Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater [uplifting novels txt] 📗

his ordinary storytelling voice. There was no theater. He was looking at nothing.

“Ronan and Matthew wanted her awake again, of course—Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t you? Truly, why wouldn’t you, I see that now. I see it from their point of view. But Ronan and I fought. I said it wouldn’t matter, she was nothing without Dad. Always an accessory to him, a reaction to him. Why wake her? You couldn’t wake the dead along with her, so she’d always be a frame for a destroyed painting. We were orphans the moment Dad died because she was just organ death. What was she except for what Dad made her to be? What could she do except what he had made her to do? She had to love us. She was always just an external hard drive for his feelings. She—”

“Just stop,” Jordan said. “You have to know now. Saying she wasn’t real doesn’t make it any easier. Just different. Anger doesn’t mess up mascara as much.”

His eyes were bright but he blinked and they were ordinary again.

“Ronan’s trying to wake up the world. I’m trying to think of how to talk him out of it, but what he’s talking about is a world where she never fell asleep. A world where Matthew’s just a kid. A world where it doesn’t matter what Hennessy does, if something happens to her. A level playing field. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s not like I can’t see the appeal, because now I’m biased, I’m too biased to be clear.” Declan shook his head a little. “I said I would never become my father, anything like him. And now look at me. At us.”

Ah, there it was.

It took no effort to remember the way he’d looked at her the first moment he realized she was a dream.

“I’m a dream,” Jordan said. “I’m not your dream.”

Declan put his chin in his hand and looked back out the window; that, too, would be a good portrait. Perhaps it was just because she liked looking at him that she thought each pose would make a good one. A series. What a future that idea promised, nights upon nights like this, him sitting there, her standing here.

“By the time we’re married,” Declan said eventually, “I want you to have applied for a different studio in this place because this man’s paintings are very ugly.”

Her pulse gently skipped two beats before continuing on as before. “I don’t have a social security number of my own, Pozzi.”

“I’ll buy you one,” Declan said. “You can wear it in place of a ring.”

The two of them looked at each other past the canvas on her easel.

Finally, he said, voice soft, “I should see the painting now.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s time, Jordan.”

Putting his jacket to the side, he stood. He waited. He would not come around to look without an invite.

It’s time, Jordan.

Jordan had never been truly honest with anyone who didn’t wear Hennessy’s face. Showing him this painting, this original, felt like being more honest than she had ever been in her life.

She stepped back to give him room.

Declan took it in. His eyes flicked to and from the likeness, from the jacket on Portrait Declan’s leg to the real jacket he’d left behind on the chair. She watched his gaze follow the live edge she had taken such care to paint, that subtle electricity of complementary colors at the edge of his form.

“It’s very good,” Declan muttered. “Jordan, it’s very good.”

“I thought it might be.”

“I don’t know if it’s a sweetmetal. But you’re very good.”

“I thought I might be.”

“The next one will be even better.”

“I think it might be.”

“And in ten years your scandalous masterpiece will get you thrown out of France, too,” he said. “And later you can triumphantly sell it to the Met. Children will have to write papers about you. People like me will tell stories about you to their dates at museums to make them think they’re interesting.”

She kissed him. He kissed her. And this kiss, too, got all wrapped up in the art-making of the portrait sitting on the easel beside them, getting all mixed in with all the other sights and sounds and feelings that had become part of the process.

It was very good.

Once upon a time, back when they lived in the nation’s capital, Hennessy and Jordan had briefly run something called the Game. The Game began at midnight at the River Road exit on I-495. Not once you’d taken the exit. At it. On the interstate, screaming by it. Bit of a fraught proposition with DC traffic. Underestimate the congestion and the would-be player would end up passing River Road minutes after everyone else had left. Overestimate it and the player showed up too early, hoping they didn’t burn too much time looping around for another approach.

Easy? No. But Hennessy had never been interested in easy.

At midnight, ready-or-not-here-I-come, Hennessy howled by the River Road exit in whatever vehicle she’d taken from the McLean mansion or temporarily lifted, pied pipering a restless parade of horsepower to the location of the game. The other girls—June, etc.—would already be in place, two of them bookending start and finish, the rest stationed at exits. The usual tricks in the bag: police band radio, radar detectors, fourteen keen eyes.

Then they raced. Point to points, drags, drifts, two up, four up, whatever burned at Hennessy that night. Sometimes when it was Hennessy, it was actually Jordan. Sometimes it was both.

The stakes of the Game were always high. Sometimes the prize was drugs. Weapons. The loser’s car. A year’s rent in someone’s really posh second home. Goods too hot to sell on the open market. The drivers, the players, the pawns, they were all of a certain type: twenty- and thirtysomething men who only came alive after dark, usually white and swish enough to be able to survive any traffic infraction that might come their way, all of