The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere

by Conway, Melissa

  “So, yeah, I know, it was a dumb idea,” Zach said, “but look how many hits it got.”

  The video had over two-hundred million views. There were over seven million comments. Zach chose one at random and said, “Everybody thought I was crazy before the big one really did hit, and now look. Most of these people want me to tell them what’s going on. Like they’d believe me.”

  “What’s this?” Lizbeth asked.

  “That’s the Video Responses.”

  “I know, but this one looks like a news report.”

  Zach clicked on it. It began with a heavily made up female reporter from a Sacramento channel sitting behind a news desk. On the video display behind her head was a photo of Zach from his doomsday YouTube video. The reporter said, “They are the subject of ridicule in cities across America, mentally ill people standing on street corners trumpeting their paranoid message: the world is coming to an end. So what happens when the world really does seem to be coming to an end? Were the crazy predictions coincidence, or was there a grain of truth? Cynthia Perkins has the story.”

  The scene changed to a ten-second sound bite from Zach’s video, one that made him seem particularly unbalanced. Kevin glanced over and saw him wince. Then a blonde reporter standing outside a large two-story house said, “Zach Wong lives in this quiet, upper-class neighborhood in San Francisco. He’s been described by family and friends as a normal, if slightly off-beat eighteen-year-old. So what would prompt an otherwise apparently mentally-healthy young man to post such an inflammatory video on the popular site YouTube? And how, in less than a week, did it become one of the most-watched, highest-rated Internet videos of all time?”

  The story showed brief clips of the reporter interviewing a few of Zach’s friends, one of the scientists he’d called attempting to discuss the electromagnetic pulses, and finally, a clip of his mother claiming he had da zhuang.

  “I can’t watch this,” Zach said. He reached for the mouse, but Lizbeth stopped him.

  “Hush! This is good reporting.”

  “How would you like it if your grandmother got on there and started chanting voodoo curses?”

  Felicity announced from the far side of the room, “Annette Moreau would never curse anyone.”

  Lizbeth spun around, looking astonished. “You know Granma?”

  Kevin noticed Zach take advantage of the distraction by closing the YouTube page. He didn’t blame him.

  “We met at your parents’ weddin’.”

  “That’s right, they did get married in Ireland. Was Caitlin there? She used to help my dad with his magic act.”

  “Of course she was there.”

  Zach said, “If Caitlin is your great-grandmother that means you’re like us, right?”

  “No, we’re not related at all, actually. She was Victor’s second wife, after me great-grandmother died of the cholera, you see. Back then, a young woman, even if she just looks young, had to have the protection of an ‘usband. My grandfather was Victor’s first-born, and Caitlin, well, she only ever had the one son – who survived, that is.”

  “What does that mean?” Kevin asked.

  Felicity hesitated before answering, as if mulling over her words. “The legends say that fae folk switched their sickly babes with healthy human ones. That may have a basis in fact, I’m afraid. Those who touched the crown couldn’t have children together. Even if the father or mother was normal, the babes seldom survived.”

  Kevin thought about the iridium nugget in his pocket. His own mother had abandoned him. Every time he’d considered having kids, sometime way in the future, of course, it was with the conviction that he’d be a good dad. Now it sounded like that was no longer an option.

  “That’s horrible,” Lizbeth said, placing a hand on her abdomen.

  “It was the price they paid,” Felicity replied. “As you can imagine, Caitlin never talks about it.”

  She sat in the middle of the sofa and patted the cushion. “Come sit with me.”

  Kevin and Lizbeth complied, but Zach stayed where he was near the monitor. Felicity opened a chest that doubled as a coffee table, removed a thick, leather bound volume and set it in her lap.

  “Caitlin came to visit me a few months ago so we could reminisce. Mind you, she didn’t bother to tell me what was about to happen with the world, but I know now, don’t I?

  “At any rate.” She opened the book to reveal pages filled with neatly labeled pictures. The first few pages had color photos. She flipped further into the book where the photos became black and white, and even further to show copies of painted portraits from another era. Beyond that were just handwritten names, staggered like in a family tree. “She kept this book to try and keep track of, well…these are your ancestors. Other than yourselves, everyone in her book of memories has passed on.”

  Stunned, Kevin asked, “She knows who my parents were?” but Zach waved his hand in the air and said loudly, “Uh – Chinese here. I still don’t see how my family was supposed to be descended from a bunch of red-headed Irish druids.”

  Felicity turned the pages of the album until she reached one that had a grainy photo of a man with distinctively Chinese features. She gave Zach a crafty little grin and he finally seemed interested enough to make his way over to the sofa. “Your father’s family came from a long line of warriors, did you know that?”

  Zach’s eyebrows lifted and he shook his head. “I don’t know anything about my father’s family. Don’t really know much about him, either. All I know is he was born in China, became a U.S. citizen and died in the Gulf War when I was a baby.”

  Kevin sat back to wait impatiently for Felicity to explain Zach’s lineage so he could ask again about his own.

  “Caitlin, in her long life, has travelled the world. As the story goes, she and Victor were in China just after the Second Opium War broke out. Qing soldiers arrested and imprisoned them, and confiscated all their belongings, but the entire garrison died of some mysterious illness. All but one soldier.”

  Felicity tapped the photo and Zach leaned in to get a closer look. “Wong Ming, 1863,” he read. “So this guy is my however-many-greats grandfather?”

  “Actually, he was your grandfather. You know that Caitlin is very old. Legend says that when a human steps into the fae world, they stay for what feels like a day but when they go home, their children have all grown up and died. The reality is simply that the folk live longer, maybe forever if they aren’t killed. He married your grandmother and when she grew old and passed on, he couldn’t bear it. That’s how so many of them went, with broken hearts.

  “This,” she turned to the front page of the album and pointed to a handsome, unsmiling Asian man in a U.S. Marines uniform, “is Ming’s only child, your father.”

  “Yeah, that’s him. I mean, Mom has plenty of pictures. Okay, so I get it that these soldiers all died because they took the crown from Caitlin. What I don’t understand is how my grandfather survived if he was Chinese.”

  Felicity smiled. “That’s the irony. Caitlin and Ming traced his ancestry and you really were descended from a red-headed Irish druid. Well, maybe he wasn’t red-headed, but he fled the Roman Empire and ended up in China. Caitlin kept track of all the folk she could in this book, but there were more who went out into the world and blended in. Their children and their children’s children could be anywhere.”

  Kevin thought about the nugget again. “And what about the children’s children? How closely related to the shapeshifter does a person have to be to survive the crown?”

  Felicity bit her lip. “All I know is the initiates who were most likely to survive were the progeny of the fae and a normal person. Caitlin herself was one such. I don’t know how many generations removed a person can be and still be safe.”

  “Hey, there’s my dad!” Lizbeth said, jabbing her finger at a postcard with a magician on it.

  Kevin opened his mouth yet again to ask about his parents, but Lizbeth was apparently more anxious to find out about her roots becaus
e she demanded, “Show me my grandparents.”

  “Why would Caitlin put a picture of herself in the book?” Felicity asked.

  The silence that followed was so profound, Kevin finally understood the phrase, “You could hear a pin drop.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  The Isle of Wight

  So many thoughts skittered through Lizbeth’s head that she was unable to funnel any of them through her voice box. Years ago she remembered asking her mother about her father’s family. All her mother would say was that they had gone to heaven, but then she’d said under her breath, “or wherever their kind go.” Lizbeth knew her mother hadn’t intended for her to hear the derogatory comment, but it stuck in her head. When she’d asked her grandmother what it meant, the older woman shook her greying head and asked, “You know how your mom feels about my occupation?” Lizbeth’s mother had even less tolerance for Annette Moreau’s ‘voodoo nonsense’ than Lizbeth did. “Well, some people,” Granma had said, “are afraid of things they don’t understand, and your father’s folks were very different souls.”

  Lizbeth was vaguely aware of Zach sitting on the side of the couch and putting his arm around her, but she didn’t acknowledge him.

  One thing puzzled her. If her mother was so leery of Caitlin that she led Lizbeth to believe she was dead, why did she agree to let her accompany her in the first place? She wished she still had her cell phone, wished the phone lines were working. She’d call Granma and get some real answers. Then something occurred to her: she hadn’t had an opportunity to even speak to her mother before Granma and Caitlin packed her up and rushed her to the airport. Granma told her that her mother was on board with the whole crazy scheme, but maybe that was, as Granma would say, “a rubber-band truth.”

  Felicity interrupted her thoughts with a gentle nudge. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  Lizbeth blinked and her memories faded away. Suddenly, it was the last topic on the crumbling earth she wanted to discuss. She looked past Felicity into Kevin’s concerned face. “What about Kevin? Who were his parents?”

  “I don’t know,” Felicity said.

  “What?” Kevin burst out. “But you said – the book-”

  She heaved a sigh and closed the album with a musty-smelling puff of air. “Caitlin knew about Lizbeth, of course, and she knew about Zach. I suspect the real reason she came to see me was to search through the album for your parents, Kevin. She met you, you see.”

  “I never…oh,” he said. “Who was she?”

  “At the time she was posing as your professor to get close to the project director of the scientific drilling vessel.”

  “Bill Masters.”

  “Yes. I gathered she, ahem, didn’t want him to know she was interested in his activities.”

  Lizbeth knew it was an inappropriate time to pry, but she couldn’t help herself. “Were they, you know…”

  “Lovers?” Felicity asked, with a teasing gleam in her eyes. “I believe so. They had a falling out over whatever project he was working on.”

  Zach’s hand was still on Lizbeth’s back. He’d been making small circles with his fingers throughout the whole conversation and she’d become rather self-conscious about it.

  “She spoke to you, Kevin, in the guise of the professor, of course, and whatever you told her very much piqued her interest.”

  Kevin stood and stepped away from the sofa, slipping his right hand into his pocket. Lizbeth suspected he got some kind of comfort from contact with the nugget.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, yeah. I think I know when she did it. Right before we boarded the ship, Professor Weinstein was supposed to have been taking a nap in the hotel room, but I ran into him having fish and chips with Bill. As soon as I started to ask him how he managed to get to the restaurant ahead of me, he interrupted and invited me to join them. I did notice the conversation got a little weird. The professor kept asking questions that he should have known. Bill was answering like he thought Weinstein had Alzheimer’s, you know, and I remember thinking maybe he should have taken that nap.”

  Felicity pursed her lips. “But it was something you said that made her wonder who you really were.”

  Lizbeth saw a look of comprehension cross Kevin’s face. He gave a short laugh, and his cheeks darkened a shade. “I said…I mean, the professor was talking about the enormity of the project, how he thought maybe we were messing with something we shouldn’t, and I agreed with him. Then they both looked at me like I spoke out of turn and I got all flustered. I told them I was, you know, drawn to the idea of exploring Silverpit Crater, but I had a feeling something bad was going to happen.”

  Lizbeth frowned at Zach’s snort. “That’s it?” he asked. “Caitlin came to see Felicity based on one of your feelings?”

  “No.”

  Lizbeth heard the mild resentment in Kevin’s tone and it irritated her that Zach had reverted right back to tossing sarcastic remarks his way. She knocked his arm away to stop the incessant rubbing over the same spot on her back.

  Kevin said, “I don’t think it was what I said. I remember wondering if Weinstein really was sick or something because his eyes looked strange. Caitlin and Griffey strange.”

  “She was reading your mind,” Lizbeth said, “but you didn’t know anything about being descended from shapeshifters.”

  Zach got up and went over to the computer again. “Yeah, but Griffey said the strong ones can sense each other. He obviously couldn’t sense us, but I’ll bet Caitlin can.”

  “Is that who it was – Griffey? That sounds familiar.” Felicity opened the album again, rapidly turning pages and muttering, “Griffey, Griffey.”

  Felicity was running her finger down the names on one of the pages. “Oh, here he is! Brian, is it?”

  Lizbeth squinted at the black and white photo of a short, bearded man with a broad nose. “That’s not him.”

  “You mustn’t assume the person he’s shown you is his real face.”

  Lizbeth frowned. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “What does this mean?” Kevin asked. He tapped his finger on a notation written in a neat hand next to the photo. The letters D.O.D. and April 15, 1912 were crossed out. Next to it was Kevin’s own name.

  “Oh, dear,” Felicity said, tapping a finger against the tip of her nose and looking sideways at Kevin’s pouting face. “I think perhaps she thought you were related to our Mr. Griffey.”

  “Yeah, but that would mean Caitlin knew he was still alive,” Lizbeth said.

  Zach produced another snort. “Wouldn’t be the first time she lied, now would it?”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The Isle of Wight

  After suffering through the angst of Felicity dropping the ancestral bomb on everyone, Zach was glad when she and Lizbeth went into the kitchen area to make something to eat. Kevin had stretched out on the couch and closed his eyes, so Zach read more comments and looked at several video clips from his YouTube page. There were a few in particular that got his attention.

  A thin woman with short brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses living in western Washington said she’d experienced the electric-like sensations, too, right before Mount St. Helens blew its top for the second time in recent memory. An elderly Filipino woman in Manila, with translation help from her grandson, described the “fits” she’d suffered before Mayon erupted. Her grandson shyly admitted to feeling it, too. A Japanese man who spoke barely intelligible English gave a serious account of the two major and eighty minor earthquakes that nearly leveled Tokyo. He claimed to have predicted each one before it hit because, “The ground spoke me it going to shake.”

  Zach thought about what Felicity had said, how Caitlin kept track of as many of the children of the underground druids as she could, but there were more out there. How many could there be, though, if so few of the infants survived? Still, were these people in the videos like him and Lizbeth and Kevin? Could they sense the gossamer sphere’s intentions, or were they the crazy ones? He had to admit
none of them seemed crazy. Heck, he had seemed more like a lunatic on his stupid video than the people who’d responded to him. He decided to check out more of Seamus the Bard’s site, but when he clicked on the link his screen told him the page could not be found. He tried refreshing it, and closed and reopened his browser, but it appeared the Internet had gone down. Banging his hands down on the desk, he exclaimed, “Augh!”

  Kevin groaned and Zach saw him pull a cushion over his head.

  “Is that your plan, dwarf-boy? To hide from what’s left of the world?”

  “Zach!” Lizbeth said. “Leave him alone already.”

  Zach was still smarting from her earlier rejection, after she’d slapped his hand away when he only wanted to comfort her. Now she’d spoken to him with the kind of scorn he got from his mom when he stayed up too late working on his art or didn’t pick up his room. Lizbeth sure spent a lot of energy defending Kevin, who had curled up in the fetal position on the couch, still hiding under the cushion. The wuss.

  Felicity asked calmly, “Has the Internet gone down?”

  “Yeah,” Zach said. “Now we can all just sit here and fester while we wait for Caitlin to tell us what we’re supposed to do.”

  As if he weren’t sitting within hearing, Felicity commented to Lizbeth, “Not so level-headed when he doesn’t get ‘is way, is he?”

  Lizbeth rolled her eyes and it infuriated him even more. With a major effort, he stopped himself from going off on her. Instead, he checked the browser again. Felicity’s home page, a website for Wolf Hounds, obligingly popped up. He went straight to Seamus’ site.

  “What are you doing?” Lizbeth asked. She’d come to stand behind him. When she placed a hand on his shoulder, his eyes closed involuntarily as a rush of longing flowed through him. He endured it for a moment and then shrugged her hand off.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled.

  “Is this that bard website?”