Sabrina's Clan (20 page)

“There’s a limit,” he warned. “You said it yourself. There’s always a natural limit to scale. The supernatural world…it’s a tiny subset of the real world. You’re trying to build a megalith balanced on a pebble.”

Sabrina smiled. “You think that because you can’t see the big picture. Soon, you’ll understand.” She picked up her pen and notepad. “Let’s start with gargoyle markers, first.”

Then her stomach growled and it sounded loud in the silent apartment. She put her hand to her belly, astonished.

Nick picked up his cell phone. “I’ll order you a pizza. You’re going to need it.” He put the phone to his ear and looked at her. He was smiling.

* * * * *

Three days later, Riley announced they had been approached on the dark net about consulting work. She stood between the armchair and the sofa, where everyone was sitting eating popcorn or stringing it for Christmas decorations, the print out of the message moving between her fingers. There was a dazed look on her face.

Sabrina smiled. It was starting. She glanced at Nick. He was looking at Riley with narrowed eyes. “A
client
?” he said sharply.

Riley nodded. “They think they have a poltergeist problem, or it’s simply a mass-psychosis they want to disperse and they think hiring supernatural experts will eliminate the impossible, which leaves them to deal with mental issues instead. Of course, they want it kept super-silent and under the radar.”

“Mass-psychosis implies lots of people. Who are they?” Nyanther said.

“That’s just it.” Riley swallowed. “I ran their contact credentials through Nyanther’s hacker.”

“Bob?” Nyanther clarified.

Riley nodded.

“So who is it?” Nick pressed.

“The dark net profile makes them look like a para-military group living in rural Kentucky. Bob says…” Riley shook her head in disbelief. “It’s the Bureau.”

“The
FBI
?” Jake said, dropping the string of popcorn into the bowl on his knees.

Nick looked at Sabrina sharply. “
That’s
what you meant about scale?”

“Anyone can be a victim of the supernatural,” she said. “Including heads of government, public figures and state authorities.” She smiled.

After a minute, so did Nick. This time, the warmth reached his eyes.

Sabrina liked to use the subway every now and again, just for the change of perspective it gave her. Cabs and limousines and private cars had become her primary means of transport. She had spent the first twenty-five years of her life using public transport for everything, including dragging home heavy bags of groceries. A single, crowded subway journey always grounded her and kept her humble…and it always motivated her to work even harder.

The day after the Christmas break she bundled up well and came home from work on the subway, which meant walking home through the first snowfall of the year. It wasn’t a heavy fall, just enough to keep toes cool. She loved the way a snowfall changed the air and the sounds of the city around her, making everything chilled and muffled and crisp.

There were kids out playing in the untouched snow, trying to catch snowflakes in their mouths and building snowballs. By tomorrow the snow would be black slush and puddles. For right now it was almost magical.

There were several mothers standing on their apartment building steps, clutching steaming mugs and watching their kids play, while chatting to themselves. It was a very peaceful and domestic scene. The tension in Sabrina’s chest, that never seemed to go away these days, loosened just a bit. It wasn’t quite sadness. Just a lingering sense of sentimentality.

Nyanther was sitting on the top step to the building, his long legs stretched out and his feet three steps lower down. He wore a light jacket over his customary shirt and jeans. He didn’t feel the cold, of course.

He was watching the kids play, too. When she reached the steps, he patted the stonework next to him. It had been swept of snow. “It’s nice out here,” he told her. “Sit and breathe the air.”

“I walked up from the subway. It’s great.” She was more than happy to stay outside for a few more minutes. She put her bags down and sat, wrapping her coat around her knees and lower legs.

Nyanther nodded toward the children. “Regrets?” he said softly.

Sabrina rolled her eyes. “God, is
nothing
sacred to you guys?”

“Killing gargoyles is sacred,” he replied.

She sighed. “Riley told you.”

“I asked. I thought she might know why you’re working so hard these days on the business side of things.”

Sabrina put her chin on her knees, the tension easing even more. There was a kind of peace in knowing everyone knew every dark secret she had. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yeah, I think that’s a large part of it. I can’t be fruitful the normal way, this, making money for people, that’s something I
can
do.”

“We all have to find our own way through life,” Nyanther said softly.

“No protests about the changes I’m making?”

He shook his head. “Nick might have screamed, except you got around him. That was well done, by the way.”

She grinned. “Figures always sell anyone.”

“If your changes work, I don’t give a damn,” Nyanther said. “I just want the gargoyles gone.”

“Yeah, don’t we all. We’re so close to finishing the tracker. It will help.”

“It will,” he said flatly, in agreement.

She let the snow fall on her, listening to the peace and her own heartbeat. Nyanther didn’t seem to be in any hurry to speak, either.

“Where’s Jake?” she said at last. “I thought he’d be home by now.” Even though Jake still formally lived in his apartment up by the park, he spent more nights here. Sabrina automatically suppressed the sexy images that never failed to erupt in her mind whenever she thought of Jake and Nyanther together. She had given up on wondering why the two of them were different from any other same sex couple she knew. She certainly didn’t fantasize about David and Jeff, the married couple in the building next door.

“Jake is off doing something mysterious,” Nyanther said easily. “He said he wouldn’t be home tonight. I think it’s something to do with the axe I made. He didn’t like it.”

Nyanther had a small forge in the basement, where he built a lot of odd and ancient weapons, in between order fulfillment for the business.

“What didn’t he like about it?” she asked curiously.

Nyanther smiled. “He said it was too general purpose, which it is. If I had not had an axe when I was with the tribes, I would have starved. It chops wood for fires, kills and skins meat, slews enemies, cuts hair and trims beards.”

“Jake is used to specializing,” Sabrina reminded him. “The modern world is all about niches.”

“Perhaps that’s why I’m sitting here,” Nyanther said, looking around at the children once more. He nodded at them. “Children didn’t play when I was human. There was no time. They foraged, they built traps for small game. They fished. They skinned and gutted and dressed. And they collected firewood.” His mouth turned down. “An endless task, one I hated.”

Sabrina smiled. His gaze was far away. He was looking two thousand years into the past. “The women standing idly on the steps,” he continued, “watching over their young…that was also something that did not happen. An older child would watch over young ones and mothers still feeding babies carried them in slings over their backs. Mothers spent their time carting water, cleaning hides, making clothes, finding food. It never ceased.”

“It was very different back then,” she agreed.

“So different that sometimes I still feel disoriented, the way I did when I woke inside the cave, with Valdeg screaming over the top of me.” He sucked in a breath and let it out. “There is no sentry here. The women and the children are not wearing weapons. Central heating will warm us when we go inside. The worst of it, the most uncomfortable thing is that I cannot see the horizon here.”

Sabrina turned on the step to look at him. “Why does that make you uncomfortable?”

“Camps were always made on sites where the horizon was as far away as possible on all sides. It let us see approaching enemies and gave us warning and time to deal with them. To be able to see a clear horizon was reassuring.”

“And you can’t see it here,” she finished, “so you’re constantly on alert.”

“Yes.” He leaned on his elbows, his shoulders bent. “Do you know that child, the one with the bright orange beanie?”

Sabrina looked at the small boy he had referred to. “Should I?”

“His name is Yacob Powell. He lives on the second floor in our building.”

“Do you know all the children by name?”

“All the children, all the adults. The women on the steps there. They are Hannah, Tricia and Robyn.” He shrugged. “I can’t see the horizon, so I catalogue the strangers that lie between me and the horizon, instead.”

“Does it help?”

“Not much.” He grimaced. “Everyone lives so close together here. Even in Scotland there are more people than I am used to but there is at least breathing room.”

“You miss it.”

He was still looking back into time, his gaze unfocused. “These are not my people.”

“You’re the only one of your people left,” she said softly. “I know something about that feeling.”

He looked at her, startled.

Sabrina shrugged. “For a long time, I had Riley. She’s found her family now. Damian is both husband and ancestor to her, she knows about her parents and even though they had tragically short lives, she knows who they were. She has a family tree that goes back for millennia. All I know is that my last name is Castillo and even that might not be true.”

“While I, at least, know where I come from.”

She put her chin on her knee once more. “The councilor at college said I should claim my ethnic heritage and use that to build my identity. There are twenty countries which use Spanish as their official language and a dozen others who use it as the
lingua franca
, so that doesn’t narrow down my ethnic heritage much at all. Being Hispanic is just a skin color. It’s too broad. Besides, I don’t speak Spanish.”

“There isn’t much call for it in Iowa,” Nyanther pointed out. “Perhaps you should flip the telescope around.”

She looked at him and shook her head, not understanding.

“If your ethnic heritage is so broad you don’t know where to start, then narrow it down. Right down to the micro level. You said the modern world is one of niches. Your niche will define who you are.”

“Maybe. I guess I’m still looking for the niche.”

“You’ll find it. Give yourself time. Look at how much your life has changed in the last ten years. That’s at least how much it will change in the next ten. You’ll know your place when you find it.”

“Do you know yours?” she asked.

Nyanther’s eyes met hers then skidded away. “I did, once,” he said.

“Ny…” she said softly, alarmed at the return of the darkness in his face.

His gaze swung back to meet hers.

The muffled peace of the late afternoon seemed to thicken and grow warmer. Her breath caught and her heart leapt and hurried onward.

His pale eyes were almost readable. She could see the loneliness there, the rare isolation of someone who was adrift in the world, just as she was. She recognized it and responded to it, because it was Nyanther.

She could feel the potential of the kiss hanging between them, throbbing with power and emotion. Her body strained to move, to lean forward through the few inches between them and take it. She knew with absolute certainty he wanted it, too. The tension was radiating from his motionlessness. He wasn’t breathing, either. Everything was held in waiting….

Sabrina couldn’t move, despite wanting to. She drew in a breath that seared all the way down to her lungs. “Jake….” she whispered.

And Nyanther breathed. It was almost a sigh. He turned his head, his gaze releasing her.

The moment was shattered and gone.

Sabrina began to tremble. How close she had been to taking that illicit kiss!

Moving stiffly, she got to her feet. “I must go in and warm up.” She picked up her bags and turned to climb up the steps.

Nyanther sat with his arms back on his knees, his head bowed and his eyes closed.

Her heart shifted, hurting. She made herself climb the steps, but was unable to stop herself from reaching down and pressing her hand to his shoulder in comfort.

He gripped her fingers, holding her hand there. For a long moment, neither of them moved. Then he squeezed her fingers very gently and let them go.

* * * * *

In the middle of winter, the cold basement with its clanky pipes and antiquated vents was closer to sub-zero than anywhere else in the old Victorian house. Working over the forge compensated and besides, Nyanther didn’t feel the cold.

Usually.

Tonight, when he unlocked the basement and switched on the banks of fluorescent lights, he could feel the chill of the air against his face and hands. It was because he was nearly human hot. He had not been able to calm and still his heart since Sabrina had sat beside him on the stoop.

Since she had nearly kissed him.

Except he had been as complicit in that moment of yearning as she.

He got the forge going, pumping it up to a white heat, a process that was much faster with a gas and electric forge than the old wood-fuel fireplace he had used to learn the trade. While the fire built to the desired temperature, he pushed the metal strips into the open mouth to heat. The strips would become knife blades with a night or two of working and proving the metal.

As he worked, he tried to divert his mind from her soft lips. The black eyes that seemed to look inside him with uncanny ability.

He had researched commercial metalsmithing and metal manufacturing when he had first arrived in the twentieth century. Even back then it had become the domain of well-funded corporations with the muscle to pay enormous upfront costs to set up metal plants. The margin of profit had been abysmal because most metal products were commodities—one car wheel rim was interchangeable with another. Bridge supports, building girders…they were all the same. There was no artistry or craft left in the work.