by Lee French
She blinked at him and sucked in a breath. Then she blinked some more, utterly confused. “What?”
He grinned. “I’m gonna guess he didn’t really talk about it to you and your brother much. My girls are aware I’m a Spirit Knight, though. Same as your dad was.”
“Spirit—what? What are you talking about?” In a few short statements, Justin had gone from an eccentric but decent person to a lunatic. Claire stared, so confused she didn’t know what to think about anything. “My dad was a park ranger.”
Justin chuckled. “Yeah, well, in a way, that’s part of what the job is. I heard you say he kept a horse in the backyard. You do know that a backyard isn’t the kind of place you usually keep a horse, right? Not one in a city, anyway.”
Claire opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. Visits from the police and animal control came to mind. The neighbors had complained. Some of her friends’ mothers had made comments. Her brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“Daddy protects us all from bad things that make animals go weird.” Lisa beamed at her father.
“Wait, what?” Claire’s eyes flicked from Missy to Justin. As much as she thought him nuts, if he could explain everything that had happened earlier, she’d listen. “There are bad things that make animals go weird?”
Justin nodded. “It’s kind of complicated. Why? Do you know a young man who’s having trouble with being chased by animals for no apparent reason?”
“No. It’s me. Dogs and cats and birds all chased me down this afternoon.” She lifted her leg to show him the bandages. “That’s where I got all these scratches and bites. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That they all got a memo about how I shouldn’t be cutting school, I guess.”
For what seemed to be several long seconds, Justin stared at her. His face slowly slid into a frown. “They don’t usually attack at first, just chase. You must have something in your possession.” After a pause, he added, “Girls can’t be Knights.”
Affronted and confused at the same time, she raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
“It just never happens. Knights are always men. When you’re done eating, we’ll go outside and I’ll see if I can figure out what it might be.”
His words sounded final to Claire, and she turned back to her meal, wondering if she would’ve been better off staying in the office for the rest of the day.
Chapter 6
Justin
Justin draped his cloak over his shoulders and stepped into his rubber boots again. He handed Marie’s long purple coat to Claire so she wouldn’t freeze in the crisp evening air, then watched her trudge outside with her head down. He hoped he could fix at least one of her problems. A Knight’s daughter deserved more peace than she’d had. She also deserved help from the Knights, because he doubted that fire had been an accident. As he recalled, Avery, who managed to be both a Knight and keep his job as a Portland cop, had promised to look into it.
He considered forcing her into the woods until he checked her shoes. Her feet would go numb in this chill halfway to his sycamore. Instead, he took her to the wood-chopping clearing and had her sit on the stump. It should be good enough for this.
Tariel stepped into sight. “Have we decided to chop her up for firewood?”
“No, we’ve got enough to get through the winter already. Turns out she’s got something on her that’s attracting ur-phasms.”
Claire squinted up at him with a sulky scowl. “Are you talking to the horse?”
Justin grinned. “Yes. She’s a sprite. More or less, she’s a dead person stuck in a horse.”
Tariel snorted. “I love it when you talk dumb.”
“And a pain in my ass. Every Knight has one, though they’re not all horses.”
“Are you saying…Kupiri was a dead person stuck in a horse?”
Justin moved to Tariel’s side and rubbed her nose. No matter how annoying she got, he appreciated the several times she’d saved his life. “Yes. This isn’t really why we’re here, though.”
“Why are we here?” Claire looked around. “Outside, I mean. You said everybody knows everything about your Spirit Knight stuff, so why can’t we talk inside? It’s freezing out here.”
“Because we need to do more than talk, and it’s best if Tariel helps me do the other part. Besides, just because my daughters know what I do, that doesn’t mean I want them exposed to the actual work.”
She sighed and rubbed her face with both hands. “Well, get on with it, then. Am I gonna live?”
Of course the teenage girl he’d rescued turned out to be sarcastic with a heaping helping of grumpy on top. He rolled his eyes and reminded himself sternly that she had cause to feel that way and he understood it. When he was her age, he’d been in his umpteenth foster home. It had made him a giant, cranky pain in the ass too.
Setting all that aside, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, preparing to do something he’d only ever heard described before. Getting into the Palace happened by instinct. This stuff took effort. He raised his hand and focused on Claire, feeling Tariel’s presence as an anchor. According to Kurt, he had to think really hard about the person he wanted to scan for Palace influence. Once he managed to tune his aura to hers, he’d be able to see…something. Assuming Kurt hadn’t been speaking in code or yanking his chain.
Justin thought about the darkness of Claire’s hair and the striped socks she still wore despite having been given a fresh pair of Marie’s white ones. She clung to one of Missy’s dolls, a patched and well-loved reminder of his own late grandmother.
She shifted on the stump, rolling her shoulders uncomfortably. “You’re creeping me out.”
He snorted. With a small shake of his head, he forced himself to focus. Then he saw it. A faint blue outline shimmered around her entire body and a bright white light gleamed over her heart. “Do you see what I’m seeing?”
Tariel bobbed her head. “Yes, and it’s strange.”
“‘Strange’ is kind of an understatement.”
“I’m trying to protect your delicate male ego.”
“That’s a first.”
Claire stomped to her feet. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here.”
“I’m not,” Justin said. “I’m just having a conversation with someone who only speaks Swahili about something only a dragon would understand.”
Tariel whinnied a burst of laughter.
“This is serious, Tariel. She can’t be a Knight. It’s not possible.”
Claire blinked, her petulance draining away. “Whoa. Wait. What?”
Tariel tossed her head and shoved him aside. “Denying what you can see doesn’t make it less real. Suck it up. Accept and move on.” She walked away twitching her tail.
According to every Knight he’d spoken to, only men had ever been Knights, and only men could ever be Knights. The order had records going back two millennia that clearly showed Knights had only ever been male. Kurt had told him that the most likely explanation was a gene on the Y chromosome that triggered a change between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.
Here stood the first female Knight, ever, and fate had chosen him to be her mentor. The responsibility of an apprentice crashed down onto his shoulders. While he’d known it would happen eventually, he’d hoped for another decade or two. That seemed to be a theme in his life. From the moment he’d lost his mother as a boy, life had rushed to shove as many duties as it could into his path.
“She’s right.” He watched his soulbound partner disappear behind the farmhouse. With a sigh, he turned to Claire. “You’re going to be a Knight. No matter how impossible it is, it’s happening.”
“So…what’s that mean?”
He crushed down a stab of jealousy. When it first happened to him, he’d had no idea what was going on. Claire would know and expect it all. “At some point in the near future, you’re going to be drawn into a place we call ‘the Palace.’ No one really knows exactly where it is. You’ll get pulled i
nto it and find yourself in an empty bedroom with shelves on the walls, and your own personal bathroom. It’s part of the dormitory wing—”
“I’m going to get my own room in a palace?” She gazed at him eagerly for the first time and hopped to her feet. “Let’s go! Take me there now, I want to see that. I can sleep there instead of that stupid foster home.”
“I can’t.” He sighed, because he understood. At her age, he’d felt the same. “A Knight can only take himself there. Herself. We don’t open a doorway anyone can walk through, we transport ourselves there somehow. I’m not really clear on the nuts and bolts of how it works. I don’t think anyone is.”
“Okay.” Her bright smile faltered. “You can teach me, then. Right?”
“No. Sorry.” Seeing her deflate like this tugged at his heart. His girls did that sometimes when he had to leave. “It’ll happen when it’s time for it to happen. Until then, you just have to wait. Once it does happen, I can teach you other things, and you’ll be able to get there on your own whenever you want. So it’s still something to look forward to.”
“I guess.” She pinched a piece of the faded yellow yarn that served as hair for the doll and rolled it between her finger and thumb.
In her place, he thought he’d be wondering if this crazy guy might be lying to manipulate him, or testing him for some reason. He tried to think of some way to help her feel better about all of this, and came up blank. She’d have to wait, whether she liked it or not. In the meantime, he could give her a safe haven. Marie’s father had done that for him.
“We can talk about it more later. For now, do you know how to fight? That’s the most important skill to work on at the beginning. You can’t be a Knight and not know how to fight.”
Claire shrugged. She’d gone into a sulk, and he didn’t know her well enough yet to guess at what might rouse her from it. Marie might have some ideas; she’d been a teenage girl up until a few years ago.
He stuck his thumbs into his back pockets. “Sounds like a no, but we don’t have to fix that now. Think about what kind of fighting you want to learn, and I’ll figure out a way for you to learn it. I’m kind of a traditional ‘punching’ and ‘sword-swinging’ guy, but there are Knights who do all kinds of martial arts, and use guns, bows, even spears and staves. You should go with whatever works for you.”
Rubbing one arm, she looked down and her hair fell forward to obscure her face. “My dad used a sword.”
“Yeah. I can teach you that, if you want. It’s not too hard to pick up if you’re willing to practice. You might do better with smaller blades, though. They’re lighter, and you don’t have a lot of muscle tone yet.”
He had a feeling he could learn to hate teenage girl shrugs. “I guess.”
“Okay, then. We’ll start that tomorrow. For now, we need to find you a place to sleep. Marie’s parents have a spare room, but I’m not sure it’s wise to put you that far away when you could get sucked into the Palace at any moment. Do you mind sleeping on our couch?”
“I guess not.”
Though he’d never been much of a praying man, and didn’t strictly believe in God at this point, Justin sent up a prayer that neither Lisa nor Missy would turn out like this. Dealing with it once in his life would be plenty.
Chapter 7
Claire
Claire settled on the couch with a blanket and pillow, amazed by how Justin doted on his girls, helping out with their baths and bedtimes. Her dad sometimes had handled that when Mom didn’t make it home in time, but they never did it together. She almost wanted to hate Missy and Lisa for how lucky they were without knowing it, except Missy had given her the doll she still clutched.
She closed her eyes to try to sleep. Her mind refused to let her, churning over the day. She wondered what other secrets her parents had taken to their deaths that would come back to bite her in the butt. Mom had told her that the locket had been a present for her third birthday, something they got to cheer her up when she’d been very sick. Everything else but the few belongings she’d taken to Alicia’s house that night had been lost in the fire, making it the only thing she had left of her parents besides faded memories.
Her father had been a Knight. Justin hadn’t explained what they did, or why they even called themselves that. The fact she’d need to learn to fight with a weapon bothered her, though, because that meant things existed that needed to be fought with weapons. No matter what their actual purpose, a group of people usually only called themselves “knights” if they protected something or fought in some kind of war. Would she be expected to kill people? The thought made her cringe.
A vast gulf sat between beating someone up and killing them. She didn’t want to imagine what Brian’s parents would have to live through if she’d beaten him to death instead of just knocking him to the ground. The thought gave her flashes of the charred husk she’d seen when Alicia’s mom took her home the next morning.
~*~
Alicia’s mom sucked in her breath as soon as they turned down Claire’s street, and the car rolled slowly to the mass of emergency vehicles blocking the way, lights flashing. Her neighbors loitered on the edges in sweatpants and robes, clumped together in chattering groups. Claire stared out the window, not comprehending any of it, not even when she realized that gaping space should be filled with her house.
The car stopped and a police officer approached the window. Alicia’s mom rolled it down and cut him off as he started to tell her to turn around.
“Their daughter,” she whispered, “she’s in the car. She was at our house last night.”
The cop blinked and turned to meet Claire’s bewildered stare. He reached back to open the door her nose was pressed against. “We’ll take care of her, ma’am. Thank you for bringing her back.”
“I had no idea. Are they okay?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. The parents and the boy were killed in the fire. We thought we just hadn’t found her yet.”
“I can take her home and take care of her until you can find a place for her.”
“No, ma’am, I can’t let you do that. We have to take her downtown.” he opened the door, and Claire watched two men carry a black bag to a van. She still didn’t understand yet. Not until she walked around the ambulance and saw the one blackened beam still standing, surrounded by more charred debris and the now-barren garden.
“There was a horse back here,” someone shouted. “It’s dead too!”
~*~
Hot tears slid down Claire’s face and she knew she would never be able to kill another human being. Or anything else, for that matter, other than icky bugs. Defend herself, yes. She’d always do that, but with her fists and her knees—not a sword, not a dagger, not even a pair of scissors or a screwdriver. No one deserved to come home to something like that, or to never have someone come home to them.
She slipped into sleep unwillingly, surrendering to nightmares of fire and burning. A flaming hand tried to take the locket from her, and she held on to the chain until her flesh blistered and fell away. When she woke, she grabbed the locket, desperate to make sure she still had it. As she’d done many times during those first few weeks after the fire, she rubbed the warm metal on her cheek. She imagined it to be her mother’s hand, offering what comfort she could.
A hand on her hair made her jump, and she saw a dark figure outlined by a dim bulb that hung over the sink. The light flared around the figure’s head in a halo. “I’m sorry,” Marie whispered. “I heard you gasp and saw you move and thought you might be having a nightmare.”
Claire took a deep breath and rolled onto her back, willing her heart to slow its frantic beating. “Yeah, sort of.” She rubbed her eyes and looked around, seeing no one else. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she asked, “Do you want some help with breakfast?”
“No, go ahead and tie up the bathroom if you need to. Justin won’t be up until the girls are, and that should be at least an hour.” She stepped away, turning to the kitchen and the matter of food.
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Claire rolled off the couch and disappeared into the bathroom, determined to take as little time as possible. She stripped and showered in tepid water, then realized she didn’t have any clean clothes to change into. If only she’d stopped to grab her backpack before fleeing school—she always carried extra underwear in it. Or better yet, she could have picked up her emergency overnight bag. Either would have involved actually being able to remember her locker combination when she was that angry, which might have kept her standing there long enough to simmer down and go back to the office.
She could have gone back. She still could go back. At the group home, she could count on staying safe where no one cared about her. Here, it sounded like she had a dangerous job ahead of her, but Justin and Marie—however loony they might be—would watch over her. The choice confused her. Maybe she’d figure it out today, while Justin worked on whatever training he had planned for her.
Wrapped in a towel, she peeked her head out of the door, only to come face-to-face with a shirtless Justin rubbing his eyes, yawning, and reaching out to push the door open. She cleared her throat, trying to avoid staring at his chiseled six-pack abs, tight pecs, and thick biceps visible in the soft glow of the blue nightlight in the hall.
“Oh. Morning.” He stood aside to let her pass.
Judging him to not be awake enough to leer at her, she grabbed her dirty clothes and ducked out. When she saw Marie in the kitchen, she hesitated to ask for anything. Clothing, however, seemed kind of important. “Um, can I—”
“Oh, you need fresh clothes. Sorry, I should’ve thought of that. Just a minute.” Marie stopped making breakfast to hurry away.
If that woman apologized to her one more time for something no one should apologize for, she would…something. No real person behaved that way. Marie was too nice. That probably explained how she’d wound up with Justin, who was also too nice. These people couldn’t actually be real. Heroic knights always had fatal flaws, like being a jerk, or stupidity, or serial infidelity.