Bloodstone

by Gwen Hunter

  Far away, in the Low Country, Aunt Matilda’s phone rang. And rang. And rang. Black despair twisted through me, twining deep into my marrow. She wasn’t there. Aunt Matilda is always there.

  On the tenth ring a click sounded. A mechanical voice said, “Leave a message. We’ll get back to you.” A tone sounded. Stunned to hear a message machine when Aunt Matilda was so vehemently anti-electronic, anti-machine, I stuttered a moment before the words came, and then they were a torrent. “Davie’s been kidnapped. The kidnappers think I have something they want—coordinates—but I don’t have them. I got a vision of them beating him but I can’t find him. They’re going to start cutting on him if I don’t have what they want by tomorrow. And Jane is a St. Claire and she’s come into her gift and I don’t know what to do. Aunt Matilda, call me. This is—” Another tone sounded, then a click, and the line went dead.

  I looked up at Jubal, tears shimmering his form. “I don’t know what to do, Jubal. I don’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll figure it out, honeybunch,” he said as he knelt at my side and took me into his arms. “You may not have the wicked, clairvoyant, psychic St. Claires, but you have Isaac and Noe and me. And you have prayer. Don’t forget that.”

  I smiled into his shoulder, feeling the calm of his acceptance steal over me. I might be a failed St. Claire, one who never accepted her gift or lived up to her potential, one who ran from the gift in fear, but I had my friends. And that counted for more than anything else. And Jubal was right. I had prayer, even if I had run from El, too. I hugged Jubal hard and wiped my face, saying a small prayer, hoping El would listen to me even if I hadn’t listened much myself recently. Calmer, I went back to the papers, hoping that the cops, if they got anything from the phone call, would notify me soon.

  I was sitting in the law-enforcement center, subsequent to a fast, slippery drive across town. Madison and Evan stood to the side, watching a technician of some sort operate a videotape machine.

  “The Asheville cops isolated the time, and sent us portions of the films from the rock-and-gem show,” Madison said. “If you can spot him, they’ll look through the entire day, see if they discover anything that will let us ID him. But so far, they aren’t willing to just give up the tapes. Not without making me jump through some hoops.”

  On the small TV screen was a poor-quality video, people taking a step, then in the next frame appearing further along, taking a different step. It was hard to follow at first. I bent closer to get a clearer view, but my position didn’t help the condition of the filming. It pretty well sucked a robin’s egg.

  “We have fourteen camera angles for you to view. If you spot him, say something.”

  No kidding. I’d thought I’d just let you guess.

  On the fifth snippet of film, I spotted not the man but my backpack, and pointed. “That’s me. And…” I bent closer and away again. “That’s him, there. Watching me.”

  Madison made a disbelieving sound, as if he was surprised that I would find anything. As if he thought I might have made up a story like getting kidney-punched and robbed. And having nothing stolen, et cetera, et cetera, yada, yada. Okay, he had a point.

  In the tenth snippet of film I saw the brown man again, this time carrying my backpack. I tapped the screen and sat back, crossing my arms, grinning up at the detective. I didn’t even have to say it. My expression said it all.

  “I think we have enough to ID the man,” he said stiffly. “Thank you for coming down to the station.”

  “What? I don’t get to look through the mug books or anything?”

  “We have technology for that sort of thing. When we narrow it down, if there’s any question, we’ll call you.”

  I swiveled in my chair and looked up at Evan. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” He seemed amused by my reaction. Jack Madison merely removed the tape and left the room.

  “That man is just brimming with personality.”

  8

  Tuesday, 12:45 p.m.

  The sleet and freezing rain had tapered off, lying in crusty gray piles against the window ledges. The streets were thick with ice, and nothing moved outside except a local man who shoveled walks for drinking money, and the town’s snow-plows, which pushed the dirty sludge into drifts almost four feet high. A warm front was expected tomorrow and it would all melt, but for now, it was a dangerous, muddy, salted mess.

  A figure walked past the window, feet crunching ice, body hunched against the wind. He slipped and almost fell before he turned and entered Bloodstone Inc. with a blast of cold air that chilled the shop ten degrees in a single instant. He was wearing city clothes, inappropriate for the mountains and the weather—a suit, wingtip shoes, a long wool coat. All gray and black. No muffler, no ear protectors, no hat, and thin leather gloves that looked stylish but probably didn’t offer much protection against the cold. I slid Davie’s papers back into the crate, set the afghan on top, and stood. “Can I help you?”

  He pulled off the gloves as he answered, “Are you Tyler St. Claire?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Adam Wiccam, Treasury Department.” With a pale hand, he opened a leather wallet and showed me a badge and ID. Any good computer geek can generate IDs, but this looked realistic, with a hologram seal to one side. He didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did I. There was something about the man that I didn’t like on first meeting, and touching him wasn’t something I wanted to do.

  “What can you tell me about your brother, David Lowe.”

  “Nothing,” I said, startled. Dave had never gone by the Lowe name; neither of us had. Why…? I reached out with my gift, and touched—nothing.

  “We’ve been looking for him for the last ten years in connection with a theft of government property.” Wiccam smiled, a twist of lips that didn’t reach his eyes, and I knew instantly he was both lying to me and telling the truth.

  Davie, a thief?

  As the thought crossed my mind, Wiccam closed off from me behind a wall of nothingness much like my own. The absolute darkness of the space where his mind should be was a shock. Was that what Davie found when he searched my mind? That emptiness? Remembering the men who attacked me in the alley, the men who projected trees and shrubs, I shut down my own mind, hard.

  “We traced him to Connersville, but he isn’t answering his phone or his door. Have you seen your brother recently?”

  I didn’t know what to say. This man was a liar, a very good one. He blended truth and lies into a confusing concoction that he might even believe on some level. And he had a wall like I did, though I bet his wasn’t a medieval stone wall. His was probably some high-tech electric fence. His eyes were hazel with bright yellow flecks. They gazed into mine, curious, waiting. And as I struggled to open my mouth, his eyes changed. A kind of knowing entered into them, a knowing I had only seen with St. Claires.

  Into the awful silence after his question, the door opened and Evan Bartlock entered, stamping his feet and blowing billows of breath until the door closed. Wiccam’s eyes shuttered and he spun, coattails flying. As he saw Evan, I thought I caught a trace of annoyance cross his features, quickly masked. What was going on here?

  Bartlock paused, reading the tableau of two people and the tension that bound us. Then he smiled. “Ms. St. Claire. Is my watch ready?”

  We didn’t repair watches, at least not the timekeeping mechanism. I opened my mouth, not knowing what to reply.

  “The silver bracelet was soldered last night,” Jubal said from over my shoulder. I closed my mouth. “But as we discussed, the metals may not hold. Differing metallic compounds often won’t hold a solder joint for very long. I’d like to work on it again, if you don’t mind leaving it another day.”

  “Sure. Awful weather, isn’t it?”

  I looked back and forth between them. Puzzled.

  “Bad. But it should improve soon. Can I show you that amethyst piece again while you’re here? I know your sister would love it.”

  “Great. I’d
love to see it.” Following that artful dialogue, they moved to a display two feet from Wiccam. I knew for a fact that there was no amethyst in that display. They were protecting me, making a point to be in close proximity to Wiccam. If I hadn’t been so confused, I would have smiled.

  “Here’s my card. If you hear from your brother, please call me. We can save him a lot of trouble later on, if he’ll just come in now.” Wiccam put his card in my hand without touching me, nodded, and glanced at the two leaning over the display case as he went back out into the weather. Standing in the cold air, he pulled up his collar and crunched off.

  I followed the man to the door and leaned against the cold glass, watching Wiccam as he moved unsteadily down the street, sliding in his city-boy shoes. I had said exactly six words to Wiccam, yet I knew he had gleaned much more from me than the six words would have shared, just as I had taken much more from him. Fingers on the glass, I considered what we had garnered from each other.

  Wiccam was not a cop. He worked for the government, but not in a law-enforcement capacity. He was a very good liar, but hadn’t expected that I would be able to ferret that out. He was gifted in ways similar to the St. Claires. He might have suspected that I was gifted, too, but he hadn’t been certain of it until he came into the shop. He called Davie by our step-father’s name yet knew we were siblings. He knew Davie was gifted. Now he knew I was, too, though he might not know how spectacularly inefficient and clumsy I was.

  I watched Wiccam as he turned down Main Street and disappeared. He had come to the shop to discover what I was. And he knew Davie was in trouble.

  Isaac eased into the line of cars at the front of the school. I braced myself with a hand on the dash, craning my head in an attempt to spot Jane through the window of the principal’s office. Due to the weather, the school board was ending classes early, letting out at two, but Mrs. Godansky felt that Jane couldn’t wait that long. She had called while I watched Wiccam walk away, telling me that the stress of her father’s kidnapping was too hard on the girl. My niece needed to come home.

  From the street I saw the back of Jane’s head in the bottom of the window. She was moving slowly, as if she talked to someone who was not in view. Isaac parked and I shoved the door open, racing across the slippery ice to the school. The SUV doors locked behind me with a beep and Isaac followed, his gait slow and steady.

  The heat was stifling in the old school, the air so arid it made my skin burn and nostrils dry with my first breath. I entered the school office and saw Mrs. Godansky standing by the printer, a silver cross and chain glinting around her neck. I noticed the door to her office was closed. Who was talking to Jane?

  Mrs. Godansky raised a hand to stop me and opened the office copier with the other. “I have Jane’s assignments here for the next week.”

  Isaac entered behind me. “Why?” he asked when I didn’t respond.

  “Jane is…” She stopped and seemed lost for words. Embarrassed? Mrs. Godansky flushed beneath her mound of gray hair as she started over. “Jane is not well. I think the stress of her father’s disappearance is more than she can stand. I’ve put in a request for her to be homeschooled until further notice.”

  “What’s happened?” I asked. There was no sound from beyond the closed door. “Who’s with my niece?”

  The principal ushered us away from her office door, into a huddle at the end of the scarred desk separating the front office from parents, supplicants, solicitors and unruly students. Godansky inclined her head and lowered her voice to indicate this was between us three. “No one. And that is part of the problem. Jane has begun talking to herself. Some of her teachers think she may need to see a…mental-health professional.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  I whirled and saw Jane standing in the crack of the open door. Her face was blotchy red and her eyes were swollen from crying.

  “And I’m not stupid and I’m not weird and I am not possessed,” she said, her voice rising with each phrase.

  “Of course, you aren’t,” I said as I knelt beside her. Carefully, I put a hand on Jane’s shoulder and opened myself to her. Inside, she was a whirlwind of emotions, anger, hurt, shame, guilt. “Ashes and spit,” I whispered, understanding what was happening instantly. She hadn’t been able to wall off or filter out the thoughts of her classmates or teachers. She had been inundated with impressions from them all for the past five hours.

  When I had come into my gift it had been summer. I had hidden away in my room for weeks, through the heat of July and August. By the time school started, my mind was secured behind a nearly unbreachable wall. Jane had been thrown into the maelstrom of kids, kids at their worst, their most uncertain, their most cruel age.

  “Yeah, it sucked a really big egg,” she said, starting to cry again. “A dinosaur egg.”

  “We’ll take you home, Jane,” I said. “And you don’t have to come back until you’re ready.”

  “Good. I hope it’s not until next year, ’cause Mrs. Godansky thinks I got a devil in me. She thinks I need to be exercised.”

  My mouth fell open. Isaac turned his full attention to the stern, gray-haired woman. Mrs. Godansky had the grace to blush. I wondered what else Jane had picked out from the woman’s thoughts. I gathered my niece close and filled my mind with all the good things she liked—chocolate, bubble baths, marshmallows toasted over the fireplace, her cat, Dynomite.

  Jane leaned into me, wrapped her arms around my neck and sighed the words, “I never had a chocolate bubble bath. And she wants to jump the janitor’s bones.”

  “Well, I never!”

  I stifled a laugh and picked Jane up in my arms. Isaac handed me the keys and I carried the little girl from the building, leaving a thoroughly ticked off black belt master of death to deal with the humiliated and disconcerted principal. The black belt master of death part was Jane’s. She thought Isaac was way cool. She wanted to know what jump bones meant. I was never so glad of my wall as now.

  It took me hours to get Jane calmed down, leaving me with both a splitting headache from opening myself to her and then shielding so hard after, and a mental picture of Jane taking a chocolate bubble bath, an image she kept sending me. If I had kept drugs in the house, I’d have been tempted to sedate the girl.

  Instead, we talked for hours, discussing the thoughts of her classmates, teachers, and even the clinical meaning of jumping bones. The birds-and-bees was not a discussion I had wanted to have with my niece, but since she could, in all likelihood, pick up impressions from Jubal and Isaac and any other sexually mature adult she might meet, it was best handled by me, and quickly. I could imagine the images she might pick up if she asked about jumping bones at the dinner table. The thought made me shudder inside. After I popped two ibuprofen, Jane and I also spent an hour on my wall.

  I had never tried to show anyone except Davie what my wall looked like. When he finally came back from wherever he had disappeared to for so many years, he had searched me out in the phone book and come directly to the shop. I carried with me, as if it had happened only this morning, the vision of him walking in the door, Jane, a toddler, riding on his hip, plaid dress flared out, black patent-leather shoes kicking.

  The first thing he had wanted, once we got over a tearful reunion and introductions, was to see my wall. He had assumed I had no St. Claire talent at all. He had thought it skipped a generation in me, as the gift had been known to do, because when he touched me, hugged me, he saw only an empty space. A nothingness. I had tried to open to Davie over the years, and had successfully shown him the shaped-stone wall, but had never been able to show him beyond it into the place of stillness in my mind. He couldn’t seem to envision it, and words to help him had failed. Maybe it was impossible to see nothingness? I was willing to try again with Jane.

  After the frank sex talk, which left her in gales of laughter about Mrs. Godansky and the janitor, after we went over the record of her friends’ thoughts and indulged in a serious counseling session about looking into a pote
ntial boyfriend’s thoughts, we sat on the rug in front of the blazing fire, ready to attempt my wall.

  A lit candle between us, our knees nearly touching, we slipped into a meditative breath pattern, both of us concentrating on the candle flame, breathing in a sense of peace and breathing out our negativity. When I felt we had each reached a calm state of mind, I opened to Jane, let her see my image of the flame, light that lifted upward, unwavering and pure. I spoke, my voice soft and slow.

  “When I need to blank out other people, other thoughts, when I don’t want to accidentally project something a St. Claire might pick up, I envision a wall.” I formed it in my mind, a wall of curved, shaped stone with crenellations at the top. “Like this. Inside is a dark, empty place, like…like the inside of a stone.” I eased the wall aside to reveal an emptiness, the emptiness of stone in my mind. “Hard. Solid emptiness. A carved and polished double-fist of onyx. And I am within it, safe.

  “I see the stone, its grain pure and hard as diamond. I feel myself inside the stone, breathing stone. Calm, like a stone, fills me. I am the stone.” My wall closed back over the stone. Perfect emptiness all around me, within me.

  “Ahh,” she sighed. “Yes.” Jane’s breathing slowed. Stuttered.

  My eyes flew open. Her breathing stopped.

  I broke the image and reached across the candle, grabbing Jane’s shoulders. I shook her. “Stop it! Come out of it!” I said. She slumped over. Without thinking, I slapped her. Hard.

  The sound of her shocked inhalation was wet, harsh, as if her lungs had closed up, folded over, crushed together.

  “Jane!”

  Her eyes opened and she took another breath, this one less labored. She blinked and touched her face, stunned. “You slapped me.”

  “Spit and decay! I’ll slap you harder if you ever do that to me again.” I remembered to breathe myself. My own lungs ached with fright.