The Keepers (31 page)

Horace searched around on the pavement with eyes and hand until he found the malkund's leg. It was sickening to the touch, somehow stony and fleshlike at once. He took it back inside, his own legs weak, his head pounding.

“It worked,” Chloe said, still crouched next to her father. “We did it.”

“We barely did it. Is he all right?” Her father was an enormous man, but he looked harmless now—almost sad—crumpled and motionless. Horace noticed that the little finger of one hand was stunted, the last joint amputated.

“He's breathing,” said Chloe. “I think he's okay. What time is it?”

He knew why she was asking. The malkund would return. “Eleven twenty-eight,” he said, squinting out into the yard. “Did you see where?”

“I saw close enough.”

“We need to get out of here.”

“You're bleeding,” Chloe said. Sure enough, blood was running down his leg from the scrape on his calf, soaking into his sock. The sight of it brought the pain alive in his mind, raw and stinging. His head hurt now, too, where he had cracked it.
He felt for the spot gingerly, found a knot.

“Yeah, well, I'm not graceful,” he said, embarrassed that both of his injuries were lame and self-inflicted. “But we need to go.”

“I know. You'll have to help me drag him in. But first get that leg that broke off, and send it through. Just to be safe.”

“I snapped another one off, too. Part of it,” he said, holding it up.

Chloe shuddered. “Send them both.”

Horace located the malkund's other leg beside the cinder block. “Do you think this is normal? Do you think they all move like that?”

Chloe watched him as he dropped the reeking bits into the box and sent them, holding the box low over the floor so the pieces wouldn't scatter when they fell through tomorrow. She shook her head and brushed a slash of dirt from her father's cheek. “There is no normal.”

T
HEY MADE THE TRIP BACK TO
H
ORACE
'
S IN NEAR SILENCE
. The whole while, Horace nervously lamented the absence of the raven's eye. An almost-spent leestone was better than no leestone at all, wasn't it? He took comfort by reminding himself that Chloe had spent the previous night under his roof, and that the raven-and-turtle statue had to be offering her some protection right now. But when Chloe, halfway home, wanted to stop and slip into a closed-up coffee shop to “grab some doughnuts,” Horace just stared at her intently for so long that finally she said, “Okay, okay. Never mind. I guess you do flip.”

By 11:53, they were back in Horace's bedroom. Chloe took her overnight bag to the attic and changed into pajama bottoms and an enormous T-shirt that read
BREAD AND JAM
. They settled on Horace's bed. On the far wall, Rip Van Twinkle
crawled through the acutely angled light of Horace's desk lamp, casting a trundling shadow many times his own size.

“You okay?” Chloe asked Horace.

“Yeah. You?”

“I'm fine. Are you mad?”

Horace started to say yes but realized he wasn't mad. “Shouldn't I be?” he said.

“Probably. But I see that you're not. I don't know how you do that.”

Footsteps sounded outside Horace's door. Before he could even tell Chloe to hide, the dragonfly stirred and she dropped clean through the bed, disappearing from sight. The bed rebounded from her suddenly absent weight, and the bottle of bubbles from earlier rolled onto the floor. He was still staring when his door opened and his mother leaned in.

“You still up?” she said. “I thought I heard you talking.”

“What? No, I wasn't. But yes, I am still up.”

Horace's mother came in with a smile. “You seem to be having a lot of late nights recently.” Her foot kicked the bottle of bubbles. She gave a little laugh and picked it up, taking her usual seat beneath the window. She began sending streams of bubbles into the air. Loki came in and sat, cocking his head and gazing at them.

A flight of bubbles bustled up and drifted slowly down. “Have you seen Chloe lately?”

“No, why would I?” Horace said nervously.

“I don't know. She's a friend, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“She seems like a friend.” His mother sat forward and blew a string of bubbles toward Loki's face. The cat blinked and flinched, trying to bite them, seeming to forget he had paws. “I like her. She's very . . . capable.”

Right above his mother's head were the tiny black words Chloe had written on the wall that first night. Horace pictured her pushing pieces of the golem from her flesh, hiding inside the tree while Dr. Jericho tore at the bark, running with the malkund in her hand. “That's an understatement,” he said, and then wished the words back as soon as they were out. Chloe was under the bed right now—or at least he thought she was. He wasn't quite sure where she'd gone. But he had no doubt she was listening.

“What's this?” his mother said. She leaned over and picked up Horace's bloody sock. “Were you mauled?”

“Oh, that. No, I'm fine. I just scraped my leg.”

“Can I see?”

Horace sighed and pulled his leg out from under the covers. The scrape was laced now with scabs like beads of drying glue. His mother peered at it. “How did that happen?”

“Long story,” he said. “There was a chain of events.”

“There always is. Were you a participant in this particular chain, or just a victim?”

“A participant, yeah,” he said. “But my intentions were good.”

“Well,” she said. “Participation. Good intentions. That's a
recipe for a life well lived.”

A few minutes later, she said good night and left, closing the door behind her. Horace's heart nearly stopped as Chloe's upper half instantly emerged from the foot of the bed, the dragonfly a blur. She stood half buried in the bed as casually as if she were standing in hip-deep water. “So your mom thinks I'm capable, huh?” she said.

“Oh my god, you have got to stop that,” Horace whispered. “It is freaking me out.”

Chloe shrugged and then jumped high, clearing the bed and folding her legs up beneath her in midair. The dragonfly stopped whirring, and she landed atop the covers. The bed squeaked alarmingly. “That was interesting,” she said, lying back down again. “Things have been interesting lately. I feel like I'm getting even more . . . capable. With the dragonfly, I mean.”

“That's a scary thought.”

Chloe didn't respond to that, but several seconds later she sighed. “I decided I'm going to tell the old folks the truth. Tomorrow night.”

“Really? About all of it?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

The dragonfly stirred again. Her face as stern as stone, Chloe sunk a finger inside her chest. One swipe. Two. “Cross my heart,” she said.

The gesture took Horace's breath away for a moment,
made him suddenly conscious of his own heart beating in his chest. He cleared his throat. “Did the malkund change your mind?”

“Partly. But also just . . . being here.” She glanced at Horace's door.

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. Everything just got me thinking. You asked me why my mom left.”

“I'm sorry, I—”

“No. I wanted you to ask. There's not much to tell, though. One day she was just gone. I haven't seen her since I was five or six.” Chloe shook her head, scowling. “But don't say you're sorry. I'm not sorry. Hell, my dad's not even sorry—he has this crazy idea that my mom leaving was some kind of noble thing. Like we didn't deserve her or she had some higher calling or something, I don't know . . .” Her voice trailed away. “And now all of this. My dad's had a hard time since my mom left, but not like lately. Not like you saw tonight.” She threw Horace an apologetic glance. “I'm embarrassed you saw my house. I know it's a disaster.”

Horace shrugged. “It's not so bad.”

“It is. And then my dad today, god—you must have freaked when you saw him. But he's not so bad, somewhere in there. He wouldn't want to see me get hurt. I know that. He's still my dad, and home is still home, you know?” She went briefly cross-eyed as Rip, flying now, dipped down in front of her face and then floated away. “That door in my room, the
one with the gate Madeline drew—that goes into a little hallway between our bedrooms. Or more like a closet, maybe, but not really, because there's a bench, and a little arched window up high, and the sun comes through in the afternoon. We go in there and we talk and we play, and no one's ever really gone in there but us, and it's about as far from anything bad as you can be.”

Horace tried to picture it. “Is that the heart? You said something before about the heart.”

“No. The heart's different. Madeline can't go in the heart. No one can.” She flashed him a surly glance, discouraging him from asking more.

“But anyway this little hallway that connects our rooms—we call it Go-Between. Like it's a country. For Madeline it's kind of a magic place. That's why she drew those gates. She leaves me notes: ‘Meet me in Go-Between.'” Chloe smiled and sighed. “I don't know if it's true what Mr. Meister told us about the Riven, and if all I was worried about was keeping my own Tan'ji safe, I might never go back to the Warren again. I can take care of myself. But that's not all I'm worried about. I'm worried that I could lose something like Go-Between. Madeline's notes. My aunt Lou. My dad—what's left of him. And if I'm worried about losing what I have, you ought to be worried too, with all you could lose. I was listening to you and your mom.”

Of course she had been listening. What had she heard? “Oh, yeah?” he said.

“Yeah, and your mom is kind of awesome. Even your dad is. And maybe with the way everything is for you here, it's hard to imagine it being so different, and I mean . . . look, you saw my dad. You saw how that thing made him. But I don't know if it's occurred to you yet to imagine your mom like that.”

The picture rose up in his mind, hitting him hard: his mom, a lurching shell of herself, no longer a parent but . . . what? Something empty and cruel, something that maybe no longer cared about Horace.

“And I think that all of this”—Chloe lifted her arms and spread them wide—“and your mom and your dad and Madeline and Go-Between, and the way my dad used to be sometimes, that's the point, isn't it?”

“The point of what?”

She rolled forward onto her knees. She held out the dragonfly. “Of this.” She leaned and laid her hand right beside the Fel'Daera on his nightstand, her fingers as close as they could be without touching it. “Of this.” She shook her head and sort of shrugged, and gestured back and forth between Horace and herself. “This.”

She was right, of course. Everything she was saying was right. But Horace wondered who she was really talking to—Horace, or herself. “Are you trying to convince me to join the Wardens? I already told you—I'm in if you're in.”

“I'm in, then.”

“So we're in.”

“Fine,” Chloe said. “But you have to let me be me sometimes, okay?”

“Fine,” Horace said. As if anyone could stop her. “And maybe sometimes you ought to let you be
me
.”

Chloe laughed. “I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it's probably a good idea. What did your mom say? Good intentions? Participation? I think between the two of us, we have those covered.”

They sank into quiet again. They lay down, head to foot and foot to head. They watched the lightning bug toil. Horace listened to Chloe's breathing, tried to attune himself to its rhythm. A few minutes later, when Chloe got up and cupped her hands gently around Rip Van Twinkle, Horace said nothing. She took the bug to the window. Horace watched, amazed, as she reached right through the glass, the firefly still cupped in her hands. She leaned forward and let him go. The little insect drifted away into the night, blinking.

And then Chloe froze. Her eyes went wide. “Horace,” she said.

“What?”

“There's a note on the window.”

Horace scrambled to his feet beside her. A small square of paper was clinging to the glass. On the outside.

Chloe bent her wrist awkwardly and plucked the paper free. Horace peered down into the grass fifteen feet below, wondering how the note had gotten there. Chloe brought it inside and held it between them so they both could read:

Under
no circumstances should Chloe go back to her home. Await our arrival tomorrow at midnight
.

—H. Meister

“They already know about the malkund,” Horace said at once.

Chloe gazed at the note, her face alive. “No. They're just being cautious.”

“I don't think so. I think they know, and they want us to wait for them. Maybe they want to help us with it.”