“Absolutely,” said Sam as she fished out her pager.
“So since we're coming back and we didn't eat dinner, how about supper?” said Jill.
And they decided upon the buffet at the Feathered Dragon.
* * *
After supper, they returned to Nia's flat and were just walking into the kitchen when Pandora appeared in the skinweler on the table.
“There's my yummy little Fairy!” she said as the ball's colors cleared away. “I've been trying and trying to get you, but you've been out.”
“Yes,” said Nia with a passing blush. “We went hiking and then out to supper.”
“I thought something like that. Now I needed to ask you this sweetling, but I was so excited I kept forgetting. To schedule the procedure, when was your last menses?”
“Fifteen days ago?” said Nia with another blush. “Yes. Fifteen, definitely.”
“That's a bit sooner, but no problem. I'll simply scoot my schedule a bit. Oh!” she squealed. “This is just so exciting! Isn’t it?”
“Yes!” said Nia, flushing yet again with Jill and Sam there. “I can't wait!”
“Me too!” giggled Pandora. “Me too! So since we'll have to speed things up a bit, don’t worry about packing your things. Just throw together an overnight bag and I'll send someone to your flat to pick up the rest of your things. Now I can't possibly cancel anything until four tomorrow. My car will pick you up at half past three and we shall meet at the lab for the first stage of the procedure. After that, you can return home. Then half past three the next day, I shall send my car and we'll do the implantation. After that of course, you'll come home with me. Any questions, pet?”
“None that I can think of, Potentate.”
“Sweetling! You can call me Pandora in private in front of Sam and Jill.”
“Thank you, Pandora,” said Nia, drawing in a deep breath.
“Oh you're always so polite and proper, my yummy little fairy, like Benjamin. No wonder he's taken to you so quickly.”
Nia gave a shrug, not knowing quite what to say.
“Well then. I've got to go. I'll see you tomorrow at four,” she said, rising to a giddy pitch.
“Tomorrow at four,” said Nia. And Pandora faded from the ball.
“Anybody up for a little stroll before bed?” said Nia.
“No,” said Jill, looking at her feet. “But I've been looking at that giant tub of yours. You reckon we all could get in at once?”
“I vote for that,” said Sam.
Nia and Sam had warm water thundering into the billowing suds in no time. “Jill!” gasped Nia at the sight of Jill skipping to the tub. “You're spectacular! I knew you had blue tattoos, but I had no idea you were covered, head to toe.”
“I'm a Beak,” she said, slipping into the water. “The state couldn't stand not being able to scare it out of me. I'm the direct descendant of Eochaid the fastest luathas unicorn who ever lived.”
For a moment, no one had anything to say. Presently Sam did: “I've never seen Pandora act like that over anyone before, Nia. I suspect she's in love with you.”
Chapter 21
Tess was just old enough to be standing between Kellen and Cait in the front seat of the last car that they were ever able to afford as they drove down the gravel lane from the house to the barn and milking parlour. Before they came to the hill which went down by the pond, Kellen stopped the car with a screech of brakes. Cait took Tess under her arms and set her out into the grassy ditch. “We're going to have a car crash now,” she said as she slammed the door. With a crunch of gears, the car drove to the end of the lane and tumbled off into the junk pile onto its hood in the old glass bottles and rolls of rusty barbed wire in the ravine.
Tess sat up with a gasp in her bed with her heart pounding and waves of scalding fear for her mother. She sat in the dark for a bit, calming herself as she straightened out her wad of sweaty sheets. She repositioned her pillow and lay on her shoulder for a small eternity, wondering if she would ever manage to go back to sleep.
“Good morning Tess,” said the skinny on the shelves beyond the night table. “Time to get ready for school.”
“Ugh! Baldy,” she muttered, rising onto an elbow.
“Pardon me?”
“I said, good morning.”
“Yeh? Well it sounded as though you should get to bed earlier.”
“Look,” she said as she put her feet on the floor, “I need to get ready for school so I won’t be late, so ask your questions. All right?”
“Very well. What do you remember about your dreams last night?”
Tess stared at the floor and yawned.
“If you're being obstinate, you're playing a dangerous game.”
“I'd never do that,” said Tess.
“Fine. Then tell me about last night's dreams.”
“I can't.”
“Can't or won't?”
“Can't.”
“Then perhaps you can tell me why you can't.”
“I don't remember a single dream. So there's nothing to tell.”
“Did you pay strict attention to the sublim board in class yesterday or were you distracted by some daydream?” said Baldy.
“Yesterday's lessons in each of my classes were about all the benefits we now enjoy since the World Alliance became the world government.”
“Yes. That was yesterday's concentration in all classes. Very well. You may get ready for school. However, if you continue having dreamless nights, you'll have to report to the dream clinic to have your difficulty analyzed. If you're a mess, they'll likely prescribe some Recite.”
“Recite?”
“It's new. Supposed to be good. It's another opium derivative, like Slumber.”
Tess made a face as the ball winked out. The clinic was their standard threat any morning after a dreamless night. She grabbed her robe from the foot of her bed and headed for the bathroom, hoping that neither Jasmine nor Trent had beaten her there. She got right in. “Probably too hung-over to be up yet,” she said as she hopped into the shower. “I wonder how they get away with that with the watchers, anyway? And I why I haven't heard anything from Teeuh and Daniel? Well if I don't hear from them by dark tonight, I'm going to find out why. I'm worried about Mom and Dad. But why Mom so much?” She turned off the water and stepped out to dry off.
“Who are you talking to?” called Jasmine through the door. “I'm about to die!”
“Just my boyfriend,” sang out Tess.
“What?”
Tess slipped on her robe and jerked open the door. “All yours,” she said, squeezing by Jasmine.
Jasmine slammed the door.
Tess hurried to her room, combed her Mohawk into place and put on a touch of mascara, blush and lip gloss, the spiked dog collar choker she had found in the hallway at school and with a sigh, settled for her usual jeans and tee shirt. She dashed to the kitchen to slice a stale muffin and put it into the toaster. She started the tea kettle and went back to her room, grabbed her little green Fairy scrying ball off the shelf so that the skinny on the shelf above wouldn't see it and worked it into her jeans' pocket. “Wow!” she thought as she grabbed up her tutor ball bag. “I'm a real Fairy with powers and everything.”
When she went to wheel her bicycle away from the closet, she saw that its front tire was flat. “I'll bet that's from Jasmine's broken glass at Drake's,” she thought. “Good job I made it all the way to the cemetery.” She locked her room, paused to fix a single cup of tea, stuck out her tongue at the milk, put peanut butter and marmalade on her toast and managed to trot down the kitchen steps without running into Trent. It was almost a nice morning to be out on a walk with her two muffins and marmalade, except that the only birds she heard were the scolding sparrows in the dead privet. She remembered the wood thrushes and meadowlarks and cow bells of seven centuries ago and how very green it all was.
The alarm in the doorway of the school went off when Tess tried to go past the metal detector and she had to take
off her dog collar and hand it to the guard in order to be allowed inside. “As if I want to be here, anyway,” she muttered as he handed it back to her with his look of disapproval. She hurried down the worn and polished hallway between the rows of dented and spray-painted lockers and throngs of milling students.
“Hey Tess,” said Josh Burgess, falling into step beside her with another athlete. “Where's your new boyfriend?”
“What boyfriend?” she said, stopping short to plant her fists on her hips and look right at him.
“Go on! We know all know about you and Trent, now that he's moved in with you...”
“You actually might, since there's nothing to know,” she said, turning away. “He and Jasmine were assigned to my barrack by Children and Family and I had absolutely no say in the matter. But had I, neither one would be anywhere near where I live. Now beat it! I've got to get to my first class...”
“With me,” he said, following behind. “I sit right behind you. Remember? That way I get first crack when you dump him.”
Josh raced past her up the steps. The moment she took her seat he was there, kicking at the legs of her desk. “This is not a good start,” she thought.
She was so relieved when the dismissal bell rang at last that she could have leaped out the school door in a grand jete (had she only known what one was). The problem was the uneasy feeling about her mother which had been growing within her all day. Why should it do such a thing? She wanted to go straight to Maxi's and let Trent and Jasmine fix their own blooming supper, but they might well retaliate in some way, and she certainly could do without their becoming suspicious and reporting something to Children and Family when she was already deliberately letting her grades fall.
“Good!” she said when she found both Trent and Jasmine's doors closed. She set about changing her clothes, patching the cut in her bicycle's inner tube and fixing a supper of toasted cheese sandwiches. She fixed a pot of tea, poured herself a cup, knocked on their doors and shut herself in her room to eat her sandwiches. She unlatched her window sash to let in the breeze while she ate, only to find that the air outside had gotten so bad that she began coughing at once. She closed it immediately and sat on her bed to eat. She looked at her scrying ball sitting on the shelf below the skinny. There had not been one word from Daniel and Teeuh. It would be a few more hours until dark. She wiped her mouth, set aside her plate and lay back on her bed to think about it.
The next she knew, someone was shaking her shoulder. She awoke with a gasp.
“Hush!” whispered the person whose finger was gently pressed against her lips.
“Daniel?” she murmured.
“Shh,” he whispered in her ear.
She took him by the hand, eased him into the closet and closed the door. “Fates!” she said quietly. “I was too asleep to cover the skinny.”
“I did,” said Daniel as he released a light from his hands to hover in the closet, lighting up the hanging clothes. “I threw one of Maxi's wolf pelts over it the moment I appeared.”
“Wow! What is that?”
“A mage light,” he said. “I think you can do it too, but I'll probably have to show you how.”
“So it's safe to open the door?”
“Except for our voices. We're probably better off closed in here.”
“This closet might make a good place for you to come in the daytime.”
“I'll remember that,” he said. “I'm sorry we haven't got hold of you, but any time I wanted to, I couldn't find your scrying ball, so I was afraid to contact you with it for fear of alerting your skinweler. And we've been frantically busy. But now we have an urgent matter. Can you come with me this minute?”
“I'm already dressed.”
“Go get your scrying ball. Can you manage without the light?”
Tess nodded and everything went black. She rose in the darkness, found her ball and came back to the closet. “So what's this urgent thing?”
“Just a moment,” said Daniel as he took her hand and held it to his lips, studying his scrying ball. Suddenly they were squatted by the table in Maxi's underground conference room. They stood up at once.
Maxi, Drake and two men in tee shirts, jeans and gum boots whom Tess had never seen before were seated about the table. Teeuh was sitting on a stool nearby next to Bart, perched on the back of a chair pulled away from the table.
“Here be, baby girl,” said Maxi, offering her a chair.
“Thanks Maxi,” said Tess.
Daniel took the seat next to her. “Bart's here because it was he who first came to our time and started this whole thing by telling Meri that your family had been taken into custody.”
“Does Maud know that you're a Fairy?” thought Tess as she caught Bart's eye.
“I am not,” thought Bart in Tess's head.
“But did she know you traveled the Fairy paths?” thought Tess.
“We squinty-eye hee-hee think Kellen and Cait may was and may even is in this head nod place,” said Maxi grandly.
“No!” spoke Bart in her head. “And you'll not tell her either.”
“Mom and Dad!” cried Tess.
Bart hopped into the seat of his chair, and with a ballooning rustle of satiny feathers, crossed the legs of her black skin-tight pants, cocked her feather crested head and slid her jingling silver bracelets up her blousy sleeve.
“Bart!” cried Tess, nearly toppling from her chair.
“Very well,” said the woman. “Bart if you must. But you'll probably be more comfortable calling me Morrigan in this form, or perhaps Changing Women, since you're one of these Fairies...”
“You speak out loud!” gasped Tess.
“Which is why I changed, sweetheart. I don't want to interrupt what they have to tell you, but you weren't hearing me and telling Maud about me would be awfully self- centered,” she said, giving Tess's arm a push. “I'll tell you later.”
“But how did you...?”
“I'm a skinwalker,” she said with another push at Tess's arm. “Now later.” She took out a manicure file and began dressing her black lacquered fingernails.
Tess turned to Maxi with a bounce in her chair. “You found Mom and Dad!” she said as she squeezed Daniel's hand.
“Here be Sergeant Philpott and Sergeant Llygad,” said Maxi, nodding at the two in tee shirts. “They chest-thump head-nod Kellen and Cait did be jerk-drag to big Ash Mountain Coal Mine in Niarg. They pretty head-nod Kellen and Cait be there this very when.”
“Great!” said Tess. “When do we go get them?”
“Whoa baby girl! It no be easy-grab. Coal mine be part of big-big no-see no-see prison camp. Big camp. Railroad go 'way out into nowhere mountains and lose all eyeball-grab. Only thing be any-see be coal car and coal car and coal car and coal car come back.”
“Daniel and Teeuh can travel by spell,” said Tess, turning to them. “They could go in and out no matter what. Have you scried to see if Mom and Dad are both still there?”
“That's our first problem,” said Daniel. “We can't scry any part of the facility because the whole thing is protected with powerful wards.”
“Wards?”
“Spells that make invisible shields which make it impossible to scry what's on the other side.”
“Neither of you can scry the place?”
“Not at all,” said Teeuh, shaking her head. “And it leaves us with at least two problems. Firstly, we can't use magic for to cross the wards. That means we neither can scry through nor yet pass ourselves through by spell. And secondly, our first attempt at scrying almost certainly has alerted whomever laid the wards that a Fairy and an Elf- Human wizard were trying to scry in. Anyone able to lay such wards would almost certainly be able to tell.”
“So they know we're coming?” said Tess.
“They know that we tried to peek in.”
“We're going to have to be careful to land well outside the wards,” said Daniel, “particularly since we've alerted them. And we're going to have to set up a cam
p in a hidden spot nearby when we get there, so that we can watch the facility long enough to develop a plan for what we're going to do next.”
“I want to go with you,” said Tess.
“No way baby girl!” said Maxi. “It be too much head-smash danger.”
“But they're my mom and dad, Maxi.”
Maxi shot to his feet. “No!” he barked, smacking the table. “I promise Kellen.” He turned to Drake: “If all go tumble-down and I get head-smash, I chest-thump count on you to looky-look after Tess, now that I let you be in underground.”
“You know I will,” said Drake.
“But we not tumble-down,” said Maxi, giving his chest a triple thump with his knuckles, rattling his necklace of beads, bones and little plastic automobiles.
“Who are you taking?” said Tess.
Maxi laid his twelve gauge pistol and holster next to his shoulder bag of cartridges on the table. “Teeuh, Daniel, maybe Sergeant Philpott and...” he said.
“And me,” said Morrigan. “Maxi needs someone who can be anyone they need.”
“And I go upstairs to gym and dance this out,” said Maxi, putting his sunglasses on the table by his pistol and hiking up his plaid shorts. “We leave at eleven o' clock tomorrow night.”
“You gave me quite a start with your change, just now,” said Drake. “So if you're a skinwalker, why'd you put in all those years with Mort and Maud as their pet crow?”
“They had good hearts and no children, so I let Maud raise me from a chick covered with pinfeathers. And remember she's just a human and I'm immortal, so she hasn't taken up much of my time.”
“So that's why Maud doesn't know you're a skinwalker,” said Tess. “You don't want her finding out all her years of care weren't needed.”
“Oh but they were needed, sweetheart,” said Morrigan. “Maud needed them, and I see no reason to take any of that away from her now. Do you?”
* * *
Just before midnight, Daniel returned Tess to her closet. “I shall meet you here in your wardrobe at half past ten, tomorrow night,” he said as he kissed her hand and vanished.
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