The Light of Redemption

by Natalie Damschroder

  “Nope. Got ’em right here.” She rattled off a bunch of stuff I’d mostly never heard before, long strings of chemical names with no context.

  “You know I don’t know what any of that means, right?” I’d tried to scribble it down, but she’d gone too fast. “What’s it used for?”

  “Mostly innocuous stuff. Some of these are fillers or stabilizers. Some can trigger certain reactive qualities in other compounds, but nothing that’s on any red flag lists. None are poisonous or bad for the environment, even.”

  “What do you mean, reactive qualities?”

  “Changing color or state or whatever.”

  “All right, what about combined with each other? On TV, they always say”—I lowered my voice and tried to sound scientifically revelatory—“By itself, it does nothing. But combined, you could blow up a city block with only a few drops.”

  “Mmmm, no, none of this ever has a reason to be combined with the rest.” She sounded disapproving of either my impression or that I gave any credence to television. Maybe both.

  “What if you did combine it? What would you get?”

  “Mostly just a big mess. That’s why it’s weird. I thought you had something interesting for me, but it’s all mundane.” Something started beeping. “Oh, crap, I gotta go! Sorry, Harmony, hope this helps!” She hung up before I could reply.

  I texted her a thank you and set the phone down, propping my chin in my hand to think for a minute. I’d hit a dead end, obviously, but it made no sense. If that stuff was edible, say, or smokable, or rare, regulated imports, or anything like that, I could understand. But fillers? Stabilizers? Color enhancers? None of that was worth shooting someone over. Unless I was missing something. Well, I knew I was. I cursed Kyle and Wig for showing up before I could collect samples of the rest. I was dying to go get more, but since Emeraud had been cleared out, there was no way to do that now.

  So maybe I needed to let it go. Maybe whatever Wig and Kyle had been using Emeraud for wasn’t something that needed Eclipse. But something else would, and I wanted to be ready. Time to pressure Conn again.

  I checked the time. It was only the middle of the day. I could at least go downtown and wander the craft fair. Conn probably wouldn’t be there, but maybe someone would know his plans for the afternoon and I could run into him “accidentally.”

  I pursed my lips at the oven. It was a self-cleaner, of course, but left ash when it was done, and I’d only half wiped it out. Eh, it would be there when I got back.

  After changing into jeans that covered the bandage on my leg and a light, airy double tank top, I wrapped my hair up on top of my head, secured it with a chopstick, and headed out with my keys and phone.

  The Pilton Craft Festival—innovative naming was not our committees’ biggest strength—was crowded, thanks to the bright sun and perfect breeze. I browsed the jewelry, leathercrafting, artwork, and more while chatting with whomever stopped to talk to me.

  And then, miracle of miracles, one of those people was Conn Parsons.

  A percussion group from the high school marching band had just passed by, and someone stepped up next to me, clapping with the rest of us. My right side tingled, and I knew it was him. My entire body smiled.

  “Hey.” I grinned at him, then spotted Ralph Jones on his other side. The old man was just a little stooped from a lifetime of working bent over, and he wore a red plaid flannel shirt over a white T-shirt and green work pants just like he always did, despite today’s over-eighty temperatures. “Hi, Ralph.”

  He scowled at the little wave I gave him. “Am not. Never a day in my life. Not like you head jobs nowadays, with your medical crap and your infiltration of government so you can float along through life like it’s nothing.”

  I grinned. Most of the town either avoided Ralph and his extreme level of grumpiness or they tolerated him as one of our “characters,” the kind they had in every small town. He was even a point of pride sometimes. But he and I had a game going. I’d be as nice and cheerful and sweet as I could, and he’d find a way to twist it into a reason to grumble.

  At least, I thought it was a game.

  “One thing you can say for the potheads, Ralph, is that they don’t typically vomit in your bushes like the drunks do.”

  I expected that to set him off, but he only harrumphed and stared down the street at a group of jugglers who’d come down from Marion for the festival.

  Conn shrugged at my quizzical-face inquiry. “This is a pretty decent crowd,” he observed. “Is it always like this?”

  “It depends. The hotter the weather, the more people we get coming out of the city. They want to do outdoor stuff on Memorial Day, and it’s nicer out here.”

  He nodded, his gaze catching the trees in the park swaying with a decent breeze, a family dashing by with a lolling-tongued dog, and an older couple arguing about what type of ice cream cone they were going to share from the truck next to us.

  “Hey, Ralph. How come you haven’t been in to get that book on knot gardens you had me order? The hold expires on Wednesday, you know.”

  He balled one fist into the other palm and turned pale-blue eyes on me. The leathery folds over his brow deepened. “The Pestilines keep changing their minds about what they want. I’m not wasting my time going all the way to the library and doing the research when like as not they’ll circle back around to a boring wildflower patch. Again.”

  “Okay, well, let me know if you change your mind.”

  He harrumphed again. Conn choked a little and turned away, pretending to watch a balloon some kid had let go of and now rose rapidly into the sky. But I had no trouble grinning at old Ralph.

  The rich aroma of roasted meat wafted past us, and my stomach rumbled. I tucked my arm through Ralph’s and turned us toward food truck row. “You hungry? I just found out I’m starving. I need some of Chango’s meat on a stick.”

  Instead of shaking me off or making some kind of claim about where Chango got his meat, Ralph deftly twisted so that before I knew it, I had Conn’s arm around my waist and Ralph was loping down the sidewalk. “You kids enjoy yourselves!” He waved his ball cap and snickered before veering toward the group of guys who usually hung out at the coffee shop. They were his peers, for sure, but I didn’t think he spent time with them. He took “work ethic” to illustrious heights. In fact, it was amazing to even see him here.

  Turning to ask Conn about that, I realized we still had our arms around each other and jerked away before I thought. His smile disappeared, and I felt like a jerk. “I’m sorry. I was just—”

  “Forget it. You want to get something to eat?”

  “I’d love to. Chango’s is my favorite, but they have everything. Barbecue, burgers, salads, fried everything, pierogies . . .”

  “Pierogies? Seriously?”

  I tilted my head to look at him as we walked in the opposite direction Ralph had gone. “You’ve heard of pierogies, right?”

  “Of course. But I didn’t expect to find them at a street fair. In—”

  “Pilton,” I finished for him. “We’re not Hicksville. I thought you’d figure that out by now.”

  “I never thought you were. It’s just that I always thought pierogies were a regional thing.”

  I didn’t think it would be regional for San Diego, but decided not to push it. “So what did bring Ralph here? I thought he’d be in someone’s yard, taking advantage of them being away for the holiday so he could work in peace.”

  Conn smiled and shoved his hands in his pockets as we strolled. “We were. Finished up the trim on a sculpted yard a few blocks away. I persuaded him to come. He needs to learn how to relax.”

  I snorted. “We’ve been trying to teach him for a decade. Longer, some of us. He’s just that guy. Works hard, doesn’t believe in idle hands, and grumps around because of it.�
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  “I think he has fun with the grumping.”

  “Me too.” We exchanged a grin, and my insides squiggled. “So what’s he like to work for? Everyone thought you were brave at first, now they think you’re amazing.”

  “Amazing?” He halted for a second before lengthening his stride to stay with me. “That’s not right.”

  “Oh, yeah, it is. You’re strong and fast and do precision work, you put up with Ralph and even got him to give a discount to the Marikuntes for the lawn mowing.”

  “I’m just doing my job.”

  “You do it well. And people appreciate that. Some people,” I muttered, spotting a familiar dark braid through the crowd. It disappeared, and I didn’t know if it was Olive, but it had looked enough like her to remind me of what she’d been saying about me.

  Conn didn’t pick up on my mutter, so we chatted about some of the townspeople he’d done work for, the teams he was coaching now and in the fall, and even, to my delight, books we’d both read recently. I didn’t ask how he kept finding me—at Emeraud, then Simon’s, and now here—because solving that little mystery at the expense of the mood wasn’t a good trade.

  We got our food—he did join me for Chango’s—and we claimed a small table under a tree, a little away from the main cluster the festival committee had set up.

  “So what brought you to Pilton?” I asked him after I’d swallowed my first bite of charred beef. “Was the house in your family?” I couldn’t ask if old lady Parsons was his grandmother. It was disrespectful to call her that. But I didn’t think I’d ever known her first name.

  It was fascinating how quickly I could kill a conversation. All the animation drained from Conn’s face. His eyes dulled, and his jaw tightened. He dipped a fry in ketchup and ate it, not looking at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said before he could give me an evasive answer. “I didn’t know that was a . . . difficult subject.”

  He shook his head and a little of the sparkle returned to his eyes. “No, it’s okay. It’s habit. Everyone has asked me that at least twice.”

  “Because you never answer it.” I hurried on, “I’m not saying you should. Your business is your business.”

  “Yeah.” He wiped his fingers on a napkin and shifted his little paper boat of food to the side. “Yes, Nancy Parsons was my grandmother. But my father and uncles needed to sell the house to settle her medical bills. When I needed a . . . change, I looked it up and found that it was on the market again. Seemed like serendipity.” His mouth twisted wryly.

  “I guess you found out it wasn’t.” It didn’t seem right to eat when he wasn’t. I set my food aside, too. “Needed a lot of work, huh?”

  “You have no idea.” The shift in topic helped, and we exchanged DIY stories and resumed eating. Afterward, we crossed the park for a couple of concerts on the lawn. The acts weren’t big names—the orchestra playing movie tunes was from the high school again, followed by a garage band of middle-aged men and a couple of pop-star wannabes from nearby towns. But they were reasonably good, and the final performance, by a family of musicians playing violins, guitars, and drum boxes in tricky ways, was spectacular.

  After the one misstep, the conversation flowed so easily, I practically forgot about Eclipse and The Brute and what I really wanted from Conn.

  Until the screams started.

  We were on the far edge of the festival at that point, debating whether or not we were hungry again and if funnel cake was a good idea or if we should wait another hour and get a real dinner. A row of white-tented booths backed up on the woods in a gradual arc before rejoining the main thoroughfare. I had just noticed how low the sun was, and had been startled to find I hadn’t thought about patrolling or talking to Conn about superheroes all afternoon.

  The first scream was exactly like the one that had lured me to scare the Inalbis. It bounced off the booths beside us and cut off abruptly, as if interrupted by a hand or a blow. Conn and I both spun to face the woods, hands balling into fists, scanning for details. But there weren’t any. The bustle had slowed, and people looked at each other, wary and bewildered, but no one moved to do anything. How could they? The scream had been too short to pinpoint anything but general direction.

  The second scream ripped out of the woods and tore into the eardrums of everyone around us. A couple of people even staggered. This time it was obvious where it came from, and I dashed between two booths, pausing to check behind them. There was no one back there. Conn emerged behind me, and a couple of other people came through at other points. Everyone looked at each other again, instead of running willy-nilly into the trees. I didn’t blame them. That wasn’t a normal scream. I didn’t think we were going to find a kid who fell out of a tree or some woman startled by a squirrel. The scream had been guttural, intense, and it had everyone waiting for someone to take the lead.

  Of course, the person who did was Conn. He looked grim but nodded at the three men and two women who came closer to us, already waiting for instructions as if he’d held up a sign.

  “Did anyone see anything?” he asked. It sounded like a dumb question, but followed the “never assume” rule. Most of us shook our heads, but one woman half raised her hand and nodded.

  “I saw some kids run out of the woods earlier. About fifteen minutes ago. They were just chasing each other and having fun, but I thought it was a bad idea for their parents to let them go in there.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. It was just a fifty-yard-wide stretch of trees bordering the park, separating it from the neighborhoods around it. In the summer, it got pretty dense with underbrush, but even now you could see the houses on the other side. Hardly deep, dark territory.

  “Nothing since?” Conn asked her, and she shook her head.

  “Okay, that’s probably not related, but good to know. Anyone else—”

  Another scream interrupted him, and he shook his head. “Pair up and fan out. Watch for the police or anyone else coming in to help. We have no idea what we’re facing in there, so if you see something, shout.”

  Everyone nodded and did as he’d instructed. He grabbed my hand and headed in the direction of the spot where the scream was most likely to have come. That caused everyone else to fan out, as he’d instructed, and left them less likely to come across whatever we were about to find.

  Which was . . . nothing.

  Conn let go of my hand after a few seconds so we could make our way through the brush. There was no path here, though I knew there were at different spots, so people could get from their houses to the park without going around to the entrance. Conn’s boat shoes were sturdier than my sandals, so he moved faster over fallen limbs and protruding roots.

  The woods were utterly silent, except for the thrashing sounds of our fellow searchers. “Make sure you look up,” I told Conn. “It’s easy to focus too hard on the ground because of watching where we’re going.” I searched for colors that didn’t belong among the green-and-brown above us, shapes that didn’t fit, and alternated that with scanning the ground and area around us.

  We’d made three passes through the woods, shifting in one direction or the other each time, and found nothing. Our fellow searchers were slowly drifting away, and we hadn’t seen anyone new. I couldn’t believe the cops hadn’t been called. Those screams had meant terrible things, things that professionals would need to deal with, whether accident or assault. But then, I hadn’t called the police, and not just because we were superheroes. I had nothing to report that they could act on.

  Finally, after about twenty minutes of searching, we stopped back where we’d both tacitly agreed the sound originated. I pushed my sweaty bangs off my forehead and drew the chopstick out of my hair, which was falling apart.

  “It couldn’t have been nothing.” Conn stuck his hands on his hips and tilted his head back again. It was starting to darke
n in the woods, with the sun low enough to cast deep shadows. We’d kicked up enough loam and mildew to fill the air with a scent that was both fresh and old at the same time. “Either someone was in real trouble and they got dragged off, or they—” He broke off and scowled.

  “Tried to lure us here?” The thought had crossed my mind more than once. It was too similar to the Inalbi situation. The scream that had drawn me to their house, where I’d heard things that made me think a rape was about to occur.

  “That’s ridiculous.” But he didn’t sound like he thought it was ridiculous. He sounded furious, and at the same time, completely exhausted. “We need—”

  He had taken two hard steps back toward the festival when the ground gave way beneath him. I was close enough that the collapsing earth took me with it too, and I yelped. Then time slowed, stretched, or my brain moved incredibly fast. I saw rows of tiny spikes at the bottom of the dark pit. I shouldn’t have been able to see them. The woods were too shadowed, the pit too deep, but somehow, there was a ball of light in my hand, illuminating our impending death.

  I was falling feet first, but Conn had tilted forward and was going to be impaled. The ball in my hand was too small. I dragged more light into me and flung it down between us and the spikes, willing it into a solid platform.

  We both whoofed when we hit it, and then time reasserted normality, and I had no idea what had just happened. We were lying in midair, inches above death, and it should have been completely impossible. I hadn’t collected any light, hadn’t even been near any. There sure as hell wasn’t any in the woods. But somehow, it had been there when I needed it, and I had saved us.

  “Okay, that was new.” Conn braced his hands gingerly on the platform of light and did a slow pushup, watching the light as if it was going to wobble and slide him off. “Um . . . what now?”

  I was lying on my side, one hand outstretched to maintain the support. The top of the pit was about fifteen feet above us. The walls were full of loose roots, but looked very crumbly. Conn might have the strength to pull us out, but it would be easier if he didn’t have to. Plus, if my memory was accurate, the spikes were placed so close together, we couldn’t get our feet down without injuring something.