Chapter 3

Thunk bounces high between the two of us to make his presence known. I can’t help but laugh at him. He’s a little like that old cat, Archimedes. Doesn’t want you to pay attention to him on your terms–but you had better look at him when he wants you to.

“Where did you get that?” my grandmother asks, her face paling a bit. “Do you know what that is?”

Screw Michaelsen’s advice. I’m getting tired of getting the run around. All these strange things have to have a logical explanation because if they don’t–I’m beginning to think I should check myself into my old hospital. “Look, if I call you Grandmother and play along, will you please tell me what is going on?”

The woman who is supposedly my grandmother nods her head excitedly. “Yes, but we don’t have much time, but you have to promise me that after we’re done–no matter what happens–you will go with Michaelsen and Hansen to the zoo.”

“The zoo? But…” I have no words to say to her. Maybe I should be locked up. The minute those doubts enter my mind my grandmother grabs my arms, shaking me violently.

“Listen to me! A human hospital will not help you, Serafina,” she scolds me, as if she can read my thoughts. “Please listen!”

I nod weakly, and she releases me. A part of me wants to believe that I’m who she thinks I am, but another part of me–the sane part I tell myself–wants her to go away. “Okay, shoot,” I tell her, anxious to just get all of this out into the open.

“Your real name is Serafina Mylnar and, up until about six years ago when you disappeared, you were living with me,” she recants, her voice steady and careful. “You were the member of a magical community full of wondrous things.”

Dong.

I can hear a bell, tolling in the distance. Grandmother hears it, too, and blows on the smoke surrounding us, making it thicker, less penetrable.

“I believe you, grandmother.” I don’t know why, but I encourage her to go on, to finish her story. After all, I have nothing else to lose because I’ve already lost everything.

“You did a very, bad thing, Serafina,” she whispers. “Unforgivable.”

Some of the pieces of the puzzle are starting to make sense. “So I was exiled? Punished?”

Grandmother nods, but I can’t tell if she’s relieved or horrified that I figured out what was going on.

“And William was my jailer?” I offer, believing I have everything I need to make sense of it all: the magic, my amnesia, waking up in the middle of an empty room. It was all normal.

“What you did was unforgivable, Serafina. What William did was…unnatural,” her gaze wanders toward Thunk.

“Thunk? But he…”

“He is an abomination, granddaughter, a by-product. He–” Suddenly my grandmother stops talking, scoops Thunk up in her hands, and puts her ear in the smoke.