The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere (18 page)

East of England

From the amount of blood he’d seen on Caitlin’s shirt, Zach doubted she’d be in any condition to fight, even in the guise of a jaguar.  She pounced, but the kangaroo shifted his weight to his thick tail and kicked out with a vicious swipe to the jaguar’s injured head.

Zach bared his teeth, furious.  If Griffey wasn’t going to fight fair, there was nothing stopping Zach from doing the same.  While the jaguar shook her head and backed off, Zach ran straight for the kangaroo.  He launched himself into the air with his left leg, spun around in midair and kicked down on the kangaroo’s back – right where he’d spotted the oozing wound Lizbeth had given the snake.  The force of the kick sent the kangaroo lurching forward on his powerful hind legs.  By the time Zach came around 360-degrees and landed on his feet in the tall grass, Wolfdogge joined the fray.

Felicity told them that Wolfdogge’s kind had been bred for battle, trained to pull armored knights from their steeds.  The dog would have never seen a kangaroo, much less know how to fight one, but after Zach unbalanced the big marsupial with his kick, Wolfdogge bit down on one of its forelegs.  With snarling ferocity, Wolfdogge shook his head, tugging and grinding on the kangaroo’s undersized arm.  For a moment, Zach thought the dog had gotten the upper hand.  Then, in a flash, the kangaroo shifted its weight to its thick tail and kicked out at Wolfdogge’s underbelly with its wickedly sharp hind claws.

Emitting a high-pitched yelp, Wolfdogge released the kangaroo’s arm and toppled backward in the grass.  Zach only got a glimpse of the dog’s horrible wound, but with a twist of his heart, he knew it was fatal.

As Wolfdogge fell, Caitlin went in for the kill.  She knocked the kangaroo sideways to the ground, jaw clamped at his throat.  For a moment, Zach thought the kangaroo was going to attempt to disembowel Caitlin, too.  Instead, he changed back into Brian Griffey, lying naked under the jaguar, breath wheezing through his constricted windpipe, arm bleeding from the wound Wolfdogge had given him.

“Caitlin!” he cried hoarsely.  “I surrender.”

The jaguar, claws digging into Griffey’s chest, hesitated.  Zach saw her eyes, swirling as she probed for the truth.  Finally, she must have been satisfied that Griffey had really given in, because she backed away and began to morph into her true self.

As soon as her transformation began, however, the liar Griffey too began to shift.  Zach readied himself to strike.  Before yesterday, he never imagined he’d fight a python or a kangaroo.  Now, as Caitlin became herself, crouched down in the grass, Griffey changed into a beast with the oversized head and wings of an eagle and the hindquarters of a lion.  As a long-time player of online fantasy computer games, Zach recognized a mythical griffin when he saw one.  He didn’t have time to marvel that a shapeshifter could become a nonexistent creature, because Griffey was instantly upon Caitlin.

“No!” Lizbeth screamed from somewhere behind him.  The quality of the scream changed at the end to sound like the piercing, distressed cry of an eagle.  Zach looked over his shoulder to see another, smaller griffin, one wing beating ineffectively at the air while the other was tucked tight to its side holding the remnants of a shirt.  It lurched awkwardly forward, tripping over a pair of jeans, head tilted to look at its own claws as they opened and closed spasmodically, all the while filling the air with its plaintive cries.

Thankfully, the appearance of the newcomer was enough to distract Griffey from Caitlin.  He tilted his head to turn a fierce eye on the stumbling little griffin. 

Zach took advantage of the momentary distraction.  He had little useful knowledge of a griffin’s anatomy, but all vertebrates were vulnerable at the neck.  His left hand shot out, gripping Griffey’s wing above the wrist.  Griffey jabbed his sharp beak into Zach’s forearm at the same time Zach’s stiffened right hand chopped down with enough force to snap a plank in half.  The vertebra at the base of the eagle’s head gave off a sickening crunch.  The griffin stiffened, but before his body could collapse to the ground, Kevin came roaring in from the other side, tackling the feathered and furred creature like a defensive end.  As they rolled to a stop in the grass, Zach grasped Kevin by the collar and hauled him off the now limp shapeshifter.

His eyes cut to Caitlin.  She’d donned her bloody shirt and pants and staggered to the flailing little griffin with eyes whirling madly.  “Lizbeth!  Be still!”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, but it was only Griffey’s body changing again, this time not into the tall, distinguished Chief Inspector, but into the stocky, coarse-looking man from Caitlin’s album.  His original form.  Cautiously, Zach bent to press his fingers to one side of Griffey’s windpipe.  He felt a weak pulse and Griffey’s eyes fluttered open, the pupils dilated so that even in the sunshine, his brown eyes looked almost black.

Through lips that barely moved, the dying shapeshifter asked, “Where’s my son?”

Kneeling several feet away, Kevin’s face had gone hard, but he said, “I guess that’s me.”

“Come closer.  Can’t move.  Neck’s broken.”  Griffey’s voice was thin.

Zach stepped back, not convinced that the threat had been eliminated.

Kevin crawled forward and sat back on his haunches, staring at Griffey dispassionately.

“Didn’t know…you’d survived,” Griffey said.

“Good,” Kevin replied.  “My parents raised me right.  You would have screwed up my life.”

Zach glanced up as Caitlin came up next to him, leading a shocked and quivering, but no longer griffin-shaped, Lizbeth.  She was dressed, but her shirt and Felicity’s jacket must have torn during the transformation, because she held the tatters together in front of her chest.  He pulled off his own shirt and looked away as she put it on.

Caitlin touched Kevin on the shoulder.  He got to his feet and walked off towards the oak grove.  She sat cross-legged next to Griffey and clasped his unmoving hand between hers.  To Zach’s astonishment, tears flowed freely down her face.

“It’s come to this,” she said, bowing her head.

“Our race does not have to die,” Griffey whispered.  “The crown can bring back our glory.”

“The price is too great, Brian.”

“Science can determine who will survive!”  Spittle appeared on Griffey’s bloodless lips.

“And war between the races would soon follow, just as it did in the past.  Even if the crown’s purpose was to create a race of shapeshifters, it won’t matter if the earth is uninhabitable.”

The sound of the wind in the grass was louder than Griffey’s voice.  “What other purpose does it have?”

Caitlin lifted his hand to her lips.  Zach saw his eyes turn lifeless just before she responded, “To speak with the gossamer sphere.”

East of England

Kevin had never liked dogs.  They were slobbery creatures that shed hair all over the place and smelled bad.  He’d barely even known Wolfdogge, but the sight of the brave canine lying so still in the grass made him want to sob out loud.

He walked stiffly away and stopped just outside the oak grove with his hands jammed into his pockets.  With one thumb, he rubbed the side of the little box with the nugget inside.  He’d found it in Felicity’s bathroom.  No one knew he’d taken it, but he suspected it didn’t matter either way.  He’d survived the sickness and wouldn’t make the mistake of touching the nugget directly again.  Still, even in its box, the iridium comforted him.

The trees, the same ones he’d “communed” with earlier, towered before him, leaves flickering in the breeze just like any other grove of trees.

For years he’d dreamed of finding his real parents, but nothing he’d imagined came near to the truth of it.  He didn’t understand what Griffey meant when he said he hadn’t known Kevin survived, but he assumed it had something to do with his abandonment at the hospital.  Maybe Caitlin could tell him.  Maybe he didn’t really care anymore.

He looked over at them.  Zach held Lizbeth protectively as Caitlin sat next to Griffey, rocking back and forth as if in mourning.  He frowned.  Was she actually sad that he was dead?  Griffey killed Simon and Len, and he’d tried to kill Caitlin.  Why was she so upset that a monster like him had gotten what he deserved?  He shook his head, thinking about how cold she’d been to Bill Masters, someone who wasn’t perfect, but who probably deserved better.  Kevin certainly didn’t understand women.

He sighed.  As much as he wished he could shapeshift into an ostrich to hide his head in the sand, he knew he had to join the others – find out what, if anything, was left for them to do now.

When he reached them, Caitlin stood.  Her tears had washed thin lines into the blood on her left cheek.  The partially scabbed-over wound in her scalp glistened.  She brushed her hands down the seat of her pants and faced Simon’s house.

“Is Wolfdogge dead?”

Kevin nodded.

“That’s it then,” she said.  “We’d best find Werka.  Last I heard, flights are still coming and going out of Heathrow.  She could be anywhere.”

 “What about him?” Zach asked, jerking his head toward Griffey.

Caitlin began walking.  “We don’t have time to bury him.  Or the others.  It goes against everything I believe in, but the crown comes first.”

“What others…?” Lizbeth asked in a small voice, but Caitlin was out of earshot.

“Len and Simon,” Kevin gestured to the patch of concealing bushes. 

Lizbeth went extremely pale under the creamy light-brown skin of her face.  In a tearful voice, she asked, “He killed them?”

“Yeah.”  Kevin didn’t need Zach’s stern look to regret that he’d mentioned it.  He tried to change the subject.  “Are you okay?  That was pretty cool, the griffin thing.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.  Let’s just-” she stopped.  Her eyes drifted to Griffey’s toes sticking up out of the grass.  Her lips parted and her mouth slowly dropped open as she stared.  Pulling away from Zach, she went and stood over Griffey, looking down at him with arms crossed tightly over her ribs.  For a panicked moment, Kevin wondered if Griffey had come back alive, but then Lizbeth said, “Can you feel him?”

He didn’t want to look.  “No.  He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes. 
Yes!
  Don’t you get it?” she practically shouted the last few words.

Zach reached out for her, but she ducked away.  In an unexpected move, she began to run, not for the house, but toward the trees.

Kevin and Zach exchanged perplexed looks.  Zach shrugged and loped after her while Kevin called out to Caitlin.  She looked around.  With a sweeping wave of his arm, he gestured to the oak grove.  Lizbeth had just disappeared into the shadows, with Zach close behind.

Caitlin made her way back to where Kevin was standing, weariness in every step.  Together, they walked across the field, navigated the tree roots, and came out on the far side.  Kevin had a sense of déjà vu when he saw the place.  It looked the same:  the four stones marking where the old church had been, the line of trees along the creek.  More powerfully than ever before, he felt the sensation that something was going to happen.

Lizbeth and Zach had pulled the clumps of sod away again and were standing next to Richard Allen’s gravestone.  As Kevin got closer with Caitlin, she suddenly gasped and pressed a hand to her breastbone.  Her steps quickened into a hopping, stumbling gait.  Concerned, Kevin stayed right on her heels in case she collapsed.

At the gravesite, she fell to her knees and pressed her face to the stone. 

In addition to Caitlin’s powerful presence, Kevin felt what he’d felt before, something emanating from Richard Allen’s grave.  He and the others had wrongly assumed that the long-dead occupant of this plot had been a shapeshifter.  As soon as Lizbeth had pointed out to Kevin that he couldn’t feel Griffey anymore, he should have realized.

“It’s here,” Lizbeth said.  “The crown was here all along.”

East of England

Richard Allen’s gravestone was too heavy for even the four of them together to lift, so Lizbeth waited with Caitlin in the overgrown graveyard while Zach and Kevin went to look in the barn for digging utensils.  The boys had been treating Lizbeth like a porcelain doll.  She’d seen violence before, and not just on television or at the movies.  Once, a gator attacked a deer on the bayou not ten yards from her boat, and on two occasions Granma gave refuge to the neighbor lady whose husband regularly beat her to a pulp.  Even so, Lizbeth had never seen a dead person, much less watched someone die. 

It wasn’t Griffey’s death that made her so fragile, though.

Shapeshifting had been a horrifically disorienting experience.  She’d been standing there, helpless to contribute to the awful scene being enacted before her.  Caitlin had fallen for Griffey’s ruse and changed back into herself.  Then Griffey began to take on the guise of a griffin.  In all Lizbeth’s seventeen years, she’d never felt such an overpowering desire to be someone else – someone stronger, faster – not a useless spectator.  She’d focused intently on the way Griffey changed.  First, pointy pinfeathers appeared all over his head and arms as his hair receded, fur began to coat his legs and a tail budded.  Then he rocked forward onto his toes as his feet elongated and his thighs shrank into the flanks of a lion.  The pinfeathers on his arms grew long and thin and suddenly popped open into full-fledged feathers while his eyes migrated down the sides of his face and his jaws expanded forward into a huge, curved beak.

It all happened so quickly that she’d had no idea the change was occurring simultaneously in her own body until she heard the sound of her own clothes ripping.  Thinking about it now, it bothered her.  How could she not feel something that traumatic?  Was she going to start morphing uncontrollably at random without even realizing it?  Caitlin had talked her through the process of changing back by saying, “Lizbeth, you must listen to my voice!  Imagine you’re looking in a mirror.  See your face, see your body, see your arms and legs and hands and feet.”  Changing back had been effortless.

“Caitlin?”

A wasp whizzed by and a songbird warbled.  The sun had broken through the hazy clouds and shone down on the pretty glen as if the brutality of the day had never happened.

“Yes?”

With all the questions Lizbeth had, about shapeshifting, about Caitlin being her grandmother, about the crown, the one that came out was, “How could I become a griffin when there is no such thing?”

“They used to exist,” Caitlin replied.  “Like a lot of other things.  Brian always did enjoy using that form.  It was his family crest.  What I would like to know is how you shifted without touching the crown.”

“Kevin’s nugget.  It was an accident.  I just held it for a second.  The guys don’t know.”

Lizbeth waited for Caitlin to chastise her, but she didn’t.  The silence stretched.  Lizbeth wanted to sit down, but there wasn’t enough room next to Caitlin and she knew from the prickers in her socks that the weedy grass wouldn’t be comfortable.  In the distance, she saw Zach and Kevin hurrying back, each carrying a shovel. 

Another wasp, or maybe the same one, buzzed by.  It advanced and retreated in that drunken way wasps have, hovering around Caitlin’s head.  She seemed unaware of it, so Lizbeth shooed it away with a few waves of her hand.  The wasp persisted, however – there was something about Caitlin that was really attracting it.  Just as it occurred to Lizbeth that it was the blood in her hair and on her shirt, a black ball of feathers shot past, snatching the pesky insect out of the air.

The raven glided up and around full circle before flapping back toward them.  There wasn’t any place flat for it to land, so it came straight for Lizbeth.  Instinctively, she held out her arm and braced for impact.  The bird landed easily, turned around to face forward and settled its wings, glossy black feathers fluffed up as if it were ill.  It stepped sideways up her arm, foot to foot, stopping only when it reached her shoulder.

Lizbeth didn’t need to see the blue eyes to know it was Caw.  “This is Len’s bird.  He looks so sad.”

“It’s hungry,” Caitlin said.

Caw snuggled up next to Lizbeth’s cheek, his feathers tickling her.

“Well, I think he’s special,” Lizbeth said, watching Caitlin out of the corner of her eye to gauge her reaction.  “I read that ravens are kept at the Tower of London because there’s a legend that if they ever leave, the tower and the kingdom will fall.”

Caitlin gave a weak laugh.  “Who do you think started that legend?”

Lizbeth shrugged, disturbing Caw, who uttered a small squawk.

“We did,” Caitlin said, and Lizbeth assumed she meant the druids. “There’s an old Irish poem that goes, ‘The raven lit upon the crown, its eyes went red as fire, but when the fever cooled, it sang a song and played the lyre.’  Humans were not the only ones who had contact with the crown.  We used the ravens at the tower for centuries to keep track of who was imprisoned.”

“What about Wolfdogge?”

“The hounds, too.”

“So can they talk?  The ravens?”

“They communicate to some extent.  Just like us, it’s who your parents are.  I’m surprised Len would keep one, but perhaps he was unaware of Caw’s heritage.  We don’t know the extent of the Guild’s knowledge of us.”

“Kevin said Len was dead.  And Simon.”

“Brian couldn’t let them live.  Had the advantage been Simon or Len’s, rest assured they would have killed him first.  I wish I had known.”

“How did they hide the crown from him?  Didn’t he read their minds?  Wouldn’t he have found out where Simon hid it?”

“Be wary of what you learn from someone’s mind, Lizbeth.  Since we merge our brain’s magnetic field, our gossamers, with theirs, we can only pick up what they are currently thinking.  We cannot distinguish between truth and lie, even in thought.  Brian was able just now to convince me he truly had given in.  Len and Simon, as Guild, would likely know it was possible to fool a shapeshifter.”

Zach and Kevin arrived with the shovels and four plastic bottles of water.  Kevin loosened the lids and handed a bottle each to Caitlin and Lizbeth.  Zach was wearing a shirt that looked exactly like the one she’d first seen him in.  Smelled like it, too.

“Check it out,” he said, pulling a backpack from his shoulder.  He unzipped it and inside, Lizbeth saw his laptop.

“That’s
your
backpack?  Where did you find it?” she asked.

“Griffey’s car is in the barn.  He must have rescued it before the ship went kablooie.”

Caitlin moved off the gravestone and said, “Dig.”

Using the shovels as leverage, Zach and Kevin were able to flip the heavy stone onto the grass.  Surprised bugs wiggled frantically away from the sunlight.  The boys began to dig and within minutes, they hit something.  Kevin tried to pry a square, wooden box out of the soil with his fingers, but it was held fast by a root of some sort that had grown around and around the box.  Lizbeth’s eyes were drawn to the nearest oak tree.  Zach lifted his shovel, but Kevin stopped him.  He touched the stubborn growth and closed his eyes.  Moments later, he lifted the box easily and handed it to Caitlin.  She brushed the dirt off the top, revealing a Celtic triskele carved into the wood.

“Let’s go,” she said, turning toward the house.

“Wait a minute,” Kevin said, holding up a finger. “Something’s going to happen.”

Zach scrunched his face.  “I feel it.”

The ground began to rumble and shake.  It was probably a coincidence that another earthquake hit moments after they found the crown, but Lizbeth shivered anyway as she waited for the ground to settle. 

Now that they had the means to stop it, would the gossamer sphere, an entity that had controlled the earth’s magnetic field for millions upon millions of years, cooperate?