They stood listening.
A moment later there came a motorcycle’s snarl out on the dark road, and then they heard it going down and away. Ned reached inside, but eventually the silvertinted light there faded, somewhere—he guessed—near the bottom of the lane where it met the main road and the streetlights.
“Ned? Kate? You two okay?”
His mother, from the terrace. He could see her in the glow there.
“We’re fine, Mom.”
“Come on in. We’re going to eat something, then talk.”
“Coming.”
His mom turned and went back in.
Ned had an image, like an old photo, of himself as a child playing with friends at dusk in summer, the light fading, his mother’s voice—faint but clear—summoning him home. Bath and bed.
“Why did you tell him?” Kate asked, softly.
“Don’t know. Maybe because he can’t fly.”
“Cadell can’t either, now.”
“I know.”
Kate was quiet a moment. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, by the way.”
He looked at her. “I can be.”
“We all can,” Kate Wenger said, and kissed him on the mouth in the windy dark.
Ned closed his eyes, but by then she’d already stepped back. He drew a breath.
“Um, was that Marie-Chantal? You possessed again, like before?”
She hit him, pretty hard, on the chest. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Idiot.”
“We going through that again?”
“If we have to.”
“You . . . you taste of peppermint gum,” he said.
“Is that good?”
His pulse was racing. “Well, I’d have to taste it again, you know, to give a proper opinion.”
She laughed softly, and turned away, starting back up towards the villa. Over her shoulder she said, “The management has received your application and will consider it in due course.”
Ned had to smile. Before following, he looked back out over the slanting field. It was fully dark now. The lights of Aix gleamed, sprinkled across the valley bowl. Above the city, Venus was brilliant, low in the sky. He turned back towards the house, saw Kate going up the stone steps to the terrace.
He shook his head, mostly in wonder. How did you move so fast from being uncertain and fearful about everything to this sudden feeling of happiness? And then back: because the image that came to him right then was of Melanie, on the shaded grass at the Roman theatre in Arles, speaking of how hard it could be to find love.
He thought of her, he thought of Ysabel. He went back up to the villa. His mom had called him for supper.
CHAPTER XVI
“I think,” said Meghan Marriner, “it is time for me to get up to speed here. Who’ll start?”
They had eaten, the dishes were cleared. Veracook was at the sink washing up. The kitchen doors were closed, and they were speaking in English. Vera hadn’t—apparently—seen the knives earlier. Ned hadn’t checked, but it seemed that Steve had. He’d gone towards the kitchen when the blade was thrown, and closed those doors.
Ned hadn’t noticed any of that. It would have been awkward to have their cook gossiping about weapons, he thought. Greg’s injury—scratched by an animal—was one kind of event in the countryside; violence in the villa would be something else.
Ned watched as his mother took some sheets of printer paper from beside the telephone and set them in front of her beside a cup of tea. She had her reading glasses on.
He usually had a decent idea of what his mother was thinking—it was important in life to have a read on your mother—but this was all new terrain. He kept glancing from her to his aunt, the red hair and the white. He saw his father doing the same thing, which made him feel better. Sometimes he didn’t think they looked so much alike, then he’d realize they did, a lot.
Meghan looked around the table now, waiting.
Ned cleared his throat. “It’s my story, I guess. Mostly. Kate and Aunt Kim can help as I go.”
Kate was still wearing his sweatshirt, and fiddling with a pen. They hadn’t called her mother in New York. Ned didn’t know what she’d said to his own mom—he’d seen them talking before dinner—but it had evidently been enough. She was still here.
He saw Aunt Kim, at the far end of the table from her sister, smiling a little. “I remember that note-taking,” she said, looking at Meghan. “You had these green notebooks with you all the time.”
“Blue. Someone,” Meghan replied, “needs to be organized here.”
“Melanie was,” Greg said.
“Then I’ll try to be,” Ned’s mother said. “So we can get her back.” She uncapped her pen.
Ned started in. He expected her to interrupt, challenge him. She didn’t. Not at the skull and sculpted head, not at the rose in the cloister or Phelan jumping from the roof. Not when Ned was sick by the mountain or fought the dogs outside the café.
She took notes. She did look hard at her sister when Ned told of his aunt’s phone call.
“I’d driven to London and flown down that morning. I’d become aware of Ned the day before,” Kimberly said. “In my garden. Nothing like that has ever happened before, Meg. Not even back when. I knew who he was and where he was, a kind of explosion in my head. Then he was gone. But I was pretty certain what had just happened. He’d crossed into the space where I am.” She looked at Ned, then at her sister. “I think . . . I know it has to do with our family, Meg. Blood ties. It can’t be anything else.”
“Your grandmother?” Edward Marriner asked quietly, from the middle of the table, opposite Ned.
“Great-grandmother, if this means anything.” It was his wife who replied. “The story was she had the second sight. And her father before her. People in Wales, Ireland, the west of England, they all tell those stories.”
No one said anything.
“Go on,” Meghan said to her son.
He told his own story. His mother wrote, neat handwriting, straight lines on the unruled paper. No challenges, no comments. He spoke of meeting his aunt by the roofless tower and Cadell and the wolves attacking there.
“What did you say? To make them stop?” It was Steve.
Kimberly glanced at her husband. “Some things about me, a place I’d been when I was younger. Someone I knew.”
“And it scared him off ?”
“Didn’t scare him. Made him think. Gave him a reason to back away. He wanted Ned out of the story, didn’t have any particular desire to kill him.”
“But he would have, if he had to?”
Meghan, looking at her sister.
Kim said quietly, “These two have caused a lot of damage over the years, honey.”
“Collateral damage?” Steve said.
“That’s about it,” Dave Martyniuk said. “It’s all about the two of them, and Ysabel.”
“Brys didn’t think so,” Ned said.
“Back up, Ned. You’re still at that tower.” His mother looked at him.
Ned backed up to the tower. Moved on towards Entremont. He was going to skip the walk up there, but Kate didn’t let him. She held up a hand, like a good student in class, and he stopped.
“I was feeling weird all day,” she said. “Like, as soon as I woke up.”
“Weird, how?” Meghan asked, looking over the top of her reading glasses, a doctor in her office.
Kate flushed. She lowered her gaze. “That gets embarrassing.”
“You don’t have to—” Ned began.
She held up her hand again.
“I felt older, and . . . darker. Stronger. Not dark as in bad. Dark as in . . .” She trailed off, looked for help.
“Desire?” Aunt Kim said softly.
Kate nodded, staring down at the table.
Ned saw Kim exchange a glance with her husband. “I do know a little about that. It was Beltaine. You were connecting through Phelan. And maybe Ned.”
“Why me?” Ned asked.
His aunt smiled
gently. “That’s the hard question in this, you know. Our family line, back a long way. We’re in this.” She looked at her sister. “That’s what happened to me, Meg.”
“But I was never like this before,” Ned protested.
“Everything starts somewhere, dear.”
“You never shaved before this year either, right?” Uncle Dave said helpfully.
His wife stared at him, her eyes wide. “My goodness. Thank you so much for the clarification, dear. That,” she added, “is an amazingly silly analogy.”
Uncle Dave looked abashed. “I, uh, have shaving on my mind, I guess.”
There was a brief silence. No one laughed.
“You’re walking up to Entremont,” Meghan Marriner said, looking at her notes. “Kate’s feeling strange. Go on.”
“Forgot to say, Phelan had told me to keep away that night. He’d overheard Kate and me planning the outing in the café, told me not to go, just before he left, and then we fought the dogs.”
“He tried to warn you?” Ned’s father looked thoughtful, but not as if the thinking was getting him anywhere.
“Why did you go up?” Steve asked. Fair question. Melanie was gone because they’d done it.
“I made him,” Kate said glumly. “Called him a wimp and stuff.”
“Oh, well, that’ll do it,” Greg said. “Really, I dig it, you had no choice. When a girl says that . . .”
A couple of smiles around the table this time.
Ned said, “It wasn’t far. It was just after five, maybe a quarter after. The place closed at six-thirty. Way before dark. He’d told me not to be there for Beltaine, and I figured it started at night.”
“It does,” Kate said. “But it got dark too soon.”
They shared the story, tripping over each other a little. The moon, the fires, the bull. Cadell and the druid and the spirits that came. Phelan appearing beside them. Ned phoning the villa.
Melanie. Ysabel.
Around the table there was silence as they spoke and when they were done.
“I just had to fall asleep back here,” Greg said bitterly, first to break the stillness.
Kate looked at him. “I’d be gone,” she said. “I’d be Ysabel now, if you had come.”
She began to cry.
Meghan pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and passed it down. She looked at Ned, and nodded calmly. He carried on alone, to Cadell and Brys in the laneway with the boar. He kept the one thing back: what he’d done to Cadell’s horns. He told of Brys attacking Greg.
“My first Purple Heart,” Greg said. “My mom will be proud.”
“After that,” Ned said, looking at his own mother, “Dad and the others came and got us, and then we talked to you.”
“And I called Dave,” said Aunt Kim.
Kate had stopped crying. She was still holding the handkerchief.
“And Dave was minding me in Darfur. We are going to have to talk about that,” Meghan Marriner said, looking at her brother-in-law.
“I know,” said Uncle Dave. “Will I get a blindfold and last cigarette?”
“Doubt it,” Meghan said. “Ned, you’re up to this morning? While I was flying here?”
He finished, taking her through Glanum and the cemetery. His father joined in there, and then Uncle Dave.
As they were wrapping up, laying the druid in his coffin, the telephone rang.
It seemed an alien, intrusive thing. No one moved for a moment. Ned’s father finally got up to answer it at the desk.
“Oliver!” he said, forcing cheerfulness. “How nice to hear from you. No, no, no, we ate early. North Americans, what can I tell you? What’s up?”
Everyone around the table was looking at him in silence. Edward Marriner said very little for a time. “Really?” once, and then, “That is extraordinary.”
And then, “No, no, of course it is interesting. Thanks for calling. I’ll be sure to tell the others.” And finally, “Yes, we might indeed think of a photograph.”
He hung up. Looked at all of them.
“It was just on local radio. Someone on a motorcycle dropped a heavy bag an hour ago in front of a café on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix, and tore off.”
“A bomb?” Steve asked.
Edward Marriner shook his head. “They thought so, obviously. Cleared the street. But when the police and dogs came, it turned out not to be.” He looked at Ned. “It was the sculpted head and skull stolen from the museum.”
Motorcycle. Ned looked at Kate. He couldn’t begin to think of what to say.
“These are the two things Ned saw? Under the cathedral?” his mother asked.
“They have to be,” her husband said.
Meghan sighed. “Fine. I’ve got a note, for what it’s worth.” She looked at Ned, and then at Kimberly. “Is that it? That takes us to this evening?”
“More or less,” Ned said. “I mean, I’m sure I’ll remember other things, but . . .”
His mother nodded. “But this is the story. Fine. A couple of questions?”
“I knew there’d be an exam,” he said, trying to smile.
“I’m the one writing it,” his mother said. “Or it feels that way.” She looked at her notes. “Wolves, twice, by that tower and in the cemetery, but dogs in the city?”
Ned blinked. What did that have to do with anything? He nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Meghan turned to her sister. “I’m playing along here, you understand? Don’t imagine I am buying everything.” She waited for Kim to nod, then said, “Do these . . . spirits change themselves into animals or take over real animals here?”
Kim thought about it. “I don’t know. I think they were dogs in Aix because there are always dogs there, and wolves would obviously cause an alarm.”
“Yes, I thought that. But you don’t know which they do, change or . . . occupy?”
Kim shook her head.
Her sister was still looking at her. “Ysabel takes over someone, right? Someone real? Melanie, this time, it would have been Kate. Different women each time, before?”
Kim nodded slowly. “I see where you’re going.”
“Good.”
Meghan removed her glasses and turned to Greg.
“Whatever else happens, young man, we are going to the hospital first thing in the morning, you and I. Rabies will kill you. The treatment’s easy now, but it must start quickly. I’m not going to be argued with on this. Some things we may not be able to do anything about, but simple medicine and common sense we can use. If these Celtic spirits entered an existing wild creature we have no idea what its condition was before.”
Greg opened his mouth. Meghan held up a finger.
“Gregory, hush. We will say you met an uncollared dog outside the locked cemetery gates. You like dogs, you knelt to pat it, it clawed you and ran away. End of story, end of questions. I show my Médecins Sans Frontières ID, I sign all their forms, and they give me the dosages to follow up. They like MSF here, they founded it. One immunoglobulin shot tomorrow morning and one vaccine, five over the next month. Not even remotely complicated. Guaranteed prevention. Are we done discussing this?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Greg said meekly. Ned would have said the same thing. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief that his mom was here, and not just because she wasn’t where she’d been yesterday.
Meghan Marriner made a precise tick mark on her first page of notes. She put her glasses on again and studied the page a moment, then looked up at her sister again.
“Same point. If Ysabel has become Melanie, or the other way round, what do we know from that? Is Melanie there in any way?”
Kim pursed her lips. “I think so.” She looked at her husband. “I think Ned had it right, before . . . the men return as themselves, but she’s summoned into someone, and she’s a little different each time.”
Meghan nodded, “So if she’s different it’s—”
“—Melanie that’s the difference,” Kate Wenger finished. “That makes sense.”
> Meghan Marriner smiled a little. “I try.”
“But what do we know if we know that?” Steve asked.
Meghan took off her glasses again. “Well, for starters, imagine she wanted to steer this, to tell us something. What does Melanie know about Provence, about Aix, this whole area?”
Ned’s brief excitement faded. He looked glumly at Greg and Steve, and then his dad.
Edward Marriner sighed. “Just about everything, honey. She spent half a year getting ready for this.”
“She’s worse than Kate, Mom. She’s worse than you,” Ned said.
“Well, really,” said his father, half-heartedly, “I wouldn’t go that far.”
Meghan raised an eyebrow at her son and then looked at her husband. “Careful, both of you. You are both in potential trouble tonight.”
“Why me? I didn’t compare the supernatural realm to an adolescent shaving,” Edward Marriner protested.
“I still think that was a good metaphor!” Uncle Dave complained promptly.
“That,” said Kimberly, “just makes the point for us. Better to keep quiet. Nobody needs to know you still think that way.”
“The management is taking the entire question of male idiocy under advisement,” Kate Wenger said.
Meghan grinned encouragement at her. “You said it, girl.”
Ned carefully avoided looking at Kate. He knew exactly what she was doing with that phrase. He’d either redden or laugh if he caught her eye, and neither would be useful just now.
He cleared his throat. “I hate to accuse my own mother of being frivolous, but is this really the best time to get into sisterhood bonding?”
“It isn’t such a bad time,” Aunt Kim murmured.
She was looking at Meghan. Ned blinked. Moods could change pretty fast, he thought.
Meghan shook her head, “Don’t rush me, Kim.” She paused, looked back down at her notes. “So you guys are saying we can’t predict anything from Melanie being part of this?”
“Maybe we can,” Kim said. “It’s a good thought, Meg. I just don’t know what, yet.”
Steve lifted his hand. They seemed to be copying Kate’s good-student gesture here. “You know, I’d bet a lot the reason there’s a search and not a fight is Melanie.”
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