by Lish McBride
“Fine,” Sylvie said. “I’ll do it. For science. Also for you, but mostly for science.” We said our good-byes, and then I hung up so I could set everything else into motion.
Ikka called her cousins to make sure the bookstore would be covered. As I suspected, it didn’t take much more than that. After the big blowup in the spring, Cade had been spending time with Duncan. And since the drove was almost fanatically devoted to Duncan, and Cade was like a son to him, they’d opened up their family umbrella to include my guardian. I mean dad.
After that, I called Alistair and caught him up. I could almost see him—hair slightly askew, maybe a few buttons on his dress shirt unbuttoned and his slacks wrinkled. He sounded that tired. Or at least, tired for Alistair.
“You want to run that by me again?”
I went over the kelpie information again and the connection I thought was there. “Look, when I asked her on the phone, she got evasive. That’s not normal Sylvie. The kelpies were really attached to those cardigans. I’m not sure what’s so special about them or what they do, but I think they’re more than a status symbol. Kelpies aren’t concerned with appearances. So those sweaters must be handy to them.”
The silence that greeted me meant Alistair was actually listening to what I said. After years of Venus, it was still so weird.
“So you’re thinking that you can barter with them. Trade the cardigans for info.”
“Yes.”
“You want to try to make a deal with deadly fairy horses that eat people.” He said it slowly, like he wasn’t sure I understood what he was saying. Or as if I had lost my marbles.
“You got it, hoss.”
“It is a sign of my desperation that I am even considering this.”
“Alistair, we’re worn out and things aren’t slowing down. If we don’t do something to get ahead of this…”
“Yes, I know. My reign will be shorter than that of the Spanish king Louis I.”
I hesitated. “Yes?”
“He was king for about seven months before he died of smallpox.”
“Oh. Okay, yes. Shorter than that, but with less smallpox.”
“Take someone with you. Someone Sylvie knows. Ezra or Lock. Whoever needs the break more. Tell the rest I’ll be sending assignments soon. And, Ava? I know you’ll be tempted to dawdle, and it’s not that I don’t understand…”
“But you need me to haul ass back to base.”
“Yes, that, exactly. But I would say it more politely.”
I waffled between who to take. Riding with Lock might be awkward, because he might want to talk about feelings, and to be honest I was kind of worn out on the whole emotions thing. But if I took Ezra, he would want to talk about whoopie pies the whole time. Which is cute for about three minutes, and then I would want to shove him out of the car at full speed.
I took Lock.
It’s not a long drive from the cabin to the store. It’s longer if you’re able to sweet-talk the driver into stopping at the Freeman’s Dairy Barn stand for ice cream because, hey, a firebug’s got to eat and Lock can stand my puppy dog eyes for only so long, though I know that when he caves I’ll be on the receiving end of such glares as “that is not proper nutrition” and “even though you don’t have to worry about weight gain, think of your arteries.” He’d slowed down on those looks after our battle with Venus. I’d overextended my reach, and if Lock hadn’t stopped me, I would have gone nova. You don’t want to be around a firebug when one of us goes. We destroy not only ourselves but also everything in a fairly large radius. It’s not pretty. So when I got a double scoop, sprinkles and jimmies, he kept his comments to himself.
I’d burned a lot of fat and muscle in the process of fighting Venus. I could see my collarbones and hip bones when I came to afterward. So for a bit, he paused the discussion of my poor eating habits until I put the weight back on. He was really worried, and Ezra was so anxious about it, he even offered to share some of his lobster roll with me once. It’s not that Ezra doesn’t share, it’s just that he expects you to snag some without asking. It’s the fox way. So if he was actually offering, then that meant things were quite dire.
I neatly avoided talking about anything of import by passing out in a sugar-induced haze. Hey, it had been a long couple of weeks. I didn’t wake up until we reached Broken Spines. Sylvie was waiting for us, sitting under Horatio’s tree with her knitting.
Cade greeted me when I came in, emerging from the back of the store. He handed me a handful of paperbacks. “These came in while you were gone. I thought you might like them. I know you’ve read the first two, but sometimes rereading can be soothing.” He held them out to me, and I took them and set them on the counter, right before I tackled him in a bear hug.
“You’ve been worried.”
“Out of my skull,” Cade said. “I know you have a team of people around you to protect you, and I know you can take care of yourself, but, well, you’re still my girl. Somewhere in my mind, I think no one can protect you like I can, even though I know that’s ridiculous. What good would I be in a fight?”
I hugged him tighter. “You’d be plenty good. I can tell.”
“Thanks, Rat,” he said, letting me go. “But I’m a reader, not a fighter.”
“You could throw books at them,” I said, tucking one of the smaller paperbacks into my jacket pocket. “Big, thick hardcovers. Those would smart.”
After we made our good-byes, we escorted Sylvie out to the van. She’d talked her dad into dropping off a duffel bag with her toothbrush and some clothes so we wouldn’t even have to stop by her place.
It was a little uncomfortable seeing her after the big firebug reveal. I leaned on the car door while Lock helped Sylvie with her bags. We stared at each other, unsure what to say. Then she lifted up a Tupperware container. “I brought whoopie pies.” Her cheeks pinked. “And the knitting stuff. Ava, I…” She hunched her shoulders.
I took the container from her. “Thank you for doing this. It really will help. And I’m glad I don’t have to hide from you anymore.” Her eyes lit up, but I covered her mouth with one hand before she could open it. “And I know you have questions. We have a short drive ahead of us. I will answer a few, but I don’t want the ride to turn into an interrogation. We have more important things to focus on.” She mumbled something into my palm. “I don’t care if it’s for science or not.” She scrunched her nose up in irritation.
We climbed into Lock’s minivan, Sylvie sitting behind me. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw her eyes light up again. “So what can you do, Lock? Can I ask? I know you can do something. Don’t hold out on me. Ava’s being her usual stingy self, but I know you’ll talk to me.” She cracked open the container and handed him a whoopie pie. He ate it one-handed while he backed out of her driveway. “I’m not above bribery.”
“Hey! I never got offered a bribe,” I said.
She squinted at me. “You never gave me the chance.”
Lock laughed. “Good to see you, too, Sylvie. Wait until we get to the cabin, and I’ll show you.” I caught the twinkle in his eyes—he knew this would drive her crazy. So out of pity I spent the entire ride distracting Sylvie by giving her a quick overview of what had happened with Venus.
“Okay, so let me see if I’ve got this straight. You, Lock, and Ezra have been working for Alistair’s group, the Coterie. Only, it used to belong to Venus, who was an evil bloodsucker. Ryan, your pretty but clearly deranged ex-boyfriend, spied on you and tried to hand you over to Venus. He was, in fact, dating you on her orders.” Her fingers tapped the seat as she spoke. “Which makes him a bad man. Venus kidnapped Cade, and you all went to rescue him, burning down most of an island and nearly killing all yourselves in the process. Would you say that’s a fairly accurate summary?”
“I would say, yes.” I poked the air-conditioning vent so that it blew directly into my face. I was really starting to love Lock’s new mom van.
Sylvie’s fingers stilled. “There’s one thing I stil
l don’t get.”
“And what would that be?” I asked as Lock growled at the driver in front of us for going ten miles per hour under the speed limit. They were busy getting an eyeful of the landscape. If Sylvie and I were playing a game of Spot the Flatlander, I could have claimed five points.
“I understand why you broke up with Ryan and everything else, but if Lock saved your life and all that, why were you guys fighting?”
The air in the van instantly became weighted. My throat went dry, and I was suddenly as into the landscape as the summer people were.
Sylvie touched my shoulder. “Wait, is this because he asked you out and you said no?”
Lock turned his frown on me before swinging his attention back to the road. “You told her I asked you out and that you said no?” He glanced back at Sylvie in the rearview mirror. “Is that what she told you?”
Sylvie tipped her hand in a “kind of” motion. “She said you asked her out but that went poorly. Ava was pretty vague.”
Lock snorted, relaxing. “Went poorly. Yeah, you could say that. Ava became the human avatar for panic.”
“I wasn’t that bad!”
Lock’s expression said otherwise. He opened his mouth, and I jabbed the button for the stereo. “You know what? We’re going to listen to the radio now.” And then I turned the volume up so high, the van started to vibrate.
I couldn’t hear Lock now, but he said something to Sylvie anyway, and I’m pretty sure it was “Just like that.”
That’s when I noticed that in my haste to turn on the radio, I’d melted the knobs and it was now stuck on NPR. You haven’t really heard Garrison Keillor until you’ve heard him at an earsplitting decibel.
By the time we made it to the cabin, I had a slight headache. Lock paused outside our door. A shrub squatted to the side, wilted and dry from our lack of rain. It had been a dry summer so far. Lock held a hand out and spoke to it in a coaxing voice. It stretched out to touch him, swaying in a phantom breeze. New shoots unfurled and a few buds opened. Lock fetched it some water from our almost empty rain barrel.
Sylvie’s face was aglow, like she’d just witnessed Hercules fighting the Hydra. “He’s a plant whisperer!”
“He’s a dryad,” I corrected. “At least, he is on his mom’s side. And before you ask, if Ezra wants to do the reveal for you, that’s up to him. In the meantime, why don’t you harass Lock with twenty questions.” She skittered off, shouting questions as she went. Lock, for his part, seemed good-natured about the whole thing.
13
WHEELIN’ AND DEALIN’
THE CABIN WAS EMPTY when we entered, but there were signs of occupation everywhere. Various-size clothes hung from the line strung in the backyard. Extra boots and shoes were drying on the porch. The dreaded whiteboard took up a great deal of space as well. I couldn’t wait until this was all over and I could get my territory back. Growing up, I’d never had a room to call my own, and now that I did I’d found that I was very territorial over it.
Sylvie was already so spun out on new information that she was practically vibrating. I had to make a deal with her, lest she drive me to distraction and make me do something I’d regret. So we decided on a trade of information. She could ask us a few questions, and Lock or I would answer to the best of our ability. If it was a question we couldn’t answer because we didn’t know or because it involved someone else’s secrets, then that question didn’t count. As a gesture of goodwill, I let her ask a bunch of questions first. Not only did this make Sylvie happy, but it also had the added bonus of getting her focused. If I’d tried to ask my questions first, Sylvie would have been all over the place because she’d have been too busy thinking of the questions she wanted to ask. That’s just how Sylvie and her giant brain work.
Surprisingly, most of her questions were Lock based. Well, not too shocking, because she thought Lock was ultra dreamy (her words, not mine), but that wasn’t why. She simply thought my power was kind of boring, which was new. People are usually excited by what I can do. Fire is like that. Start a bonfire and watch people flock like dazed moths.
But Sylvie was pretty much over it. “So, do they call you a green man, like in all those hippie pagan books my mom has? Are you actually green? Do you have your own tree? I read somewhere that dryads can’t leave their trees. Is that true? If it is, how come you can leave yours?” Lock politely answered the first twenty before he started to shoot me looks of desperation.
I took pity on him. “Sylvie, give Lock a break. It’s our turn anyway.”
She folded her hands and waited expectantly.
“First, about you figuring me out. I mean, even if you heard or saw something, most people would have shrugged it off or decided it was sleight of hand. Not many would take the leap to firebug.”
“I suppose not.” She twisted the ring on her finger while she decided how to answer my question. “I’ve known about the hidden world for quite a while, though, if that’s what you mean. My uncle Tim married a siren. Well, half-siren, I guess. I think her dad was human. I’m not sure it matters anyway. She’s really nice, though she can never join us for caroling, and there was that one unfortunate incident where she sang the happy birthday song and no one remembers the last two hours of Grandma Hildy’s birthday party. Do you know how unsettling it is to not know whether you had cake or not? I had another piece just in case and got a stomachache.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever had that problem.” I could see Lock struggling not to laugh. It’s hard to keep up with Sylvie sometimes.
“Well, it’s really weird. Anyway, she’s pretty awesome. She was terrific help during the marine biology unit at school. I’ve met some pretty neat people through her. Only I’m sure not all of them are actually people. They wear things to help make them appear human. Aunt Fiona has a necklace that she wears, kind of like the ones you guys have, only the symbol is different.”
Lock glanced at me. Lock and Ezra both wore anti-fire charms around their necks. Silver for Lock, platinum for Ezra due to weres’ silver allergy. They were small—about the size of a Scrabble tile. The boys were usually good about hiding their wards, but apparently not good enough. Or we hadn’t been worried about it around Sylvie. Not that it mattered now, but it was a security breach, and one we’d have to watch in the future. Not everyone took things as well as Sylvie did.
“And that’s how the knitting thing came about.”
I must have spaced out and missed some of what she said. Then again, maybe not. Sylvie was pretty handy with the non sequitur. “How was that?”
“Aunt Fi was having kelpie problems. One had moved into the stream she liked to frequent. Kelpies eat a lot, and one moving into your ecosystem can be rough if you share the same dietary needs. So she, my aunt Fi, thought it might be good if the kelpie spent less time in the water hunting. But they dry out, you know? And so they have to return to the water pretty frequently.”
“Skip to the end, Sylvie.”
“I’m putting ‘skip to the end’ on your tombstone, cupcake,” Lock said.
“I just don’t like to dawdle, conversation-wise.” I motioned for Sylvie to speed it up.
“So like I was saying, kelpies need to stay damp, like frogs, only with more fur.”
More fur? Were there furry frogs?
“So this kelpie, it was eating up all my aunt’s favorite snack. Which made her grouchy. I guess I would be upset if someone did that to me—like when my dad finds my stash of chocolate and eats it all. But then I thought, well, kelpies are sort of like sharks—they scare people and eat a lot, but they’re still a necessary part of the ecosystem.” Sylvie pulled her knitting bag onto her lap. “I overheard my aunt talking about the problem with one of her friends—a witch, I guess.” Sylvie paused and thought for a moment. “Are there different kinds of witches?”
“Yes,” Lock said. “While some powers overlap, they tend to specialize in the magic that is strongest in them.”
“Can they specialize in symbols? Like yo
ur necklaces?”
I nodded. “So your aunt’s friend was like that? A rune witch?”
“I’m not sure. Just a guess. But they were talking about creating something for the kelpies to help them stay moist so they could spend more time on land. They’d been experimenting with a charmed necklace, but it wasn’t working well. So I asked them if it had to be jewelry.” She held up a skein of yarn. “The thing about this cotton is that it’s absorbent. It already wants to hold on to the water. So I asked if we could make something out of this. The witch spelled the yarn and made up a pattern for me to follow that had runes in it, and I tweaked the pattern so the kelpies could easily wear it. Since the cotton naturally absorbs, there was less stress on the spell.” She showed me the cardigan she was working on. “They can wear it in either form and they can spread farther onto land so they have longer to hunt. It means less stress on the water resources and my aunt gets to eat her fish in peace.” She put the stuff away. “So why the sudden interest?”
“There’s been some trouble. Lots of creatures acting weird. We met some kelpies who had formed a herd, which was strange. Your sweaters appear to be working, though. They were all out of the water and feeding when we met them.” I would have to point that out to Alistair.
Lock opened up some windows to let the air in, making sure the screens were firmly in place when he did. “Ava noticed that some of them had sweaters on and thought they looked familiar. We were hoping to maybe trade one or two of your cardigans for some information. Something has the kelpies spooked, and we need to know if that thing is what’s been causing all our problems.”
“At the very least it could rule some options out.”
Sylvie pushed to the edge of her seat so she could see us better. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be. I’ve already handed off any completed ones. There’s the half-finished one I’m working on. I think I can persuade my aunt and her friend to part with it, but it’s still a lot of work, Ava, and time consuming. I’m not sure you’re going to have much to offer.”