The Thread that Binds the Bones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Stop it,” said Maggie, snapping her fingers in Carroll’s face. He shook his head and smiled at her.

  “What do you want with a baby, Uncle Carroll?” Laura asked, laughter in her voice.

  “A baby is imperative,” he said. “Is that another thing you don’t know?”

  “Manners,” said Trixie.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head again, focused on Trixie. She returned his look. Their gazes locked; she saw the little girl, remembered sitting her down in the master bathroom early that morning, putting a towel about her shoulders, snipping off her curls—a child who sat preternaturally still, smiling a small smile; who afterward held one of her own curls and marveled at it, so that Trixie knelt and let the child touch her hennaed hair, to feel the difference between coarse and fine. She remembered the sweetness of awakening to someone live curled up against her.

  She saw the man, and remembered him stalking around the pharmacy, saying things in that foreign tongue. Tyke made it a policy that both of them retired to the back room when Carroll came in: less seen, less noticed, less acted upon. Trixie remembered going to fetch a light bulb for a customer after a visit from Carroll and finding nothing but naked filaments in sockets and glass dust. She remembered watching him from the pharmacy window one evening as he dropped from the sky in front of Polly Martin, who was fifteen and should have known better than to be out walking after dark. Polly had not even screamed. She had stared at Carroll, leaned closer, until his arms went around her and he lifted her into the sky and she disappeared forever. Trixie had watched. Everything in her had screamed to stop it, but she knew there was nothing she could do but call Polly’s mother and tell her to grieve.

  “Will you come home with me?” Carroll asked Trixie.

  “Is that an order?” said Bert.

  Carroll glared at him, then shook his head, put his hand over his eyes. “No,” he said.

  “No, it’s not an order?”

  “No, I’m not going to turn you into a cat again. Restraints. You’re her friend.”

  “And no, Carroll,” said Trixie. “I won’t go home with you, but thanks for asking.”

  “Will you—” He frowned and stood up. “This is hard,” he said to Maggie.

  “Yeah,” she said, grinning.

  “Will you come home with me?” he asked her.

  “No.”

  He opened and closed his hands. “I’m going to lose it,” he said. “If I go home alone. They all know who they expect me to be, and it will be hard to be someone new without help.”

  “Don’t go home,” said Trixie. “Stay here.”

  “Your room?”

  “The couch in the front parlor,” she said.

  “Okay. Thanks. I’m going to get some food for you now.”

  “What?”

  “I want to help. You need food. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Do you have any money?” Trixie asked.

  “No.”

  “Money’s part of manners, Carroll. Only—” She went to the counter, to her purse, and pulled out her wallet. After looking in the currency compartment, she frowned. “Damn!”

  “They wouldn’t understand at the market anyway, Aunt. I never use money.”

  “You better start. I know. I’ll write a check. Let me make a shopping list.” She took a pad of paper and a pen out of one of the drawers and began checking through her cupboards.

  “Uncle Carroll?” Michael said.

  “What?”

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. Nor do I care.” Trixie brought him her list and a check filled out for everything but amount. He accepted the pieces of paper and touched her hair, his movement slow, as if he expected to be challenged.

  “You upset?” she said.

  He nodded. She saw the hand that held the papers shake.

  “I’ll let you out the front door.” She headed for the hall, and he followed her.

  “Carroll,” said Bert.

  He paused at the threshold and looked back.

  “The wedding’s in a couple hours. You want to come, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “Thanks,” said Carroll. Closing the door behind him, he followed Trixie down the hall and into the front parlor.

  “Talk to me,” she said when they arrived.

  “You’re afraid of me,” he said.

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Maggie says she’s not, but I could change that with a word. I don’t want to. But it feels like—it’s so much easier to make mistakes now. I have the power to make big mistakes, and you can’t stop me when I’m in this form. I have habits. I don’t know if I can catch them in time to stop them. I—don’t know if I’ll want to enough, if there’s no more…”

  “No more what?”

  He stared at the floor. “No more electric blanket,” he said, and she saw the muscles in his arms tense and release.

  “If I sleep with you, you won’t hurt anyone?” Trixie felt pain in her gut. She remembered Polly Martin, and what little she knew from Maggie. “All right,” she said.

  “No! Not like that,” he said. “Not because you’re scared or because you want to save somebody else. Not because I force you. I’ve already done that. I try and try. I know there’s something I need. I could never find it—until I was little and weak. Then you cared about me. If that’s what I have to do, I’ll do it again. But first, I’ll get groceries. I won’t be able to do that later. They won’t know me to be scared of me.”

  “Do it different. Look, this is a check,” she said, showing him what he held. “You take the groceries through the checkout line, and when Verna totals them up, you write the amount in here. Okay?”

  “This is money?” He studied it.

  She grinned. “Yeah.”

  “This is your money.”

  “Yes, Carroll.”

  “But if I use this, Aunt—it won’t be a present.”

  “Yes, it will. Manners. Every time you use manners I consider it a gift. All right?”

  “All right,” he said.

  She frowned. Then she hugged him, finding it easier than she had thought it might be. He was shaped the same as her boy Ray, tall and thin but wiry, and with her eyes closed she could almost forget she had her arms around the most dangerous person in the county, and was about to send him off to terrorize other people.

  “Thanks,” he said. He touched her face and left.

  “When did he get here? What did you do to him?” Michael asked in a whisper as the door closed behind Trixie and Carroll.

  “Michael,” Laura whispered. He leaned forward. “That’s none of your business.”

  He lifted a hand toward her. Alyssa slapped it down. They looked at each other a long moment; then Michael smiled. “Yeah,” he said. He sighed. “Yeah. We really came to see how you were doing,” he told Tom. “There were a lot of parties and meet-the-in-laws and spellcasting for fertility and all that skoonaclah, and our wedding night—” He glanced at Alyssa, who grinned. “But I’ve been wondering about you ever since you came. And Laura. I always knew where you were, but I didn’t really know—who you were, maybe?”

  “You always knew where I was?” said Laura.

  “Yes. First Seattle. Four years—college. Then San Francisco. Then L.A. for a little while, then Portland.”

  She laughed. “You were the person I was hiding from.”

  “I knew that. That’s why I found you, at first. But then, I don’t know, you were in school, Outside. I kept thinking of long distance things to do to you, but they stopped being funny. You were just too—too normal or something. It didn’t seem fair.”

  “What you did to me at home was never fair either.”

  “Yeah, but everybody seemed to expect me to—I don’t know—” He bogged down and looked at Maggie, who had taken her seat beside Laura again and was sipping coffee. “I thought there was something wrong with you.”

  She waggled her eyebrows at him.

  Aly
ssa tapped his shoulder. “Don’t change the subject, Michael. Are you saying you used to persecute Laura as well as all the others?”

  “I guess you could call it that,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I had power, and she was wingless.”

  Alyssa said to Laura, “He calls you his favorite sister and says he loves you and that you’re coming to our wedding if he has to go get you himself. I don’t understand your branch of the Family, Laura.”

  “Who is the teacher?”

  Everyone turned to Tom, who had retrieved his oatmeal and taken Carroll’s seat, and he realized the voice that had just spoken was Peregrine’s.

  Trixie, subdued, came back from seeing Carroll off. She sat down beside Bert.

  “What do you mean, Ancient?” Laura asked.

  —Tommy? May I pursue this?

  —Sure.

  “Who’s teaching you the disciplines these days?” Peregrine asked.

  “Great-aunt Fayella,” said Michael.

  “Small and venomous,” muttered Peregrine. “Jaimie mentioned her. We should have paid more attention.”

  “What do you mean? What’s going on, anyway?” Michael asked. “Why are you calling your husband ancient, Laura?”

  “The Presence who possessed him after purification—it stayed inside him. Sometimes it talks. Ancient, what does the teacher have to do with this?”

  “It is the teacher’s job to balance the scales, to subdue the strong and protect the weak, to instruct each into a sense of his own worth. When Jaimie spoke of her schooling, she said the dark disciplines were encouraged, but all the others were slighted. Only, you learned them all, niece?” He looked at Laura.

  She shrugged. “Book learning, anyway. She rushed through a lot of subjects, but I took good notes and studied them. I spent a lot of time in the library, too. She really rewarded the masters of the dark though. When Michael transformed something—me, half the time—she gave him tishina. Same with Gwen and Sarah and Marie and Piron; and who knows about the younger ones. And she rewarded deadwalk, and illspeak, and fetchcasting, and beguilements; she liked ill-eye and all the tangles, and she rewarded us when we practiced these things on each other.”

  “Was she Carroll’s teacher too?” Peregrine asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said Laura. “She’s been…teaching since…” Her eyes widened. “Since the late fifties.” She looked at Peregrine, then across at Bert, whose eyes narrowed.

  “There are Fayella stories,” said Trixie slowly. She frowned, her brows pinching together. “Hard to remember. The Nightwalker.”

  “Oh,” said Bert, touching his temples with the first and second fingers of both hands. “Say more.”

  “Charlie Campbell,” Trixie said, and touched her throat.

  “Oh, God,” said Bert.

  “Charlie Campbell,” Trixie whispered, rubbing her throat in little circles. “That was in the days when the whole upper and lower school was just a couple of rooms—no portables. Charlie was in the seventh grade when I was in third, just before the Second World War. The trains used to stop in town then and we had strangers around; things hadn’t boiled down into the kind of isolation we have now. Nor we weren’t so frightened then, at least not of people from the Hollow, not until the time Miss Fayella took Charlie, the handsomest boy in the whole school. And she—” Trixie paused. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I forgot this. I forgot it.” She looked up. “She was a right handsome young woman in those days, but even so, she robbed the cradle. She took him away…”

  “And she sent him back,” said Bert. His face wore no expression, but his eyes were hot.

  Trixie nodded. “She sent him back some months later. I must have been about eight. I saw Charlie walking the streets in the twilight. I was just a little kid then, running around with the boys. We were always running along the backs of buildings ’cause you never knew what somebody might throw out. Bert, you were just a baby. Must have been about four. How can you remember any of this?”

  “I was always interested in everything.”

  “I saw Charlie walking the streets in the twilight. I ran up to him. I thought he must have gotten away from Miss Fayella somehow. But he was dead. Parts of him were gone. Oh, God.”

  “They put a curfew,” said Bert, “and the Everything Store got in blackout curtains; everybody in town bought ’em. Nobody went out after dark if they could help it. But it got so bad Lem Hickory went out to the Hollow and talked to Mr. Jacob about it. Mr. Jacob put a stop to it. Said they hadn’t even known she was doing that. Miss Scylla went to the Campbells’s holdings with apologies and charms and the rites of grief and comfort, and no one saw Miss Fayella in town anymore.”

  “So she stayed home and trained up the young ones?” said Trixie. “How could they make a decision like that?”

  “When was the war?” Peregrine asked.

  Everyone looked at him.

  “I have been dead a long time,” he said in the face of their shock.

  “It started, for our country, in 1941,” Bert said.

  “And she did not begin to teach until the late nineteen-fifties, Laura?”

  “That’s what Jess told me.”

  “So she was sequestered for a period,” Peregrine muttered. “Someone must have tried to give her a deep cleansing. I hope. But it has not worked. She has put everything out of balance. This must stop.”

  “No wonder Carroll is so mixed up,” said Trixie.

  “Ancient,” said Laura, “is that why Michael had so much trouble during Purification? Would Carroll fail?”

  “During Purification, deeper presences than I manifest, and their tests measure qualities I cannot sense. You are right, though; character weighs in the balance, and past actions. Your training, and how you have incorporated it. I do not know if Carroll would succeed. There is a solid core in him—but I don’t know if he knows it.” He felt pain in his left hand, and shook it, then noticed that the wedding ring was glowing again.

  “Oh,” said Tom. “Eddie. It must be. The rest of us are here. I’ve got to go.”

  “What?” Michael asked. “Not now. I’m just finding out—”

  “That can wait, and this won’t,” said Laura. “Michael, you be nice while we’re gone.” She jumped up and went to Tom, putting her arms around him. He dropped his arm around her shoulders and spun a strand to pull them both to Eddie.

  Chapter 19

  Gas fumes almost overcame them when Tom got them fixed and focused into the reality of Pops’s garage. Eddie was spraying gas everywhere, yelling, “No! No! No!” as he did it. Pops lay on the ground, gas-spattered, his glasses smashed beside his head, his eyes shut. Tom saw his chest rise and fall.

  A green-clad woman, young and very beautiful, stood on top of the regular gas pump. “Yes, yes,” she said, jabbing her index finger toward Eddie like a radio controller aiming an antenna at a model airplane. “Get it all ready. We’ll have a friendly little fire.”

  Tom slipped out of Laura’s arms and ran to Eddie. Sticky tar-black strands webbed around Eddie, but Tom’s foxfire touch dissolved them. Eddie flung the gas nozzle away. He screamed and ran for the regular pump, grabbing the woman’s ankles and jerking her down so suddenly she had no time to react. Her head hit the pump, and she barely managed to break her fall with her arms. “You bitch!” Eddie yelled, kicking her in the ribs.

  “Stop it!” Tom caught his shoulders and dragged him away. The woman pushed herself upright. She spat at them. A shape like a translucent black bat flew from her mouth, landed on Eddie’s neck, and tried to creep into his shirt. It refused to dissolve when Tom touched it with foxfire. Instead, his fingers burned. He could see the bat eating at Eddie’s skin with its under-surface.

  —Peregrine! What is it! How do we fight it?

  —A power of water. Spit blue at it.

  —What?

  Eddie jerked and twisted in his grasp, gagging and choking.

  —Spit blue!

  Tom hawked and tried
to imagine himself spitting a color. He saw a shape like a blue hand leave his mouth and smother the bat. The black and blue fluttered against each other, then dropped off Eddie’s neck and fell battling to the ground.

  Eddie curled over, coughing. Tom glanced at the woman, saw her open her mouth again. He spat first. He saw a red hand emerge from his mouth; it flew to her face and gagged her, making her swallow what she was preparing to spit. She started coughing with her mouth closed, her face going red. While she was incapacitated, he cast a tight-woven silver net around her, thickening it until he couldn’t even see her. “Helpless but healthy, helpless but healthy,” he whispered to his net, then wondered if that was too generic a command; it was a condition, not a shape. He looked around for Laura, saw her carrying Pops inside the station, with his glasses floating after her.

  “Eddie?” He knelt beside Eddie.

  Choking and red-faced, Eddie tried to straighten. His throat was red and peeling, as if eaten by acid.

  “What did she do!”—Peregrine, can we heal?

  —Try. Summon and harness energy; touch the afflicted area; concentrate on the golden reweaving. Pour it there; it asks and aids the body to make repairs whatever way is best.

  Tom remembered the golden glow he had seen Laura summon when she healed Maggie. Carroll had used it too. Tom touched Eddie’s throat and called. Presently light answered his call, flowing around Eddie’s neck and sinking into his skin. The ravaged tissues restored themselves under the glow’s influence. Eddie touched his throat, managed to stand up. After a minute he looked at Tom. “God, that was awful. Thanks for coming.” Then his eyes widened. He looked around. “Pops! Where’s Pops? She was gonna make me burn up the station and Pops too! What happened to Pops? She made me knock him over and pour gas on him. If I hurt him, I’ll kill myself.”

  “Laura took him inside,” Tom said. “If anything’s wrong with him, she’ll fix it.”

  “How can you trust one of those murdering bitches!” Eddie ran into the shop with Tom trailing him. “You get away from him, you evil witch!”

  Startled, Laura looked up. Pops lay on the couch in the room where people waited for their cars to get fixed. Laura held his head in her hands. Eddie ran toward her, arms outstretched, his hands aimed at her throat.