Changeling Read online

“Your father has a computer? Cool!”

  I’d never seen a mortal computer, of course, but I’d read Macworld from front to back three times, so I knew more about them than magic computers, which were the realm of Tech Folk anyway.

  “My father is a software designer,” the mortal said. “He was the one who taught me to install memory. He should have known that I would not attempt to repair his motherboard if I had not been confident of success. I still do not understand why he was so angry.”

  “I got in trouble for doing something I didn’t know was wrong, too,” I said. “It’s so unfair. You were just trying to help your father and I just wanted to go to a dance, and now we’re stuck in a broom closet, waiting to find out if a bunch of bogeymen vote us the naughtiest children in New York.”

  “You are teasing me again,” the mortal child said reproachfully. “Bogeymen do not exist. Michiko made them up. And I am twelve years old. I am a preadolescent, not a child.”

  I sat up in the darkness. “What do you mean, bogeymen don’t exist? What’s Carlyle, then?”

  “Carlyle is a nightmare.”

  “Nightmares are horses,” I explained. “Carlyle is a bogeyman. They’re not alike at all. Who is Michiko?”

  “Michiko looks after me. She is from Japan. She says that the Funny Man who lives on top of the Carlyle Hotel will come get me if I do not go to bed when she tells me to, whether I am sleepy or not.”

  “Well, Michiko was right. That’s exactly what he did.”

  “I told you,” the mortal said. “The Funny Man is a figment of Michiko’s imagination. I am having a bad dream because Michiko shouted at me. I do not like people to shout at me.”

  I was beginning to understand why Michiko had shouted. “Are all mortals like you?” I asked.

  “No,” the mortal said. “I am very intelligent, but I have difficulty relating to people. When I was younger, I had a therapist who helped me develop social skills. For instance, when I meet someone, I am supposed to say, ‘How do you do? My name is Jennifer Goldhirsch.’ ”

  The last two words hit me like a wave of freezing water. “Don’t say that!”

  “What did I say?”

  “Your name.”

  The mortal was quiet for a moment. “Why not?” she asked at last.

  “Somebody might be listening.”

  “What would be wrong with that?”

  I tried to imagine explaining the most important rule of survival in New York Between to a mortal child who didn’t believe bogeymen were real. “Never mind. Just never say that name out loud again. Ever.”

  “I do not understand,” the mortal child said. “I like my name. It creates a pleasing image. Jennifer means ‘white wave,’ and Goldhirsch means ‘golden stag.’ ”

  I didn’t care what the mortal’s name meant. I just never wanted to hear it again.

  Not because I didn’t like it. I did. It was my name, too—my true name, almost the only thing I remembered from before I came to live with Astris. It was a horrible coincidence that another mortal had it, too. I knew names worked differently Outside: Probably there were hundreds of Jennifers and even Goldhirsches, so the power got diluted. But in New York Between, I was it.

  “Pretty,” I said, thinking furiously how I could keep this other Jennifer from blabbing our name all over the place. “Listen. You said this was a dream, right?”

  “I believe it is,” said the mortal. “Yes.”

  “Well, you know how in dreams, the rules are different from when you’re awake?”

  She considered this. “Yes.”

  “In the dream, the rule about names is that you don’t tell them to anybody at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bad things will happen.”

  “What kind of bad things? Do you go to jail?”

  I didn’t ask what jail was. “Worse. Anyway, you can’t use your real name. For example, everyone calls me Neef. It’s my dream name. See?”

  “Neef is a silly name,” she said.

  I gritted my teeth. “Neef is not my name,” I said as patiently as I could. “It’s what you can call me. You need a dream name, too.”

  “Are you referring to a nickname? I already have a nickname. Mom calls me Jenny.”

  I shivered as if refriger-ants were crawling up my back. “That’s not made-up enough. What color is your hair?”

  “Brown.”

  So was mine. “That’s no good. I can’t call you Brownie if you aren’t one. Let me think. What about Closet?”

  “Closet is not a name.”

  I thought up a couple more names, but she nixed all of them. We were arguing over MC (for “mortal child”) when the wall behind us opened. Carlyle appeared, all dressed up in a formal kimono, his long nose twitching with eagerness.

  “And now, here it is,” he projected over his shoulder. “The moment you’ve all been waiting for! I present to you—the naughtiest children in New York!

  “Come on, you two. It’s showtime!”

  CHAPTER 8

  SMART IS GOOD. LUCKY IS BETTER. SMART AND LUCKY IS BEST OF ALL.

  Neef’s Rules for Changelings

  Carlyle dragged us out of the closet and into a riot of screaming and wailing like a banshee family reunion. I shut my eyes and clamped my hands over my ears. It didn’t help. Besides, I couldn’t stand not knowing what I was facing.

  I peeked through my eyelashes at sea of bogeymen. They were every color of the rainbow and then some, bristling with horns and antennae and spines and spikes and teeth.

  I closed my eyes again. Okay, it’s important to know what you’re dealing with. But sometimes the problem is too big to look at all at once.

  Ladies and gentlemen. Honored patron of brats, buzzed Carlyle, his mind-voice smug and confident. Let me tell you a little something about my candidates for this year’s Eloise Awards.

  When he wasn’t talking directly to me, I could tune the tengu out and think about other things. Like how he couldn’t possibly fit three hundred bogeymen into his nest. We must be somewhere else—somewhere big, maybe with exits I could see. I forced my eyes open a second time and studied my surroundings.

  I was standing on a raised stage at one end of an immense hall lit by giant chandeliers like sculpted ice. Carlyle stood between me and the blur of color that had to be the unluckily named mortal child. Garlands of flower fairies draped the mirrored panels along the walls; a couple of long tables piled high with fairy food and balloons stood waiting in the back. I didn’t see any windows or doors.

  The bogeymen laughed hideously at something Carlyle said, and a chorus of panic-stricken screaming swelled to a fever pitch behind me. Turning, I saw a seething mass of scarlet faces and roaring mouths, grabbing hands and squirming bodies. It took me a breath or two to realize that they belonged to the naughty children, penned up in a big brass cage at the back of the platform.

  The bogeymen were less terrifying.

  Carlyle pulled me around again, but not before I noticed that there was a space between the cage and the back wall.

  As you can see, Carlyle buzzed, they’re a pair of hooligans. Disgustingly dirty, of course, but that’s the least of it. This one (he shoved the mortal child forward) is driving her parents to the edge of madness. She is stubborn. She is disobedient. She is destructive. She is incredibly rude. She throws tantrums, and she never says she’s sorry. This one (he shoved me up beside her) is even worse. She broke the geas set on her by the Genius of Central Park and disrupted the Solstice Dance. And she’s not sorry either. Just look at that sullen pout. Have you ever seen a more hardened case?

  Three hundred pairs of yellow, poison-green, and scarlet eyes fixed themselves on me. I blinked hard and glared back. I wasn’t some stupid wild mortal who didn’t know what was what. I was the Central Park changeling, and I wasn’t going to cry.

  I came pretty close, though. What saved me was a small brown turtle. I felt something tickling my foot, and when I looked, there it was, clambering purposefully acros
s my toes. There was a stir among the bogeymen. A hand appeared from nowhere and grabbed the turtle by its shell.

  “Gotcha!” said the hand’s owner. “Bad Skipperdee, skittling off like that. Do you want to get squished flat?”

  It was Eloise. Her hair was like dried grass, and her belly hung out over the waistband of her pleated black skirt. Except for the red bow in her hair and the pink undies that showed whenever she bent over, she was paper white outlined in black, with sketched-in features. I’d never seen anything like her before, and I hoped I never did again.

  Eloise scrambled to her feet and skewered me with a beady black glare.

  “Here’s what I like,” she announced. “Playing with turtles.” She stuck Skipperdee’s nose against mine, so I was looking cross-eyed into its little turtley face. It opened and shut its mouth unhappily and retreated into its shell.

  “Here’s what I hate. Being bored. Being bored is not allowed. A lettuce leaf makes a nice hat.”

  She spun around and collapsed at the edge of the stage with her black-and-white legs sprawling and tossed Skipperdee from hand to hand. I knew how he must feel.

  See, Carlyle projected triumphantly, Eloise likes them.

  “Eloise is bored out of her mind,” shouted a bogeyman in the back. “And so am I. One of them is rude? Don’t make me laugh, birdman. That’s wuss stuff. My kid would eat her for breakfast!”

  “Yeah,” shouted another. “You got nothing, Carlyle. You hear me? Nothing.”

  On the contrary, Carlyle objected. I have a great deal. I have the girl who broke up the Solstice Dance single-handedly, and I have her exact twin, who may not be an actual juvenile delinquent, but is, I think you’ll agree, undeniably naughty. And what do you have, pray tell? A boy who tied his sister to a tree and forgot about her. I rest my case.

  Her exact twin?

  I turned and looked, really looked, at Carlyle’s surprise.

  She was staring at the nearest chandelier as if it was the only thing in the room. Her body was roundish and so was her face. Her eyes were hazel and her mouth kind of tucked in at the corners. Her hair sprang in wild brown corkscrews around her head. It looked uncombed and unkempt, and it would look that way no matter what. I know. I have the same hair. And the same face and eyes and mouth. If she’d been barefoot and wearing a spidersilk dress instead of sandals, a long blue skirt, and a jacket embroidered all over with flowers, even I couldn’t have told us apart.

  Carlyle’s surprise wasn’t a mortal child at all; she was a fairy changeling. My fairy changeling.

  I’d always known how I’d come to live in New York Between. Astris had often told me the story of how a Kid-napper from the Bureau of Changeling Affairs had chosen me out of all the little girls in New York Outside to be the official changeling of Central Park. She hadn’t said a word about the fairy changeling left behind in my place, and I hadn’t asked. I was more interested in hearing about me.

  Carlyle’s mind-voice broke into my shock.

  Just look at them, he was saying. Like two peas in a pod. What are the chances, do you think, of finding them in two different realities and bringing them together? I should get points just for that.

  “You should be disqualified, you mean,” yelled a bogeyman in the front. He was kind of mauve, with huge red eyes and the usual mouthful of nasty teeth. He wasn’t on any of the lists I’d learned. Someone must have made him up.

  “Yeah,” a dog-headed bogeyman said. “That one on the right, she’s not even mortal.”

  Not mortal? Carlyle scoffed. She smells mortal. Her parents treat her like a mortal. She’s growing up and getting older. That’s what mortals do, isn’t it?

  The bogeymen weren’t impressed. There were cries of “Cheat!” and “Not fair!” and “What does Eloise say?”

  Eloise scrambled to her feet and stood on the tips of her little black Mary Janes, holding Skipperdee over her head with both hands. “Here’s what I say,” she screeched. “BEAR PILE!”

  And she dove into the crowd of bogeymen headfirst.

  A bright green bogeyman unhinged his jaw and roared. Carlyle shifted into a raven and flew at him, scaly claws spread.

  This seemed like a perfect time to escape—if only I could find the way out.

  “I do not like this dream.”

  My fairy twin had transferred her attention from the chandelier to the storm-tossed sea of bogeymen. Her arms were crossed and her head was sort of tucked down in the collar of her jacket, like Skipperdee in his shell. I could hardly stand to look at her. Was my face really that round and piggy? And was my voice really that ugly? I mean, next to the silver music of most fairy voices, I knew my voice was flat and coarse, but inside my head it didn’t sound nearly as bad as hers.

  A small red bogeyman came hurtling over my head, bounced against the cage of naughty children, and flew back into the scrimmage.

  “There’s got to be a door,” I said. “Bogeymen can’t walk through walls.”

  “Bogeymen do not exist.”

  “Then we’ve got nothing to worry about, do we?”

  “My therapist says that dreams, however subjectively frightening, have no objective reality. It would be irrational to be frightened.”

  I glared at her. She didn’t notice. I walked to the back of the stage. Just as I had thought, the little space behind the cage of naughty children was big enough to squeeze through. Once I got past them, I could jump down off the stage and crawl along the wall, checking the mirrors as I went to see if any of them opened or transported me somewhere. It wasn’t the best idea in the world, but it was the best one I could come up with.

  The fairy changeling appeared beside me. “Can you read kanji?”

  “Can I read what?”

  “Kanji.” She pointed to one of the mirrors. “There is a sign over that door, but I cannot read it. It is Japanese, or possibly Chinese. Japanese is written in Chinese characters called kanji.”

  She started to tell me more about kanji, but I interrupted her. “You can see doors?”

  “Yes. There are three, one in the center of each wall.”

  I believed her, of course. If she said she saw a door, there was a door. Without being able to see the sign, I didn’t know where it led, but anywhere was better than where I was. Unfortunately, I was going to have to bring her with me.

  “Listen,” I said. “We’re going to move very slowly to the side of the stage and then we’re going to slip behind that cage and crawl along the wall to the nearest door and then we’re going to go through it.”

  “Then will I wake up?”

  “Maybe,” I said cautiously. “You can’t tell until you’ve tried.”

  I was surprised at how calm I sounded. I envied the fairy changeling her belief that the biting, scratching, screaming bogeymen were just a bad dream.

  We edged nearer the naughty children. When we got close, the ones by the bars started grabbing at us and begging us to rescue them.

  It was horrible. If my dress hadn’t been magic, they would have torn it right off me. Their hands were hot and sticky against my arms and face, and I had to keep pinching them to make them let go. The fairy changeling went into a panic, scratching and slapping and screeching, “Do not touch me! I do not like to be touched!” at the top of her lungs. Luckily, the naughty children were already making so much noise that the bogeymen didn’t hear her.

  Breaking free from the last of the clutching hands, I jumped down from the stage and crouched panting against the wall. Eloise’s bear pile was a lot more terrifying when you were right down in it. A lot more dangerous, too. A barbed tail whipped at my shoulder. A clawed hand nicked my knee. I was too scared to move.

  With one last “Do not touch me!” the fairy changeling tumbled from the stage, picked herself up, and scurried off along the wall like a frightened squirrel. I ran after her, dodging fighting bogeymen and a hail of dried-out raisins, toward a strange glimmer—not a sign, exactly, but something like the shadow of a sign. I was almost even with i
t when I cannoned into a large, warty, chartreuse- green bogeyman.

  “Hey, you guys, look!” the bogeyman shouted. “The naughty children are escaping!”

  The noise got, if possible, louder. Carlyle’s mind-voice exploded in my head: Stop them! Stop them! I leapt for one of the mirrored panels and pushed. It swung open onto a whistling darkness.

  The fairy changeling was behind me, her hands over her face, screaming. I grabbed her wrist.

  “Do not touch me!” she wailed, and wrenched herself free.

  A lot of Folk don’t like to be touched—leprechauns, for instance, who have to give up their gold if you catch them. The Pooka, who had made a study of catching things that don’t want to be caught, told me you have to grab Folk from behind, pinning their arms if possible.

  This isn’t as easy as it sounds, particularly when you’re in a hurry and scared out of your mind, but I managed to get a grip and drag my fairy twin backwards through the door. I could see the kanji sign now, and under it, another sign that read, “Carlyle Hotel/Madison Avenue.” We were on a narrow platform beside a formless roar. It took me a breath to realize that we were in a Betweenway station.

  I’d never ridden the Betweenways.

  As I hesitated on the platform, I could hear a ruckus that sounded a lot like three hundred bogeymen, plus Eloise, trying to get through a narrow door at once. Nothing ventured, as the Pooka often said, nothing gained.

  I stepped backwards onto the Betweenways, pulling the changeling with me.

  CHAPTER 9

  SOMETIMES THE LONG WAY AROUND IS THE BEST WAY HOME.

  Neef’s Rules for Changelings

  The Betweenways are a magic transportation system the Folk use to get around New York. Astris had always told me that they were dangerous for mortals and it took a long time to learn to use them safely. Folk always know exactly where they want to go and can’t be distracted. But mortals have to concentrate very hard on their destination to keep from riding around forever or until they starve to death and blow away, whichever comes first. She’d promised to take me for my first lesson after Midsummer. I’d really been looking forward to it.