“Oh, you’re going to stop us?” Doran shot back. “Really? You would come between—”
“No, but he will,” Valerius interrupted, cutting his eyes to me. “I’m only the messenger. And should the situation deteriorate, I’ve been authorized to bring in Lord Coileán’s…associate,” he continued. “Who wields a weapon that fires iron projectiles. Effectively, I might add,” he muttered, absently rubbing a small burn scar on his forearm.
Syral looked back at me, pursing her pale lips as she considered the situation. “You’re threatening us, then? Whatever you’ve been told about our last quarrel, really, it must have been exaggerated.”
“I don’t care what you two do to each other outside my presence,” I replied, bringing forth a glass of scotch to give my hands something to do other than ball into fists. “Nor do I give a damn whether anyone eats here tonight. I brought you here to explain that no one is to touch Aiden.”
Ji and Nanine exchanged a quick glance, and I downed my drink to calm my temper. “Let me clarify, since there seems to be some confusion,” I continued when the glass was empty. “No one kills Aiden. No one maims Aiden. No one sets up any sort of trap in which Aiden will come to harm. No one tries to sell Aiden to anything out of the Gray Lands. No one imprisons Aiden. No one throws Aiden out of the realm. No one enlists the help of a third party to do any of the aforementioned to Aiden. Have I forgotten anything?”
“General enchantment,” Valerius offered.
“Right. No enchanting Aiden against his will or to do him ill, understood?”
The others glared at me sullenly, and I nodded. “Glad we had this chat. Stay if you like. I’ve lost my appetite.” With that, I rose and marched out of the room, leaving the silent table to take care of itself.
I found Aiden waiting a few yards down the corridor, hands in his pockets and shoulders slumped. “Didn’t go so well?” he mumbled.
“No one’s dead, so I think it’s a success,” I replied, changing into jeans and a T-shirt. “Want to go bother Joey?”
“Lamb chops again?”
“We’ll raid the kitchen on the way out.”’
“Sounds good,” he said, pulling himself off the wall. “Hey, I left my Wii out there if—”
“Coileán!”
I whirled around to find Syral approaching, followed closely by her younger shadow. “Problem?” I asked.
“Nothing new. I just wanted to see the little mongrel for myself,” she said, and peered up at Aiden. “Hmm. I suppose he has Mother’s look about him, doesn’t he?”
She continued to stare, circling Aiden for a closer view. “Uh…hi?” he mumbled, swiveling his head to keep an eye on her. “Have we—”
“All right, no one plays with your little pets,” she interrupted, then patted Aiden’s cheek and flounced back the way she had come, arm-in-arm with Huc.
Aiden stared after them. “What…”
“Sister. Brother. Not the most antagonistic of the lot, either.”
“Right,” he whispered, then shook his head and pointed toward the kitchen.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
A few months after I moved to Arizona, when Meggy was still living at my place, a traveling ballet troupe passed through Phoenix. I’ve never been the greatest patron of the arts, and what I knew of ballet made my feet hurt in sympathy, but Meggy thought the show seemed promising. After two weeks of needling—and since we were together night and day, Meggy had plenty of time to work on me—I finally caved and procured a pair of decent tickets.
The evening’s entertainment was Swan Lake, and Meggy sat on the edge of her chair, entranced by the lithe young things in feathers and spandex that twirled and leapt across the stage. I found myself engrossed as well, as overall, the dancing was beautiful. But shortly after the lovers ascended into the heavens and the curtain fell on the final bows, an erratic percussion sounded backstage, and the curtain lifted to reveal a few of the lesser members of the company still standing about, surrounded by little girls in tutus and one very uncomfortable little boy in white tights.
The music started up again, and the children began to cavort around the legitimate ballerinas, some with a modicum of grace and skill, but most flailing about like epileptic puppies. The boy managed to sneak offstage in the chaos—with half the dancers moving the wrong way, he had a ready-made distraction—and one girl, overtaken by the moment, leapt from the stage and ran to her mother’s seat in tears. Meggy covered her mouth and looked at me, physically trying to hold the laughter in. As I was on the verge myself, I did nothing to help the situation, and she ended the evening with her face pressed against my shirt, shaking in a fit of barely muffled giggles.
I thought back to those eager, awkward little dancers as I sat on the sheep fence in the afternoon sun and watched Valerius knock Joey off his feet for the ninth time in twenty minutes.
A man who knows his sword and can wield it as an extension of his will can make an art out of dealing death. The captain was a virtuoso, light on his feet and lightning-fast with his strikes, and by the second day of lessons, he could anticipate Joey’s moves from the subtle cues of his opponent’s eyes and feet. Joey was no slouch, all things considered—I had to award him a few points for knowing how to hold a sword at all, given his age—but for every blow he attempted, Valerius delivered two.
It was painful to watch, though I’m sure Joey had it worse than I did.
They fought with wooden practice swords, partly due to the captain’s wariness of Joey’s usual steel, but mostly so that Valerius wouldn’t accidentally kill him. The blades weren’t sharp by any means, but fast-moving wood against skin provides its own brand of sting, and Joey limped as he rose from the dirt. Valerius stood a few feet away, relaxed and waiting as Joey struggled to find his feet. “Your leg is now useless,” he said, “and I’ve probably hamstrung you. Watch your flank—you turn too much when you lunge, and you’re making yourself a target.”
Joey gritted his teeth and wiped his sweaty hair from his eyes. He was breathing heavily, though I couldn’t tell whether it was from the exertion or the pain. “You said I wasn’t turning enough.”
“You weren’t,” he replied. “But you overdid it. Again, now.”
Joey dragged himself back into a fighting stance, waited for Valerius’s nod, then started to weave around him. The captain watched calmly, parried Joey’s first blow, then hooked his ankle around the boy’s leg and threw him to the ground. “And now you’re dead,” he said, holding the blunt sword against Joey’s chest. “Again.”
“All right, kid?” I called from the safety of my perch.
“Fine,” he said wearily. “I’m fine.” He waited until Valerius stepped back, then used his sword as a crutch and pulled himself upright. “Water break?”
Valerius consulted the sun, then shook his head. “You can go longer. Again.”
While Joey continued to earn a fine set of bruises, I looked across their makeshift ring into the barn, where Aiden sat with Georgie, stroking her head to keep her calm. The dragonet had lengthened at least three feet in the two weeks since Joey had found her, and her girth was almost keeping pace with the rest of her growth. More troublingly, her first teeth were fully in, and she bared them every time Joey hit the ground.
Aiden murmured to her when he tripped and bounced, but Georgie’s response was all too clear: Bad. Don’t like.
She was no longer broadcasting her every mood to all minds in a fifty-foot radius, but Georgie was vocal—relatively speaking—about her dislike of combat practice. Joey was hers, apparently, and she took it extremely personally when he was hurt. After their first lesson, when Valerius had almost lost his sword arm to a pissed-off dragon, he had suggested taking their activity elsewhere, but Georgie had liked that idea even less. And so they continued to fight by the barn under her wary eye, with Aiden sitting beside her to stave off bystander-inflicted casualties. The idea of leaving my brother that close to a dragon didn’t sit easily with me, but Aiden h
ad quickly learned where to scratch Georgie for maximum effect. After watching a few sessions, she tolerated Joey’s lessons with minimal grumbling, but only with her head in range of Aiden’s hand.
I slipped off the fence and skirted the combatants, then joined Aiden on his hay bale. “How much longer does this usually last?” I asked.
He considered the tableau for a moment, then winced as Joey went down again. “Give them half an hour. Val’s going to keep beating Joey until Joey gets a hit in.”
“Really?” I watched Joey stagger back to his feet, clutching his side. “You think he can do it in half an hour?”
“No. But I think Val will give him a mercy shot by then,” he replied, scratching the base of Georgie’s horns as she broadcast her continued displeasure with the lesson in progress. “He hasn’t broken anything yet, at least.”
I produced a hip flask of bourbon and swigged. “Does that usually happen?”
“Do you see bits of Val in Georgie’s teeth?”
“Point taken.”
Aiden murmured reassurance to the dragon, then glanced down at my flask. “Sharing?”
“This?” I asked, lifting the flask for inspection. “You wouldn’t like it.”
“I might…”
I gave him a look. “If Meggy thought I was letting you drink hard liquor, she’d throw a fit.”
“How about a beer?” he asked hopefully.
“You said you don’t like beer.”
“I’m learning to like it!” He read my face and huffed. “How am I supposed to acquire a taste for it if I never try it, huh?”
“And how am I supposed to explain it to Meggy if you show up tonight smelling like a frat house?” I retorted.
Georgie lifted her head and snorted. Nervous.
“Stop ratting me out, Godzilla,” he muttered.
Keep scratching.
Aiden bent back to his task, but he sighed when I kept my silence and waited for an explanation. “I haven’t been to anything like this in years,” he mumbled, “and the last time I did, I ended up getting my face rearranged under the bleachers. Not a lot of happy memories, you know?”
“First,” I said, capping my flask, “the bleachers are a concrete block. No one’s getting beaten underneath them.”
“There are other places—”
“And no one who would want to beat you is going to be there. Meggy’s not usually the violent type.”
Joey yelped as he fell onto his bruised knees, and Georgie stiffened beside us, ready for attack.
“I promise you,” I said, reaching behind Aiden to pat the dragon before she could get any rash notions of heroics, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Unless you eat the hot dogs—I’m not responsible for those.”
His mouth twitched. “You’re sure about this?”
I looked around us—the unsettled dragon, the swordfighters in the yard, the flask in my hand—and nodded. “A little normalcy will do you good, don’t you think?” I looked up when Joey yelled again, then called into the yard, “Valerius! I want him left alive, please!”
The most that could be said for the Rigby Buccaneers was that they tried.
The boys seemed to know which way to run and whom to sack, which was promising, at least from a technical standpoint. Hampering their attempts to run and sack was the slight problem that no one on the team was more than five-ten or two hundred pounds. A few of them that season looked like fantastic contenders for college benchwarmers. Their parents said the team had a lot of heart, which made their inevitable trouncing all the worse—not disappointing, just painful.
But Olive had secured a position on the cheerleading squad, and so Meggy’s Friday nights that fall were booked solid. Considering the low entertainment value of Rigby’s football games, I couldn’t help but wonder if Olive had subconsciously picked up pompoms to spite me.
The sky threatened an overnight rain, but the weather was holding well enough for the evening’s game to go on as planned. I found Meggy sitting in the middle of the old bleachers, wrapped in a blue anorak against the wind and clutching a thermos of coffee. “Hey!” she said, patting the vacant concrete beside her. “My money’s on a washout by halftime. And you must be Aiden!” she added, spotting my brother as he trailed me up the bleachers. “Come on over, plenty of room!”
Aiden looked around at the half-empty stands and grinned. “Rain scared everyone off?”
“No, this is a good crowd. We just suck,” she replied, and grabbed him in a quick hug. “Welcome aboard the crazy train,” she murmured. “How’s he treating you?”
“Terribly.”
“Figures.” She stepped back and gave him an appraising look as she sipped her drink. “Okay, there’s a little resemblance with you two,” she said after a moment, “but you’ve got to squint to see it. You, uh…you look like your mother.”
“So I hear,” he mumbled, rubbing his neck, then pointed to the bench of cheerleaders. “Which one is Olive, Ms. Horn?”
“It’s Meg, hon, and that one,” she said, indicating the other end of the row. “I’d say the skinny blonde, but that’s about half the group. And if I try to get her to wave, she’ll disown me. Um…two in from the left, the one with the cockeyed ponytail—that’s Olive.” She hesitated, then added, “Takes after her grandmother. You’ll see it when she turns around. But hey, enough of that,” Meggy continued with affected brightness, trying to dispel the unintended tension. “Welcome to Virginia! Any interest in the ocean? That’s really about all Rigby’s got going for it, but the beach isn’t half bad.”
Aiden perked at that. “Yeah?”
“About a mile that way,” she replied, pointing over the visiting team’s bleachers. “Not the warmest right now, but that’s what you get in October, you know? And if this storm blows up, we might have decent waves tomorrow. You don’t surf, do you?”
He made a face. “I’ve, uh…never actually seen the ocean. Montana’s kind of landlocked.”
Meggy reached across me and squeezed Aiden’s knee. “Been there, know the feeling. Tell you what, we’ll go down in the morning—it’s more impressive when you can see where you’re going. And hey,” she said with a snap, “you like boats? I know a guy in town who does charters—we could get you out, let you get a little salt in your lungs, eh? You can swim, right?”
While Meggy and Aiden discussed lifejackets and the statistical probability of rogue waves, I slipped out from between them and headed down the bleachers for a walk, trying not to remember Meggy’s first time at the land’s end and the things we’d done in the sand. Meggy and I had made up for lost time in the months since our reconnection, but part of me still hated myself for what had transpired in California, and all of her reassurances that the desire had been mutual did nothing to make me feel less filthy.
Maybe, I mused in the small hours, Meggy was clinging to the ghost of her dream of a family, looking for something to help her through the changes in her life. Maybe I was only a diversion until something real came along. Maybe I would never measure up to whatever version of me had resided inside her head all of those years. Or maybe, somehow, this thing between us was real, and my Meggy was trying to move past what I’d done to her.
I wanted a drink, but Rigby High didn’t sell beer at their games, and I wasn’t going to embarrass Olive further by being not only her mother’s creepy boyfriend, but also the alcoholic who couldn’t stay away from a flask for one measly game.
And so I struck out in search of nachos.
There are times in life when one’s masochistic stomach demands tribute of the basest form. For me, that meant stale corn chips smothered in a lukewarm orange goop generously described as “process cheese product.”
Rigby’s band booster nachos were overpriced at three dollars, but the jalapeños were free, and standing in line beside the concessions building gave me an excuse to get out of the wet wind. I handed over the money, cursed my life choices, and was making the most of the toppings bar when I heard a woman
behind me say, “You do know that’s not really cheese, right?”
I put the chili flakes down and turned to find a familiar pair of dark-rimmed glasses watching me. “Ms. Stowe?” I replied quietly, dropping the nachos to free my hands.
She slurped her slushie and grinned. “Not going to hit a girl, are you?”
“Not if you tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”
Vivian prodded her sweatshirt, blue with a white screen-printed pirate sneering monocularly on her chest. “Dating the coach. I’m serious!” she insisted, seeing my expression creep toward incredulity. “Hal’s an occasional amateur paranormal investigator during the off season.”
I rolled my eyes and resumed my nacho customization. “And did the spirits tell him whether he’d have a winning record this year?”
“No, but they probably didn’t want to crush his dream.” She joined me at the folding table of condiments and contemplated the vat of relish. “And you’re here because…”
“My daughter cheers.”
“Ah. This would be the kid with the memory wipe?” I looked up sharply, and Vivian shrugged. “Rick filled me in. My spider sense goes off around her, and I wanted the details before I went recruiting.”
“You have a spider sense?”
“I’m not completely vanilla,” she muttered.
“And your beau?”
“One hundred percent Madagascar, so do me a solid and don’t blow my cover, eh?”
Moving on to the sad jar of mild salsa, I replied, “I have other things to worry about than ruining your love life, kid.”
“So I hear. And ew, that shit’s more water than tomato.” She leaned closer and muttered, “I understand there’s some trouble in the Gulf.”
“We’re not having this discussion.”
“Yes, we are. I’ve got people down there.”
I paused, put down my food again, and stared her full in the face, but Vivian didn’t blink. “If there’s something going down, we need to know about it,” she said. “Folks need to get to safety. You’ve got nothing to gain by holding out on me.”
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