by Lish McBride
Sid angled in between us. “They are. Those kelpies are definitely wearing cardigans.”
“You didn’t notice that before? It’s stranger behavior than all the other things put together,” I said.
“We didn’t get this close before,” Bianca said in Sid’s defense.
Sid slipped his arm around my shoulders. “Believe me, it’s something I would have mentioned. Each one is like a tiny horse version of Mr. Rogers.” He stifled a guffaw.
“What?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“I was just imagining them as a scary movie poster: Night of the Kelpies: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” And then he couldn’t stifle the laughter anymore and he had to step away. At least one of us was having a good time.
The kelpies returned from their discussion. “Do what you must, but the kelpies will not help you.”
They’d called my bluff, and there wasn’t really anything I could do. “Okay, I understand. Can I ask about the cardigans, though? How? Why?”
“The reasons we have them are our own.” Then the kelpies left. There was nothing to do but hike back to our cars. We were leaving with more questions than we’d had when we walked up, but at least we were still in one piece. Which, when dealing with kelpies, is a definite victory. Still, I couldn’t help but think that whatever was bothering the kelpies was eventually going to bother us, and I needed to find out what that was. Soon.
10
COMING OUT—IT’S NOT JUST FOR DEBUTANTES
BY THE TIME we got back to the cabin, I was exhausted. The blood and other bits of peryton had dried, leaving my clothing stiff and scratchy in places, and I smelled. My boots were covered in mud, so I’d had to leave them outside. Veronica and Ezra weren’t coming up roses, either.
“Crazed nixie,” Ikka said, her nose scrunched up in distaste.
Sid snapped his fingers. “That’s the smell I was trying to place.” He handed her a laundry basket for her clothes.
“Mean, vicious, rabid nixies,” Ikka said, dropping her shoes into the basket. They squished. She was sopping wet.
I went into my room and had to literally peel off some of my clothing. I think a fine layer of skin and hair went with some of it. Bianca, now in my robe and waiting for the shower, had to help.
“Ow!” I glared at her, but she didn’t look the slightest bit repentant. “You could be a bit more gentle. Try not to enjoy this so much.”
“Yeah, I love touching dried animal guts. Best thing ever.” She finished yanking my shirt off. “Don’t be such a whiner. It’s better to do it fast, like a Band-Aid.”
We glared at each other, and for some reason that made us both bust into giggles. After we were done, I shucked myself out of my jeans, throwing them into the laundry basket she held.
“Don’t take that the wrong way,” Bianca said. “I still don’t like you.”
“You like me enough to touch animal guts.”
“I just don’t want the cabin to stink.”
“Fair enough.” My underwear went into the basket, and I put on Cade’s robe. I had found a fragment of antler and bits of feather in my unders. I shuddered. Shower soon. “It can’t get worse than this, right?”
Bianca flopped onto the bed. “I’m hoping Alistair is wrong and it slows down.”
I rested the laundry basket on my hip, wondering if I should just dump the clothes in the trash. “Is Alistair often wrong?”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “Never.”
“Great.”
*
THE MORNING arrived too quickly, as it does when you don’t get much sleep, and it was met with much grumbling and a side of blueberry pancakes. Sylvie showed up at nine, a container of berries in hand and a smile as big as her face. If she was surprised to find a cabin full of grouchy, bruised, scraped, worn-out people, she didn’t show it. Instead, she joined Cade in the kitchen and started making pancake batter while he got the coffee going. We have a decent-size kitchen table, but it wasn’t quite big enough for everyone we had over. Ikka and Olive brought in some of the folding chairs from our sugaring shack so we could try to squeeze in. Sid handed out coffee mugs while Sylvie, ever the morning person and happy hostess, began to pour.
Katya, her face wan and her hair in a messy bun, held out her mug wordlessly.
“It’s hot,” Sylvie warned. “So if you’re not going to add cream, I’d give it a minute.”
Kat was so tired and out of it, I’m not even sure she heard Sylvie. She huffed a gentle breath over the top of her cup. Frost whirled through the air, and the surface of the coffee froze into a thick layer. Kat set it down, hard. “Damn. Overdid it.” She grabbed a butter knife and began to chip away at her now-iced coffee, a few quiet tears moving slowly down her cheeks. I remembered this stage of grief. When everything was so raw you cried over the stupidest things, sometimes without even realizing it was happening.
The room became unnaturally quiet, the snap of the bacon and clink of the knife on the ice the only noise as everyone stopped, looking from Sylvie to Katya and back. Even the unflappable Cade sat there, spatula in midair, his mouth a thin line as he thought furiously of a way to spin this. Kat abandoned her knife and glared morosely at her cup.
Sylvie patted Kat’s arm. “That’s okay. It’s just coffee. Ava can fix that for you, can’t you, Ava?” My friend hit me with a do-it-now-or-we’re-not-friends kind of glare. I hesitated. She couldn’t mean what I thought she meant. I looked to Lock for his take, and he shrugged one shoulder, Ezra resting his head on the other as he tried to sneak in a nap. At least I think he was napping. He had sunglasses on.
“I suppose we could…” I trailed off. We could what? We didn’t own a microwave.
Sylvie pointed at the offending mug. “Now is not the time for subterfuge.” She wiggled her fingers. “So just do your thing and fix it.”
“My thing?” I said slowly.
“The fire thing. I don’t know what you call it. I tried looking it up. At first I thought it might be pyromancy, but that’s used for divination and I don’t peg you as the seer type. So you’re not exactly pyromantic, which I don’t think is a real word anyway. Pyrokinetic maybe? Most of these terms come from video games and D&D, which isn’t much help, but it’s not like I can do real research. People don’t study these sorts of things, I suppose because you all want secrecy, which I get, but it’s vexing, you know? And I did try to respect that, or at least give you some opportunities to confide in me, but you were taking your sweet time.” She patted Katya’s head. “In the meantime, this girl is crying, and I just can’t abide that—I can’t. So fix her damn coffee or you’re not getting any.”
Sylvie finally stopped for a breath. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes narrowed, and she was mad. No, she was frustrated, and Sylvie didn’t handle frustration well.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you mad,” Ezra said, not moving from his spot.
I looked around the room for some kind of help. Everything in me screamed to keep this hidden, to throw Sylvie off the scent, even though it was clear that it was too late for such things.
“And don’t go looking to your Super Friends here for assistance. I may not know what they all are, but I know that they know what I know.”
Cade gently took the coffeepot from Sylvie. While I had seen Sylvie upset before, it was rare to see Sylvie this upset. She didn’t anger easy, being the fairly happy-go-lucky type. My instinct may have been screaming at me to hide, but cool logic was telling me two things: One, the jig was up. Two, if I wanted to keep Sylvie as a friend, it was time to come clean. I handed Katya a cloth napkin with one hand, and with the other I tapped the frozen surface of the coffee. The heat released slowly as the ice melted and turned to steam, the coffee warm once again.
Sylvie lowered herself primly into a chair. “Thank you.”
“How long have you known?” Lock asked.
“I’m not sure. A while? Her hands sparked once after she had to deal with a customer who yelled at her when we would
n’t buy any of his books. Not a big spark, but I saw it. At first I thought I’d imagined it or something. I read this study once that talked about how when your brain is confronted with something it can’t explain, it will make crazy connections and draw false conclusions. Like the people in the 1600s who believed in the spontaneous generation theory—there was this guy who thought you could wrap cheese in rags and it would spontaneously produce mice, because he never saw the mice climb into the rags. As far as he was concerned, they just appeared. It’s also why we connect black cats to bad luck. Superstition is brought about by our brain skipping over missing information and building a hypothesis based on that faulty data—”
“Sylvie.” Cade had gone back to flipping pancakes and cooking the bacon, but I’d heard him say her name in that tone often enough to know it meant that she needed to get to the point.
“I paid attention after that, and I saw it happen again. Not a lot. You’re good at hiding. I thought about taking notes but figured I shouldn’t without your permission.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Notes would have been bad.”
“Once I realized what was going on with you, it wasn’t such a leap to figure out that the rest of your friends probably have something going on as well.” She tented her fingers around her mug. “There was just always this intangible wall, this separateness that you kept between me and the rest of your group. At first I thought it was because I’m younger, but that didn’t really seem to bother you, and besides, I’m not that much younger. Then I thought maybe you were the kind of girl who wasn’t really comfortable with other girls, but then you made more girlfriends.…”
Sylvie turned to Lock and said something, but I could no longer hear what she was saying. I felt a hand rest lightly on my shoulder. I was not surprised to see Bianca beside me.
“I’ve thrown up a quick veil,” she said. “No one is paying attention to me—they can still see you, but they can’t hear or see me, so don’t say anything. Okay?”
I gave a slight nod, disguising it as taking a sip of my coffee.
“You’re going to have to call this in to Alistair,” she said. I tensed, and I knew Bianca felt it. “Don’t panic. Really. I think it will be okay. We all like Sylvie, and whether you believe me yet or not, Alistair is not a monster. I don’t think he’ll do anything to her, but he does need to know there’s a potential security issue.”
Another minute nod from me. I didn’t like it, but she was right. Alistair had to know that I’d screwed up. I excused myself to use the phone.
The call was short, and once I’d hung up, I returned to my breakfast. My heart wasn’t much in it. I ate, but I don’t remember what the pancakes tasted like or how many of them I consumed. After that, the morning was relatively quiet until Alistair arrived with Les and Duncan.
Duncan gave me a bear hug in greeting, something he’s been doing my whole life, but for the first time, I hesitated before I returned the hug. I’m not sure he noticed. Or maybe he did and understood. I still hadn’t quite forgiven him for his part in the confrontation with Venus. How long would it take me to trust him again? He was the closest thing I had to a grandfather in my life, which made me realize that I did want to forgive him. Someday, hopefully soon. But my heart wasn’t quite there yet.
Alistair took Sylvie aside to talk to her while Les and Duncan introduced themselves to Katya. The plan was that she would go live in Duncan’s cabin for the moment. I could see that she quickly warmed to the two men, even though they were gruff.
Les was a thick man, short but slabbed with muscle. Black hair hung to his shoulders, and he had either an extreme five o’clock shadow or a very tightly cropped beard. A fine tracery of scars wound around his throat and trailed into his shirt. I’d always wanted to ask about them but had never quite felt comfortable doing so. He wore the leather vest most of the drove wore, the emblem of a scrappy jackrabbit ready to rumble on the back. In short, Les perpetually looked like someone who could start some shit. Still, he had Katya smiling in short order.
Worried about Sylvie, I tuned out the conversation and didn’t realize I’d been staring at Les’s scars until he said something.
“It’s killing you, isn’t it?”
“A little.”
I could tell Les was trying to decide whether to end my suffering or let me twist. He finally took pity on me. “Becoming the head of the drove means the old leader must be removed. Sometimes the leader will step down or die, but mostly leadership shifts because someone challenges the old regime.”
“And you had to fight?”
“I had to fight.”
“It’s all brute force, then?” The drove didn’t strike me as the kind of group to rely only on strength. They were too wily.
He shook his head. “Not really. After the fight, there’s a ceremony. If the drove accepts you, they step forward and blow silver powder into the wounds. It burns like nothing you’ve ever imagined, and it isn’t a quick thing. It lingers, as it should, so you don’t forget what you just went through—you remember the cost of what happened. The scars will never fade.”
“It’s a mark of station?”
“And a mark of acceptance,” he said. “Every time I’m challenged, the scars build.”
“What happens if they don’t accept you?”
Les’s voice grew soft. “If you’re lucky, they shun you.”
“And if you’re not lucky?”
“Then there won’t be a big enough piece left to bury.”
I wanted to reach forward and touch them, to see if I could feel the heat of the silver. Was it still in there? Did it still bother him? “Does it still burn?”
“Sometimes.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Yes,” Les said without hesitation, his voice firm.
It made me wonder what the old leader had been like, for Les to have gotten that cold, hard look. But I’d already asked enough personal questions. If on another day Les wanted to tell me, that would be up to him. So I did the mature thing and thanked him, then left to check on Sylvie.
When I entered the kitchen, I found Cade talking to Ikka, his newspaper and coffee forgotten next to him on the counter. Sylvie was gone, off to the bookstore. In a move that I found to be somewhat premature, Cade was talking to Ikka about getting someone from the drove to temporarily handle my workload at the bookshop.
Lock, Bianca, Ezra, and Sid already sat around the table. I plopped down into the seat next to Ezra. To the untrained eye, Alistair looked like he always did—perfectly coiffed and ready to sail his yacht into the sunset. I’d spent enough time around him, though, to see a few telltale signs that the last day or two had been rough. His smile was just a hair tired, his shoulders not as square as they usually were.
“You think it’s going to ease up?” Lock asked, his chin resting in his hand. Bianca nudged his shoulder with hers. A tiny childish part of me wanted to shove her out of the way, but I squashed the urge. Lock was allowed other friends. I had to get used to sharing my favorite people. This was the trade-off for getting more friends in our group. Our circle was expanding, and that was great, but it also gave me a flutter of panic deep in my gut. What if all our new friends made Lock and Ezra see that I wasn’t that necessary? That I was a burden? Let’s face it—I was a bit of a pain in the ass. Would all these new people make them realize they didn’t have to deal with the hassle that was my friendship?
Alistair shook his head. “I wish I could say yes, but from all reports it seems to be escalating. We’re in a lull right now, but I don’t think it will last.”
“What reports?” Sid asked. “We didn’t get sent any this morning.” A hand appeared from below the table, the palm held out flat. Without looking over, Sid placed a cookie into Olive’s waiting palm. The hand and the food disappeared. I peeked under the table to see Olive sitting cross-legged, half the cookie already gone. She glared at me, twisting away like I might crawl under the table and take her snack away from her.
&nbs
p; Alistair reached into his pocket, removing his phone. It had been vibrating off and on since I walked into the kitchen. He frowned at it before setting it to silent. “You were all spent. I brought in some volunteers from the drove, and Parkin is helping out.” That was reassuring. The drove knew what they were doing, and Parkin was a were-rhino. Nobody in their right mind argues with a were-rhino.
“Why outsource?” Cade asked, handing me a small plate of cookies.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting back upright. “Doesn’t the Inferno already house a lot of people?”
“We still don’t know how loyal they are. For all we know, they could be helping whatever’s going on,” Bianca said.
I frowned. “Is it that bad?” Ezra tried to swipe a cookie from my plate, and I smacked his hand without taking my eyes off Alistair. “Next time, I burn that hand.”
“I don’t really know,” Alistair said, glancing at his phone again. Although it was still in silent mode, even from here I could see that the screen kept lighting up. “We haven’t really had time to fully vet everyone. I believe most of the staff we have left is loyal except for a small handful who are pretending. Those people are marked and can be expected to do exactly what’s best for them and nothing else. That doesn’t mean I would trust any of them with our lives, which is essentially what I have to do with my teams right now.” He folded his arms, probably to keep himself from grabbing his phone, though the move looked nonchalant. “Basically, we’re still recovering from the shift of power from Venus to me. Repairs are presently being made, but people were lost, and though we’ve gained some, we’re still not a strong and unified force.”
“We’re afraid someone will use this turmoil to try to stage a takeover,” Bianca added.
Ezra yelped, cradling his hand.
“What did I tell you?” I didn’t feel too bad singeing his fingers. He would heal.
Alistair reached over and grabbed a few extra cookies from the container on the counter and put them on a plate, sliding them over to Ezra. Far from thanking him, Ezra just stared at the cookies, a thoughtful expression on his face. Alistair’s eyebrows tilted up in surprise.