by Sara Hanover
They both laughed. Goldie gathered herself. “We have another mission or two this evening. I can drive if you’re worried about Tessa.”
“I do, and that would be nice.” Mom looked at me. “How far are you going and how late will you be?”
I shrugged at Goldie. “How far?”
“Toward the coast. Maybe a three-hour roundtrip? Plus getting Steptoe on the way.”
Mom frowned as she checked her watch. “It would be eleven when you get back. Late, but if you stay off your phone,” and she looked down her nose at me as if she still had her reading glasses on, “you should still get to sleep about the same time.” She added, “And don’t you think you should take Brian?”
“No,” we said together.
“All right then. I’m not sure he’s in. He can be very quiet.”
He could, but he mostly wasn’t. When the professor was in charge, you could hear the bluster all the way to the rear fence. My mother looked down. “What about Scout?”
My pup looked up, hope glistening in his brown eyes. Goldie shook her head, very slightly.
“Nope, not this time. I need you to guard the basement,” I told Scout.
Goldie let her curiosity out when we’d finished, washed up, and said good-bye.
“What about the basement needs guarding?”
“Some of the professor’s goods.”
“His stuff survived the fire?”
It seems she was familiar with phoenix wizard rituals. “Not much, but a few odds and ends.” I felt a little uneasy telling her, so I skimped on the details. I could remember the conversation I’d accidentally eavesdropped on, and he hadn’t had much confidence in her then. He had his prejudices, though, and I gathered true love was one of them.
Goldie dropped the car keys in my hand. “Drive to Steptoe and I’ll take over from there.”
The house looked still and grim as we pulled up and parked. New bright yellow “Danger Do Not Cross” tape wrapped about the place, fluttering in the evening breeze. The clouds had thinned out while we ate, and the moon peeked from behind one, its glow getting stronger and stronger. If Brian wasn’t at our place, he could be here, doing last minute sifting through the wreckage. With my worry about how he felt about Goldie, I didn’t want to run into the wizard, but neither did I want Steptoe to stay captive if I could free him.
Carrying his jacket in hand, I took Goldie around through the side yard, after whispering to her that we needed not to attract attention from the neighbors. We stopped short when we reached our objective. The backyard looked as if it had been bombed. Not the professor’s little arbor area, but the grassy lawn leading off the sun porch, away from the house toward the deep rear footage, yawned with holes everywhere. Gophers would have been in awe.
I’d fled, but Steptoe must have put up more of a battle than I’d seen, surfacing and being pulled back down again and again with each crater. I gulped at the sight and held his coat to my chest. Had he even survived? Or had Malender had a bit of fun at my naiveté?
I whispered at Goldie’s shoulder. “Brandard might be in the house, but I don’t think we should disturb him.”
“I’ll keep watch. Tackle him if necessary.” She gave a half-grin as if she hoped it might be necessary.
I went to the center of the area and, down on one knee, stripped my glove off and put my hand stone downward onto the ground at a yawning edge of one of the bigger holes. Nothing happened for several long breaths except I could feel my pulse slow to a reasonable heartbeat. Rain had made the grass slippery and cool, and an odor rose from it that carried the familiar stink of the glop. I wondered if it roamed below and would reach up and grab me. A sudden fear of grasping tentacles ran through me. Dust-bunnies-under-the-bed nightmares had nothing on this beastie.
Just in case, I drew both legs up under me so I could dodge or dart if I had to, and the maelstrom heated a little. Goldie watched me briefly and then took her own alert stance, cued by mine.
The ruins creaked a little. I couldn’t see a light within, so I didn’t know if Brian moved through there or not. I watched it warily for a few moments and trained my sense of smell in case the glop stench got markedly stronger. It did not.
“Simon Steptoe,” I whispered lowly. Three times, right? I repeated it two more times. “You’re free. Come meet me.”
The stone in my palm does not loosen, ever, but it can pulse now and then. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but at least it reacts, and it did now. Like a heartbeat, pulsating and quickening, like a creature waking up.
“Come on,” I urged. “Wake up, my friend.”
The ground rippled under me, like a carpet being yanked up. I fought to keep on my feet, and Goldie merely jumped up and hung in the air for a moment as if her wings held her aloft. She didn’t manifest her feathers, but her body reacted as if she had. She lowered after a breath or two.
The dirt buckled under me. I jumped back with a muffled squeak, startled and expecting the glop. Instead, a very pale hand reached up.
I reached down and grabbed it, thinking that it had better be Steptoe. I said so. “Steptoe?”
Cold but alive, it yanked and pulled me down to the grassy blades, chin to the ground. I gritted my teeth and pulled back, rearing up, playing tug o’ war with whatever/whoever lay below. It gave, bit by bit, inch by inch, until I could see a man’s head and then his shoulders and shirtsleeves and arms, and he spit out a mouthful of roots and dirt, sputtering.
“Keep hold, luv!”
“I’m not letting go.”
Steptoe peered up at me, one eye closed by a terrible swelling, and muttered, “I might.”
“No, you’re not. Come on. I’ve got your coat and things to do tonight.”
Our voices: hushed and urgent. Our hands: tight and clinging. I dug in my heels and reeled him in as though he were a prize 175-pound catfish until he floundered to a stop in front of me, heaving and fighting for breath. I slapped him on the back once or twice until he rolled over, looking at the sky.
“Stars,” Steptoe observed. “Thank the heavens. That’s a bit of all right.” His accent thickened.
“Get up and thank everyone later.” I helped him up and dusted him down, mud and earthworms sloughing off him. “I should have brought towels. You’re a mess.”
Goldie fell in behind us as I marched him to the car.
“Give me my coat.” And he wrenched it from my hands with a little half-growl, a tiny red light in his black eyes, a reminder of his feral beginnings. I hoped I hadn’t saved the wrong being. He snapped his coat in the air. A long hair fell off it and I grabbed for it, shoving it into my pocket.
Steptoe took a deep breath, wiped the back of one hand across his mouth, smudging a bit of dirt at the corner, and hugged his clothing a second. The moment he shrugged the coat on, he stood clean and dapper looking and dry, if weary beyond words. Even his swollen eye looked nearly healed.
“Just pour me in and I’ll get a few winks.”
Goldie held the door for him, but I don’t think he even noticed her before stretching out, somewhat, on the compact back seat and falling asleep, his arms crossed over his chest to hold his suit jacket tight.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FLOCKING TOGETHER
STOPPING FOR GAS didn’t wake Steptoe even when Goldie switched to driving with much noise changing seats, filling the gas tank, and slamming the door shut. She raised an eyebrow at me. “Consorting with demons?”
“He doesn’t look like it to me. I think of him as a very well-dressed chimney sweep.” I found it hard to believe what others claimed about him, although I had not the slightest idea what he could be, otherwise.
She twitched a quick glance at him. “Really? I guess there is a slight resemblance. It’s the dialect, I suppose. There had been rumors that he’d slipped his chain from Zinthrasta and gone chaotic good, but I hadn’t be
lieved them.”
“But it can happen?”
“Oh, yes. Usually for two reasons—a demon genuinely feels remorse for some of their acts and wishes redemption, because they’ve seen the consequences of their behavior and it’s frightened them, or, more often—it fits into the game plan of their master and being the trickster comes naturally to them. The jury is still out on Steptoe’s true motivation.”
“So the tribes are wary about him.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Other than flash-bangs and the coat, I haven’t seen a lot of what he can do, but he has grit and he’s helped me, often without even being asked. I judge him on that if I have to judge him at all.” I paused, with a short wonder about the tell-tales at home.
“As long as that works for you.”
That’s rather the way I’ve treated all of them since being introduced to the professor and then Brian succeeding him. I wasn’t sure if there was another method to go about it. How many strange things can you see in a day and accept? I changed direction.
“Did you know Morty well?”
“I was his wife.” The headlights of passing cars played over her face with light and dark shadows as she concentrated on the highway.
I decided to push through her short answer. “It seems dumb, I know, but sometimes people know each other and sometimes they don’t. I had questions I never got to ask him, even though he suggested once he might have answers for me when we had time. We never got that time.”
“Hmmm. We were close. It’s possible I might be able to supply a few for you.”
I flipped open my mental notebook. “It’s a family problem, and I didn’t realize it myself, but it started with my Aunt April. Dad’s aunt, actually, so that makes her my Great-Aunt April, and she is somehow the reason my father disappeared.” Actually, I was the reason, but I didn’t feel like disclosing our nasty argument.
“Sounds complicated.”
“It is. Aunt April likes to gamble. To the point where she is seriously addicted. Maybe it’s for the adrenaline, I don’t know, but my father found out and stepped in to help her. He ended up losing my college fund, his retirement, and our mortgage. I don’t think he was necessarily that bad a gambler. Mortimer mentioned something about identity theft. Then my father got involved in something that, more or less, disappeared him. Everyone thought he’d just abandoned us, but it’s more than that. He haunts my house. He seems caught between here and there.” I ran out of words, and she didn’t ask for a better explanation.
“Mortimer knew him through the work he did occasionally outside the clan?”
“Said he did.”
“And your father’s name?”
“Not memorable. John Andrews. John Graham Andrews.” I turned my face to look outside the window, feeling my nose sting and my eyes well up. I had him, but only barely, and if I couldn’t find the solution to bringing him back from whatever dimension he ghosted in, I should let him go.
“I’m afraid he said nothing to me, at least, not recently.”
I let out a puff of breath.
“No, no, don’t get discouraged. That doesn’t mean the end of it.” She patted the steering wheel instead of my arm. “Morty kept journals, very detailed ones. He wanted them passed to Hiram, but I doubt if he even told his son they existed. He could be private like that.”
“Wouldn’t they have been found?”
“Doubtful. I, however, have a good idea where they would have been stowed. The only difficulty there is the clan letting me back into Broadstone Manor to retrieve them.”
Knowing what I currently did, I muttered, “Good luck with that.”
“The nice thing about luck is we generally make our own, particularly if we prepare. Getting the Eye will greatly help to convince them to give me entrance. Once we do, the rest will open up.”
Harpies were optimists? News to me, but I’d take it. I needed it.
A soft snore sounded from the back seat. Steptoe, I’m sure, had never heard a word.
I leaned my head against the passenger window glass, and I think I fell asleep myself.
* * *
• • •
“We’re here.”
I rubbed my eyes open and could hear Steptoe stirring and fussing around. Here seemed to be pitch-dark, off the road, and the only things the car’s headlights illuminated were loblolly pines, which were everywhere. I cranked a window down to smell and hear the ocean. “We’re at the beach?”
“Yes.”
“Awesome.” I hopped out, kicking sandy soil as I did. The soft roar of waves hitting a shore I couldn’t see yet surrounded me, as did the heady smell of salt and something I couldn’t quite identify.
“Don’t wander. There’s quicksand and sinkholes hereabouts.”
“Bummer.” I spread my arms and turned about cautiously. If I could get to the shore itself, I could run along the sand, see the tide coming in or out, with that fluorescence edging waves sometimes held. From very far away, I thought I could hear a horse whinny. “We’re at Virginia Beach!”
“Nearly.”
“Thought I heard one of the wild ponies on Chincoteague.”
“Possible but not likely. More probable one of their tamed herd mates here on the coast. We’re at the edge of Westmoreland State Park, Colonial Beach.” Goldie had the trunk open on the car and arms inside, searching about. “No shovel?”
“No,” I answered deliberately. “Are we burying someone?”
She ignored me. “Should get a camping shovel. And a hatchet. Just in case.” Goldie closed the trunk lid and realigned her armor a bit. “We’ll just have to make do.”
Disappointed I wasn’t closer to the wild pony island refuge but glad to be out of the car and just about anywhere else, I trotted after her. Behind me, I heard a car door open and close. After a few moments, Steptoe caught up with me.
“Wot’s up?”
“Treasure hunting.”
“Oh? Indeed.” And Simon hummed a few cheerful bars but shut up when Goldie threw him a look over her shoulder. Something decided to take a bite of him and he slapped the back of his neck. He shot a glare at her as if she’d sent it personally.
Maybe she had. I gathered there was little love lost between harpies and those of Steptoe’s ilk.
She took us around what might or might not have been the edge of the park, which was a huge amount of acreage for camping and other recreation and sped up when we neared what looked like a logging road with a cabin waiting at the end of it.
Had been a cabin but now looked like a catastrophe. Even in the night, with nothing but a crescent moon to shine down upon it, it looked like little more than a pile of logs, tossed here and there, on what might have been a foundation. Goldie made a little sound as she came to a halt.
She stood, shoulders slumped a little, and muttered what sounded like “Stupid fucks” to me, but I decided not to ask her to repeat it. Finally, Goldie turned to me. “They’ve demolished my camp.”
“Looks like it. You didn’t have your, ermm, sister-eggs stored there, did you?”
“No. No, those stay at the main nest and no one would bother them. An egg is considered pretty much a blank start, and needed in our clan, as our population ever dwindles. No, the notion of who the mother and father are wouldn’t taint the egg. This was done to get to the Eye of Nimora. Damn them.” She strode forth then, angry as a harpy could get, which was pretty angry. Both Steptoe and I decided to stay out of her way and took a lesser path.
I could understand her feelings, having been through the destruction of the professor’s home with him. And having lost my own home when we’d been evicted. I remember my mother crying as she ran her hand down the inside of my closet door where she had penciled off major markings in my height and the year of my age and the calendar as she did. We took a picture, but it never seemed quite
the same. I suspect she cried for a lot of other things, too, as we shut our door for the last time. We didn’t drive by again for months and months and when we did, she was shocked to see it had been “flipped” with all new landscaping and painted white with a forest-green trim, looking nothing like what we’d left behind. That made it both better and worse for me. It didn’t look the same, so it didn’t remind me. At the same time, there seemed to be a gigantic gap in the beginning of my life.
Goldie went to a side shed, pulling aside a door lying on the ground, and knelt with a hissing breath. It, too, had been shredded as I studied what was left. What could reduce a building to splinters? It hadn’t left tracks, whatever it was. She got up and paced about, then went to a knee again, running her hands carefully through nails and shards as sharp as any sword.
When she faced me again, I really didn’t want to be there, but I made an effort to stand still. Very still.
“Gone. It’s gone.”
I squelched that tiny voice at the back of my head that wanted to say, “Told you so” and kept quiet.
“Someone knew its worth and where I was likely to have kept it. I’ll return to my nest and ask among my sisters. We have to find it. Mortimer gave it to me as a wedding present, but I always knew the day would come when I’d have to return it and counted on that. Now someone has shattered my pledge.”
She looked back at the scattered timbers for a moment before adding, “I can’t rest until it is restored to the Broadstones and its taker is punished.”
“Impressive,” Steptoe commented. “But it’s likely to have been one of your sisters.”
I hadn’t dared say it, let alone as flippantly as he made it sound.
“Whatever it takes.” She turned and, with a half-shout, half-groan, unfurled her wings. She ran her hand along them, testing the flight feathers, and looked to me.
I had to ask. “Still bound?”
“Yes. But I would leave you here, if I could. We’ve both work to do.”
I rubbed my maelstrom stone. Brought back to mind the deer’s spirit which I had cut loose to free it from Malender. Took several steps to close on her, and examined her wingspread. My stone pulsed a little, and I held it up to show her. “This might work. And it might not.”
