The Silent Strength of Stones (22 page)

“Tell me true, Nick. Is he really staying over at Lacey’s? If he is, why doesn’t he go back there?”

“He’s feuding with his family. He can’t go back, Pop.”

“And he doesn’t have any clothes.”

I got a mug of milky coffee and sat down across from Pop.

“But he has darned nice manners,” Pop said. “All right, he can stay. You can even give him some more of my old clothes, if you want.”

“Thanks, Pop,” I said, surprised.

“No matter how I feel about my backhoe days, chances are I’m not going back,” he said. He watched the back of Evan’s head. “Somebody might as well get some use out of my old rags. Guess I was saving them to paint the house in, but there’s more. Not sure they’d fit me anymore anyway. And we got fifteen-year paint on the house right now. Might last us eight or nine years,” He smiled. There was that surprising charm again. “What do you think about that Susan, eh?”

“She seems nice,” I said.

“Nice? With cannons like that?” He wagged his eyebrows at me.

I stared at my mother again. She looked way too skinny to me, and almost flat in front. I needed to ask Evan some more questions about warding.

“Nice,” I said.

He parted my head. “You’re so young.” He got up, carrying his coffee mug, and wandered over to sit in his easy chair, where he could watch Mom and the TV at the same time.

I sipped coffee and watched my family from behind as they were transfixed by images on a small screen. This was like old times, with Evan standing in for me. Could we actually return to the way life used to be? Everything was so calm. Where was the fear and panic I had felt?

Mom turned to look at me. Her eyes were shadowed and looked like tunnels. I had stared into her eyes more than once until I got lost in them, not because they were silver and animated like Uncle Bennet’s, but because I knew all she saw was me and all I saw was her. I had never needed friends while she was still living with us. She had been everything I wanted and needed.

Panic was right there, waiting. I stood up, turning away from her gaze, and said, “Night, Granddad, Pop, Susan. Evan, I’m going upstairs now. Pop says you can stay.” My voice was a little high.

“Thank you, sir,” Evan said to Pop. He rose. “Good night. Pleasure to meet you all.”

If I had had wings, I would have flown up the stairs.

7. Trouble Breathing

I started feeling sick just as I finished brushing my teeth. One minute I was leaning over the sink, glaring at my foam-mouthed face in the mirror, occasionally staring at the reflected images of the biplanes on the brown-and-white shower curtain over the tub behind me, tasting the mint in the toothpaste and trying to ignore the mildewy scent the bathroom still had after a long steamy winter of showers with the window closed. The next minute I felt a theft of breath that left me dizzy and weak, and my stomach cramped. I spat out toothpaste foam and rinsed my mouth, hoping that would help, but it didn’t.

I wondered if I had done the perfect thing, cooked a meal that would give my parents food poisoning; but the expiration date on the marinara sauce had been years away, and I knew the pasta and the sausage were fine. I hadn’t eaten anything else since breakfast besides a handful of potato chips, and I’d never heard of potato chips making anybody sick. Maybe I had the flu. Which would just make things more difficult. Pop didn’t cut me much slack for sickness.

Hadn’t Evan told me to be well? How long did commands like that last? I would have asked him, but I was feeling too sick to even leave the bathroom.

I was wheezing. It was just like the day Mom left. My chest burned. My lungs labored. I lay on the fuzzy brown rug on the bathroom floor, sweat rolling down my face. I wished I were dead.

Evan staggered in through the open door and knelt beside me. His face was gray and wet with sweat. “It’s happening, Nick. They unbind,” he whispered, shutting his eyes tight. His cheeks were taut with strain, and tendons stood out in his neck. He gripped his head with both hands.

“Fools, they don’t even know what they’re doing!” Evan said in a harsh whisper. “Nick, bind!”

Breath whistled on its way into me. I didn’t understand him in my head, but something in me understood, because I sat up, dug my Swiss Army knife out of my pants pocket, opened the smaller, sharper blade, and pulled his hand away from his head. I cut across my thumb and across his, said, “Blood brothers,” and pressed my cut to his.

He opened eyes burning and golden and repeated it, then said some words in the other language. The constriction in my throat eased. I gasped in air. It tasted cool, refreshing as ice water on a hot day. My stomach settled and I started feeling normal again.

Keeping his thumb pressed to mine, Evan gripped my hand and drew it toward him. He touched his lips to our joined thumbs. Gently he released my hand, easing his thumb from mine, then licking the blood away from his wound with just the tip of his tongue.

“Taste,” he said.

I waited a beat just to see if I could.

His power to command me had vanished.

I sucked the blood off my thumb. It had an undertone of salt.

“Now I’m in you and you’re in me,” he whispered.

“It’s not the same,” I said, feeling muted shades of disappointment, sharper fear, and sadness. For the first time since Mom left I had found somebody whom I actually wanted to take care of me, and now that was over. It had barely lasted twenty-four hours.

“It’s not the same, but it’s something,” he said. “Without it, we might have died.
Akenari
. They know they’re right, but they’ve never dealt with a fetch bond before. They chose the wrong unbinding. I should have loosed you myself.”

I got up and splashed cold water on my face. I filled a glass with water and offered it to him. He drank most of it, splashed some on his face too. I slumped down across from him, my back against the cupboards under the sink; he had his back against the tub, and we propped our feet up on each other’s backstops.

Evan said, “So what is ‘blood brothers’?”

“A way to choose your relatives. Something best friends do. Not a big formal thing like what you did to me before.”

“Something they won’t know to unbind,” he said, “at least not yet. I don’t understand why the Presences allowed the Keyes to unbind us—I thought I was doing the right thing when I fetched you. Maybe there just aren’t enough Presences here in this strange land to influence us one way or the other.”

Thinking of the moment back in Lacey five when all the Keyes had gone silent, asking for guidance, listening, not hearing, I said, “What is a Presence, anyway?”

“It’s ... it’s complicated. Those who have gone before are Presences, and then there are other sorts—creatures and beings that live with Powers. Some of them know a lot; some of them know only a little; some sleep deep and some sleep lightly, and some are always awake and watching; some come because they want to and some come because we call them. Some are strong and some are barely there. At my real home there are a lot of them, but they’re pretty quiet. At the Keyes’ home I haven’t noticed many. Here, none have spoken to me at all, but I thought maybe that was because I have cast myself out from the family. Once you cut the thread, the Presences abandon you, or so people say.” He studied his cut thumb a second, then glanced sideways at me and offered me a small smile.

“Are these Presences supposed to actually guide you through your daily life? How do they talk to you?”

He thought for a moment. “Well, I guess first you have to practice your disciplines. Sometimes the Presences don’t talk very loud. Disciplines help you hear them. I was never very good at my disciplines. Second, you have to decide you want to listen for the Presences. You look around and see if there are signs. You make a space where they can contact you—there’s all kinds of ways to do that, with fire, water, earth, air, with
skilliau
or spiritspeak, or other things. I was never any good at that either. I’m not interested in having outside things telling me what to do. I don’t know if you noticed that.”

“I noticed.”

“Third, you have to figure out how to interpret the messages you get. Actually, I’m pretty good at that part. I like puzzles. And fourth, you have to decide whether you want to follow the directions you’ve been given. That’s the tricky part. If you don’t actually perceive any of the directions, you don’t have to follow them—that’s my theory, anyway. If you actually figure out what the Presences and Powers want you to do, you can get in terrible trouble if you don’t do it.”

“You prefer flying blind.”

“No. Not flying,” he said. “If I’m a bird, I’d just as soon see where I’m going. But acting on my own, yes. So. Blood brothers, whatever that means.” He frowned and stared down at his hands, which lay palms up on his knees. “Saved us, anyway. We were too bound together to survive being separated without preparation. Thank you, Nick.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. I wondered if I loved Evan with the same intensity now that he wasn’t a wolf and my master. I could still remember the orders he had given me, about accepting him no matter what shape he chose, about how his relatives’ curses should slide off me, about how I should be comfortable. I looked at him. He raised his eyes and met my gaze. The instant overwhelming feeling I had gotten before from just looking at him was gone. I knew I didn’t know him very well, and I could think about that now. Everything I knew about him, though, I liked.

He gave me an open-mouthed grin. “Different,” he said.

“When she first saw me with you, Willow thought I put a spell on you.”

“You did.”

“She said you hated everything.”

“I did.”

“How could I put a spell on you? The only magic I really know is talking, and I hardly even talked to you.”

“You spelled me just by being so interesting. It’s a spell of fascination. Before I discovered you, I wasn’t interested in anything except woodsrunning, exploring, and hunting.” His eyes narrowed. “And there was something else about you. An opening. An asking. A place that needed something. Willow saw that too. We both had the same thought. We both wanted to connect with that place in you. But I got there first.”

I wasn’t sure I understood him. It sounded really eerie. I put my hand on my chest, remembering the scooped-out feeling I had had after Mom left. “Was it like a wound?”

“A wound?” he said. He frowned. “N-no, it was like a flavor, or a beckon, a, maybe half a melody asking for its other half. I’m no good at explaining stuff!”

“I don’t know. You’re better than no explanation at all, even though I don’t always understand you.”

“Why would you think a wound?”

“A big ... unbinding? What Mom did to me by leaving.”

“Huh.” He leaned forward and touched my chest too. “Huh.” He sniffed his fingers. His eyebrows drew together. “I don’t think ...”

There was a tapping on the door, tentative, un-Pop-like. I glanced over and saw my mother standing on the threshold. “Nick?” she said.

My hand on my chest closed into a fist. “Yeah.”

“Could I talk to you?” She glanced at Evan. It was the sort of look that invites a person to leave. He smiled at her instead. “Alone?”

“Why?”

“Just because.”

She had always said that when I asked “why” one time too many. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

I wanted so much just to look at her.

Then again, I sort of wanted to kill her.

I said, “Evan’s my bodyguard. He knows all my secrets.”

“All of them?”

Her voice was so familiar it was strange. I felt it stroking me. I knew she had a laugh just under the surface. Part of me wanted to tease it out of her the way I used to, and part of me wanted to run.

“Lots of them, anyway,” I said. “Some that I don’t even know myself.”

“Do you need him to protect you from me?” She sounded uncertain.

“I might.” I scrambled to my feet, and Evan got up too. As I turned toward Mom, I saw an image in the mirror over the sink and jumped. There was a busty woman with a lot of wavy blonde hair, wearing a pink dress trimmed with white lace. She had killer fingernails polished pink, and she was wearing nylons and high heels. I blinked and looked back at my mother. Short hair, nearly flat chest, a sensible turtleneck in olive green, bare, bitten fingernails, a dark skirt that reached to mid-calf, gym socks, penny loafers. “Jeee-zus!” I felt blood tingling in my cheeks.

Evan glanced at the mirror, at my mother, at me. “Hah,” he said.

“What is it?” Mom said, and now she sounded worried.

I pointed to the mirror. “Tha—” I squinted at the image. Its lips were bright pink, and it was wearing silvery lavender color above its large blue eyes. “What the—”

Evan said, “It’s the warding, Nick. I’ll wait just outside the door. Yell if you need me.”

“Don’t—”

He nudged my shoulder with his knuckles and edged around my mother, shutting the door with her inside the bathroom.

“Warding?” She looked pale, even though her mirror image looked very healthy. I turned my back on the mirror, leaning against the sink counter.

“Mom?” I said.

“Nick? Oh, Nick!” She came toward me, her arms held out.

“Don’t,” I said, putting power into my voice, stopping her where she stood, I crossed my arms over my chest, tucking my hands into my armpits and hunching my shoulders. “What are you doing here?”

She lowered her arms and stared at me with wide eyes. “I had to see you.”

“Why?”

“I miss you so much.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She blinked. A tear ran down her cheek.

“If you missed me, you wouldn’t have left.”

She stared at the carpet. “I shouldn’t have left. I should never have left.”

“Why did you?”

“I had to leave.” She rubbed the tear away with the sleeve of her shirt, and looked up at me again. “I tried to explain this in my note. Did you understand any of it? I know it was difficult stuff for a thirteen-year-old.”

“What note?”

Her eyes got big. “Oh, Nick.” She touched her cheeks with her hands. “You didn’t get my note?”

I shook my head.