A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 (22 page)

59. TARA

There was a tiny part of me that wanted to giggle at how uncomfortable
Sam was feeling right now, but the larger part of me was feeling bad for
Melody. I mean, she thought she was being all cool and collected most of the
time, but
Hello, Othello
, it was
obvious to anyone who’d known her for a while, that she was suddenly crushing
on Sam.

Which made sense of course, because he was
now unattainable.
I was suddenly very glad I had met G. Not only was I
no longer smitten with Sam, but G. was strong and steadfast, and Sam, as I
could see now, was still lacking some spine. The realization almost made me
laugh, but one look at the daggers shooting from Lily’s eyes and I knew that
would be a can of worms I didn’t care to open.

Sam sauntered in with his laptop and speakers under his arm
and set them up on the coffee table in front of the couch. Lily sat next to
him, forcing Mel and I to sit on the loveseat, further away from Sam, and from
the laptop screen.

“So the audio signal is definitely there, but its encrypted
or something. Lily… and I were just downloading and installing some new codecs
before you got here, and we were about to try them out. Here goes nothing,” he
finished, almost under his breath, and clicked the play button.

And then the daggers stopped shooting back and forth across
the room because the audio actually played.

There was static. There was a sort of metallic scraping
noise, like that of heavy machinery in the background, and faintly, very
faintly, was the sound of Matthew’s voice.

“You missed,”—some static—“garage. Watch out for”—some more
static—“she’s not who she seems. Stop”—a loud grating mechanical sound and the
squeal of microphone feedback, then finally—“vortex at Orla.” The sound faded
away, and then there was one last whisper: “You’re running out of time.”

I never swear, but “Holy shit,” I breathed. I looked,
wide-eyed at Mel, and then at Sam and Lily. Lily was the only one who didn’t
seem completely spooked, but I wouldn’t exactly say she was ‘calm’ either.
Agitated maybe.
I made a mental note.

“What the hell was that?” Lily said at last.

“That,” Melody said, for the first time seeming like she had
control of the situation, “was the voice of my dead brother’s ghost.”

#

“No, I am not going to break into the garage with you,” said
G. firmly on the phone. “And I really don’t want you to go over there with
them, either. It’s a bad idea.”

I knew he was right, but the audio from the séance was
compelling. “I know you said you were spending time with your dad tonight, and
I don’t want you to worry about me, so I promise to keep my phone with me, and
Sam and Lily are going to come. It won’t be just me and Mel this time.”

“It’s a bad idea, Rapunzel.”

“I know. But we’ve got to do it. Matthew said we were
running out of time. And I believe him.”

G. sighed on the other end of the phone. I know he believed
it, too. We’d talked about it before. Both of us felt this sort of underlying
anxiety – that whatever Orla was, it was big. And somehow we were all tied up
in it – all a part of this
quarrel
.
I’d heard Melody’s grandparents talking about it and I’d asked some questions
of the Akashic records on my own. We were supposed to be a part of this.

“I have to go,” I said softly. “I’ll be really careful, I
promise.”

“Okay,” he said at last, sounding tired and unhappy. “Keep
me posted.”

“I will. We won’t be going until way after dark, probably
around midnight or so… so if you change your mind,” I said, trailing off.

“I won’t,” he said.

Melody and I spent the rest of the evening watching stupid
old movies that we weren’t really paying attention to. Half the time we were
lost in our own thoughts, and the rest of the time we were talking over the
movie, discussing the evening’s plans and what we might need.

I suggested taking some pogs, and Melody thought that was a
good idea. She thought maybe we should take some black tourmaline to keep in
our pockets to keep us grounded, and I thought it couldn’t hurt. I didn’t know
if it would work or not, but what the heck, right? We both agreed that we
couldn’t let the grandparents know what we were up to, so we agreed to pretend
to be hanging out in the clubhouse, and when we left, we would just leave the
television and lights on in there to make it look like we were home. It would
be late enough that her grandparents probably wouldn’t even check.

And then it was time to go.

60. G.

I couldn’t sleep. Dad had nodded off during the movie, and I
channel surfed for a while before deciding to go to bed. But no matter what I
did, I just couldn’t fall asleep knowing that Tara and my friends were breaking
into the garage against my advice. If they got arrested, it would serve them
right.

This self-righteous train of thought did not make me feel
any better.

I heard a muffled thump coming from my bedroom window and
sat up for a second, debating on whether to get up and see what it was. The
sound came again, and I skulked to the window to pull the blinds back, prepared
to see some criminal lurking in the bushes. To my surprise, it was not a
criminal at all, but a cat.
Mr. Smith, to be exact, standing
on the exterior windowsill to my room and rubbing up against the glass.
His mouth opened and closed in what I could only assume was a meow, and
curiosity got the better of me. What was the cat doing all the way over here? I
had never seen him outside of Sam and Melody’s neighborhood. Maybe he was
hungry?

I headed into the kitchen to grab a slice of lunch meat and
then out the back door to see if the cat was still there.

Mr. Smith was perched on my bedroom windowsill, licking his
front paw and very deliberately ignoring me as if he were displeased that I had
taken so long.

I got down into a crouch, ripped off a piece of lunch meat,
and tossed it on the ground a few feet away. I made a little noise to get the
cat’s attention and then waited to see if he would come investigate. After a
moment, he stopped licking his paw, gave a nonchalant cat stretch, and hopped
down. Giving the meat a perfunctory sniff, he looked at me and blinked a long,
slow, yellow-eyed blink. He meowed and walked a few feet away, stopping to
stare at me over his shoulder to see if I was paying attention.

I got a very strange, very intense feeling that he wanted me
to follow him.

“You don’t want the meat? I can’t go with you. It’s late.”

Mr. Smith meowed at me again and walked another couple of
feet before stopping to look at me over his shoulder. His eyes glowed from the
streetlight that shone through the trees, and I got a very distinct
otherworldly impression that Mr. Smith wasn’t just
any
cat.

I looked back toward the house. Dad was asleep. I knew where
the spare key was to get back in, and if he woke and found me gone, he would
probably assume I went over to Tara’s. Not that he’d be pleased about it but… I
looked back at the cat. “Okay,” I said, aware that I was talking aloud to a
cat. “Just let me get my shoes and lock the house.”

Mr. Smith sat on his haunches, gave me a slow blink, and
then promptly began licking the fur on his shoulder, head and neck twisting at
an awkward angle – impossible for humans, but just an ordinary feat of biology
for a cat.

House locked, shoes and socks on my feet, I approached Mr.
Smith with caution, not wanting to scare him off. As soon as he could see that
I was ready, he gave me another slow blink, the yellow glow of his eyes almost
seeming alien in the lamplight, and then took off at a fair clip, me jogging along
behind.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out where we were
going. I knew the neighborhood, and I knew the alley behind the strip. At the
far end of this alley was a vacant lot, and on the other side of that was the
garage that used to belong to Melody’s brother, Matthew.

“Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath and watched as Mr.
Smith’s tail went from a question mark shape to a swift flick back and forth. I
couldn’t decide if I was more amazed or irritated that the damned cat got me to
go back on my word.

Movement across the distance caused me to look up, and I saw
a dark form slide along the road. It was a sports car, one that seemed vaguely
familiar, headlights off and motor idling as it coasted in neutral to a stop in
front of the garage. I looked toward the garage doors and could see the
telltale bob of a flashlight inside and realized that the car was not full of
my friends; my friends were already
in
the garage.
Tara
was in the garage. I
began to sprint.

61. MELODY

It wasn’t as scary breaking into the garage as it was before
when it was just me and Tara. Maybe because we had done it once
already,
and maybe because we had more people this time, but
the whole experience was vaguely energizing. I’m not the criminal mastermind
type, but this felt a lot more like a secret agent mission than it did like a
crime.

Tara and I skipped ahead, repeating our moves from last
time, with Sam helping to remove the dry erase board and Lily keeping a watch
by the door. I didn’t like her, and I especially didn’t like Sam insisting that
she come along, but in the end, it was useful to have another set of eyes and
ears since Tara was holding the flashlight and Sam and I were busy pulling the
board down.

“Okay,” I whispered, “there’s the cubbyhole where we found
the other stuff last time. Since you’re taller you can probably reach further
back. Maybe we missed something way in the back.”

Tara handed the flashlight to Sam, and he used it to peer
into the back of the hole.

“I do see something,” he said after a moment. He stuck his
arm in the hole, shoulder-deep, and there was a rustle as he snagged the item
with his fingertips. As he pulled it out, we were startled by Lily’s harsh
whisper.

“There’s a car outside.”

“Shit,” Sam said. “Here, take this,” he thrust the flashlight
and the item into Tara’s hands and turned to grab the screwdriver from me.
“Let’s get this back on the wall,” he said.

Tara flashed the light around so that we could see what we
were doing, but then she stopped, pointing it directly at the back of the
whiteboard. “Hey, you guys. Stop for a second. Look at this.”

I was irritated and nervous. “What?” I said, more loudly
than I intended.

“There’s something drawn on the back of the whiteboard. I
can’t really make it out. Quit moving it so that I can get a better look.”

“No time,” said Sam, now very tense. “Get out of the way,
Tara!”

“But
look
,” she
said.

“Oh shit, you guys, time to go,” said Lily, tiptoeing in
from the front door. “That car is still there, and two guys are getting out. We
need to go.” She stopped in midstride and stared at the back of the whiteboard
as Sam and I struggled to get it up on the wall. “What the heck is that?”

“I know
,
that’s what I’ve been
trying to get them to look at.”

“NO TIME,” said Sam, sparing the back of the whiteboard a
brief, irritated glance. “You can tell us about it later.”

“Shit,” I said, my hands getting sweaty with nerves. I was
losing the grip on the whiteboard.

We heard the front door to the garage open and the little
bell tinkled. We froze. Someone else was inside.

62. G.

The two guys had gotten out of the car and were making their
way toward the front door of the garage. I could still make out a faint glow of
flashlight inside, so I knew that the crew was still in there.

It was a good thing that I was running every day as a part
of my
Muy
Thai training, because the sprint would
have worn me out before. But not now, and with the additional surge of
adrenaline I felt coursing through my veins, I was picking up speed. Tara was
in trouble. I had to get there.

Mr. Smith was in a full out gallop now, easily keeping pace
with me, and I knew he had brought me here for a reason. Somehow this crazy cat
had known that my friends were going to need me. I didn’t have time to wonder
about that right now. And I was pretty sure I owed Mr. Smith something better
than a piece of lunchmeat, too.

The men were inside now, and the flashlight had turned off
in the main part of the garage. I reached the parking lot and the low-slung
sports car, and without even thinking of what I might do, I grabbed the nearest
heavy object I could find, which just happened to be a fist-sized rock, and
used it to smash the driver’s side window. The car alarm started blaring and I
heard some muffled shouting as the two men came running out of the garage. I
took one last look at the garage doors and didn’t see the flashlight bob, but
there was no time to linger. One guy came careening around the car toward me,
and the other stopped under the lamppost, already on his cell phone. I
hesitated for another second and took off running again, this time further down
the street, dodging up between a hedge and another old building.

I looked behind
me,
the guy was
giving chase, though I was much faster than he was. I didn’t see any sign of
Mr. Smith or even of Tara and company, but that didn’t matter right now. If
they weren’t smart enough to find a way out of this mess, then there was
nothing else I could do to help them, except maybe show up to bail them out
later… if my Dad would lend me the cash.

I got a couple of blocks away before I realized I was
running along in the dark, with no pursuers, and I stopped to rest and catch my
breath, propping myself against a nearby tree. I heard a noise in the
underbrush nearby and was glad to see that Mr. Smith had been keeping up with
me after all.

I was exhausted, my breath coming in ragged gasps, and
realized that whatever cardio I was doing for my weekly routine wasn’t quite
enough. I guess I’d have to add some more – sprinting really took a lot out of
you.

And then I heard a muted swoosh and a slight breeze pushed
against the skin of my neck as a dark shape plunged from the tree I was leaning
against. It swarmed over the suddenly hunch-backed and puffed up form of Mr.
Smith.

The owl was back, and this time, it clearly had the cat in
its talons.

I didn’t think. The glowing sword sprung to life in my hand
and I slashed through the air, making a clean, decisive swipe at the shadowy
form of the owl. The blade met resistance and the owl gave a terrible cry –
like it was choking on its own hoot.

There was a curious, rank smell that reminded me of rotten
eggs and singed feathers, and the owl veered away, dropping Mr. Smith to the
ground as it fled my glowing blade.

I fell to my knees, suddenly drained—no more energy, no more
breath. I had to rest. As I struggled, I looked over to see the cat gingerly
licking the spots on its back where the owl had clutched it. Shiny, dark red
patches showed on his fur… the owl had drawn blood. Mr. Smith had just survived
a very close call.