Canes of Divergence (10 page)

The shy smile that slid up the corners of Owen’s mouth then was enough to make the whole thing worth it to Zander.

“So, what was going on at my house?” he asked as he punched in the numbers for the garage code. “
Did you have a nightmare or something?”

Owen was silent as the door went up, and he still didn’t say anything as the two of them walked through the garage and then into the kitchen.

Zander was starting to wonder if he’d upset him by asking the question when
Owen climbed up onto one of the stools at the island and rested his chin on his hands, looking at Zander with an intense expression in his brown eyes. “It wasn’t a nightmare, exactly.”

“No?
Just a dream that bothered you?”

“I don’t know yet. I can’t remember enough of it right now. All I can remember is him telling me I needed to be at home, that I should be home.”

“Who told you that, Owen?” He was starting to get a little freaked out now.

“Alvin.”

Zander’s legs suddenly felt like jelly. “Who is Alvin, Owen?” Surely, the little boy had to be talking about someone else – not the strange man he’d met down at the river the other day.

The look Owen gave him then made Zander’s stomach flip like it was on a roller coaster. He didn’t answer the question, either. After several seconds of studying Zander, he said, “Do you ever think there are things that are just
supposed to happen?”

Now Zander paused. “Like things you can’t control?”

“Mmm … sort of. But more like there’s a certain way things are supposed to be, and that when they’re
not
that way, things keep happening to try to get them to be that way.”

Zander swallowed, thinking of the conversation with his father earlier. Was it possible that he was going to grow up and take over the business anyway, no matter what he thought he wanted? “Don’t we have a choice, Owen?”

“That’s not what I mean. You always have a choice. Some people always do the wrong thing, no matter how many chances they have to do something right.”

“What if you don’t know what the right choice is?”

Owen looked thoughtful. “Nobody
always
knows what the right choice is. Everyone makes a choice sometimes that messes everything up. I guess what I’m talking about right now isn’t about right choices or wrong ones. I mean more like … do you think there’s something bigger than just what we think we want?”

Zander
looked at the clock. Three fifteen. This was so not the time to be dealing with a conversation like this. With an eight year old who was thinking heavier thoughts than Zander ever usually did. “Can I say I don’t know right now, Owen? It’s really time that you should be in bed.”

“Okay.”

Getting Owen tucked back into bed was easy
. Zander left the door propped open and hung out in the hallway for a little while, listening for any sign of trouble, but within a few minutes the breathing from the little boy’s room was slow and steady. He headed back toward the stairs to go get his own stuff.

It was then Zander realized that staying in this house for the weekend might be harder on him than on Owen.

He’d been so preoccupied with taking care of Owen when they arrived, that he hadn’t realized it was the first time he’d been at the Robbins’ house since the last time he’d come to pick up Quinn – when they were still together.

Now, he was staring at the closed door to her room.
Maybe Owen would have called it one of the choices that messes everything up, but he couldn’t help himself.

In the next instant, the door was open, and he flipped the switch on the wall, bringing to life the reading lamp on the little table next to her bed.

He looked around the room, the whole time feeling like he’d been kicked in the gut.

Everything was the same. If they’d started packing for their move, they hadn’t yet touched Quinn’s room. It looked like she’d only just been here.
Her desk might have been a bit neater than usual, and the lid was closed neatly over the white wicker hamper, instead of sitting on top of her chest of drawers while the clothes overflowed the basket, the way he remembered it often being, but otherwise…

He half expected her to follow him into the room, to sling her backpack over the back of the wooden desk chair, to flop onto the bed, still neatly made exactly the way she always did it herself. It was all so familiar, he somehow automatically drifted to the cozy reading chair – her prized spot, but where she’d always let him sit, so they could remain a respectable distance from each other in case her mother peeked in through the required crack in the door.

The emotions that overcame him sitting in here surprised him. After all, she hadn’t died – she was just living somewhere else right now. But his emotional response was so overwhelming that he’d been sitting there for probably way too long before he realized exactly how strange it was.

Shouldn’t she have taken
some
of her stuff with her? The green blanket that was folded on the end of the bed – he knew that was her favorite; she’d slept with it every night since they were little kids. He wasn’t sure she was capable of watching a movie on the couch without it. And yet – there it was.

The picture of her and her real father was still on her nightstand, too, and he knew how much that one meant to her. And was that…?
It was
. Her cell phone was there, sitting next to the picture, in the same spot she always left it.

He wasn’t even being cautious now. Crossing the room, he picked up the ph
one, flipping it open and pressing the power button. Nothing. He pulled open the nightstand drawer, where he knew she kept her charger. It was there, too, and he took it out and plugged in her phone. A few seconds later, the battery symbol appeared on the screen, letting him know it was charging. The power button worked now, but it would take a few minutes for it to come all the way on.

He closed the nightstand drawer – there were still journals and papers in t
here, but looking through those just didn’t feel right.

Of course, the next thing he did felt a little intrusive, too –
walking to her closet and pulling open the folding doors – but at this point, he had to see. It was still full of clothes. Long sleeves, short sleeves – they were all here. If anything was missing, it wasn’t obvious.

He was beginning to feel a little sick to his stomach.

Just as he was closing the closet doors again, her phone started going crazy. It lit up like a Christmas tree and buzzed every second or two for the better part of a minute.

Knowing he was definitely crossing a line, he picked it up and scrolled through the options. There were several dozen new text messages – he could see that most of them were from Abigail, and there were a few from him, too. He knew what those said already.

He was more interested in her sent messages, so he went quickly to those. Once he did, he was even more confused. The very last message she’d sent was sometime in March, to her mother.

I picked up Annie from Maggie’s.
Going to spend some time with her, and then I’ll bring her home.

I need to talk to you.

He looked at the date using the calendar over Quinn’s desk
, which was still turned to March. She’d sent that message on the last day of school before spring break. There was nothing after that.

He remembered that day clearly. It was the day after she’d broken up with him, on the phone.

Scrolling to the outgoing calls, he found it immediately. The twenty-three minute phone call that had broken his heart was nearly the last one she’d made. The only one after that was labeled “Will and Nathaniel – Home”. It took him a minute to realize the names must refer to Doctor Rose and William Rose – he’d never heard
anyone,
let alone Quinn, refer to either of them by anything informal. That call had only been three minutes long, made on the first Sunday of spring break – the day he’d seen her having brunch with Megan in the café.

Chained to the wall by the power cord, he sat down on her bed
and started looking through all of the calls now. There were several more outgoing calls to the Roses’ number, including a few calls mixed in with incoming ones from Zander’s own number, labeled as “missed”. There weren’t any text messages to or from either of them, though.

In fact, the only other text message that was interesting at all was one to Quinn’s mom on that same Wednesday she’d broken up with him. It was short, informing Megan that Quinn planned to go to the hospital with William that night to see his brother. She’d sent it during school.

Even in the few sparse words she used in that message, though, he could feel the anger and distance between Quinn and her mom. He knew they’d been fighting then, but he didn’t understand all of it.

Megan’s response to that message was an equally short,

Fine. We won’t plan on staying up for you. Make sure you have your key.

So that’s what Quinn had come home to the night she’d called to break up with him.

He didn’t understand any of this. It was almost like Quinn had stopped existing after the day he’d last seen her. She didn’t have her phone; she didn’t have her clothes or her things…

For days, he’d been convincing himself to let this go. But now… There was something just too strange about it. It wasn’t right.

He stopped short of listening to her voicemail messages. That was too personal, or at least that’s what he told himself. Of course, he also didn’t have the password, and he knew that it would be obvious that the messages had been listened to. Anyway, he was almost certain he wouldn’t hear anything – it was probably all messages from him and Abigail, maybe some other people from school wondering where she’d gone.

Leaning back against her pillows, he opened the phone’s photo album, but he regretted that almost immediately. So many of the pictures were of him and Quinn, laughing and goofy together, clearly happy, and – he’d thought – in love. Maybe that had been a stupid thought to have at eighteen.

There was Quinn standing on the bottom step in her Valentine dress, as Zander put on her corsage, there were pictures at school, pictures of them tubing at the ski resort… At some point, someone – probably Abigail – had even been sneaky and snapped a picture of the two of them kissing at a table at Bruno’s Pizza.

There were lots of pictures of her family too, pictures of Annie dressed up in the skirt Quinn had bought her for her birthday, Owen holding up a collection of interesting rocks…
His only consolation was that there were no pictures of “Will” or his brother.

Even the pictures seemed strange, though. Zander’s phone, too, had once been filled with shots like these ones, but after Quinn had broken up with him, he’d pulled out the memory card and tucked it in a shoebox on a shelf in his closet. He didn’t want to
delete
those pictures, but he didn’t want them staring at him every time he opened his phone either.

On Quinn’
s phone, the pictures, like everything else, stopped right at the beginning of spring break. There were quite a few pictures of Annie – far more than Quinn would normally take of a single event – dated the same day she’d sent that text to her mother. It appeared she’d taken Annie out for hot chocolate and then shopping.

And then, there was nothing.

He couldn’t slow his pounding heart, or calm the churning in his stomach. If he didn’t know better, he would think … there was no way that something really
bad
had happened to Quinn – was there?

Rosewood Castle, Eirentheos

T
HE BABY HAD
just finished nursing and was drifting off to sleep in Quinn’s arms when William finally returned to their room.

Quinn glanced at the clock over the mantel, and she looked b
ack at him in time to see that was where he’d been looking, too.

“I didn’t think you’d still be up,” he half-whispered.

She put a finger over her lips and stood up with Samuel. He stirred, but his little eyes didn’t open. She carried him into the bedroom and held her breath as she laid him in the little borrowed cradle next to their bed.

For all of her worry, though, he nestled right into the blankets and stayed asleep.
Thomas had been right – after three full hours with Mia this afternoon, Samuel’s mood had turned around completely. He’d been happy and content for the whole evening, eating well, and napping better than usual. Quinn wouldn’t be surprised if he gave her a few hours of peace now.

“Where have you been?” she asked William, once the bedroom door was safely closed. “Did you go out to Mistle Village?”

He nodded. “So you know, then.”

She walked over to him, and reached to put her arms around his waist, needing to be next to him
, to feel him against her, safe – at least for tonight.

But to her utter shock, he took a step back fro
m her, actually holding his hand out to keep her away from him. The crushing rejection was instant, like the wind had been knocked out of her, and she blinked up at him in hurt confusion.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just
… the fox for sure had rabies, Quinn. If I have it, I don’t want to risk infecting you, or anyone else.”

She narrowed her eyes. “By hugging me?”

His hand stayed up. “It’s just too dangerous.”

“It doesn’t happen that fast, William.”

“We don’t know that.”

“
Don’t be ridiculous. Anyway, you can’t get me sick. I’ve had rabies shots.”

“What? When?”

“A few years ago.” She told him the same story she’d told Thomas earlier, but when she was finished, he still wouldn’t let her get any closer to him.

“The shots don’t last that long, Quinn. They’re only guaranteed for about two years. After that, they’re not always effective unless you have booster doses.
We’d have to test you to see if you’re even protected at all right now.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. That’s one of the reasons we don’t just give them to everybody – aside from the fact that even in your world they’re pretty complicated and expensive to produce. You have no idea how long it took Nathaniel to be able to build up a supply line, or how lucky we are that gold is a lot more valuable in your world than it is in ours.”

“
This
is my world too, William. Don’t do this. Don’t pull away from me now.”

“I’m not trying to pull away from you; I just really can’t take any chances with you – and especially not with the baby.”

She could tell by his expression that he wasn’t going to relent on this. It was suddenly hard to breathe. Swallowing hard, she took a step back from him and leaned against the arm of an overstuffed chair. “So what’s going on with the vaccine in Mistle Village?”

“I don’t know for sure
. It’s incubating, but I don’t know if it will work or not when it’s finished. We’ve never really known exactly what we’re doing with it. Studying it in your world only gets us so far, because we can’t make it the way it’s made in your world. We don’t have the technology, or the cell lines to grow the virus on. We don’t even have all of the same animals. We have to use other methods. Sometimes what we try seems to work, other times, we mess it up. We won’t really know if it’s safe or if it will work until we give it to somebody, which we’ve never done before – at least not to people.”

“So you’ll be the first?”

He nodded. “The batch we have going in Mistle Village should be ready in a little over a week, hopefully, if nothing goes wrong.”

“Is a week soon enough?”

“There’s no way to know how long it takes. We have until I start showing symptoms. That could be in about ten days, or it could be a couple moons. This bite,” he held up his arm, “is a pretty severe exposure, so I’d say we’re probably looking at the lower end of the scale. And, of course, the longer we wait, even if I don’t have symptoms yet, the more time the virus has to replicate and spread. The other problem is that even once I have the vaccine, it doesn’t protect right away, and we don’t have any of the immune globulin at all. We don’t even have a way to make it right now.”

“But there’s still time.”

“There might still be time.
If
the vaccine we’re making works, and
if
it’s effective in time without having the immune globulin. This is bad news, Quinn. I’m not trying to scare you, but, tonight, as I was riding, I decided – you need to know.”

“Oh, well,
gee
, William. Thanks so much for
deciding
to include me in your little life-and-death situation here.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, it is what you meant. You just didn’t mean for me to
catch
that bit.”

“I’m trying not to scare you.”

“Well, you are scaring me, Will. You’re scaring the hell out of me, actually.” She pressed her hands together tightly, trying to keep them from shaking, but it didn’t work.

His eyes widened a bit, probably at her language, but he only nodded. “I know.”

“Is Alice even safe, without the immune-stuff?”

“We hope so. We treated her quickl
y. As long as the vaccine can work faster than the virus, she’ll be okay.”

“But possibly
not
?”

“Possibly not.
What else do you want me to say? I’m also still worried that Emma could have been exposed, and I’m even more worried about Ben.”

She nodded, staring at the floor, and blinking back the moisture that was filling her eyes as quickly as she could force it back.
“You’ve been bitten by an animal before. Why weren’t we worried about this then?”

“River boles never carry rabies – or at least we’ve
never found an infected one. I don’t know why. Rabies is a lot rarer here than it is in your world – and I don’t know why that is, either. Maybe it’s the different animals.

“
In any case, that bole bite you saw wasn’t what we consider a concern. And thank the Maker for that, because if it had been, we would have used up the doses of vaccine we’re giving to Alice. It’s not like we’ve been back to your – to Bristlecone – to restock since then.”

“If it’s so rare, then how does a rabid fox manage to get into the
castle
?”

“I don’t know. Does it really matter how?”

“It kind of seems like it does.”

“Well, right now it doesn’t. The fox did get in, and it
was
rabid, and Alice and I both got bitten by it. That’s where we are.”

The tears would no longer stay behind her eyelids. She wiped surreptitiously at them with her fingers, trying to hide them from him as she stared down at the floor. As horrible as all of this was,
it was still his rejection of her that was cutting her to the quick.

After a long moment, he cleared his throat. “How’s Samuel? He seemed really upset earlier. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

She shrugged, trying to make sure her voice would be steady before she answered. “He’s fine now. He’s asleep.”

Will was quiet for another minute before he finally said, “Okay.”

“Stay with him for a few minutes. I’m going to get some tea.” She couldn’t even bring herself to look at him as she walked around him to the door. “I’ll be back before you have to do anything crazy like
touch
the baby,” she said under her breath as she pulled the door shut behind her.

Once she was out of the room, she realized she didn’t even want to get a cup of tea, because that might mean facing someone else in the common room or down in the kitchens. She didn’t want to discuss this with anyone else – not while she was so angry with William. That wouldn’t be fair, she knew – they’d made that rule together, not to involve anyone else in the heat of an argument.

Instead, she took a short walk out to one of the balconies, needing to get some air on her face. She stayed there for a few minutes, trying to calm herself, trying to get her tears firmly under control. She didn’t want to be angry or crying when she talked to him again. Not going to bed angry was another rule.

She wasn’t gone long at all
but what she found when she got back brought the anger and tears rushing back.

He
was already asleep. And he wasn’t even in their bed. Instead, he was under a blanket on the small sofa in their bedroom. A half-drunk cup of tea, still warm, was on the wooden arm beside him.

If the electric kettle on their little table hadn’t still been filled with hot water,
she might have thrown it across the room.