by Nancy Werlin
“I need to to clean up here and direct things.”
“Can’t Fenella do that? With Sarah instead of you?” Zach didn’t look at Fenella.
Lucy shook her head. “I want to do it.” She consulted her list. “Dad?”
“What?” said Leo, who’d been out on a gig until late. He leaned against Soledad and issued a loud, fake snore.
“As soon as Walker gets here, you’re going with him in his truck.”
Walker’s truck. Walker. Ferocious longing caught Fenella unprepared. It seared through her, anchoring her again in her body. Walker—that was healthy, that was right. Her whole body knew it. Whereas this . . . this thing she was doing—
She summoned back the disconnected feeling of floating. She reminded herself of the consequences of failure.
“You could nap for a few minutes, love,” Soledad was saying to Leo.
“No, our daughter won’t let me.”
“I could go with Zach,” said Fenella abruptly, loudly. “Lucy, Sarah could be here with you.”
Zach’s eyes flared. “Um, I, well,” he stuttered.
Then he said, simply, “Lucy.”
Fenella was astonished that Lucy didn’t hear how his voice caught as he spoke.
But Lucy was nodding abstractly, “Okay, fine, thanks, Fenella. Zach, Fenella’s with you. Sarah’s with me.”
Zach went pale. For a fraction of an instant, he looked across and met Fenella’s eyes.
And he gave up. She felt it happen. The darkest part of Zach was in thrall to her. It was the impulse of chaos; and because he was so young, it was a part of him that he had little knowledge of, and absolutely no experience controlling.
When it was over, Fenella knew, Zach would blame not only her, but himself. He would spiral down relentlessly into the darkness . . .
She knew what would happen. She could see it.
Zach confessing to Lucy. Lucy’s horror. How she’d run to her parents. Their reaction. Zach being asked to move out. Dawn’s bewilderment at the disappearance of her father. It was even possible that Zach, full of self-hatred, would then—
Yes. The ripples of destruction would spread outward and destroy them all, shattering the Scarborough-GreenfieldMarkowitzes. Even if, eventually, Fenella had an opportunity to explain, it would be too late and it would do little good.
Fenella would not have to watch for long, she told herself. She would be dead. She would get the third task done as quickly as possible and then she would die, so she would feel nothing. Nothing—
Walker was there.
The floating feeling that had protected Fenella dissolved completely. Her body tensed with awareness. Walker was close behind her, so close she could reach out a hand and lay it flat against his chest. It seemed to her that his presence filled the entire room. She turned to look at him; she had to.
“No, no,” Walker said. He had never looked happier. “Send Leo with Zach. Fenella can come with me.” He had Fenella’s elbow cupped warmly in his hand. She turned with him. She moved with him. She let him steer her toward his truck.
And—deliberately or not, she was never sure—she let the thread of power between her and Zach snap.
She stumbled. She would have fallen except for Walker’s arm coming around her in support. “You okay?”
Fenella didn’t answer. They had reached the passenger side of the truck. The seat was already occupied. The dog Pierre stood on the seat with his head hanging out the open window, his one good eye fixed yearningly on Lucy, who had just come outside too.
The dog barked.
Across the yard, Lucy looked up, saw him, and smiled. The dog scrambled through the open window of the truck, leaped down, and raced to her.
Pierre.
Her alternative plan formed instantly in Fenella’s head.
She looked up at Walker. “Can I drive?”
“I’d better do it today.”
“Come on. You know I’m competent. I’ll enjoy it so much.”
He held out for a few seconds more, looking down into her eyes. Then he grinned. “All right.”
“Great. I need to get something from the house first—I’ll be right back.”
Fenella passed Lucy and Pierre on her way in, and then again on her way out. The dog was up on his hind legs, licking Lucy’s face. Lucy had her arms around him. She was ruffling his head and laughing.
Lucy loves that dog, Fenella reassured herself. That dog loves her. It will count. It must count.
Please, oh, please.
Nobody was looking when Fenella climbed behind the wheel of the truck, and Walker got in on the passenger side. Nobody watched while Fenella adjusted the mirrors. Nobody paid attention as she started the engine and backed competently out of the wide driveway of the church.
She paused, then, foot on the brake.
Everyone—Zach, Soledad, Leo, Miranda holding Dawn, and the crew of volunteers—was listening to Lucy. Pierre lay contentedly on the ground with his chin resting on the toe of Lucy’s sneaker.
Walker said, “Fenella, turn left at the end of the street and then—”
He never finished his sentence. As he spoke, the cat slipped around the door of the apartment, which Fenella had left ajar. Ryland raced directly toward Pierre, making the kind of noise an ordinary cat might make if he were being boiled alive.
The dog leaped to his feet. Dog and cat collided into each other, amid snarling and barking. A whirling dervish of tumbling fur moved across the fading autumn grass so quickly that it was difficult to recognize where one animal began and the other ended.
The sharpest possible gaze, however, might have noticed that it was the cat controlling the direction of their combined movement.
Into the road.
Walker swore, reaching to unlatch his seat belt. Before his fingers could connect, the mass of frenzied fur rolled in front of the truck.
Fenella shifted gears and stomped on the accelerator.
Chapter 34
She didn’ t want to see; she couldn’t bear to watch. As the truck jolted forward, Fenella closed her eyes.
She heard Walker yell her name. She felt his hand grab hers on the gearshift. But she was already in second gear, heading toward where the dog would be.
Simultaneously, however, Fenella’s other hand moved, on the wheel of the truck. It moved independently of both her brain and her will.
She jerked the wheel hard to the left, to avoid the dog.
It was too late. She knew it within a second. The impact of the collision was unmistakable.
Fenella slammed on the brakes. The truck rocked to a halt. She tasted salt in her mouth.
She could hear screaming. It was a woman’s voice.
Maybe she would never open her eyes again.
The salt in her mouth was from blood; she had bitten into her lower lip.
She could hear Walker’s urgent voice but she couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. He forced her numb right hand away from the stick shift. His foot kicked hers away from the floor controls. He did something else and the truck engine died.
A single fact penetrated slowly into Fenella’s mind. The dog was alive. Pierre was barking, a frenzied healthy barking that was edging into a full-throated howl. The barking was intermingled with the screaming.
The dog was alive and well, yet the truck had hit something. Something heavy. Heavier than Pierre?
Fenella could understand the voices now, hear what they were saying.
“Oh my God, oh my God!”
“Call 9-1-1!”
Who did I hit? Fenella thought. Who?
She was frozen with dread.
Then came a keening even worse than the dog’s, a human keening. It was a special kind of noise—Fenella knew it well. She had made it herself, once.
It was the sound that a woman makes over the dead body of her lover.
Please, Fenella prayed. Not Zach. I know death must come for him and Lucy someday. But please not while they’re so young.
; Let me not have done this.
Let him live.
In that moment she knew: It would have been better if she had seduced Zach. At least, then, there would have been the possibility of healing, of forgiveness, of renewal.
Death ended those possibilities. Death ended all possibility.
How could this have happened? This was the one thing she had sworn she would not do.
Shakily, Fenella reached into her pocket for the oak leaf, desperate for its comforting pulse. She curled her fingers around the leaf.
It did not pulse.
It had abandoned her, she thought. She straightened her fingers and let the leaf fall from them. She buried her face in her hands.
Beside her, the truck door was wrenched open from the outside. Walker grabbed her arm and pulled her down, out. Whatever he was saying still did not penetrate, though his urgency did.
Fenella’s legs were weak. She fell onto her hands and knees beside the truck. Walker did not catch her. He was no longer there at all; she felt his absence.
Of course he had gone. Walker would hate her now too. They all would.
What had she done, what had she done, what had she done?
Screaming tore through Fenella’s head like a hundred steel blades. It was inside and outside her head. Sirens were shrilling, coming closer. There was hard pavement beneath her hands and knees. She pushed herself into a sitting position. She grabbed her knees and pressed her body against her thighs, curling small. She rocked back and forth, eyes shut.
Then came the brush of soft fur against her side.
Fenella.
It was Ryland. Fenella managed to move her lips. “What’s going on? Who—” She swallowed. “Who did I hit?”
You didn’t do it on purpose?
“No. No! It was—I changed my mind—it was an accident.”
Silence.
“I’m begging you,” she whispered. “Tell me. I can’t bear to look. It’s Zach, isn’t it? I’ve killed Lucy’s husband.”
Finally, Ryland spoke again in her head, his tone quite dispassionate.
It’s not Zach. It’s Leo. He ran into the road. I suppose he was hoping to grab the dog in time. But then you swerved and hit him instead.
Fenella felt at first a shameful rush of relief. Not Zach. But then—
“Leo’s dead?” she said numbly.
She could envision Leo Markowitz’s face, intent, leaning over a guitar. She could almost hear his voice, lifted in song. And now she recognized that the woman’s voice she heard, the voice whose keening had turned into a low whimper, was Soledad’s.
She did not need to open her eyes to know that Soledad was beside Leo’s body. Cradling her husband in her arms. Begging him to wake up.
She had done the same for Robert.
Ryland said: Your veterinarian friend is doing what he can. But it doesn’t look good.
“I didn’t mean it,” whispered Fenella. “I was trying to hit the dog.”
You’re not making sense. You swerved away from the dog.
“I know.”
After all my work too. I did what you told me to. You’re sure you didn’t see Leo coming, and improvise? You didn’t simply realize that hitting him was a better solution?
“No. No! Leo shouldn’t have been there. It was a mistake. Also, I—I had my eyes closed.”
A pause. Then: You are an extremely frustrating young woman.
Fenella did not reply. She listened to Soledad’s keening. The good news, said the cat, finally, is that you have succeeded at the second task. You have destroyed love.
At this, Fenella opened her eyes. She looked straight on at the destruction she had wrought. She looked at her family. Lucy and Zach and Soledad and Miranda. And yes, Walker. They all had their backs to her.
As they should.
It had only been a few minutes since the accident. The sirens sounded closer. Help would be here soon. Eventually they would remember her. Then Walker would tell them that it had been Fenella in the driver’s seat.
She thought of her dead leaf, fallen in the cab of Walker’s truck.
“Ryland?” she whispered.
What?
“Can you please, please, please get me out of here?”
Yes, said the cat. Let’s go see my sister and find out about the third task.
Chapter 35
A fire truck, an ambulance, and two police cars roared down the street. The vehicles pulled between Fenella and Ryland and the accident.
Fenella managed to push to her feet and totter after the cat. Ryland paused by a leafy rhododendron bush. He gestured with his head for Fenella to slip behind the bush. He twined himself around Fenella’s ankles and then they were in mist.
Three steps forward, then two to the left.
The mist drifted off on a gentle breeze.
They stood on a winding, worn stone path that lay inside the archway of a private little walled garden. Beyond the garden’s low walls, covered with delicate new ivy, Fenella could see a green forest and, farther away, the purple outlines of mountains.
The garden itself seemed designed to please a domestically minded human woman. It was both pretty and cozy, with riotous flowerbeds. On the garden wall, a magpie preened its long tail. Above, the sun shone down benevolently from a lovely blue sky.
Fenella looked toward the forest. Were any of the tree fey present? Her hand crept into her pocket to touch the leaf that was no longer there.
This place again, Ryland complained. I hate this garden. My sister should stay away, but she likes to torture herself. Look, there she is. At least she’s not pretending to be Mallory Tolliver.
In the small stone clearing at the center of the garden, under a tall oak, stood a chair formed from flowering vines and the roots of the living tree. Queen Kethalia sat in it.
Seeing Fenella and Ryland, the queen rose. Her strong hawk’s wings flared out behind her and she lifted a clawed hand in an ambiguous gesture that could have been either waving or beckoning.
With Ryland slinking beside her, Fenella moved to the queen. The queen reached out her clawed hands, as if she wanted Fenella to take them. Fenella barely touched the hands. She stood awkwardly.
“How are you, Fenella?”
“I did it,” Fenella said heavily. “At least, Ryland thinks so.”
“Yes. The second task is complete. I can feel the difference in your body. You are nearly free.” The queen’s tone was neutral. “But you don’t look happy.”
“He was a nice man, the man I killed. Leo Markowitz.” Fenella paused, and then words came out in a rush. “You would have liked his music. They—my family—will miss him terribly. He was Lucy’s father, the only one she ever knew. And his wife—they were married many years—her name is Soledad. She—they—everybody was so kind to me.”
She felt pressure behind her eyes and in her throat. But murderers had no right to tears.
“You have indeed destroyed love,” said the queen, almost gently.
“There is no going back.” Fenella’s voice was strangely high.
The spotted lizard crawled out from the mass of the queen’s hair. She stroked him gently with one finger. “Have your feelings changed?”
“Which feelings do you mean?”
The queen scratched her lizard’s back with a careful claw. “Do you still want to die?”
Fenella exploded, incredulous. “More than ever! Especially now, I deserve—” She stopped speaking. Her eyes flickered.
“What?”
“I deserve death,” Fenella said. “Not as reward. As punishment. No. Death is too good for me.”
The queen made a gesture, inviting Fenella to sit on the living chair that was formed of tree roots and vines. The branches of the seat accommodated themselves to Fenella’s shape, cradling her.
Fenella put her head in her hands. “I thought I was trapped before. I was willing to do anything to free myself. But now I have killed, and—it was an accident. Killing Leo, completing the second task. I
have done two terrible things. To my own family! There will be a third task ahead. And I must do it—for their sake now, not mine. To save Lucy and the child.”
“Yes.” The queen restored the lizard to her shoulder. “You must go forward.”
Fenella took in the multitude of shades of green and brown and orange that composed the flowing mix of hair and fur and feather cascading from the queen’s head and the nape of her neck, noted the way the cascade melted into the feathers of the queen’s wings. So beautiful; so alien. Yet the queen looked kind, even sad.
“You warned me at the start. I should never have accepted the tasks.”
“I understand,” the queen said. “I too have walked the path of destruction, and seen no way out.”
Fenella asked sharply, “You didn’t choose to pursue destruction, though, did you?”
“No. But destruction was where I found myself. I played my role.”
“It wasn’t the same,” said Fenella. “I know about this. You went into your mission with the goal of saving others. Your intentions were honorable.”
“Do you think, then, that good intention excuses bad action?” asked the queen. “Do you think it is allowable to destroy one person in order to save many?”
Fenella slipped from the tree chair onto her knees. She looked all the way up into the queen’s face. “I can’t do anything else to them! I can’t complete the third task.”
“You are declaring defeat, then? You will belong to Padraig, and you will condemn Lucy and her child to this as well?”
Fenella thought of Walker, and of how he had looked at her. “Someday,” he’d said. Walker would not want that someday anymore. At this moment he would be denouncing her to her family.
“I wish I had never agreed to this,” Fenella said hopelessly. “No matter the outcome, I have done too much harm.”
“There can be healing, though. On the other side of pain and suffering.”
Fenella shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”
The queen persisted. “People can recover from even the worst blows. They mend and go on with their lives.”
Fenella thought of how her family had rallied after the loss of their home. She thought of how Lucy and Zach had fought through great terror together. But—
