Between the Lines Read online

  “And if it’s the wrong key?”

  Kyrie shrugged. “The oxygen spell wears off. And you drown.”

  How on earth would he know which key to pick? One wrong choice here would be his last. Oliver blinked, struggling to swallow his panic.

  “Come now,” Ondine snapped, leaning over the half shell. “We don’t have all day.” Annoyed, she overturned the bowl of keys, scattering them into the sand at Oliver’s feet.

  There was the tiniest flicker in his fading vision—perhaps a ray of sun slanting through the sea, maybe the reflection of a fish’s silver scale. At any rate, it drew Oliver’s attention to his father’s compass hanging around Ondine’s neck.

  Very slowly, as he watched, the needle began to jump, quivering to the right until it seemed to be an arrow directly indicating one key that had drifted and fallen a distance away from the others.

  It points you home, his mother had said.

  Oliver leaned down and grabbed that key. He felt his vision fading as he slid the key into the padlock. It slipped easily, effortlessly, and the hinge fell open. A black cloud of squid ink billowed from inside.

  The contents were not gold, or jewels, or anything that would be considered treasure by any stretch of the imagination. The mermaids brought him, one by one, each item from inside the chest.

  A fire extinguisher.

  A megaphone.

  A shark’s tooth.

  Oliver blinked, his vision blurred. “But these aren’t riches,” he forced out.

  “What makes a treasure a treasure,” Marina replied, “is how rare a find it is, when you need it the most.” She reached toward Ondine and ripped the compass from her sister’s neck, pressing it into Oliver’s palm.

  Oliver considered her words. And as he passed out, he thought that maybe this was the best advice one could ever be given about love.

  OLIVER

  THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DELILAH MCPHEE:

  She bites her nails when she’s nervous.

  She sings off-key.

  She mispronounces the word schedule in her flat, odd accent, yet insists that I’m the one who can’t speak correctly.

  She has the most mesmerizing eyes. It’s as if she needn’t speak at all, since everything she’s feeling is written within them.

  “You’re not listening,” Delilah says.

  After my spending hours without her, we are finally together again. It is a little difficult to hear her, because she’s blasting music from that magical box called a radio, in the hopes that it will keep her mother from hearing her talk out loud to me. Behind Delilah’s shoulders I can see the familiar bits of what I know is her bedroom—pink walls, pink lampshades, pink everything. At the edge of my vision is a fringed, furry throw pillow. And yes, it’s pink.

  “You keep distracting me,” I tell her.

  “All I’m doing is sitting here talking to you!”

  “Exactly,” I say, and I smile at her.

  I like knowing that when I smile that way, it makes her cheeks go red. It’s interesting that the same thing happens when I smile at Seraphima, but I don’t find that nearly as charming.

  I am looking at the way Delilah’s eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks and trying to decide if her hair is the color of milk chocolate or polished teak as she natters on and on. “I completely understand why you feel trapped,” Delilah says. “But it’s better to be trapped and alive—whatever that means inside a book—than free and dead.”

  Teakwood, definitely. Or maybe walnut.

  “If something as simple as a spider didn’t make it out of this book, how do you think a human being is going to fare? What if I pull you out of the book and you’re only… a word?”

  She gets up from where she is lying on her bed, talking to me, and starts pacing back and forth. From this perspective, I can see more of the room behind her: a mirror with pictures affixed around its edge, of Delilah and the girl she was speaking with earlier today; of Delilah with her arms spread wide at the top of a mountain; of Delilah and her mother making funny faces. I think that if I were to get out of this book, one of my first orders of business would be to steal one of those photos, so that I could always have her with me.

  The other thing I can see from this angle is the way every inch of her figure is quite visible in the odd clothing she wears—some sort of blue hose with several rips and tears. They’re so tight it’s as if she’s practically wearing nothing.

  “Why aren’t you wearing a dress?” I blurt out.

  Delilah stops moving and faces me. “What? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “What you’re wearing is indecent!”

  She snorts. “It’s a whole lot more decent than what some of the girls in my school wear,” she says. “Relax, Oliver. They’re just jeans.”

  I realize that although I’ve seen Readers in strange garb before, they are usually so close to the page that I haven’t marked the differences between their clothing and mine. On Delilah, though, I can’t help but notice.

  “As I was saying,” she continues pointedly, “I really wish I could help you. But I’ve been thinking about you all day—believe me, you’re all I’ve thought about—”

  At this, I grin.

  “—and I don’t think I could ever forgive myself if I were the one who killed you.”

  My head snaps up. “Killed me? Why the devil would you do that?”

  “Oliver, have you listened to anything I’ve just said? I can’t risk having what happened to that spider happen to you.” She sits down, looking into her lap. “I only just found you,” Delilah says. “I can’t lose you now.”

  In the fairy tale, I’ve never had to worry about death. I know the mermaids will not let me drown. I know I’ll always beat the dragon. I know I’ll always defeat Rapscullio.

  But this Otherworld, it doesn’t work the same way. There are no second chances. Death, here, is for real.

  It hits me with the force of a blow: the understanding that I’d rather die than know I might never have a chance to truly, finally, kiss Delilah McPhee.

  Maybe the reason I’ve never died in this story is that I’ve never had something worth dying for before.

  “We just need to think of a different escape method,” I suggest. “There has to be another way.”

  I hear Delilah’s mother calling her name, and all of a sudden the book is slammed shut. I wait a few moments, in the hope that Delilah might come back.

  When she does, it’s on page 43 once again. “Sorry,” she says. She is hurrying around her room, locating a rucksack and stuffing a towel inside. “I have to go to swim practice.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it quickly,” I reply. “I did.”

  “I know how to swim,” Delilah says. “It’s a sport. I’m supposed to be doing it for fun. But when you come in last place every time in the individual medley, it’s hard to find the joy.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “My mother thinks it will help me fit in.”

  “You should just tell her you’d prefer not to.”

  She pauses and looks at me. “Why don’t you tell your mother off when she gives you a hard time?”

  “That’s different. I was written that way.”

  “Well, believe me,” Delilah says. “Being a teenager isn’t all that different from being part of someone else’s story, then. There’s always someone who thinks they know better than you do.”

  I offer my most charming grin. “You could stay with me instead.”

  “I wish.” Delilah sighs. “But that’s not going to happen.”

  “Then take me with you.”

  “Water and books don’t mix very well.”

  “DELILAH!” Her mother’s voice booms in the background once again.

  And so she closes the book, more gently this time, and abandons me.

  I sit down on the edge of page 43, already missing her, as Queen Maureen wanders into the edge of the margin. It’s like that when the book is closed�€