Silent Doll (17 page)

Leaving the knocker alone, I pushed the door open and stepped into the dim hall beyond. Virginia never locked her door. Why would she, when she had a spell on the house that would repel anyone who meant her ill will? I could walk right in; I wasn’t here to hurt her. I just wanted to raid her personal library.

As an ex-Enforcer, retired not fired, Virginia had an excellent selection of books that she’d acquired over the years while working for the Magical Council’s police force. If there was any way to diagnose Trinket’s spell and break her binding to her family, it would be here. Virginia had specialized in curse and hex removal.

I was as quiet as I could be on the old stairs, which seemed to creak no matter where you put your feet. The pattern of the old runner up the middle was worn to a point where you could hardly tell what the pattern was anymore. The first floor held the bathroom, two bedrooms, and the library, as well as the stairs to the tower, which was Virginia’s sacred space. Somewhere high above was an attic space for storage.

I walked into the cold library. That was the only problem with the house; it was heated entirely by wood burning fireplaces, so Virginia only heated a room if she was going to be in it for a long period of time. She talked about installing modern heating, but after having to have the house rewired for electricity, she feared the cost. It wasn’t so bad in the summer, but in the winter the bill would be murder.

I walked to the far wall, which was one enormous bookcase, stuffed with all kinds of books. Mostly magical tomes, but the odd Nora Roberts paperback was tucked in here and there. I looked over the titles, carefully pulling books I thought would be helpful and making a small pile of them on the coffee table. I was just pulling out a book on alchemical practices when I heard a throat clearing, “ahem” from behind me.

I turned slowly, putting the book on top of the pile.

Virginia stood in the doorway in a floor-length white nightdress. Her white hair was braided and hanging over her shoulder. She shuffled into the room; her slippers looked to be made out of blue bath mat.

“Care to tell me what brings you here so early in the morning?” she inquired archly.

“Thought I’d get some light reading done.”

Virginia examined the six books on the coffee table. “Oh yes, very light reading,” she said. “Try again.”

“I’m borrowing some books. It’s not like I haven’t done that before.”

“True, but not usually at this time of day.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said, turning back to the shelf. I selected a seventh book and deposited it atop the pile.

“You tried not to wake me and be sneaky about it because?”

“Good manners,” I said with a bright, fake smile. We both knew why I hadn’t wanted to wake her. I was much better at burning bridges than I was at mending them.

“Just talk to me, Cassandra,” she sighed. She looked sad and guilty and more like an old woman than ever before. I was a little pleased to note that our arguments had somewhat of an effect on her too.

“What about, exactly? About you lying to me? About you keeping me in the dark?”

“Cassandra, I never lied to you.”

“Never directly, but you knew more than you were telling me. That’s a lie of omission, which is just as bad. Even now when I’m in on the big bad secret, you still won’t even talk to me about it.”

I took a deep breath and tried to rein in my temper. I felt like Luke Skywalker when he figured out that his mentor Yoda must have known that Darth Vader was his father. Virginia—my Yoda—had known who my mother was, known she wasn’t human, and known I wasn’t a witch. The list went on.

“Why can’t you believe that I was trying to do what is best for you?”

I hated when Virginia took that grandmotherly tone with me. “I’m not a child anymore, Virginia. Playing that kind of card just won’t wash with me. What gives you the right to decide what is best for me?”

“Cassandra, you are little more than a baby in your lineage. You have yet to live even one lifetime yet.”

“You can’t keep coddling me,” I snapped. “I am not a child, and even more importantly, I am not
your
child.”

Virginia got her grumpy face on. “Don’t act like I haven’t had a hand in raising you,” she shot back. “I have guided you these last few years. I’ve been here since the beginning, when the only help I could give was to change your diapers!”

I bent over, picking up the pile of books, and held my eyes wide, trying to stop tears from spilling out.

“Don’t try that with me either, Virginia. Don’t try to play the family card on me. Your son married my mom and you can’t pretend that you never resented that she took him away from you, or that you’ve taken some of that resentment out on me. I never knew my father and I never knew you, and when I met you, you didn’t bring me in as family. You apprenticed me. You worked with me with little or no visible emotional attachment. You let me think I was alone in the world. You saw my pain, my confusion, my loneliness, and you let it continue when you could have stopped it. Family doesn’t do that.”

I started for the door. I knew she had the power to stop me, to take the books back, to deny me access to any of her knowledge; but something in my words must have rung a chord in her. She stood aside, letting me walk into the hallway.

“I’m sorry, child,” she said in a small voice.

“Well, that’s a start. I mean, you’ve got a lot to apologize for, as I see it. When you feel like sharing everything with me, you know how to get in touch. I’ll bring these back in a few days.” I lifted the books in my arms to indicate what I meant and started for the stairs.

I wasn’t going to cry. It hurt to be at odds with Virginia, but I just didn’t know if I could ever trust her as completely as I had before.

She said, quietly, “I’m trying to keep a promise to protect you. I wish that you could understand that.”

“The best way to protect me is to teach me to protect myself. You know the whole give a man a fish, teach a man to fish deal. Whatever.”

Virginia came to stand at the top of the stairs as I reached the bottom. “Cassandra—”

I looked up.

“I know it’s wrong to wish so, but you won’t ever call me grandma, will you?”

“Does that seem likely to you?”

We stared at each other for a long time. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed six times and the sun rose. Her house disappeared around me. I stood in the middle of a stranger’s living room. Damn it. I hated crossovers that I wasn’t locationally prepared for. I was lucky it was so early in the morning.

I headed for the front door and put the books down while I fiddled with the dead bolt. I heard a small squeak from behind me and turned to see a small, pajama-clad boy standing on the stairs. He was rubbing his sleepy eyes and holding a bear by one paw.

“Who’re you?”

“Um…I’m the tooth fairy, kid.” I put a finger to my lips in a
shhh
gesture. “I popped in at the wrong address. Just go back to bed and I’ll let myself out.”

“Okay,” he said sleepily and shuffled back up the stairs. I unlatched the door, grabbed the books and hightailed it out of there.

Chapter Nineteen

Now that I’d made a start on helping Trinket with her problem, my conscience allowed me to sleep. I collapsed against my pillows and was out in an instant. Thankfully, I didn’t really dream.

When I woke at last, back on the other side, I blinked at the clock and discovered that I had slept for twelve hours. I guess I really had been exhausted. I showered, haunted by a creeping uneasiness the whole time, then toweled my wet hair and settled cross-legged on my bed to read.

The combination of alchemy and true magic to create Trinket was treated as a theoretical concept by most of the scholars on the subject. The alchemist created the doll itself; could make it walk and perform simple tasks, but that was all clockworks. A series of mechanisms that made gears hum and pulleys raise and lower weights. That did nothing to make the doll alive to the degree that Trinket seemed to be.

By the standards of alchemists, of engineers, and creators, Trinket was the pinnacle of achievement. Whoever had made her was a genius. I found myself wanting to see inside her, to know how she worked; then felt ashamed at my curiosity. She was one of the most interesting creations I had ever encountered—which thought made me realize that I was torn between calling her a creation or a person. She might be man-made, but there was an intelligence inside of her that didn’t make any sense.

I left my bed in favor of putting on some clothes, a pair of jeans, and a black T-shirt showed the stages of evolution—except in the last one, the modern man had turned around to face the others. The legend underneath read: “Quit following me.”

I went into the kitchen and put a pop tart in the toaster. While I waited for that I made a quick trip downstairs to fetch the mail. It consisted of an official invite to the after-moon bash at DJ’s bar on Monday, the electric bill, water bill, and a second notice about having missed my cable subscription fees. They were threatening to cut me off. I sent that one flying straight into the trash when I got back to my apartment.

I put the pop tart in my mouth, holding it between my teeth so as not to burn my lips. I stopped to get a glass of milk from the fridge and stared at the pot of African violets that were sitting on top. I still hadn’t solved who had sent me the flowers and nothing more had arrived. The rhyme only had two types of flowers in it: “roses are red and violets are blue”—a complete misnomer. Violets were, as their name suggested, violet. Part of me wondered how this poem was supposed to end. I’d seen a million versions of it because there were so many words that did or could be made to rhyme with
blue
.

I’d run through the list of men I knew in my head several times and come up with no positive idea as to who’d sent them. Aram would have taken credit. Jareth didn’t want a romance, just a physical connection. DJ had the chance to mention the flowers over our set-up date and hadn’t. Simian could have sent them, but he’d have surely filled DJ in, so that DJ could claim credit and therefore my good graces. Hamilton was showy and brash; he would have delivered flowers in person to reap any reward immediately. Benjamin hated my guts. LeBron and I didn’t see each other that way; besides, he was chasing another cat up a tree, literally.

I chewed on the pop tart, now cool enough to eat, and tasted the strawberry filling on the tip of my tongue.

There was always Magnus, I thought idly; but he’d moved away to Manchester. Perhaps even the move hadn’t been enough to stop him from thinking about me. Then I thought how incredibly vain that sounded. Magnus and I were over, way over and we were moving on with our lives. Any flickering of anything between us, at least on my part, had been doused thoroughly with a bucket of water.

I went into my room, lay down on my belly and selected another book from the pile, thumbing through the pages. I had a tendency to get bored with books that were a tad too technical; they read like stereo instructions. Instruction manuals and I were not on speaking terms. I had to have someone else set my stereo up.

I chewed and tried to read, getting lost in the words. I knew the meaning of most of them; it was the sentences they were in that made no sense. I’d always been a more hands on kind of learner, just delve right in and work it out through trial and error—which is why my mother had banned me from the kitchen at age seven. Apparently Rice Crispy stars did not require sprinkles. I couldn’t follow a recipe to save my life. Which, to be honest, wasn’t a big worry to me. If I ever entered a battle to the death I doubted my opponent would challenge me to a bake off—not even demons are that sinister.

I brushed crumbs off my page and kept scanning through the pages. I was getting nowhere. I reached down the side of my bed to get the glass of milk I’d brought in with me and took a long glug. Ever seen those advertisements—Got Milk? One day the poor grammar of that sentence was going to send an English teacher into a graffiti frenzy.

I chuckled at the mental image and turned back to my book. In the middle of the book I’d been reading sat one of the others. It must have slipped when I’d moved on the bed; I gently pushed it back out of the way. It slipped again to bang me in the elbow. Frustrated, I pushed it off the bed altogether. It hit the floor with a thunk. I turned my eyes back to the pages under me—and the book I’d tossed aside struck me square in the side of the head.

I looked around suspiciously, rubbing my sore temple, then picked the book up and read the title.
A Magical Approach to Animation of Mechanics.

“Jesus, okay, I can take a hint,” I said aloud, glaring at the empty room. At a guess, my ghost was back. Anyone from the other side that was in my apartment at cross over, got stuck in my apartment till the sunset again. I was surprised to find that included ghosts. Spirits, apparently, see more clearly than humans do. Shame you had to be dead to get that kind of insight.

I thought about the ghost that Incarra had seen in my spare room. He was wearing an apron, looked like a workman of some kind, and had said
help her
. I wondered now if maybe he had meant Trinket. Could a spirit attach itself to someone like Trinket?