Fair enough.
Regardless, it wasn’t really what Calisa wanted to know. What she wanted to know was…Everything. I want to know everything: what she is, why she’s here, why she hears plants scream and how she talks to worms and where she went and what she did when she ran into the woods.She had no idea how to begin to ask any of that. “Can you talk to everything?”
“Sure,” Melidor said. “Trick is: Does it talk back?”
“Well, um, does it?”
She shrugged. “If it has something to say.”
Crouching down, Melidor pressed her cheek to the dirt. She hummed to herself and closed her eyes. Calisa waited to see if she said anything else, but she seemed done.Don’t push,she told herself. She’d delivered her peace offering; it was time to back away. Later, she could ask more questions and figure out how to deliver her mother’s message. “There’s fresh tea inside, if you’d like.”
Melidor stayed on the ground, her lips moving silently. She’d gotten icing all over her fingers and smeared on one cheek, mixing with the dirt.
Calisa retreated to the inn.
Inside, Jack was on his second slice, and Kendra was still sipping her tea. She had a pile of pink icing on her plate. “Melidor is feeding the cake to the worms,” Calisa reported. “Can she actually talk to them?”
Jack mumbled around the cake.
“Manners!” Kendra snapped.
“Sorry,” Calisa said. “I’ll, um, take a piece up to Mulligan.”
Shoveling another bite into his mouth, Jack put down his plate and cut a slice for Mulligan. It flopped over onto the plate. She noticed that he had a dot of icing on his cheek, just where a dimple would be, and suddenly wished she could make him smile. But nothing witty popped into her head. He handed her the plate, and she just said, “Thanks.”
Climbing the stairs, Calisa puzzled over how she could learn more. Even outside of Auntie Zee’s rules, it wasn’t socially acceptable to just walk up to someone and ask their life story, but she wanted to know everything about everyone here.
Especially Auntie Zee.
And Jack.
And why Mom-Elise thought it would be good for Calisa to be here, aside from the fact that hello, nexus of realms, very cool. Or was that precisely the key fact?
She knocked on Mulligan’s door. She didn’t hear any movement. Pressing her ear against the door, Calisa listened. She knocked again. “Mulligan?”
He didn’t answer.
She wasn’t certain he was in there, though she hadn’t seen him in any of the common rooms or heard him on the stairs.
“There’s cake, if you’d like some,” Calisa called through the door. “I’m going to leave the piece here. Try not to step on it, okay?” She set the plate down beside his door and turned toward the stairs.
Opening the door, Mulligan stuck his head out. He smiled broadly when he saw her. “Did I hear you mention cake?” Hiseyes lit up as he spotted it, and he bent to pick it up. “Delectable! Sugar is a balm for the wounded soul.”
Calisa smiled and tried to figure out a polite way to ask if he had a magical portal in his closet. “It’s vanilla cake with raspberry jam filling.”
He put a hand to his heart. “You are an angel sent from above.”
She wanted to reply,And where are you from?But that kind of made it sound like she thought he was from hell, which would be rude. “Thanks. Um, did you enjoy your vial of hot chocolate?”
His smile drooped and his shoulders sagged within his black robes. “Alas, it was not enough to entice him to wake.”
Never mind the portal; she couldn’t leave a statement like that just hanging out there. “Entice who to what?” She wondered if Mulligan was going to slam the door shut in her face or snap at her like Kendra for asking. If he did, she wouldn’t blame him—well, she’d blame him a little because it wasn’t an unreasonable question.
He hesitated.
“It was great hot chocolate. Evenmagical.” Calisa added as much emphasis to the word as she could, stopping short of either wiggling her eyebrows or winking.
“Ah!” His smile broadened so wide that the skin of his cheeks was stretched taut over his bones. “You know! Excellent. I had thought, given your ancestry, that you must, but you gave no indication of it the other night, and I did not wish to presume.”
