Grey Lore

by Jean Knight Pace

The woman was crumbling her cookie into her tea. Watching the crumbs fall reminded Ella of Hansel and Gretel—their trail of stones and crumbs.

  “Because I know where home is,” the woman replied simply.

  The comment made Ella’s insides hurt.

  “Is Sam home?” Ella asked.

  “I expect,” the old woman replied. “Sam’s home is not far you know.”

  “Yes,” Ella said. “I know.”

  “Do you then?” the witch asked. Pausing, she added, “And your home?”

  Ella did not answer. She was not sure there was a trail of crumb long or wide enough to ever lead her back home. She turned from the witch and looked out the window.

  Zinnie dabbed the edges of her wrinkled mouth with a linen napkin. “If you want to find the things you’ve lost, you need to help others find the things they seek. That’s just common courtesy,” she said.

  “You want me to give Sam the ring.”

  “Sam does not need the ring,” Zinnie said. “Only the small piece on top of it.”

  “Which is attached to the ring,” Ella said, still not sure either of them was sane.

  Zinnie raised a bushy, gray eyebrow.

  Ella shook her head. Since she apparently wasn’t being courteous enough, she might as well ask her question. “Do you have all your teeth?”

  Zinnie smiled as broad as the Cheshire cat. “Yes,” she chuckled. “Every one.”

  Ella took a cookie after all.

  When Ella got to Sam’s house she held out a small, parchment-wrapped cookie and Sam took it.

  “You saw her,” he said.

  “Or we’re both crazy,” Ella said. “But I think she’s real. Of course I also think she’s a witch, so maybe we’re just both crazy.”

  Sam tasted the cookie—a moist chocolate almond bar with powdered sugar on top. “Lovely Luna Lunatic,” Sam murmured.

  Ella squinted at Sam for a minute and then added, “Longed a lolly to take a lick.” She cocked her head. “How do you know that rhyme?”

  “My mother used to say it to me at bedtime.”

  “Mine too,” Ella added. And then, after a pause, “Sam, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not like I said a single thing that didn’t sound crazy.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Ella mumbled, and then smiled.

  Sam had said that the two squares would form some type of a master key. With it he hoped to break Sarah out of the institution.

  Everything Sam said sounded like something out of a looney bird’s mouth, but Ella had to admit that it did look like the two square pieces would slide together—one fitting inside of the other.

  Which didn’t mean that she wanted to watch Sam hammer away at her mother’s ring. He’d lined up several delicate tools, but it didn’t look like any of them was going to be much help.

  “Ella, I’m going to have to break it,” he said nervously, examining the ring from every side.

  “I don’t think you’re really breaking it,” she said, trying to sound brave about it. “You’re just setting it free.”

  “I’m not sure you believe that,” Sam said, giving the ring a gentle twist, “but thanks for letting me do this.” Sam twisted a bit harder. The ring wouldn’t budge. He looked at Ella. She nodded and he twisted harder.

  Ella closed her eyes, expecting to hear a pop or a crack. Instead, when she opened her eyes, Sam was turning the small square round and round, as though unscrewing it from the band of the ring. After several turns the tiny square dropped off, leaving the ring with a raised, ridged bezel that contained a small, clear diamond. Sam laughed, a giddy sort of sound.

  Ella was too stunned. She stared at the ring for several minutes while Sam took one of his father’s tools and carefully chipped off the remaining bits of metal from the square until it was perfectly smooth.

  Ella slipped the ring back onto her finger. She could never wear it in front of Vivi now, but she would wear it here, today. In his hand, Sam held the large copper square as well as the small golden one that had been attached to the ring.

  “CN,” Ella said, looking at the letters. “I always thought the ‘C’ was my mother’s initial,” she said.

  “I know,” Sam said. “I’m sure everyone did.”

  Together they looked at the two swooping letters—the letters that had connected and complicated pieces of their pasts, the letters that would connect and further complicate their combined futures. CN. Charles Napper.

  Chapter 56

  Jones had gone against his better judgment in leaving Ella that note.

  Why he’d let Witten drag him into this whole business, he couldn’t say. It was just like the first time, only worse.

  All those years ago, Witten had limped into his camp, claiming a car wreck and needing Jones’s steady hand to extract a piece of metal from a deep, angry wound in his ankle. Jones had used a pair of tweezers and a small tool made of silver that he’d been planning to recycle. With them he picked the embedded square of metal from Witten’s leg. Using the silver pick, he’d pushed the skin back over the wound, planning to thread a needle and stitch it up. But by the time he’d worked the flap of skin so it was next to the other skin, the wound had started to heal.

  Witten had taken the silver pick from his hand and continued to run it gently along the line of the wound until all that remained of the cut was a faint pink line.

  Jones was shocked. He’d never seen a home remedy like that before—maybe all those mystics with their crystals and coppers were on to something. Witten didn’t seem surprised at all.

  When Jones had asked him how he’d gotten a square of metal stuck in his leg, Witten had said he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Jones got that. There were plenty of things he hadn’t wanted to talk about either—like the fact that he’d left his father’s farm to seek his own way, hunting and fishing with his dogs and his camper. He’d seen a lot of the world, but he’d started to feel lonely and listless—like he lacked purpose in the deep, beautiful world around him.

  For several days Witten had stayed on at the little camp. He seemed to enjoy the dogs on the same deep level that Jones appreciated them. They’d hiked and fished in peaceful silence, and then at night they’d fried up their catch, talking and telling stories. Witten told better stories than any of the other travelers Jones had known. Yet underneath it all, he could tell that Witten was anxious about something, restless, unsettled.

  Jones was still surprised to wake up one morning to find that Witten had taken off in the middle of the night.

  The next day two investigators had shown up seeking a missing person. Jones could have set them on his trail, given them a description of what he’d been wearing, sought some kind of revenge, but he found he didn’t have the heart.

  Witten was practically a kid—a troubled kid maybe, but a very young man finding his way. Jones had been like that when he’d left his father’s farm ten years earlier. He understood how it felt.

  Jones had given the investigators vague, evasive answers to their questions. The next day, he’d come back from hunting to find his camper burned to the ground, the dog he’d left to keep watch shot through beside it.

  And just like that, his world had turned. The tragedy propelled Jones to return to his ailing father’s farm. It had also given him a vision about how to proceed. Jones had a gift with dogs, and it turned out he wasn’t a terrible farmer either—respecting things like land, animal, and soil in a way his peers did not, making extra money through his dogs and his metalwork. Within his profession he could even have been considered successful.

  And then that vagrant storyteller had shown up in his town and everything had fallen apart again. Jones wasn’t sure he could rebuild his life the way he’d done twenty-five years earlier.

  The FBI had come this time—with a search warrant. They’d confiscated almost every drop of silver Jones had owned, though he kept a few special pieces in a few special places. When the investigators lef
t, their lips were pressed tight together. Jones considered that as good as a promise to return.

  It was true that Jones had run because he was afraid. After all, he wasn’t quite sure he was innocent. He did ship silver “bullets” to anyone who ordered them. They were one of the most popular party and novelty items sold from his online silver shop. And they should have been nearly useless as actual bullets. Silver was a soft metal, difficult to use in weaponry in general.

  Or so he’d thought until those horrible shootings had begun.

  He should have stopped selling the bullets then, but requests had suddenly skyrocketed, swinging into a morbid trend. And farmers weren’t known for being rich.

  Still, Jones should have quit making them, cut his losses. As it was, the FBI had found an entire box full of the things, as well as payment records, including his most recent shipment—sent that morning—one silver and one titanium bullet. Which didn’t look great for Jones.

  But being afraid was only half the reason Jones had run.

  The real reason, the deeper reason, was because in his gut he felt that something bigger was forming—something not entirely normal, something someone wanted and needed him for. Well, maybe not him, but his dogs.

  And Jones wouldn’t let his dogs be used, not like some chip in a game Jones didn’t know how to play. To him, the dogs weren’t just resources or weapons or pieces on a chessboard. To Jones, they were souls; they were friends. If they did help anyone, it would be because they chose to do so. And they might. Loco had already left—following after the child, he was sure. Because of this Jones had decided to give the girl a tool, a tool to call the dogs if she ever needed them.

  He could do no more.

  Chapter 57

  A master key could work in a lot of places, but Sam suspected that a master key would get the most results in a master computer. Sam was sure one was hidden in plain sight like everything else. Which didn’t mean he could see it.

  Sam had spent the last few days manically trying the key all over town. He’d tried the key in the library computer, the school computer, the computer in the sparse office at the Havensborough Unit. He’d found encrypted information in all of them.

  At Havensborough, he’d found information about Zinnie’s diagnosis and medications. He’d even found, at last, Zinnie’s room number, which wasn’t a room number at all, but an entire wing. He’d also found a log with dates of each of her escapes or “releases” as the record called them.

  At the library computer he’d found listings of books, articles, and myths about wolves. Several had sections highlighted with notes. He’d also been able to open dozens of articles from URL’s that no longer existed—articles about wolf migration and its steady and recent shift toward the Midwest. He also read blood-chilling stories of Gevudan wolves attacking families and animals in France—eating their flesh till the bones were dry.

  At school, he uncovered some of the simplest and most disturbing information of all.

  Lists of students and faculty—their names color-coded. Purple for the shifters, blue for the humans, black for the half-breeds, and white. Sam found himself under the white category, and it was then that he figured it out. Whites were the unknowns—possibly human, but possibly not.

  He didn’t have time to go through most of the names, but among all the names there were two aberrations—Ella, of course, who was marked deep red. They needed her for the Festival.

  And David Witten—who was silver.

  It was strange to stop thinking of Vivi as her aunt—strange, but not.

  The truth was that it had actually been a whole lot harder to learn to think of Vivi as her mother’s sister than it was to accept the fact that she was really a psychopath imposter. In fact, of all the crazy things Sam had ever said, this one had somehow been the easiest to believe—Vivi was neither blood nor water.

  All the wondering why her aunt acted the way she did, all the worrying about why they couldn’t connect—it all lifted off, leaving Ella with a sense of relief, of freedom. It was good to have the cards on the table, even if Ella was playing a losing hand.

  This new freedom made it easy for Ella to use Sam’s master key to sneak into Vivi’s personal computer as well as the laptop Vivi used for work. There was no betrayal anymore, just a sense of self-preservation.

  Once hooked up to Vivi’s computers, Ella found more information on Charles Napper than she or Sam could ever get through. She read information on Napper’s long career, his work with mental illness—particularly hallucinations, his philanthropic endeavors which always included efforts to find and “cure” those with such hallucinations.

  She found information on his work in the field of chemistry—how he’d taken a strain of very old DNA procured from an ancient ear, and used that to find matches for the pTr4 genome—the one Napper believed would lead him to another with similar DNA. This is how he had developed the test tubes that had been used in hospitals around the U.S. This is how he had first found the sisters after they’d gone in for blood work and a psychiatric workup in rural Ohio. It was all intensely interesting and fanatical and mad-sciencey.

  But none of the computers—not the ones Sam had tapped into around town, not Vivi’s own computers—contained the everything that Sam was looking for. What they would do with the everything when they found it, Ella wasn’t sure.

  They were sitting together at Ella’s house, logged into Vivi’s computer researching Napper and the Central Indiana Hospital when Ella’s phone buzzed. She picked it up and clicked on the smiley icon that was Brandt’s face.

  “Ugh,” Sam said. “I don’t like that guy.”

  Ella ignored him.

  “You know I saw him pound a kid half to death once. I should have looked him up on the school computer.”

  Ella shrugged, more curious than she let on. “You said yourself that being a Changer didn’t mean you changed necessarily. Like your dad.”

  “Means you can,” Sam said. “And that guy does. Just because he doesn’t grow fur doesn’t mean he can’t flip from smiling guy to angry lunatic in two minutes flat.”

  Ella had to agree with that. It was another reason to favor Jack with his calm, easygoing demeanor. But Jack wasn’t the one willing to text her; Brandt was.

  Suddenly, Sam grabbed Ella’s phone from her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “In plain sight,” Sam mumbled. “So plain you’d see it every day and never even think of it, right?”

  “Right,” Ella said sarcastically. “Because they’d want to give a teenager a super computer to carry around.”

  “Why not? Sam said. “It could keep track of you. And they’d want that.”

  “Yeah,” said Ella. “Until I accidently drop it off the bleachers at some football game.”

  But Sam wasn’t listening. He was unscrewing the case to get a better look. At its side was a slot for a memory card—a little bigger than you would expect on someone’s phone.

  “Doesn’t mean anything,” Ella said, though she’d begun to think that it probably did. “Besides,” Ella said. “How would they even be able to access the information?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sam said. “Supposing they don’t have some awesome spyware installed, I guess maybe they could put an evil, fake relative in the same house as you. I’m sure Vivi could look at your phone almost any time she wanted.”

  The thought of Vivi slinking into her room at night to download information from her phone was possibly the creepiest thought yet. “I hope it just uses spyware,” Ella said.

  Sam held the slender, silver case and slipped the key into the side.

  The first thing that popped up were Ella’s vitals, heart rate, pulse, and oxygen levels.

  Ella grabbed the phone back. “Oh crap,” she said, scrolling down. It knew her age to the day, her height, weight, hormone levels, nutrient intake, everything.

  And then there it was—too much.

  Volumes from decades or maybe centuries of informatio
n. There were names, dates, histories, fairy tales. There were maps, records from jewelry stores and silver mines. Books worth of information on chemistry, physics, alchemy, witches, werewolves, trials, killings. Everything.

  There was just no way to start it all or end it all. Until they came to their mother’s names.

  Ella started to cry. Sam put an awkward arm around her. And together they scrolled down into the pieces of their family’s past that would become their future.

  They found official records, medical records, pictures, and journal entries from the sisters—photocopied and recorded. Slowly, Sam and Ella pieced the information together.

  Their mothers had been taken to a rehabilitative ranch when they were teenagers—at ages seventeen and fifteen. They’d been having hallucinations—imagining they could hear dogs speak at every full moon.

  Mysteriously, their parents had died in a car accident shortly after the girls were taken into The Ranch. And oddly, a will was found giving the philanthropist who funded The Ranch custody over the girls.

  For several years, the sisters grew up on The Ranch, taking medications and receiving every privilege that two young girls could enjoy. They had a cook, governess, driver, tutors, doctors, horses, and nice clothes.

  Everything except family.

  And so they clung to each other as only teenage girls can. Until a mechanic—a young man named Patrick—came to the ranch to fix some classic cars. Unlike the other workers, he did more than his job. He told jokes, smuggled in magazines and candy, taught the girls tricks for rigging engines. He cared for them in a way no one else had. And then one day he smuggled in a small silver bracelet for the youngest sister. Three years had passed. It was Christa’s eighteenth birthday.

  Her governess exploded when she saw the bracelet—removed it from Christa’s wrist with tongs like it was a poisonous snake. She sent it in a copper box with the driver to be removed from The Ranch.