He used to sleep here, I remembered. This was his room, back when he was Gabriel. I opened my eyes.
Item of Interest the First: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster on the closet door. Not one of the new ones; real vintage eighties Turtles, with April O’Neal in her yellow catsuit. I smiled, remembering the fight I had with my mother when, shopping for kindergarten clothes, I insisted on Ninja Turtle shoes, not caring that they came from the boys’ department. My favorite was Michelangelo, but Damon seemed more of a Raphael kind of guy. Who knows, maybe as a kid he liked Leonardo.
Item of Interest the Second: small bookshelf next to the window. Top shelf inhabited by videos — not DVDs, videos. The first two Turtles movies. Aladdin. Batman Returns. Back to the Future. Edward Scissorhands. I remembered watching most of them with my dad, sharing a popcorn bowl, wiping our buttery fingers on each other. It gave me warm fuzzies to see that Damon liked the same movies. Or had, once upon a time.
The next shelf was books. Tolkien, no surprise there. A few other fantasy titles, but mostly classics. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Tarzan of the Apes. The Red Badge of Courage. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Poe, Harper Lee. He’d read all that before covanting in his mid-teens? He’d been homeschooled, I remembered. So these books might have been his parents’ ideas, not his. But he hadn’t gone out of his way to burn them, at least.
Item of Interest the Third: A modest collection of toys atop a wooden chest in the corner. A globe. Several large plastic dinosaurs. A painted metal train engine that might have been his father’s. And a floppy-looking stuffed puppy with black spots and a woebegone expression. The puppy was well-worn, tattered and faded, missing part of an ear. I visualized a tiny Damon — very similar to his little cousin Pipsqueak — curled up with his puppy in this very bed, on these very sheets with their stars and moons and rocket ships. How much of that little boy remained in Damon? He couldn’t have burned him out entirely.
A clink drifted in from the hallway, sounding very much like dishes, and I recommenced Operation Vertical Wonder Tummy. By the time I tippy-toed into the kitchen doorway, the clinks had multiplied and spread, joined by a party of traveling clanks and clatters, as well as an invading army of marvelous cooking smells. Dr. DiNovi stood at the stove in a plaid bathrobe, breaking eggs into a skillet.
“Good morning, Naomi,” he said. “Set the table, will you?” He held out a stack of plates and silverware. “Do you like omelettes? I am adept at both the cheese and chocolate-chip variety.”
Wonder Tummy Occupant cheerfully volunteered for one of each, but he was not the boss of me. “Chocolate chip, please.” I started setting out plates. “Dr. DiNovi, you know how to get in touch with Damon, don’t you? I know he doesn’t want to hear from me, but maybe you could give him a message?”
Dr. DiNovi flipped an omelette onto a plate, then turned from the stove to pluck a cordless phone from its cradle, dial a number without looking, and toss the phone to me.
I fumbled the catch, of course, but the phone was still ringing when I got it to my ear. And why couldn’t you do it, Mister Professor Annoying Omelette Person… I debated hanging up. I debated throwing the phone back to Dr. DiNovi. I debated hanging up again. But I didn’t.
And when Damon answered, I knew why. I was hungry. Not just for omelettes.
“Yes, Dad?” Of course, I was calling from his parents’ number. His voice was wary, resigned, but not hostile. I didn’t want to hear the steel walls go up in his voice when he realized. I stayed quiet long enough for him to speak again. “Hello?”
That would have to be enough. “Paris says find the Methodist cemetery in Augusta, Kansas,” I said, and hung up.
Helen joined us for breakfast, and if either of the DiNovis thought me nervous or subdued, they said nothing about it. My appetite, I admit, was unaffected. I wolfed down two large omelettes while Helen and the good doctor chuckled over a story from his Formyndari days, something about a kathair who turned out to be a fairly harmless, and entirely human, crackpot with delusions of Dracula.
“We did manage to get the guy committed before he could seriously hurt anybody,” Dr. DiNovi said. “Old Jake Cunningham — remember him, Helen? — said he’d rather deal with an honest kathair any day than a wacko like that. I can’t say I agree. Kathairna tend to be pretty wacko themselves. I think he just didn’t like having to pull his punches.”
“Is ‘kathairna’ the plural of ‘kathair’?” I asked. It seemed like Damon had used the word the same way.
“Yep. Corrupted Greek mixed with corrupted Swedish. Tenebrial’s what you might call an incomplete dialect, not functional as an independent language, but melded halfway with the languages of the outside world — just as Shadows themselves tend to be,” said Dr. DiNovi, Professor of English Literature and Linguistics. “Any group of people with knowledge and concerns not shared by the community at large is going to evolve its own jargon, especially one as secretive as ours. Tenebrial mostly borrows and adapts words from Greek, Latin and Swedish.”
“Swedish?… Formyndari headquarters is in Sweden, right?” A.k.a. Boringsville?
“That’s right, you were there the other day.” He said this as casually as if I’d gone to the mall. “ ‘Formyndari’ is from the Swedish word for ‘guardians.’ Started with a mob of torch-wielding villagers whose friends and family were getting picked off by a pair of sister kathairna. There’s still songs about it. They didn’t get organized until a man named Greger Mattiasson took the lead. He’s our founder, complete with statues. You’ll find a disproportionate number of Hunter’s sons named Greg or Matt.”
“And you used to be a Hunter?”
Some of Dr. DiNovi’s laugh lines went subtly flat. “For five years, after my brother died. Then I met Helen and decided it was time to settle down.” Another of those gooey-eyed glances.
I tried to visualize my jovial, paunchy Lit professor in stake-jabbing, cloak-swirling Van Helsing mode. It made my brain hurt. I could visualize the Hunter’s prey, though. Westley, Audrey, Paris, Dove, all reduced to silvery ash. My appetite died.
“I have to say I’m impressed with my colleagues,” he continued, “for tolerating Damon’s Orphanage as well as they have. It wouldn’t have happened back in my day. I’m not sure it could have happened back in my day. We didn’t run into many like Damon, with personalities and self-control and nice, crisp outlines. We were lucky… or unlucky… if they still had the ability to speak. Something like the Orphanage — not just one, but a group of coherent, self-aware, non-killing-machine kathairna — most of my comrades would have called that an impossibility.” He cocked his head and peered at me thoughtfully. “There seem to be a lot of those going around.”
.
Regardless of whether one is pitifully pregnant and has just been dumped by a vampire, one’s professor will still flunk one who fails to show up for Western Civilizations at ten o’clock Tuesday morning. I decided to derive a certain comfort from the inexorable tyranny of academia as Dr. DiNovi drove me to campus. Wasn’t it nice that some things never changed? Even if those things made one want to scream and go back to bed?
At several points during the drive, Dr. DiNovi seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but he didn’t say it. The anticipation was killing me.
“Naomi?” he said at last, as I climbed out of his SUV.
“Yes?”
“Things are going to be okay.”
“Dr. DiNovi, I’m a big girl. I am divorced, disowned, penniless, pregnant, and behind on my homework. I am fully aware that things are not going to be okay.” I gave him a wide, cheerful smile, heaved my backpack onto one shoulder, and headed off down the sidewalk.
DAMON
I was starving. After bearing up stoically to more than a decade of relentless hunger, a few days without it had been enough to bring me to my knees. Metaphorically speaking, of course; I had too much to do to let myself be distracted by a little thing like raging starvation. Get a grip, boy. It’s been less than twenty-four hours.
<
br /> Hours of careful maneuvering had failed to rid us of the Formyndari guard, who sat in our living room with a dour expression, murmuring occasionally into his headset as Jewel and Adonis bounced popcorn off his balding head. His Shadow, a leggy blonde with a nose ring, circled the property outside, and the balding fellow made frequent trips upstairs. We could still have paraded Paris and fourteen of his closest friends through the house, playing trumpets, if we timed it right. One pair of guards was simply inadequate to watch this many Tenebrii in this large a space. Priscilla needed to make up her mind about me and cut it out with the half-measures, but I was hardly going to tell her so.
Westley had volunteered to hang around outside and keep an eye on the blonde. I didn’t stop him. Maybe time alone was what he needed. More likely it was the last thing he needed. But for the first time I could remember, I was scared to talk to him.
The cell phone in my pocket buzzed. My parents’ number. Speaking of people I didn’t really want to talk to. “Yes, Dad?”
There was no answer, only a very quiet exhalation.
I recognized it.
Which was ridiculous. There was no voice to it, nothing to recognize. But I knew it was her.
The starved feeling seemed to draw up into a point, like, well, a starving man reaching for food.
“Hello?” I said, and the word sounded bizarrely normal.
“Paris says find the Methodist cemetery in Augusta, Kansas.” Click.
For several seconds, I could make no sense of the words, thoroughly distracted by the sound of her voice. By the time sense returned, I was listening to a dial tone.
And the Formyndari Hunter was watching me.
The words “wrong number” almost made it past my lips. But it would be an obvious lie. I needed to get to Kansas without suspicious Formyndari on my heels. “My Lumi,” I said instead. “We’re… having some problems.” My cheeks flushed, and I let them. The suspicion faded reluctantly from his eyes, and he turned his attention back to a tinny voice on his headset.
I strode casually from the room, trying to think. Paris actually had gone to Naomi, which I hadn’t expected. There was no need to clear a path for him here, only to get away from the guard myself. Methodist cemetery in Augusta, Kansas… His Lumi’s grave, probably. I knew less about Paris than any of my other orphans, didn’t even know for sure whether his Lumi was dead. He had never spoken of her. It didn’t matter; I just had to get there.
The room Paris shared with Jewel was the smallest in the house, and had been his alone until Audrey’s arrival necessitated some rearranging. A line of masking tape down the middle of the room showed that even Paris’s favorite housemate was given no quarter. Jewel’s side of the room was unmistakable — it overflowed with hairbows and nail polish, curly-haired dolls and lacy clothes, the bed piled with pastel pillows under a gauzy white canopy. A ten-year-old’s dream come true. Paris’s side seemed not only spartan in contrast, but virtually uninhabited, which in fact it was; he spent less than half his time at the Orphanage, and I had never been able to find out for sure where he went. Augusta, Kansas, perhaps.
Many Shadows kept photographs, for shading purposes — places they visited, but rarely, and so needed a visual aid. The Formyndari had already searched for such things, and so had I, which had left his austere handful of belongings rather less neatly stowed than usual. But now I had a clue to work with. If Paris’s Lumi had been Methodist…
I turned to the tiny bookshelf on the wall above Paris’s low, narrow bed. It was sparsely populated, but one of the few books it held was a hymnal. Hymns of Charles Wesley.
I shook it, but nothing fell out. Not until I flipped through the pages did I find the two yellowing Polaroids between pages eleven and twelve, undisturbed for so long that I had to pry them loose. One was of Paris, standing on a lawn next to a plump, sweet-faced woman with an uncertain expression. Paris’s expression, in contrast, was rather dazzled; this had to be his Lumi, and she was thirty if she was a day. Unusual, that. There was a story here, but it was none of my business.
The other picture was a headstone. Deborah Jane Stonecastle, 1949-1984. Beloved daughter, sister, and teacher. A teacher, whose Shadow was an androgynous pre-teen. A story, indeed.
The graveyard picture was twenty-four years old, at a guess, but a nice thing about cemeteries is they tend not to change much. I’ll say this for the dead; they stay put.
There was a big, bushy evergreen, possibly a yew, in the background of the picture; its shadow ought to do nicely for a point of arrival. I memorized the picture, then tucked both photos into my pocket.
It would be unwise to head off without telling anyone what was up. Normally I would head straight for Westley, but not today. Dove and Darling’s room was next door, and I could hear someone moving around; perfect. I knocked on the door, opened it without waiting for an answer. I expected to see Dove sketching at her desk by the window, possibly for one of the children’s books she illustrated, but instead she was on Darling’s side of the room, sifting through the CDs, gloves, belts, knives, and other detritus piled on Darling’s bed.
“Damon, you seen Darling today?” She glanced up at me, looking worried.
I had to think a moment. “No, I haven’t.”
“She not been here since those lie shou come. Always when she go, she leave me note. But I cannot find.”
I touched her shoulder. “Dove, Darling is a big girl. She is extremely able to take care of herself. She just doesn’t want to be here with the Formyndari. She’s fine.”
“But she always leave me note!”
“She just didn’t want the Formyndari to find it. Dove, listen to me. If you let on to the Formyndari that she’s gone, that will not be good for her. Do you understand?”
Dove glared at me. “I know what you thinking. You wrong.”
“I’m not thinking anything, Dove,” I said, only half-truthfully. “I know anyone would rather be elsewhere when there’s a Hunter sitting in the living room, I’m not—”
“You are. But you wrong. Darling not kill those people. Know how I know?” She crossed her arms, defiant and almost amused. “She not ask me to help her.”
I crossed my own arms in half-conscious imitation. If we’re going to have this conversation, then by thunder let’s have it. “Would you have helped her?”
“Help her kill people? No! I would beat sense into her until she give up crazy idea.”
“Maybe she knows that, and that’s why she hasn’t asked you.”
“No. Darling would not, Darling could not keep this from me. Beside, she with me when those people killed, you know that.”
Grocery shopping with Dove, supposedly, when Cousin Dolly and her Lumi died. And for Martin Iverson, getting horribly bloody while supposedly hunting — again, with Dove. Supposedly. “Dove, honey, everyone knows you’d lie to God and the Pope to help Darling.”
“Maybe. But I not have to, when truth is Darling innocent.”
I rubbed my forehead. “Okay. I’ll think about what you’ve said. Now, listen. I have a lead on Paris. If I’m not back in three hours, give these to Westley.” I handed her the photos. “Until then, cover for my absence as best you can. Okay?”
“Okay.” She looked up at me. “Damon?”
“Yeah?”
“Westley is…” She bit her lip. “Something wrong. He shout at me. Then he sorry; I not mad. But he never do this before.”
“Yeah,” I said heavily. “I know. I’ll be back in a few hours, okay?”
I stepped back into Paris’s room, where Jewel’s canopied bed cast a decent shadow. It took me longer than it should have, to shove aside the worry for Westley, for Paris, and for Darling, and above all to shove aside the ragged, gaping absence of Naomi, and focus on the image of Deborah Stonecastle’s grave.
The squeezing dark lasted longer than usual, and a shiver of panic broke through my focus. It was only a myth, only a myth that a Shadow could be lost forever on his way to some improperly visualized
destination…
Then I could see sunlight, and feel cold air in my lungs. I retained the presence of mind not to come all the way out of the shadow until I had taken a look around, but when a quick glance showed no one nearby, I let my body fully arrive. I was grateful for my leather jacket; it was a cool, misty day in Augusta, Kansas, very different from the sunny photograph. The cemetery itself had aged. Weeds gathered at the edge of the fence-posts and gravestones, and the evergreen whose shadow I stood in was broken, only half as tall as its photograph. No wonder shading here had been difficult. Had Paris managed it?
The moment I turned toward Deborah Stonecastle’s grave I saw him, sitting cross-legged before the headstone, his expression deeply thoughtful — which was a nice alternative to the raging anguish I had braced myself for. Few orphans could visit their Lumi’s grave and maintain composure. He glanced up at me as I approached, then returned his gaze to the stone. A dozen white roses sat in a glass vase before us, too fresh to be from anyone but Paris.
“I’ve finally forgiven her,” Paris said softly.
“For… this?” I gestured vaguely at his body.
He raised an eyebrow, distantly. “That, too. But mostly for leaving me. Leaving me like this, with nothing… It’s a lot to forgive, but I’ve finally managed it.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were dry, but they seemed darker than I remembered them. “Have you ever forgiven Claire?”
I flinched. “Does this have anything to do with Boston?”
“Nothing whatsoever. Or maybe it does, who knows.” He saw my exasperated expression and smirked, which was a relief. This new Zen Paris had not completely displaced the snarky jerk I knew.
“In Boston,” he said, “I tried to save a woman from getting murdered in an alley. I failed, but I did manage to send her murderer with her. Are you going to give me to the Formyndari for that?” His tone was not accusatory, merely curious.
I growled and ran a hand through my hair. “Of course not. That would be simple.”
Secondhand Shadow Page 27