by Leah Cutter
Two machines sat on the floor in the next room. Adele recognized them as tests Thaddeus had created for his apprentices. The dwarf had added an obscenity to one: on top of the smooth curved lines of the original piece sat two black needles at the end of crude pistons.
“My goodness, what has he done?” Cornelius asked, stepping forward.
Adele immediately understood their purpose—to strike the hand of anyone who reached down for the machine. She sniffed the air, scenting for what she thought she would find. There it was. Blood of a human. No magic. But something.
Cornelius ran his finger along one of the needles, then stuck it into his mouth. Wonder passed over his face. “Tinker,” he said softly.
“Bascom!” Adele yelled.
The warrior strode forward. A brilliant ruby shone from one eye. Soot and sweat smeared his red war paint. He glowed with fairy power, lighting up the room. Muscles rippled across his wide chest, almost making up for his small wings.
“Find the human Tinker,” Adele told him. “Bring him to me.”
“It shouldn’t take long, my Queen,” Bascom said, bowing his head. “We’ve already started tracking. This had been up top for a while.”
“Alive,” Adele added. “We need him alive.”
Bascom glanced up at her, his face grim. For a moment Adele wondered if he would be the one to challenge her. Then he looked down again.
“Alive, Ma’am. Aye.”
After Bascom left, Adele sent the rest of the court back to the kingdom. They all looked as uncomfortable as she felt. Royals didn’t leave the kingdom often, not if they could help it. Warriors were the only ones who traveled frequently.
Adele wandered through Kostya’s things alone. Did the warriors know what Thaddeus’ machine would do? Did they understand what it would bring? They would return to the surface and the old ways, with fame and glory for all. It was their only chance against the humans.
Adele would have to watch Bascom, Imogene, Gideon, all of them.
A handful of grass caught Adele’s eye as she turned to leave. More blood coated its razor-thin edges. Adele tested it, surprised that it wasn’t the Tinker’s. No, it was a Maker’s. She resolved not to tell the others of her discovery. A Maker could change everything. She’d need to find the Maker herself. She could convince the Maker to join them. Just as she would convince the Tinker. They would help her, her kingdom and her people. They just had to.
If they wouldn’t, well...the Maker could die.
Chapter Three
Denise waited in the hot sun for the school bus. The weather had been unseasonably warm all week, or so the weatherman had assured her. Tall grass on either side of the road captured any cooling breezes. Dust still hung in the air from the car that had passed earlier. Cicada calls cycled up and down around her.
The twins would be upset with Denise for waiting and would accuse her of not trusting them. She could hear Dale’s whine: “We were just late the one time! Jeez.”
Denise didn’t have a good excuse for waiting, or even a bribe to deflect the twins’ anger. All she had was a mother’s worry that something wasn’t right. It hadn’t just been the phone call from the day before, or the electricity failing so completely. Someone watched them. Every time Denise walked outside, her hackles raised from unseen eyes.
The crunching rock of an approaching vehicle turned Denise’s attention. It came from the opposite direction from where the school bus would travel.
A beat-up red pickup truck came around the corner. As it slowed, Denise recognized the driver—Eli Patterson, her landlord. One tanned and weathered arm rested on the open window. White stubble sprouted all along his strong chin. He kept his head shaved; today he wore a faded green cap.
“Waiting for the kids?” Eli asked.
Denise sheepishly nodded. Eli reminded her of Uncle Leonard, a gruff man who’d moved away from the family and had a hobby farm. He’d always talked about making it, big dreams but no plans for achieving his goals.
“It won’t do for you to worry yourself sick about them,” Eli warned.
“We’ll be fine,” Denise told him, bristling. She was not worrying too much about her children. “We lost power again last night,” she countered.
“Did ya now. Must have been a fairy haunting, ’cause our lights burned steady all night long. Did you try your phone?”
Denise nodded, a bit worried. “Also dead.”
Eli beamed. “It was the fairies, then. They can’t abide electronics. Folk tales tell of iron being a curse for them—to tell the truth, magnets work much better.” He paused for a moment, drumming his thumb against the steering wheel.
Denise tried to maintain a straight face and not show her surprise. Fairies? It was no wonder the electricity kept failing if her landlord blamed it on myths instead of actually fixing the problem.
“Tell you what,” Eli continued. “Been meaning to do some landscaping ’round your place. Rowan and myrtle. That’ll do the trick. Keep the fairies at bay.”
“Thank you,” Denise said, not knowing how else to respond.
It took three tries before Eli’s engine caught. “Dang it,” he said. “Pardon my French. I just replaced the plugs in this old beast. One of them must not have settled right. See you later!” With a wave, Eli rolled away.
Fairies? Really? Denise found herself shaking her head. Who would have thought such a thing? No wonder the house they rented had sat empty for so long, with a landlord like that. She wouldn’t have believed the gruff old man had such fantasies. That helped her come to a decision: As soon as school let out, they were leaving. The electricity going out half the nights they stayed was a good enough reason to break the lease.
Suddenly, the world spun and grew darker around the edges. Denise took big gulps of air. She wondered for a moment what had happened—if she was sick—then reached up to her neck and took her pulse. It was weaker than it should have been, as well as jumpy.
Damn it. She’d missed her last appointment with her cardiologist, too busy running from Chris. She hadn’t gone looking for a new doctor yet, either. She couldn’t put off finding one to look at her pacemaker. When she’d been nineteen, she’d started fainting, and they’d discovered she had a congenital heart defect. The first pacemaker they’d implanted had been a temporary measure. However, complications arose when they’d tried to remove it, so the doctors had switched her to a permanent one.
Denise took deep breaths, visualizing all of her tension lifting off her and floating away, carried off in the warm summer air. By the time the bus arrived, Denise’s pulse had returned to normal. However, instead of a whine, Dale took one look at her and asked, “Are you all right, Mom?”
“Everything’s fine,” Denise assured them. “It just got warm, waiting for you.”
Dale and Nora exchanged one of those looks—words flowing in a single glance.
“I’ll make lemonade when we get home,” Nora said.
“And we would have come straight home today,” Dale assured her.
“Yeah, he can’t push me carrying that box.”
“It’s beautiful, Dale,” Denise assured him. He’d brought it home a couple of times to show off his progress. Her father would have loved it. He’d been a true craftsman and could fix anything. He and Dale had been cut from the same cloth. Most boys, when given their first toy car, would push it around the floor. The first thing Dale did was set it upside down and try to take the wheels off.
“How do you two like it here?” Denise asked as they started walking down the lane, wanting to see how much of a battle she’d have when she brought up moving again.
“It’s okay,” Dale said, shrugging, as noncommittal as only a teenage boy could be.
“I like our house,” Nora chimed in. “I like the trees, and being so near the ocean. I really like the storms here.”
Denise chuckled. That was her daughter—a wild woman who only let go during allotted times. A huge storm had blown up the first week they’d been there.
Nora had gone for a walk along the ocean. When the rain hit, she’d gone crazy, shrieking and racing the waves, laughing the entire time, her hair plastered to her face and back, soaked to the skin. Once she came back inside she was under control again, as if it had never happened.
“If the power keeps cutting out, we may have to move again,” Denise warned them.
“Just houses, not schools, right?” Dale asked, worried. Nora’s face held the same expression of concern.
“Why?”
Dale talked about Rich and Tabri, as well as Ms. Anderson and the cool screwdriver set she’d given him.
“I’m sure you thanked her for them, right?” Denise asked.
Dale nodded, suddenly blushing. There was something more about those screwdrivers. Then Nora distracted her, asking about supper, and Denise forgot to tell them about their landlord’s strange beliefs.
***
Nora wandered into her own room. Dale had banished her from his room that night after dinner, calling her bad luck. Her mom sat at the computer, still working. Nora was on her own. She looked mournfully around her room. Only a few stuffed animals sat on the shelf above her bed—a white tiger, a fox, and the teddy bear Grandpa Lewis had made her. She’d left behind most of her books, as well as her yarn. When Mom had told her to they had to leave, Nora had grabbed needles instead.
If Nora had been home, with her friends, she might have gone to the coffee shop on the corner with them for a juice or for ice cream. Or they would have talked on the phone about the last day of school, the cute boy who sat next to Nora in homeroom, anything and everything. Tonight, she wandered through her room, not sure what to do with herself.
Nora picked up her beloved Franken-sweater off the floor. It told a journey, to her. The chest, over the heart, was part of the first sweater she’d ever knit, a reminder of where she’d started, complete with uneven stitches and messed-up pattern. She wasn’t quite up to Grandmother Lily’s level: Entrelac knitting intimidated her, as did quite a few lace patterns. She called herself a solid intermediate knitter, but someday she’d be advanced.
Because summer break was so close, none of Nora’s teachers had assigned serious homework. She decided to work on one of her projects instead. She pulled all five of her knitting bags out of the closet and threw them onto the bed, arranging them in a semi-circle in front of her, like a magic circle of crafting. The bedspread she sat on, also made by Grandma Lily, had a Mariner’s star quilted into it. Nora deliberately sat in the center of the star. She opened the first bag and sniffed deeply: fine wool still coated in lanolin. Then she put it away and pulled out the shawl she was making for her mother’s birthday, out of a beautiful variegated Japanese wool. The pattern itself was a series of swirling hexagons. Once Nora had figured out the pattern—that the rows were grouped in threes, not twos—it had become much easier.
Still, Nora now finished off only a single hexagon. She didn’t want to risk her mom walking in and seeing it.
Feeling buoyed up by the rich colors of the shawl, Nora attacked her next project. She was making a sweater in the round for her teddy bear. The small size meant not many stitches, so the project went quickly. However, the raglan sleeves weren’t setting straight.
Nora knit two more rounds, easing and adjusting, before she finally decided it was never going to work. Grinning, she slid the circular needles out and started to pull apart her work.
“You’re demented, you know,” Dale told her from the doorway.
In response, Nora began pulling out the yarn more dramatically, her hand rising from her lap to over her head with each tug.
Dale rolled his eyes and went back to his room.
Nora laughed quietly. He didn’t get it. Neither did Mom. None of her old friends from home had, either. She was still searching for someone who did, who understood the greatest secret of all: The power to destroy was almost as great as the ability to Make.
***
Dale didn’t understand Nora’s fascination with the beach. It was just a strip of sand, really, with the ocean on one side and a rocky cliff on the other. You couldn’t go swimming—the water was too cold and rough. No one else ever visited while they were there. Even the gulls disdained their beach; not enough prey, Dale guessed.
The wind pushed at Dale as he trudged down the rock trail, blowing his carefully styled hair into his eyes. Nora just tied hers up in a lopsided bun. Only one more day of school left, a half-day. They’d be out by noon. Kind of weird that school ended on a Tuesday, but Dale wasn’t going to complain.
Nora had talked Dale into helping her collect rocks and shiny debris thrown onto the shore by the waves. She took his pieces and placed them in the sand, creating a picture. First came the outlining circle, then three anchor points. Swirling lines filled the background. Finally Dale saw the outline of a woman. The top point formed an eye in the center of her forehead, and the other two lay in the centers of her open palms.
As they finished, Dale pointed out, “You know, the tide’s going to wash this away.”
“I know. Cool, huh? Like those sand paintings Buddhist monks do.”
“Demented,” Dale told her, shoving her shoulder.
Nora pushed him back. “Spiritual,” she said in a high, mincing voice, imitating Mrs. Chakmus, their social studies teacher. Dale grinned. He looked at the piece. Primitive, but it was kind of neat. “So—what now?”
“Wanna stay and watch it get destroyed?” Nora asked as she walked to a nearby log and sat down.
“You really are insane,” Dale told her. He looked at her, then back out at the ocean. Despite the sunshine that afternoon, it still felt cold and gray. “Naw. I’m going back to the house. Just don’t get yourself trapped by the tide or Mom’s going to kill you.”
“I’ll be fine,” Nora assured him.
Dale snorted. “Yeah. Finely insane.” He ducked as she threw a handful of sand at him, then turned and plodded back to the trail. At the top, just before it turned and lost sight of the ocean, Dale looked back. Nora walked around her “painting,” drizzling sand over the outline. Was she destroying it herself, or trying to bury it and protect it?
He looked beyond her to the ocean. If he was honest, the water frightened him. It spread from shore to horizon, too big to be tamed, all chaotic waves and unknowable creatures. With a final shiver he turned and continued walking back to the house, relieved to be out of the constant wind.
The faded red pickup truck of Mr. Patterson, their landlord, sat in front of their house. Dale didn’t see their landlord, though, until he got close. Mr. Patterson stood on a ladder on the far side of the garage, pounding nails into a black metal piece that now framed the corner of the roof. He wore his usual gray shirt and too-big jeans. Dale had wondered if he’d been sick; all his clothes hung on him, making him look extra scrawny.
“Hey there,” Mr. Patterson called to Dale as he came down the ladder. “Just adding a bit more protection. Uhm. From the rain.”
Dale knew Mr. Patterson was lying. Corners didn’t need any special reinforcement. Still, Dale asked, “Like window flashing?” He’d helped Grandpa Lewis repair his cousin’s home one summer when they’d been visiting.
“Sort of,” Mr. Patterson said, tilting his head to the side like a bird.
Dale picked up one of the cast-iron brackets laying on the driveway. The metal felt cold to the touch and was hinged at the center. It took him a moment to pry the two pieces apart. “They’re magnetized.”
“Exactly!” Mr. Patterson said, picking up another one and pulling it apart. “They’re like lightning rods, to draw away the electricity.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Dale said, shaking his head and handing the metal piece back to Mr. Patterson.
“Ah, you’ll learn,” Mr. Patterson assured Dale.
“Okay,” Dale said, backing toward the house. “I, ah, gotta get going.”
“You have a fine evening. Let me know if the power stays on all night tonight, okay?”
“
Sure,” Dale said, making his escape into the house. He was surrounded by crazy people.
“Mom?” Dale called. No answer. The whiteboard next to the door had a scrawled note—Groceries—below Nora’s scrawled note: Beach. They’d negotiated this system of always letting each other know where they were once they’d discovered that cell phones weren’t reliable. If Dale and Nora swore to keep the board always up-to-date, their mom promised not to freak out and ask where they were twenty-four hours a day. Dale added a note, Just Nora, to let his mom know he’d come home.
Dale stood in the kitchen listening to the clock for a moment. The house smelled of the hamburgers Mom had cooked for lunch. He thought about blasting his music loudly—something he could never do around his sister and mother—but the quiet settled over him, soothed him.
Instead, Dale went to his room to work. First he laid the plastic down on the floor, sighing again at the necessity. At least he had floor space and could work in his room, unlike Nora, whose room always looked like a tornado had just struck. She kept everything out in piles, never putting things away.
From the toolbox, Dale pulled out the machine. He hadn’t found a phosphorus compartment yet. The smaller screwdriver set Ms. Anderson had given him turned out to be handy, though the three-prong-headed screws still gave him problems. He also got out his notebook. Nora had personalized it for him, burning the leather binder in a pattern of clouds and gears. Dale didn’t keep something silly like a diary in it, but he did take notes about the projects he worked on.
Dale drew a quick sketch of the placement of the wires connecting the gears. He probably would remember, but he wanted to be sure. He didn’t quite understand their function. Were they part of the primary mechanism, or the backup? He wished yet again that he had friends here, people he could talk with about clockwork. Or anything else.
The sound of crunching along the gravel road wafted through the quiet afternoon. Dale waited, listening. He didn’t hear a door opening or his mom—Mr. Patterson must have left.