Indexing (Kindle Serial) by McGuire Seanan

Author:McGuire, Seanan [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2013-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

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We left the cleanup crew to their unenviable task and returned to the office, where we had an unenviable task of our own to undertake: finding a Wicked Stepsister with no active narrative to call her own. Jeff and Andy went for their respective safety nets: the archive for Jeff, and the FBI directory of missing persons for Andy. His logic was good—if the victims of our wayward Wicked Stepsister had never been reported as murdered, he should be able to find them somewhere in the FBI’s files. Someone had to have realized that they were gone.

Demi sat down at her desk with her hands tightly folded in her lap, looking like she had no idea what she could possibly do in this situation. I would normally have tried to come up with some kind of busy work for her, but at the moment I was preoccupied with a more pressing matter: Sloane.

She hadn’t said anything during the ride back from the Marlowe house, and that wasn’t like her. What’s more, she wasn’t going for her computer, either to work or to look at eBay listings. She was just hovering around the edges of the room, expression flickering lightning-fast between rage and despair. It was worrisome to say the least, and terrifying to say a little more.

I took a breath, trying to calm the too-rapid thudding of my heart. The narrative wants me to be flighty; wants me to be the kind of girl who runs at the first signs of danger. I’ve been working for my entire life to train myself out of those urges, and for the most part, under most circumstances, I’ve succeeded. But Wicked Stepsisters are close relatives of Wicked Queens. Under the right circumstances, one can even evolve into the other, shedding the trappings of one story for whatever happens to be available to them. And the Snow White—and the agent—in me knew that we were in danger when there was an active Wicked Stepsister nearby.

Sloane had her own set of narrative impulses to fight with. Going near her when I was showing signs of distress would be like hanging out a big red flag and inviting her to take her shots. She couldn’t help it. I didn’t need to encourage it.

When I was sure that I wasn’t going to have an inconveniently timed panic attack, I walked over to where she was pacing and asked, quietly, “Everything all right with you, Agent Winters?”

“That wasn’t my last name when they found me, any more than ‘Marchen’ was yours,” she replied. “You get to be a fairy tale, I get to be a freeze. Somebody in senior management has a real shitty sense of humor, you know that?”

I paused, briefly stymied. Then I tried again, asking, “But is everything all right?”

Sloane’s laugh was brief and brittle, like ice breaking in an enchanted forest. “All right? Fuck, Henry, you know me better than that. I know me better than that. No, everything is not ‘all right.’ Everything is never going to be all right.

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