Let’s face it: we didn’t know anything. All we had were a fistful of papers, a cranky baby, and a lot of guesswork.
Still, it was better than nothing. This feeling of helplessness was more than I could handle. I’d rather do something, anything, than just stand by waiting for someone else to jump in.
Wendy made us a pot of tea, while Gavan stood by the back door, taking in everything with that all-encompassing (and slightly unnerving) gaze of his.
“You have imps,” he said.
“We haven’t seen imps around here in years.” The last infestation had occurred when I was a baby, far too young to remember. Everything I knew about them came from stories I’d heard growing up. Imps were like humanoid Corgis, yappy and argumentative and likely to bite you in the ankle.
“They left their mark near the nursery window,” he said. “It is to be expected. They always guard the children of the leader.”
“I would rather have an infestation of army ants,” I said.
Gavan laughed. The sound surprised all of us. “They are powerful protectors,” he said. “Their presence is a good thing.”
“If they can calm Laria down, bring on the imps,” I muttered.
“I didn’t know someone so small could make so much noise,” Wendy observed.
“I’m going to call Luke,” I said as I tried to think. “Maybe he can help us figure this out.”
Wendy brightened. “He’s a cop. He must know all about maps and landmarks and all that stuff.”
“How will he see the maps?” Gavan asked. “He has no powers of his own.”
“He doesn’t need powers,” I said. “I’ll take a picture with my phone and send it to him.”
“I do not understand how that is possible.”
“Stay tuned,” I said, feeling encouraged for the first time in hours.
At the very least, maybe the sound of his voice would soothe his baby girl.
I snapped a few pictures then tried to call Luke from my cell but couldn’t hang on to a connection long enough to send them. Frustrated, I switched to the old cordless handset from the landline. I whispered a thank-you to Luke for keeping it charged up.
He answered his cell on the second ring.
“Where are you?” I asked in lieu of hello.
“The airport hotel,” he said, sounding puzzled. “Why?”
“I need your help.”
“Tell me,” he said, snapping instantly into cop mode.
I laid out the situation as quickly and clearly as I could. “We think it’s some kind of map of a wooded area, but none of us can figure out where the exact area is.”
There was a long silence. “And you’re saying our ten-month-old daughter drew it.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Our baby daughter who can’t handle a spoon yet.”
“Luke, I know it sounds crazy but trust me, she drew it.”
“Did you ask her to explain?”
“You know she can’t talk.”
“Hey, she’s an aviator and a cartographer. Talking should be a piece of cake.”
“We can banter later. I need your help now. Mallory’s in-laws are going to call the highway patrols between here and Rhode Island if I don’t come up with something fast.”
“If they’re stuck on the highway, they’ll be found without a phone call,” he said. “Once the plows are out, they’ll be checking for stalled cars, fender benders, getting travelers to shelter.”
“What about before the plows?”
“Before the plows, nobody’s going anywhere.”
“They’re giving me until eight o’clock.”
“So what if they call the staties,” Luke said. “They have resources we don’t.”
“And we have secrets they couldn’t imagine.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Think about it, Luke. If they start crawling all over Sugar Maple, we’ll be found out in two seconds.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“How do you know?”
“State police patrol state roads and highways. Sugar Maple is out of their jurisdiction.”
“And what if they can’t find Mallory and Ava? What then?”
“We’ll deal with that problem when and if we get there.”
Somehow I didn’t find that very reassuring.
“The map is pretty crude,” I warned him as I wandered through the house, with Gavan and Wendy trailing close behind, hoping to bump into a hot spot. “It probably won’t make any sense, but I need your opinion. Gavan thinks she’s communicating in some old magick type of pictographs.”
“Like the drawings in front of a rest room that differentiate between males and females.”
“Except not half as easy to interpret.”
Luke’s silence spoke volumes. He wasn’t buying any of it.
“Forget you’re a logical, real world cop for a minute,” I said. “Think Sugar Maple.”
“This is a lot even for Sugar Maple.”
“Don’t cops follow every lead, no matter how implausible?”
“Not if it means tracking footsteps on the moon.”
“Humor me,” I said. “I think this means something.” My human intuition was working overtime.
Another long silence then, “Okay, don’t waste time waiting for cell service. Fax it over to me at the hotel.” He read the fax number off his welcome packet and I repeated it back to him.
We hung up and I tore through the house in search of our ancient fax machine. I finally found it under the bed, squeezed in between two big blanket bags filled with scraps of unidentified yarn.
“Don’t say a word,” I warned Wendy as I wiped off a thick layer of dust. “I forgot to tell the house sprites to clean under the furniture.”
Wendy made a noise somewhere between a snort and a flat-out laugh. “Nobody needs to tell me to dust. I’d be out of business if I did such a terrible job.”
“Maybe you should move to Sugar Maple,” I said as I carried the fax machine into the kitchen and attached everything that needed attaching. “Give the house sprites a little competition.”
She and Gavan exchanged a look that I pretended I didn’t see.
It took me a moment to remember how to work the fax but the machine rumbled to life, dialed out, and did its thing.
“Okay,” I said, stepping back from the fax. “Any time, Luke.”
“The maps are still here,” Gavan said, “but Luke sees them. What brand of magick is this that links to humans and their machines?”
“It’s called technology,” I said with a rueful grin, “and it just might put us magicks out of business one day.”
He looked overwhelmed and I felt a tug of sympathy for him. The man possessed powerful magick, but everyday life in the twenty-first century continued to overwhelm him. I could only imagine how difficult it was for the rest of Rohesia’s clan. Maybe I hadn’t done them any favors when I welcomed them to Sugar Maple.
But right now I had other things to worry about.
“What’s taking him so long?” Wendy fumed, pacing the length of my small kitchen. “Why doesn’t he get back to us?”
Ten minutes went by.
Then twenty.
We were coming up on an hour since I sent the pages to him and I was starting to wonder if maybe I should send them out again when the fax buzzed to life, spilling new pages onto the floor.
Moments later, the phone rang. I grabbed again for the cordless.
Luke didn’t bother with hello. “Grab the pages and follow along,” he said, in full-out cop mode.
I spread them out on the table. We all gathered around. Even Laria seemed focused.
“Ready,” I said. “I’m putting you on speaker.”
“I can read individual stands of trees and the basic terrain, but I can’t pinpoint the location. The problem is that a hell of a lot of New England reads exactly like this.”
I managed not to groan.
“It’s an aerial view, so it has to be
Sugar Maple,” he continued.
“An aerial view?” That surprised me. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.” He explained something about foliage density and the way Gavan had interpreted streams, ponds, and creeks. “I used Google Maps to verify that I was on the right track.”
“And you believe it is Sugar Maple.”
“It has to be,” he said. “Sugar Maple is the only town Laria has flown over.”
“Give her time,” I said as she squirmed against my shoulder.
His laugh was low and amused. For a moment, daddy trumped cop.
“It’s still a long shot,” he said. “This is all speculation.”
“I know that,” I said, “but Laria is trying very hard to tell us something and we have to follow through. The problem is, we don’t know where to start.”
“I started with some basic deductive reasoning to narrow the search area,” Luke said. “We know they didn’t go south of Sugar Maple because the highway is northwest.”
We all nodded, which was kind of silly since we weren’t using FaceTime.
“If they made it to a motel that was anywhere near the highway, they would have phoned Josh’s parents in Rhode Island. Since we know they didn’t call, we can rule that possibility out for now.”
This was Luke at his best and, despite the high stakes involved, I loved listening to him lay out the facts.
“So let’s assume they turned back before getting on the highway,” he went on. “That places them north of us.”
“Laria flew over the woods to the north,” I said.
“More than once,” Luke said. “Which means there are two possibilities: either Laria is telling us flat out that Mallory and Ava are stranded in the woods north of Sugar Maple or she’s extrapolating her first-hand knowledge to convey some place else.”
“In other words,” Wendy said, a slight edge to her voice, “you don’t have a clue.”
“I have plenty of clues,” he shot back. “What I don’t have are facts.”
“Given what we know”-- I paused for a moment to aim a little side-eye Wendy’s way “—or don’t know for sure, what would you do, Luke?”
“I’d get out there and start looking. If they’re stranded on the highway, they’ll be found, no problem. But local road crews won’t start operating until the snowfall ends. If they got stuck on one of the side roads, we can get to them a lot quicker, especially if you add a little magick to the mix.”
Gavan would begin to the northwest, heading toward the state road that led to the highway. Wendy would head northeast in case Mallory and Ava had turned back and somehow missed the turnoff to Sugar Maple and headed into the woods.
“The three of you need to stay in constant contact.” From the tone of his voice, I knew this was not up for debate. “You don’t want to put together a search party for a member of another search party.”
“I understand.”
“Want me to call Paul Griggs and Lorcan Meany and some of the others? I’m sure they’d come out and help.”
“No!” The word burst out on its own. “I mean, thanks, but we can handle this.”
“That was fast,” he said. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Of course there was. But I still hadn’t come close to processing the fact that old friends and neighbors were turning against me. “There is, but we’ll talk when you get home,” I said. “Right now, we need to concentrate on finding Mallory and Ava.”
I wasn’t looking forward to telling him that his best friends in town might be working against us, but I would worry about that later.
The annotated pages, complete with Luke’s own graphic interpretation of Laria’s drawings, definitely helped to pinpoint the search area we would be dealing with. It didn’t hurt that there was only one road in and out of Sugar Maple, but old logging trails still cut through the woods and it was possible, although unlikely, that they might have veered off onto one.
Assuming they were anywhere near Sugar Maple at all.
The whole search was probably an exercise in futility but the thought of doing nothing at all didn’t sit well with any of us, and especially not with Laria. I had returned her to her high chair, which wasn’t a popular decision until I gave her a new stack of blank pages and her multicolored markers. She inspected them carefully for a long moment, then pushed the pages off the tray and watched them drift down to the floor. The markers followed immediately after.
“I wish you could tell me what you’re thinking,” I said, crouching down so I could look into her beautiful gold eyes. “You’re so far ahead of me, honey, that I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.”
She caught and held my gaze. The air around us seemed to coalesce into a shimmering curtain of energy. Wendy and Gavan faded away. My cozy kitchen became nothing but a hazy memory.
The play of emotions on my daughter’s tiny face took my breath away. She still clutched Ava’s hot pink scrunchie in her fist, holding it out toward me, a look of near desperation in her eyes.
“Tell me,” I whispered. “Tell me what you want us to do.”
But despite the magick at her command, she was still a baby, without words to command.
“You don’t need language,” I urged her. “I’m listening.”
An image, hazy and indistinct, took shape between us. A little girl with blond hair . . . another body lying in a clearing near a fallen tree . . . oh God, was it Ava and Mallory?
The images disappeared before I could be sure.
“Please, Laria,” I begged my daughter, “bring the pictures back. I need to know where they are so we can help them.”
But the effort to conjure up the images had exhausted my daughter and she fell deeply asleep, her chin resting against her chest.
“What the hell was that all about?” Wendy demanded as the room swam back into focus. “One second you were normal and the next you were zoning out. I’m not ashamed to say you scared the daylights out of me.”
“It was Laria,” Gavan said, “using the ways of my people to help us.”
I spun around to face him. “You saw it, too?”
“No,” he said, “but the energies were strong and familiar. I understood what was happening.”
“They’re in trouble,” I said. “If what I saw is correct, the two of them are out near the edge of the woods.”
“Can you pinpoint which side of town?”
I shook my head. Unfortunately Sugar Maple was surrounded by thick, dense woods that extended in every direction. “I couldn’t make out any landmarks.”
We were wasting time. Seeing the little girl in distress set a fire under me to stop talking and start finally doing something. Before I became a mother, I would have been first in line to search for Mallory and Ava. Maybe if Elspeth had been around I might have pulled on my snow shoes and headed out, but she wasn’t. My priorities had changed and protecting Laria was now at the top of the list and always would be.
“I know this is asking a lot, but I need you two to go out there and start searching for them.”
Gavan didn’t hesitate. He was all in. Wendy followed but I could see that she was apprehensive.
I didn’t blame her one bit.
“If Elspeth were here, I’d be out there with you.” I hoped it didn’t sound as lame as I was afraid it did.
Nobody said anything.
“Luke might call again,” I stumbled on. “Or the in-laws. I need to man the phones.”
“I know that,” Wendy said gently. “You don’t have to apologize for being a mom.”
Was that what I was doing? I hoped not.
I ran to the back closet where we stored our winter gear and pulled out everything I could find. Wendy started layering on my sweaters, scarves, thick socks, and gloves. She topped off her ensemble with my huge ankle-length down coat, mittens, boots, and snowshoes.
I offered Luke’s heaviest coat and work boots to Gavan, who said thanks, but no thanks.
“You can’t go sear
ching the woods during a blizzard dressed like that,” I protested. Granted, he looked totally gorgeous in his embroidered cloak but there was no way a thin layer of embellished wool could protect him against a major storm.
“I will be fine.”
“Please, Gavan,” I said while Wendy watched and listened. “There’s a blizzard out there. Luke’s a little shorter than you are, but I think the coat will fit.”
“I have been through storms before and will be again.”
“You really should bundle up.” I’m not sure why I couldn’t let the issue go but I was like a dog with a particularly juicy bone. Maybe I just wanted him to look more like the rest of us and less . . . spectacular.
“He’s magick,” Wendy said, as if I needed reminding. “Weather doesn’t bother him.”
“Magick doesn’t protect you against everything this world can throw at you,” I said, sounding very much like a mom. “You still have to be careful.”
Gavan met my eyes. It wasn’t difficult to know exactly what he was thinking. Sugar Maple wasn’t the safe haven it used to be and he and Wendy were part of the reason why. We had lived in plain sight for centuries in peaceful anonymity. But now, with the addition of another human and a clan of old magicks, the balance had shifted toward suspicion. And with suspicion, came danger.
It had started small. Punctured tires. Smashed windows. Foolish pranks that weren’t pranks at all, but warnings. For the first time I wondered if maybe Mallory and Ava had fallen prey to one of them. I pushed the thought aside. First we had to find the mother and daughter, and then we could figure out how it all came down.
But now I was asking Wendy to go out into a blizzard and do my job for me. I was asking her to risk an encounter with beings, whether Sugar Maple residents or Rohesia’s clan members, who regarded her as a danger to their existence.
I was asking her to do my job.
And that was how I ended up giving my cousin a touch of magick to see her through.
Chapter 12
WENDY
At first I didn’t feel any different. I guess that was what surprised me the most. If this was being magick, it felt a lot like being human. Talk about a disappointment.
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