The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “You’re positive it was a woman?”

  Instead of replying, Bettel said, “Any idea what she was after?”

  Sophie could feel her face turning red. She knew, all right, and she was a terrible liar.

  Stay in the vicinity of the truth, then.

  “I’m a videographer,” she said. “The most valuable thing I own is hardware. Dive equipment, cameras. For making footage of…”

  Wooden, ship-destroying monsters?

  Pink narwhals? Red froglike amphibians with tails?

  “Animals,” she finished. “Engaged in animal behavior.”

  “Anything proprietary in your video files?”

  “You wouldn’t steal it. Anyway, my material’s backed up online. If someone wanted it, they’d be better off hiring—”

  “You think this was a hired job?”

  Dammit! For the briefest of seconds, she wished she could just give the inspector the patented Wracker Don’t care, shut up, don’t be so curious brush-off. “I dunno. But hiring, you know, hackers.”

  “You’ve been out of town and out of touch, I understand.”

  “I didn’t know this was happening.” She shot a dirty look through the window at Bram, who was in the yard, chatting with the dog handler.

  “If I asked for your movements—ports, dates, countries visited?”

  This was a trap. Her U.S. passport was among the heaps on the floor, where both of them could see it.

  Oh, this looks suspicious. What to say?

  “This kind of search isn’t a random hunt for jewelry or some easy-to-sell music player.” Bettel’s gaze was all-encompassing, like the searchlight on Shepherd.

  “Look,” Sophie said. “If it was my house and not my folks’, I’d say search the place top to bottom. Bring in sniffer dogs, bomb dogs, whatever…”

  “But?”

  “But my mom’s a bit of a hippie, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not interested in your parents’ weed stash. You’re the focus here, Sophie. It’s your room they’ve searched. Twice.”

  “My point is there was nothing to find. I’m not smuggling drugs. Or doing anything—smuggly. Promise.”

  “Why would you bring that up, I wonder?”

  “Because it’s what you seem to suspect.”

  Bettel joined her at the window, pointing at her parents, who were down on the lawn with Bram. “What happens when whoever she is comes back?”

  “There’s nothing I can tell you. I’m sorry.” She probably looked every bit as worried and terrified as she felt. Or maybe she looked shifty and guilty.

  Five guilty.

  However she looked, Bettel seemed to read her intention to keep her mouth shut. “Okay, Sophie. If you change your mind, give me a call.”

  “I will. Thanks. Um, did you send a fingerprint tech?”

  Raised eyebrows. “He’s in the master bedroom. Why?”

  Sophie made her way down the hall. Her parents’ room was untouched, but for a few clumps of mud and the screen door being knocked out. She took a whiff of the air, scenting for the reek of the assassins that killed Gale.

  Police saw the thief running away, she reminded herself. Nobody had called it a freakish monster with claws.

  An athlete. Her half sister, Verena, fit that bill.

  She shoved the thought to the back of her mind, along with the guilt seeping from its source, and focused instead on the uniformed officer with a miniature feather duster who was taking prints off the glass of the French doors.

  It was easier to say sorry than to ask permission. Sophie raised her camera and took shots—including a close-up—of the powdered prints on the glass.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve got a shiny new interest in crime science,” Sophie told him. “That powder—graphite, right?”

  The print technician nodded.

  “Do you only identify prints using computers nowadays? Is there a room somewhere where guys with indexes and card catalogs and magnifying glasses do the work?”

  The tech laughed. “Mostly computers. Why?”

  “I’m researching Victorian procedures for print identification.”

  He went back to dusting. “I know a retired instructor you could talk to.”

  Bettel had followed her. Upon hearing this, she threw up her hands and strode away.

  Sophie pocketed the fingerprint tech’s contact info and rejoined her family. Mom had already decided a house full of cops meant they had to go out for dinner. “Any excuse to not cook,” she declared.

  “Sounds good to me,” Sophie said, and soon they were on their way, in two cars, to a Greek place in the Mission District.

  Sophie hadn’t realized how much her diet had been limited to seafood until someone offered her moussaka. Restaurant fare was amazing. Normal industrial window glass was amazing. A world that ran on electricity and Wi-Fi, without a single flicker of spellscrip anywhere in sight? So amazing.

  As was having a dad who taught poetry instead of wading around in puddles of blood that he’d shed himself.

  Her delight in all the conveniences and familiar comforts didn’t change the fact that family dinner made for an awkward couple of hours. Bram had obviously convinced their parents that there was no point in quizzing the two of them about where they had been vanishing off to.

  Unfortunately, that left a yawning chasm in the conversation.

  Sophie cajoled a good fifteen minutes of national politics and local news out of her father. Then everyone fell silent.

  “That police detective thinks you’re smuggling drugs,” her father said.

  Sophie snorted.

  “I told her rare animal parts were, statistically, more likely.”

  “Am I deluded, or are you happy about this?” Sophie asked.

  “Your father thinks that I’ll cave on getting a dog now.” Regina had always been a cat person. Unlike Dad, the prospect of more break-ins obviously did not amuse her.

  Sophie searched her mother’s face. She had left abruptly, without explaining anything, and she’d been gone for months. Her departure had been an awful scene.

  Five awful, tears all around.

  Now, though, Mom seemed resigned.

  Should I feel better about that, or more guilty?

  “We’ll move me out,” Sophie said. “Make my room into a guest room. Box up everything I own, put it in storage—”

  “And pay for that how?” Mom said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once you take a look at the papers scattered on your floor, I think you’ll find some rather terse notes from credit card companies.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t meant to be gone so long, and the fact that she’d spent everything the credit gods would give her to buy camera and scientific equipment had halfway slipped her mind. She wondered if she’d had any money in the bank before she left. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I obviously need to move out.”

  At the same time, Dad said, “You do think Sledgehammer Sally will be back, then?”

  “Teeth,” she muttered, out of habit, in Fleet. When she looked up, her father was mouthing the word.

  “Was that ‘tits’?” her mother asked.

  “I—” She looked to Bram for help.

  “You can move your stuff to the Dwarf House, Sofe.”

  “Then they’ll break in there!” their mother objected.

  “Mom’s right about that, son.”

  “There’s nine of us, Regina—someone’s always home. Besides, we do have dogs.”

  “Whatever you’re sitting on, kids, it better be worth it. For what you’re putting us through? I expect to retire on a mound of diamonds.” Mom snapped open the dessert menu. “Baklava to go? Who’s in?”

  * * *

  They headed home to find the police were done, and plunged right into straightening up the house and boxing everything Sophie had left. Packing barely took an hour. After, Bram drove a load back to his place while Soph
ie stayed with her parents. They downloaded a costume drama to avoid talking.

  She expected to spend the night awake, in a stew over it all: the break-in, the threat to her family, Inspector Bettel’s obvious suspicions—even the money shortage. But the familiar softness of her childhood bed and something about being home—the smell of fog and damp that seemed to come through the window, the mutter in the pipes, and the bed-hogging presence of her mother’s six-toed cat—lulled her into a deep sleep.

  It was broken, near dawn, by a dream of the bandit Kev, on his knees. Skinny, smelling of fear, he was fumbling teeth out of a mixing bowl filled with watered-down blood. With frantic movements of his red-stained fingers, he tried to arrange them to fill one of the punched-out gaps in her bedroom walls.

  Sophie jolted, hard enough to send the cat scuttling across the room. Sitting up, half awake, she clamped her hand over her mouth as she gagged, remembering Cly’s blandly focused expression as he skewered one of the bandits. The surprise on the woman’s face, the gush of blood between her teeth, from her nostrils …

  Alive, and then instantly not.

  Distraction. She lunged for her phone, diving into her backlogged in-box. By the time she was calm again, her parents were moving, and she stumbled downstairs for breakfast and fractured conversations about jobs, break-ins, and guard dogs. It was a relief when Bram arrived to save her, helping to load the last two boxes of her worldly goods and then driving her all of two blocks away, out of sight of home. He parked in front of an old Victorian surrounded by temporary fencing and covered by a tarp. “I was thinking that sledgehammer could’ve come from here,” he said.

  “Or a dozen places just like it. You should’ve told me.”

  “You were gone. Stuck.”

  She rocked in place, banging her head against the padded headrest—not quite hard enough to hurt. “Teeth!”

  “What are we gonna do?” Bram asked.

  She handed him her phone, on which a notes app displayed a string of numbers.

  “What’s this?”

  “Legal description of the parents’ property. If we can find you a spell and ingredients for a Don’t Break Into This House inscription, I was thinking you could try it out, using this as the house’s name.”

  “That’s our go-to now? Magic?”

  “Burglar alarm didn’t work, Bramble, and we can’t be honest with the police. Anyway, it’s practice, isn’t it? That’s why you’re making treasure boxes in the Dwarf House attic, right? Now you can practice this.”

  He acknowledged this with a grunt. “I’m doing schoolkid magic. What if the spell’s too hard?”

  “Then I’ll hire a scribe—once I’m back in Fleet, where I’m actually solvent.”

  He waved the property description. “What if lot five, parcel twenty, civic tax code mumbo jumbo doesn’t work?”

  “We get the parents to name the pile of bricks? Hansa Estates?”

  “House of Usher,” he said.

  “Knowing Dad, it’ll end up Thornfield.”

  He reached into her bag, fishing out her notebook. Finding a new page, he wrote, WHAT IF A PERSON, PLACE, OR OBJECT IS GIVEN TWO NAMES?

  “That’s not a communal to-do list.”

  “It’s a book of questions, isn’t it? Keeping them in one place makes sense.” He had that mulish expression on: This isn’t just your thing, Sofe. Not anymore.

  She didn’t want a fight, not now. “Okay.”

  Satisfied, he pulled back onto the street. “Where to?”

  “The horologist’s, to pick up Gale’s pocket watch. It’s gotta be what our thief was after.”

  It had belonged to Gale, who had fumbled it in a San Francisco alley, the first time she and Sophie had transited to Stormwrack together. Sophie had searched it out after Bettona sent her back.

  “You’re not keeping it with you?” Bram asked, after he’d paid the repairman and they were back on the road.

  Sophie opened the watch, revealing its painted white face. It had black numbers and impossibly fine hardwood hands. She wound it, just a little.

  Tick, tick, tick. The sound filled the car, beating in her eardrums. It had an echo—a heavier, more resonant mechanism. The grandfather clock at Beatrice’s?

  “I can’t be caught with it,” she said. “Verena said her people would love to blame me for John Coine coming here to kill Gale.”

  “My place then?”

  “What about a big old bank vault?”

  Their parents hadn’t been wrong about the cost of paying for storage. Sophie had bought a bunch of camera equipment before her first long sojourn to Stormwrack, and what savings she’d had—which had never been much—were tapped out.

  Bram shelled out for the safe-deposit box while she endured a stern lecture from the bank manager about timely payments, debt consolidation, and big R Responsibility before they got to leave.

  She only stopped hearing the ticking when they were about six blocks from the bank.

  CHAPTER 8

  Sophie spent the next few days at Bram’s, researching forensics and chemistry and hanging out with her parents in the evenings. She managed to connect with the elderly fingerprinting expert, who was only too happy to walk her through the basics of distinguishing whorls from arches, ridgecounting, and other arts of manual print identification.

  She loaded as many science texts onto her phone as she could, got her birth control implant refreshed, sold her bike for cash to placate the credit card company, and paid a couple of bills. She trimmed her father’s roses and took Mom shopping for clothes for the planned trip to Peru.

  She was talking to a dive shop owner about maybe running a quick marine photography workshop, when Beatrice phoned.

  “Can you talk?” Her birth mother didn’t bother with a preamble.

  “Of course.”

  “I have a message from the family. There’s an emergency of some kind. We’re expected as soon as we can get back.”

  Sophie felt a mixture of emotion: twinges of guilt over Mom and Dad, the pull of her half-finished research. She had missed being in Fleet, but sometimes it had seemed like a faraway dream. She and Bram had barely begun sifting through the data she’d brought back.

  “I’m in the middle of a bunch of stuff.”

  “It’s not a request. According to this note, you took the Oath.”

  Ungracious as always. “So, what? I’m at the Fleet’s beck and call?”

  “E-mer-gen-cy,” Beatrice repeated, drawing out the word, as if Sophie were four. “If it’s trivial, I’ll bring you right back.”

  “I’ll pack and come over.” She texted Bram, grabbed her stuff, and headed across the city on Muni.

  Beatrice was tall and voluptuous, where her sister Gale had been weather-beaten and compact. Her accent and style of dress were utterly American. She had a black and white fox tattooed on her right shoulder, but only a Wracker would recognize its style or suspect that it meant she was from Verdanii. When she and Sophie first met, she had been appalled to realize that her secret firstborn daughter had tracked her down.

  In fact, she’d had an epic freak-out.

  Time and a bit of acquaintance had taken the edge off her—the greeting she gave Sophie, this time, was barely nettled. “You missed our window,” she said. “We’ll have to wait sixteen hours.”

  “I thought we were in a flaming rush.”

  “I’m not a practiced eraglider anymore. Unless they send Verena, we’re waiting until morning.”

  “What about that clerk of Annela’s … Bettona?”

  “I wouldn’t let Bette drive a bus,” Beatrice said scornfully.

  “I can tell my brother we’re delayed?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  As she texted Bram, Sophie said, “Someone’s been busting into my parents’ house.”

  Beatrice didn’t blink. “They’ve guessed you have Gale’s watch.”

  “Who?”

  She shrugged—a real shrug, not the Stormwrack You’re way to
o curious shoulder-bob.

  “Could it be Annela?”

  “Nah. You’re sworn to obey the law; she’d demand you give it up. If she even knows you have it.”

  “Haven’t you told her?”

  “If anything Verdanii is rightly yours, it’s that,” she said.

  “It hasn’t crossed Annela’s mind?”

  Beatrice tilted her head and Sophie felt her skin crawl: she’d seen herself in the same pose, in pictures. “There may be some ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ there.”

  “See if I loop a sinking anchor,” Sophie grumbled.

  “Or that, yeah.” They had been standing in the entryway of the house. Now Beatrice turned, leading the way into a dinky, dated-looking kitchen. She poured two cups of coffee, held one out, and sat at a bar stool alongside the counter.

  Sophie sat across from her, taking it in. The place looked as though it had been built in the 1970s, but everything was in good repair. A big window dominated the kitchen sink. Out across a narrow rectangle of yard, Verena’s half brother, Shad, and a couple other student-age adults—a couple, from the look of them—were staining a newly erected cedar fence.

  The woman who broke into the house had been a track star of sorts; Inspector Bettel said she had jumped from the second-floor balcony to the ground, and had outrun a police dog. But she hadn’t been strong enough to knock in Sophie’s parents’ door or to punch holes in the walls—for that, she’d needed the sledgehammer. “The intruder was either someone from Stormwrack operating here,” Sophie mused, “or someone from San Francisco who’s helping them. How many people know about Erstwhile?”

  “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

  “I’m oathed up now, remember?”

  “Good point. In that case … Seventy or so, most of them high government officials. All sworn to secrecy and most too old and creaky to get up to home invasion.”

  “To come here, people need travel permits from Annela’s office. How many of them have come lately?”

  “I’ve got the list.” Beatrice pulled it out of a valise. Already prepared … Sophie wasn’t the only one asking. There were a dozen names, each with an island nation beside it.

  “All Wrackers? Nobody from Erstwhile goes to and fro?”