Speed of Light (3 page)

“And Saigon cinnamon.”

“Don’t you have cinnamon there?” He pointed toward the overflowing spice rack Rumi kept adding to.

“Not the right kind.” I shook my head, pressing the dough into the tin, pinching the sides up so the juice stayed in.

“Oh.” He looked so disappointed I almost relented. Almost shrugged it off. But she’d be back and she’d want to know what I’d found. And if I didn’t give her something, she’d hurt him. So much worse than my words ever could.

I slid a pie onto the oven rack. With my back toward Tony I frantically blinked back tears. He couldn’t see me cry. He’d want to know why. He’d want to help.
He can’t help; no one can help me
.

“You need these for this meal? Now?” Tony crossed his arms. I could tell by the way he worked the rosary beads that I tried his patience. I didn’t know why he stayed around. He didn’t deserve this, but I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t take it back.
If only he’d never found me, he’d be okay. They’d all be okay
.

“Why don’t you come with me? Show me what you want?” he asked.

“No. You know. There’s a pie in the oven.”

“You have to go someday.”

“Meridian’s going to take me.”

He brightened at the idea that Meridian might spend more time with me. I knew he wished he’d inherited her instead of me. “I’ll return in a few. They’ll be back in a few hours.”

Meridian decided my mother needed a grave marker. Meridian decided to ask Rumi to help her. Meridian decided. Meridian decided. Meridian decided.

I waited until Tony was gone and wiped my hands on the towel. I started in the studio itself. The colors of the glass sparkled like candies and rock sugars. The Spirit Stones glowed, happy to see me, unaware they shouldn’t be, because everything around me shattered, spoiled. I touched one globe threaded with rays of pomegranate and concord, bits of blueberry and currants spun around the tree trapped inside.
This one is mine
. I tucked it in my bag and headed for Rumi’s desk.

Breathe, Juliet, breathe
. Like the pie dough, snooping required cool hands and a calm mind. I chewed my lip until I tasted blood.
Rumi’s forgetful. He’ll never even notice anything is gone
. A few notes, nothing I could read easily. Piles of books covered by sheets. Sheets of numbers.
Nothing
.

Heading down the hallway, I pinched myself on the wrist for wavering above the trunk he kept in his bedroom. A treasure chest from all his trips around the world. That’s what he’d called it when I’d asked about it last month. Like he had no secrets. Nothing to hide.
Unlike me
.

I lifted the lid. The top was filled with snapshots. People I recognized from Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, and Passover. Any excuse for a party. For a meal together. Meridian was outlined and barely visible. I was a pure blob of washed-out white. A Fenestra thing.
We control our ability and we get to be immortalized on film
. Or so they say. Meridian swears she saw photos of her Auntie—the only other Fenestra we knew about, except maybe my mother.
Maybe I have an Auntie somewhere, too? If I do, all the more reason to find something to give HER
.

More photographs of Rumi’s friends, elders like him who dished out stories the way I added salt to mashed potatoes.

I shifted through until my hands felt the old scaly leather of a portfolio. I lifted it out; tears ran down my cheeks. How do I betray my friends to save them? Or refuse and let her mete out punishment.
They are innocent. I have to protect the innocent
.

T
he car ride back to Rumi’s glassblowing studio and living space in Carmel’s Art and Design district was quiet, save for Custos. Her butterscotch haunches took up most of the backseat, while her tongue and jowls painted drool pictures on the glass. She was a two-hundred-pound goofball, and I wondered if we were wrong and she simply was an odd dog and not a creature of the Creators.
Given a choice, wouldn’t they pick a more stately and elegant messenger?

Rumi’s industrial warehouse, on the corner of Meridian and Main Streets, was divided into a studio for his whimsical rainbow of glass creations and a monastic
living area behind it. The Nocti attack during the Feast of the Fireflies shattered and ruined much of his inventory. He’d built his stock back up with the usual tchotchkes and pretties, the practical dinnerware, and the giftware of platters and frames. To us, his most important work was the Spirit Stones. An ancient indicator often called Witch Balls, they lit up in the presence of Fenestra and darkened around Nocti.

If the constant stream of customers was any indication, the busy summer season, which typically began on Memorial Day weekend, started two weeks early this year. I often manned the counter at Rumi’s shop, watching him work. His hands gracefully spun, expertly crafting the glass, seemingly without his head and heart giving input.

When we arrived, Custos disappeared into the trees and brush along the paved Monon Trail. The Spirit Stones, hanging from the rafters and hooks under the eaves, glowed brightly as I walked under them. Rumi’s had become our main gathering place.

“Thank you for coming early, Tony, Juliet,” Rumi greeted us as he swept in from checking on the front. I think he felt as if he could make Juliet trust him by immersion. He shouldn’t take it personally. I wasn’t sure she trusted any of us.
Not really
.

“Did they have a choice? You insisted.” I grinned.

In the kitchen, Juliet chopped vegetables. She was tall, and her frame was sturdy, which gave an insanely capable and responsible air to her sixteen years. However, in many ways, I felt like she was a middle-aged toddler—so
burdened by life’s hardships and yet completely clueless about the current world. Her blond hair bleached more each day as she spent time outside, secretly, at her creek. She thought we didn’t know where she disappeared to, but DG and the Wildcat Creek drew her back. Whether she found comfort there or was doing a weird kind of penance, I didn’t know. We made progress and lost ground at almost the same rate.

The air was fragranced with sautéing onions and garlic, baking bread, and cooling pies. I wondered which souls’ memories were on the menu tonight. Auntie quilted the soul dust off; Juliet’s talent was food. When a soul transitioned through her, Juliet picked up a highlight reel of tastes and recipes from the soul’s life. I hadn’t yet figured out my own way to deal with the soul dust—quilting made me bleed, and I was barely capable of nuking leftovers in the microwave. I’d taken to carrying a notebook in my pocket to jot down words and reflections. I continued to doubt what my talent for soul dust might be. The best I could do were words and stories.

Tony, a former priest and Juliet’s legal guardian, washed dishes piled around the sink. He’d known Juliet’s mother, Roshana, and given her sanctuary before the Nocti kidnapped them both and placed Juliet at DG. He carried the guilt of those years in his whitened hair and the lines around his eyes.

“Have you been here long?” I asked, hugging hellos.

“She woke early this morning needing to make six kinds of pie.” Tony smiled toward Juliet and pointed at
a stack of old books on the table. “I brought reading.” The soft strains of Irish folk ballads floated in the background. Pies of cherry, peach, sugar cream, and pecan lined the counter. The crusts were flaky and perfect. I knew she’d done it all by hand, even the tiny pastry birds on the top of the cherry pies and branches on the peach.

“Are you going to tell us why Rumi insisted we meet early?” I asked.

“Nope.” Tony grinned. “His show.”

I shrugged and snagged an extra piece of dough Juliet covered in butter and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar before baking.
Heaven in a bite
.

We’d settled into a rhythm of weekly dinners together, mostly on Sunday afternoons and evenings.

“Can I help?” I asked Juliet gently. I might very well cut off a finger, but I would do anything to get her to open up to me. Anything at all.

Juliet shook her head no, her braid swishing down her back. “I’ve got it.” Unfortunately, she continued to skitter like a shy wild animal around us. Occasionally, I glimpsed strength and reasoning in her that Auntie would be proud of. However, her anger simmered below the surface, ready to boil again. She needed time and routine. And her Protector.
Does she have one?
I grinned at Tens, who listened intently to Rumi’s meandering story.
What would I do without Tens?
Before Tens, I had been as lost and angry as Juliet.

I grabbed a specialty Stewart’s grape soda out of the
fridge, holding one out to Juliet as well. We loved grape anything. Rumi preferred his food in glass containers, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him cans of grape Faygo were easier to stock and were tastier.
Artificial grape goodness, the more purple the better
.

I know Rumi and Tony believed they were educating us, but mainly they entertained us with their antics. We counted on these family dinners to continue building our relationships and to share news. They’d grown into recitation times of stories and poems, each of us trying to outdo the others with our theatrics and selections. Tony and Rumi took their job as self-appointed mentors to new levels. The two now leaned toward each other over a flattened map.

“Juliet, can you come out of the kitchen? Join us? We need to chin-wag, talk,” Rumi called, his voice serious.

About what?
I glanced at Tens. His expression was as confused as mine.

Juliet’s comfort level visibly dipped as she dropped next to me on the couch. When Custos brushed the swinging door open and Minerva marched in beside her, I knew we were embarking on a potentially scary conversation.
They only show up for serious business
.

At Tony’s nod, Rumi said, “We’ve been expatiating about your futures. We think you children need to have a perdurable, an everlasting, education.”

“We are not going to high school.” Horrified, I shrank back at the thought. “You can’t possibly think—”

“You can’t make me.” Tens crossed his arms.

Juliet simply paled further, withdrawing against the sofa.

Tony held up his hands. “No rioting. Just hear us out.” He motioned for us to relax.

I wasn’t the only one perched on the edge of my seat ready to bolt.
High school? They’ve cracked up. The pressure is too much and they’ve lost their minds. I remember the uniform, the name-calling, the pinches and shoves
. Not a single pleasant memory of school lingered.

“We’re not enrolling any of you at Carmel High School,” Tony said, but his glance at Juliet seemed to say it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

At least I’d had some school; she’d been ostracized her entire life, hidden away until she became a viable Fenestra. Her eyes flashed what seemed like a warning to me.
What?

Rumi unrolled a long white parchment scroll and started tacking it up on his wall. Written in cursive and blocked with different colors of ink were names, dates, and acronyms. It was a timeline of sorts. “We don’t mean you need to evolve into mathletes or cheerleaders.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Tens would make an awesome cheerman. Bottom of the pyramid?”
That’s a picture!

Tens sent me a scathing glance and replied, “I think quarterback, or striker, is more my style.”

“In your delusional dreams, emo-wannabe-delinquent!” I teased him.

He nodded his agreement with a red face that had us
all laughing. Rumi stood back, quite pleased with himself. Tens’s curiosity was both his strongest trait and his weakness. “What’s that?” Tens walked over to the scroll, peering at the writing.

Rumi traced the chart with his finger, thrilled he’d snagged the interest of one of us. “This marks dates and any information we have on the girls and your kind. We had to be covert, in case anyone else saw it, so there is a text that matches the notations. We only used knowledge that’s proven as truth, a priori.”

Tony held up one of his old books; inside it hid a spiral notebook.

“Clever.” The fake book was a dictionary from the nineteenth century.
Not gonna be stumbled over there. Unless Rumi needs more archaic words
.

Rumi continued. “But these are the Fenestras, Protectors, and Nocti we think we know about. The underlines are the for-certains. That’s four.”

“Four?”

“Meridian, Tens, Juliet, and your Auntie,” Rumi answered. “We don’t have confirmation yet that Roshana, Juliet’s mom, was a Fenestra, right? Anything substantial?”

I shook my head. “I think she was, but I haven’t figured out how, or why, she’s disfigured or aging on that side of the window.”
Big questions. Without easy answers
.

Tony smoothed Juliet’s hair as if trying to reassure her with his touch. “What your Sangre Josiah told me has resonated in the months since.” Josiah had visited Tony with
messages and medicine that helped us temporarily defeat Ms. Asura. The Sangre were warrior angels higher up the chain than Fenestras, but Josiah wasn’t forthcoming, so my understanding was frustratingly limited. “When I approached Rumi, he’d been thinking the same thing.”

“Which part of Josiah’s edicts are you referring to?” Tens asked before I could.

“Josiah said that united we’re stronger,” Tony answered.

Rumi agreed. “Part of uniting, of accreting together, is having as much knowledge as possible. It will help us stay resolute, be pertinacious.”

“I’ve read Auntie’s journal. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with a million pieces.” My ancestors wrote cryptic bits and seemed to think they’d get around to writing the full stories later. They never did. Irritated, I continued. “We don’t know anything concrete.”

Rumi’s eyes lit up with excitement. “But that’s not true. We’re assuming a lot of lack here. And we do know pieces. Don’t you see? We don’t know what we don’t know. We need Cognoscenti.”

Confusing much?
I rubbed my temples.

“A who?” Tens asked, as if he followed Rumi.

Tony took over. “Rumi’s right. We haven’t examined what we know with fresh eyes and with people who bring more knowledge to the conversation. Even without Auntie’s journal, there’s plenty to study. Religions. History. People. Anthropology. Myth. Cultures. Dying practices around the world. We don’t know which paths might lead
us to more of you. Cognoscenti are experts. We need more in our coalition. To build strength with knowledge.”