Secrets of the Guardian (Waldgrave Book 3) (16 page)

“Jack took my books away because he said it wasn’t a woman’s place. I think he did it because I wouldn’t stop calling him a son of a human whore, and he knew where I must have gotten it from—I didn’t stop even after the books were gone, though. Or maybe he was jealous because he couldn’t read them himself. Anyways. One day my father removed all of the servants from the house. I think he had them killed but I never found out—he said he did. He said he would kill me if I didn’t go along with all of it. Looking back now I know it was an idle threat, but I was just a child then. Then he legally designated the two of us as married. I was twelve—twelve! For Christ’s sake! Jack wasn’t much older. My father took on a new staff and introduced Jack as his son, Pyrallis. I watched the day he burned all of his personal records up to that point. He tried very hard to rid himself of any record that I was his daughter, and Jack wasn’t his son. Jack didn’t like that very much, that he was burning all of his old diaries. I found a collection once; I think he saved them. He was always funny about the family heritage, and near obsessive. He saved things, like those diaries, obsessively.” Olesia paused, and a slight smile crept onto her face. “That’s how you knew, isn’t it? You found one of his collections. Things my father tried to bury and destroy, but Jack saved them.”

It took Lena a moment to realize that Olesia
had asked her a question. Too baffled for words, she finally nodded.

“Well, at least he was good for
 
something,
 then, if he brought you back to me.” Olesia took another long drag. “When he was old enough, my father formally introduced his son, Pyrallis, to the rest of our community. That was just after the time when they started the Council, and Jack got to do that too. Me? I got to sit at home, not reading because Jack didn’t want me too. The books were his, he said.

“I hung around the house all day, not doing much of anything. Jack and my parents never let me out. I never got to know anyone, because they were afraid I would tell or let something slip. I hated Jack with a passion, and he certainly knew it. I hated the house, my parents, and my whole existence. That was when Jack made the offer. He said he would let me go away—wherever I wanted to—if I gave him a child. I was so desperate, I thought it would work. Let me tell you, those were the worst three weeks of my life followed by the worst nine months. I never wanted a marriage or a family. My family was terrible, and I had no desire to continue such a tradition. But I did it anyways. That mistake was Avalon. Jack named her. Jack didn’t let me go, as you can well guess. He was infatuated with the legend of the portal by this point, and escaping earth and all the filthy humans, and he didn’t just want a child—he wanted a boy.

“Well, that was about the time that I took to drinking, so things get a little hazy. Jack and I were trying for our second child, but as you may have heard, there’s a curse on the fertility of this family. The doctor couldn’t find anything medically amiss with me, so we kept trying. I don’t remember a lot of what happened back then, but I remember the fire. I was sitting in the library staring at all those books I wasn’t allowed to touch—those volumes that everyone thought were so much more important than me. I was drunk at the time. And then I found a book of matches in the kitchen that they used to light the cooking fire, and I started to think, ‘well, if it worked for Jack.’”

Olesia went quiet again. Lena could feel her eyes practically bugging out of her head. “You set the fire?” She mustered.

Olesia lit another cigarette before continuing. “I did. I started in right there in the kitchen with some of the books. I must have been yelling or something—I was drunk, remember—because Jack walked in right when I had got it going. I saw him. He saw me. We both saw the fire spreading from the stack of books to the curtains and walls, and then we both made a run for the staircase. I went to Avalon’s room to get my daughter. Jack went to the library and started chucking the books out the window. The house was filling with smoke so fast, I knew my parents and everyone else weren’t going to make it out—it was night, and they were all supposed to be asleep. We didn’t have smoke alarms in those days. And then I was there, standing on the lawn next to the smoking, flaming house with my little girl in my arms. She was crying because she didn’t know what was going on, and I was crying because I knew what I had to do. Jack never would have let me go if I’d taken her with me. He would have hunted the two of us to the ends of the earth and beyond trying to get the male heir he always wanted. It was the lowest point in my life, what I did that night. Jack was still on the second floor pitching books out the windows to save them from the blaze, and I left my daughter standing there next to a burning building. I sacrificed my own daughter to free myself from the life I hated.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. Olesia went on chain smoking cigarettes, the gray tendrils circling her figure like ghosts from the past as the sun passed across the sky, sending the slant of illumination coming through the window slowly and surely across everything it could manage to touch.

Olesia had doomed Ava to live the life she had hated in order to make her own escape; even in the form of this smoking angel who held all the answers, Darays thought only of themselves. It seemed to Lena that she was only the latest in a long line of women who had walked out on the families that either didn’t live up to their expectations or that they had never wanted to begin with. As Ben had put it, none of them cared to clean up their messes—there was no responsibility, and no repercussions, for any of their actions. Olesia’s own mother had been absent in her own way, rejecting to care for the rights and needs of her daughter; Melinda Daray, who thought of her daughter Olesia as little more than a fluke. She was just like Ava, who had told Lena point blank that she considered her as little more than an accident, leaving her behind with her father when she fled back to Waldgrave.

Lena wasn’t sure how long they just sat there, exactly, but they had arrived in the afternoon, and it was passing dusk when a voice in the living room suddenly cut through the silence.

“Mom?”

Lena was jarred from her train of thought. She looked up at the doorway as a tall young man, perhaps in his early thirties, with auburn hair and death in his eyes walked in looking at her curiously. He reminded her of something long, long ago; a tiny face she could barely remember, dressed in an aged yellow life jacket and fidgeting with a coil of rope on a boat bobbing off the coast of Ecuador. She had a picture of him on his last birthday, gleefully hugging a Labrador puppy, tucked away somewhere.
   

“Mom?”

“Oh, Tom!” Olesia said, turning around. “Lena, this is my son, Tom. Tom, this is my granddaughter from before, Lena Collins. Avalon’s girl.”

Lena could only stare at him, slack jawed and dazed. He bore an uncanny resemblance to her dead brother, and through some trick of fate Olesia had given him the same name. She looked around the room, sure that it had all been a dream, but the retreating sunlight, the smell of cigarettes, the subtle mewing of cats beneath their feet, the couch underneath her, were all real. She looked back up at Olesia, who had a smug and subtly sarcastic smile spread across her face, and Tom—the heir that Pyrallis Daray had always wanted, here in South Carolina, helping his mother run a decrepit bed and breakfast.

You’re one lucky bastard no one ever found out about you,
 she inadvertently thought.

Tom gave a wry smile as he sat down on the arm of the chair that his mother was sitting in. “So I’ve been told. It’s good to meet you finally—I’ve always wondered what happened to everyone.”

“Yeah…me too.” Lena said faintly. “It’s good to meet you too.”

They stared at each other uncertainly. Lena couldn’t stop staring at him, because the look in his eyes was unmistakable. He was dying, and she knew both Olesia and Tom had to know it. Tom eventually looked down at his mother.

“Oysters tonight then? For three?”

“Four.” Olesia replied. “She brought a friend…what’s his name, by the way?”

“Devin.” Lena said distantly.

“Okay then. Are you going to feed the cats while I get all that going?” Tom stood and headed back into the kitchen. “How’d Brandon do today?”

“Oh, he’s asleep down the hall. Sleeps like a rock, just like you used to.” Olesia pulled herself up and out of her chair and started to walk away. Lena followed her out onto the porch, where she opened up an ice chest that was filled to the top with dry mix cat food. She filled two large pitchers with food, handed one over to Lena, and then started down the stairs.

“Who’s Brandon?” Lena called.

“Tom’s boy. Two weeks old. Tragic, really.” Olesia walked to a gap in the latticework that concealed the space under the house with Lena in tow. The many cats that had taken to living in the flood space there ran up to them, meowing anxiously.

“What happened?” Lena asked, mimicking Olesia as she threw handfuls of food out amongst the swarms of cats, as though she were throwing feed out to chickens.

“Oh, it was his wife. She passed on briefly after the birth. Went earlier than our doctor said she would, and then had an expedient delivery. She was human, and there were complications, and the doctor couldn’t make it out in time because it just all went so fast. We all knew it was coming, though; she had the look. That baby was born right there in the kitchen.” Olesia dumped the rest of the cat food in a wide circle on the ground. Despite the fact that there were so many cats, they all seemed to be well maintained—their fur was clean, their eyes were bright, they were friendly, and there were remarkably few kittens.

“We started rescuing them just after Hank passed, and they’re all neutered. We love our cats.” Olesia said in response to her thoughts.

“So, I’ve been meaning to ask you…How does Doctor Evans know about you being out here?” Lena asked. There wasn’t much surprise left in her after everything she had heard that day.

“It’s his land.” Olesia retorted. “After all the trouble my mother had with me and I had with Avalon, I wasn’t taking any chances when I got pregnant with Tom. I called him right up and he set Hank and I up here, and we eventually bought the property from him. He never told on us, of course; wasn’t too keen to keep the relationship going though. Spent a lot of time around Jack as I understood it, and thought it was a bad idea to know too much about what we were up to. He takes doctor-patient confidentiality very seriously. Always did, and he never bought into any of the portal stories; that’s why I didn’t hesitate to call him up.”

Lena dumped the rest of her cat food and then followed Olesia back up to the house, where she was ordered to wash up for dinner. She went upstairs and knocked on Devin’s door. When he didn’t answer, she opened the door and snuck her head in. Devin had been napping, and sat up with a start. He looked at Lena with a blank expression.

“We’ve fallen off the edge of the map,” she announced. “And it’s time for dinner here. So get up.”

She closed the door again and found her way to the bathroom, where she scrubbed the cat food smell off of her palms and then headed back down to the kitchen, where the oysters had been steamed and Tom was carrying them by platefuls into the dining room.

Devin came down, everyone ate a raucous and delicious dinner filled with stories and conversation, and then Tom went and got Brandon out of the main floor bedroom to sit with him out on the porch. Olesia insisted that Lena spend some time with him, because no one was sure how much time Tom really had left. Devin stayed in to help Olesia with the dishes, which she found to be highly impressive behavior.

Outside the house there was a cacophonous chorus of toads sounding out from the dark field of irises as the cats bounded around trying to catch them. The stars were out in millions, and there was a steady, distant rumble of waves rolling onto sandy beaches and rocky outposts. Tom was sitting in a rocker with his tiny son bundled in his arms.

“I’m very sorry about your wife. Olesia told me what happened.” Lena began.

“No one has forever.” Tom said quietly. “I’m more sorry for Brandon. He’ll never know her. I’m guessing he may never know me either, from the look of things. These are precious moments.”

“Yes, they are,” Lena said. Tom seemed surprisingly calm about the fact that his expiration was drawing near. Normally she wouldn’t have asked, but he seemed to want to talk about it. “When did it start?”

Tom sighed. “Just after Janet died. I was absolutely lost, I think. She was my whole life. I mean, I went to school and all the other stuff, I had friends, but it was terribly lonely growing up out here with only my mom. I loved both my parents, but it’s just desolate with so few of us around, and she never let me go seeking any others because…you know. Human company just isn’t the same, I guess. And then there was Janet, and we loved each other very much. I think she’s the closest I ever came to not being lonely. Then she was just gone. I woke up the next day, and I looked in the mirror, and it was just like this. It’s been this way ever since.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” Lena asked. Somehow, it was easier to talk in the dark. It was a fact that had held true her whole life.

“Not really. I mean, my mom always knew it would come to this. Together, the two of us, we’ve had friends pass on our whole lives. It’s not worth grieving early. You have to enjoy the time you have, and there’s no changing when you go. I wouldn’t ruin these last moments with any of you for something as inevitable as death. I only hope that Brandon is okay after I’m gone. Actually, we’ve been looking for some time for someone else to take him, but he’s Silenti, and all of our friends out here are human. It was so lonely growing up, that I really don’t want to do that to him—my mother won’t live forever. I’d like it if he could stay with family.” Tom took a deep breath and turned toward Lena; the light from the living room window caught half of his face, illuminating a serious expression. “I guess what I’m getting at here is that you seem like a good person, and if you’d like to take him with you when you leave, I’d appreciate it.”

Lena squirmed in her chair. Despite the fact that she had known Tom all of three hours, at most, she already liked him. He looked like Thomas. He had just lost his wife. All he wanted was the best for the child he was going to leave behind. She felt connected to him in an indescribable way, like they had been friends all along, sharing the same past and destined to the same end, and that end was Brandon.

“I realize it’s sudden.” Tom pressed on. “But I’m dying. I never got to meet my sister. I always wanted a brother or a sister. I’m dying, Lena, and it seems like more than a coincidence that you would find your way here just as I need someone to look after my son.”

But what he was proposing wasn’t a good idea on several levels. Lena had never wanted to be a parent; it had just never appealed to her. She had no interest in getting married or having babies. Even then, she wanted very much to take Brandon, if only for Tom and Olesia’s peace of mind, but somehow she thought it would look suspicious if she showed back up at Waldgrave, after an extended absence, with an infant. People would wonder, even if she said it wasn’t hers.

And if anyone ever found out who this child really was, well…

Lena didn’t wish the life that she had lived on anyone.

She tried to tell herself it was better for Brandon to stay out here, living with his grandmother, but she knew it wasn’t true. She couldn’t take him back to Waldgrave. “Tom, I’m honored. I really am. But we both know that probably isn’t a good idea…”

“My mom said he was dead. Jack is dead, isn’t he?” Tom asked.

“He is.”

“Then why…?”

Lena felt another pang of guilt. She could hear in his voice the hope he had been fostering since meeting her only a few hours earlier. “Tom, the time when your mom left…things just aren’t the same. Jack is dead, but his legacy lives on despite everyone’s best attempts to stamp it out. No one trusts me there.”

“I
 trust you.”

Lena shook her head. “—I know you do, and like I said, I’m honored. But the thing is, since Jack, no one has trusted us. Any of us in the family. Until just recently there were all of these sanctions and limits on what we were allowed to do. I just got let off after two years of house arrest, and that’s only because I finally convinced some people that this family line would end with me. If I show up with a baby…”

Suddenly, Lena felt very foolish. Here she was, another Daray, walking out on a child for selfish reasons. She was caught between the fact that this child needed her, and the fact that she really didn’t want to lose her freedom. She was Olesia all over again, standing with a child outside a burning building, making one of the biggest decisions of her life without even realizing it. Without intending to, she had become her mother; she wanted to do the right thing for this child, but this was all an accident. And she was absolutely clueless about caring for a child so young, and it would be disastrous to try to take him with her—even given his fate here, it was better than the one that faced him going to Waldgrave.

Lena sighed, still shaking her head. “I’m going to have to think about this, Tom. Can I hold him?”

Very carefully, Tom got up and placed Brandon in Lena’s arms. Up to this point, she had thought that he was still asleep, but once he was in her arms she saw that his eyes were open, looking around in the slight light coming through the living room window behind them. He gazed up at Lena out of his tight, warm wrappings and sighed so heavily that his whole body shook as he exhaled. Lena smiled and nearly laughed; she knew how he felt.

Tom sat back down in the rocker. “Tell me what it’s like there. Where you live.”

“It’s not a very good place right now.” Lena said quietly. She tried to think of the best way to put it, but wound up just saying what was on her mind. “Someone I was really counting on didn’t do what he was supposed to, and now things are falling apart. People are getting kidnapped and murdered, and that’s the whole reason I’m out here now. My uncle won’t let me come home until it’s safe, but the thing is that I’m finding it’s not much safer out here. It’s kind of a nightmare.”

“Wow.” Tom said softly, shaking his head. “That’s quite a lot to deal with.”

“Yeah…I bet you’re glad you didn’t come looking for us now, right?”

“And this guy that didn’t do what he was supposed to, he doesn’t feel bad about it? About causing all of this?” Tom asked.

“I don’t think he does.” Lena said, readjusting Brandon in her arms as he continued to stare at her with his deep blue eyes. “See, the thing is that he devoted his whole life to this…cause. And he kind of made mine a living hell in the process, but whatever. We had conflicting goals, but at the same time we fell under the same laws and restrictions and I guess we ended up in a lot of situations together, and we were kind of close because of it. The thing is that he devoted his whole life to this cause, and then found out that this cause was a big fake. It was a total lie…except that it kind of wasn’t. Since he left, I’ve found out some stuff that might change his mind, but after seeing him act like he has been, I’m not sure if I want him to come back or not.”

Tom sat quiet for a while. He leaned forward in his chair, gazing out across the irises. “But if he comes back, he can fix it?”

For what felt like no reason at all, Lena’s eyes started to tear up. She drew in a quick breath and held it while she bit down on her lip, trying to distract herself from the mess back home. Kids as young as Brandon were dead or missing. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone can fix it now.”

“Do you miss him?”

Lena looked out across the dark field, avoiding looking at this man—her new uncle, to the place where the stars hit the line of trees and disappeared. “Lately I do. He always knew what to do. Or at least he was good at making it up as he went.”

“No, I mean do you miss
 
him?
”

Lena tried to think. Did she miss Griffin? She knew she missed having his protection. She had never realized how much she had used the safety net he provided until it was gone. But then, there was that voice over the phone again, and the way she had felt when she heard it. “I think I do.”

“It’s really bad that he did what he did, for whatever reason. People depended on him, and you can’t just go off and leave everyone else hanging because you don’t feel like doing it—my mom always told me that. I think what she did to my sister still haunts her to this day. But just going off isn’t how a community works. You have to take care of yourself, sure, but you have to consider what you’re doing to everyone around you, too. And some people are born with more responsibility than others, and it’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. He had a responsibility to take care of the people around him and he didn’t, for whatever reason. You seem to know what’s going on here, and I’m not meaning to lay any blame because what’s done is done, but maybe you should be talking to him about whatever happened—you have a responsibility to the people around you, too.”

She had never heard it put so succinctly. This valley of irises was a magical place; it really did have all the answers. She wanted to stay there forever with these enchanting people; they were the family she had always dreamed about. They didn’t have territory wars with other families, they didn’t worry about the political repercussions of every trip they made and every conversation they had. These people cared about each other because they knew they didn’t have to worry about their children getting kidnapped or murdered. She would have stayed there forever, but Tom was right.

It wasn’t fair, and she had responsibilities. She had to go home and fix this, because she was seeing clearly for the first time that she might be the only person who could. It didn’t matter what was going on between her and Griffin; they were both being selfish. There was a greater good here, and they were both going to have to get over it—Lena was going to have to go first.

She had to tell Griffin about Brandon.

*****

They sat out on the porch for a short while longer, but Tom eventually took Brandon back in to feed him and Lena followed before too long. Olesia was sitting in the pink and blue living room, still smoking like a chimney with the window next to her wide open. For the first time, Lena had to wonder about Olesia’s smoking. Silenti were immune to many diseases, and perhaps cancer was one of them.

“You going to bed?” She asked, wispy ashen tendrils leaking out of her nostrils.

“No.” Lena said. “I have some thinking to do.”

“Stay up with me for a while?” Olesia said, gesturing to the spot on the couch next to her.

“Sure.” Lena said, collapsing onto the couch. After so much information in one day, she was mentally and emotionally exhausted.

“I see Tom decided to ask you after all.” Olesia said, exhaling a wide, hanging plume of smoke. “Actually considering it?”

Lena thought back to Tom’s request that she take Brandon with her when she left, and searched Olesia’s face. The elderly woman seemed entirely impassive, as though she didn’t care one way or the other about the fate of her only grandchild.

“He’s not my only grandchild. You’re my grandchild too, remember, and I care about both of you.” She sat back, raising her eyebrows as the cigarette trembled in her hand. “You’re right. I don’t care whether Brandon stays or goes. I can’t and won’t force you to take him. I won’t guilt you into it because I know better than my mother that it’s your choice if you want a child. I’ve learned. At the same time, it’s hard for me to say I think he should stay here. I’m too old to start this over again, but you—well, I don’t know about now, but in my day you’d be the perfect age.”

Lena sat quietly, not wanting to talk about the prospect of taking or leaving Brandon anymore. She
 
was
 the perfect age by Silenti standards; in mainstream society, teen motherhood was generally frowned upon, but in the Silenti world, everyone who intended to married and started having children by their early twenties at the latest. Children grew up fast in the Silenti world because they had to; where there was no promise that they would live to see the world much longer, they had to live in fast forward. Hesper had Maren when she was almost nineteen, and Lena was almost nineteen now. When she thought about it in those terms, there was no reason she couldn’t take Brandon. But she wasn’t any normal almost-nineteen-year-old; people, even people here, would notice in a bad way if she showed up with an infant.

She wanted to help Olesia, Tom and Brandon. Why did these people have to be so nice? It was bordering on abnormal how friendly and
well-adjusted they were, except for one thing. “Why don’t you care that Tom is dying?”

Olesia grunted, sending another eruption of smoke floating up to the ceiling. “I do care. I just don’t see the point in getting upset about it. You see, my father called it ‘living in the echoes’—my mother and my daughter are dead, but here you sit in front of me looking exactly like both of them. Beautiful and haunting to a fault. We’re doomed to live in the echoes, this family especially, for whatever reason you choose. It’s a Silenti thing that we share these connections with our ancestors, feeling their heartaches and acting out their dramas. It drove my grandmother Lenore mad to see it all playing out again; her husband was taken away by the Nazis. Did you know that?”

Lena nodded. Lenore had become one of her favorite twigs on the family tree; it was partly because she had never written anything, and only sketched the world. She saw beauty, even when the world was ugly. Griffin had called her insignificant, but in the end, it had been Lenore’s drawings—her “corner diary”—that had unraveled everything.