“So instead you go around secretly reading our emotions. That’s like wearing X-ray glasses and looking through our clothes. Or worse. Looking all the way to our bones.”
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Looking just through clothes would be worse.”
“Keep out of this.”
Not this time. “Besides, X-ray glasses suck as an example. You wear those on purpose. Daniel can’t help being empathic. And he’s right. If the first thing out of his mouth had been ‘Hi, I’m an empath,’ we would have freaked. We couldn’t have acted normal around him. Well, as normal as we ever act.”
Eddy had turned to him bristling, but he’d made the rare shot she couldn’t rebound. “All right. But it still feels weird, I’m sorry.” She vaulted out of her recliner; the momentum carried her to the door, from which she looked back at Daniel. “Anyway, I don’t care if you sensed all along that I liked you. I don’t care if you sense how much I like you now. I just don’t like realizing you had so many secrets. So if you have any more, maybe make a list for me, will you?”
Daniel hadn’t gotten his mouth all the way open before she took off down the stairs. Empathy must have told him to let her go, because he slumped back on the couch. “Thanks for the help,” he said sincerely.
“You know she’ll get over it, right?”
“I’m hoping so.”
“You can’t, like, feel it?”
Daniel worked up a quizzical smile. “Kind of. And she did use the present tense.”
“Huh?”
“She said ‘how much I like you.’ Not ‘liked.’”
“What is it with girls, anyway? They’re all, pay attention to their feelings. Then they find a guy who has to pay attention, and they flip.”
“Yeah, but nobody wants to feel like an open book. Especially around closed ones. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Well, first time we met, you acted friendly, but you felt jealous.”
Hell no, Sean almost said. But memory said hell yes. He shrugged.
Daniel continued, “I thought you were Eddy’s boyfriend, or else you wanted to be.”
“You were off the mark there.”
“I know it now.”
“It was just how tight we’ve always been. When there started to be other guys—”
Daniel’s brows went up.
“Hey, not many other guys. But I still didn’t want her to dump me as her best friend.”
“She’s not doing that, Sean.”
“I know. We’re cool.”
“She wouldn’t have dumped you for anybody. That’s not how she flies.”
“I know. I guess I worry about stupid things sometimes.”
“Tell me about it.”
Sean laughed, then Daniel joined in, then they both sat silent. It was an okay silence, and if Daniel was taking advantage of it to read Sean’s feelings, big deal. Mainly what he felt was wiped. Funny, though, how Daniel had said it was Eddy who flew a certain way, when it was Sean who’d been doing all the flying—
Flying. The window. The crow-in-waiting over Nyarlathotep’s head, the one Orne had prepared for a guest magician—
That was so not something he needed to think about. Naturally he opened his mouth and said, “Hey, about the meeting tomorrow. How they’re not going to let you sit in.”
“Don’t get me started on that again.” But Sean had already turned on Daniel’s ignition. “If it were only Helen, she’d have let me in. I didn’t want to say it in front of Eddy, because you know how she is about Marvell—”
“What’s Marvell got to do with it?”
“Helen talked to him about the meeting before she came up. He’s the one said it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to be there.”
Surprise? Not. If Marvell would go control freak all over Sean, why not all over Daniel, too?
And all the more reason why, wiped or not, they might have work to do tonight. “We saved you pizza. Let’s go nuke it. Besides—” Sean paused.
“Besides what? Wings? Breadsticks?”
“No. Just something I’ve got to show you in the library. About tomorrow. If you really want to hear what they say about you.”
Maybe the more Daniel’s huge eyes protruded, the harder he was doing his empathy number on you. They were popping now. “Pizza sounds great,” he said.
“And?”
“Whatever else. Especially whatever else.”
Whatever else, then, if they could pull it off.
17
Over the rest of the pizza, Sean matched Daniel’s confessions with two of his own: how his magical line ran back through a dozen generations to Redemption Orne and how he’d been meeting Orne in the Founding windows. Daniel seemed relieved that he wasn’t the only one with strange ancestry, but he out-Eddied Eddy in his doubts about the seed world. In the end, it was the fact that she’d actually helped Sean keep exploring it that persuaded him to give the “guest avatar” a try.
Sean climbed the stepladder to the left window, while Daniel stayed on the dais, ready to connect with Sean’s ankle. Their first two attempts, Sean passed into the seed world alone. Evidently Daniel had to really grip Sean, not just touch him. The third attempt, he held on tight, and Sean popped them both into their respective crows. Daniel’s collapsed off its branch, narrowly missing Nyarlathotep’s pointy crown. He twitched and flailed the way Sean had during his initial transfer; then, just before Sean had gotten panicky enough to summon Orne, he hopped up, comfortably crowish and ready to fly. They took a spin over the bay that would become Arkham Harbor, not a jetty or dangerous breakwater in sight, just waves caught in mild mid-swell. It rocked having someone to cruise with, but they couldn’t go farther that night. He still had to show Daniel the hollow chestnut tree and the amber rondel that, beak-tapped, turned into a lens overlooking the library. Crowded wing to wing, they found they could both peer through the spy-hole and, presumably, hear everything said at the conference table.
The seed world was awesome, Daniel squawked, and the spy-hole was, like, fate. Sean croaked agreement. But when they popped out, Sean on the stepladder, Daniel clutching his ankle, the obvious problem occurred to them. To spy on the library, they had to be about as blatantly visible to the meeting attendees as two people could get.
Daniel’s eavesdropping hopes were fizzling unless Sean could remote-connect with the window the way Orne did. Out in the hall, Sean used his mind key to gather ambient energy and then intended it through the closed library doors and across the room, where he imagined it settling on the glass crow like an invisible hand. Daniel touched the targeted door panel and said it was getting hot, but nothing else came of Sean’s effort except a rotten headache.
While he was resting for another try, Eddy came downstairs. She’d gone to Daniel’s room to apologize. No Daniel. She’d gone to Sean’s room. No Daniel and no Sean. Add one and one, and you got the two of them screwing around with magic somewhere.
The way Eddy had reacted to Daniel’s earlier secrets, Sean couldn’t blame him for spilling right away about their seed world trip. Her response was relatively mild: Sean shouldn’t have gone into the window without her around, and he shouldn’t have taken Daniel with him, and they were both going to get their asses expelled if they weren’t more freaking careful. However, she didn’t say a word against their eavesdropping plan. Sean made the mistake of asking why the unprecedented disregard for authority, and she blew up, though quietly, so Helen wouldn’t hear. God, hadn’t Eddy kept her mouth shut a million times when Sean was up to shit? (Yeah, but—) And, God, didn’t he think Daniel had a right to know what they said about him during the meeting? (Yeah, but—) And finally, what was she, some kind of knee-jerk protocol droid, unable to think things through for herself? (Nope, not a chance.)
That settled, Eddy sat down and considered the problem of remote-accessing the seed world. Sean couldn’t touch the crow portal from inside the library, and apparently the hall was too far from the windows or the do
ors too sturdy a barrier. What if Sean touched the window from outside, in the garden?
It was a great idea, except for Dad’s security window. There were six inches of air space between it and the stained glass that held the portal. Eddy pointed out that six inches was a much shorter distance than twenty-five feet, and so they borrowed an extension ladder from the carriage house to experiment. After climbing to the level of the crow, Sean had to lean sideways to position his fingers on the Plexiglas above it. Eddy steadied the ladder. Daniel held his ankle from the ground. Scared of melting the Plexiglas or, worse, blowing out both it and the stained glass, Sean exposed only the top knob of his mind key. That gathered too little energy, so he exposed the top of the topmost brass curlicue micron by micron, until enough silk lightning had leaped into it for him to fashion an imaginary hand he could intend toward the crow. Yes. It passed through the Plexiglas and sparked on glass and lead, and he and Daniel were crows again for the few seconds before Sean flew them back out of the seed world.
Damn, this could work.
Details, though, Eddy said. She went inside the library while Sean extended his arm across the security window. The trees along the rear of the property kept streetlamps from backlighting the Founding, but when the fluorescents between the stained glass and Plexiglas were on, they faintly illuminated Sean’s arm, and Eddy could make it out, no problem.
Well, yes, problem. Helen was sure to light up the Founding so the meeting could admire it.
Thanks to working for Joe-Jack, Sean had a solution. He flipped off the library circuit breaker and hunted up a screwdriver, with which he detached the light switch wiring. Helen wouldn’t try to illuminate the Founding until after dark, so no way she could get an electrician to fix Sean’s sabotage before the meeting.
After high fives all around, they went to bed. The house ghosts, ever polite, continued to avoid Sean’s dreams, but other interlopers showed up: the kid with his scalp split; Mr. Haddock; the True Atlantis merpeople, who were really Deep Ones. Scariest was Daniel’s mother, who had a bathrobe sash knotted around her neck, or else a towel, or else strips of pillowcase, you know, stuff you could get in a sanitarium. The noose made her gills bleed, and the blood dripped down her squamous arm onto Sean’s sheets until he would have woken to a sodden red mess if she hadn’t stayed a dream.
But she had stayed a dream, and when he jerked awake with a gasp, the only thing dampening his sheets was his own sweat.
* * *
Dr. Richard Bremerton arrived Saturday around three o’clock. Weirdly, he looked like a younger, taller, skinnier, and more hyperactive version of Geldman. Sean, Eddy, and Daniel had gone biking after lunch. When they braked in front of the Arkwright House, Bremerton loped down the steps, introduced himself to Sean and Eddy, then examined Daniel’s Jamis with bike-geek intensity. That done, he hustled Daniel up to Helen’s office to examine him. Marvell showed up at five, and he and Helen joined Bremerton in interrogating all three of them about the accident at the harbor. Sean mentioned Curious Changer (their new name for Mr. Haddock because, come on, it wasn’t cool to disrespect Daniel’s people, even if he didn’t want to become one of them). That slip earned them some extra grilling before Helen sent them out for burgers and a movie.
They got the burgers but skipped the movie. At dusk, they parked the Civic out of sight on High Street, snuck into the back garden, and put their ladder up. While Sean and Daniel crouched in the lilac bushes below the Founding, Eddy watched the library from a low branch of the side garden beech. It was full dark before she returned to whisper that yeah, Helen had tried to switch on the Founding lights and given up with a shrug. Bremerton and Marvell were looking over papers at the conference table. Geldman had just walked in. It was go time.
Sean climbed into position. Eddy slipped underneath the ladder to hold both side rails, her back braced against the house. Daniel gripped his left ankle, fingers clammy with sweat. Sean tried not to think about their webbing, or about how Marvell would go ballistic if he caught them. See, Professor, my dad wanted me to make sure the security window was holding up—
“Sean,” Daniel whispered. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Getting there.” Sean hooked his right arm around the ladder and closed his eyes. As anxiety yielded to concentration, the silk-lightning matrix formed in his mental black space. It wound around him. Through him. He envisioned his mind key, exposed exactly as much as the night before. The energy it absorbed he twisted into the wiry image of a hand that could breach the Plexiglas, and then he reached for the crow. Reached! Touched. Changed arms for wings that carried him through the dusk-coppered air of the seed world. He wheeled at once into the cover of the wood, where Daniel lay twitching at Nyarlathotep’s feet. They were both where the people in the library couldn’t see them, though sharp eyes might spot the absence of his crow. No help for that—they’d have to hope the dark windows wouldn’t attract notice.
Recovered from his transition, crow-Daniel hopped inside the chestnut tree and went for the amber rondel. His pecks had no effect, and he sidestepped to let Sean tap it into a lens. Then, scrunched together, Sean’s wing over Daniel’s feathered back, they each managed to put a beady eye to it. Marvell was in his usual big-shot seat at the head of the table. The others stood at the sideboard, getting coffee. Geldman turned first and looked straight at the Founding, straight at the left window, straight at the signature rondel, and it was no accident, because he hoisted his cup as if to salute Sean and Daniel. “Why isn’t your window lit, Helen?”
“The switch is broken. Every time I think we’ve fixed all the electrical quirks in this house, something else blows.”
“Give her some of your candles, Mr. Geldman,” Bremerton said, sitting to Marvell’s right.
“Perhaps I will, for emergencies.” By selecting the chair next to Bremerton’s, Geldman put his back to the Founding.
“Shit,” Daniel croaked. “I thought he saw us.”
“Dude, he did. I almost bailed.”
“But if he’s not going to tell—”
“Shh. He can probably hear us, too.”
Geldman’s chair tipped onto its back legs, returned to all four, like a curt nod.
Helen sat to Marvell’s left. “We’d better start. Mr. Geldman, you examined Daniel right after the accident?”
“And found what I expected to. He’d immersed himself in seawater for ten to fifteen minutes, which counteracted my treatments. He’s back to where we started four months ago. You would agree, Dr. Bremerton?”
“It’s incredible. All that progress gone. Gills reopened, digital webbing regrown. His gums are tender, too—I’m afraid the Deep One dentition is pushing out over his implants.”
“My interventions, being magical, are subject to instantaneous reversion. However, I’ve restarted the treatments, and so Daniel’s Change will begin to abate again.”
“Well, this immersion shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Marvell said.
Helen sighed. “That’s Mr. Glass’s take on the incident.”
Marvell patted her forearm. “I’m sorry you had to take the brunt of his wrath, Helen. But can we blame him for being upset?”
“No, but it’s not like Daniel dived off that jetty on a whim. He knew his gills would reopen and so he’d be able to bring up the injured boy. Today’s paper says the boy will recover.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“It also asks the rescuer to come forward. The boy’s parents want to thank him. And yet, the way Mr. Glass talked to Daniel, you’d think his action was a spoiled brat’s, not a hero’s.”
All Sean could see of Geldman was the hand he rested on the conference table. Its fingers rose slightly as he spoke: “Mr. Glass is more likely to set Daniel back than the immersion.”
“Yes, he can be a bit overzealous,” Bremerton said. “Still, you have to deal with the parents your patient’s got, not the ones you might like.”
Marvell smiled. Helen didn’t. Sean felt D
aniel’s rib cage bellow.
Geldman’s fingertips described circles on the tabletop. “There’s wisdom in accepting the unchangeable. However, more things can be changed than we commonly suppose. To return to Daniel’s condition, Dr. Bremerton, you can assure Mr. Glass this reversion’s done no lasting damage. The Change—the program of the xenogenes, as you put it—will yield to magic as before. Give me a year, and Daniel will look as human as even his father could ask.”
Like Sean, Bremerton must have caught Geldman’s emphasis on the look. “He’ll have a human phenotype, but his genotype will remain hybrid. In Mr. Glass’s eyes, tainted.”
“Deep Ones probably talk about the human taint,” Helen said.
“No,” Geldman said. “They value the addition of complementary human traits to their genetic pool. Otherwise, there’d be no Deep One–human hybrids. There don’t absolutely need to be, you know.”
Marvell scowled. “The Order does know, which is why its policy is to discourage new outbreaks of hybridization.”
“The Deep Ones don’t look on mingling as a disease process, Professor. Or a social ill. They see it as an aesthetic, even a spiritual, choice.”
“I know that, too. And they supposedly know, per the terms of the 1930 treaty, that mingling’s not a viable choice in the current state of human—”
“Ignorance?” Geldman suggested.
“Human understanding,” Marvell said. “Leave it at that.”
“Certainly, as we’re here to discuss Daniel Glass, not the timetable for global enlightenment.”
Sean wasn’t sure what Marvell and Geldman were arguing about, but he was already on Geldman’s side. “Your boss kicks butt,” he muttered to Daniel.
Daniel didn’t answer. He jostled Sean to get closer to the peephole.
After a few seconds, during which Marvell gulped coffee and Helen flicked anxious glances at him, Bremerton restarted the conversation. “Anyhow, I don’t doubt your prognosis for Daniel’s immediate future, Mr. Geldman. As for the long-term effects of your treatments, I’m still afraid we could see reduced efficacy over time. Maybe toxicity, neoplasms, metabolic disturbances.”
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