by Beth Dranoff
Seeing Owain last night. Being with Sam today. And then there was Jon.
Going back to the Agency and hoping I could make it out alive.
Choices. Desires. Ramifications.
I bit my lip and tried to focus.
“So, Dad,” I said to the silence of the room. “How are things?” I want to say that if I squinted hard I could see him standing in the corner, smiling with pride. Except squinting made my brain hurt and it was pretty much me, myself and, oh yeah, I up here. Even if my father had hidden something useful, it didn’t mean I was having any luck finding it.
Still, I experimented. Like I did every time.
“Map on my back,” I said. Nothing. “What’cha gonna do with all that map / all that back with all that map?” Words set to the beat of a Black Eyed Peas song had me wanting to blast some music and dance, but otherwise sparked no magically useful response.
Served me right, looking for someone else to save me. I was a big girl. I had a brain. I could totally figure this out for myself.
And yet, there I stood, uninspired to do anything other than deal with the overall grit buildup in this place. Yup. I came, I urge-to-danced, and I cleaned. Because sometimes it’s got to be done.
Or so I hear. The urge doesn’t strike that often.
Sure, it felt like someone could have been watching me. But I didn’t see anything, and I was making a conscious choice in that moment to believe only what I could see, hear, smell, taste or touch. Anything else required faith—not my forte—or at the very least a viable alternative working theory.
Didn’t get much sleep last night, what with Owain and then breakfast with Lynna. And that couch looked so soft. I didn’t need to be anywhere for a while...
I closed my eyes.
* * *
Ow!
My back was on fire. A shiatsu pinprick pattern of pain I’d felt before, but only once. That night on the beach. Under the full moon, in the chill of the summoning, as the portal gaped its maw to grant all manner of beasts and monsters and nightmares passage through the sharpened gaps in its ephemeral gorge.
Except that the sun was still up and I hadn’t summoned anyone or anything.
I tore off my tank top, then my bra, then my legging crops. Too much fabric. And what the hell was going on here?
I skidded over to the exit and pulled the lid back, calling down for my mother. To her credit, although her eyes widened at the scene, all she said was: “What can I do?”
“Take some pictures of my back? I’m gonna want a visual.” I tossed her my phone, camera activated, after helping her up into the attic space. “Also, could you please describe what you’re seeing?”
Mum moved around behind me, and I heard the click click click of the shutter capturing the moment. Fuck, that hurt. How did I make it stop?
“Could be the sun,” Mum said. The floor beneath us groaned as she changed position. “It’s shining directly on your back.” I grunted. “Try moving into the shade.”
I did. Nothing happened. And by “nothing” I meant I was still being stabbed by hundreds of tiny fairy blades all at once. Or acupuncture needles, assuming they were being shoved into my flesh far deeper and rougher than the instruction manual recommended.
“Anything?” Mum’s voice rose on a question mark. I shook my head. “Maybe try the opposite end of the room. Closer to the books and papers.”
“Nope, still hurts,” I said, trying it. “Light still on me?”
“It is,” Mum said. “How odd. It’s following you.” She sighed. “I’m so sorry, Danyankeleh, this isn’t the life I would have chosen for you. Or you for yourself.”
“Danyankeleh,” I repeated. “Since when do you call me that?”
“What, your nickname?”
I turned to see my mother, frowning, perplexed. “It’s what Dad used to call me. Not you. Danyankeleh.”
The bookshelves started rumbling, and the drawers of papers and topographical etchings flew open. Sheets flying in a breeze that didn’t exist. Mum and I looked at each other, and I nodded. Hoping she understood. Mouthed a 3-2-1 countdown and then...
“Danyankeleh, Danyankeleh, Danyankeleh, Danyankeleh,” we said together. A wet sucking sound as the overhead lights flickered. The bookshelves shook, rattling the contents, and a new wooden box came flying off and at my head. Super-cat reflexes: I caught it millimeters before it smacked me in the nose. Back pain suddenly gone.
“Dana,” Mum said, voice tight. Tighter than before. “Look at your arm.”
I expected fur, claws—the usual.
Instead I saw...feathers? Curved orange talons where my fingers were supposed to be? What the hell? Maybe not all the shifters I knew stuck to the same features each time they transitioned, but I’d never seen anyone go outside their species before. Not even Anshell, although of anyone I wasn’t betting against him on that nifty superpower.
“No,” I muttered. Trying to find a focal point in my head, channel everything into that tiny pinprick of white light and then shove it through to find the other side of my increasingly questionable sanity. Hoping it would all come out normal and smelling of lilacs and roses and lavender the other end.
“Danyankeleh.” A voice from the shadows.
“Stuart?” My mother cut through the magical thickness of the space in this room with pain and loss suddenly not quite so of the past. Of course. She would recognize the sound of him faster than me.
I didn’t know where to look first. My father? Mother? At the grotesque claw that was more dragon Celandra than anything I recognized on myself?
Fuck it.
I snagged my tank and somehow got it back over my upper half, only then turning to look where my mother was staring. Green static fuzzing, flickering, around an outline. So familiar. He opened his mouth, shaped the two syllables my mother hadn’t seen from him in over sixteen years: Hannah.
Grief and loss shoved down and away. Buried but never quite left behind.
“Stuart!” My father, his transparency solidifying as we got closer.
“Hannah.” His voice repeating. The name echoing tinny as though bouncing along the accordion pleats of an aluminum foil sheeting vent.
“Dad?”
His head swiveled towards the sound of me. I could still see the orange flowered curtains through his opaque transparency.
“Danyankeleh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
And blinked out of visible existence again.
Chapter Nineteen
“I don’t know what to do with this,” Mum said. “We buried him. Is he a ghost? I don’t understand.” I squeezed her hand as her voice rose. “What is he doing here now?”
“I have no idea.” Then: “You said we buried him, right?”
Mum nodded.
“OK, I remember the funeral and the shivah and all that. But we didn’t do open casket. I know there would have been shomerim there, guarding his body from the time he died to when we—” I swallowed down the marshmallow thickness expanding in my throat, even so many years later. You never forget the sound of dirt hitting a coffin. “When we put him in the ground. But what if something happened? Between when you identified the body and when we did the thing at the feld?”
“I never saw his body,” Mum said.
“Wait, what? How did I not know this?” Useful information that could change everything.
“Well, you were young,” Mum said. “And it happened badly, and far away. His remains needed to be identified before they could be shipped back to us here.”
“But didn’t he die in an accident? Something to do with work?”
“Yes. Work,” Mum echoed. “Agency work.” She gave me a look that said figure it out.
I didn’t like where this was going. History—that reality fabric of a past I
’d thought I knew—was reinventing itself on the fly.
“Who identified him?”
“Your old boss,” Mum said. “Ezra Gerbrecht.”
* * *
Ezra, my mentor. Substitute father. The man who’d handed me over to Alina and tortured me for information. Then rescued me from some nameless monster not named Alina. Abducted me twice. Who, in the space/time continuum of maybe twenty-four to forty-eight hours, had presented himself as a befuddled old professor suffering from early-stage dementia, the steel-trap-minded senior-level leader of the Agency’s Canadian Bureau, and as my father. Which one was the real Ezra?
Then there was my actual father. Another riddle to unravel. First: was he actually dead? Recent evidence suggested not. Second: if he wasn’t dead, who or what had we buried? And finally, if we accepted the increasingly plausible possibility that my father was still alive, then where the hell was he?
“I’ll bet those Agency labcoats know something,” Mum said. Blunt with a lip-twist of bitter lemon. “Not that they’d tell us. Not after all this time.”
“I could go back. Take the freelance job, trust Owain, gamble on being able to get close enough to the right clearance levels for some answers.”
“If you need money that badly, I’ll give you some.” Her eyes suspiciously shiny again. “You don’t need to do this.”
“It’s not the money,” I said. Pacing now. “Although that would be good. What I need is information, the kind I can’t seem to get anywhere else.”
“You said you were done.”
“I know.” The same way we both knew what I was going to do next.
“Promise me you’ll be careful.” Biting her lower lip, the pain a reminder of what she was holding back.
“I promise.”
“I’ll bet someone there could figure this all out,” Mum said, changing the subject; pretending she believed me, pretending she cared enough to sacrifice me for whatever “this” was.
I nodded. And hoped I’d be able to escape the bowels of that hell twice.
* * *
The Danyankeleh effect had shaken loose two maps and a box of letters still in their original envelopes. Correspondence between my father and Ezra from a different time. I scanned through pages of family news, tidbits about mutual friends, rambling sentences on gardening and growing, an exchange of recipes and some offhand comments about astronomy. Innocuous.
Now I saw them for what they could have been then: communication between two men so close that either one could have covered for or caused the other’s disappearance.
“Was Dad a gardener? I don’t remember him much with pots and dirt,” I said. Testing that theory.
“Gardening?” Mum laughed; a short bark. “No. The closest your father came to outdoors living was that old charcoal hibachi. Pretty sure the filthy thing is still in the garage. He’d stick whatever he could find on metal skewers then throw them on the grill. At least half the time they’d end up blackened char—completely inedible—and we’d order a pizza.” Her shoulders unclenched, the memory tugging a smile from the creased edges of her mouth.
“So he had no interest, as far as you know,” I scanned the last three letters I’d opened, “in seed varieties, cultivating clippings of leaves or branches, or cross-pollinations of any kind?”
Mum was staring at me now.
“I have no idea what the two of them were talking about, but Stuart could barely boil water for pasta. And we’ve already established what happened when he got involved with that hibachi. Those weren’t instructions for grilling, were they?”
I shook my head.
“Then they couldn’t be recipes for any kitchen I can think of.”
“And the stars?”
“Still no idea,” Mum said.
I looked at some of the so-called constellations Ezra and my father had been going on about. Funny names. Dog’s Breath Passage. SMERGH. Acronym or actual name? The Eightway. Bucket of Gorp. Zarcon Loubitz. Googling on my phone wasn’t helpful either—whatever these were, nobody was tracking them online. Although we were talking about Ezra and my father—they’d go old school on anything important anyway. Still, none of this made any sense.
I took pictures of the letters on my phone, just in case. Made a list of the odd names, recipes and growing instructions I was finding in those old letters. There had to be a connection.
What was I missing?
I saw new maps in layers of tissue-thin sheets atop the scored oak tabletop, scattered by the wind that had blown through earlier. I was no cartographer, nor was I a geography specialist of any kind, but the terrain seemed off to me. Like I was looking at distorted reinterpretations of the same space looping over and over again.
The table had been outfitted with four L-shaped brackets I’d thought were for show. My cursory eyeballing assessment suggested the edges would line up with the maps. But why guess?
I grabbed the sheet closest to me and, pushing the others aside, lined it up with the corner guides on the table. A click as the page snapped into place. Huh.
From underneath, the solid wood table began to glow as though the map was an x-ray image and I’d attached it to a lit panel.
I grabbed the next-closest map, the one marked Bucket of Gorp, and lined it up with the flèches before smoothing it down with flattened palms on top of the first one. This time lines curved and points of circled interest levitated off the pages; glowing sapphire snakes and stones of lake-bottom murky greens bordered in goldenrod yellow. The buzzing in my ears mirrored the vibrations against my hands from below.
“Let me try,” Mum said from beside me. I jumped at her words; I’d forgotten she was there.
Mum lifted the next sheet in the pile: Zarcon Loubitz.
“Do you feel it?” Maybe if it buzzed for Mum too, I could validate my reality.
“Feel what?”
I touched her hand, the one holding the parchment, and her eyes widened. Energy from me to the map with her as conduit.
“What is that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think it has to do with these pages.”
Mum handed Zarcon Loubitz to me. As soon as I settled it into place on top of the other two sheets, colors and lines sprung up to dance on the page; worms crawling over each other for freedom.
One thing was clear: I was the key. My touch was a living flesh and bone divining rod for something I hadn’t been able to figure out—yet.
I hoped what I was touching was paper. Tried not to focus on the shade variants of the ink, the texture of uneven surfaces rubbing under my fingertips, the recognition that these maps could have been etched onto something that shed in layers and maybe hadn’t come from a tree.
My imagination was made up of memory and reconstructionist history and nightmares. Sometimes I forgot how to tell the difference between what really happened and my any-time-of-day-as-long-as-it’s-inconvenient imaginings of terror. Blind obedience was no excuse. I focused on my breathing, counting with numbers that stumbled backwards as I pushed them uphill, until the white humming of my vision receded and I was back in the room. The maps were sheets of paper, nothing more.
“Honey?” My mother touched my shoulder, light, and I started. I’d forgotten she was here again.
I nodded. I could do this.
Maybe I needed to think about this differently. Seven sheets, seven layers. How many Danyankelehs did it take to unlock a dimension? I felt like I was looking at things beyond 2D or even 3D. Was there such a thing as 5D, 6D or 7D outside of hair dye colors?
The individual elements from the maps continued to float several inches above the stack of pages. I saw mountains and skies and rocks and paths. Water, snow and ice. Snaking rivers of color woven through a loom with skeins of potentiality strung an infinity of lifetimes ago.
I touched the apex, one finger only, and a point of light appeared above it which spawned two more and then two more again. There was an answering stab of pain from my back. Damn. And here I’d thought it was safe to put my shirt on again.
I drew my index finger along one of the shimmering, undulating snakes and shivered, an answering sensation of touch along my back once again.
The maps in front of me were linked to the tattooed dots on my back. I could only assume that my father had done it, although I had no idea how.
No wonder Alina and who knows what else was after me for my skin. The information I wore was dangerous. Exactly how dangerous was still a big unknown.
To find out more, I needed to get closer to the source: my father. And since I couldn’t reliably do that, I was going to need Ezra.
And for that, I had to rejoin the Agency.
Chapter Twenty
Managed to get through my shift at the Swan Song, albeit on auto-pilot.
The headlining group was a synthpop cover band trio called Depeche Load. The colored films we’d added to the overhead lights at their request rotated, casting a flickering glow of cotton-candy rainbows over the room. There was an adoring gaggle of pig-tailed fans in white-and-blue Japanese schoolgirl outfits clustered near the stage, their skirts at least a handspan above their knees with white socks pulled up to a handspan below. They were joined by another cluster of bolero-wearers in tuxedos, suspenders and undershirts.
There were gigglers with Adam’s apples, and tuxedo-wearers with breasts. At least two breasts, maybe more. There could even have been tails but I wasn’t going looking.
The combination of music, lights and high-pitched laughter was giving me a headache. OK, maybe my head was still spinning from earlier in the attic, but the squeals passing for singing weren’t helping. Plus the hangers-on kept coming up to the bar and ordering crazy drinks to match whatever Yu-Gi-Oh! character’s card they happened to be holding.
The latest one was a classic: Blue Eyes White Dragon. I went with a layered test tube of shots for that one: Mexican Ricacha Horchata for a creamy cinnamon/vanilla/raisin base, then some Dutch Bols Blue for an orange kick, topped with some kind of chocolate liqueur imported from parts unknown. Possibly using ground parts unknown as well. A Sandor cost-cutting special. Everything alcoholic went better with one of those tiny paper umbrellas, right?