Demons in My Driveway

by R. L. Naquin

  Mom bent and kissed him on the top of the head. “You’ve been missed. We’re off to Aggie’s for the afternoon, but I’ll want to hear all about your trip when I get back.”

  He grinned and swung his legs on the railing. “I’ll catch up with Maurice.” Gris leaped to his feet. “Is he in the kitchen?” He didn’t wait for an answer, and disappeared through the door Darius held open for him.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for never mailing me anywhere, Mom.”

  She squeezed my shoulder, eyes laughing. “Don’t be silly, sweetheart. I’d send you Federal Express. It’s quicker.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Aggie, of course, was waiting for us at the gate. “My girls! What a wonderful day, both of you here for a visit.” She hugged us, one with each arm, then ushered us inside, leaving Riley and Darius outside to keep watch.

  What they were watching for, I wasn’t sure, but Aggie sent me out with a plate of cookies and mugs of hot cocoa to keep them busy.

  “Seriously, guys.” I set the tray on a small table under a tree. “You don’t have to stay. We’ll call you when we’re done. I promise.”

  Both men glanced at me, stuffed cookies into their mouths and said nothing.

  “Fine. But it’s freezing out here. Not my fault if you get cold.”

  They shrugged and continued to chew. I appreciated their need to be big strong men protecting their women—though Riley and I weren’t together. To me, it wasn’t that they viewed us as weak and vulnerable so much as they viewed themselves as failures if they couldn’t do their jobs. I tried not to roll my eyes as I went inside.

  If freezing their manly asses off made them feel more in control of a situation nobody had any control over, who was I to take that away from them? At least they got cookies and hot chocolate.

  Mom and Aggie were already in the living room. All the books on the far left belonged to Mom, and she stood with a mug of cocoa in one hand, her other hand running over the dusty spines of cracked leather and fraying cloth. An idyllic smile played across her lips as she browsed.

  It struck me how much she must have missed this collection during the twenty years she’d lived mostly alone in a cottage in the woods in far off New Hampshire. Mom lost a lot when she went away—her books, her friends, her home. Dad and I weren’t the only thing she’d given up. I hadn’t truly considered how lonely and isolated she must have felt.

  Aggie—nearly identical to my mother in facial expression—stood across the room pulling what looked like random books from the shelves and placing them in a pile on the table next to her.

  Most of the books had indecipherable titles, either because the ink had worn off or the language was foreign. Aggie had a gift, though. Books sort of spoke to her. She knew which ones had the best chances of giving up the information we needed.

  I knew nothing. If I tried to search their crazy library, I’d be yanking books for no good reason and would likely find myself reading about the care and feeding of the long-extinct seven-toed winged seacamel of Barbados.

  Aggie turned her head toward me, smiled, and handed me a tome covered in torn green silk that smelled like it had been rescued from a fire. The title was singed away.

  “Check in here,” Aggie said. “I have a good feeling about it.”

  I plopped into the chair next to her pile of research material, prepared for an afternoon of skimming through ancient texts. This one, it turned out, was a gardening periodical, which caused me to question Aggie’s superpower of finding promising research material by feel alone.

  As I flipped through the chapters on working with dryads to enhance soil nutrients, sylph water for lasting moisture, and planting during the equinox for larger blossoms, I stopped to look at the beautiful, faded watercolors placed at the end of each section.

  I stopped on one in the chapter titled “Weed Prevention Through Verbal Tuning.” The painting depicted an old man stooped over a row of what looked like radishes, his arms held out from his sides and his lips forming an O. The caption beneath read “Curator singing a simple ballad for healthier vegetable growth.”

  I flicked my gaze first at Mom, then at Aggie. Both had expressions of extreme concentration as they scanned the stacks.

  Curator.

  The picture was probably a coincidence, totally unrelated to what we were searching for. I reached into a basket on the floor and chose a piece of red ribbon. Aggie kept scraps there to use as bookmarks. I placed it in the book and closed the cover.

  The next book in the pile was a cookbook. The cover was in much better shape, but the inside was difficult to read, since it had been handwritten in scrawling cursive rather than printed on a press like the previous one.

  Still, it didn’t take me long, flipping through, to come across the word again. The recipe for Curator Pie didn’t sound at all tasty—it combined sheep liver, eucalyptus leaves and dried pig mucus.

  I like pie. I like it very much. But I draw the line on mucus of any kind.

  I couldn’t be sure, but unless someone is a koala bear, it seemed like eucalyptus leaves might be kind of toxic.

  The explanation beneath the recipe described a new moon ritual that didn’t require the Curator to actually eat the pie in question, merely smear it on their person. The writer was unclear as to the purpose of this disgusting action.

  I bookmarked it and moved on.

  This third book was smaller, handwritten, but in a neat print rather than a scrawled cursive. The cover was soft and pliable, with no title, but the first page declared it to be the private property of Marjorie Willenstock. The first entry was dated June 23, 1872.

  As I skimmed through the entries, I realized it was the diary of an Aegis—or rather, a young girl of fourteen who was expected to become an Aegis but didn’t want the title or the responsibilities. I set the book aside to take home with me. If there hadn’t been so many other books I needed to go through, I’d have run home immediately to read Marjorie’s diary.

  It might not give me a lot to go on about Curators and Covenants, but it might tell me more about who and what I was.

  I’d been late to the party, and nobody around me could tell me what was going on. When I had been trying to find out what an Aegis was, Aggie and I’d had very little success.

  Later, we discovered my memory wasn’t the only one the Board had tampered with to keep me from trying to locate my mother. They’d also messed with Aggie’s. They’d failed to remove all her memories of my mother, but they’d done an excellent job of causing Aggie to forget what an Aegis was, making it all the more difficult to figure out what was happening to me.

  The Board was never going to be in my good graces. They’d given me far more trouble than help.

  We spent hours in that room together, poring over books, pamphlets, travelogues—anything that made Aggie’s fingers tingle or caused Mom to yell an excited yip.

  The snippets we collected painted an odd, confusing picture—Curators seemed to be similar in some ways to Aegises, in that they helped the Hidden. But mostly, they communed with nature, grew things, performed rituals and basically behaved like fairy-tale witches.

  What the hell that had to do with giant rainbow birds I had no idea.

  The only clue we had about the bird itself was a wood-block print in a book of Middle Eastern folk tales. The picture was in black and white, but the bird was the right size. It sat nestled on the top an enormous tree, while elephants, lions and dragons gathered around the trunk looking miniature in comparison to the bird.

  Even in faded ink, the bird looked wise and thoughtful, and its tail feathers and wingtips curled up in a way a thunderbird’s did not.

  “It’s not a roc, is it?” I held the book out for Aggie to examine.

  Her tight curls bounced as she shook her head. “Rocs are jet black and much smaller than this.” She pointed to the base of the tree. “See how tiny the elephant is? A roc can pick up an elephant, but it would take both claws. This bird here could pick up two or three
elephants with a single claw.”

  “That’s a big bird,” I said. “So what is it?”

  “That’s the Simurgh.” She pushed the book back toward me. “Read the stories in this. They’ll tell you all about it.”

  “It? There’s only one?”

  Aggie bent to pick up a few of the books I’d been through and rejected. “Well, they’re just stories, of course. But according to some legends, the Simurgh was the first Hidden to step out of the Wild Mists of Story.”

  Mom shelved the book in her hand and joined us. “So, you don’t think it’s real?”

  Aggie raised her hand, palm up. “Who knows? That was a very long time ago, and nobody I know has ever seen the Simurgh.”

  “Papa Dino said the First Hidden was a giant bird. It wouldn’t still be alive, would it?” I flipped through the book in my hand, keeping one finger on the page with the picture. “Maybe it had descendants, though.”

  I rubbed my burning eyes. I’d been squinting in poor light at faded script for too many hours. “Those feathers had to come from somewhere.”

  Mom took the book from me and closed it. “Take a break. If the answers are in there, they’ll still be in there later.”

  Aggie headed into the kitchen, flapping a glittering, ring-bedecked hand at us. “Come with me. We’ll look for answers elsewhere for awhile.”

  We gathered around her kitchen table with fresh mugs of hot, minty tea to refresh us. I’d suspected Aggie might pull out her bag of runes, but instead, she brought forth a deck of cards I’d never seen before.

  Aggie mixed the cards—I’d say shuffle, but she kind of riffled them together several times rather than doing it the way a Vegas dealer might. When she was satisfied, she set the cards on the table and gestured to my mom.

  “Cut the deck, Clara.” Her lips drew together in a serious expression.

  Mom shook her head and pushed away from the table a few inches. “No. Let Zoey. I don’t think I want to be read today.”

  I tilted my head at her. Aggie had already predicted her own death in the near future. I didn’t necessarily believe in all of this stuff, but if Mom was about to pull a card announcing her death, too, was impending, maybe I didn’t want to know. It was hard enough to keep us all alive as it was without dire predictions saying I was attempting the impossible.

  The less I knew, the less likely I was to cause a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  My future, on the other hand, made me curious. Who could resist taking a peek, real or imagined?

  “Cut them?” I asked.

  Aggie nodded. “Wherever it feels right.”

  I grabbed the top cards of the deck and slid my fingers down the pile until I had the urge to stop, then lifted the top two-thirds to set aside.

  Aggie smiled, and placed the bottom third on top of the new pile, then turned the top card over.

  In every movie I’d ever watched, people somehow managed to snag the Death card under these circumstances. In fact, having never seen a full deck of tarot cards before, I’d always been suspicious that all the cards were, in some way, representative of the Death card. It was more dramatic that way.

  My breath caught when I saw the card Aggie placed before me.

  Not the Death card.

  This card was hand painted in bright colors. The animals were gone, and the tree the bird nested in wasn’t as large, but I knew what I was looking at.

  This was a picture of the Simurgh in all its rainbow glory.

  Mom leaned across the table to get a better look, her long hair—so much like mine—brushing my arm. “Is that a phoenix?”

  “It’s the Simurgh,” I said, my voice hushed.

  “No.” Aggie tapped a finger on the card. “She’s right. This is the Phoenix. It’s a major arcana card, meaning change and transformation.”

  I snorted. “I didn’t need my fortune told to know change is coming.”

  Aggie took the card and flipped it over on the deck. “Not just change. The Phoenix represents the death and rebirth cycle. You know, it dies in a fiery blast, then is reborn anew from the ashes?”

  I frowned. “I’m going to die and come back to life?”

  She patted my hand. “Don’t take things so literally, dear.” She gathered the cards and shuffled them a little, then gave my mother a questioning glance. Mom shook her head, declining again to have her fortune read.

  I found that disconcerting, though I didn’t press.

  Plus, the whole death-and-resurrection prediction was wigging me out. I was trying to prevent what amounted to the zombie apocalypse—not to mention the recent appearance of vampires. I didn’t want to read too much into the fortune-teller thing—which I wasn’t entirely convinced was legitimate—but both zombies and vampires could be considered the result of dying and coming back to life.

  I suppressed a shiver. Not how I’d planned to live out my life—or afterlife.

  As morbid as the thought was, I didn’t think that was exactly what the card was trying to tell me. “Aggie, are you sure that was a phoenix? It looked a lot like the drawing I found of the Simurgh.”

  Aggie gave me a sideways glance and a half smile. “Honey, they’re not that different. The Simurgh holds all the knowledge of the world. According to some of the stories, it’s died and resurrected a hundred times over. The phoenix is just another representation of the Simurgh.” She shrugged. “If you believe folklore.”

  After all that I’d seen and all the fantastical creatures I’d met, I was far more inclined to believe in folklore than tarot cards. In this instance, it seemed they went hand in hand.

  In spite of Aggie’s resistance, I left her to chat with Mom while I moved to the sink and washed up the dishes we’d dirtied. The delicate china of the plates she used to serve cookies seemed more breakable next to the heavy mugs from our tea and cocoa. Kind of like Aggie herself. She was a force of nature, invincible and powerful, housed in the tiny, frail body of a woman who admitted to being well over a hundred years old. She seemed to be ageless, yet older than a redwood.

  My stomach knotted at her prediction of her own looming death. I’d only had her back in my life for about a year.

  I wasn’t ready to give her up.

  As I placed the last hand-dried mug in its cupboard, my phone vibrated in the front pocket of my jeans. The text was from Kam. We’d left her on the front porch to keep an eye on things.

  Portal in the driveway. Talia’s here. So is Sara. Better come home.

  I swore under my breath and texted her back that I was on my way.

  “I have to go.” I kissed Aggie on the cheek. “Stay and visit, Mom.”

  Mom frowned. “Are you sure? What’s wrong?”

  I kissed her cheek too. “It’s a Sara thing, not an end-of-the-world thing.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” Aggie said. “Send Clara’s young man in on your way past. No need for him to sit out in the cold by himself. He’s not the one you’re punishing.”

  I blinked. “I’m not punishing anyone.”

  Mom cleared her throat and showed a sudden interest in a saltshaker shaped like a hula dancer.

  Aggie patted my hand. “Of course you’re not, sweetheart. I’m sorry I said anything. You go on and take care of Sara.”

  Out in the yard, I watched Riley and Darius blow on their cold fingers, their heads pressed together in quiet conversation. Was that what I was doing? Punishing Riley? For what, exactly? The breakup had been mutual.

  Mutually heartbreaking.

  Being together had been too hard. Being apart was too hard. Being apart while constantly together was probably harder than either of those things.

  There had to be a better solution. If the world weren’t coming to an end, maybe I’d be able to figure out what the solution was. Then again, if we lived in a calm, safe world, Riley and I never would have broken up.

  I sighed. Being an Aegis kind of sucked.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kam sat in a rocking chair on the porch, feet
up on the railing, ankles crossed, looking like a sheriff in the old west. Except she wasn’t dressed for the part. In fact, she hadn’t donned an elaborate costume in a couple of days. For the second day in a row she wore jeans and a hoodie.

  “You okay?” I worried about her. It wasn’t only the lack of elaborate costumes. The spark had gone out of her, somehow.

  She shrugged. “I’m fine. Just worn out.”

  I wasn’t convinced. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “Not really.” She glanced at glowing gems embedded in her wrist. “I’ve been thinking about what you and Darius keep saying—that I need to conserve my magic if I’m ever getting home. All this talk of djinn magic opening portals has me a little worried, I guess.”

  I rested sideways on the railing and folded my arms. “Worried about what?”

  She hesitated. “What if djinn are in on all of this? Or maybe they’re being forced to open the portals?”

  “Honey, we don’t know how it’s being done.”

  “But djinn are being robbed of their magic, how can I throw mine away so easily on a ballgown or a cheerleader uniform?” Her voice was quiet and quivery.

  Sorrow pulled at me. Kam hadn’t seen another djinn in a long time. I put my arms around her and held her tightly. “We’ll figure it out,” I whispered. “We’ll set everything right.”

  She nodded and sniffed. “I know. We always do.”

  I let go once I was sure she was okay. “Where is everybody?”

  “They’re inside,” she said. “Maurice is pacing around the house. They won’t let him in.”

  I put my hands on my hips and squinted at the windows. “What do you mean ‘pacing around the house’?”

  My question was answered when Maurice stomped around the corner, hunched over and muttering to himself. He nearly ran me over.