by Ryk E. Spoor
Dave stretched out a hand. “Hold on…”
I shook my head. “It’s okay. I guarantee it. She’s doing exactly right. She likes dragons, I take it?”
Jenny gave a strained laugh. “Her room is almost completely wallpapered with them. When she was a baby, she had a stuffed dragon that went with her everywhere.”
Mitch was following Lizzie, staring raptly at Aris.
Aris scuttled in half-eager, half-fearful steps to the edge of the roof, looking down at Lizzie. I could just sense the emotions he was radiating, hope but fear at the same time, fear that this would end the same way, that there would be a moment of caring and then total loss.
Lizzie seemed to feel it too. “No, no, it’s okay. Really. I’m not mad at you now.”
Dave and Jenny tensed as the tiny dragon of shadow plucked up courage and dropped down towards their daughter. I couldn’t blame them; small it might be on a relative scale, but it still had sharp-looking teeth and claws.
But it curled up into the girl’s arms like a satisfied kitten and radiated such incredulous contentment when those arms hugged back that even Dave broke into a broad smile. “So that’s it?”
“In a way. You guys have to promise to come here regularly. Aris needs people. But the right kind of people, which you are, but not everyone is. You might have to come here more often than you used to. He’s stuck here, so he can’t come back with you. Maybe one day he will be able to move around, but there’s no telling if that will ever happen.”
Dave and Jenny looked around at the settling evening. The threat was gone from the darkness; it was a calm and untroubled evening in the Adirondack woods. “Can you guarantee it won’t…go back to what it was?”
I nodded firmly. “You’re talking about a being so loyal, it hasn’t left in over…well, lots and lots of years. If you choose to be his friends and, I suppose, new masters and companions, he’ll stay by your side—as much as he can—forever. I know it’s weird and scary in some ways, but you guys also seem to be the kind of people who can handle things pretty well. Hell, you came back and faced him a second time, which is more than most people would be able to manage.”
Dave nodded slowly. “How…where’d you learn all this, about him?”
“Like they say on TV, there’s things you don’t want to know. It’s up to you what you do. I’ll buy the camp if you don’t feel it’s something you can handle.”
Mitch had cautiously extended his hand, which Aris had nuzzled.
“Well…” Dave rubbed his beard, staring at the little creature. “I guess it’s better than a dog. Nothing to clean up.”
Jenny knelt next to her daughter and looked at Aris. The little draconic spirit looked back and I felt it radiate a tremendous feeling of apology and sorrow mixed with hope and pleading.
That worked. The truth of those emotions couldn’t be denied, not by anyone who was reasonably honest with themselves, and the Plunketts were definitely that. Jenny gave a little smile and reached out to gently pat the smooth scaled head. “It’s okay. I accept your apology.”
When I left a little while later, I could see Lizzie and Mitch laughing in amazement as Aris put on a shadow-show. The little thansaelasavi saw me walking away, came flying through the night air and hovered there, radiating thankfulness and apology for the hell it had put me through.
“That’s all right. I’m going to be fine.” The walk up the hill had hurt like hell, but it was all going to work out. “You just watch over them. You know that there’s other forces out there waking up. Keep an eye on them. They’re not wizards. And they don’t know the truth, and shouldn’t.”
It radiated iron determination. I smiled and nodded. “Good enough.”
I watched as the spirit-dragon flew back to the family that had adopted it, after all that time of fear and darkness, and grinned.
“Finally, a real happy ending.”
I turned and headed downhill, toward my own happily-ever-after.
Chapter 86: Answers of Mystery
“Well, it all worked out well enough,” Syl said as we sat down to dinner.
“Just glad you’re really back. Sorry we haven’t had time to talk the last couple of days.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Jason! Good lord, you were half-killed and then trying to get everything fixed up between Arischadel and the Plunketts.”
“Still, I didn’t even ask you about what happened with Samantha and her friend,” I said, cutting her a slice of pork roast and putting it on her plate. “How did it go?”
She served herself some mashed potatoes, while screwing up her face in an “I’m trying to figure out what to say” way. “It went…kinda funny.”
“How do you mean?” I reached out, found I hadn’t filled my own glass, got up and went to the kitchen. “Go on, I’m listening.”
“Well…you’re going to be getting some big bills coming in.”
“Big bills?” I honestly hadn’t expected this to be an expensive handholding. “Why?”
“I found out when I got down there that Aurora’s first problem was getting home. Samantha was trying to arrange it, but while she’s not hurting for money, honestly, I didn’t want her blowing a couple grand.”
“Where was she? I thought she disappeared from New Jersey?”
“That’s where she disappeared…but she called Samantha from Cairo.”
“Cairo…you mean Cairo. As in, Egypt?” That was…funny, in the strange-funny sense. A girl disappears in America and ends up in Cairo. “What the heck was she doing there?”
Syl smiled wryly. “She wishes she knew.”
“Amnesia?” This was starting to sound like a bad thriller plot. “Aurora disappeared about a year ago. Does she remember anything?”
“Almost nothing,” Syl said. “And she’s not faking it, I could tell. She’d had a big fight with her parents, then saw Sam at the library; Sam almost calmed her down but then Aurora lost her temper again and ran off. She says that the last thing she remembers is realizing that she’d somehow gotten lost, and walking down a road without any houses in sight, just lots of trees, mostly pines.” Syl took a sip of her wine, then another bite of pork.
I knew the general area Aurora must live in, given she was walking to the library Samantha worked at. “Wait a minute. There’s just no way there’s anything around there that looks like that.”
“We know that, Jason,” Syl agreed. “And in one of her other last memories she says there was a castle at the end of that road. So we’re not even sure if those are connected memories. Aurora thinks they followed right after she left the library, but if you ask me, I think she’s remembering a couple of things from whatever happened to her after she disappeared.”
I gazed off into the distance, thinking. “What do you think happened? Fugue state?”
Syl shrugged. “Honestly, Jason? I think something very strange happened to her. I don’t think she just blanked out and ran off, if that’s what you mean. Physically, she shows no signs of hardship; no diseases, no injuries, no signs of accidents, abuse, or anything else. She even showed up in Cairo wearing the exact same outfit she was wearing when she disappeared. And she wasn’t carrying anything she didn’t have on her before, either.”
“Her parents must have been ecstatic at her return, anyway.”
“Actually, that’s one of the weirdest parts of this whole thing,” Syl said. “Her parents hadn’t panicked much when she disappeared, and they’d apparently said to the police and to Samantha that they expected her to disappear one day, and that they were sure she’d be back.”
“What?”
“That was my reaction too, Jason. Her parents are a little…odd. From what I could gather, they drifted around the country quite a bit even after Aurora was born—Deadheads, I think. They still have that…aging hippie vibe, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean, the kinda spaced-out look that you sometimes use to make people underestimate you?”
She laughed. “Exactly. But in their ca
se, it’s mostly not an act. That was one of Aurora’s problems; she hated bouncing from one state to another, and her parents apparently told her some stories about her past and such that…weren’t exactly sensible, so when she finally went to regular school, she got laughed at a lot. Samantha didn’t give me a lot of details and Aurora didn’t want to talk much about that.”
She leaned back, looking pensive. “But…whatever happened, it did change her, according to Samantha. She went back to her parents and didn’t have a single word of complaint about them—and Samantha says that she always complained about them.”
I shook my head. “Well, that’s a heck of a mystery. But at least you’re done with it.”
We finished dinner and started cleaning up; then the phone rang.
“Wonder who that could be?” I muttered as I grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”
“Mr. Wood,” came a familiar, slightly rough voice. “Glad I could catch you at home.”
“Given your resources, I’d be surprised if you didn’t know I was home before you called, Mr. Achernar.”
“Spying on you would be rude. I try to avoid that when I might ask the people in question to do work for me. I called because I thought you might like a quick informal update of what we’ve learned.”
“Hold on, I’ll put you on speaker.”
Achernar’s voice came from the speakers set in the corners of the room. “Ready?”
“We’re ready,” Syl said. “Hello, Mr. Achernar.”
“Hello, Sylvie.”
“So what did you find?”
“Completely ruled out any natural cause,” he began, “unless I start including magical effects as ‘natural,’ which isn’t going to fly in most departments. There was no known natural phenomenon, or for that matter deliberately designed human phenomenon, which could make such a crater yet leave that one column intact as it was. I had the Jammer and half a dozen other modeling experts try every possible combination and we got exactly nothing.
“Blast effects and stress directions also showed that the detonation emanated directly above that preserved column, in a sphere just slightly wider than the column, while the material directly below was somehow completely untouched.”
I whistled. “I knew that’s what it looked like, but really, that’s pretty unbelievable.”
“The whole thing is unbelievable. We subjected the area to the most intense analysis possible, and there isn’t a trace of any chemical or radiological contaminant. People like myself and Sylvia, of course, sensed a huge amount of lingering mystical power. So internally, the explanation is that there was an almost pure magical explosion of physical force that lacked most of the thermal and luminance effects we associate with explosions and which prevented concussive transmission at the center.” I could hear the ironic smile in his voice as he continued, “Of course, officially we haven’t even got a clue as to what really happened, since there’s nothing on file that can cause this.”
“What about the thread?” Syl asked.
“Ahh, the thread. Now that turned out to be very interesting. Since we discovered it during the initial investigation, it’s also not on the official files, at least not yet.”
Achernar’s voice dropped to a confidential tone. “We analyzed that thread every possible way we could, and we know, or deduce, a lot of things about it. First, it’s part of a larger garment, probably a pair of loose pants, and it was pulled out by a thorn that almost certainly was snagging a thread that had been damaged earlier.
“We guess the latter because the thread itself is extraordinarily strong. It’s a kind of silk and extremely tough…but no type of silk we have ever seen before.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not a bit. This thing is a goldmine of questions, but not so good with answers. It’s dyed black…but we can’t identify the precise dye used. There were traces of some kind of pollen on it that don’t correspond to any pollen we know.”
“Any clue on the person wearing these clothes?” I kinda doubted it, but it was worth asking.
“Only that it was probably a man, based on traces of sweat and its composition, but that’s still only a guess.”
“Anything from the pictures?”
“The Jammer managed to extract a little bit more,” Achernar answered. “There were signs that the brush and other plantlife on that untouched piece had been pressed down in a pattern that fits a human figure of moderate size. There was also a mark that looked like part of a footprint, right on the edge of the column.”
Interesting. “So there was a person there, on the protected portion…and they just somehow up and walked away.”
“Wearing clothes made of an unknown fabric, dyed by unknown materials, yes.”
“Almost certainly this would be the same person who wiped out the evidence I saw—”
“—and knocked the column down to try to wipe out that evidence too, yes,” Achernar agreed.
Syl pursed her lips. “Do you know that part?”
“You mean that the column was deliberately knocked down? Yes, we do. Besides the flash of light we all saw, we found the precise portion of the column that was hit, and it had suffered an impact something on the level of a wrecking ball…when there wasn’t anything to be seen, and no trace of chemical explosives either.”
“So now what?”
Achernar hesitated a moment; when he resumed, there was an edge of ironic humor. “Haven’t a clue. But I would like you to ask…your own sources…if they have any ideas. I’ve got some people of my own, but unless I miss my guess your one friend has some connections I’ll never match.”
That made sense. With something that magical, he’d want advice from anyone he could get. “I will talk to him tomorrow.”
“Excellent. I’ll let you people get back to your own lives, then.”
“No problem; glad you updated us.”
“My pleasure. Good night!”
I hung up and glanced at Syl. “Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.”
She nodded, eyes distant and seeing things beyond the room. “And it’s not over yet.”
Part VIII: Trial Run
July 2001
Chapter 87: Back from the Dead
“Yeah, I finally have to admit it,” I said reluctantly. “I can’t do this alone.”
Achernar’s voice held just a touch of amusement, but there was respect in it as well. “Frankly, I’m amazed you’ve hung on this long. Personally, I’d have given it up, oh, a year ago; at most I’d have waited until the Gabon Blast made it obvious that the strange was in our world to stay. Instead, you’ve tried to do it all yourself for another three months. So how can we help?”
“Well, I’m going to have to remodel Wood’s Information Service—the building—so I can actually have departments. Now that I’m living with Syl away from WIS, I can dedicate the rooms that I used to live in for work purposes. The hard part’s going to be personnel.”
The rough chuckle indicated that Acherner understood perfectly. “No doubt. We have the same problem.”
“Exactly. You’ve got experience in finding employees who are both trustworthy and open-minded. Whoever I hire as my right-hand person needs to know a lot about what’s going on, including—if I’m going to give them a chance at doing even part of my job—some awareness of what’s already happened.”
Achernar was silent for a moment. “You mean about things like actual vampires and such?”
“If you don’t know what’s really out there, just how can I expect you to sort out the bullcrap from the real stuff that sounds crazy?”
“Point.” A pause. “How many people are you looking for?”
“I’d say…three. I mean, anyone would be a help right now”—I looked at the three other lines blinking red; the message count on my phone now showed twenty-three new, unread messages since an hour ago—“but I think I need someone to run the business side and a couple more at least, to help sort out the crap from the diamonds, and maybe do initial inv
estigations.”
“And you’d like Pantheon to see what we can do to find appropriate candidates. Not afraid we’ll put a ringer in your organization?”
I grinned, though he couldn’t see it. “If you tried really hard, you could probably convince me to join you, so it’s hardly worth the effort to try to trick me that way. So no, I’m not.”
“True enough. Tell you what we can do: you forward all the resumés you get to us, and we’ll have them vetted. We’ll dig deeper on anyone who passes a preliminary sniff test. You’ll interview the ones that pass that investigation. We’ll be looking for traits that are useful for you, not necessarily to us, in case you’re wondering.”
“Great!” That took a huge load off my shoulders. I heard a chime from the outer door. While Morgantown was pretty far off the beaten track, people were often still willing to make the trip in person and thus get past the answering machine. “Whoops, got to go.”
“We’ll talk later then. Bye.”
I got ready to buzz the newcomer in from the entryway, glancing at the CryWolf image, which focused on his hands; it was unseasonably cold today and the person was wearing a hoodie, so his hands were the only exposed flesh easily visible.
No shimmers or other strange phenomena appeared, so I pushed the button to let him in. “Can I help you?” I asked as the newcomer stepped in and closed the door behind him.
He pushed the hoodie back, and I saw a cascade of long black hair and steel-gray eyes that momentarily struck me absolutely dumb. “Hi, Mr. Wood.”
“Xavier? Xavier Ross? What the—how…?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m very sorry that I caused you all that trouble,” he said, and I could tell he was being earnest and honest. “I came here straightaway to apologize so you’d get it from me instead of hearing it on the news or something.”
I finally recovered enough to think. Xavier looked nearly identical to the way he had when I first met him; the only difference I could see was a very thin, white scar on one cheek. “I sure hope you went to your mother first.”
His gaze dropped to the floor. “Yeah, I went home first.” His voice wavered. “She…Mom and Michelle…they were really happy I came back. Not too mad. And they understood that I had to come here fast, before the news got out.”
