The Silent Strength of Stones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Try it,” Willow said.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Not just now.”

  “Nick, tell me how you feel about me.”

  “Don’t, Evan.”

  He laughed, “How can you say no to me, Nick? What are you hiding?”

  “I can say no because you told me before not to let you mess yourself up again, and I’m not hiding anything from you. I’ll tell you later.”

  “What?” He jumped up and sat on my stomach, then glared at me as breath oofed out of me. “I never said any such thing, I would never give my actions over into your hands!”

  I looked up into his eyes and tasted a syrup of sadness, because I had handed myself to him almost utterly—was counting on him in ways I didn’t even know yet—but he was saying he wouldn’t return the favor. I had a clearer idea of where I stood in his regard. Not the almost-equals I had assumed. I closed my eyes and sighed.

  “Hey,” he said, pawing at my shoulder, “that probably came out wrong. What did I say that makes you think you can stop me from messing up?”

  I sifted through my memories. I wasn’t sure exactly what he had said, but I remembered feeling it gave me permission to question his orders when I thought they would get him in trouble. I remembered the specific instance from that morning, when I had been wide open to his words because he had told me to be, and he had said I could ask questions if I didn’t want to do what he told me to; but this was something even more specific, something he had said in the last little while.

  “What was it, Nick? Tell me.” This time his voice had that hot edge to it I had heard in my own voice and in Willow’s when we were persuading people against their wills.

  I opened my mouth. “‘Don’t let me do that to you again, Nick.’” Megan jumped. It was eerie. Evan’s voice was lower than mine, but it sounded like Evan’s voice coming from my mouth.

  “Do what?” Evan asked.

  “Something stupid that will get you into more trouble.”

  “I never said that part.”

  “I guess I assumed that was what you meant.” I remembered: he had rendered me dumb and then undid it, and I had assumed he meant I should stop him from making me do things that would make him look foolish. This introduced a new element to our relationship: creative hearing.

  I wanted to stop doing everything else and just think about that for a while, but Evan said, “Why is it stupid for me to want to know how you feel?”

  “Because we’re not alone,” I said.

  He sat staring down at me for a long moment, then gazed away across the pool. Presently he turned and licked my nose. “You fascinate me,” he said.

  “I wish I knew what you were talking about,” said Megan.

  “You would be able to if you could deal with him turning back into a human,” I said. “On the other hand, I’m not always sure what we’re talking about, and I can understand the words.” I looked at Kristen. She was still peacefully asleep. I looked toward the office. Adam Lacey was nowhere in evidence, which didn’t mean he wasn’t watching.

  “If he changes into a human, is he going to keep kissing you?” Megan asked.

  “Nick, say this to her: a lick is not a kiss. A lick is just a way of getting reacquainted.”

  I grinned and said it out loud, then added, “Of course, he hasn’t said he’d turn back into a human, anyway.”

  “I’ll do it for the rest of the afternoon if she likes. After that…it depends on what happens.”

  “The Friday night dance,” I said.

  “Make Nick teach you how to dance,” Willow said.

  “Megan can teach him. More fun for both of them.”

  “It is really a wonderful thing, Evan,” said Willow. “You get to hold the other person, but the music sings through both of you. It’s a good way to live inside music.”

  “Get off me.” I pushed at Evan until he jumped down off my chest. “Megan, you want to try this again?”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll close my eyes.”

  Evan lay down between the chaises. This time I sat up and watched him, but I still couldn’t understand what I was seeing, The white wolf stretched out on the cobbles, laid his head between his front paws, and shimmered and pearled and shifted, and then there was a tall muscular man with wolf-bite scars and a blond mane. He rolled over and stretched his arms up in the air. “Ahhhh.”

  I tossed him his swimsuit and he pulled it on. He sat up. “You can be my valet,” he said.

  At the sound of his voice, Megan opened her eyes and smiled.

  “As long as you only have one pair of shorts, I think I can handle it Megan, this is Evan. Evan, this is Megan. I hope you like each other.”

  Megan reached out a hand, and Evan took it and licked it. I nudged him with my foot “Stop it! Shake her hand.”

  “That’s stupid,” Evan said. “Your tanning oil is making me hungry,” he told Megan.

  She put her feet flat on the ground and leaned forward until her face was close to his. She stared into his eyes. He stared back. She reached out, slowly, and touched his hair, snagged her fingers in it, and he leaned his head against her hand and closed his eyes.

  “It’s a trick?” she whispered.

  He moaned like a contented dog, high in his nose. She brushed the hair back from his face, and he opened his eyes and smiled up at her, his open-mouthed grin.

  She gripped his head between her hands, then stroked her hands down over his shoulders. He stretched up and laid his head and arms on her lap, and she continued running her hands down his head and shoulders and arms.

  I was feeling hot and pleasurably uncomfortable just watching them. “Let’s go somewhere else,” I said to Willow.

  “In the water,” she said. She stood up and pulled off her short green shift, revealing an orange suit that was more like a short-sleeved leotard; it covered her except for legs, arms from the elbows down, and neck and head, but it was skintight, and she looked just as great as she had looked and felt the night before.

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me up off my chaise and into the water. The shock of cold against my body solved my tent-suit problem. At least I had grabbed a good breath before we jumped in. I made for the bottom of the pool.

  Willow followed me down and kissed me. I wondered if she had been getting as stirred up watching Evan and Megan as I had, and then I didn’t wonder anything at all, not even how to breathe.

  When I opened my eyes I realized we were drifting toward the surface of the water, which was just as well, since my lungs were telling me I was out of air, and pool water didn’t sustain me the way lake water sometimes did. Willow let go of my head just as we broke surface, and both of us gasped for breath. She still gripped my shoulder. Her orange leotard had darkened in the water, and it clung even tighter than it had before. I glanced down at her through the distorting magnifying lens of the water, then smiled and glanced away, peeking at Evan and Megan, who weren’t talking, but were communicating. I looked at Willow again. She was looking at me. I wanted to finish our broken-off conversation about her baby brother from before, and I wanted to kiss her again.

  “Evan!”

  Willow and I jerked. I felt my heart speed. The tall muscular man I had only seen through a window at the store and a doorway at Lacey number five stood on the concrete, not too far from where Evan and Megan had been sitting side-by-side and somewhat wrapped around each other on the chaise. Evan turned and rose, stepping between Megan and the speaker. Red flushed his cheeks.

  “A lyllya veshoda,” the man said, and began a long harangue in the other language. Evan lifted a hand, pushed it against the tide of words, flinched, wilted. Megan stood behind him, her hands against his back to support him, her face showing confusion.

  “Hey!” I yelled, pulling myself out of the water onto the lip of the pool. Willow grabbed me, tried to shush me. I shook her off. “Hey!” I said, walking up to this guy and getting in his face.

  The man looked through me with his silver-flickery eye
s, and continued to speak.

  “Hey, cut it out!” I grabbed his arm, pulled on it, trying to get him to shift his attention.

  He spat out a few more foreign words, said, “Worthless nazgar! You’ve slacked long enough! Pull your weight! Earn your keep!” in Evan’s direction, clicked his teeth together, then stared down into my eyes. The green and blue flickers among the silver drew me in again.

  When I woke up this time, I was at the bottom of the pool, my mouth open, trying to breathe water.

  My throat was raw by the time I finished coughing up the water, and I felt soggy and tired. Willow stroked my head while tears dripped from her face onto my chest. Evan knelt at my other side, with Megan beside him. Megan had given me the actual mouth-to-mouth; it wasn’t something Willow or Evan knew. Megan’s face wore no expression.

  Willow glanced up at Evan. “How could you let this happen to him?” she said in a small hard voice. It had an edge to it that sliced—at least, I felt it. “He was in your care. How could you?”

  Why was she blaming Evan? How could he have stopped it? It had happened so fast.

  He had told me I would be safe from his relatives. I had wanted to believe him, but I never really had. How could you stop a snake in midstrike?

  Evan looked hollow-eyed and exhausted. He stared back at her. “I didn’t stop it,” he whispered. “I should have.”

  Willow gripped my hand hard. “Not again, Evan,” she said. “Can’t lose him.”

  “No,” he said. He touched Megan’s cheek. “Thank the Powers you were here. You gave us grace. Thanks.” She stared at him unblinking.

  He lifted his hand and laid it on my throat. It was warm. “Heal,” he murmured. He ran his hand over my chest. “You are refreshed. You repair yourself. You feel fine and energized.”

  I closed my eyes and just breathed in and out for a while. His hand was warm against my chest, almost tingling with a heat that radiated outward, chasing the deep chill out of my blood. I could feel the soreness fading, though the hurt wasn’t evaporating instantly this time the way it had before. In a little while my throat didn’t feel as though I had swallowed broken glass. I opened my eyes and looked up at Evan.

  He said, “Nick. Listen. Take this in. Don’t get in front of Uncle Bennet, okay?”

  “But he was hurting you!”

  “Hey. I’m supposed to protect you, not the other way around. I should have stopped him from—I was too shaken up and couldn’t think in time to—don’t risk yourself for me, Nick. I mean it.”

  I could feel that command trying to take hold of me the way his other words had, but it didn’t lock in. I tried to figure out why. “Well, I couldn’t—I didn’t—I don’t know, it wasn’t like I knew I was going to—” I tasted wolf, remembered how we had exchanged breath that morning, and said, “You’re in me.”

  He patted my chest three times and looked across me at Willow. She wiped her eyes.

  “Besides,” I said, “you didn’t hurt me. Your uncle did. It’s not your fault. It’s not his fault,” I told Willow.

  She touched my face, my mouth, my chest. She shook her head. “I didn’t do anything either,” she whispered. “I couldn’t think fast enough.”

  “I’m okay now.”

  Willow looked across me at Megan. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Megan finally blinked. “Once a lifeguard, always a lifeguard,” she said.

  I said, “Thanks, Megan. I owe you.”

  “No problem.”

  “I owe you, too,” Evan said to Megan. “Willow’s right. Nick’s my responsibility.” He sighed. “And that’s more important than what was happening to me…Nick? I can’t be your dog anymore.”

  “What? I—What? Why?”

  “Because I was stupid. As long as I stayed a wolf he couldn’t do anything to me. The change web protected me. But I relaxed my web, and he locked me into this”—he thumped himself on the chest—“and took my change web away. Dad gave Uncle Bennet a sliver of my snow crystal, and he used it on me.” His yellow eyes narrowed as he stared in the direction of cabin five. “I can’t shift shapes—my own or anything else’s—now. And that is the part of my power that I treasure, the part I use.” He shook his head slowly. “This isn’t what Mom and Dad meant to happen when they sent us to be with Aunt Elissa and Uncle Bennet. I know it isn’t.”

  “No,” said Willow. “You haven’t exactly been behaving the way Mom and Dad expected you to, though. I’ve been doing what they tell me to, and they’ve been okay to me.” She shook her head. “But Uncle Bennet should never have done that to Nick.”

  Evan looked off into distance, then stared down at me, his mouth grim. He touched my chest. He said, “I told you they smelled wrong, Willow. They’re not supposed to hurt people. Let alone Uncle Bennet violated the covenant of salt! You could have died, Nick. Stupid paragar. Didn’t even think it through. This is wrong.”

  “Yes,” Willow said.

  Evan patted my cheek twice. “I am crippled, Nick, but this much I can do. Introduce you to the family and tell them you have shared salt, that they have to leave you whole and well. Megan, eat something with us.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No.”

  Evan sat back and looked at Megan. She crossed her arms over her chest. “No. I just saw that guy stare at Nick, and Nick jumped into the water and nearly drowned. I like you, Evan, but I don’t want to be where you are. I mean, that shapechanging thing was almost too much.” She shook her head slowly. “This web stuff, and crystals and all that…I’m sorry, but I can’t take any more of this.”

  He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “But—” he said.

  “No,” she said. “No, I…no.” She got to her feet and walked away, pausing briefly; to look at sleeping Kristen and pick up her towel and magazine.

  Evan watched her go. When he looked back at me, something had gone from his eyes. “Come on,” he said, rising and pulling me to my feet. “Come meet the rest of us.”

  6

  Family Matters

  I had left my clothes back by the fallen tree. Without them I didn’t feel exactly ready to meet the rest of the family, but Evan was waiting, so I wrapped my towel around my shoulders. He patted my head. “I’ll tell them right away about the salt,” he said. “Then they should leave you alone.”

  I glanced toward Kristen, who was still asleep. “Just a minute,” I said, and went over and knelt beside her. “It’s okay to wake up now,” I murmured. “You’ve had a nice nap and everything’s okay.” I touched her shoulder gently. She sighed and woke up, smiling at me, then frowning.

  “You’re not Ian,” she said.

  “You’ve been asleep. Didn’t want you to sunburn.”

  “Oh.” She yawned, stretched. “Thanks, Nick.” She glanced past me at Evan and Willow, and for a moment her pupils snapped wide, then irised down to pinpoints.

  “These are my friends Willow and Evan,” I said. “Willow you met last night.”

  “Yes,” she said in a toneless voice.

  “We have to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “You okay?”

  She closed her eyes. A single worry line split her forehead. She looked at me and said, “I guess.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I bit my lower lip. I remembered when all I had wanted was for her to look at me, to give me a chance, to maybe take me seriously even though Pop had said it wasn’t possible. Now I knew I could tell her to fall asleep and she’d do it, and who knew what else she might do if I told her in just the right voice? I had plenty of ideas left over from nights of staring at the sloping ceiling above my bed and thinking about her. She might even enjoy some of them. Who knew?

  “Just am,” I said. I had told Willow we were better off not ordering each other around, and I was pretty sure I had meant it. What if I told Kristen to do something and she did it? How would I know whether she liked it? What if I didn’t even care?

  What if I ordered
Pop around the way he had been ordering me around all this time?

  “Okay,” Kristen said and sat up. “Where’d Megan go?”

  “Back to her cabin, I think. We had sort of an argument.”

  “Wow, I was really out of it.” She gripped her forehead as if trying to squeeze knowledge out of it.

  I stood up. “You going to be okay?”

  She lowered her hand and glared at me. “I feel fine,” she said.

  I shrugged and went to join Willow and Evan.

  Granddad’s creel was sitting on a low table in front of the living room fireplace in Lacey cabin five, surrounded by bits of flora—leaves, flowers, pine needles, a rubbery gray-green piece of lungwort, and a moss-covered branch with a small shelf fungus on it—and other weird objects: a clouded crystal as big as my hand, a small brass bowl holding a flickering fire that gave off spice-scented smoke, a slender green glass vase with liquid in it, small bones from I couldn’t tell what kind of animal, and tangled woven stuff that reminded me of bird nests and macramé.

  The wood-veneer walls of the cabin were draped in silver-gray webs that looked almost spidery but much too big. The webs even hung across the French doors that led out to the porch above the lake. Things that winked and glittered hung in the webs.

  All of the other furniture that belonged in this room was gone. Nothing here but a lot of people, the cluttered table, the fireplace, and a bunch of webs big enough to trap toddlers.

  Evan’s hand rested light and warm against the back of my neck. Willow stood to my right. Everyone else faced us: Aunt Elissa, in something long and black and almost translucent; Uncle Bennet, bulky and ominous in the clothes he had worn to the pool, pseudojeans and a blank white T-shirt; the third grown-up, whom I saw clearly for the first time, a tall thin jeans-and-flannel-shirt-wearing man with sandy hair, sleepy blue eyes, and smile lines, just the sort of man Mariah would have been attracted to if she had met him; pale redheaded Lauren disguised in dirt, staring at Evan as though she had never seen him before, which maybe she hadn’t—at least in human shape; and the two stair-step boys, their features blurred mirrors of each other, both dark-haired, the older my height and gray-eyed, the younger a few inches shorter and green-eyed.