. Her eyes snapped open. If only she were baking for
this
woman, she’d have won the trophy already.

The woman glanced down the long row of bakers. “Look, take a minute to think about it, all right? I’ll come back to you last. But if I might make a suggestion”—she regarded Cady kindly—“why don’t you bake the cake that’s
your
favorite?”

Cady kicked her toe against the oven door as the woman in the chef’s hat continued on down the row.
Bake the cake that’s
your
favorite.
It sounded so simple. But how was Cady supposed to know what her favorite cake was? Cherry? Chocolate? Almond? Cady had never thought she’d have to worry about such a thing until her Adoption Day party and, for some reason, when she squeezed shut her eyes and searched her brain, all she found was a mess of confusion. But somewhere, out in the audience, Toby and Miss Mallory would be watching, and Cady didn’t want to disappoint them.

Cady set her elbows on the countertop and did her best to think. She was so busy with her own fitful thoughts that she didn’t notice the small fist-size slip of paper that had found its way into her flour bin.

46

Marigold

M
ARIGOLD WAS TYPICALLY THE TYPE OF GIRL WHO REFRAINED
from whacking surly old men in the shins as hard as she could. But today was not a typical day.

Whack!
“You hurt my brother!” Marigold screamed at the Owner.
Whack!
When he tried to push her away, she jumped on his back and—
whack!
—kicked him even harder. Zane was still in the dirt, moaning.
Whack!
“You
hurt
him!”

“Get off, get
off
!” The Owner raised a hand—was that an
ice cube
inside it?—to push Marigold away, but she was too quick for him. She whacked his arm, hard as she could, in the elbow, so that he shrieked and convulsed.

The ice cube snaked down his arm and found its way to Marigold’s wrist, where it promptly wedged itself under her Talent bracelet. She squealed at the sudden chill of it, trying to shake the frosty stone from her skin, even as she clutched tight to the Owner’s back. But the ice cube was trapped beneath the three shiny silver beads of Marigold’s bracelet, and she could only watch, mesmerized, as it quickly shrunk—tiny, tinier, tiniest—into her skin, the cold traveling through her veins, up her arm, and into her chest. And just like that, the icy stone was gone, vanished, sunk completely inside her.

The Owner tossed Marigold to the ground, where she landed—
thump
—next to Zane. Spinning on his heel, the Owner crackled across the broken mounds of glass, flung himself inside his car, and left in a screech of tires and dust.

“What . . .” Marigold rubbed her wrist as the Owner’s car disappeared down the main highway. “What happened?”

“I think . . .” Zane said slowly, rubbing at his forehead. He frowned. “I think you got my Talent.”

“What?”
Marigold wouldn’t have believed it for a second if she didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to hock a loogie right that very moment. She kicked a shard of broken jar across the Owner’s tire tracks, sending the last squirrel sprinting back into the bushes. “We should go to the police,” she said, doing her best to think things through. “That guy’s dangerous. He just
stole
your
Talent,
so who
knows
what he . . .” She trailed off with the immensity of it all.

Zane pulled his hand from his forehead to blow cool air onto his scraped-up palms. “You’re right,” he said between breaths.

Marigold snapped her head up. Of all the startling things that had happened that afternoon, those two words were perhaps the most extraordinary. “I am?”

“Yeah,” Zane said. “We
should
go to the police. But how are we supposed to get there?”

That’s when the rope dropped from the sky, a thick length of rope with knots tied into it, expertly, every foot or so. Marigold and Zane’s eyes followed the whole length of it, up, up, up, until they found the source—one hundred feet above them in the sky.

A hot air balloon, with a red-and-blue striped top. It looked surprisingly like the balloon that had crashed into their apartment wall only one week ago.

A man leaned over the edge of the basket to peer down at them. Marigold could just make out the top of his gray suit.

“You kids need a lift?” he called down.